Rest Is Important, You’re Right It Isn’t Fair, and Other Things I Need To Hear Right Now

Things I need to hear:

It doesn’t matter if you’re not being productive, and also, it does. It is okay to take a break, to focus on resting, to lay in shock on the sofa eating cookies and drinking wine for a week. It is okay to be in pajamas that have been worn for just a few too many days such that you would feel guilty shoving your lover’s face down into them. But also, it’s good to keep going. It maybe even feels better to fold the laundry and put it away, to put on not only fresh pants, but pants at all. It maybe even feels good to do up your hair and wear a nice shirt, put something fancy together just because it’s Tuesday.

You have spent time focusing on feeling good, but you need to mix in some things that are good for you. Wine and cookies and lamenting is not particularly good for you. (You have learned these lessons so many times in so many ways. Yes. Here it is again.) It is extremely hard to go after the things that are the best for you, because you have to actively break some patterns, and breaking patterns is one of the hardest things of all to do, even though they are psychic and not physical. Maybe especially because they are psychic and not physical. Do it anyway.

And then rest. Rest rest rest. It’s okay to do that, too.

Old ways are crumbling, have been crumbling, and we don’t even know what these new ways are yet. What color they’ll be. What flavor. We don’t have any sense of how deep the change will be, how big the loss.

Log off of the social media, even Instagram, the one you say is the better one because people are actually sharing their lives on there and not just parroting headlines. Too much input is too much input. It feels better to write and create, even though it doesn’t seem like it. Even though it feels impossible to put pen to paper and you end up writing “I don’t like this pen” a dozen times before you write any other words.

It’s okay not to write, but it’s also good to write. It’s good to step up and do the hard thing, to practice discipline. To identify that which you are actively avoiding doing and do it. Do it.

Holding the line – long-term discipline – feels better than going after the short-term comfort. Maybe that doesn’t feel true right now, but try it for a little while and see. Does it feel true? If not, then stop. But when you’ve done this before, you remember how good it feels to hold the line.

You cannot solve capitalism by thinking thinking thinking. It isn’t fair. There are people working to make it better. How can you deeply accept the world, even in this state? How can you deeply love the world, even in this state? Keep going. You will make things that will help — yourself if no one else. You will find your feet again, find your grounding again, feel forward into the future again. It makes sense that this is hard, this is the hardest, this is so unusual, this is so unknown. So you get to make it up.

What is your best day? Let’s make that day tomorrow. What is your favorite way to spend an hour? Spend it on this next one. You have more control than you act like you do, and less. You have more power than you act like you do. Spend it. Coax it. Create it. Let’s go.