Making the Best of a Bad Situation

When it feels like everything is falling apart, some perspective, acceptance, and understanding might help you make the best of a bad situation. I took my own advice this week and it helped me keep my sanity amidst some chaos. -- Connect with me on your favorite platform: https://pods.link/aardvarkgirl -- Well, this isn’t the episode I planned on releasing this week. But, a lot of things happened over the last several days that I didn’t plan on either. I won’t bore you with all of the convoluted details, but essentially the plumbing in my house went haywire and now my kitchen island and master shower are out of commission. I’ve been dealing with these massively noisy dehumidifiers that make it impossible to sleep, let alone record, so I’ve had to move into my own guest room, use my guest shower, and the cats are pretty annoyed that all of their stuff has been moved. Now I’m talking to plumbers and water mitigation experts and insurance adjustors, trying to learn all the lingo and make sure I’m doing what I need to. There have been so many people in and out of my house to assess things, estimate things, try to fix things just to find out they can’t and someone else has to try something different. I’ve seen these various repair guys more in the last week than I’ve seen any of my friends in over a year. It’s kind of ridiculous. I think my house is trying to tell me I’ve been in it too long and need to leave a little more often. But no, this episode isn’t about wonky house woes, it’s about dealing with unexpected situations without losing your mind. I know I talk about certain concepts quite a bit. Staying positive, going with the flow, believing that everything happens the way it’s meant to. It’s one thing to talk about it, but it’s another to actually put it into practice. So I want to share how I’ve applied my own advice in this situation, along with some observations about perspective and control. There are so many times when it feels like the world is conspiring against you. Your clients all need you at the same time. You finish one thing and two more come up in its place. Everything is an emergency. The days are flying by and you don’t even know how long it’s been since you last got up from your chair. Add in the extra demands of your personal life, your family, and all those little things you need to tend to, and this is the typical life of a self-employed creative. It’s easy to focus on the stress of it all. What is going wrong. How overwhelmed you’re feeling. It’s all real. There are days you want to scream, or cry, or where you just laugh because that’s all you can really do. But, that doesn’t help anyone, especially yourself. Getting frustrated doesn’t help you do your work faster. It probably slows you down. Getting mad doesn’t fix the problems. It just makes you feel worse. Thinking about how unfair it is doesn’t change what’s happening. So while I do think it’s important to feel your feelings and acknowledge them, I also think it’s necessary to reprogram the negative ones. That’s where perspective can be helpful. I’m not happy about sleeping in my guest room. I love my tempurpedic bed and I typically don’t sleep well anywhere else. But, I am grateful that I have an extra bed in my home so I didn’t have to sleep on a couch or somewhere else. I also feel weird using my guest shower, but I am thankful I have an extra shower so I don’t have to hose myself off outside, which could be pretty awkward and not very effective. It’s nearly impossible to function the way I normally do without my kitchen island and sink. But, I’m fortunate enough to be able to swork around it, even if it’s not ideal. It’s difficult to get my work done with all of these people coming in and out all day, but how lucky am I to be able to be home while this work gets done? I really don’t know how people who have job jobs do it. I haven’t been able to go anywhere or schedule anything because I’m usually waiting for someone who could show u