Grab a coffee, get cosy, I hope these words can find you in a moment of gentleness.
February has been my month off from work. I’ve never taken a full month off, it was so exciting when I planned it. I was itching for expansiveness. To wander freely through chunks of time, between daydreams, whims, books, writing. To cook up projects, explore my creative energies, try out art and movement therapy, let my energy wander freely, read more, build a writing practise, create a creatively lead life, figure out what I wanted the next phase of my work life to look.
So I planned February off to give myself to daydream, chase passions, plan projects, figure out what was making me feel alive and think of how I wanted to add it to my life.
That’s a lot of to expect from a month off, isn’t it? Writing it out, I realise how heavy that list it.
But that’s the expectations and hope I entered this month with. A loaded hope.
For a while, it felt great. I’d wake up every day, have my coffee while I journaled, spend the rest of the day moving between picking up books, writing, making art, going for the occasional walk. My days felt very aligned with what I had envisioned for this break - moving between creative endeavours seamlessly, being a creatively alive, waking up at 6am and enjoying the day’s sunshine kind of person. A very pretty looking, instagrammable, fitting all the narratives around the creative life version.
A few days in though, I started feeling restless with my books, my writing, my walks. I was making myself exist in spaces I didn’t really want to be in. I was living the version of this time I had conjured up in my head, without giving myself the space to check-in with myself if it was aligned with where I really was.
I started to feel dried up, irritated, going through the motions and constantly restless.
The thing about pretty versions of anything is, they’re held up by rules. So many, strictly held, assumed rules.
Here were some rules my pretty looking days were being held up by:
No binge watching shows.
No TV before the evening.
No sleeping in.
No lying around in bed.
I never sat down and decided these, but the strictly curated, imagined version of this break I was trying to create very much was built on these.
Even my rest had rules.
We enter spaces with rules, unspoken, acknowledge series of “shoulds” that align with our imagined version of experiences. Whether that’s imagining a break that’s filled with all the books we finally get to read, or travel plans that look a certain kind of relaxing, or an image we have of our life in a certain season.
Our attempts to trust ourselves and our bodies are built on such an inherent mistrust. That voice, that somewhere deep down believes, if I let myself start binge watching shows, I will spend the entire month in bed watching shows. Or if I let myself sleep in, Im two days away from turning it into a a 4am sleep, 2PM wake up routine. Such a tight hold on what was consciously intended to be a fluid, expansive space.
The irony of putting such loaded expectations on my time off, when so much of the work I do with clients is to allow themselves to rest, is not lost on me. I was wanting to come out of this break some way. I’m not sure what way. But something to show for the time off - more rested, energised, inspired, creatively healed? And creative healing in my head, doesnt happen in bed, now does it?
But that’s exactly where it happened for me.
Somewhere in the middle of last week, on a particularly bad day, I crawled into bed at 2PM and started a random show. I had no energy to live the strictly held up “creative life”on that. (I’ve noticed, it’s easier to let ourselves “off the hook”, or just do what we feel like, when we’re having a bad day. Maybe because there’s something to justify watching tv in bed at 2PM?)
A few hours of TV later, I had the urge to work on a quilt I’d abandoned around a month ago. I stayed up till 3am that night making the quilt. The next day or two were spent oscillating between more TV and lazying around, and bouts of wanting to pick up a specific book, or write.
I had taken this time off to give myself space. What I’d forgotten was, sometimes space looks like switching off. The not pretty, lying in bed, tv version of space. Sometimes the re-energising happens in the background of zoning out, doing nothing, eating ice cream in your pyjamas, and “wasting time”.
I knew when I was done with TV. I knew when I wanted to move on to something creative. I didn’t get swallowed by an endless hole of month long television (which we sometimes might, and that’s fine). But without any rules, my energy knew where it wanted to go, and when it was ready to go there, when I wasnt controlling it so tightly. So amazing, to witness myself access these parts of me. Realise, they surface when they’re ready, but also see the inherent mistrust in feeling like without the rules, and the control, I won’t find my way to myself.
It is our desire and desperate need to control that creates such a disconnect from our own wisdom, the knowledge we carry. From knowing, in a deep, lived way, what we need, what we want. Our rules are so tight, so suffocating, there is no room for our instinct and intuition to play, flourish, surface.
We are terrified of lawlessness, because we don’t trust ourselves. But what if we don’t trust ourselves because we’ve never let go of the rules long enough to find out what we’re capable of? To let ourselves experience finding our way back to ourselves? To let ourselves have that moment of being in bed, in the middle of show and suddenly feeling like, actually, I would like to sew a quilt right now.
We have been taught we need to be controlled, and disciplined, but it’s that desire to control that takes us so far away from our own voices, from a deep knowing each of us carries within us. Instead we desperately grab on to “should’s”. This is what my life should look like at 30. This is what time I should wake up at. This is what my month long break should look like.
Building that trust in ourselves, finding that ability to hear our own voices, lean into that nagging feeling of wanting something else, itching for a different energy, is a long process. A process of unlearning systems that have ingrained that mistrust of ourself so deeply in us, whether that’s our family of origins, our culture that so firmly holds “others know better”, productivity culture, or society that teaches us we’re small and we don’t know what’re right for us, and loves to tell us what’s right for is.
So many layers inside and outside of you need to be shed for you to hear and trust your own voice, but one good place to start is to lean into that nagging. Get curious about it. Explore it. Let yourself see if there’s anything of note lying on the other side.
I didn’t pick up that quilt thinking I was gonna be at it for 6 hours straight, I picked it up to sew two pieces together, because I felt like it. And somedays, that’s all I’ll feel like And somedays I’ll feel like doing it for days in a row. And some days we will find ourselves in slumps, and maybe that slump will just be letting us know something is demanding our attention. Can we learn to trust ourselves to know, to come back, to show us the way, to let us know what we need?
I think about what is possible when we let ourselves be. I think about what change can actually take place when we stop trying to squeeze it out of ourselves and instead trust the slow drip. I think about what meaning can be made when we let things be what they are.
-Lisa Olivera
I’m still watching my show, several episodes at a time, I’ll probably sleep in tomorrow, and wake up when I’m ready to. I’ll read some, or I won’t. It’ll come to me, my energy will lead the way. Learning to trust that, that it comes to us, that we know when we’re ready, is the hard part. That’s where the work lies.