You don’t have to stay until you fix it

Hands up the super-conscientious. Come all you eldest children, you sorter-outers, you dependable ones. Come here and take a deep breath and listen to this. YOU don’t have to fix everything. Everything is not your fault. Everything is not your responsibility. Really, it actually isn’t.

I remember a day back in 2011, I was in my kitchen with the radio on. “Rumination and self-blame” said the speaker “are the two things most strongly linked with anxiety and depression.” Rumination and self-blame. Rumination! How that word struck a cord with me. Thinking things things over and over, I could own that. At the time I thought that I was actually pretty good at not blaming myself. Until I noticed that I kind of took responsibility for…everything. Stuff that was way way out of my orbit. Leading to a nagging guilt. Maybe I wasn’t being there enough, doing enough, maybe I wasn’t enough.

One of the keys to resilience is self-acceptance. Not reckless irresponsibility, but acceptance that you are one human in a great big complicated world. Seriously, everything is not your fault.

So maybe that means you don’t need to fix it all.

Maybe that means you could share responsibility? Build a coalition, a team?

Maybe you could even give yourself a break?