for the sleepy girls (and everyone else)

Greta, the sleepiest girl in the world.

For the better part of the last week, I have been dealing with excruciating pain that comes and goes in waves in my left ear. The infection, for which I saw my primary care doctor and am currently on antibiotics, has left me exhausted, frustrated, and devoid of any and all motivation. As the end of the second day that I’ve taken off work draws nearer, I am faced with the prospect of returning to the classroom tomorrow and watching my slow, sleepy existence of these last two days flipped on its head and replaced with the chaos of a room full of high school students cycling in and out around me. I inevitably chide myself for not being productive enough on these sick days and regret not pushing myself to do more, make more, be more resilient.

These are not new thoughts. As someone who works full-time in one capacity and then works in varying amounts on my studio activities, this is a common refrain in my mind. While I sometimes find myself with time, I often find it hard to use that time. It is an ongoing process for me to stop correlating rest with laziness. In a culture that nearly screams at us from every available platform to work, buy, consume, and be more, it can feel like self-sabotage to take a nap after work instead of steam-rolling ahead with my latest creative ideas. Creativity in some ways, feels like a luxury and if I don’t have the energy to do the creative work, how can I move forward? 

When I get lost in these self-doubt spirals, I try to look at the bigger picture. There is no timeline for a creative life. Doing more may speed up that timeline, or it may just result in one spinning their wheels. Is it worthwhile to make more art if that art reflects a life of tiredness? Can that hollow emptiness of exhaustion be felt in the final piece? Would it not be better to listen to one’s body and pause for a bit before striding ahead? It feels like a privilege to be asking these questions and I don’t know the answers, but I do know that I never want to resent my relationship to artmaking.

I have no concluding thoughts; I’m more interested in taking a nap right now than puzzling through this at a greater depth. I may always wrestle with these feelings of inadequacies or I may just be a sleepy girl who needs to go at a different pace.