Shall We All Just Take A Day Off?

I'm completely guilty of being a person who takes pride in being overworked. I wear my longest shifts like trophies, my tangled schedule like a medal of honour. I worked full-time as a waitress while my friends were heading off to university and travelling the world, and it was difficult to not feel like I was failing when I wasn't where I wanted to be and wasn't even really working towards where I wanted to be. I felt inadequate and ashamed in the face of their amazing new experiences. But if I could still manage to meet them after doing a 15 hour shift, it would feel like I'd done something amazing too. It helped turn a feeling of inadequacy into a feeling of worthiness. Only by writing this down now am I realising how unhealthy it is to feel a sense of pride from overwork.

It's not hard to see that an unhealthy pride of our own productivity is just a symptom of a society that pays people and assigns value based on what they can produce. I think a particularly unhealthy mentality around overwork develops when working in repetitive service jobs that many dismiss as unskilled, because one of the only ways to feel good about your work is if you're doing a lot of it. I've long known that it's not healthy that my self-esteem is solidly built around a belief that the best people are the busiest ones. But only recently have I started to realise how unfair my unhealthy perceptions are on others. To feel good I need to feel like I'm doing a lot, but this gets impressed on other people and make them feel like they're not doing enough. At a time when I finding it hard to focus, work, or even get out of bed, other people's productivity made me feel even worse about myself. 

The actions of those that 'go the extra mile' can get adopted by companies and impressed into systems of work because 'if she can do it why can't you'. Once, during a really busy shift a manager came up to me to say it was my turn for a break. We'd been so busy that breaks were only just starting to get done and my shift was due to finish in just over an hour, so I told him I didn't need one. He replied 'thanks, I wish everyone was like you'. This was just a throwaway comment of gratitude, but it made me realise that me going above and beyond what's expected makes that the new 'what's expected'. For everyone. Obviously this is wrong, we're entitled to a break, if I choose not to take one there should be absolutely no pressure or expectation on anyone else to not take one either. But when we're constantly having to fight for jobs and prove our 'worth' to bosses, each of us doing more for less every day, the bar just continually gets higher and higher all the time. For 'millennials', there's also an innate need to fight back against the assumption that we're lazy people. I'm rolling my eyes writing this because I honestly don't know where this assumption that we try so hard to shake actually comes from. In my experience, millenials are incredibly more okay than their parents were with doing too much for too less. My nana pretty much falls off her chair every time I tell her how many hours I'm doing in work that week or that I don't get paid any extra for working bank holidays. 

For me, the pressure to be productive in society doesn't equate exactly into a desire to be productive, because my need to be busy and productive also extends out to my social life. I pride myself on being able to make a friend's party no matter what time I have work the next day, or what deadline I have coming up. I work really hard on making sure that I can be at everything; if I can find a way to write a blog post, work a double shift and still not be late for a pal's birthday meal I feel invincible. This isn't a bad thing in itself, but it becomes a complex where people then feel they can't say the perfectly legitimate: I'm not going to make it tonight, I'm tired. 

I know that I won't be able to easily turn off this innate need I have to always be doing a lot of things, but I also don't think it needs to be turned off completely, just down a bit. I would like to find a way to do all the things I do without feeling bad if I have an unproductive day, and without making others feel pressured to do the same as me. Yesterday my friend asked me how I juggled 'so many things', and he probably doesn't realise how much of a compliment that question was to me, someone whose self esteem hangs partly on a pride of being overworked. I answered by saying that I'm just someone who loves to be busy. Which is true, but I'm also a little worried that it's a lie. I think I might work as hard as I do at the things I do because I'm terrified that if I'm not busy, I'm not anything. And if that sounds like you too, maybe we should all take tomorrow off. And be okay with it.

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