When You're Not the Energizer Bunny

At the end of December, three days before Christmas, I took one of the biggest tests of my life. I had literally spent hundreds of hours studying for it, hours stolen from sleep, rest, play, work, and connection.

I took the test, and within minutes I knew that I passed. I had been unsure of how I would feel after I saw the results. I was thrilled, relieved, and in shock that it was finally over. And I was immediately on to the next thing. All of my test preparations had dwarfed my Christmas preparations, so I literally left the testing center and went straight to the store for Christmas shopping. Then it was Christmas, travel, and so on.

My family had moved cross-country exactly a year before I took the test, and then again into a new home, which we are remodeling, about five months prior to the test. Now that it was over, I felt energized and ready to engage my dauntingly long project list.

Things were moving forward, projects were getting completed, and I felt good. And then, suddenly, I lost steam. It’s not that I lost momentum; I just ran out of gas completely. Well, not completely. I was still mostly managing life and work and home. But the extras, the to dos, and the negotiables stopped happening.

And I felt a lot of guilt about it. I would look at what others were accomplishing, what time they went to bed, the projects they completed, and I would feel pretty lousy. I was expressing this to a friend, and she basically said, “So what, you realized you’re not the Energizer Bunny?”

Bam.

I want to be able to keep going, and going, and going. I don’t want to stop and recharge, especially if the stopping means more than an afternoon. I want endless energy and drive and forward momentum. And I feel like other people want that of me too, which makes it even harder.

But here are some things I believe to be true: No one is the Energizer Bunny. We all have different energy levels, but at some point, we all run out of steam. We all get tired. We all get overwhelmed. We all need time to recharge; sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for a day, or a week, or even an entire season. This is an essential part of what it means to be human. When we fail to honor that part, we fail to honor something basic and true about who we are and how we are made. And we propel ourselves toward burnout and personal and relational dis-integration.

For most of us, stopping completely is not an option. There is a job, there is a family, there are commitments. There are people counting on us, and we cannot totally withdraw from real life to “recharge.”

But we can be gentle with ourselves. We can set our Project List aside for a few weeks or a few months. We can light more candles, take more baths, go on walks, and read more books. We can spend more time on our decks and less time on our phones. We can go to bed a little earlier. We can give ourselves permission to not be the Energizer Bunny. And we can be gentle with those around us, honoring the humanity of their limitations and need for rest.

And gradually, as we slow down, as we allow ourselves stolen hours to sleep, rest, play, and connect, we will feel ourselves recharge. It may happen in a day, or it may happen over months. Our energy level will increase again, and we will be able to dive back in. This is also part of being human; the pull to work, to create, to move forward. In honoring our natural energy levels, our need to rest, and our drive to work and create, we find greater health and fullness than we could otherwise imagine.

So these days, I am working to honor my own need to rest and recharge. I hope that you will find my more often on my porch sipping tea and less often in my basement cleaning my storage room. I am trying to read more books and make fewer lists. I am not the Energizer Bunny. And that's ok.

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