What’s On Your Plate

Photo from Food52

After nearly three years of all the precautions, I’m officially a statistic. That’s right, I caught the COVID, despite my best efforts. C’est la vie. I’m truly grateful for my healthcare team, and of course my husband and son, who are the best carers a woman could ask for. Fortunately, those two are just fine – negative tests and no symptoms. I have to say, the timing isn’t great. But then, it’s never really a great time to get sick, is it?

Photo from Food52

For the record, this one is sneaky. Last week I’d felt tired, but attributed that to having just traveled, and the whole time zone difference thing. Then, the sore throat happened. Originally, I attributed that to seasonal allergies in Texas (I’ve never lived somewhere with so many allergens, year-round it’s something or other), but within hours, it was clear there was no way allergies were the culprit. I had a niggling feeling (after all, there’d been unabashedly ill folks on my flight not even attempting to be respectful of others and cover their coughs). So, I took a test, which was negative. By the next day, I felt so terrible I wondered if I had the flu and strep simultaneously and, called my doctor. She put me on a protocol and told me to test again the next day. Sure enough, it was positive. My doctor tweaked my protocol and gave marching orders to ‘rest as much as possible and heal’. I spent the weekend in bed, with short breaks for soup and supplements (and a tiny bit of Horizon Forbidden West). I’m feeling a little more human today, but this experience has me thinking a lot about plates...

Yeah, I know cue the tire screeching. What? Plates? Indeed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how everyone has a proverbial plate. You may have heard the phrase, “I have enough on my plate”, before. It’s a way of saying you’ve got a lot going on and can’t possibly take on more. I’ve used that colloquialism myself several times throughout my life – most notably when I was working on learning polite ways to say no, back in the days before I’d embraced “No” as a complete sentence. In those days, I often found myself feeling like I needed to justify my lack of acquiescence to someone else’s ideas for my time, rather than simply declining. In an effort to let people down easily, and also because it was true, I used that phrase on repeat, “I’ve got enough (or sometimes even too much) on my plate.” It was effective and I was proud of myself for establishing a boundary. Over time though, I just learned to say no. I also spent some time looking at that proverbial plate of mine, examining its contents and questioning if I did, in fact, want all those servings of all those things on my plate.

Photo from Food52

I still do that work quite regularly. If you’ve been with me for a while, you already know I’m a journaling junkie. I adore doing journal work and use it in a variety of ways. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years (many times) examining what’s on “my plate” - what’s in my life, where I’m spending my precious time and energy. And, I’ve faced the very real fact that at some points in my journey, I didn’t even like most of what I was spending my time on and with. So, I took ownership of my choices and made new ones. For the most part, everything on our proverbial plates, we’ve said yes to at some point. But just because we said yes, doesn’t mean we signed on forever. Anything we put on our plate, we can take off, or reproportion, or reseason. This lesson came particularly hard-won in my early years of motherhood when everyone and everything seemed clamoring for my attention and involvement. I’ve since had many opportunities to practice this lesson over the years.

I’ve also come to learn that sometimes you’re not working off a dinner plate. The truth is, we aren’t all working off (or with) the same size plates at all. In fact, it is our capacity, our bandwidth, that directly determines that factor, and of course, that’s different for everyone. In some seasons, we can work off a freaking platter. In others, we may only be able to manage a bread plate. Our capacity shifts at various stages in our lives and so too, does the size of our proverbial plate. Right now, with being ill, I’m working off a salad plate at some points, and a saucer at others, often in the same day. Being aware of this is vital. Let me tell you, when your job is to rest and heal, it takes all the pressure off any sort of performative productivity. I’m not out to win awards. In fact, there is no “busiest person” award or “most productive human” award. And even if they existed, I’m not sure I’d want to participate in that (actually, I’m sure. I don’t).

Having COVID is reminding me that while what I choose to have on my plate is important, it’s not so much about what is actually on my plate right now. It’s more about my capacity, my bandwidth, the size of my plate. Obviously, everything can’t fit on such a small surface area. Or at least not in the portions I’d had them. So, I get to be selective. I get to check-in with myself regularly. And I get to winnow portions down, and in some cases, take them off my plate altogether. For example, I’m not hanging out in Sparta this week (that’s my home gym in case you’re wondering), I’ve cleared most of my schedule, and I’m outsourcing as much as possible. Thankfully, my Love has been keeping me in steady supply of Tom Kha Gai and chicken noodle soup so I don’t even have to worry about feeding myself right now, which is a good thing. I’d love to end this with something poignant, but it’s kind of not happening right now. Bottom line? Our capacity shifts, for various reasons, but ultimately, we are the curators of our lives. We get to say (or have a say in) what is on our plate, no matter its current size. Here’s to filling your plate with things you enjoy.