On recovering from overwork

The joy of realizing that I already deserve to exist

Hello,

I’ve been having a bit of an awakening, of late, and it feels apt to share it today, when half of you are on break for Thanksgiving.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to escape reality. For a long time, I did this through alcohol. I’m sometimes prone to doing it through stories, too: if I’m not careful, I start to use stories as a way to fall asleep, rather than to wake up. I am easily tempted by fantasy.

What I’m realizing lately is the extent to which I’ve also always tried to escape or manipulate reality through overwork.

[Image by Isabel Wilkinson: isabelwilkinson.net]

I’ve lived my life as though there’s some state of bliss awaiting, if I can only prove myself through some unknown, arbitrary achievement, the goalposts for which will always keep leaping some distance ahead. Being good enough is always just around the corner.

I can’t count how many relationships and good days, weeks, months, years I’ve lost to this delusion. And I’m sure to many of those who know me best, it’s been absolutely obvious for years, if not decades. But like all the deepest truths, even if I had a cognitive sense that there was something not quite right in my approach to work, I couldn’t really feel it until it sank in somewhere beneath my brain. And it took me losing a lot, over these past few years, for that to happen.

There’s been a lot of grief, in processing this realization. Grieving the life unlived and all the love that was available to me, which I left wasted by the roadside because I didn’t know it was there, because I didn’t think I deserved it yet.

I know that people often read my letters and worry about me, because I seem to be constantly having some sort of dark revelation. But I want to be clear: though there’s been grief in this realization, that grief is the bridge to utter, radiant joy. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to finally feel, in my body, that I don’t have to work myself into the ground in order to deserve to exist. That it’s enough to just wake up every day and love my life and the people around me.

A couple of weeks ago, I sent you a manifesto about going home, about the way back to belonging if you live in a society that prizes a conformist kind of achievement and a narrow life path that feels dead to a lot of us. I spoke about a connective, polyphonic, radically feminine, ecological, intuitive way of making meaning and understanding ourselves as living beings, which I believe we can collectively return to, and in some cases, already are.

I’ve spent years trying to reach that place through work, through manhandling and manipulating my life. But it seems so obvious now that of course, I’ll only get there through dropping the overwork. Because that connective, polyphonic, radically feminine, ecological, intuitive space is in fact just the living world. I don’t have to create it or do anything at all. I just have to surrender, and there it is.

So that’s what I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future. And I hope you’re smarter than me and have already been doing it.

Enjoy the holiday, those who celebrate.

xx Ellie