I’m sitting at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, consumed by my stupidity of having forgotten a pen to write with. So I succumb to my computer to free write before diving into work. It’s hot again today, and I hoped to seek refuge in any empty, cool, coffee shop. One so empty and so large, I never quite understand how it stays open with so few orders and such prime real estate.
Work has been the slowest it’s ever been. And while I can’t complain for the ample amount of downtime, I do feel myself, for the first time since high school, absolutely and utterly bored out of my mind.
Having grown up in a space where my interests were strictly organized as extra curricular, from a young age, I found myself in a mundane pace of: wake up 15 minutes before I had to leave for school, eat toast and down coffee on the 30 minute drive south to campus, pretend to pay attention in classes that bored me for 8 hours a day, and at 3PM, find myself finally free to focus on the things I wanted to. Theater, dance, choir, writing. But, by 6PM, it was back home, where I fell asleep in my AP History textbook’s nightly reading of 50+ pages (ultimately dropping the class to no one’s surprise).
In an odd way, this lifestyle cultivated a learnt behavior that’s taken years to even notice: only finding enjoyment in the “in between” moments. Only between class and and nightly homework. Only between family obligations. Only after Sunday church services, but before (seemingly all day) lunches with family friends.
My parents kept me aggressively busy. When it’s all you know, you never know if it’s what you want. But at the time, I did want it. I wanted all of it. The voice lessons, the college audition prep, performing in two shows at the same time, the scene study classes downtown.
The burnout first hit when I was 18. Senoritis, as most people call it. But retrospectively, it was more. In a way, I feel like I never really recovered from that time. I would skip class my last semester of high school to go lay on a patch of grass in the parking lot, somehow never found out. My grades started to tank, but I didn’t really care. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was craving rest.
That was 10 years ago. I’m only just learning “how” to rest. Recovering from burn out isn’t rest. Recovery is just a branch of survival mode. Rest comes later. Rest comes with intention, not the product of over extending ourselves. Rest comes with comfort, ease, and flow. Rest comes with quiet, not silence, but quiet.
Dare I say, rest comes with a cuppa earl grey, before the city rises, alone in a living room with the warm morning light. Or, so I’m learning.