The other day I told my husband I think I have some sort of deep-seated puritanical guilt about rest. He cackled. I am certainly not a puritan, but I am truly terrible at rest. I try to rest and quickly get bored, and feel guilty, and then go on to the next menial (or aspirational) task at hand. I think part of me doesn't think I deserve rest, and that if I just push through I will some how earn the ability to rest.
I don't know where this asinine thinking started, but I suspect it stemmed from the idea of rest in childhood. As a child, no fun could be had until alllllll the chores were done. I had a single mom and she was very particular about cleanliness and order, so there were always a lot of chores. Some mornings we'd get up before the sun in the summer so we could both complete all the chores and make it to the best parking spot at the beach early in the morning. Please note: we did not live near the beach. We were about an hour away. We're talking one early morning, for a parking spot, an hour from home! No one could relax, or enjoy a Saturday, until those chores were done. Had a sleepover? Friends got roped into chores. Didn't feel well? Chores. Wanted to rest? Great, you can do that once you do your chores.
As an adult, this same engine keeps running. I can't rest until everything is done, and everything is never done. A stressful week turns Saturday morning into a chaos machine — I start nine projects and finish none of them. An idle hour at work becomes an excuse to recreate processes, unpack organizational disfunction, reorganize an already organized document, make a list of the lists I need to make. I can't make it through more than a few days of vacation before wishing I was home and getting itchy for being productive. When I'm listening to a book I'm also doing 3 other things, podcasts pipe in while running errands or doing chores (ha.)
For a long time I thought this was just how I was wired. High-functioning, driven, a finisher. I wore it like a credential. What I didn't see was that the engine was running on something, and that something was my health.
Here's what I'm learning, mostly against my will: the body keeps its own books. It doesn't care that I haven't finished the chores, or that I have nine projects going at once, or that a day off isn't over yet. It just starts quietly adjusting its homeostasis until someone notices. And if no one notices, it starts loudly adjusting things rapidly to get your attention.
In my case, the cost is reflected in labs. Unbalanced ratios, elevated panels. Autoimmune dysfunction. A brain fog thick enough that I reread the same email three times and still can't tell you what it said. The bloodwork isn't a request for rest. It's a receipt. The rest should have already happened, but I didn't listen. The consequence is that years of pushing through and working harder have actual physiological markers.
The whole directive of my life has been to earn rest by finishing the chores and pushing through to the next milestone. Never being happy with rest, never being happy with the way things are today, always certain there was one more thing to cross off before I was allowed to exhale. The body's position, it turns out, is that rest was never something to earn. It was a baseline. And when I wouldn't take it, it got taken out of me, in the form of inflammation and cortisol and whatever is making it so I can't remember why I walked into the room.
In the past several months, I've lost two colleagues to the consequences of stress. They pushed through, doing the "right" thing, going the extra mile. They were genuinely good people and couldn't overcome what the pushing cost them. It put things in perspective, in the way only that kind of loss can. Life is fragile and short. The chores are not done. They are never going to be done. That existing is reason enough to rest. That I don't have to trade anything to earn rest.