Really

All my life's an ode to a lazy word. Plus dandelions

In our first months in Berlin--after the initial shock of the relocation had worn off and we had visas in hand and were feeling confident in navigating our new neighborhood but before the existential dread of prolonged unemployment really settled deeply over us--I remember feeling something unwinding inside me.

It was a freeing feeling, these months that liberated me from a constrictor I didn’t even realize was so tight. In those months, really for the first time in my adult life, I was relaxing on a regular basis. I spent a lot of time bored and consequently picked at some crafts and wrote a lot. Eventually I disentangled my reality from that of the news cycle and calmed down enough not to immediately associate the stray firework with gunfire. I took my child to the ER without a fear of financial regret when it turned out to be no big deal. As my mind and body were adjusting to the pace and reality of life in Germany during those several months, my nervous system must have breathed a sigh of relief.

I learned a lot about myself during that time. I learned about how I think and how I move. I learned some things that work reliably for me and things that I am really better off avoiding. It was a time when I was really peeling back the onion layers of a life, evaluating what I had come to predict and patterns I had established. Chris and I often joked that everyone should take a reset in their mid-30s because you’re finally old enough to know yourself and also not so old that transformations don’t have time to grow.

As I’ve dived back into a robust schedule over the past few weeks, cramming 24 hours of German class plus the to-and-fro into days that already felt decadently busy with parenting, creative pursuits, self-care, exercise, and social endeavors has hit really hard. I could expound on that “really”. I’ve heard that it’s lazy language, that it’s a word you can always cut without thinking twice or replace with something more impressive, but really? I’m really tired. I’m really overloaded this week. I’m really-- just really, as in reality--feeling the contraction of the coil in my bones. I don’t need to say it’s “excruciatingly” or “significantly” or offer up some other polysyllabic qualifier. “Really” does enough for me right now.

And really, what I want to guard against is slipping back. In glamourizing the hustle and celebrating the exhaustion. I have lived long enough in the upper echelons of productivity and achievement culture to know that it’s an easy story to sell. It doesn’t often look like slipping on the outside. Instead, it looks like the person at the German test today, being thanked and admired by her classmates. It looks like the to-do list crossed off at 11 pm. It looks like happy kids who haven’t yet been forgotten at school or gone to bed unfed.

But it feels like slipping, in more ways than one. It feels like the gears that I used to run so effectively have slipped a little bit and in their place, a few dandelions have taken root. A little crack in the machine has let some light in, and I’m seeing for the first time just how polished the mechanism was. The German class successes, the completed lists, and the cared for children are on the face value of stress, time crunches, and frantic texts as I play Tetris with human lives. It’s all really a lot.

I’m looking back over the week. It was three long days--10 hours from leaving my house to coming home for dinner, three days in a row. I haven’t had that kind of hustle in years, and I don’t miss it. But there are signs, little dandelions along my path that give me a little sense of just how far I’ve come. Because in those three days, I’ve also ridden my bike to and from class. I’ve met with friends old and new, and I’ve taken my lunch breaks outside instead of holed up at my desk. I’ve gotten done what needed to be done, gotten kids where they needed to be, but I’ve also taken care of me in there, too. It’s possible to hustle and care for yourself, to rest effectively and to ratchet the energy up to 100 when necessary. The trick is to remember that the things I need to do to care for myself cost time and energy, too.

I’m not immune to the sparkle of hustle. Would I like to earn more money, do more, see more, accomplish more? The answer, honestly, is probably still “yes”. I don’t accept settling or slowing down easily. But I am confidently moving into a phase where spending my time can serve a lot of different purposes. There is a strong case to be made in which any of our endeavors across our various pursuits feed our whole life’s work, that we are so much more than a product of our outputs. The gears can slip and we can find a whole new capacity for life beyond the machinations of where we were.

Really.