Sometimes, I have a bad week. And nothing really *happened* I guess, just the slow hum of more Pandemic Time. I've been jokingly referring to my mood as a Pandemic Pout, but you could also call it "hitting a wall", "reaching my limit", "throwing a big ole temper tantrum".
And even though I've built an entire business around helping people learn how to rest and feel less guilt and shame about it, I still fought myself all week. Here is just a small sampling of the unhelpful things my brain threw up at me this week!
Your pandemic is nothing - very little has changed!
You're being a baby!
You just want to be lazy and are using "the pandemic" as an excuse!
Other people have it so much worse - who are you to be pouting??
If you don't get to work RIGHT THIS SECOND you will never work again and this will be the moment where you look back and say, that's when my whole life stopped being useful and I slipped into the cavern of Terrible.
But underneath a lot of those conversations with myself is the idea that I both don't deserve to have my feelings or rest, and that if I do rest, I will not stop working again.
I didn't invent either of those ideas. They didn't come out of nowhere. They're baked into a bunch of cultures I'm steeped in every day - the idea that my worth boils down to how much I produce, and that there is always someone who deserves rest and care more than me. I can know intellectually that my thoughts aren't helpful, but it still takes a little bit of practice to not ACT like they're true.
So this week, I'm trying to practice being a person who experiments with rest, and practices showing myself more self-compassion. I'm collecting data - if I play 20 minutes of Stardew Valley over lunch, how do I feel? How does that change if I play 3 hours? If I sleep in, do I feel more rested or more anxious? What about going to bed earlier? What would a day off in the week feel like? What can I do on my off days to limit screen interaction?
I don't have the answers - I'm in the middle of navigating work and life and all the rest of it under these conditions like you are. But I do know that I do feel differently from day to day. Things feel a little more possible. Maybe I needed some rest, and some grace. Maybe you do too.