Recently I came across this unpublished piece that I wrote several years ago, while I was still living the faster-paced city life, and wanted to share after my most recent post about making a positive life change. I needed to take a sick day, but it ended up healing so much more than my cold-addled body. And it feels especially relevant in our stressed-out 2020 world where the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health is on everyone’s minds. So here it is:
I woke up, as usual, before my alarm. It couldn’t be almost 6 a.m. already. (Please, oh please, no.) I adjusted the alarm to 6:20. That would still give me just enough time if I hurried. But the friendly little chime on my iPhone telling me to wake up, the one that of late had started inciting feelings of dread, would end up being irrelevant that day.
The afternoon before, when I started feeling that heaviness in my head, that dull ache at the back of my throat and in my ears, I was pretty sure I was getting sick. And the following morning I was proven correct: There was no way I was going to work that day.
My body felt awful. Disgusting. We’re talking a constant headache, snotty tissues, and… anyway. It was gross. But even though my body was not at its finest hour, my mind and soul felt WONDERFUL.
Wait, what?
Yes. You heard me. Nobody likes to get a cold. Nobody likes being sick. And I’m continually thankful that thus far in my lifetime, stuff like colds, stomach bugs, and strep throat are the worst I’ve ever had to deal with in terms of illness.
But I desperately needed that sick day. A day off where I was more or less incapacitated, forced to be alone at home with the thoughts bouncing around inside of my pounding head. Perhaps that was what was causing the pounding in the first place. How had I gotten to this point of being such a mess?
Rewind to two or so weeks earlier. Scene: I’m stressed out at work, starting to get a bit concerned about job security, constantly feeling like I’m under a microscope as a relative newbie who still has some work to do to prove herself. I’m not eating right, and I wake up in the middle of the night panicking about work, struggling to fall back to sleep. It’s the last thing I think about before going to bed, first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. Hitting this goal or that goal, worrying whether I’ve done enough for this client or that client or said or written the right thing, thinking about the emails I have to send and phone calls I have to make. In short, I still didn’t feel like I deserved to be there.
All of that had finally caught up with me.
Much as I loved my job the majority of the time, the pressures were starting to become analogous to a Dementor from Harry Potter. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, these are evil creatures that make you feel doom and gloom–and ultimately suck out your soul.)
It wouldn’t take a medical degree—or a fellow Harry Potter geek like myself—to realize that this was not healthy. My body was long overdue to start yelling at me.
After I notified my boss that I was definitely not coming to work that day, I took an early-mid-morning nap. Finished the book I was reading. Took a late-mid-morning nap. Ate lunch, complete with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Snoozed again. Did some writing for fun on odd projects I’d started. Swept the floor. Did a little bit more sleeping, or at least some more sprawling-on-the-couch-with-my-eyes-closed. Picked up a new TV show. Worked on my lonely little recently neglected history dissertation for grad school.
Hold the phone. Worked? Worked?! On what was, technically, a day off?
Yes. After taking most of the day to do, well, nothing, I finally had the time, energy, and mental clarity to tackle another challenging project totally unrelated to my job. One that had been looming in the background, and that I’d completely forgotten how to enjoy because it had been buried deep under the pile of stress from work, and shoved behind other priorities in my life. In that one sick day—maybe even just an hour of that one day—I remembered 1) why I’d decided to study history in the first place, and 2) how to enjoy writing about it. (It also didn’t hurt that the show I picked up that afternoon was NBC’s Timeless, with a kick-butt female historian as its time-traveling main character.)
My writing, in short, was like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. It just needed a little love.
Hmmm. Let’s take that analogy a bit farther, all the way to its obvious logical conclusion. You probably know where I’m going with this. You might say that I was like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. I just needed a little love. Not from the people around me; I am fortunate to have that in spades from family and friends. But from me. ME! That day, somewhere in the middle of my second Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I realized that I had to remember how to take care of myself, take care of the things that were important to me, whether something as huge as a dissertation or something as small as my penchant for coloring books (or Harry Potter).
That day, I started to relax. I started thinking about all of the other important things in my life and reevaluating my priorities. Giving myself a kick in the pants for not pressing “pause” sooner. Bear in mind that through all of this, my head was still pounding, my throat felt like sandpaper, and my ears felt like they were underwater. (Never mind all the boogers.) But I felt…happy? Free? More myself?
I started thinking about work-life balance. About not sweating the small stuff. About small changes I could make to de-stress. About the people, places, and things I really loved, and how, in the grand scheme of life, I was lucky and shouldn’t worry. I started realizing that I needed to unplug completely from work whenever I wasn’t there, and just be. To stop worrying about work while I was spending time with family and friends. To write more, draw more, paint more, run more, walk more, read more, sit around and do absolutely nothing more. Be me more, in short. To not be so hard on myself all of the time. Actually, that one’s so important that I need to repeat it: To not be so hard on myself all of the time.
Moral of the story? When your body starts yelling at you, slow down and listen. It might tell you more than you realize you needed to hear.
