#283 – Who demands productivity at all costs?

If I asked you: "would you rather feel productive and exhausted or rested but unproductive" –– what would you respond?

If you're like me, you'd probably go with the former. Good ol' exhaustion beats any type of rested feeling, especially when it follows a sprint of frantic activity.

Because, if you're like me, the Ghost of Exertion/Exhaustion is a fixture in your mental space, rallying you to get going, chop-chop, whenever it thinks you're spending too much time just being.

Yesterday, after a call with my son, I sat down to write, but instead, I opened the job site tab on my laptop.

Suddenly, I couldn't escape the urgency to find a job––whatever job. The site was showing me jobs I knew I didn't want, but I still did the mental exercise of envisioning myself in those roles.

When I realized the futility of the activity and closed the tab, I didn't know what to do. So I started doing searches online for things I might need to know in the future.

Nothing seemed to help escape the sadness of not producing.

Then I saw it: the Ghost of Exertion/Exhaustion, running in place with its sweatband and leg warmers, a water bottle in its hand, was looking at me, chop-chop!

I closed the laptop and stood up, but it took me the whole day to realize what happened. The Ghost was trying to protect me from the pain of seeing my son's spending 184 days of his 20th year in jail.

The pain of knowing he has been denied his right to bail, that the person who's posing as victim was in fact the aggressor, that powerful people use and abuse their power to protect themselves.

I thought productivity was the solution: it'd make me forget the pain.

But not feeling something doesn't make it go away––it just hides it for a while.

So, I stopped and rested in the feeling, letting it be until it lost its potency.

When have you stopped doing to rest in your feelings, and have emerged stronger on the other side?

Love,

Carolina