Have You Considered Taking it Easy?
reflections on rest and “making up for lost time.”
I have tried to resist it, but I think it’s time to acknowledge things: there is something in the air in 2024. The astro girlies say that it’s because we’ve entered the Age of Aquarius, an astrological event that ushers in a time of rebirth and renewal on a global scale. I’m a very surface level star girl (I know my big three and little else), but I do feel like something’s shifted. I’ve been taking some time to consider why I feel this way, and it came to me earlier this week, when I saw a comment on a TikTok video lamenting the recent (and way too frequent) changes to the app’s algorithm. The commenter was reminiscing on 2020 TikTok, and mentioned missing “quarantine vibes.”
Besides being shaken by the fact that things are so rancid we’re romanticizing the early days of coronavirus, I realized that while I most certainly do not miss the “quarantine vibes,” mentally it feels like I’ve been stuck there for years. I’m only just now climbing out of the pandemic haze; years are starting to feel like discrete entities again and not like one long uneventful day stretching indeterminately ahead of me. For the first time since Covid-19 plunged me, like many of us, into an unexpected and uncertain situation – a very difficult adjustment for my Type A ass, who created a life plan at 13 and adhered to it with little deviations until age 24 – I finally feel like the dust has begun to settle and a path is starting to unfold in front of me.
I’ve written before on where I was at the start of the pandemic, and about some of what I’ve experienced since then – international moves, career changes, agonizing and exhilarating personal growth. But now I can also see that something else developed: a pressing feeling that I need to “make up” for lost years of underproductivity stretching from early lockdown until early 2022 (because for me, 2021 very much gave 2020: The Sequel vibes.) Of course, this is a little silly. What do I even mean by underproductivity? What is the baseline level of expected productivity in a time of social collapse and political upheaval in the wake of a global health crisis??? (Yeah, I sometimes forget that we lived through that, too.) But such are the effects of the hustle culture that we live in. Even in times of crisis, we measure ourselves by our output, not our resilience, the decision we make every day to keep going at all. I’m sure many of you knew what I was getting at, that you’re familiar with periods of “relaxing” that are anything but because the mind continues to race in the background: “I could be [insert relevant task to career advancement, glowing up, or leveling up] right now.”
This is a thought that has plagued my leisure time since last October, when I wrote here that I’d be spending the last six months until my 30th birthday working on myself, drawing up a strict daily schedule. After all, it’s grind time, no flossing, as a great poet once said. I’ve mostly followed it without until a few weeks ago, when I simply couldn’t. A couple Mondays ago, I woke up at 5 am, went to the gym, struggled through a workout, went home, and showered, as has become my custom – then, completely exhausted, I broke protocol and crawled back into bed, telling myself I’d get back to the usual routine after a brief nap. I woke up at around 4pm, utterly aghast that I’d wasted the day and tried to force myself to get up and make up for it. I didn’t. Instead, I watched TV and scrolled and beat myself up for the work I wasn’t doing, then went back to bed a few hours later, only to wake up that Tuesday and do the same thing. Gym, morning routine, followed by a long nap that I woke from at noon. I spent some time doing nothing in particular – and feeling like shit about it – until I thought to myself: have you considered taking it easy? Writing it out now, it does not feel so profound – but at the moment it shook me a lil’ bit. Historically, it’s quite rare for me to consider how I can be gentler with myself, not tougher (and if you’re reading Brain Rot, I suspect this might be the case for you as well.)
I took the rest of the day off, letting myself lay around, read, watch TV (mind you, this is all the stuff I’d been doing anyway…) but now I’d freed myself from the guilt of being a human woman instead of an eternally achieving sexy fembot glow up queen baby girl boss babe (the horror!). So what happened after giving myself a shame-free day off? I woke up toward the end of that week feeling (mildly) refreshed, wrote some of the best pages I’ve generated in a while, and hit a milestone that had eluded me for weeks in a large project. In other words, a bit of rest was exactly what I needed to get back on the “track” I was so worried I was about to fall off of.
But I don’t want to talk about rest being important because it makes you a better worker – there’s something grotesque about that, even though it’s true. I want to talk about how nurturing yourself is a skill like any other, something you learn, something you get better at over time by putting it into practice. But it’s a skill we’re rarely taught, growing up in environments where we’re told, implicitly and explicitly, that work and achievement are the most important things about us. As I transition to grown ass woman territory, I’m coming to terms with the hard truth: if you don’t make the choice to learn to relax, eventually you will be forced to — and personally, I’d rather not find out what it feels like when the decision is made for me by my body and mind refusing to function.
A couple weeks ago, I was at the stage of needing physical rest – but I can also sense that there’s a different kind of exhaustion at the fringes of my psyche, that there’s more I need to do to get beyond feeling like I’m working to live, not living to work. So I’m teaching myself how to build rest that actually restores energy (and not just numbs me, like mindless scrolling) into my days. But first I have to learn what it is that energizes me at all, a feeling I’ve lost since my main hobby became my job (a blessing, but with side effects I never considered). I have a feeling that this will be a kind of work of its own.
I’m a little over halfway into that six month journey to thirty now, so I think it’s time for a bit of reflection. In the first three I’ve begun to see what I can do when I push myself to my limit week on week. I’ve reached some big writing milestones; worked with brands I never thought was possible; took a vague idea and turned it into my first ever product offering, a positive affirmation coloring book for girlies who like to throw ass. In the second three, I think I will be turning back inward, taking the time to reintroduce myself to…myself, to prioritize care and tenderness just as much as I have focused on discipline and direction. I feel, for the first time in a long while, that I have access to 2019 Lola, a part of myself I thought I’d never recover. I’m so excited for her to meet who am I now and to take stock of who I’ve become.
To aid me in my journey, I’ll be adding this to my morning affirmations:
My three year anniversary of posting on TikTok was earlier this week, so I’ve been in an introspective mood, thinking about how so much has changed since then and how you all are a huge part of that. Thanks for giving me the space and hanging out. I hope you take a beat and consider that maybe “going harder” isn’t the solution. Maybe you just need to take it easy.
Restfully yours,
Lola xx