What Does It Take To Get Some Rest

[Me sitting in my chair, awake but not working.]

So here I am, smack in the middle of our annual holiday, or what Americans like to call Vacation, but really, this year, its more ghastly variation, the Staycation–the misguided mangling of two words to make both of them into the opposite of themselves. To stay and carry on with life is one thing, and to escape it all and gaze at some other tranquil scene is another. Surely the two can’t have anything to do with each other. But what happens when you’re too tired to do anything but Stay, but you also need, as they say, ‘to take a vacation.’ The question is, Rest, and how can you get it when you’re too tired to go get it?

This year, even though we longed to rush off to the sunlit South, to sit in the heat and eat Mexican food, we just didn’t have the wherewithal to pack up and go. That’s how exhausted we, or rather, I was. Too tired to pack. Too tired to think. Too tired to plan. Too tired almost to get out of bed in the morning.

It’s an unusual place to be, for me. I’ve always had a little bit of energy. Sure, you have a baby here and there, and it takes at least six weeks to recover, to find yourself buzzing around in the shadowland of sleep deprivation–irritated with clutter, chaos, and fatigue, but basically happy and able to go on with the baby and the cooking. But eventually the baby, or babies, sleep, and three or so years after that first fantastical moment, you yourself finally stop waking up automatically at 2am. The first time you sleep through without waking up you go on sleeping for almost a week–catching up on ten years’ worth lost to the fat baby’s strongly held belief that he, or she, is going to die of hunger.

But sleep isn’t the only thing that is required for rest. It’s the first thing, but it’s not the only thing. If you aren’t getting enough sleep, well, you do that. But then, even then, you might find that you are just worn out, stumbling to put one foot in front of another. For true, I’ve been writing about this for a whole year almost–as my thyroid has spun out into confusion and incompetence, as I’ve tried to come to terms with the appalling limitations of physical and mental weakness. I was not, this year, as I once was–the sort of person who basically muscled through and kept going.

Which brings me to the second critical requirement for rest–the mental ability to stop racing along in the Kingdom of Anxiety for a few wretched minutes, the abandonment of a fight or flight response to every single circumstance that throws itself in your way. I know people write books about this but I haven’t had time to read them. I’ve been too busy to see that I needed to de-escalate, too distracted to sort out why, even though I was just sitting in a chair, I was still mentally worn to a thin, cracked, about to break, plate of glass.

So here I am, at the Staycation half way mark, having given the internet a fairly wide berth, having cleaned out some cupboards and sat ever more languidly in my chair staring at the tree outside my window, and I think I’ve discovered that it’s nothing more than being a lot more introverted than my children give me credit for. I just need everyone to go away and leave me alone for a bit. And by everyone, I mean, really, everyone. Just the chance to not talk, and not answer a question, and not make a decision for someone about whether or not they should be riding a bike or throwing a ball. Nor to peddle heavily along on the political outrage machine. To not do anything, in other words, but just Sit, awake but not working. That’s something I just haven’t done in, well, let me think, a whole lotta years.

Introverts know this about themselves. But I’m only half an introvert. The other half likes to be with people. But I always forgot to count all the children as people.

The other thing that I knew to be true, but didn’t want to face, is that my whole world wouldn’t crumble if I didn’t blog every day. And, get this, neither would anybody else’s. I didn’t really want this to be so. I hold my very being in my hand every morning as I desperately blog, trying to mark out a place for my own mind to exist in the midst of a life where I could easily be eaten alive by the needs of everybody else. It’s been the way that I’ve gained some ‘rest’ for myself the last few years. But it’s not a very good substitute for the true thing–that thing where you actually don’t work for a few minutes, you don’t answer or produce or create or order or engage. Blogging, though it gives me the illusion of rest every morning, is far more akin, over time, to work itself.

So, enough narcissism. Or, as I heard someone once say, ‘Enough about you, let’s talk about me…’ No wait, that’s not right, I can’t think how it should go.