LIFE

Rest and Relax, It’s Easy They Say

How do we do that and where do I sign up?

It was a corporate video that broke me. I was in it, and when they played it for me after it had been released and circulated, I noticed something wrong with me. By then it was too late.

I was interviewed to discuss pedagogy, education and creativity. The interview was featured in a corporate video commissioned by the board of directors to promote the elite private university where I worked. It targeted educators, students and parents. It wasn’t my first. It was part of my job as I traveled promoting ‘creative communications’ as an industry field to schools and conduct training for teachers.

This time, I sat down and really looked at myself. It was not a pretty sight. From the neck down, I was awful. I was twitching. I was shaking my left leg incessantly. I looked agitated. I looked restless.

It was a comment from one of my students that woke me up from my former over-confident self. “Miss Natasha, you look like you’re on something.”

That was it. The other shoe had dropped. That proverbial pin that dropped silently to the floor was finally heard.

I let out a nervous laugh. I wasn’t provoked, attacked or triggered. I was “outed” by one of my very own students, my Children of the Corn. The good news? I was sober and lucid. The bad news? I was reaching a mental and physical breaking point I didn’t even realize it.

My soul was screaming to be let out of an exhausted vessel, and here I was thinking I was the cat’s whiskers. I had allowed my abused self to be recorded for the world to see that I was practically losing my shit.

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up. Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”― Helen Smith Bevington, American poet and educator

What is your season to feel alive? This is a question I ask myself very often since that video episode over a decade ago.

Since then, I took not one step back, but a few, to re-assess myself. I’m not talking about a medical check-up (that goes without saying) but about my mental health climate.

We often talk about seasons and its effect on us. Indeed, the struggle is real.

In countries with four seasons, summer is deemed ideal as it pushes folks to spend more time outdoors. The sun is a welcoming character that brightens our mood and becomes the panacea to the winter blues we cradled.

Winter is bleak. It brings about cabin fever and seasonal depression. Spring is wet, temperamental and cumbersome. One minute warm one minute cold, crying in between on the pretext it’s a nurturing act for our vulnerable nature.

Autumn is the ensemble of melancholia. As temperature drops, the gold and earthy palettes dim the lights on our outdoor activities, as if to say, “It’s going to be time out and quiet time from now on.”

In countries like mine (Malaysia) in Southeast Asia, we have it differently. We have the monsoon and the drought seasons. One brings us torrential rain and massive floods; the other brings us scorching heat and dried-up fields. Both are inconvenient, but I’d take the sun and high temperature any time.

For me being outside of a building at any given time placates my mood. From glare of the sun to enchantment of the bright moon, I am a friendlier person thanks to generous boosts of endorphins and serotonin.

The unceasing rain during monsoon makes me not only lazier and moody, but it takes Herculean effort to get me out from underneath the duvet. Any time I am restricted within four concrete walls, my patience, sanity and confidence take a nosedive.

I am also a disaster when placed in a cool to cold temperature setting. I become a human burrito at home (buried in layers enveloped by a favorite fleece blanket) replete with a bright red nose and ears.

My thought processing becomes sluggish that I’d need to alter my diet to ensure I’m not slumping my metabolic rate and overloading my carbohydrates that will ultimately reduce me to a snail.

Seeing that video however, I realized it had nothing to do with the elements outdoor. I had imprisoned myself within my own head; constructed my own four gray concrete walls.

I had issued myself the worst kind of prison sentence called overworked. I was soaked in brine made out of my own perspiration, debility and prostration. Looking at my restless leg and agitated movements, clearly I had ran out of fragrance to hide the odorous fact.

What on earth have you done to yourself, Natasha?

Once you sense this, it only gets worse.

At home on a video call with my confidante Dre, he asked me what my plan was for the weekend. “Laundry, grocery shopping and cleaning the apartment,” came my automated reply.

“So when do you rest?” He queried.

“That’s how I de-stress.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not resting. That’s still doing work. You need to stop working and rest.” Dre stressed on the word ‘rest’.

“That’s how I do it. When I’m not thinking about office matters that’s how I know I’m resting.” I defended myself.

“Have you ever tried doing nothing?”

“What do you mean nothing?”

“Doing something that you’re not expecting any physical output or tangible result. That kind of nothing. You’re always so goal-oriented, you’ve lost touch with how to be human when it comes to resting and relaxing. You need to go back to your ABCs on how to chill and be kinder to yourself.”

Ouch.

“But it’s not like I’m not enjoying getting the place sorted. I get a sense of satisfaction seeing things in order.” I tried to offer a rationale.

“Poor you, you don’t even know the difference between work, chores and relax. You have a disease called ‘Needing To Be Productive’. Just because you’re not making or doing something, doesn’t mean you’re being useless. Relaxing by not doing anything is a reward in itself, like how I have days I can sleep for 12–14 hours undisturbed and you think I’m dead. That’s how I reboot my system. You’re like a walking zombie close to burnout.”

Ouch ouch.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty for doing nothing,” Dre added like a final jab to the jugular with a blunt, wooden spoon. “That’s the starting point of relaxing.”

“Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.” ― Kevin Barry

Barry has a point, but I believe Joyce Rachelle drives it home for me when she wrote: “Sometimes exhaustion is not a result of too much time spent on something, but of knowing that in its place, no time is spent on something else.”

I looked at my reflection. I was a mess. I was all over the place. I was doing too much, clutching to stray straws to make a weaving of logic to my life.

I took a long, hard look at my apartment. I walked to the kitchen, pulled the drawer and took a handful of black garbage bags. I walked to my room. It wasn’t messy. That was me. But I needed a last hurrah.

I changed into a two-piece bikini and turned up the dial of my speakers. With music blasting to The Weeknd singing ‘Save Your Tears’ with Ariana Grande, I wanted a final attempt for personal consolation before I pivoted to a new frontier.

I performed and completed a spring-clean and packed a small suitcase with enough clothes for a weekend getaway. Dre was still on video accompanying me witnessing my interior exorcism.

“And where are we going with that suitcase?”

“We are going to The Ascott where I’m going to take a plunge into the pool followed by a long hot bath. After dinner, I’m going to turn off all the lights, switch on the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign and sleep for a whole day. I’m going to reboot my systems and start all over. Defragment myself.”

“Now that’s the way to do it!” Clapped my confidante. “Finally someone is learning to be human. But first, for God’s sake, put on some clothes. You’re about to step out of your apartment with nothing on but a skimpy bikini.”

Okay, I’m almost there.