As many of you already know, I quit my bricks and mortar job, Friday being my last day there. This morning my husband woke me up on accident as he rolled out of bed just before 7:00. I have never been described as an early bird, and when I was working at that last job, my poor husband used to have to work really hard just to get me to roll over and acknowledge his presence. I hated getting up, and I used to whine and sniffle until Doug would give in and give me a back rub. When he finished his back rub, I would finally get up and grumbling, start getting ready for the day. I didn’t have to get to work until 9:00 am, so I would usually postpone getting out of bed until 7:45 or even 8:00 some mornings. I dreaded getting up.
So this morning, when Doug woke me up as he left the bed (he usually gets up between 6:30 and 7:00 every morning, which is just this side of crazy to me) I laid in bed and thought smugly to myself, “I don’t have to get up this morning. I can sleep in until I feel like getting up, whenever that is.” I stretched and sighed happily to myself. Then I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling. I started to think about the blogs I was going to write, and the items on my to-do list for the day. I got excited about everything I needed to do, and it was then that I made an amazing discovery: Yes, being a freelance writer means I can get up at any time that I want to, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll want to get up before I usually do.
As I got up and started puttering around the house, writing blogs, doing laundry, etc, I came up with something even more stunning: I used to use sleep as an excuse to hide from the world. When you hate your job with a passion and going to work every day is just as difficult as stuffing red hot needles under your fingernails, sometimes you sleep because you want to act as if you aren’t really living the life you actually are. When I was sleeping, I didn’t have to worry about people not showing up for their shifts. I didn’t have to worry about office politics and who was going to stab me in the back that day. I didn’t have to worry about making everything work together and making sure everyone was covered for the day (something that was a lot more rare than I wished it was.) When I was asleep, none of these problems existed.
Now that I don’t have enough stress to eat my stomach lining in two days flat, I have found that I actually don’t mind getting up in the morning. When I wake up, it’s okay to get up and start the day. I used to spend a lot of my weekends sleeping or reading fiction novels, both methods of escaping the real world. It made me rather boring, which is something my husband complained about on more than one occasion, but it was my way of coping with the massive amounts of stress I had pressing down on my shoulders every day.
Now I feel weightless, like I could do anything I wanted to. It’s a fantastic feeling, and one I hope doesn’t fade anytime soon.
Here’s to stressless work-at-home jobs that we actually love!