coping with inadequacies

Doesn't it stink to admit you can't do it all? And you can't always even do some of it as well as you'd like to because there is just too much of it....whatever "it" is.

I am, as expected, struggling with not being able to get everything done in my chaplain job with only 25 hours a week to play with. I don't know whose judgment i am afraid. Probably most notably, my own. This is what I feel I was born to do, and on days when I feel like I am not doing it as well as I'd like, it's almost as if my identity is in jeopardy.

But then, I always did tell myself that my identity would never be determined by my job. In the past, I have said that my life was about people---particularly the people closest to me. It felt like a truly worthwhile guiding force to make my life about them. But then again, I have been challenged by people close to me like Jason because I am seeing now how I put too much on "my people". If I make my life all about them, it is a lot of pressure. People I love can be the top priority, but they cannot be my everything. Of course intellectually I have always known that. But I have never been very good at living that out. I get easily disappointed when people cannot always be there for me in the ways that I need and want, forgetting that they have limits and that they are only human.

A woman yesterday that I attended to lost her husband while he was in dialysis. After his death, she just kept crying in despair "What am I going to do without him?". It is sweet but also kind of scary. I think its only natural that you grow so close to some people that you cant imagine life without them. You even come to NEED one another, much as none of us likes the feeling of needing someone else. But I don't ever want to be in a position where I am lost and flailing without one particular person. I want to have the strength to go on. Every time a relationship has failed or I have grown apart from someone, I feel a certain panic that I cannot continue without them and yet I always do.

I still have that sentimental streak. I want to think that because maybe I can't live without the other person, maybe they can't live without me either. It feels good for a moment but it doesn't totally feel right. That is not love. Love is not compulsion or total need. It must also be about grace and about freely willed desire. I am still figuring all that out.

I wonder if this struggle for me is partially a result of the whole twin connection. That kind of closeness sort of skews your idea of what healthy closeness will look like when you choose it and make it for yourself. I wouldn't trade it for anything though. I wouldn't trade any of the people in my life. My disappointment or expectations are not really about them or anything they do. It is stuff for me to work out because I am still.......STILLLLLLLLLL....growing up. :)