[237/365] back to being a peasant

[cosmolinguist]

This blog post -- I mean, newsletter...missive? dispatch? what are individual instances of a newsletter called?! -- is mostly about something else, but I've had it an open tab for a few days now because of this paragraph:

Doing this 200 mile race — all the joy and suffering and outrageous spectacle of it — always makes me think about the hierarchy of hard things. You can set aside time to train for a marathon or a 10k. You can aim for a promotion at work, or orient your life around the completion of a huge project. You can prep for months for bar. You can spend your entire high school career trying to get into a particular college. You can spend actual years of your life planning a wedding, trying to get pregnant, working towards a degree, or buying a house.

"You can set aside time."

July and in some ways August were a time when my work, which is usually so varied in both topic and amount, was a firehose of one topic. It was sudden and big enough that everything else was immediately disregarded: from a conference I'd traveled halfway across the country to be at, to all my other ongoing topics.

It was stressful, because I -- usually a behind-the-scenes person and very happy about it -- was suddenly a linchpin of a frenzy of activity. Suddenly my name was known to the Big Bosses. I was asked to do a lot of stuff I never had before (I have the former-gifted-kid discomfort with ever saying "I don't know anything about that, can you help me/who can help me?", but I got inured to it quickly because it was happening so very often -- on an almost daily basis at first, I'd say). Unexpectedly, my subject-matter expertise wss now in the highest demand, and so was my willingness to be interviewed on no notice or to brief higher-ups on their own interviews.

But it was also fun. Because I was supported in this by my manager and his managers and the whole team picked up the slack so I could devote myself to this one thing. Because I care deeply about the work I'm doing (like people care about what college they're getting into, or their wedding, or passing the bar, or running a marathon), and have reason to hope it makes a difference. And because it turned out that even the things I hadn't done before went okay. Some of them even went really well! So that was fun.

It was all fun. I didn't mind postponing a day off that I'd booked, because it was fun and exciting to be working so hard as a valued part of a big team of people. It was fun to be important. It was fun to set aside all my quotidian tasks.

You can set aside time.

Like for a festival. A liminal space, outside the normal rules. Maybe I'd found the Bean in my slice of cake and now I could be King for the day. I knew it wouldn't last forever and that made it fun too. It was an adventure.

And now it's winding down. As August has gone on, my regular work has crept back in. I've sent apologetic emails for things I didn't get back to people about. All my meetings have been about other things. I'm back to the usual familiar stresses of my job. Heck, I haven't had my name in a piece of national media in three weeks (and that was just the publication of something I'd written a few weeks before)!

It's fine. I love my job. It's nice to hear from my regular team more -- I'd been feeling so detached from them, and they're so lovely! It's great to return to making dinner and taking the garbage out and all the chores I was either too busy or too tired to do for a few weeks straight.

But of course there's also a feeling of ...now what?

It's difficult to go straight back in to ordinary life. The end of a ritual should include some mechanism for re-entering the everyday world. Of course the obvious one here is rest. My boss's boss has made it very clear (even tagging me in two messages over the course of jsut a few minutes in the big group chat for this liminal space) that I should have a holiday, a break.

But...

I'll book some time off, after the end of next week when the Big Project is, if not done, passing an arbitrary point where it'll become just another thing I'm working on a bit when it's relevant. (The way it's dwindling away rather than coming to a defined End Point is another reason I'm struggling with what comes next: I'm struggling with when comes next!)

I'm notoriously bad at resting. I don't know how to do it. Doing nothing re-creates my experience of depression. And I always see chores that need to be done, and the dog always needs something... And that's fine! I love my life. But I'm not sure how to rest just like I'm not sure how to have hobbies any more. I did tasks constantly for so long in my marriage that I don't know how to be a person outside of what I'm doing.

But soon I'll book a vacation for my lil family: we're intending to do another few days in Center Parcs like we did last year because we all enjoyed it so much last time. Even Gary! I'm so glad he's doing so well lately. I'm glad I'm doing so well lately.

Comments

[silveradept]

Neither of our cultures on either side of the pond is particularly good about both rituals to get you away from work into a liminal space, nor about rituals to get you back from the liminal space into the ordinary and the quotidian again. About the closest thing we get are the transit times from those things and spaces, and that only works if the travel isn't stressful or otherwise requires someone to do stressful things so that others can have their ritual reintegration times. I feel like we need a couple of "nothing days" on the ends of any vacation or rest, where we can be at the office, but there's no or very light work to be had, so as to let us let go of the things that will continue to happen while we are gone, and to bring us back into the flow of what's happened while we were gone. The way we do things right now is very abrupt, like we're supposed to engage in the shift like we have suddenly been hit with the true meaning of a Zen koan, in both directions.

[hunningham]

I'm notoriously bad at resting. I don't know how to do it. Doing nothing re-creates my experience of depression. And I always see chores that need to be done, and the dog always needs something... And that's fine! I love my life. But I'm not sure how to rest just like I'm not sure how to have hobbies any more. I did tasks constantly for so long in my marriage that I don't know how to be a person outside of what I'm doing.

And I have been thinking about this on & off ever since you posted it. No wise advice or suggestions from me - just wow this resonated - "I don't know how to be a person outside of what I'm doing". Recently I've been trying to think about time outside the to-do list and it's hard.

[cosmolinguist]

And I've been thinking since then about you saying this comment stuck with you. :) It's meant this phrase "I don't know how to be a person outside of what I do" has occurred to me many times in the last week or so!