Part 1 – Why
I’m going to start this post the way I start many of the posts on this blog: with a big disclaimer.
I recognize that my financial situation and lifestyle enable me to put everything on hold for a two-week road trip, and that is not the case for everybody. The point of this post is less about the value of doing what I did (though that is how I will illustrate my point), and more about the value of doing something that is restorative for you.
Also, as usual, I mention my work in this post, but this blog is a creation entirely of my own and not associated with my organization in any way.
More Isn’t Better…
We all know that down time is important, but we so rarely make it a priority, especially in a society that uses busyness as a metric for merit.[1] Growing up as a kid who did every activity available (because I was genuinely interested in everything I encountered), I received praise for all of my different activities – and that continued into adulthood. I didn’t busy myself in order to receive praise (at least not consciously), but I did come to understand that that was how one lived a full life.
I remember being asked in middle school if/when I just sat down and watched TV. “Why would I do that? It’s a waste of time,” I would reply.
My lovingly bestowed nickname in college was “ulcer woman,” as I regularly overloaded on classes, ran two clubs, worked two jobs, and played a varsity sport. “You can sleep when you’re dead,” I would laugh.
Throughout those years, whenever I traveled, I would run myself ragged seeing as much as possible in order to make every minute worth it and suck the marrow out of the experience, returning home exhausted. “What if I never get back here?” I would wonder.
At my first job out of grad school, my boss (whether intentionally or unintentionally) took full advantage of that enthusiasm. I regularly worked as much as 80 hours a week (salaried – no overtime), but I didn’t care because I wanted to do a good job and see the company succeed. By the time I made it to my next job, my boss (who knew me professionally beforehand and knew about that tendency) took it upon herself to make sure I had a healthy work-life balance. She would regularly tell me to go home at the end of the day and check in with me if I was putting in more hours than she thought I should be.
I genuinely loved what I was doing and loved the company, so I didn’t care if I worked extra hours, but she did. With her encouragement, I spent less time in the office… but I filled that empty time with more activities: singing in a choir, running the local brewers guild, training for marathons, planning expansive gardening projects, hosting frequent parties to release my homebrews, writing a weekly blog on sustainability, etc. So while work and life were in balance, both sides of that scale were very full and not what I would call “healthy.”
…Better is Better
It wasn’t until quarantine that things changed. I’ve written frequently about how the pandemic and quarantine have altered my perspective and my approach to daily life.[2],[3] Starting a new job leading a company right at the beginning of lockdown really forced me to be mindful about how my close-knit team was coping in isolation, and also about how I could set a good example of work-life balance when work and life were physically in the same place. I made it a mission to be my former boss to my new team – ensuring that I wasn’t getting emails from them at 10pm (but that I wasn’t sending them, either).
With severe restrictions on in-person social activities and severe Zoom burnout rendering virtual socialization less appealing, we had a lot of unstructured down time. Sure, there were gardening, and cleaning, and blogging projects to do at home, but I had lost about half of my “play time” activities. Christian (also a heavily-scheduled person pre-pandemic) and I got used to watching movies together in the evenings and having quiet time on the couch with our respective hot drinks and kitties in the mornings. It was such a wonderful discovery to learn that we actually liked spending time with each other (something our schedules hadn’t allowed much of in previous years.)
I avoided quiet time like the plague when I was younger because I felt depressed and anxious when I wasn’t being productive. But then, during a plague, I received blanket permission from society to be unproductive as we all dealt with collective, once-in-a-generation trauma. As things started opening back up, I started to feel anxiety about losing this quieter, more thoughtful and deliberate life I had constructed for myself. And, as I’ve discussed previously on this blog, I started making mindful decisions about what was coming back into my life, rather than just reverting to my old approach of trying (unsuccessfully) to find a place for everything I wanted.
Baby Steps
It is a well-known axiom that your mess will expand to fit the space available. Although I have stepped back from choir and have handed off the brewers guild to someone else, it baffles me how busy I still feel. I look at how I spend my time: keeping up with the never-ending weeds that force me back to the beginning of the yard again once I’ve made it to the end, researching and writing on a new topic every week for my blog, taking care of kitties and plants… and these are things I love to do. There’s even more that I barely get to: I’ve been running/walking very little these days, rarely getting to cleaning, dishes, and laundry, and I’ve completely stalled out on sorting through some still-untouched boxes from my apartment (here on the fifth anniversary of moving in with Christian).
Despite having decided not to return to some much-beloved activities (and feeling immensely guilty for it), I have still felt recently that I’m going through an unending cycle of activities, responsible for the lives of animals and plants in and around my home, the livelihoods of my team at work, and the health of myself, my husband, and our relationship. And that’s why taking time for ourselves was so important.
I really dislike taking breaks (even during the workday) because I feel like I lose my momentum and have little desire to get back to the task at hand. When it comes to a vacation, there’s a ton of work that needs to be done to prepare for an absence, a ton to catch up on after you get back, plus the uncomfortable task of asking people to take care of things while you’re gone, which I hate to do – first because I’m a control freak, but also because I don’t want to impose on others. I guess I’m not the only person who feels this way because of how often I’ve had to remind people on my team to take vacation (even if it was just to have time off of work while travel wasn’t possible).
I realized that I kept encouraging people to take vacation even though I hadn’t taken any significant time off myself. I stayed with my parents for a month last year after my mom was done with chemo, but I still worked a full day, every day. I took a few long weekends last fall using vacation hours I was going to lose at the end of the year, but I wasn’t unavailable for long periods of time. In the time warp of quarantine, it alternately feels like I just started my job and/or that I’ve been around forever. Either way, it was long past time for my first extended break from the team.
Next week, we’ll look at how I did it and what unexpected results I got.
Are you taking your vacation? If you don’t have vacation time, how are you making time for yourself outside of your daily obligations? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Thanks for reading!
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-busyness-badge-of-honor_b_5695718
[2] https://radicalmoderate.online/tidying-up-week-1/
[3] https://radicalmoderate.online/414-days-of-solitude/
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