“I did know, though, and I was silenced.”
Is there a better feeling than “no more events today”?
Every 9-12 months I realize (admit) my life has become an unrelenting paen to being a workaholic and then I start to take steps to act like a person who values her relationships, her mental health, her physical fitness.
This is an extremely predictable cycle.
Yesterday I woke up, resolved to do yoga First Thing, made the absolutely classic mistake of checking my work email, and then spent the four hours from 9.30am doing a thing I am good at, which is diagnosis and repair.
If this were earlier in the cycle, in the (more) destructive stage, I’d have let that set the tone for the weekend.
Instead I made myself hit the mat for 20 mins; cooked breakfast; sorted three months’ worth of post; went for a chill 8-mile bike ride with no real destination in mind; regretted forgetting to take my allergy medicine before embarking on said; made dinner and watched TV.
Somehow (somehow, she says) that put me mentally in a place where I could start to reply to personal emails; do a few more of the kinds of low-stakes but irritatingly anxiety-inducing chores that pile up over weeks and months; and then go to sleep without the chronic feeling of having “wasted” the day.
I know I am constantly on the verge of relapse because when I woke up this morning (after, I confess, a 45-minute work-related phone call) and did a quick bit of yoga I found myself being annoyed that the device I use to assess my self-worth on a given day had failed to record the exercise. Does this even count swiftly followed by wow I need to chill.
So I biked to the hilariously overpriced farmer’s market, bought some fruit and some aspirational kale, and enjoyed the sunshine for an hour or so.
Did I then come back home and deal with work email and work text messages? Yes. Am I going to do more of that this evening? Absolutely.
But at least (I tell myself) I am being more intentional about what I’m doing, and why.
Recommendations:
Gentleman Jack on HBO: If you liked either Gilmore Girls or The L World; are currently enjoying Killing Eve; identify with characters who are Problematic Diarists – you are 100% the target audience for this.
Pose (current season on FX, season 1 available on Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon Prime): If you associate “yas queen” with Broad City; if you don’t know the difference between shading and reading; if Madonna introduced you to voguing; if Paris is Burning filled with you both love and rage; if you still sometimes think about Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; if you have mixed feelings about RuPaul’s Drag Race - watch Pose, get your life. Season 2 starts June 11.
Attribution:
“First time out the gate — first awards-show season — and I’m killing everything!” Porter said. “Had I known, I would have put a dress on 20 years ago.” It was almost too easy. Like, really? A man wearing a dress is still that big of a big deal? He paused, raising a stern finger. “I did know, though, and I was silenced.” - Billy Porter in an interview with Emilia Petrarca for The Cut.
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