My year of stress and realization
Sleeping (or not) to avoid taking action
Have you ever gone to bed and woke up more tired?
The more I slept, the more tired I got.
During some time I wasn’t able to work, I decided to focus on my sleep. Sleep had always been my kryptonite because I had the reputation of sleeping too much, and during the times I was working the lack of sleep was always there staring me and making me feel like I was born tired somehow.
So I decided to let myself sleep as much as I wanted, and even though this sounds like privilege and a beautiful way to live; it was haunting, enlightening and it made me face a lot of facts about myself.
Some of the things I found were:
My relationship to productivity, and how guilty I’d feel about sleeping
How not having a schedule affects the way I function during the day and how it affects my confidence
How much I avoid by sleeping. And the things I avoid
The importance I give to time and how it also affects my confidence
Later I found (thanks to technology and giving all my data to an Apple Watch), that I don’t sleep as much as I thought (and others thought), I tend to sleep just enough and that what I make of my time being awake had been the real problem. My real kryptonite was being awake.
the connection between procrastination and feeling tired
Procrastination happens in crunches of time and in stretches of time, because it’s not about laziness but about avoiding some type of confrontation with what seems an uncomfortable task for all kinds of reasons. Personally, my procrastination sometimes comes from how uncomfortable it feels to break a pattern, each time the difficulty presents itself.
Time....it reminds me of that Pink Floyd song, I remember listening to it walking home back in my home country, always seeing people in a rush or chilling, and me always being scared of my next birthday, of whether or not I've made something meaningful with my life. Thinking I still have a lot of time left and also too little, battles within me of not making valuable achievements like I had planned, but mostly always planning and never really doing...anything.
time is key in getting rest, or is it vice versa?
Time to think is what made me realize everything that I was missing from being all over the place trying to chase a dream in the worst possible direction.
In the end it only made me realize that sometimes what drives us, what makes us get up everyday, isn't necessarily the goal we are trying to get to, but its simply the idea of getting somewhere we want to be that leads us to some place we need to.
Losing perspective and not readjusting is what leaves us dissatisfied when we finally get what we want, because we become insistent with a past self achieving something that perhaps is no longer necessary, useful or desired by present you.
All the rest I got was just a time loop
A time loop to make connections between all of the patterns that got me here, that made me face my past and embrace it a little more, that made me realize I was always lost and always found. All the rest I got wasn't me getting enough sleep, but instead enough time to realize I don't need that much, and that when you don't own up to what you're best at doing (even if you don't believe you're any good at it) we are always behind, never on time, never enough time to sleep, always too much time we don't know how to use.
Time after all was the stress but also the realization
I thought I needed time to catch up, turns out I just continued to be me but in a different bed. In moments of pressure, 'doing' is the best way to realize if your past was worth it or not.
'Action' is what keeps us in the present, 'thinking' keeps us everywhere else.
xoxo, denisse.
