whoa...I snapped...

Ok, so it wasn't a big snap, I've snapped big before, but it certainly wasn't a good snap. I've already apologized to the people involved (thanks for understanding, Beth)...but it put a certain amount of reality to something I'd already seen coming. I'm a people person...I love my friends and I love hanging out with them, but beyond that and above that, I'm an introvert (which more than anything else just means that I draw my energy from my time alone...for me it's usually time alone with a book). Despite all the time I get to spend on my own in my cubicle at work every day, it's not the sort of reviving alone-time that I need to recharge. When I started all of the things I'm involved in right now I was coming off of a serious recharge (which I hadn't really wanted by the end of that time). So I was ready to go! I was more than ok with coming home all but one night a week and having a 15-30min turn around to be wherever it was my friends were, doing whatever it was we'd planned on doing (always fun things)! I craved that time with people. But I also wasn't thinking about the fact that a lot of these things wouldn't slow down or taper off when I ran out of energy.

The last couple of weeks I've been trying to figure out a way to create more time for me. Time when I can finally finish a book that it's taken me more than a month to read (that never happens, especially with a book I'm interested in, like this one - I should have been done within a week, maybe 2). But being a people person, and even more so a people-pleaser, I haven't been able to figure out a way to say "no" to things. Maybe that's it...maybe I'm just being forced to learn to say no. The hard part comes when you're a people-pleaser and you'd rather wear yourself ragged than let your friends down. I guess this is all to say that A.) I'm going to be saying "no" more often, if I can; B.) I'd really love help in saying "no", I don't know what that means, maybe it means just give me the option/freedom to say it, don't make me feel like a jerk for saying it; C.) know that even if I am saying "no" right now it doesn't mean "never", or that I don't want to hang out with you, rather it means, I know I'm not going to be fun to be around until I can recharge, and I'm afraid I'm only going to keep snapping and it may only get bigger, if I don't learn to say "no".