When Rest IS the Work by Beth Stavros

When Rest IS the Work
by Beth Stavros

My name is Beth, and I’m a work-a-holic. A full-fledged, “multiple-ten-hour-days-per-week”, “every-employer-brings-up-her-work-ethic work-a-holic”. And I’m pretty sure it’s ruining my life.  But, what if I told you that rest was part of the work? And not participating in it is making your work suffer? 

Because it is! 

And I’m saying this as someone who is consistently near-sabotaging themself with over-work. 

Can’t focus on tonight’s big work event I’m leading? Maybe I stayed up all night taking it apart in my head because if this event goes off without a hitch, people will see that I am a grown-up who can be trusted with important things. 

Tuckering myself out right before a big performance? Could it be because I didn’t listen to my body as I should have and instead just rehearsed harder and harder the week of said performance, because–dang it–I can make something perfect if I don’t stop working on it?

I can’t say exactly when this mindset started for me, but I’m guessing the recession contributed to it. See, I graduated from college in 2009. Yep. That 2009. And while people were telling me to “chase my dreams,” I was darting like a highly caffeinated pinball between any of the three (sometimes four) part-time, low-pay jobs I had been lucky enough to charm my way into. I was locked into survival mode, running myself into the ground because student loan debt wasn’t going to just vanish. And besides, I had gotten my first job on my fifteenth birthday. I was no stranger to working, and now, I didn’t even have to square work with my university studies. Three to four jobs at once was totally doable! Even if it wasn’t, it took all those jobs with all their powers combined to give me the bare minimum I needed to scrape by, so it's not like I had much choice in the matter. (As a storyteller, I feel duty-bound to tell you that these “scraping by” years were spent splitting half a duplex best described as “imitation Tudor-meets-mod-meets-eighties, but it’s not a friendly meeting” with five to six other people and their various pets, which included a pigeon.)

Now, I live in Wisconsin, in a 121-year-old house that I only have to share with my husband and two cats. By some miracle, I’ve started to be able to make a living as an artist. 

A real, live, working artist! (I can’t believe it either.) 

And you know what? I’m still running myself into the ground–this time for an entirely different set of reasons than sheer survival (Though, I am still battling that scarcity mindset. Maybe more on that in a different article.) If the work isn’t perfect, I convince myself I can make it so through self-denial. I tell myself I can eat or sleep after I make the work better. If the work is good, I feel guilty for taking a breath when I could be making more good work, since I must be on a roll and it would be wrong to waste it. And does anyone else out there have to fight the looming feeling of guilt for not working on their art ALL THE TIME because it’s something we’re so lucky to do as artists and we should be making the most of it at any given moment? 

I say all of this so you’ll know that when I talk about rest, it has NEVER come easy for me. Whether I was burning myself out for lack of setting boundaries in office jobs, or not letting myself go a single day without hours of writing when the thing I really desperately needed was just sleep. 

I'll say it again: rest has never come easy. And certainly not when it came to creating. 

I think, on some level, I always knew I wasn’t going to scrape any semi-respectable writing out of a brain that was battered to paste from having no time to recuperate. But there is a difference between knowing something and believing it. (Just ask Tilda Swinton’s angel Gabriel from the Constantine film.) And so, despite this knowledge, the ruthless approach to writing was my approach. And I don’t know if I’d have ever really re-thought my methods if I hadn’t gone into circus work. Because when you really need rest as a working aerialist, your body gives you no other option than to do so. And there are plenty of things you should be doing when not actively in the air that are still very much part of the work. Like stretching. Eating quality meals. And sleeping. A lot. All these things are part of the work. And if I don’t do these things, my body just stops working as it should. Needless to say, I've finally had to rethink my approach to how I create.

So, I’m trying to take a cue from my physical training and take the same approach to my writing: hard resets between shorter bouts of work. (In the same way that two hours of training is fine if it’s good training, 250-500 words is fine, if it’s good writing.) 

I also look for things that are part of the work. Listening to that music I find super-inspiring–just letting it wash over me? Part of the work. 

That walk I want to take to step away from my novel-in-progress and get some perspective? Part of the work. 

That sleep I really should get because the chapter I’m working on just keeps rambling? Part of the work. 

I’m still learning not to feel bad for taking this approach, but here’s the thing: I like what I have been writing since this tweak a lot better than what I was writing before it. And you know what? I like writing better than I have in a while.

If my pre-circus creative habits/approaches sound anything like yours, please know I wish I hadn’t taken over a decade to rethink them. I urge you to ask yourself what your work looks like.? Not just productivity as we have come to view it, but all the other things that nourish the process and enrich your creativity. Those things matter.

So here’s to the work. All of it. The work-work, and the rest-work. May we partake generously in both.