When do you switch off?
An ode to leaving behind patriarchy and pursuing a creatively fulfilling life.
Someone asked me this week, "You are doing so much creatively — when do you switch off?"
I giggled to myself.
There's an assumption tucked inside that question, one I understand because I used to carry it myself. It goes something like this: a full life is a draining life, and creative output is a withdrawal from some finite account, so eventually you have to stop everything and lie face-down somewhere to refill it. Rest, in this model, is a separate room you retreat to. A door you close on your life in order to survive your life.
That's not how it works in my world anymore. It’s not how it’s worked for me for a long time — ever since just before my first Saturn return, in fact, when I left my full time career locuming around hospitals in Australia with just 1k in my bank account to commit full time to doing what I love.
Someone who isn't following their creative inspirations has to schedule recovery, has to carve out "time off" like a surgical intervention, because the rest of their days are spent leaking energy into places that don't feed them. Of course I have periods of recovery too. But mine aren't scheduled interruptions to my life — they're woven through the fabric of it.
Every morning starts with tea ceremony and meditation. I receive bodywork weekly, hands on my body reminding it that it's allowed to soften. I walk daily in nature, no agenda, just my body moving and trees and whatever the sky is doing. These aren't wellness boxes I tick before getting to the "real" work. They *are* part of how the work happens.
And here's the part that surprises people most: following all of my creative threads is itself deeply relaxing. When I let a thread run — when I actually follow the pull of a project, a piece of writing, a line of research that's alive in me — it stops pacing behind the door of my attention. It stops knocking. A neglected creative impulse doesn't go quiet just because you're ignoring it. It gets louder. It shows up at 2am. It sits on your chest during the meditation you're using to avoid it. The idea that discipline means suppressing your instincts until designated "off" hours is, in my experience, exactly backwards — it's what keeps people wired and depleted at once.
My creativity is fed. Which means my breaks are actual breaks — not escape doors from a life I'm quietly fleeing. There's a real difference between resting *from* something and resting *within* something. One is relief. The other is rhythm.
And I don't think (or want this to be) a superior-person parable. Sometimes I do need the escape door too — the collapse, the nothing-day, the full unplug when the field gets too loud even for someone whose life is built this way. That's allowed. It doesn't undo any of the above. It's just the other instrument in the same orchestra: structural rest for the ordinary days, and permission to fall apart a little when the extraordinary ones ask for it.
What I've stopped doing is treating rest as evidence that the rest of my life is unsustainable. It isn't a rescue mission. It's just Tuesday.
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