Realisations
Or: My nine-month-long weekend is over and I can't deal with it
Recently, I went to get a massage. It felt like everything a massage is meant to feel: mostly rejuvenating, sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes just really intimate. But it also felt… different. Like I had earned it after several busy months. I love getting massages, so I was immediately put off by the fact that I was thinking of one of my favorite life experiences in terms of achievement and output. Massages are meant to remind you of your physicality and humanness, not your productivity and cog-ness.
I have reasons to be pissed. My life looks very different since my last post here in October. For most of 2024, I built my Substack around the beautiful, quiet sabbatical I was taking in the mountains. I’m still there, but now I’m on sabbatical from enjoying my life.
Folks, I had to get a full-time job. Look, savings dwindle. Parents get angsty. Groceries start feeling heavier. I traded time for money and can now be found glued to a laptop screen for most of the week, fighting for my life on the weekends.
As you move from a sabbatical back into work, you wonder if some big changes are due—some sort of badge to show for all the time you spent existing outside of structures, a report card for your “break.”
As much as I’d like to eschew any of that quantification, I can’t help but feel like I somehow screwed it up. Like I did my time-off ‘wrong’ by not resting enough, not creating enough art, not discovering enough about myself. So, during my massage, I convinced myself that perhaps writing some points down wouldn’t hurt. Not in that insufferable “This is how I made my sabbatical productive by curing Alzheimer’s, and here’s why it’s your problem” way that you can find in abundance on professional networking sites—just putting together some…
Realisations. I’ve had a few. Some big, like the importance of water flossers. Others small, like how everyone around my age is absolutely miserable.
Realisations I’ve had (and they most certainly aren’t your problem):
1. I have severe career/work anxiety, and it seems to be going nowhere. It just keeps building on top of every work experience I’ve had, like a tower of spikes. And I don’t know what to do with it—I don’t know how to touch it, unpack it, dismantle it, or move past it. I’ve been alternating between days of absolute emotional paralysis and days of simply being grateful that my loved ones exist and that SSRIs work for me. Trees are pretty great, too.
2. Does that mean I can never operate as a functional member of society again? I wouldn’t say that. This phase has forced me to acknowledge the privilege of having considerate parents whose home is always open to me. It has also taught me that I value my time and autonomy more than anything else—more than material comfort, mainstream success, or even relationships. There is a marked difference in how I feel, think, and act when I can define my hours at my own pace versus when I have to sign them all off to an overlord. For this reason, I’m not too sure I can go back to climbing a traditional career ladder ever again. I want to hear beyond the jingle-jangle of (what feels like) golden handcuffs. And if that means my CV looks more like a wide map than a well-plotted graph, I just need to shed my fears around it.
3. Why is everyone in their late 20s to mid-30s so unhappy at work? What the hell is up? Every friend, colleague, or kindly stranger I’ve discussed this with seems to be floundering—whether they work in education, policy, publishing, medicine, content creation, or tech. I’ve lost count of conversations where we struggle to identify what work adds to our lives apart from routine and stable income—and for some (like me), even that is tricky. People seem uncertain, unsure of what the future looks like and their place in it. And most of them are simply tired—tired of the illusions of ambition, of how modern work is structured, of how creatively stagnant they feel. Where did we go wrong? Also, are you an exception to this realisation? If yes, I’d love to hear from you—what’s going right?
In other news:
My little brother is married! That’s fully bonkers. All of 2024, my brother’s approaching wedding was a steady countdown in the background of my life in the mountains. Going back to the city every few months to plan the events with my family felt like the most elongated process I’d ever been a part of.
And yet, when that mid-December week finally arrived (and whooshed past), I barely remembered that any forethought had ever existed. The celebrations, interactions, drinking, eating, dressing up, bickering, and laughter felt so urgent, demanding, surreal, infuriating, joyous, and wonderful all at the same time that I thought it best to switch my mind off and just go with the flow.
Surprisingly, I managed to survive—and have fun too! I also got asked about my own “plans” as the elder unmarried sister only a handful of times and was able to tackle them with humour, thankfully. I still feel a warm glow when I think of the love that was so palpable between my dearest, sparkling new sister-in-law and my brother, who have been together since high school (!!), and the memories I made with my family and friends. I feel the glowiest when I think of my fits, though. Dropping some below.
Something I’ve been listening to:
I don’t know when my Spotify algorithm pushed it on me, but the reprise of Always Coming Home by Mountaineer has been a soft, comforting, whimsical, much-needed escape this week. It’s sufficiently obscure, so I feel cool recommending it too.