I’ve been giving myself the opportunity to let go of my responsibilities lately. My entire life I’ve been the responsible one. The one who says something and then follows through. True to my word. When people are asked to describe me, the first word they usually use is “Responsible”.

Sometimes it almost feels like a self-fulfilling continuum. I follow through, that helps people realize I’m responsible, they expect me to be responsible in the future, I want to meet that expectation, so I do the responsible thing again. And it happens over and over until it snowballs into this place where I have a difficult time saying no, and the guilt of not following through becomes more intense. Don’t get me wrong, I love this about myself. It is one of my strengths, and I pride myself on being someone that others can count on.

But I’ve been trying to live in a place where I attempt to let go a little bit. I let myself be 5 minutes late because it’s good for me to step outside my comfort zone. I let myself do the minimum on something instead of going above and beyond. I have even let myself go a couple of weeks in between blogs.

I can’t say the guilt isn’t there. I still want to be the good old follow through girl that I’ve always been, but after the last 6 months of going non-stop and having a vacation that turned out to be more stressful than if I hadn’t gone at all, I don’t have a lot of myself to give.

That hurts my heart to write. I am not at full capacity and I hate admitting that. What people are getting is not the best version of me. But for now, I have to be okay with that. I have to let myself eat tacos, play board games, and have a couple of drinks with my roommates or stay a little too long at brunch after church because that’s what I need right now. I need to have some time to just exist.

And I’m working on it. I’m saying goodbye to a few things that I might enjoy doing, but are not what I need to focus my time on right now. I have to wait for a few commitments to be over, but I’m holding myself back from jumping on to the next opportunity. I’m remembering that even though I CAN do many things, some things are mine to do and some are not. And I have to be okay with that because in reality I want them all to be mine because I love doing all the things.

Ultimately what I am responsible is for myself and my relationship with Jesus and my output into the world. When I’m overrun by responsibility and weighed down by the guilt of not being able to live up to the expectations that I assume others have of me, I have distanced myself from my relationship with my Savior and therefore have diminished my ability to pour out to others.

So I take daily steps to ask myself “What it is mine to do? What do I need today? What is going to help me serve others best?” And in the meantime, while I don’t have 100% of myself to give to anyone, I am working on giving myself grace and surrendering to Jesus to receive His absolute freedom.