Slowing Down When Everything Tells You To Speed Up

Photo Credit: Dylan Spitz

On Friday mornings over the last few months we get a half a dozen doughnuts for breakfast. Through the thick of quarantine the gas station Dunkin’ and our local Duane Reade become our most frequented hangout spots.

I learned to like coffee thanks to Dunkin’. I learned to take Friday mornings easy because of Dunkin’ too. These easy Friday mornings piqued my curiousity and I started asking questions like, why am I only living my Fridays at this pace?

Why have I been racing myself every day of the week?

There are actual, specific reasons I can list out as to why I’ve felt the need to constantly run or outrun who I was yesterday. Some have to do with the culture New York City promotes. The saying goes that “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” — if you read between the lines, this statement is only true because New York forces you to exist on so little that you learn it doesn’t take much for survival to look like thriving. Particularly when compared to everyone else’s experience of New York.

I grew up in a different New York than I live in right now. My New York is Uptown New York, a neighborhood with neighbors who knew me as a toddler and saw me ride my bike up and down the street in the middle of summer while music played out of car stereos. They knew my mom’s little white car that we would drive to pick up Avon boxes every few weeks.

Life in that New York was slower. People didn’t care where they were going as much as they cared that they didn’t get evicted from the place they called home.

I live Downtown now and it stands for more than my zipcode. It’s made it undeniable how much my life is centered on a work life that is unsustainable.

Since the beginning of my career, I’ve spent every day working towards something. For the first time in my life I’m actually in the thick of that something and I can’t lie, on most days I’m too tired to enjoy it.

I didn’t achieve a major goal or have a big win, it’s more a feeling. I feel settled in my career, but simultaneously out of sorts with who is seemingly setting the pace for it. I thought it was me. I’ve taken on clients, writing projects, partnerships, that made sense for me. I’ve enjoyed every second of them, but how attached I am to my work also gives me anxiety and that isn’t okay.

It’s going to sound silly, but what brought this train of thought to life in my head was my computer breaking. My MacBook’s screen went dark a few weeks ago and it sent me into a spiral. It made me challenge my attachment to the device and why I was mourning it like a friend loss.

Last week when I finally stopped using my boyfriend’s computer as an interim solution and took my Macbook to get fixed, the Apple genius told me it would be close to 3 weeks to get my laptop back. Since beyond my feelings about work-life balance, I still need to work, I walked out with an iPad.

Freedom in the age of the multi-hyphenated and too many tabs is being able to only do one thing at a time. This iPad was my subtle reminder that we were only ever supposed to do one thing at a time.

I don’t want to go back to what I knew — my old New York or my new one — but I also don’t want to keep building my life at a pace that I don’t actively feel I’m setting.

Over the next month, I’m going to use my iPad as my main workhorse. I’ll still have to turn to my laptop for spreadsheets or other things, so it’s not a complete cold turkey decision. Except, I do feel different already at the end of week 1.

I told my friend this week,

“Turns out it’s easier to feel fulfilled when your expectations are a realistic size instead of an ocean to fill.”

I’ve been trying to fill an ocean per day every day of my career. I thought I would miss it more than I do now that I’m simply trying to fill a glass of water to fill myself.