A hard stretch does not always look like a crisis. Sometimes it is just a long run of days where nothing moves the way I want. Sleep is thin. Work feels tight. I keep waiting for a moment that says, right, now it gets easier. That moment does not come because I am impatient.
I read Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey a while ago. The picture he uses is simple. A green light means go. A yellow light means slow down. A red light means stop. I am not reviewing the book. I just recognised the feeling. In a tough time I often act like I can turn a red light green if I push harder. I cannot.
Waiting is not the same as quitting
For me, quitting is when I drop something that still matters because I am fed up. Waiting is different. I stay with it, but I stop telling myself this week has to feel better by Friday. I still do the work in front of me. I just stop treating a slow week like a personal failure.
I finish most days around six. After that the house has its own pace. Some evenings I am at my daughter’s football. Some evenings it is just food and a quieter room. If I carry the work mood into all of that, the stretch gets longer, not shorter. Work is not my family. I have to remind myself of that when I want to open the laptop again “just to fix how I feel.”
I am not good at this every time. I still ask myself, every few hours, if I feel better yet. Usually I do not. Then I go back to one small thing I can finish, and I leave the big mood alone.
If you are in a long stretch and rest feels like falling behind, I wrote about how to build mental resilience. It is only what I have lived through. What works for me may not work for you. Some weeks you cannot force the green light. Staying in it, smaller, is not the same as giving up.
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