I wore busyness like a badge of honor

...but what did I really want?

In my sophomore year of college, I took a class called Sleep and Dreams. As part of the class, we were asked to keep a sleep journal. I wrote down what time I went to bed and woke up each day, calculating how many hours of sleep I got each night. At the end of the quarter, I averaged this number over the entire ten weeks of journaling.

(Thinking about it now, was our professor using all this data from hundreds and hundreds of students as part of his research? Probably not, because what I knew of his research mostly involved narcoleptic dogs? Still seems slightly suspicious, though…)

Our cat Athena is neither narcoleptic nor a dog, but she is my sleep inspiration!

Anyhow. I don’t remember the precise number, but I’m pretty sure my nightly sleep averaged out to 6-point-something hours that quarter. (I don’t know about you, but I know I need at least 8-9 hours a night to feel rested.)

I remember feeling a little lowkey proud of this. I was tough, right? I was highly productive. I was busy—and, like many of my peers, I wore this busyness like a badge of honor.

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A recent conversation got me thinking about how dramatically less busy my life is now from the way it was then, or even the way it was through most of my twenties. And how much less busy it is than the lives of a lot of people around my age.

I feel very comfortable with my current level of busyness, or lack thereof. Maybe it’s only when it seems to evoke the slightest whiff—probably all in my head, at least sometimes, but I still smell it—of judgment, or envy, or amusement, or befuddlement, that I might feel a little uncomfortable.

It’s not laziness. (After all, as I’ve learned, laziness does not exist.)

It’s a hard-earned, hard-fought, daily choice to resist all the forces within and outside of me that want me to work myself into the ground. Literally. It’s life or death.

And I’m choosing, I hope, to live. I’m choosing to practice sacred self-care as resistance. I’m choosing to practice rest as resistance.

(Yes, I’ve been reading a lot about these things, lol. So much gratitude to

Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes

, author of Sacred Self-Care;

Tricia Hersey

, author of Rest Is Resistance;

Devon Price

, author of Laziness Does Not Exist; and

Tamu Thomas

, author of Women Who Work Too Much; among others.)

This means taking time for long walks, for visits with friends with no particular “productive” purpose, for cooking, for sleep.

A photo from this morning’s long, misty walk

I don’t want to wear busyness like a badge of honor anymore.

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Busyness, I think, is a complicated thing. And the last thing I want to do is shame anyone in the opposite direction—not for being “lazy,” but for being too busy—when sometimes it’s what we have to do to survive.

Sometimes there is literally no way to add up the hours in a day—between work and caretaking responsibilities and other community commitments—and not end up with a grand total of . . . too busy. Way too busy.

I still think, sometimes, of the year in my twenties when I was working “part-time” for a Christian campus ministry organization—which, of course, is code for at least full time—and part-time (that is, legitimately part-time) for a health tech start-up. I was always using the breaks between college quarters to catch up on my hours at the start-up, and I was always using my (tiny amount of) PTO from the start-up to go to conferences required for my ministry work.

I only did one year at that ministry organization, mostly for other reasons. But I’m so glad I left. It was a recipe for burnout, no question about it.

And yet. Were there ways I could have chosen rest, even within that system? Ways I could have adjusted some things to make space for restoration, ways I could have negotiated boundaries differently, ways I could have let some things go? Absolutely.

It was a toxic environment. But there may have been ways I could have found a little more gentleness within it.

In reading

Tricia Hersey

’s book Rest is Resistance, I was struck by how Hersey has been there, in a more extreme way than I ever have—in that place where you have to hustle so hard just to make ends meet. And, for Hersey, that was exactly when she realized how crucial it was to make time to rest. To resist that endless hustle. To declare our own humanity—to ourselves and to a world that constantly dehumanizes us, valuing us only for our capitalist productivity.

Let’s be honest, I’ll probably never not be plugging this book.

Hersey helped me understand more deeply that rest is not just a privilege for those with too much time on their hands. It’s essential for everyone. And it’s doable, somehow, in some form, for everyone. We can make a way.

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I find myself wondering this: When I was so busy all the time, what did I really want?

I didn’t actually want to not have any down time—to lack space to sit and be, dream up bonkers dreams and think eccentric thoughts, or curl up with a novel and a steaming mug of tea.

What I actually wanted, I think, was—and still is—a few things:

• I wanted to be active.

I genuinely enjoy being on the move. I feel good when I’m making time to work out or move my body in some way daily. I enjoy being involved in a variety of activities, putting time and energy into things that feel important to me.

But maybe just some of the time, not all the time?

Kaitlin Curtice

wrote a lovely post recently about embracing the seeming paradoxes of what we might hope for in this new(ish) year. (Or in life in general.)

I like the idea that we can embrace seemingly opposite hopes at the same time. I can want to be active and want to rest and self-restore. We need both these things, in balance.

• I wanted to belong.

Isn’t this what a lot of our busyness is about, at least sometimes? Feeling like we need to say yes to every invitation in order to maintain our comfortable place in a community—or, if we don’t feel comfortable in a community, to prove, perhaps, that we really do belong there.

Whatever my friends were doing, I wanted to be there. FOMO, for the win…or the loss. The loss of the quiet restorative times my introvert soul desperately needs in order to be well.

These things, too, we can learn to balance: time in community and time alone.

• I wanted to be valued.

Sometimes the communities we’re a part of—and I’m looking at dominant white US culture more broadly here too—may value us, or seem to value us, for what we can do for them. What we can produce. What we can offer. Churches can be like this, for sure.

It’s easy to want to do all the things because it feels like the more we do, the more others value us.

But maybe, instead, we can build communities that don’t operate like this. Where people just are valued, simply for existing, for being their wonderful unique quirky selves in our world. I want to be part of communities like this. I want to value people in my communities like this.

In sum: I don’t really want to be busy. I do want to be active. I do want to belong. I do want to be valued.

I’m sure this is a non-exhaustive list. But feels like a start. (Maybe you agree or disagree or have other things you’d add? Holler in the comments, please!)

I’m choosing to believe there are ways of experiencing the things we actually want, without being busy all the time. Without sacrificing rest, care, gentleness, boundaries, alone time, restoration.

So, I offer these questions to ponder and keep pondering—especially in all the increased instability this year may bring. What do we really want, instead of busyness? What about it is satisfying, and what is unhealthy and destructive for us and our communities?

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If you’d like to share, I’d love to hear what your relationship with busyness is like, and how it’s changed over the years. What are you learning about rest, boundaries, or what you actually want in life?

Glad to be on this journey with you.