The Need to Unplug

It takes an average person 14 minutes to fall asleep, according to a sleep app I just downloaded. To me, that sounds … like a dream, honestly. When my head smacks the pillow at night, the first thing it wants to do is make sure my emails are all caught up; that no one’s sent me anything while I cooked dinner and showered that I might as well get started on.

It’ll all come crashing down on you in the morning, otherwise, my apocalyptic head sings to me in a 1950s-housewife lilt, and each time I actually believe it. So there I’ll find myself, furiously refreshing my accounts and making sure I can get that last little pinch of work in before I lay there for another 15 minutes and decide to check my emails again.

[quote]My best friends are my tablet, Pandora, and Xanax. My worst enemies are quiet evenings, errands that should be fun (like shopping), and an empty Xanax bottle.[/quote]

It’s always been a problem with me. “The early-bird gets the worm,” I told myself as a child, waking at 4am to dress myself for school. It didn’t take long — my outfit was already neatly stacked on my dresser so that I’d basically only need to pop out of bed and walk into them. I’d sit there going over my homework to make sure I nailed every question to the fullest of their extents while cartoons played in the background. I’d get fresh paper and redesign the layout of my responses if I’d sullied the page with too many obvious erasures. Hell, if the corners of the pages were wrinkled, I’d obsess that the teacher would find my presentation sloppy and wonder if I keep my room the same way. Never!

Fast-forward to 2015. Now, between making myself accessible to coworkers and clients for 18–20 hours a day and being unwaveringly consumed by the terror of being inept at work, I spend my free time parting my hair in search of the random grays that are starting to pop up.

My best friends are my tablet, Pandora, and Xanax. My worst enemies are quiet evenings, errands that should be fun (like shopping), and an empty Xanax bottle. Needless to say, I’ve given my body and mind over to the machine, and I’m grinding on this hamster wheel like it’s gonna take me somewhere.

Yes. I’ve tried therapy. “You’re living in tomorrow,” a therapist once told me. (She was hot, but geez did she talk too slow. Speed it up, honey!) “When you live in today, you’ll see a change in the way you look at your life, and you’ll be able to appreciate more of it.” (Sure, yeah, can I go now?)

But I took some advice from an old boss. He told me, “Cara. Slow down. Maybe unplug at 5 o’clock. Go off the radar, sort your life out.” He said I gave him anxiety. So I did. Once I walked out of the office, I turned my tablet off, silenced my phone, and went AWOL. It was … strange. Unsettling, at first, but then I grew to like watching Jeopardy! and feeding my fish. I actually sat on the porch with Sleepytime tea and metaphorically kissed the moon as it made its way to our part of the world. I could actually see the value in this after a week and then:

“Why aren’t you answering your phone? We have an angry client who says you’re AWOL.” My boss. Aaaaand we’re back! This is our American life, my friends.