what if i never start again?
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.
self care week: what's your evidence?
i don’t know that i’ve ever met anyone who felt like they were taking exquisite care of themselves all the time.
most of the time, people say things like:
“i do workout pretty regularly but i’m so terrible at sleep.”
“i get enough sleep but i have 0 hobbies or interests that are active right now.”
“i eat pretty well but i can’t remember the last time i was ahead of the game on my work.”
and at the heart of it is often the fact that we need to do so much to keep stable physically, mentally, and emotionally, and there just isn’t enough time in the world to do that and be a grad student, too. in order to do everything that you “should” as a grad student, there is always something that could be working on, something you could be reading, something you could be writing.
so where do you fit in the care you need? and how are you making those decisions?
i have a few questions that i ask clients when we’re getting to the bottom of something like burnout, or any other situation where time is disappearing and there isn’t enough left:
where is your time going?
what informs your decisions about what you do and when?
what evidence do you have to support those decisions? where’s the data?
it’s really easy to internalize the “publish or perish” model in academia and believe that anything in your life that doesn’t directly move your work forward is at best, a distraction, and at worse, keeping you from getting a job one day. who can justify working out when the choice is “work out now or have a job later”?
but if you’re well rested, you think more clearly. you often get things done more quickly. you can switch between tasks more easily. you’re more engaged and present when you’re rested. at least if you’re me, you’re also a nicer person and more pleasant to be around.
and even if you couldn’t measure the impact of care on your work:
you still deserve to care for yourself.
so this week, think about how you can get some evidence for the file entitled “reasons why i deserve to take care of myself despite what my brain gremlins think”. that might look like:
tracking your time to see where you are actually spending your days and nights
tracking your mood to see if it is impacted when you care for yourself
tracking your output to see if there is a connection between how and when you work, and what you do to take care of yourself
keeping track of what thoughts come up when you think about taking care of yourself - “i don’t have enough time”, “after i’m done i will” and the like
the more evidence you have, the easier it is to make data-based decisions about your schedule, and what you include as non-negotiable in your daily, weekly, and monthly routines. the more evidence you have, the more you can see your own patterns and start to address them. this isn’t a magical solution - knowing that sleeping more helps you focus won’t magically make your to-do list shrink. but knowing that sleeping more helps you focus might make it easier to say, at 9 pm - “it’s time to wind down, this can wait until tomorrow” rather than pushing through until 1 am. and that makes a difference.