How to Redefine the Need to Justify Your Free Time
By: Katy-Rose
Tags: Wellbeing, Personal Development, Cognitive Behaviour, Awareness, Core Beliefs

It was an ordinary catch-up Zoom call, as I’m sure we’re all pretty familiar with these days.

She was telling me all about her walks: 5 miles on one day, nearly 7 miles the next. And then she paused after listing all her achievements, and asked me, “how is your fitness?”

Let me put this in context for you.

I have had 3 weeks off — leaving one job role and having my first gap before starting the next since 2012. I have had all kinds of life events, mental health blips, emotionally taxing work roles, and in summary, I left my previous job because I have been burned out for years.

Now I can reflect back with clear eyes, half of the jobs I’ve held in these 8 years completely wrecked my confidence, made me lose my identity and sense of self, and that was without the coronavirus.

I planned all these things to do with my time off: house work, improvements, cleaning the car, sorting boxes, filing paperwork. All the fun stuff that gets put off.

Photo by Arek Adeoye on Unsplash

And then I spoke with my support network: friends and my life coaching circle.

The decision was made for my wellbeing.

My community were very clear in reminding me that I’m taking this time to rest, not to be productive and stay burned out. I planned this time to recover from the self-confidence damage, on-going stress, being a key-worker without a single day off sick since the pandemic began, and to refill my mental well.

In fact I left my job a few weeks early because I could feel myself crashing again. I knew I’d end up off-sick (again) if I didn’t change something.

This was designed as a rest period, to recuperate. To reinvent how I’ve been feeling about my life.

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

Back to the conversation with my mother.

She has recently discovered joy in walking, leaving the house almost every day. I understand this is healthy, and I’m glad she is keeping her fitness up. Especially with her having 3 separate conditions requiring her to shield.

But the combination of achievement listing for herself followed by that question: knowing I don’t like walking… it felt like a trap from the beginning.

Mum: “How is your fitness?” So I did what any responsible and polite adult does… I answered with all the sarcasm I could find. Me: “My fitness? Seven.”

I’m not really sure what the ‘correct answer’ for that would be, anyway.

Anger & frustration are responses to threat.

Being an over-thinker, self-improvement seeker, and scholar of psychology (BSc) and neuroscience (MSc), I can see my patterns. I have a life coach to help me step back and get the context when something is in my blind-spot.

What I’ve done in these 3 weeks is try to slowly, gradually, positively, shift my belief about having to prove myself. I wrote about this in November; commenting on this sense inside me that I am “Still Not Enough. For society, for other people, for the expectations people accept as ‘normal.’”

And the frustration I am still finding here comes from that belief being threatened. I’m doing a lot of journaling, pausing, sitting in the discomfort of not achieving every single day… And it’s not enough for those who are used to following the systems and expectations around us.

I feel I should stress I love my mum, and she wasn’t saying this with any kind of negative intent. The fact it is bothering me is a reflection of my mental space, not her words specifically.

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

I am so damn tired of trying to justify my existence.

It’s the next evening now, and I’m still ruminating on it. I even find my brain trying to plan how I can get more exercise in purely to be able to justify my time and my decisions to her. To the world. To myself.

I found myself justifying my lack of walking by listing what I do. I’m an active person, rarely sitting still. I don’t fit in a certain task on a certain day each week, but I am active even when locked down inside my own home.

But the very fact that I felt the need to give (and found myself giving her) justification via achievements and ‘proving’ my fitness tells me that I need this rest more than ever.

I am trying to give myself permission to rest.

I haven’t had a physical break, except when I’ve been ill, for 8 years. And because of the culture I live in, I’m not allowed to take it without guilt. A mental break is just not something the Western world dare let people even dream of having.

Because then we might realise how capable we are, and how little we need the systems around us.

I’m aware that I am so privileged in this scenario, and I do not intend to waste my opportunity. I’m not wasting it on walks that make me miserable and extra housework when my soul needs fiction books and video games, and I want to dance around the living room to music instead of vacuum my car.

Which coincidentally, are both ‘fitness’ in my eyes.