Several weeks ago, my therapist and I were discussing my propensity to work more and more, regardless of how tired I felt or of how many people around me told me to take a break. I was honest about how much taking a break scares me, reasons unknown (or better said, reasons I don’t want to look at), about feeling exhausted at the same time and like I am just scratching the surface of everything I want to (feel like I have to) do. I likened my daily toil to a mouse wheel that gets faster and faster. But a wheel that is pushed to go faster by the mouse herself, by nothing outside of it.
I have always been praised for my hard work. Yes, also looked at with compassion for the more and more frequent moments of utter exhaustion I experienced. But mostly praised. “You work so hard!” “You do so much!” “Wow, you are really wonderful to be handling so many things at the same time!” And each time the dopamine hit blasted in my system for just a few seconds (less and less each time) and I was already in search for the next rush. And, as addiction goes, the next one would have to be stronger. The next batch of work would have to be more, more difficult, more important, … more … .
So, weeks ago, I found myself telling my therapist: I want to stop, but I don’t know how. And my mind was transported instantly into my parents bedroom in the apartment I was born in. The year was 2000 and I was talking to my brother who was describing his addiction to heroin. It was the beginning stages of a fight that he would eventually lose, and he was telling me: “sis I really want to stop, but I can’t”. The realization of the similarities between the mechanisms scared me. Knowing the Goliath my brother lost to daily for over a decade, felt overwhelming. But, if I want to be honest about it, I need to understand that addiction by any other type would follow the same mechanism.
I’ve been doing what I know to do with any problem that feels daunting. I started reading and went to the very hard but amazing work of Gabor Mate and what always struck me in the way he dealt with addiction was the questions he asks. The question he asks about addiction is not why can’t you stop? It is why did you start? What were you missing? What were you looking for that you did not have?
I have been sitting with this question for a while now, and I have been tempted to give it up. Even now, as I write this, I am fighting the gremlins of oh not this again, oh who is interested in reading about this, oh this is just you, oh come on you’re so overly dramatic and so on – voices I have lived with my entire life.
Earlier this week, I listened to a series of podcasts in which someone was describing his road to burn out and the attempted way of getting out of it, through rest and reckoning. And I heard him say something that really resonated with me: he spoke about mistaking love for appreciation. The fact that I instantly wanted to turn off the podcast and the punch in my gut told me I need to pay more attention. That he is on to something.
I remembered when I was very young, learning the lesson of if I get good grades, I will be loved. If I listen to my parents I will be loved, if I am a good girl I will be loved. And all of these magnified later into if you get married, if you have a child, if you are a good wife, if …, if …, if …. . And I never stopped to wonder if what I was receiving was love or appreciation, and if they were the same thing . Because the truth was that they weren’t: appreciation was a false friend. It was almost like I had a headache that would not go away, and I kept taking stomach pills to try and fix it .
It would be very easy to blame our parents for things that happened in our childhood. It would however be unfair to them to divorce their parenting from what they themselves experienced, from the traumas and lessons they received as children, from what society told them when we were children. It would be very easy to put everything on the back of our parents who showed happiness when we got a good grade all the time forgetting that this was actually what school and society told them was needed for us to succeed in life, to be appreciated and to “make it”.
Yes, it’s very hard to acknowledge that our parents did the very best they could with the information they had at the time. It is very hard at almost 50 years old to understand that the only person who can do something about this battle is me that it has in fact always been me. It is very hard to sit with the reality that the only person I need love from before anyone else is myself. It is very hard to stop mirroring what looks like love on the outside to mimic a semblance of it on the inside.
In my fifth decade of life, I wish for myself to be able to wake up one morning and say, you know what, today I will just take it easy and not feel guilty about it. And not be so scared about it. To some this may sound like a very easy thing to do and to others it may sound like something I should be able to achieve without much effort . Until this year this all sounded to me like Chinese, a language that looks so difficult, I don’t even want to attempt to learn it. Living in a country that doesn’t value overworking for the past year, I feel myself starting to look at relaxing like I look at Danish language: sure, it’s very hard, but I like the sound of it and I’m starting to learn it, one word at a time.
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash
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