The biggest complaint of my adult, nay my life since I started VCE is lack of sleep. The stress of VCE and life, attempting to balance education, work, hobbies, and an active social life took its toll. However, this is not the root issue. The root issue, as I have so far identified it, is that for my while life I was encouraged to pick up hobbies and activities, but I was for lack of a less aggressive phrase punished for putting them down. Those actions by others for me to not put activities down wasn’t necessarily done from a place of malaise from others. Be it a piano teacher not understanding that I want to learn how to play more than how to get my levels, a close family friend being happy I have taken an interest in their passion, or a family member trying to justify money being put into something that I no longer wish to do. From a young age, reinforced by the dice rolls of family, and then moulded by an education system that would rather you have a finely honed edge in a specific topic than an 80% in all topics I picked things up and learned how to never put them down.
This has caused several issues of severe embarrassment, but not much more that that until I started hyper-fixating more and more as I grew older over the last few years. This, combined with joining the full-time workers of the world left me more and more with less time on my hands, with increasing internal pressure and guilt at not being able to do these hobbies that I claim to love doing.
As any neuro-spicy would be able to tell you, there is a combination of factors that cause greater stress in the workplace.
These, combined with the previous workplace experiences of being a basketball referee who had 20 parents yelling at her calls while she was 16, and working at the ATO where the situation was best described “as close to a battle royal featuring only being paid 50c more per hour than min wage” as I dealt with clients that may threaten suicide or calling about receiving a tax bill for the recently dead mother all made for a worker who tried to put her entire being into her work despite just that being too much for one person to handle.
The factors of self-punishment when a hobby wasn’t able to be practiced, an unwillingness to drop a hobby when it wasn’t fulfilling, and putting more energy than was available into a 40 hour work week could break a person quickly. But as a mentor said “You are a smart, capable, and incredibly driven woman”. I was able to hold this weight for a year and a half, and while doing it, convince myself that it was not only reasonable to hold a work/life balance like this, but it was my fault for not being able to hold it up.
A year and a half is a long time, but it is not forever. It ended about a month ago, when I had less and less energy each week to bring myself to work and to my hobbies, and that internal voice of punishment got louder and louder. But you see, It was not that I couldn’t hold all these spinning plates to me, just that I had to fix my sleep and “redistribute my energy”. Ignore that I wasn’t sleeping due to the acute stress and that I had no energy because of a lack of sleep and said acute stress. I had convinced myself that each week I would be able to practice all of my hobbies and that got me through each work week. Then on the weekend I was basically in a recovery mode as I repaired the mental and some physical damages of stress, but for this whole time I had convinced myself that this is the way the things were, and I was on the right track
This brings us to the title, where I had the most personally impactful psych sessions of my life. Other sessions may have brought me into more harmony with those around me, or redirected my energy towards my hobbies or work or goals that I wanted to achieve, but this one built on years of what I had been told and pointed them at my core, who I was when I wasn’t working. That session, the most major phrase from it was “Kaitlyn, I’m just asking that you don’t hold on so tight”, and at that time I wrote it off, didn’t understand it and deflected with my glassy eye gaze that I swear I don’t put on on purpose, it just happens when information goes into my brain and doesn’t connect or hit with any idea in there. I got it after the session though, and I am so sorry to my Psych, who tried so hard to connect that idea where it needed to go, and it didn’t hit where it needed to until I was in the car on the way home.
In my head, the stress about hobbies, the panic to put any of them down wasn’t an idea or a theory about the world, it was just how the world was, like how an axiom is the foundation of logic, not putting down hobbies and the want to do them was central to how I moved through the world. You should have been there to see that penny drop, to see a woman who’s time outside work was doing hobbies or activities, or being stressed and trying to rest while not doing them, to see all that just relax an instant, to see that boulder that we work around roll ever so slightly.
After that, everything broke out of her. The stress that had built up for years was suddenly released as she realised that she could put an activity down, thank it for what it had taught her and how she loved it so, and move on and not have it take up her time anymore. However, something else broke in her, and something that has not found a solution yet, or may not even have a solution.
That, that is the fucking question, isn’t it? To have someone who moved to the beat of perceived external pressures combined with hyper-fixations no longer have a rhythm of stress, how do you get her to move again? Once again, we come to another lesson taught by this most powerful mental health expert; “You don’t have to be anyone other than the person you are, right now”. There’s not much more to consider than that, and goddamn is it a simpler rule to live by than a lifetime of pressure to do things and keep doing things.
Right now I am a tired woman, so I shall rest and heal this body and brain, and to let the excited but nervous kid who selects projects rest and form her own passions again, away from societies’ expectations. Tomorrow, I may do something, but that is for tomorrow Kaitlyn to do, for I do not and should not control her, and right now I shall be who I am. I’m going to order dinner tonight.
To my Psych; I am sorry for how I appeared in the most recent session, you deserved someone better than a concrete wall in front of me, but please know that you lesson did get through to me, and I am less stressed now, so much less stressed. As of this Wednesday, I have gotten 3 full nights of sleep. You are correct that I am quick to overcomplicate and analyse, and that maybe there is no issue, and most importantly to just let go slightly, and to let myself let go.
For posterity, and to hopefully get a laugh in future, here is a short list of what I punshed myself for not getting done in a week;
All this on top of a 40 hour work week.