Bottoms up

Since I started working 14 years ago, the longest break I ever had from work was 3 weeks when I moved to The Netherlands. Not even when I was left unemployed in Portugal at the height of the financial crisis of 2008 did I get a break between jobs.

So...how the fuck do you stop, when you don't really remember how anymore? 

For the first week it was just hard to stop a splurge of feeling and thoughts running through my head at the speed of light. Was this my fault? What will people say and think? What the fuck am I doing? And it went on and on and on. Then I kept telling myself that the company I work for has over 3000 employees worldwide and that no one is irreplaceable. 

The second week was about accepting. Shit got real. I understood that whatever "this" was, it was really happening and it wasn't going to be fixed by chilling off work for two weeks. I started reading more on the topic but soon became overwhelmed with information (do you see a pattern here?). Self help books, online articles and sharing with a very close friend who went through a very similar situation recently. The third week looked promising. 

Spoiler alert: it wasn't. It was terrible. I started thinking about what the fuck do I want to do with my life and questioning almost every decision I had ever made, thinking which one had landed me in the shithole. And then I froze - again. I couldn't do anything, I didn't want to go out and be with people and spent most of the days in bed or lying on the sofa half asleep. 

Four weeks in and today I feel a lot better. I stopped thinking about "what if?" and "what's next?" to focus on the now. I started from the beginning with meditation, I got on my bike and pushed myself (by being a dipshit with no sense of direction) to cycle until I could barely walk or sit for that matter and am trying to make it to 11 days straight of meditation and exercise - apparently that's how long it takes to create a new habit. I have also been spending more time outside, playing or just talking with my little one and stopped looking at my phone so much. I continue to read and the book of the week is the best seller and most adequate book for me (and my potty mouth) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. It does exactly what it says in the tin - fucking read it!