For long periods of my life, I allowed myself moments of idleness, small disappearances, parentheses in the face of the acceleration of things. When life became too intense, too overloaded, long before the word “ self-care » be on everyone’s lips, I granted myself the right, the time and the space to escape everything, and to hear myself think.
I was a child and a teenager who was very bored, and, as an adult, I gradually filled my life to escape, precisely, from this abyssal boredom which flirted in me with a very great sadness. . During my twenties, in addition to my full-time studies, I always had a part-time job while accumulating small contracts left and right. I had to: both to pay my rent and to try to carve out a place for myself in the literary world, which had been the target since my childhood. Writing. Literature. I didn’t want to miss any opportunity, any chance, and I told myself that the only way to get there was hard work.
However, when the occupations became too heavy, when I felt that my fatigue was beginning to be unbearable, that the work was so exhausting that I no longer heard myself think, I waited to have one or two days off then I closed my phone and I was watching a series in 48 hours, only emerging from my room to go and cook myself. Or was I going to do long walks that I interspersed with strolls in thrift stores or on the second floor of the Colisée du livre, corner of Mont-Royal and Papineau, to unearth titles at $1 or $2. Full days to rehabilitate myself out of my overloaded agenda; I took time for myself. To be almost in my silence.
I don’t know when I stopped allowing myself these breaks. Today, everything is settled to the quarter turn. I no longer have time to disappear like this for a long time. Too many appointments, too many things to do. The moments of relaxation certainly exist, but are calibrated, planned. There is no more time for improvisation, for clearing the air. This week, I was talking to a colleague, telling her that I had procrastinated during my working day by cleaning all the carpets in the house. She rolled her eyes at me and said: you’re productive even when you’re not doing what you have to do.
I don’t know how to recreate, to rediscover this empty time of yesteryear, this saving emptiness that I no longer know how to approach for a good 10 years, the one where I managed to rehabilitate myself, the one that was necessary for me to understand again who I was apart from the rest. I think about the cortisol level in my body, which must be so high without sustained rest; I think about my circadian rhythm always out of balance from constantly being in front of my computer. Who wins what when I kill myself at work? Who is the exhaustion of my body for? In a short time I will be 35 years old and I wish myself emptiness, downtime, for my birthday; I wish myself to dare to look at the boredom that I have fled so much to see if I will not be able to find new keys there.