spilt milk #1
Whoever first said idle hands are the devil’s workshop really didn’t know a single thing about napping. It’s a Proverb and all, but I feel like we’re missing some significant historical context, because who could think something so pure as idleness breeds anything evil? I crave idleness like plants in parched earth under the bright summer sun. I want to be thoroughly finished with all responsibilities and demands on my attention. I want to close my eyes and float.
In those periods of peace, when time and dust motes alike are suspended for a moment when the jet propulsion of my life decides to defy the laws of physics and just stop, there’s a satisfaction that cascades over me filling out every crease and contour. This idleness is the deep breath washing oxygen through my blood cells.
I find myself chasing this particular kind of stillness. Do I need more silence or Phoebe Bridgers’ whisper vocals? Do I need the luxury of our velvet couch or the warmth of my linen bedsheets? More often than not, it alludes me and I begin negotiating with myself like an addict in denial for just a little bit longer. I’ll find it in a few minutes. It feels beyond me, like hitting snooze in the hazy space between dreamland and reality. Or when the book you’re reading is too exciting to put down and you just have to get to the next scene, or the next one, or the end.
On TikTok, they call it rotting. There’s a girl who comes up on my FYP and talks about how to not rot. Normally I will flick the video away, quickly, to tell the algorithm I don’t want this content. But sometimes I’ll watch with equal amounts of self-loathing and curiosity. She smiles into the camera, teeth white, eyes serious. She sits under overhead lighting in a small apartment and gives you a to-do list.
No matter what combination of tasks she lists, they always start with putting your feet on the floor for momentum. She claims this is neuroscience, but I don’t believe it. Every advice column I’ve ever read about this issue told me to put my alarm clock across the room to make waking up easier. But when I do that, I’ll just roll over, somehow asleep again already, and let it blare, annoying birds and neighbors alike. This is a problem that has persisted my whole life. When I lived with my parents, I had a lofted bed and would scamper down the ladder, turn off the alarm clock, and return to sleep.
So putting my feet on the ground doesn’t give me any momentum because I know I can always undo it. I can always go back to rotting mode. I can always decide that the day has been far more than enough and pull up a new 100,000+ word hurt/comfort fic on Archive of Our Own. It’s too easy for me to hit cmd+z.
Maybe this is what the idleness Proverb was about. Less about idleness itself, and more about the ability to see through the veneer of societal expectations and the risks of that. Because once you start ignoring texts, the red notification bubbles on my screen mean a lot less. The anxiety from never writing thank-you notes dissipates and suddenly you’re just not the kind of person who is good at remembering birthdays.
Blaming capitalism and the Puritanical roots of the United States is easy. We’re working more than we have ever before, with less and less life satisfaction. Even when my coworkers are calling in sick, they’ll still leave a message in Slack, “text me if you need anything.” There are think pieces, and polling results, and research telling us how miserable our relationship with productivity is making us. So it’s perfectly understandable that I would seek out my favorite kind of silence, it costs the boss money.
But the weight of everything I have not done suffocates me. Shame rolls in my belly, crawling up my spine, heating my cheeks.
Maybe Proverbs wasn’t talking about idleness, it was talking about anxiety-induced avoidance. Because mid-glorious-rot, I see the things pilling up beyond my sluggish rotting brain and I hate it. It feels awful to let emails from people I care about go unanswered. When the same five things get bumped from one week’s to-do list to the next.
I fear I used up all of my allotted cosmic energy and I just have to live the rest of my life mid-rot-haze and over-indulging in naps. The world moves on and shoes start dropping. I am not just a person who is bad at remembering birthdays, I am staunchly unreliable. And that’s a one-way ticket to rotting mode.
My therapist says All This™️ is because I am tired and my expectations of *everything* are too high. Her evidence: rotting doesn’t seem like the behavior of someone who is bursting with energy and has zero sleep debt and all of the things that contribute to sustained vitality. And despite my penchant for rotting, the cumulative months I’ve wasted as a puddle on my bed, my therapist reminds me gently of the half-dozen projects I casually mentioned and staunchly pushed forward. When I can’t meet friends, I’m plowing through my To Be Read List, bookmarking cool articles that make me feel smart to come back for — and I do come back for, at 1 am when I can’t be fucked to go to sleep yet. When I can’t create things, I’m methodically finding collectibles in RPG land. My therapist tells me even my fun is work.
In April, I got on an SSRI + beta-blocker combo. I was working on a local ballot campaign and it was destroying me. When I put the two bitter blue Propranolols on my tongue for the first time, my favorite kind of silence returned. I asked my doctor if they were habit forming — he had recommended “something on the sedating side of the spectrum,” I declined — he said, “no, the only habit propranolol will form is making you feel better.”
It’s weird how different the world feels when the chemicals in your body are different when my blood vessels don’t have to fight adrenalin-induced vasoconstriction to open up my work email and I can breathe. But despite how much better things are because of the extra serotonin in my brain, I think I am just tired.
I keep waiting for a clear resolution. What is life after being tired? After recovering from being tired? I am learning, slowly, to accept being unremarkable. The resolution looks like dried plasma healing over as a scab. Parts of myself are sloughing off, parts that my body no longer needs. And if the formation of scars feels haphazard, so be it. We’re aiming for unremarkable now.
