An Unusual Form of Stress

This is going to be an odd sort of post and it could turn out to be long. We'll see.

It is a month now since I left my job at the school, and three weeks since I began my new part-time at the church. During that time I've had a lot of time to think, to reflect, without that thinking and reflection complicated by worry about What Comes Next (which had occupied my thoughts almost non-stop for the previous two and a half months).

I cannot tell you how good I feel.

I cannot tell you how good I feel.

I do not feel stressed. For the first time in a very long time. I come home from work and I putter around the house, I catch up with my on-line Scrabble games, I read, I play at the computer. Sometimes I sew. Let me say that again: Sometimes I sew. This is in great contrast to Before. Before I left the school, I had to sew every day for as long as possible. I was just driven to do it. Something that had begun as a pleasure had turned into an obsession.

I have thought this through, and here is what I have come up with.

For thirteen years I worked in a job where I did not have enough to do. This is something that not very many people know.

I am a fast (and accurate) typist and I do my work efficiently. I enjoyed the work that I did. But there was not enough of it. I invented things to do to keep busy so that the time would not drag. I felt like an anomaly -- many of the people that I know talk at length about how overworked they are, how crazy-busy they are at work -- I always kept very quiet during these conversations. I needed to appear busy when there was very little for me to do. I played a lot of on-line Scrabble. I wrote a lot of blog posts.

You may be wondering why I did not ask for more to do. I did. Every summer at my annual evaluation, I would tell my boss that I could do more. More in quantity, more in scope, more in depth. I suggested that he delegate to me projects that he ordinarily would give to another person, one who always appeared to have way too much to do, and in fact, said that was the case. I was capable of doing more, and I wanted to grow. But it never happened.

And now, away from that atmosphere, I realize the incredible stress that I was under for thirteen years. Stress of needing to appear busy, to manufacture tasks to occupy myself, to help the hours to pass. And when I got home, I think, I sat down at that Bernina and turned out project after project, flimsy upon flimsy, out of a nearly desperate need to be productive, to be creative, to be busy.

I don't know whether I'm right or whether this even makes any sense. Honna seems to think it does. And, really, it doesn't matter one way or the other. I know that I feel good. That I do not feel stressed. That I feel more like who I used to be, a long, long time ago.

Before. Before I worked at the school.