It’s no secret that we live in a busy world. We’re bombarded with subliminal messaging that makes us feel like we need to be constantly doing, super productive and that ‘busyness’ is a badge to wear with honour. So what happens when your health takes you outside of the rat race and forces you to rest? After 18 months of being a ‘professional patient’, rest was fast becoming my middle name. But now as I start rebuilding my life, doing nothing is not something I plan on giving up…
So often we think of self-care as optional, until suddenly our bodies are screaming at us to stop and look after ourselves. I was one of those people. Always striving to do more, do better. The idea of resting seemed wasteful and self-indulgent. I’d grown up often being questioned in detail about what I was doing because simply sitting and chilling out wasn’t something my family could understand even though I knew it was an important component to incubating my creative ideas. I soon learnt the way around it was to look like I was doing something—reading, writing, researching, anything that made it seem like it had my full attention and wasn’t just ‘lazing around’ watching TV or staring at the ceiling thinking.
Things got worse when I left university to become a freelancer, something none of my family had ever experienced having always gone ‘out’ to work with physically active jobs. Suddenly there I was, sitting at my desk doing not only design work but juggling all aspects of running a business including admin, customer service, marketing and more. From the outside, it looked like I spent every waking hour at the desk and had nothing to show for it. Sometimes that didn’t feel far from the truth.
Learning To Rest
‘If you do not make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness.’
Fast forward to early 2023. My body had been screaming at me to stop for years at this point. Every summer I was becoming burnt out, exhausted and I didn’t know it at the time but my now-diagnosed endometriosis symptoms were making me lose at least a week of the month feeling completely drained. And yet I still kept pushing myself… until I couldn’t anymore.
An unexpected miscarriage in May 2023 was the first time I acknowledged to myself that all was not well with me. I paused temporarily, feeling all the emotions and dealing with the physical aspects of my recovery before deciding enough was enough and tried to pick myself up and carry on which is when my body said NO.
I remember waking up at 4:30 AM on the 13th of August 2023, a Sunday morning, in the most excruciating abdominal pain. My pain tolerance is high but this was easily an 11/10 pain level. So bad I couldn’t even speak to wake my husband and tell him something was seriously wrong. By 8:30 I’d crawled downstairs and was curled in the fetal position on the sofa waiting for the out-of-hours GP to call me back. I don’t know how I got to the appointment but I was sent home with over-the-counter co-codamol and told to speak to my own doctor first thing Monday morning because I didn’t look ‘ill enough’ for hospital admission.
By Monday afternoon I was sitting in A&E having all manner of tests and scans and the following day I was given a diagnosis: a suspected self-resolved ovarian torsion. It was impressed upon me the seriousness of this and that I needed to rest a lot. At this point I needed no convincing, I felt horrendous and in no shape to do anything.
After another month of horrific pain and more scans, the consensus was that I needed a gynaecology referral for suspected endometriosis. It was the first time I’d even heard the word. Thus began my period of extended convalescence.
The Challenges Of Being A Long-Term Patient
Resting felt easy at first because I was in too much pain and felt too exhausted to do much else. However over time, through trial and error of dealing with my symptoms, I started to feel a tiny bit better. At which point, the guilt came in about me sitting around doing ‘nothing’. It’s something I grappled with for a long time, continually trying to pick myself up, forcing myself to try and think up new ideas, market my business, and show up for work. And yet, I could barely concentrate on following a TV show, let alone work.
I spent a lot of time napping, staring at the ceiling and crying in the frustration of it all. My world became incredibly small almost overnight and there was little hope on the horizon of it changing while I was still in the throes of my flaring endometriosis and journey to diagnosis. For months I battled with my body, trying to get it to do something, anything. My life felt like it was on hold, I didn’t even know if any of my hopes and dreams were vaguely possible anymore. I was a shell of my former self, simply existing, just about surviving and all the while feeling incredibly guilty and frustrated by it. I was incredibly hard on myself.
The day I finally accepted that I couldn’t keep pushing myself, was the day I had to cancel a special afternoon tea that had been booked months prior with my mum and godmother. I was bitterly disappointed but knew I needed to take better care of myself so I went gentle on myself… for a while.
Fighting To Get Back On Track And A Hard Stop
It got harder to rest as time went by and I started to feel more well. Until everything unravelled once again in 2024. In June I had another miscarriage and it hit me hard but before I even had time to process the grief, I received a phone call from the hospital with a date for my diagnostic laparoscopy. Weeks later in mid-July, I had surgery coming home with a formal diagnosis of endometriosis and a recommendation from my consultant to ask for a fertility referral as my next step (i.e. focus on having children first, then treat my endometriosis later).
Following my recovery this gave me something to focus on, following up with appointments, test results and filling in forms. I scheduled a series of weekly workshops and finally started to feel ‘useful’ and ‘productive’ again. I thought I could finally get my life back on track and I grabbed that possibility with both hands. That is until my third miscarriage in October 2024. I’d held out so much hope that my surgery and the treatment I’d received would create a different outcome so when it didn’t I was devastated.
I tried to bury my grief. Limping along with my workshops and focusing on my physical recovery. Despite randomly bursting into tears, not sleeping and feeling constantly exhausted, I truly believed I was managing and that I would be okay until I found myself zoning out in the middle of a workshop, struggling to keep concentration and find the words. Finally, I admitted to myself that I was truly not okay. I handed over all my workshops to my business partner and gave myself over to grief. November was mostly a blur, and I wasn’t sure if I ever would feel like myself or feel happy for that matter, ever again.
Why I’m Not Ready To Give Up Doing Nothing
Fortunately, things did get better, slowly but surely. We began investigations into my recurrent miscarriages which gave me hope. I started receiving counselling from a local charity specialising in pregnancy loss. I turned inwards. I rested. I focused on tiny glimmers of joy. I rewatched comforting films and had big cries to sad songs. I asked the universe for help, over and over. I focused on simply breathing. I gave myself permission to do absolutely nothing with no expiry date and it was healing.
I’m now mentally in a much better place. I feel hopeful, I’ve found new ways to cope with my emotions when my previous tools weren’t working. I’ve gained so much clarity on what is and isn’t important to me and the story I want to write for the rest of my life. In stopping completely, drawing myself inwards from the world and cutting out all the noise, burdens and obligations of life I’ve found that so much of it is simply that; unnecessary noise. I have no desire to pick up some of those obligations and burdens now I’m feeling better and honestly, that’s okay!
The best part is the space it’s created in my life. I’ve given myself time in my day to feel into how I might want to spend it. I haven’t recommitted to workshops and my business partner is continuing to pick up my slack without resentment while I work out who and what I’ve become in the aftermath. I’ve created space in my life to really listen to my body and what it needs and it turns out it’s got a heck of a lot to say.
‘Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing… If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.’
Because the truth is, inside of the nothing is actually a whole lot of something. It is much easier to keep ourselves mentally, physically and emotionally busy rather than sit with our inner quiet and truly listen to what our body, heart, mind and soul have to say. Doing nothing can actually lead to so many unexpected breakthroughs.
In the past month, I’ve ditched all social media and resumed blogging. I’ve resumed working on my fiction series. I’ve begun exercising regularly and am looking at making healthy changes to my diet. I’m working on decluttering ahead of putting our house up for sale. I’m online window shopping for my new wardrobe to go with my healthier body. I’m spending more time with the people who matter to me and allowing myself to have more fun. I’m having creative ideas again! All of these things feel like the tip of the iceberg. I’ve started a process now of deep change in all aspects of my life and at the heart of it, the one thing I truly want to keep is my doing of nothing. Chilling out, having a nap if I feel like it, staring at the ceiling incubating a new idea, going for a walk and just listening to the world as I do it.
Doing nothing has become an art form for me and I’m loving it. What might happen if you tried the same and ‘unbusied’ yourself?
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