T. S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, which is a joke to me and an endless source of joy. April is seldom the cruelest of the months, though it can be a little necessarily soggy to bring about all the buds and blossoms, and all that rain can be a drag.
This year, April crept in with the springiest of spring weather—warm and sunny and full of promise. It didn’t rain for at least a week and we were blessed with a beautiful Easter. Once the rains did come, everything around us perked up and came to life. Plants in the garden quadrupled in size in one week. I’d peek out the kitchen window every hour and swear they’d all grown another inch.
I began April in desperate need of rest. I could feel it in my body, but it was worse than I thought. In March, my dad went into and out of the hospital, with little assurance that anything was going to get better. Less than a week later, my boss emailed to say we finally had work to do after a year on hold, which meant I’d be spending more of my hours in front of the computer doing research and writing. March also took my daughter back to school four days a week after homeschooling for most of the school year.
Through it all, I held onto my 100 day project, writing ten minutes every day and posting a time lapse video on Instagram. It was my creative outlet, a lifeline. It carried me through a sticky February and into an even stickier March—that simple act in ten minutes a day.
I’d created a daily habit, one I was proud of, and reasoned that it was tiny enough to be sustainable for a hundred days. Intentionally, I’d chosen something to so tiny and so doable that it would seem ridiculous to quit or give up.
I mean, how much easier could I have made it?
Of course, I never could have imagined what was in store for me in the first thirty days of this project, or the second. We don’t expect major life changes. We don’t consider potential family emergencies. These things just happen, catching us off guard because we’re busy simply living our lives.
Inherently, this project sidelined the idea of rest in favor of an absurdly long string of days doing the exact same thing. A hundred days is a long time not to take a break.
And despite being an advocate of rest and a sleep enthusiast, I convinced myself that my super-tiny, eensy-weensy ten minutes a day for a hundred days wouldn’t be a problem.
Little did I know.
I felt it starting around Day 50. I was already on the other side of some of the stress. My dad was home from the hospital, and things felt like they were settling down. I wanted to rest but rationalized and reasoned that I could keep going. That it was good for me to keep going.
The thing is, this daily writing helped so much as I was walking through a lot of turmoil and uncertainty around my dad’s hospitalization. I haven’t read through all of what I wrote yet, but just getting it down and out of my head, having a safe place to put all my messy, angry, exhausted thoughts felt good.
If I wasn’t in the throes of this project, I’m not sure how much of that I would have written.
But by the time April rolled around, the writing wasn’t working anymore. I was still writing, but I’d reached a tipping point where the ten minutes became another to-do list item. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. I was checking a box, putting words down just to say I did it, without any care or attention.
Because I didn’t have any more care or attention to give.
I was spent. Exhausted. Fatigued. No more gas in the tank. Nothing more to give.
One day, after confessing to my husband that I sat for an hour at the computer and didn’t write a word, instead dawdling around and tidying my desk, he hit the nail on the head: Sounds like you’re burned out.
His statement caught me off guard but rang a bell inside me. I’d been feeling it build, that burnout feeling, the exhaustion. It reaches back to a couple months ago with my dad’s illness, but even before that through the many layers of this pandemic.
Never getting back to baseline. Continually digging deeper.
I could and have used a million metaphors for what it feels like, but this one feels most true: being underwater, getting pummeled by the waves, barely getting a breath before going under again.
That’s how life has felt. Not creating, not writing. Living. At times, I’ve been so upside down, I couldn’t find my way up. Even bubbles leading to the surface were elusive, blotted out in the darkness while I struggled to find air.
When I think about how much everyone has on their plates, not just now but all the time, I am amazed. We all carry our burdens, these heavy things that are ours to bear. But we also help carry each other’s when we can.
Sometimes we’re strong and can carry more than our own load. Other times, we buckle under the weight of even the smallest thing.
And still, the world spins on.
It makes me think of the first lines from Allen Ginsberg’s “Song”:
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
It isn’t just I carry your burdens and love you. It’s also I let you carry my burdens and love me. I let you. I allow it. I don’t armor up and keep plodding along, alone in my way.
Except here I was, sitting with my husband on an ordinary Thursday night, listening to him tell me it sounds like I’m burned out.
He said it, then a light broke through from the heavens and I realized what I already knew: it was time to rest.
It wasn’t optional anymore—it was necessary.
Why? Because rest is necessary. Because we’re made to cycle between work and rest, output and input and no-put. Because we’re not meant to become so overloaded that even the tiniest, itty-bittiest little things drag us down instead of lifting us up.
In their book Burnout, sisters and co-authors Emily and Amelia Nagoski say this: “We are built to oscillate between work and rest. When we allow for this oscillation, the quality of our work improves, along with our health.”
Creativity needs space to breathe.
We also need space to breathe. To really breathe. Deeply, expansively. Not just the staccato breath of someone trying to keep her head above water, but a full breath to the bottom of our lungs.
That breath says slow down. That breath says pay attention.
That breath is what I’ve needed. A breath, a break, a pause.
The Nagoski sisters call that pause the “default network mode,” which runs in the background, making connections while we do seemingly innocuous tasks like folding the laundry or taking a shower.
Our brains are like rubber bands that stretch and contract, our creativity existing in the tension, then finding itself pulled too tight. Rest gives us balance and a chance for the default mode network to do its work.
“Walking away from a task or a problem doesn’t mean you’re ‘quitting’ or giving up,” the sister write. “It means you’re recruiting all your brain’s processes for a particular task—including the capabilities that don’t involve your effortful attention.”
After 65 days, I pressed pause on the writing for my 100 day project to rest and spent a lot of time thinking about creativity as a cycle. What do I need on a regular basis to continue to be creative and productive? How do I build in rest so I can prevent myself from burning out?
The simple answer is to anticipate the need for rest, to respect and understand the vacillation between work and rest. Both are important. Both are necessary. We’re not machines, after all. We’re human beings.
A few years ago, I wrote this in my journal:
“This is not just a writing practice, but also a living practice. We have to listen—to others, to ourselves—and we need space in order to contemplate and create. The world can be so fast, demanding so much, but there is time to slow down, time to taste and chew and digest. There’s no rush.“
As I continue with this project, having rested for two weeks and now reading through what I wrote on Days 1-65, it’s becoming clearer that the need to push beyond my limits is completely unnecessary. In ten minutes a day, I’ve gotten so much accomplished, so much raw material to work with.
It’s the habit that matters. We don’t want to break the chain, as Jerry Seinfeld famously said, but breaking it doesn’t nullify all our hard work. If anything, according to the Nagoski sisters, breaking that chain will do nothing but amplify it and enrich the process.
A hundred days is a lovely, round number. But it’s just a number. This is just a project.
Being productive without fail isn’t the most important thing. What’s important is the journey. What’s important is finding what works for you.
Leave a Reply