Have you drank the bullet journaling Kool-Aid yet? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll give a brief overview:
Bullet journaling is a fairly new organizational tool that many people use. It’s a way to customize a planner by creating your own with the components that you use most. You start by buying a blank journal and drawing your own calendars for the year, month, and week. You can also use it to create meal plans, track how much weight you’ve lost, or keep a running list of shows and movies you want to watch. Bullet journaling caught my eye because I could create my ideal planner based on what I wanted to prioritize.
So I got started. I bought a dot grid journal, some nice pens and markers, and more washi tape and stickers than I’d like to admit. I spent so much time perusing bullet journal ideas on Pinterest and Instagram. I would meticulously spend time on the weekends drawing up the next week’s layout. At first it became something very soothing. I loved the satisfaction I felt from being so organized!
But the fun eventually wore off.
I don’t know that I ever made it a full month where I completed my habit tracker or had a layout made for each week. I felt so discouraged each time! So I’d try again the next month. I would painstakingly try to draw beautiful layouts. Maybe if they were aesthetically pleasing enough, I would use it?
When that didn’t work, I tried more minimalistic layouts. This worked better, but I still ended up in the same slump. I was spending more time on my monthly layout than I was on the tasks I actually needed to complete. I’d refer back to social media to inspire me, only to feel more inadequate than when I first started.
I had missed the point. I had held myself to impossible standards.
I know it seems totally silly (and it is!) that something as trivial as a journal could affect my self-esteem so much. But I had set my own standards so high that I left no margin for error. Are you holding yourself to impossible standards? Are you feeling like you’re inadequate because you haven’t been able to measure up to what you believe is ideal?
What about being a mom? Do you feel the weight of your perceived failures as a mother? Are you striving to be supermom and coming up short?
When I first became a stay-at-home, I was paralyzed by the weight of doing it all. I’d write to-do lists every day, every week. Cleaning, meal prepping, laundry. At the end of the day when I still saw a sink full of dishes, a nasty floor, or a pile of unfolded clothes, I felt I had failed for the day. Even my fancy bullet journal to-do lists didn’t change my feelings of failure when I didn’t live up to the perfect ideal of motherhood
Now that I’ve been a mom for a couple of years, I can say that this has gotten easier, but I still fall into the trap of feeling inadequate when I don’t “perform” well as a mom. I feel shame rear its ugly head telling me that I’ve somehow let my kids down, but really I’ve just let myself down because I didn’t live up to what I thought being a “good mom” looked like. But I am learning and growing, just like you. I’m learning to accept my mistakes as mistakes and not failures.
And at the end of the day, if my floor is sticky and the sink is full but I’ve continued loving my kids and showing them that by my actions, then no unfinished to-do list gets to tell me I failed.
