“You can only do the best you can do. Sometimes that is survival and sometimes that
is stellar. And that’s okay.”
This has been a mantra of mine for years. Until my twenties, I had always marveled at
how charmed I felt my life was. Things
generally went well if I worked hard.
When they weren’t as great, I knew that it was temporary and soon I
would feel back on top. I was
lucky. I had a good family, good friends,
a good education. And then, really for
the first time, life got in the way.
When I was 24, my first husband and I decided to have a
baby. We went through almost 4 years of
infertility and 2 miscarriages before I finally had a successful
pregnancy. My husband was deployed for
about half of that time, so I was left to cope on my own. This was my first real survival mode. I got up every day, went to work and went out
with friends. But emotionally, I was
just trying to get through the day. I
was grieving the miscarriages every moment of every day, and all I wanted to do
was to get to the end of the day so that I could go to sleep and not think
about it. I did what needed to be done
and only what needed to be done. And
that was okay.
Over the next few years, we had a baby, he got out of the
Navy and went to law school, we had two more children and moved back to my hometown. When the boys were 2, 4 and 6, my marriage
fell apart. He moved out on Halloween
and confessed his infidelity on Christmas.
I filed for divorce the first week of January and by early February, my
youngest son began to have seizures on the hour every hour for two weeks. This was real survival mode. If my children were clean and fed, that was
successful day. And that was okay.
The process of the divorce and getting my son healthy both
took about a year. Once we got a good
diagnosis (epilepsy) and the right medication, his seizures slowed to once each
month for a year and then were well controlled for nine years. He is now seizure free and has been released
from his neurologist.
There is nothing wrong with survival mode. When life gets tough, we need it to kick in
so that we can get out of bed each day and do the things we need to do. We need to survive. We need to keep putting one foot in front of
the other and moving forward. But we
also need to be aware when it is time to move out of survival mode so that we
can get back to life.
My son was diagnosed with epilepsy for ten years. I also
had two other boys who went through the normal ups and downs of childhood. And I was a single mother for eight of those
years. But there is a point at which you
realize that you are through the worst or at least managing it, and survival is
not enough. For me, it took some time
after the seizures were controlled to get out of survival mode. I still had to grieve the loss of my marriage
and accept my own situation and new reality.
I probably spend most of 4 years in survival mode. This is not to say I didn’t have stellar days
or experiences, but mostly I was getting through. When I began to realize I needed more, I
started dating and started writing. I
started putting myself out there to market my writing and eventually wrote my
book. I got married. I blended a family with my new husband. And I am still going.
What I learned is that survival mode is a necessary part of
life. I learned that the more you survive,
the less you feel set back by life getting in the way. I learned that when you decide it is time to
get on with it and live your life, make plans, set goals and then go after
them, you start to achieve stellar. Stellar
is defined by knowing it is time to step up and take charge and then doing it.
I tend to be a perfectionist. This quality is both
productive and destructive. When you are
in survival mode and you are beating yourself up for not excelling every day,
you are destroying your own self-esteem, and it becomes self-defeating. You have to be able to accept that survival,
when that is all you can do, when life gets in the way, is an accomplishment. But when you are headed into a stellar
period, that same perfectionism acts as drive to do more, learn more and keep
pushing forward. The key is to recognize
when it is time for these shifts. You
know when survival is all you can do…but you also know when it is time to do
more than just survive. So do it!
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more about by new book “Sweeten the Deal: How to Spot and Avoid the Big Red
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