It’s time for us to stop perpetuating the obscene notion that if you’re not busy, you’re not trying hard enough.
The idea for this blog post came to me a couple of weeks ago, fourth cigarette and 167435435th mental breakdown into a miserably grey Wednesday afternoon. Perched in my garden with nothing but a wooden chair and a golf umbrella to separate me from the pouring rain, and wearing only a pair of Umbro sports shorts and a leopard print coat, I was in the middle of my most recent existential crisis. For the trillionth time since finishing University at the end of May, I found myself panicking about the future and what it holds for me. As usual when crisis strikes, I turned to my ever-faithful Whatsapp group for comfort. Thoughts were tumbling out of my head and onto my frantic typing fingers at a million miles an hour, and none of them were particularly positive.
What
the fuck am I going to do now??
Move
to London? Travel the world? Build a fort in the Amazon?
The post-uni hiatus I am currently in the crux of affords
me and a lot of other graduates the luxury of free time and plenty of mental
space – a winning combination for dreams to be cultivated and inspiration to
strike. However, with mental space and more control over my own life than I’ve
probably ever had, I’m encountering daily periods of sporadic but overwhelming panic.
Thankfully, (and perhaps worryingly), I know I’m not alone. In the digital age
we’re all living in, we are bound on an everyday basis by an incomprehensible amount of pressure to
succeed.
“Has my Instagram hit 11 likes yet?”
“Why is no-one liking my hilarious tweet?” “God I need to get that blog post
published tonight or I might actually die.”
All seemingly laughable worries, but with social media
allowing us to make CONSTANT checks on what everyone and their dog is doing at
any given moment, comparison and the pressure to do well in EVERY ASPECT OF
LIFE EVER is a very real problem facing us millennials (side note: are you as sick of
that word as I am?). Granted, we’re not completely to blame for the comparison
climate we’re currently living in. We’re the generation who ran out of the
school gates filled with aspiration and dreams, to be met by miserable news
headlines and the poorest job market our nation has seen in years. As a result,
we’ve adopted a hyper-motivated mindset which implores us to overwork in order
to succeed. Whilst it’s brilliant that our dreams and the motivation that stems
from setting goals drives us forward each day, the path to promised ‘success’ is gruelling. Unsurprisingly, I’ve
not seen anyone Instagram that phrase in italics over a picture of a sprawling sunset.
As a twenty one year old female, I’m currently existing
somewhere in the soul-scrambling realm between being a teenage girl and a real
life bill-paying, job-having adult woman. Not a girl, not yet a woman. Britney
eat your heart out. This is already a confusing enough stage of life to be in,
but add social media and the #DailyGrind mantras that dominate our feeds and
it’s a bloody shit show. We should be pushing ourselves to blog more, work out
more, network more, be more. We’re overwhelmed with seemingly positive
affirmations that if you work hard, you’ll succeed. Perhaps I’m not giving the
rest of you enough credit here, but I know when I read motivational quotes like
the aforementioned, I’m thinking of ‘success’ in terms of pinning a picture of
my photoshopped head onto an image of a supermodel’s body, or squinting at a
laptop in the darkness trying to desperately conjure up a project I’ve taken on
despite knowing I was far too busy. I’m not thinking
of success as the feeling of being happy in my own skin, or the knowledge that
I completely and utterly love whatever project I’m pouring myself into.
I’m thinking of success as a signposted destination I’m trying to
reach. A destination up the top of a very rocky cliff. Which I’m scaling with a
toothpick.
Of late, I’ve found myself in a horribly unhealthy cycle
of guilt. Guilt when I have a day off work – why aren’t I picking up extra
shifts to save money? Guilt when I watch another film on Netflix instead of
writing – do I even want to be a journalist? Guilt when I’m laughing with my
friends instead of pouring every drop of my being into creating a future for
myself. This is exhausting. I am exhausted. After yet another string of panicked texts to a friend, one
night recently she replied with one of the most simple yet effective reminders
I’ve received: “you can’t be successful if you aren’t well rested,” - a practical, grounding sentence which suddenly brought back to earth the distant,
unreachable notion of success. It’s true that success doesn’t happen without
hard work, but it’s even truer that the waterfall of pseudo-motivational thoughts
we’re all drowning under hinders our chance at happiness even further.
I found some wise words on the subject from Charly Cox, one of my favourite writers:
"We are often foolish in that we let our obsession with creation, following the force of sizzling anxiety and adrenaline to put the intangible into a product, take over the bare materials we need to do it well: living. Taking stock and thinking. Reading, watching, crying, eating.
Our brains don't just stop because we're not wrist deep in paint or late night loomed in stanzas.
They're preparing for the next project.
They're recuperating, tidying tiny pieces into their boxes to make enough room to lay out the new ones."
As usual, Charly’s hit the nail on the head. It’s time for
us to stop perpetuating the obscene notion that if you’re not busy, you’re not
trying hard enough. I’m over it, you’re probably over it, yet here we are, still
buying into the notion that we MUST.DO.MORE. What I’m trying to say, in this long and rambling post,
is that it’s time to reclaim the path which leads to success and redesign it
for ourselves. Your worth is not inherently intertwined with how many boxes
you’ve checked off or how many rungs you’ve climbed. Of course I want a career
I’m proud of, and side projects to boast about with my friends, but I also want
to sleep. And eat 3 packets of Wotsits on the trot. And watch so many episodes
of Friends that I actually BECOME Jennifer Aniston.
You are allowed to look after yourself. You are allowed
to have a break. You are allowed to (whisper it) *have fun*. You shouldn’t feel guilty for allowing yourself time to
experience the things that make you feel happy, be that binge watching a TV
series or saying no to a morning work-out in favour of sleeping in. It’s all
helping you grow.
