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On being called lazy

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When I was five my Primary Two teacher, Miss Black, wrote on my end of term report card that I was 'prone to laziness'.

_{My Dad immediately went into battle about it, arranged a meeting with the head teacher and a weeping Miss Black* who was made to recant. I can't remember the details of the incident - I was too young - but it passed into family legend and I'm sure that there would have been a great fuss at the time.}

_{What I do remember though is the absolute knowledge that being lazy was the worst thing I could be, and the importance of never ever being seen to be idle. So, from then on I was always doing something - even when that 'doing' was pretty ill thought out or dull - a comfort blanket of busyness.}

<sub>I think it's probably unusual to be able to pinpoint the beginning of a busy habit so neatly, but I suspect that it is something that many of us acquire in childhood. It starts with making sure we are always doing something with our time - having a book or a ball or whatever approved activity is suitable - rather than simply being happily unproductive.

By the time I was a teenager I was used to layering things up - I could say I became an excellent multitasker but for the fact that layering things often took me way longer, and was less effective, than doing them separately would have been. I cleaned my teeth while curling my hair into lopsided ringlets, I would read a book while chopping vegetables and forget everything in it, I would put eye liner on while ironing my outfit and burn a hole in my blouse.

None of this was due to lack of time - it was so inefficient that it used more time - but rather it was connected to a fear of being judged to be idle. A fear of being thought lazy. A feeling that I justified my existence by all this busyness.</sub>

_{I became addicted to that rush of doing things - the not quite having enough time, the slight panic, the flutter, the piling on. Often I would massively over schedule my days - adding a physical rush and stumble into the mix.}

_{Now, when I find myself slipping back into the pattern I feel it in my body - high in my chest, at the bottom of my throat - a flapping. Like a panicked pigeon,}

_{It was a miscarriage that brought me to my senses. Or more accurately a few miscarriages.}

<sub>Between my daughters I had three miscarriages. I took no time off to grieve or to care for myself at all for the first two. In a way that now makes me tearful when I think of it, I treated myself appallingly, adding in more and more stuff to spin, desperately trying to be whatever the opposite of lazy is, perhaps trying to bring myself better luck, become more deserving.

Then - a few days after miscarriage number three - I collapsed into crying and couldn't stop. I was persuaded to go and see my GP. He was a lovely quiet, still man. He listened to me with my plans for putting things right, he looked through my records. He signed me off work for six weeks and advised me to spend those weeks doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.

He suggested I go for walks, eat cake, maybe watch a morning movie - whatever I thought of as being idle, to become completely unproductive. And then he gave me an appointment in a week to go back and tell him how little I had done.</sub>

_{I often think of this - how it took someone 'in authority', with their ridiculous suggestion, to overturn habits embedded in me by someone 'in authority' thirty years before. I'm not sure I like that idea at all but it is true.}

_{I'm not saying that the month of idleness (I didn't manage the six weeks!) cured me of my fear of laziness - but it did give me a touch point for how life feels if you don't over crowd it. It means that now, when fear or worry makes me start to hoard up things to do, I know what it feels like and I can stop.}

_{I also now know the difference between being actually busy - for life can be incredibly busy with real things that need to be done and to pretend it isn't is just foolish - and my manufacturing of busyness as a way of avoiding things or living up to some ideal.}

<sub>I'm not prescribing six weeks of idleness - but if you think this sounds like you, I would suggest seeing what happens if you take an hour or two. A blank hour without anything productive to do and without a phone to scroll. Not as a productivity exercise, not as a meditation, not as a way to finish reading that book. Not with any aims at all.

Just a gap in your week. A chance to unwind into boredom and feel what it is like. A chance to see if some of the flapping throat of busy is actually a fear of being lazy.</sub>

_{I would love to hear about your experiences with fear of being thought lazy (it is a massive thing for most people I know with chronic illnesses, especially invisible illnesses) along with suggestions for adding a little idleness into life. Please leave a comment.}

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