If Life Is a Circus I Must Be the Clown

By Frances Bevan

When life has turned into a three ring circus and you dont know how it got that way it can cause you to feel overwhelmed and out of control. Change needs happen, but where do you start?

This book is designed to help you:

identify what you are juggling,

determine why you are juggling these things,

decide what to put down,

learn how to put them down without breaking them, and

how to get back up after you fall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504337144

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 Frances Westerhof-Bevan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-3713-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-3714-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015911516

Balboa Press rev. date: 09/24/2015

Contents

Overview

Chapter 1 My Circus

Chapter 2 Balancing

Chapter 3 Juggling

Chapter 4 What Needs to be Put Down

Chapter 5 How to Put Things Down

Chapter 6 How To Get up After A Fall

Chapter 7 Take A Bow

About the Author

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Overview

Come one! Come all! Step right up and get your ticket here to the most chaotic circus you’ve ever seen! Hear the sounds, see the sights. The main attraction of this show is not what you would think. You will see a person trying to balance on things that shouldn’t be balanced on, you will see her juggling things that shouldn’t be juggled and you will see her performing tricks that not even she imagined she would do, all for the sake of entertaining the audience.

In case you haven’t guessed, this is my life. I really don’t mind being compared to a clown. Being a clown helps me keep life in perspective. It encourages me to let some much needed comic relief into my life. It reminds me that not everything needs to be taken so seriously and that as long as I have the ability to laugh at myself, I will always be amused. At the end of the day, a clown is a clown and I am me. A clown does not control the entire circus and is not responsible for the well-being of all other clowns. I do not carry the weight of the world on my shoulders and that one poor choice will not have devastating global effects even though sometimes the pressure of making choices can feel overwhelming. I don’t know any clowns who are responsible for destroying an entire country’s social economic system, although some leaders may give the impression that they are clowns from time to time. A clown will never singlehandedly destroy the environment by putting an empty water bottle into the trash instead of the recycle bin, so why do I feel so guilty when I do it? If a clown forgets to pay the electricity bill on time they will pay the bill the following day without causing irreparable damage, so why do I wake up at night in a cold sweat with a debilitating fear that maybe I forgot to pay the bill? My mind automatically goes to the absolute worst outcome possible because inside I feel that I am responsible for everything around me. Even if a clown were to do all these things she would still be considered a good clown and, in the same way, if I were to do these things I would still be considered a good person.

Although being a clown isn’t a bad thing, it isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes I forget that I am real too. I am a real person with real feelings that I need to accept and embrace, no matter how others may view me. I am reminded that I am a human only after I have taken on too much, been stretched too thin and I have come apart at the seams. Overwhelmed doesn’t seem like a strong enough word to describe how I feel at times. These overwhelming feelings come from me trying to keep up with what I thought others expected from me. I thought I was expected to be the perfect mom, the perfect partner, the perfect employee, in short, I thought I had to be a perfect version of all things to all people. Every part of me that was real was pushed so far down inside that I forgot I was allowed to have feelings and opinions, that I was allowed to disagree and I didn’t always have to say ‘yes’ to everything that was asked of me. For a while it seemed like my purpose in life was to act exactly as others wanted me to act and participate in everything and anything that others wanted me to participate in. By doing so, I forgot who I was, who I wanted to be and who I was meant to be. I was too busy doing things for everyone else’s sake.

I had been under the impression that the ability to multi-task was an admirable quality; however when I began to look at how this presented in my life I saw an image of a clown juggling brightly colored balls while riding a unicycle with each ball representing a different responsibility I had taken on. I was juggling too many balls while trying to keep balance and I was pedaling way too fast to keep things under control. In this analogy the juggling balls are not the things that help us meet what Maslow described as our basic needs. Basic needs are