I’m on holiday for the first time this year, and I can’t seem to relax. It’s the 27th of December, and I still feel like I can’t rest. In just a few days, this year will be done, but I can’t breathe.
I’m caught in an exhausting back-and-forth: wanting to spend my time wisely and do things I love, yet feeling like nothing I choose seems important enough.
How can I dare not to do something worthy with my time now that I finally have more of it?
My anxiety keeps me in a constant state of alarm. It makes me miss the present moment because I’m already bracing for the one after that, and the one after that.
I know this isn’t uncommon. Feeling guilty for resting is something many of us experience. But I can’t help feeling deeply saddened and angered by this phenomenon we’ve all accepted as normal.
Why can’t I just be? Why can’t I relax and savour this time without calculating how ‘soon’ it will end?
I’m not ready to return to work, to routine, to the relentless pace. Yet there’s a part of me insisting I should already be preparing for re-entry, that I need to naturally drift back into it all without fully claiming the rest I desperately need.
I longed for this time off for months. I counted down to it. Why, now that I’m here, can’t I settle into it and let it hold me?
Perhaps the cruelty is this: we’re taught that rest must be earned, that it’s only valid if we’ve sufficiently exhausted ourselves first. And even then, we’re expected to rest productively—to emerge transformed, rejuvenated, ready to produce again.
But what if rest isn’t meant to be strategic? What if it’s simply meant to be?
The work right now isn’t to relax better or rest harder. Maybe it’s to notice this resistance, to acknowledge how deeply we’ve internalised the lie that our worth is measured by our output.
I don’t have the answer to why I can’t settle. But naming the impossibility of it—the way even rest has become another thing to achieve—feels like the beginning of something.
And maybe that’s enough for today. To see it clearly. To feel the anger at what’s been stolen from us: the simple, unproductive joy of just being alive.
