All to often we bombard ourselves with a work load we can't fathom how to get through, forget past. We get stuck in a cycle that dictates that in order to be successful you need to work till you see the bones in your knuckles. It is however true that one needs to have work as the key ingredient in attaining the said success, but what happens when you are working yourself to a bent back, but results do not reciprocate the efforts?
"How do you keep up with your schedule?" are the words that are said to me at least twice a day.
At first I took pride in my work ethic, I relished in knowing that I had a stamina and drive that burnt each day. That I could wake up at the crack of dawn and get to working tirelessly till the midnight oil was burning, day after day. Until the fateful day.
It started with me getting up and as usual directing my energy to what was to be attained and completed for the day. A glance at my journal said that I had at least a dozen meetings to get through, followed by work from the said meetings and end the day with tackling the pending projects. Neither one of these things bothered me, except a pain in my lower back and a throbbing headache begging for rest. I would recite they famous life quote, 'if you want to live like a queen, you need to work like a slave'. I headed out about my business and as I was approaching the venue for my meeting I simply could not find the strength in my legs to carry me the 20m it was going to take me to get seated. I turned around, images blurred in front of me and hailed a cab with energy I neither know where I got from nor cared to think about. I headed home and went to bed, fully dressed and passed out. For the rest of the week I could not get up, I could not take food in and I couldn't seem to concentrate on anything for more then 5 minutes. I had my first mental break-down.
Exhaustion was something that was spoken about at home, and a lesson I purposely choose to ignore for I always thought I knew better. Wrong. I believed exhaustion was merely an excuse to not work and get the full potential you reserve out of yourself. Wrong. I believed that you needed to do twice as much as the average human to attain the things only you dared dream of. Wrong. No matter how much work ethic you posses, the one key ingredient that will always be needed is rest. Rest is the one essential key element that will ensure that you get done all that is required of you at maximum speed, and only helps your concentration. Yet, we deprive ourselves in the hope that this be false, and that the only way we can push forward toward our dreams is if we work till the images blurr in front of us.
I admire work ethic, I admire hard work and I sure as hell admire drive. The one thing I learnt in the time that I couldn't so much as move a muscle is that, you cannot afford to loose an entire week of work. Ironic right, considering that in the midst of having a mental break-down I was to be thinking about how I should be getting more rest and not about how much work I needed to get done. Now, in having realized how detrimental it can be to my career to have to rest it out, I also realized how fundamental it is to take a break and say that, now I rest.
If I am to be entirely honest, it is not that I believed I needed to work like a slave that drove me into exhaustion. I ran from myself and drove myself such that I didn't need to face my inner demons. What are those demons you may ask, the fear of failure. I was so afraid that if I took a minutes rest I would fall behind on my work and never regain the momentum. I was so afraid that procrastination would become my friend. I was terrified that maybe if I do not seize the opportunities granted to me right now I would miss out on my golden chance. Now, although these things are what could send me into a turmoil of fear, they too should be the very things that drive me and ensure that I have enough trust in myself to know that rest will not take away my ambition. Rest would not rid me of my momentum. That belief in self is what lacked, that I had to sit and drive myself into exhaustion at such a young age is scary. Yet, we find it in so many driven people. What genuinely gets to me is that people who have done those very things of working themselves past crazy hours will say those very things in their motivational speeches that they survived on three hours sleep. The human body needs an average of 6 hours sleep to function at full capacity. Do not be fooled into thinking that rest is not essential. You can only be superwoman if you can fly, and energy is needed to fly.
So fly on superwoman. Fly on.
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