Alright, true confessions time: I AM THE WORST AT RELAXING.

The last day of school was a week and a half ago.  In that time, I have managed to finish my grades, plan my whole next year’s curriculum for poetry and vocabulary, begin a gluten-free diet, and otherwise I’ve been sleeping for 12 hours a day.  Seriously, it’s amazing how refreshed you can look when you’re asleep more than you’re awake.

Honestly, I’m having trouble slowing down, like if I stop for too long I’m going to go flying apart.

For weeks I was dying for summer break to start.  Lessons became teeth-pulling agony as the kids became more and more wild.  I was so tired as the final weeks were passing.  I could feel my body stop working, piece by piece.  Simple things like laundry and grocery shopping slipped through the cracks.  And I kept telling myself that it was all going to be okay if I just made it to the second week of June.

And now what I had been looking forward to so much is finally here, and I don’t have any idea how to stop.  I’m terrified that if I stop I’m going to lose all my momentum and then August is going to be on top of me and there I’ll be with nothing done and then next school year will be another year of endless trying to catch-up.  I keep trying to tell myself that it isn’t really going to be that way, that if I don’t put in 8 planning hours a day then the world isn’t going to completely fall apart.  I know that I have many weeks before the next school year starts.  I know that I did my job fairly well this year, and that I will do it even better next year, even if I don’t have it perfectly planned out before day one.

Stopping involves looking at what might be missing from my life.  Faced with more hours than I know what to do with and not enough hobbies to occupy my mind I have a tendency to crash and burn like a pro.  I crawl into the place where all my choices seem like mistakes, where finding the energy to shower seems impossible, where loneliness turns into (seeming) isolation, and before I know it I can’t remember the last time I talked to another human being.

I’m so worried about turning into a total shit-show that I’m running myself raged as if I have to go back to work next week.

The whole thing is going something like this:

I know from experience that even if I start to fall apart, I will be put back together.  I also know from experience that lesson planning comes together in the end somehow.  I know that once I’ve gone through whatever I’m going to go through with all this time on my hands I’ll see how irrational and overreact-y I’m being.  I’m working on using my confidence about the future to reduce my anxiety about the present.

And so, in the spirit of taking a break as a normal person, I’m well into Season 3 of The Glades.  Thanks be for Netflix.

(I Year, 8 Months, 30 Days Sober)