The Ups and Downs of Down Time

I recently decided to take some time off as I transition from finishing my design education to beginning my design career. This is the first time in my life that I have deliberately taken time to do nothing, and it’s been challenging. Here are some of the things I am learning.

Deliberate Down Time

I am writing this on Wednesday, June 27th, which happens to be my birthday. I turn 31 today.

Just like any other day, I started the day with my cherished morning routine, which consists of a large cup of coffee and some quiet time before the day begins. Unlike most other days however, today is different; not just because it is my birthday, but also because I won’t be working today. I didn’t work yesterday, and I won’t be working tomorrow either.

I am currently 12 days into a 6-week long phase that I’ve decided to call deliberate down time.

I graduated from design school in May. I was working a part-time design job that helped me pay the bills during my final year of design school. Shortly after writing an article about what I was looking for in my design career, I was offered a great full-time position at a service design consultancy, which I will begin on August 1st. Upon accepting the offer, I decided to quit my part-time job and take the next 6 weeks off in order to do… nothing.

Since I just graduated, I can’t really afford to travel right now, which means that the majority of my down time will be spent in Toronto. Fortunately, summer in Toronto is an incredible time, filled with festivals, concerts, parades, patio hangouts, and afternoons in the park. There will be lots of fun things to do during my down time, but what I’m more interested in (and somewhat scared of) is what I will experience when I’m not doing all of those fun things.

Before I talk about doing nothing, I’ll provide a bit of context about how I got to this point.

Powering Through

For the past 13 years, I have been in a constant state of powering through.

In 2005, I graduated high school and went to university. I powered through an engineering degree. I graduated and then powered through my first job at a engineering firm. I quit that job and within a week I started powering through three and a half intense years working in sales and marketing at Procter & Gamble.

I realized I had no interest in staying at P&G, and realized I wanted to pursue a career in design. I applied and was accepted into design school. I quit my job at P&G, and a week after my last day at P&G I was sitting in a classroom learning about the principles of design.

I powered through design internships and scholarship applications in order to cover my tuition and cost of living. I powered through months of horrendously expensive but crucial therapy so I could finally end a decade-long battle with an eating disorder. I powered through a difficult intimate relationship, and underwent more therapy so I could understand why I felt the way that I did.

When things got to a breaking point, I ended that relationship, moved out, and as a broke design student in Canada’s most expensive city, I found a new place to live within a week. I powered through my final year of design school, graduated, accepted a job offer, and here I am.

Hello Anxiety, My Old Friend

13 years of powering through, and now here I am doing nothing. Or perhaps more accurately, here I am attempting to do nothing. I anticipated it would be hard, and I was right.

Halfway through the day, I might get a sudden sense of anxiety or loneliness. In response, I might go for a walk, call a friend, pick up a book, or clean my apartment. Eventually the feeling passes, but it’s not pleasant. There is this sense of urgency. I feel like I need to DO something. I feel like it needs to happen NOW. Or else… well I don’t really know what.

It’s this crippling fear that drives me to take action. I can recognize and acknowledge the feeling of anxiety in a split second. Within two seconds, I can be doing something that will help to reduce that anxiety. But it always seems to come back.

I am fortunate to have had access to years of therapy that have helped me learn to manage and mitigate my anxiety. Developing and maintaining a broad arsenal of self-care activities has been a great way for me to feel empowered in my own life when it comes to dealing with my anxiety. Calling a friend, having a bath, taking a sick day, or going for a long walk are all ways that I take care of myself, and I will always tap into to these strategies when necessary. I just happen to be interested in seeing what happens if I take a break from them, and really just sit with myself.

I’m still prone to experiencing these waves of anxiety when I’m busy with school or work, but the sensation tends to feel bigger, more urgent, and more daunting when I’m not preoccupied. I feel anxious often, but it seems to affect me more when I’m alone without much going on.

This is one of the reasons that I decided to take these 6 weeks off. I have always been fascinated with understanding why I do weird shit and why I feel certain feelings. I love learning about the root causes of human behaviour. It helps me understand myself and feel more in control of my own life. I figured that this down time would probably trigger a lot of my anxiety, and instead of distracting myself or making myself busy to temporarily mitigate it, maybe I could actually try to understand it on a deeper level.

This down time offered me a strange form of freedom. I didn’t have a job or a project or a semester to complete. I didn’t have a team or a boss or a professor to be accountable to. I did have a partner, but he was currently overseas for an extended work trip. I had this rare opportunity to take the time to sit around with no distractions, face my anxiety head-on, and see what happened.

Lessons Learned in the Abyss

I have officially entered the abyss. At first, it was terrifying. The longer I spend in here however, the more I grow to like it. So far I’ve only been here for 12 days. I’m guessing that as I get deeper in, I’ll learn more, so I’ll keep this list updated as needed, but here’s what I’ve learned so far.

When I was growing up, I was a busy kid. I had piano lessons (and daily practice), basketball/soccer/volleyball practice (and regular games), church (usually at least twice a week), school (and it’s resulting homework), school plays, and chores. I grew up with two younger brothers, and my parents opted to skip cable television, so we had to find other ways to spend our free time. We would play video games and watch movies, build forts and play with legos. When I was by myself, I loved to read and to do crafts. As the oldest of three kids, I would sometimes read to my brothers or attempt to art direct their own creative endeavours.

Baths were one of the only activities I recall doing as a child that were a time that it was okay to do nothing. I remember loving bath time. I could relax, stare at the bubbles, and let my mind drift wherever it pleased. Sometimes I would lie down in the tub on my back so that my ears were submersed but my face was still above water. I would notice how different everything sounded under water, and let my hair float around my head like a mermaid.

To this day, I adore baths. Funnily enough, so do both of my brothers. When we all get together, our partners all love to tease us about how much time we spend bathing.

I think it’s really important to do nothing sometimes. Doing nothing helps my brain to relax and reset, and it creates space for me to be in tune with more subtle stuff that might be happening within my body or my mind. That said, I can be pretty terrible at doing nothing. Sometimes when I have a bath, I’ll still watch Netflix or mess around on my phone. I still don’t really know if I should be able to tolerate staring at a wall without any sort of stimulation. That might just be too extreme. But I do think it’s hard to do very little. To allow yourself to not be productive.

There has always been this unspoken rule in the circles that I exist in that our value comes from what we create, what we achieve, what we buy. Until very recently in my life, I defined my worth by these measures. Danielle was a grade on a project. Danielle was a number on a weigh scale. Danielle was a salary on a pay check. Danielle was a $500 pair of shoes. Without these outward achievements and things, I had no worth. This rule dictated a significant portion of how I spent my time and my money. If my value was defined by my actions, of course I wanted to keep myself busy!

It is only quite recently that I’m starting to believe that my value extends beyond what I do. I am a human being; not a human doing. I am worthy of love, respect, and safety simply because I exist. Those aren’t things that I, or anyone else should be required to earn. I am a person. People are worthy. I don’t need to be doing things in order to be valuable.

In the summer between grade 10 and 11, my family moved from a temporary posting in small town America back to a medium-sized Canadian city called Kingston. My father was in the Canadian army, and this was the seventh time I had moved since I was born.

For reasons that were completely unknown to me at that time, and are now far better understood (again, thanks to the wonders of therapy), I struggled to get out of bed every day for about a year. As a 16-year-old, I didn’t have the emotional intelligence or the vocabulary to understand that I was severely depressed. All I knew was that I dreaded being around people. I often spent lunch periods in the library pretending to do homework, but really just hiding from my peers. I hated idle time that wasn’t spent actively doing work in a classroom. Bus rides were awful. School assemblies were awful. Pep rallies made me want to die.

Eventually, I made friends with a few people and that made things a bit easier. It was still hard, but I powered through each day, and eventually was able to have a part-time job, get into several universities, and join the field hockey team at my school. I graduated high school with a 92% average, and entered into my 13-year-long phase of powering through.

Fast forward to today. As I mentioned, today’s my birthday. I tend to get emotional on birthdays, so I proactively scheduled a therapy session so I could have a dedicated time to deal with my feels.

Today was actually the first time I’ve gone into therapy without any idea of what I wanted to talk about. Usually, I will sit on the couch, start talking about the highs and lows that I encountered that week, and before I know it, 50 minutes will fly by and I’ll be on my way home. This time, I sat down, and told my therapist (let’s call her Mary) that I had no idea what to talk about. She gave me a few options of activities we could try in order to spark some sort of conversation. The first option involved playing with some toys and creating a scene to talk about. The second option involved looking at flashcards with random shapes on them. The third option was a short guided meditation. I went with option number three, and explained that it felt the most in-line what my whole deliberate down time situation.

Off we went. It started out like any standard meditation. Mary encouraged me to get comfortable, focus on my breathing, and observe any notable sensations I felt in my body. No problem.

Next, she suggested that I think of the most beautiful, comfortable, safe place I’ve ever been, and imagine myself being there right now. Easy. I knew just the place. I recently got back from a 10-day trip to a little slice of paradise called Mal Pais, Costa Rica. I went there with a friend to celebrate the completion of my design degree. I had actually visited Mal Pais by myself exactly 4 years prior, and it was a place that I immediately fell in love with. It was a natural oasis. The most beautiful beaches I’d ever seen. Sunsets so vivid they’d make you cry. Wonderful, friendly locals. The freshest seafood I’d ever had.

I imagined myself sitting on the beach, just on the edge of the water. I felt truly happy. I let the waves gently roll in and out over my feet and my legs.

Mary guided me to observe how I felt in this place, and to observe what was around me. I noted the beauty of the sunset, the peacefulness of the ocean. And then I realized something that immediately brought me to tears.

I was alone.

I was in my happiest, safest, most beautiful place. And I was enjoying it by myself.

I didn’t feel lonely. I didn’t feel idle.

I was doing nothing, existing by myself, and I was truly the most happy I had ever been.

This realization came over me like a tidal wave. I stayed in the meditation for a few more minutes. Mary guided me out of it, and we talked about what it was like.

I had known that entering this period of deliberate down time was going to be hard. I knew that I had a hard time sitting with myself, and just being. But what I realized in Mary’s office today is that I actually feel happiest, safest, and most peaceful when I am alone. Solitude is no longer something that I need to fear.

As a depressed, confused, traumatized 16-year-old girl, solitude really had been a terrifying thing. When I was 15, I was molested by my best friend’s father. Shortly after, I was uprooted and transplanted into a new city, and forced to start everything in my life over again. I barely had the energy to get up in the morning, let alone make new friends, adjust to a new curriculum, and apply to universities. Solitude at that time would have meant facing the feelings that the molestation had created. Those feelings were too scary for me to deal with at that time. So I did what so many traumatized people did. I pushed those feelings away. I pushed away the fear that every man in my life had the capacity to hurt me. I pushed away the sadness that someone didn’t care about my own needs. I pushed away the anger that an adult would take advantage of a vulnerable child. In doing so, I also pushed away my own humanity.

I don’t think it’s possible to selectively numb certain feelings. If you numb anger, fear, and sadness, you also end up numbing joy, excitement, and happiness. Numbing yourself makes it very easy to ignore your own needs. Numbing yourself actually works out quite well when you exist in a world that values you based on your infinite capacity to do, achieve, and purchase. I couldn’t feel my own crippling exhaustion, so I could keep powering through my life despite the fact that I was running on empty.

It wasn’t until a decade later that I finally felt safe enough in my own life to begin acknowledging and exploring what happened to me. I started, ever so slowly, to feel the sadness, the anger, the fear. I started being able to make connections. I realized that my eating disorder had been a way for me to protect and take control of my body after someone else had robbed that from me. I realized that drinking was a way that I tried to numb my fear of sitting with my own thoughts. I realized that because my first sexual experience had been so fucked up, that I kept subconsciously putting myself into other sexual situations that were also fucked up.

Ever so gradually, I started feeling those scary things that I had been avoiding for so long. This process enabled me to get to a place where I no longer needed to be afraid of sitting with my own thoughts. I had felt what I needed to feel. Those terrible things will always be a part of me, but feeling them allowed me to move on in my life.

One of the weird things about trauma is how it makes you feel like you need to keep protecting yourself, even once the threat is no longer real. Because of what happened to me when I was 15, I have been living my life terrified of solitude.

This period of deliberate down time has given me the space to realize that instead of fearing that solitude, being alone with myself is actually something that deep down in my subconscious, I cherish. I feel so profoundly grateful for this realization.

Towards the end of my therapy session, Mary told me that for my birthday she wanted to give me the gift of myself.

What a gift. To simply be.