dailynewsnblog
Like many working mothers, I used to spend my days in a near-constant state of emergency, juggling a million lists in my head of all the important things I had to do.
“I used to spend my days in a near-constant state of emergency, juggling a million lists in my head of all the important things I had to do.”
You know the lists: All the chores, tasks, goals, responsibilities, and aspirations I was taking on as a new mother, a manager, an artist, a wife, friend, daughter, writer, and pet owner. Most days started with the regular checklists, but there was always something being added, some email or idea or need pinging from a direct report or my supervisor, a friend with a favor, or my husband asking me if I remembered to eat breakfast.
Trying to figure out the best way to fit an impossible number of to-do items into a fixed set of hours each day was like being in an immersive algebra word problem during a test I forgot to study for. But I was determined to crack the code, certain that if I just tried harder, I could make it all work.
If I go to the grocery store nearest the gas station, I can also fill up and clean out my car. I have to remember to take the exit on the West and not the South side so I can pass the library drop box and the post office on my way home. Unless we need to pick up the dog’s meds, in which case I should actually start at the library, and I could go to that gas station instead of the one by the grocery — then maybe it would make more sense to put in an order for pick up and have my husband do it on his way home…
And this was just the stuff I was trying to squeeze into the bookends of my work hours, that sliver of time when I was also meant to exercise and meal plan, clean the kitchen and the bathrooms, help my team with a new project and take my kid to the activities and playdates I was supposed to schedule, bond with my husband, maintain friendships, read for book club, read for fun, write for my novel workshop, organize my closet, figure out my style, maintain a skincare regimen, and call my parents. Oh, and walk the dog.
Every day was a Tetris game of multitasking, yet even if I somehow managed to accomplish everything on that day’s agenda, I’d still crawl into bed after midnight in a wrung-out, bug-eyed frenzy — because a new list had already begun to form.
“I’d still crawl into bed after midnight in a wrung-out, bug-eyed frenzy — because a new list had already begun to form.”
I lived like this for years.
This might sound familiar to you. It might sound like burnout, or like I might have benefited from outsourcing some of my responsibilities to a babysitter, a cleaner, or a meal delivery service. Maybe it was time for an audit on our activities — the book clubs or soccer practices or Saturday morning swim lessons — and hit pause on the ones that weren’t an uncontested net positive on our lives.
What if I told you that I did all those things — hired the nanny and subscribed to a grocery delivery, stopped attending my late-night writing group Zooms, and handed off swim lessons to my husband — and I was still, somehow, just as harried and wild-eyed as before? On some days, even more so?
I didn’t use that extra time to rest, but to just try to do more stuff. More tasks, more goals, more ways to optimize and strategize continued to flood into the tiny, unfilled spaces of my brain; everything lit up with urgency.
I was living in survival mode, desperately trying to simply get through each day, confident only in the fact that I was not living up to my fullest potential. I was a day late and a dollar short, across the board. But I soldiered on, marching upstream and trying to replenish my resources as they dwindled away, all while the current was only getting stronger.
“I soldiered on, marching upstream and trying to replenish my resources as they dwindled away, all while the current was only getting stronger.”
And then our daughter was diagnosed with diabetes. Overnight, it became clear that I’d activated survival mode for conditions that were, ultimately, not all that threatening. Because now I was learning what it was like when the stakes actually were life and death.
Spoiler alert: Survival mode isn’t a sustainable lifestyle choice. And it took going through a true emergency for me to learn how to see the rest of my life with a clear-eyed perspective about what truly matters and what, really, just wasn’t a big deal.
The tl;dr? Almost everything on my to-do lists is just categorically not all that urgent. And I am willing to bet that it might be the same for you, too.
An urgent perspective
After my daughter’s diabetes diagnosis, our life got infinitely more complicated for a time. And then, like magic, it got a whole lot simpler.
“Our life got infinitely more complicated for a time. And then, like magic, it got a whole lot simpler.”
When you get a type 1 diabetes diagnosis, you’re admitted for inpatient care for at least 24 hours, regardless of whether you’re in DKA or not. We were lucky — Poesy was four, but we caught the signs early and were able to get a diagnosis well before this life-threatening condition. But we still had to drop everything and spend the night at the hospital, because our new team of doctors, nurses, and educators had to give us a crash course in our new life. A life that, thanks to all the lifesaving technology and medicine available to us now, everyone promised should be as long and healthy and normal as before.
But of course, this isn’t exactly true.
“Everyone promised should be as long and healthy and normal as before. But of course, this isn’t exactly true. “
For starters, her medical care is lightly brutal. She gets pricked and poked every day now, sometimes multiple times a day. Her body is pocked with marks in varying degrees of healing from her pump sites and CGMs, her skin raw and irritated from the medical-grade adhesives.
She was the only Kindergartener with an iPhone, and parents sometimes worry about having her over for playdates or parties because they don’t want to be responsible for her diabetes management.
She can’t just jump in the pool or the bath without first being disconnected from her very expensive medical equipment, and sometimes she misses recess because her blood sugar drops and she has to stay in the nurse’s office eating a snack she doesn’t want because she just wants to be with her friends. After months of waking her up in the middle of the night to treat lows with juice, she had so much tooth decay we had to have four teeth pulled in a wildly expensive procedure she had to have local anesthesia for — a genuine nightmare for a parent trying to figure out how to manage her blood sugars while she’s under.
I want to be clear: Not an hour goes by that I don’t feel like the luckiest woman in the world — that if I was going to be the mother of a child with a lifelong chronic illness, it was going to happen at a time when we could not only get a clear diagnosis but also access to the medicine and tech she needs.
But I’m not going to sugarcoat it: diabetes sucks. It’s been almost two years, and though we are so much more familiar and adept at managing it, the truth is that living with a chronic illness is like being in an endless Iron Man race — only there’s no finish line, you didn’t get to train, and you have to keep going no matter what happens.
“Living with a chronic illness is like being in an endless Iron Man race — only there’s no finish line, you didn’t get to train, and you have to keep going no matter what happens.”
If you’ve ever experienced a catastrophic health event, you are likely familiar with the way it reorients your perspective on what truly matters in your life. But if the event was something that had a clear end — a full recovery, a return to “normal” and life as it was before — it’s all too easy to slip back into the habit of treating everything on your to-do list with urgency.
This is not the case with chronic illness. There is no going back. There is no break. No matter how many days we might have when everything is “going well,” there will always, always be some new wrecking ball diabetes has up its sleeve, ready to remind us what it feels like to be in a true emergency.
Living this way can feel impossible sometimes, especially when you imagine piling it on to the frenetic pace of an already packed and busy life. But if there’s one gift that diabetes gave to us, it’s this constant readjustment to our perspective. When your days are mapped by the grace of your child’s CGM data, living in five-minute increments with the updates that inform the millions of decisions necessary to keep her alive, you suddenly care a lot less about all of those lists you used to keep.
“If there’s one gift that diabetes gave to us, it’s this constant readjustment to our perspective.”
All that stuff that used to seem so important, so time-sensitive, such high priorities… well, it’s not that they don’t matter. It’s just that very rarely do any of those things require the sort of high-strung urgency I was giving them.
Living in real survival mode made me realize that I’d been doing so for years — in conditions that were, honestly, completely survivable.
And I was doing it to myself.
When doing okay is more than enough
A previous employer used a system for our annual reviews where our performance was rated in various categories from 1–5. On this scale, 3 was considered “meeting expectations,” or, simply doing your job. Getting 3’s was a good thing, in theory, and yet, it always seemed like some sort of low-key failure. Maybe it was the internalized grading system of my youth, but unless I was getting 4’s and the rare and most coveted 5’s, I would agonize over what I needed to change to bridge that gap.
Which was probably the whole idea.
“Whether I was ‘meeting expectations’ or ‘exceeding’ them, I was continuing to get paid exactly the same amount for doing that job.”
Here’s what I never understood back then: Whether I was “meeting expectations” or “exceeding” them, I was continuing to get paid exactly the same amount for doing that job. I even got a couple of 2’s over my time there, which ultimately didn’t affect anything about my pay or responsibilities, only my emotional state and my ego.
Yet I was willing to put myself through a self-imposed pressure cooker to try to prove something that changed absolutely nothing about the realities of my employment there.
After the diagnosis, I learned what happens to perform between 1-3 in pretty much every aspect of my life: Not much.
Initially, I threw all the balls I’d been juggling in the air directly to the ground. I had to — nothing mattered as much as my kid’s life. After the hospital, I had to figure out how to start picking some of the balls back up, adding them to the new ones I was already juggling for diabetes. And at first, I dropped them all, a lot. I only picked up the ones that I absolutely had to, and I left everything else on the ground.
Almost two years later, I still haven’t picked some of them back up. And I’m not sure if I ever will.
“Diabetes chewed up all my old lists and spit them out. It just didn’t matter anymore if we had time to clean the kitchen or if we left it for another day.”
Diabetes chewed up all my old lists and spit them out. It just didn’t matter anymore if we had time to clean the kitchen or if we left it for another day. Remembering to keep up with prescriptions and proper sharps disposal had taken over the spaces in my head where I used to monitor school calendars and family logistics. So we were late meeting deadlines and turning in paperwork. We missed information, forgot appointments, showed up in baseball hats over dirty hair, with very little idea about what exactly was going on. Sometimes we had to pay late fees, something that used to eat me up with self-criticism. Now, we started viewing them as the cost of buying us the extra time to get something done.
I started doing my job with just enough focus and skill to keep it, no longer motivated by doing my best, standing out, growing into the next step. What was a slew of emails marked “urgent” when our kid’s leg had an abscess from an infected infusion site? Or when she has a tech failure that results in an all-day high, and I’m on the phone with the nurse every twenty minutes, troubleshooting?
Or when she has such a terrifying, sudden blood sugar crash that her numbers are off the chart, only reading “low,” and we’re Googling how to use the glucagon to save her life?
“Now? I just apologize, and I move on. I show up late. I answer the email, finish the project, and then I move on to the next thing.”
Every day, she could die. I’ve had to make peace with the fact that I’m not going to answer every email or remember to update someone on a work project status when I’ve been sucked into a diabetes alert. Once, I’d agonize over all the ways that this could be interpreted by others, whether someone was mad at me, and all the possible ways that my negligence was going to cost me in the future. Now? I just apologize, and I move on. I show up late. I answer the email, finish the project, and then I move on to the next thing.
Am I performing at a 5? Would you call me the sort of person who goes above and beyond, who gives 110%, who you can always count on to show up and perform at the highest possible level? Probably not. But if I were, I’m not sure it would change much.
Learning not to take all of it so seriously, however, has had a profound impact on my life — changing it definitively for the better.
Holding it all a little loosely
Stress, everyone says, is such a killer. The effects of long-term stress on our bodies are astounding, and yet we culturally treat succumbing to it as a moral or personal failure rather than a systemic one.
Make no mistake: We live in a culture that has lost the plot when it comes to urgency. When our environment is fraught with ambient stress and constant external pressure to be better and do more, it’s all too easy to believe that the only way to survive is by soldiering on.
“We live in a culture that has lost the plot when it comes to urgency.”
But what if we just … didn’t?
I don’t mean dropping all the balls, necessarily. What I mean is recognizing that juggling doesn’t have to be an inherently dire act — in fact, literal juggling is about entertainment and play.
So what happens if we just start treating our juggling act a little less seriously?
Here’s the secret I’ve learned: I know I’m going to drop something every day. And guess what? It’s usually fine. The outcome is rarely memorable at all.
“I know I’m going to drop something, every day. And guess what? It’s usually fine. The outcome is rarely memorable at all.”
I go into each day with the understanding that I won’t get everything done. I know I’m going to be late, or miss an important message, or have to ask for a deadline extension.
I know I’m going to have to bail on a friend or reschedule a meeting, and I know the clothes are probably going to remain in the hamper for another day. And I also know that none of this says anything meaningful about my life or who I am as a person.
When I had to drop everything for diabetes, I dropped a lot — a lot — of balls. But I learned something crucial from that experience: very few of them actually broke. What I mean is: Very few tasks on my daily to-do lists are actually important. Going from being a proactive, Type A perfectionist to a t1d mom winging it as she goes showed me that, by and large, it’s completely fine to deal only with one fire at a time.
It’s okay if I go to the grocery store I prefer instead of the one by the gas station; maybe it means I have to do the post office tomorrow. Okay. I’ll just do it tomorrow.
If we forget class valentines until the night before, guess what? The drugstore opens at 7 am, and they have candy. Not a soul will notice or care whether Poesy gives them a cardboard Hello Kitty valentine along with their chocolate.
“No one is benefitting from my anxiety and stress about being late — it’s certainly not going to make me suddenly punctual.”
When it’s clear I’m going to be late, I send a quick heads up and then do my best to get there without getting into a car accident and creating an actual emergency. No one is benefiting from my anxiety and stress about being late — it’s certainly not going to make me suddenly punctual. So I’m going to choose to just put it down and focus on being present when I get there.
The external outcomes from doing all these things without activating survival mode are shockingly similar.
The difference in their impact on me, however, is profound.
What we have to take seriously
Living with a chronic illness is a special kind of hell sometimes, and there are days when I’m filled with grief over all the things my child is going to have to carry for the rest of her life just to keep herself alive. But most days, I’m grateful that keeping her alive is even an option.
“It isn’t just the passage of time that makes our grief and hardships easier, but the ways we learn how to live with them.”
It isn’t just the passage of time that makes our grief and hardships easier, but the ways we learn how to live with them. Every time we made it through a new challenge, we learned that we were capable of doing so. In other words, we learned to trust ourselves in an emergency.
After the initial few months of baptism by fire, our family became more familiar with managing diabetes. We learned how to live with our new care responsibilities, how to troubleshoot and respond to the various curveballs T1D likes to throw. We got a little spontaneity back, started doing things “from before.” We even got brave enough to try eating out at restaurants again.
We weathered so many hard days, the sort of days that give new meaning to the idea, that leave you feeling truly broken, certain there is no way you can keep going on like this.
Until we did. Because we had to.
Weeks and months and then a year passed, and one day we had the sort of experience that, only twelve months earlier, had brought me to my knees. Now, it was just the sort of day we sometimes had, one we knew we could survive, because we had already before.
“I realized I had to truly prioritize my own rest and recovery — even if it came at the cost of all those other responsibilities I was supposed to be juggling.”
I couldn’t just sit around the house having panic attacks, not when it was my job to be not only alert and capable of managing the logistics of my daughter’s care, but also to be available to help regulate her emotions. For the first time in my life, I realized I had to truly prioritize my own rest and recovery — even if it came at the cost of all those other responsibilities I was supposed to be juggling. Even if there isn’t a diabetes curveball that day, I’m likely still playing catch-up from the last time it threw us into survival mode. And these episodic dips into survival mean that I’ve learned to take my recovery needs seriously.
A breakthrough came on a day in March when, after several terrifying diabetes scares in a row, I couldn’t stop hyperventilating. I did some of the regulating interventions I’d learned in therapy, and then my husband sent me on a walk just as the sun was starting to set, so I could come down and settle a bit before locking back into the rest of the evening.
I went to the cemetery near our house, where I often go for walks. It was a gorgeous early spring evening, and I took a few photos and videos, wanting to be as present as possible as I noticed the color of the trees, the quality of the air, the sound of the pavement beneath my feet.
I took two selfies, one right at the start, and another ten minutes into my walk, to send to my husband when he texted to ask how I was doing. I think I’m feeling better, I texted him. I think this is helping.
Later, looking at the images, I was floored to see the difference was apparent in my face. It wasn’t just an emotional distinction — I didn’t suddenly look more relaxed or happy or anything like that. What I mean is that I went from looking wan and absolutely haggard to someone who had just been revived. In those ten minutes of walking in the sunset, my face got back its color. It looked fuller, like I’d been renewed with something vital and life-giving. Which, of course, I had.
You can’t live from emergency to emergency; you have to recover.
Sleep is no longer a luxury, but a non-negotiable. Walking outside, letting the sun touch my skin, eating actual meals, and disengaging my brain from list management are the ways I recover my body and mind, repairing and strengthening so that when the next emergency arrives, I can handle it.
This is how I’ve taught myself to trust that it is going to be fine. Even if I have to relegate some of those other “urgent” to-do items to “not a big deal.”
“Taking things less seriously doesn’t mean they don’t get done — it just means I’m not constantly suffering while doing them.”
Taking things less seriously doesn’t mean they don’t get done — it just means I’m not constantly suffering while doing them. And the incredible thing? It’s created a surprising amount of room in my life for fun, play, and beauty — all things that contribute to recovery.
If we treat everything as an emergency, eventually we’re going to realize that we’ve created a life that has drained itself entirely of meaning. We might even run ourselves so far into the ground that trying to extract ourselves becomes the actual emergency — the sort that would take a lot more time and far more resources from which to rebound.
We’re all juggling, here. Sometimes, we’re going to drop the balls. We need to remember that’s part of the trick.
“Sometimes, we’re going to drop the balls. We need to remember that’s part of the trick.”
Maybe instead of berating ourselves about it, or rushing to pick them back up, we let ourselves pause.
Maybe we can set some of these balls on the ground, just for a minute, just to give ourselves a chance to stretch our muscles a bit. The balls will be waiting for us, but they might be easier to manage after we’ve given our hands a break.
Maybe we can just take a lap around the cemetery at sunset, only heading home after we’ve gotten a little bit of our color back, a little bit of the life we didn’t even realize we’d been draining.
Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and she is the author of Finishing Lines, where she writes about her fear of finishing, living a creative life, and (medical) motherhood. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.
