Wasting Time

For the last several months, I’ve been working on doing a “better” job of wasting time. This is a strange project to work on after spending most of my life “optimizing” every step and every second, to the point that I used to give helpful and inspirational talks to other moms who were writers on how to make sure that they used every small block of time available to write the maximum number of words possible. I don’t do this anymore. I don’t try to do this. I try to actively do the opposite of this.

I admit, I’m in a different stage of life than I was a decade ago. I’m an empty nester, but I’m also a recently divorced woman who has gone back to full-time work after most of a lifetime spent as a full-time writer and who has also retrained completely in a relatively complex and demanding world (the financial world). This has meant that I work a lot harder than I used to, and also that I need rest more than I ever did. I have had to learn many new strategies on how to turn my brain to “off” or at least “neutral” and how to make sure that angry customers ranting at me on a daily basis don’t get space in my brain on repeat when I try to sleep.

Last year, I switched from working a regular 9 to 5, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to a 4 by 10 schedule so that I get a day off midweek in addition to my regular weekend. This was mostly intended to reduce my commute time and also to enable a day for my medical and other health appointments which have increased with age. But I also tried to add in attempts to do more “fun” activities on my mid-week day off, to resounding failure. I exhausted myself if I did more than one “fun” thing on any one day off, and I learned since then the miracle idea that hey, days off are supposed to be OFF. They are not intended to be used to get more done, either as a writer, or as an athlete. Fun can be as exhausting (or more so) than work, and for someone who is still recovering from a perfectionist, high-demand religion, it’s important to give both my brain and my body the constant message that it’s OK and even good to NOT be on a hamster wheel to success or divine exaltation.

Yes, I live in the real world, in which I have to do some chores around my house. I live in a world in which food does not magically appear to delight my taste buds nor to keep my body running properly. So there are compromises that have to be made. I try to keep a close eye on how exhausted I am on my weekends, and I admit, there are weekends I can mow the lawn and also do meal prep for the week and there are meal when that’s possible but would also feel punishing. So I don’t do that because I’m trying really, really hard not to trigger a new round of suicidal ideation the chances of which seem to go up if I’m exhausted and unable to make an effort to get my brain off a bad thought cycle.

On Memorial Day, my sister asked me what I was going to do for the holiday. Nothing, I said. It is really hard sometimes to actually do nothing. So one of the “activities” for the day was to see if I could sustain an entire hour of meditation. I got takeout for lunch and made a simple meal for dinner. I watched some trash reality TV (Wear Whatever the F You Want, in this case). I watch a lot of trash TV these days, from Hell’s Kitchen to Survivor to Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. And not because I’m planning to write about Mormonism in fiction again. It’s for fun. It’s to pass the time. It’s to get my body to sit down for a little while and not demand that I exercise if I watch TV, which I still have a tendency to do.

For so much of my life, I thought of television as an important part of my learning about story, so it was essentially a part of my work world. I read for hours every day and this was also me learning about writing. Yes, I enjoyed those things but they were also work. Almost every part of my life was set up to be work or work-related. Or religion-related, which means exaltation-related, which means perfection-oriented. Which means stress and pressure, even if not physical exertion. I don’t want that life anymore, not even if it means I burn in hell for the rest of eternity. No thank you. I will sit on my butt on my days off instead.

I have a swing on my front porch and I just put water in the fountain so I can listen to the burble while I sit and do nothing on summer evenings. I am working on learning to stop listening to the voice my father installed in my head that I have no value if I’m not producing something every minute of every day. Fuck off, I’m telling my father’s voice. I’m wasting time here. I’m doing a glorious amount of nothing.