WĀ H I N E
Enoug h of this BY M E LO DY T H O M A S
I
didn’t think of it till the very moment I began to type, but this is the last month of the decade. Come January we’ll officially be in 2020, year of the future, where we were supposed to have holograms and flying cars but instead got increasing social isolation and climate dread. I remember being eight years old and a friend saying to me, ‘Have you ever thought about how in the year 2000 we’ll be fifteen?!’ The crazy, far-off place of the year 2000 is now 20 years in the past. The 80s – forever cemented in my mind as roughly 15 years ago – are now more than double that. Time is weird. It’s best not to dwell on it. A few weeks ago I was having a bit of a crisis. Freelance life is tough – sometimes there’s no work, which brings on anxiety over how you’re going to pay the bills, and then the rest of the time there’s too much work, because you were so anxious about going into debt that you said yes to everything, and now you have more projects due than any one person ought to be able to complete. You’re running on stress, adrenaline, caffeine, and sugar, your family is an inconvenience getting in the way of your productivity, you have an internal list of friends you must catch up with as soon as there is time (hint: there never is), your body is falling apart from a lack of sleep and exercise; and if your romantic relationship somehow survives all of this it’s simply because neither of you have the energy to address how bad things really are. I suspect this isn’t just the case for freelancers, given the number of people who – when you ask how they really are – reply ‘exhausted’, ‘over it’, or ‘ready for a break’. Funnily enough, this crisis hit as my work life slowed down. Summer is usually a busy time for me, and for years I’d been wishing I could have a break during the warmer months. Then a big project got pushed back, leaving me with exactly what I’d wished for. Only I didn’t want it any more.
I’d forgotten that time and space – unplanned – can leave a person face to face with themselves in a way that’s quite confronting. I found myself tackling some hard truths – essentially, that over the past few years I’ve become so focused on work that it’s come to represent the core of my identity and the main contributor to my self-worth. A summer break shouldn’t be spent agonising over grand anxieties, like who I am and what I am doing with my life, and yet here I was. There’s a line I found quoted online, from psychiatrist and author David D Burns: ‘A silent assumption that leads to anxiety and depression is “My worth as a human being is proportional to what I have achieved in my life.” This attitude is at the core of Western culture and it is self-defeating, grossly inaccurate, and misleading.’ How many of us, faced with the fact that we have not done all the things we wanted to by a certain age, have turned this feeling of not having done enough into a much more dangerous idea, that we are not enough. That we are not pretty or thin or confident or happy or successful or loved or funny or fertile or productive enough because we aren’t trying hard enough, because we don’t have what it takes, or because we simply aren’t worthy of it. I’m not in the habit of making New Years’ resolutions, but nevertheless I’m going into 2020 with a new set of priorities. Of course work is important – if not for the sense of satisfaction that comes with being good at something, then at the very least for being able to support yourself or your family financially. But it’s not who we are. We are the connections we make with other people. We are the things that bring us joy. We are the safe homes for the bodies of our children. We are the stories we tell about ourselves and others. We are the beat that calls our bodies to the dance floor. We are alive and that in itself is a miracle – let’s not squander a moment more.
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