Last week, I pushed through the discomfort of telling people I had a blog. It’s the worst part of having a blog, aside from writing it. 

I got some really exciting and heartfelt responses. It reminded me why I bother. And it activated the part of me that is afraid to let you down. I think that’s called…caring? So, with my heart beating just a little harder, here I am, writing and caring.

In one of the responses, a friend asked for “words of wisdom for upending your life.” The life coach in me is tickled. 

As it turned out, there was something very specific that I needed to hear. I was grateful to her for drawing it out.

Sometimes, I get stuck in ‘efficiency mode’: let’s only do what is necessary and avoid wasting time or money.

En route to the East coast, my partner Ike and I are currently in a little Colorado mountain town between two halves of a train ride he insisted we take. The train is twice as slow as driving. TWICE. This excursion and this whole mode of transportation were entirely inefficient, which I reminded him often. 

But, it was essential.

It’s essential to take the long, windy road and leave room for life to surprise you. Those are the days where you get to the end, because you spent the afternoon relaxing in a huge, geothermally-heated public mineral pool and then stumbled into an unbelievably corny vaudeville dinner show, and you go, wow. That was weird. I am satiated. 

You feel it in your body. You sleep well at night. You wake up, shrug your shoulders because it’s all a question mark, and get ready to do it again.

But all this mirth and togetherness and spending money has the part of me that thinks I’m being frivolous and neglecting my responsibilities very nervous. 

This morning, I opened my emails and started to respond to things that had piled up, including my friend’s email. 

I told her, “document how you are feeling along the way and reflect on where you were.”

Until deciding to move to LA in 2018, I was lonely, depressed, and made pretty much every decision based on my future and career. I’m still unwinding that program.

Soon after making a change, you focus on the next set of problems. You forget the ones you solved because they're not there anymore. Traveling with Ike, having fun and being together all of the time has solved my longest standing problem: loneliness. But if I don't take time to recognize and appreciate that, a week in, I’m back in efficiency mode, worrying I'm doing something wrong.

This is what it feels like to change, to stretch my capacity to enjoy myself. There’s tension between the old way and the new way, arguing in my brain as I walk my new walk.

It doesn’t feel perfect all the time. It isn’t supposed to. But it feels right.

I am a recovering overachiever. I no longer want to value myself based on how much I’ve done. I want to feel good as often as I can, not because I’m “productive” enough. I want to enjoy my life! I want others to be able to enjoy their lives! And I want to live in a world of people enjoying themselves. Not one where we’re all grinding ourselves down to fit some status quo.

I see people (myself, my clients, my friends, people out in the world) who are exhausted and unfulfilled. Trying our hardest 24/7 and rarely landing. Rarely permitting ourselves to just be. I think this happens for a lot of reasons. We live in a world where being “busy” is not only the default, but is praised. So there’s external pressure. But also, we keep ourselves busy because, we LITERALLY don’t know what else to do. We are INCAPABLE of relaxing. If we even dare take time away, when we get there, we sit down to “relax,” twiddle our thumbs for five seconds, and then start making plans or pick up our phones. We’re crawling in our skin and reach for ANYTHING to alleviate the discomfort of just inhabiting the present moment, as it is.

Even typing that, my stomach turns. There’s an automatic aversion to SPACE, NOTHINGNESS, SILENCE.

And yet, we CRAVE it. We’re exhausted. We live in a perpetual state of stress. Even the activity we most prefer to “unwind,” (watching TV), activates our body’s stress response. But the idea of just closing our eyes and breathing, not taking in any stimuli to give our brains and bodies a chance to decompress, terrifies us. We say we want rest, we desperately need it, and yet, we make a full-time job of avoiding it. WHAT IS THAT?!

Here’s a glimpse of it in action. What I’m noticing in myself lately, is a tendency to pile on. I tell myself I’m going to make breakfast. I find myself making breakfast while washing a couple dishes and listening to a podcast, and oh, I wanted to sweep the rabbit cage, so I’ll do that while the eggs are cooking. And when I walk over to their cage, I notice a plant that needs to be watered, so I put the broom down and go get the watering can. I need to fill it. And oh, my filtered water pitcher is empty, so I put the watering can down and start filling the pitcher. Now I’m back in the kitchen so I peek at the eggs I remember I’m cooking. 

WOW. Chaos. Exhausting chaos. Jumping from one thing to another without finishing anything. Letting my mind ramble and bounce. Picking one thing up, then setting it down to pick up another. Why? Why not just do a task? Start it, stay on it, and complete it.

Peering under the hood, I think my inner overachiever is calling the shots. Everywhere I turn, something needs my attention. Facing so many somethings, I want to get the most done as efficiently and quickly and simultaneously as possible. The more I cram into each moment, the more time I will have later. Right?

But wait, remember my tangent about how we never actually arrive at this imagined future where we relax and focus on what we want? THAT is the problem with the overachiever program. 

Letting our overachievers run amok presupposes that at some point, we will earn the ability to underachieve. All that hard work and multitasking will finally pay off. Any one else feel like they’re still waiting for that big pay day? There’s a problem with relying on this system to manage our work ethic and life satisfaction. The input and the output aren’t balanced. We’re constantly outputting and running on empty.

So I challenge you to create more balance. See if you can find moments to rest, whether it’s a whole weekend away or two minutes in the middle of the day. Instead of treating them like another space to fill, try letting it be empty space. Try balancing doing with not doing, instead of balancing doing one thing with doing another. Maybe you’ll land in being an achiever. Because for me, being an overachiever feels more like being a never-enjoyer. I’d like that to change.