Booked and Busy
I haven’t been this busy in a very long time.
I have multiple projects running concurrently. Just how I like it.
Is it emotional bypassing? Mmm… Maybe.
Emotional bypassing is what happens when we use activity, productivity, spirituality, positivity, or even “growth” to avoid sitting with emotions that feel too uncomfortable to fully experience. Sometimes staying busy isn’t just ambition. Sometimes it’s a very effective way of keeping grief, anger, disappointment, or uncertainty at arm’s length.
And I know myself well enough to admit that I’m the type of person who has to keep it moving.
If I really stopped (completely stopped) I sometimes think I’d be overwhelmed by a tsunami of emotion. All the things I’ve been through. Every trauma…
So yes, being booked and busy can be a form of detachment. A form of coping.
But for me, it’s also a philosophy.
Life is happening now.
Not in the past. Not in the imagined future. Right here.
There is a difference between processing the past and living inside of it. Rumination sounds like: I should have known. I could have done something differently. What if I had said this? What if they had done that?
In cognitive therapy, depression is often understood partly through the relationship between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. When our thinking becomes repetitive, hopeless, self-critical, or focused on perceived failures and losses, our mood can follow it downward. And when we feel worse, we may withdraw, become less active, and spend even more time inside those thoughts.
It becomes a loop.
Sometimes you have to change the channel.
Not because the pain wasn’t real. Not because you shouldn’t feel it. But because replaying the same thought for the hundredth time is not necessarily processing—it may simply be rehearsing your suffering.
Take the lesson. Keep the wisdom. Leave the punishment.
Yes, it’s hard sometimes.
Yes, loss comes with a hefty side of grief.
And somehow, almost offensively, life keeps going as though nothing happened. The sun rises. Emails come in. Dogs need fed. People laugh in restaurants. Someone is falling in love while someone else is grieving what they lost.
Life continues moving.
And eventually, we have to decide to move with it.
Feel what needs to be felt.
Grieve what needs to be grieved.
But don’t build a home inside yesterday.
Life is happening now.
Remember this: There are no mistakes, only decisions. And every decision gives you information. Some lead exactly where you hoped, and some become the lesson that changes what you choose next.
xo, LC
