What Vacation?

After two days of being off from work, I was bored. After six, I was still bored but suddenly didn't want to go back, even though I was worried about catching up. When I unlocked my office on Thursday morning, it was though I'd never left. Six days suddenly felt like a few hours had passed. I knew my voice mail and e-mail would say otherwise.

I had forgotten a few things. Though I'd been off for six days, I'd only missed two days of work. There was a weekend and pair of company holidays in the middle of my vacation. And because it was the holidays, I wasn't the only person who was away. I had no phone messages. I found one layout marked up with revisions that had been slid under my door, but the woman who left it was out until 2008. I had some other projects that were due to her, but the person covering her would be out Friday and there was no way I'd get it all done in one day. Even though my vacation flew, I didn't face the amount of stress I was expecting.

As the day wore on, my biggest hurdle was when technical support logged in remotely to add a font I'd requested on my machine, and subsequently closed a file WITHOUT SAVING even as I was starting to scream “WAIT!” into the phone. A half hour's worth of work was gone, and I suddenly missed the support staff at my old company which, for all the problems that led to the layoffs earlier this year, had once been the pinnacle of technology.

The smaller hurdles involved the reduced staff, and I hit a lot of dead ends. I also got a lot of work done, and because some things had to wait until next week, I was unusually at ease. For years I've been doing the same work that countless other people in my field do, but I think I've been putting a lot more unnecessary pressure on myself. I was the same way in my early school years, lying awake at night worrying that I'd forgotten some part of my homework or would fail a test the next day. At some point you just need to let stuff go, and know that sooner or later it all falls into place. My challenge is recognizing that the world won't end if I miss a deadline. I keep figuring this out and forgetting it.

Mentally, I fast-forwarded my long weekend to put out fires that turned out to be small embers. When I learn to chill, embers will be sparks. Meanwhile, the two days I'm working this week and (hopefully) short day I'm working on Monday are an anomaly. It feels like I never left work, but in a way it feels like I'm not fully back yet, because so many people are off. I think next Wednesday is when the real blaze will begin, and in thinking that I'm probably conjuring it into existence. What's wrong with me? Maybe I need to stop weighing whether I deserve vacation time and instead consider when I need to pause and recharge.