The Guilt Free Life

The other day I chose to miss work.  I have weeks and weeks of unused vacation time, so it wasn’t like I was playing hooky exactly…but I wasn’t sick and I should have been at work.  But it was a Thursday, mid-week when sales lag and the workload is lighter, and I was so burnt out that I couldn’t fathom another day in my cubicle.  So I sent my required message to my boss, and I stayed home.

That day I organized my home office, poured the grains I’d had in bags into the clear plastic containers that had looked so appealing on the shelf at Storables;  I matched up the lone socks in the laundry room, determined how much I lost in the stock market last year; and wrote out to-do lists for my many projects.  In essence, I regained my sanity.

I felt revived, renewed and relieved that the mayhem among which I was living was finally heading towards harmony.  I went into work the next day happy to be there after my break.

Yet early the next week, I got sick for real.  Immediately after I made the call, I began justifying all the reasons I was a slacker–I let down my team, I really wasn’t that sick, I should be there for my customers, and so on.  The guilt I felt was like a deadweight on my only slightly-pounding head.  I was too guilty to sleep, too tired to organize, and too engaged in self-flagellation to bother using my brain for anything productive whatsoever.  I wallowed in my guilt all day, when just days before I had cherished the time I had to myself.  Yet what was the difference between the two days off?

Basically, the difference was my point of view.  Since I rarely called in sick, the initial day off was time for me;  the second, for which I had a justifiable reason to be home, instilled guilt in me because it was so close to the first.  Whose life was I living anyway?  Who were my allegiances to?  Apparently not myself, since my guilt was related to my feeling that I let others down.

It took a day or two to process my reasoning, and afterward I recalculated my priorities (yet again) to put myself, and my sanity, back at the top of the list where it belongs.  My team, my family and my customers will be much happier when I restore my sanity anyway, so next time I feel the need to take a day off, it will be guilt-free one for sure.