My room is a time capsule. Everything that happens here seems to stay here, seems to exist in a neat vacuum I call mine. Inside my room, my life runs in parallel to all the things outside—parallel, adjacent, never touching. Between these two lines, there’s this space between: the sidewalk of the streets Whelmed and Overwhelmed.
I have three midterms in the span of the next 30 or so hours, on which a third of my grade hangs on the line. No matter how many times I’ve tried to psych myself out for what’s to come, more often than not it’s felt like I’m tripping, and I can’t tell if it’s because of my own feet or the ground at this point. But where the ground ripples with the stress of uncertainty of failure or success, I look up and see that the sky breeds humility. I think to myself about the beauty of stillness, the exquisiteness of presence, the breathless pursuit of the future
.
To learn to say no.
To learn to say that enough is enough.
To learn to be still.
It’s a weird concept to be stressed about not being stressed, as if not doing work is a cardinal sin. I should be studying. I should be reviewing. I should be doing work. I should be doing anything to take up my time. And these shoulds tell us that rest is anything but deserved. The clock ticks by with another minute without any substantial manifestation of productivity, and it leaves me feeling as if I need to push even harder to make up for whatever was lost. “Push harder”, as if I wasn’t already giving it my all.
Sometimes the concept of rest and self-care seem so foreign to me. Why rest when there’s more to do? Why take time to care to check in with yourself when there are papers to write and meetings to attend and material to learn and responsibilities to address?
To take inventory of your heart.
To take up space.
In the aftermath of my “yikes” day, I stretch out my legs for the first time in a month. And quite honestly, it felt wrong at first. As the series of shoulds bombarded me, they reminded me that everything I had, and still do have, keep me in a neat, tight little box. And once the box opened just a little bit, I found myself missing the walls that told me exactly where I was and what I was supposed to do and what I was supposed to be.
To be okay with not every waking minute being 156% productive.
People told me that I definitely deserved a rest, but I didn’t feel like I did. Life moved on. Professors taught more material. It’s not as if I could put everything on hold while I caught my breath. I told myself I didn’t deserve rest, as if rest was something I could earn instead of a basic necessity. To look away from the ground—from the sidewalk, from this balancing act between being whelmed and overwhelmed—and up at the sky reiterates that life does go on, regardless of whether I watch as the constellations signal the change of seasons or I have my nose buried in a book.
And the sky is just as indulgent as rest: always present, always begging for attention, always, always, always.