After my regrettable COVID diagnosis earlier this week, I decided on the spur of the moment to re-engineer my week's travel plans. I had originally intended to fly home yesterday. But, as the day approached, and I still felt awful, I decided I should spare myself that experience (and the world my germs). I therefore rearranged my flight reservation so that I'd fly home a week later.
This meant I suddenly had an extra week to myself at my family's place in Wyoming. I genuinely believed—as I say—that I would need this time to recuperate. But I won't deny that I was also sort of looking forward to it. I would suddenly have far more space to myself than I usually have at home. And, by coincidence, I had something in my schedule I had not had in year: a genuinely free week.
My usual supervisor on my freelance contract was on break this week, and he said I could take the time off as well. Classes were not scheduled to start back up for another week. My flight had been successfully rescheduled. There were suddenly no obstacles in my way. There was nothing to fret over. There were no needs of others clamoring for my attention... And now I have no idea what to do with myself.
I wrote in an earlier post about a passage from Charles Bukowski's 1971 novel Post Office. Bukowski's alter ego, throughout the book, loathes his time as a federal employee. He looks forward as to a deliverance to the day he can finally quit. Yet, when that day comes, he immediately collapses into a dark depression. He calls this experience "the bends." And it is only writing the book itself that pulls him out of it.
I realized all over again this week just how apt Bukowski's analogy is. Sudden freedom from work is indeed like surfacing too rapidly from a deep-sea dive. The pressure of demands on my time and the needs of others has suddenly been lifted. I'm completely alone and free! And yet, my body is still producing all of the same countervailing internal pressure it was before, under pressurized conditions.
And so, I've been wandering about all morning with a strange anxiety. I feel I ought to be doing something, but what? Why is there no one who immediately needs my attention? Why is there no deadline suddenly staring me down that will help me to organize my day? I can read books and write blogs, per usual—but each book is read too quickly and uninterruptedly now for it to feel natural!
The human animal longs for escape from the chains of obligation—and yet, like an inmate released after decades inside, it soon blinks uncomfortably in the open air and longs to retreat to the prison it knows. D.H. Lawrence wrote of work as a prison—yet, in the same poem, he recognized that the person exempt from work is never truly free of its chains: he is more like a man on supervised release.
"Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison/ in terror lest you have to go in," Lawrence wrote. That is me this week. There seems something decidedly wrong about this unaccustomed freedom. I cast nervous glances about me. There must be some obligation I'm forgetting. It is lying in wait for me, and I just haven't noticed it is there. It may spring on me at any moment.
But no. The "bends" framework helps explain what is happening. It is not truly that there is anything I need to be doing right now that I'm not. All that has truly happened is that my internal pressure has yet to adjust to the absence of external pressure. It is still sending out the same level of countervailing anxiety, despite the lack of any external cause pressing down on it. The result is imbalance.
And so, all that is needed to recover is time. I just need to spend a few more hours in the depressurization chamber. And, eventually, my internal pressure will regulate to keep in proportion to my newfound lack of external pressure.
The moment can't come soon enough. But then, of course—when it does—it will be only a matter of days before the external pressure is back in full force again.
And then it will be back into Lawrence's "work-prison" I go.
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