I remember sitting in my room on what was supposed to be a family vacation, staring at the same paragraph for so long that I began to resent individual words. Outside, my family was doing vacation things. There was laughter somewhere in the distance. Somebody had made it to the beach. I vaguely remember hearing a debate about whether we should go to dinner that night or cook. Meanwhile, I was locked in a tense standoff with Chapter Four of my dissertation. To be fair, Chapter Four was not fighting back. That didn’t stop me from acting as if the future of higher education hinged on my ability to improve a transition sentence.
Every so often someone would stick their head in the room to see if I was coming outside. My answer was consistent, “Just give me a few minutes.” If you’ve ever known a doctoral student, you already know that “a few minutes” bears no relationship whatsoever to actual time. An hour later I was still there. The beach was inviting, the weather was beautiful, and every body else was having a good time. And in the face of all that, I was in my room acting like peace, happiness, and personal fulfillment were all waiting on the other side of a successfully revised chapter.
Looking back, that’s what strikes me most. The certainty. The absolute conviction that I would finally exhale once I finished whatever was sitting in front of me. At the time, this seemed perfectly reasonable. But I was lying to myself.
There was always something important that needed my attention. A degree. A promotion. A child who needed me. A deadline. A family responsibility. A problem that required solving. Life kept presenting me with things that mattered, and I kept saying yes to them.
The strange thing is that I wasn’t chasing accomplishments for the sake of accomplishment, I was chasing relief. I was convinced there was a version of my life waiting for me where everything would finally settle down. In my head, I imagined that the to-do list would stop reproducing overnight, people would stop needing me, and I would have the time to sit still without mentally rearranging the next six months of my life.
I never found that version.
What I found instead was that every finish line seemed to have a finish line of its own. The degree led to the next responsibility. The promotion introduced a new set of expectations. The thing I thought would create breathing room somehow arrived carrying its own luggage. And because I was good at handling things, life responded by handing me more things. That seems rude, but it does appear to be how this works.
Looking back, what I remember most isn’t the exhaustion. Although don’t get me wrong, I was TIRED! What stands out to me is that I normalized it. There were times when I looked at my reflection with travel bags under my eyes and said, “This seems like an unreasonable amount for one person to carry.” I had become so accustomed to being capable that I lost track of joy. Then I opened my laptop and kept going. I had become so accustomed to being capable that I lost track of joy. Or maybe I noticed its absence and assumed that was what adulthood felt like. To be clear, that was not the most reliable conclusion I’ve ever reached. What nobody told me was that achievement and joy are not the same thing.
One can make a very impressive appearance without the other. For years, I treated joy like a reward that would be distributed upon completion of all assigned tasks. Unfortunately, the assigned tasks never seemed to end. And somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that joy wasn’t waiting at the finish line. It had been knocking on the door of that vacation house all along asking if I was coming to the beach. Before I assumed I had time to answer that call. These days I recognize the pattern, I don’t always get it right but I tune into joy way more.
