Every once in a while your body and mind will tell you to stop.
Listen to it and:
Often, we ignore it and try to double down, or we feel a sense of guilt and beat ourselves up for recovery.
Don’t.
It serves no one and your creative energy, on fumes, probably leads to work that you wouldn’t be proud of, anyway.
Drop the guilt and lay down.
You’ll be up in no time.
After quitting my job, I had this idea that I would take a few weeks, do some travel, and let my mind relax. It was one of the fantasies I had, going out in the world with friends, avoiding the New York winter, and having a good time. It was a beautiful dream.
I didn’t do any thing like that.
I went in the opposite direction. I started working harder. I started hunting for projects right away. I connected and reconnected, put forth a few ideas, and gave my white board some serious pen love. It paid off. At my last count, I am working on seven different projects with seven different teams.
There is a part of me that doesn’t want to give up the work. There is a voice in my head that gets scared, and says if I calm down, I won’t matter, and if I don’t matter, I don’t exist.
Luckily for me most of the projects I am working on are on a short-term basis or long-term enough for me to take a break. I am circling the date of April 9th, my birthday, as the time to take a week or two off and give myself a vacation.
Making this public so I can’t back out. Hold me to it.
Dealing with a cold, particularly a bad cold, is annoying to me because I often forget how long it takes to recover.
When I look back on the memory of that cold, I don’t think of the full process, I just think of the worst of it. I reflected on the 48-72 hour period where I ran a high fever, cough everywhere, and never wanted to leave my bed. I missed out on looking at the full picture.
Instead of thinking about full recovery, I thought about getting back to functional, and usually, that only means physically. I ignored my mental slowness and emotional fatigue. I missed opportunities by pushing too hard too fast.
I try to move on with my life after three days, when the real recovery takes about ten. I’m like a goldfish to this part of the process.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been sick.
As a kid, I used to get sick often, about once every 2 months. It used to come like clock work. Some of it was self-induced (imagine giving yourself stress headaches in the third grade…) . I got used to the idea of sickness. I had methods and a plan. By the time I got to college I had a “sick kit” always ready. I walked with Dayquil at all times.
In the last year or so since I decided to eat better, I stopped getting sick. In fact, before this week, the last time I remember getting a cold was early last year, January of 2015. I ended up getting confident. I threw away most of my medicine. When my roommate was sick, I didn’t care. I used to laugh, because he made light of my decision to not wear a coat this winter and swear I would catch a cold. I would just watch him get sick at the usual rate.
Well, my ego caught up with me and I caught it this week.
I forgot how debilitating it is. When you are in the middle of the worst of it, it feels like a mental and physical block. Your reserves are done. You can’t think. You are in pain.
It sucks. I learned something.
It’s hard to get out of your comfort zone. It takes a lot of energy to go past the map, After you’ve stretched yourself (physically, emotionally, financially etc) past the internal boundaries we resign ourselves to. It is never an easy journey.
At the end of that journey, we have three options. there are two choices, each with a reward, along with a third, suckers choice that unfortunately we all too often go to.
Option three kills insight. Don’t choose option 3.
If you are thinking, why isn’t there an option 4 for transformation, don’t worry. If you don’t go backwards and you rest long enough – you start moving 🙂
BLOW IT UP. SELF DESTRUCT SEQUENCE IN 5…4…3..2…1
Oh I love to do it. Secretly, I think we all do.
When I think about all the self-destruction I’ve done in my life, it’s never good, but it comes with a few lessons. One thing I learned is that most of the time, it comes from me not being myself. Do it long enough, living as a lie becomes a powder keg, and within minutes of something bad happening, that keg explodes.
That comes at a price. For all the fun I have subconsciously when I clear the decks, the pain afterwards is never worth it. Eventually, it makes me sick, and I decide to cut myself off from the people who support me, and I fall right into depression.
Self destruction is the kickoff sequence to a bunch of negative feedback loops.
Much of it stems from not being myself, forcing an issue, and not listening.
What sucks about the self-destruction sequence is that, like in James Bond Films, its difficult to stop, and generally is a waste of time. What I find far more fruitful, is to save what I can, and recover.
In recovery, it becomes really important to contact people, and get some love.
The time to figure out what happened is going to come, and trust me, there is no point in rushing the process. Remember, you just exploded, the wreckage is visible for miles, and there is no shortage of people who will let you off the hook.
In order to face up to recovery after that self destruction, resting is important, and the idea of not getting defensive is another one. Explosions happen. We aren’t robots, and we can’t expect to act like them. The only thing that works is to cut the feedback loop at the source, before it goes to far.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 