What To Do When You Can't Stop Doing

What To Do When You Can't Stop Doing

• Monday, 7 May 2018

I’ve been trying to focus this entire afternoon.

It’s not as though I have work to do. I have no deadlines; no commitments. I’m literally trying to do nothing.

And it’s the hardest thing in the world.

I need my hands to keep busy: typing, tapping, fidgeting, flicking through the pages of something I’m hardly even seeing –  never mind reading – because all my eyes can see are soft-focus shapes. I hold my phone but I need to reply to emails, texts, comments, swipe, tap, double-tap - all now, all at once. People are waiting on me and I feel like I owe something to them. Reply now, tap now, delete now.

I can't stop. LOL. Great.

I could cop out with an easy answer, blaming it on the buzzword of the century: social media. Because of course, like everything, it's always social media and the bandwagon of ailments that have made us this way, craving the instantaneous. Because we're the Millennials who want everything and “we want it now.” But I think it's deeper than that. It must be.

I feel guilty when I'm not doing something. Even when I don't want to do anything, there is something to be done. Even if there's no work, I feel I can always find more.

I never want to be relaxing, to be having ‘down-time’ or ‘me-time’. I work. It’s what I know how to do. More importantly, it’s what I know how to do well. It’s what I’m comfortable with. I’m in my element even when the thought of multiple deadlines and shifts at work and rehearsals and one thing after another pile up and keep me awake at night and press me to obsessively make mental lists upon lists upon lists (love me a good list!) that I will no doubt forget. Futile lists. Messy thoughts. Unaligned. A literal mind-map.*

*shout-out to a previous history teacher who labelled me a “lovely girl…very scatty…but lovely.”

So is that it? Is my mind that muddled? Am I just scatty?

Mind over matter, you say. Busy yourself with something else. Well, I am, and it's not working. Exercising doesn't work. Reading doesn't work. Scrolling through social media doesn't work. It doesn't work because they all have an end. They all have some kind of a full-stop. But thoughts don’t; they're perpetual and hardly fixed. I'm writing this on the evening of my final essay hand-in of second year: people have told me to celebrate, to relax, to chill out. But I can't. Not when working is something that I kind of like.

My mam says I move too fast. Too fast. That I needed to slow down. I guess she’s right. But hearing something and telling yourself something are two very different things.

And today I’m telling myself to simply stop. Slow down. Life is already too fast (I’ve just finished my second year at uni – NAH WTF???) and with time too sparing and moments too fleeting, working at 100% capacity every single second of every single day probably isn’t helping.

I guess I’m scared of wasting days doing nothing when, in actuality, I am wasting time trying to keep busy. I could be productive by simply just living, ya know? To stop expecting so much from myself and taking time out to just be. Easier said than done, really, but I think it’s worth a try. Everyone needs a break from time to time. I just need to remember to not feel so guilty about it.