Writing

Vacation

Vacations are permissions from our overlords to be human for a little while. You earn your vacation days by working, and then you can do whatever you want. That, for most people, means traveling somewhere. I can understand intellectually the concept of vacation, of course, but maybe because all my vacations when I was growing up were always lined with school vacations, because my parents were both teachers, and we almost never traveled anywhere besides my parent's hometown, the concept that I have to accumulate vacation days to travel somewhere is kinda weird.

Another thing that is a little off is how I hate structure, but I fundamentally need it to survive. I look with dread to calendars and appointments, but they make me feel comfortable at the same time. Structure, be spatial or physical, gives me a boundary that I can rage against. The day-in day-out routine is crushing, but the moment I'm lifted from it, with, let's say, a vacation, things go tits up. Combine this with the worst personal planning skills of the planet, everything involving traveling having to be planned long before, and prices only go up as you delay to do anything related to traveling, and you have a reasonable picture of why I may say that I'm not very found of vacations.

So I decided to make a plan for my vacation this time. First, I got, well, "lucky" is not the right word, but maybe more "careful with what you wish for", as for several reasons I can't travel. So 80% of my vacation anxiety is gone. Then comes the time void of a person that lives in a small town with a lot of time in his hands, that is terminally tired but does not know how to just rest, and wants to do tons of things that either take a lot of money or preparation, and I'm short in both. And after that, someone that feels that the world is spinning too fast, so I need to ground myself again with the job and the rest. And finally, this will be broken down into chunks, as I still have responsibilities on some days of the week that I cannot avoid and I love having. So my plan is simple: I'll try to do the same things that I think I want to do and that I think I need to do every day.

I will:

1. Do 30 minutes of exercise minimum. Anything goes, from walking to stretching, I don't care, just need to exercise.
2. Read at least one hour on a technical topic. Preferrably a book or a solid source, no random blogs.
3. Do something related to the reading I just did for between one and two hours. It could be writing, it could be coding, or something else.
4. Organize for one hour. That means organizing the house, folders in my computer, photos. Or a trip, or a plan.
5. The rest of the day, do fucking nothing, with zero guilt.

Yeah, yeah, I can hear you from over the internet saying that vacation is supposed to rest, or that I'm controlling, go live your live a little. Go do something fun! Yeah. Now go read the text above again, and try to think what fun it would be to spend my hard-earned vacation running around like a headless chicken, thinking that I should have been doing something incredible fun and expontaneos and whatever, while the reality would be being worried and doomscrolling.

So I did, day one. I worked on my rent manager application. I walked to the pharmacy. I took two walks with my dog. I had lunch and coffee with a friend. I cooked at night something that I didn't like. And now I'm writing, for the first time in almost a year. I feel good. I think it's working? Weird.