I have been taking more naps lately. Doctor’s orders!
Well, I guess technically, it’s therapist orders because they have corrected me twice now that they are not legally a doctor. But in my mind, ethically and morally, they are, so yeah fuck it, we’re calling this one doctor’s orders.
I have been going to therapy regularly for two years now. We’ve gotten to the meat and potatoes as they say. Most of the stories I had heard about people’s first experiences with therapy is about it taking time to open up to their therapist. Maybe even going through two or three different people in the process and, once they found their person, really easing in to the waters of fostering and nurturing that oh so holy safe space. Not me. I came in ENGINES HOT. When you go to a good concert, I find what separates the good from the great is when the artist has the audacity to open up with a banger. Maybe even their biggest hit. I decided I wanted great therapy not good therapy, day one. I played my greatest hits first. And boy, had I taken a lot of hits!
Over the course of the past two years, something that keeps showing its capitalistic head in my sessions has been my mismanagement of productivity. Now of course, I didn’t know this was what it was at first. I had all of the pieces to the puzzle but my therapist helped me to put those pieces together and connected the thread between the plethora of symptoms I was experiencing and the fallacy of naming them the disease. I would say things like ‘I’m tired all of the time, but I know everyone’s tired’ (we’ve been in a pandemic for a year and half). Or ‘I’m dating this person and I want to spend time with them but they’re getting the two nights a week I normally would have to myself’. Or ‘I know I do a lot but I also function at a high level, it’s one of my strengths’.
All the great therapists are incredibly patient. I have a feeling a good two months before we really dug into this issue my therapist was just collecting evidence for a crime they had solved long ago. But like everything else in life, real change only comes once you arrive. Someone else can’t do it for you but someone else can help you get there. That’s therapy at its best.
One morning, at the start of a session, my therapist asked me to list a typical week out, day by day. So I started: ‘Mondays, that’s my day off to ‘sleep in' (up at 7!), therapy at 11, the week’s errands usually between noon and 3, CrossFit (yes I do Crossfit, no I am not a god damn monster), at 4:30, tennis at 6, bed at 10. Tuesdays through Saturdays all look pretty much the same, I’m at work around 5:45AM (I’m the GM of two cafes), there until around 4PM, run to CrossFit at 4:30 (still not an asshole!), home by 6:30, make dinner (I love to cook and it resets me), take the dog on a walk, usually get in bed around 10:30. Sundays are my other day off and always a ‘Big Plan’ day. Maybe kayaking or hiking. Maybe go on an 8 or 10 mile run. Oh, and on Tuesdays I usually play tennis again after CrossFit, oh, and on Thursdays I have my Volleyball league after the gym, and I guess on Fridays I do ‘Movie Nights’…..’. I began to trail off.
I’ve always hated the term busy body. It sounds gross and disingenuous and implies someone who is essentially running from themselves while yelling ‘call me!’ at everyone else. I’ve always had a high capacity to do a lot of things and do them well. I’ve always thought I was the exception, not the rule. To some extent I still believe that because something deep down in me believes I can handle anything. And after listing off my day to day for my therapist and realizing I was doing a whole lot of shit and doing it at a very high level, that was my answer to their question.
Therapist: ‘Why are you doing all of this?’ *CHECK*
Me: ‘Because I know I can handle it.’ *CHECK*
Therapist: ‘But should you?’ *CHECKMATE*
I would spend the next few minutes defending myself furiously while not being asked to. Which is when Houston will confirm, we have a problem. I can work 60 hour weeks (It’s good for me and I’m paid well!!!), I can hit the gym 5-6 times a week (I love the challenge and if you’re not for health are you even a doctor!!! wait you already confirmed you’re not…), and okay, maybe my using a three hour tennis match as a night cap is pushing it a LITTLE, I would be willing to commit to maybe playing one less match a week (especially at Christmas and Thanksgiving!!!).
I realized the same thing I had realized months ago. I was tired. But now I knew why. I was being too productive. Being tired was the symptom, productivity the disease. I had pushed myself harder and further than I ever had (during a mother fucking pandemic) and I had done it. I had confirmed what I already knew: that I could handle more. But it had come at the expense of my mental health, my physical health, and in a lot of ways, my joy.
I left with a game plan. It didn’t look like dropping everything at once and it didn’t even mean cutting things completely out. But it did mean going to the gym less. It meant being more intentional with my time at work and trusting those in places of power to do their own jobs. It meant me agreeing to just sit for at least one hour a day and do something that was pure pleasure. This is how I watched 4 seasons of Jersey Shore in two weeks and honestly more therapists should be prescribing it. It asked me to rest when I was tired, even if I felt guilty for it, and built naps into my Sunday afternoons. That has now spilled into Mondays as well and it’s incredible, big nap fan. I literally wrote this after waking up from my Monday nap so if it’s bad it’s because I’m groggy and if it’s good it’s because therapy works. The plan allowed me to keep my life in some ways and allowed me to find something new and more sustainable in others. The trade has been more than fair.
Boundaries are the thing I’m going to keep learning until the day I die. Walking past the line I know I’m towing just to say I did it. And even at my timely death (timely because I will for sure die one day and it will for sure be because I did too much) I suspect my little ghost soul will try to pack just one more thing into his eternity. Because he can. Because he’s just a little more resilient than all of the other little ghost souls around him. But hopefully it is true that we keep getting better the closer we get to who we are. Hopefully that little ghost soul will stop floating or flying or doing whatever it is little ghost souls do to get from here to there and ask if he should.