When the gynaecologist told me I had cancer and that I’d need at least two months off to recover from the inevitable hysterectomy, one of my reactions was relief. Two months off work! Two whole months!
To be clear, I’d already had the diagnosis over the phone and had spent the following week before the face-to-face appointment ‘processing’ the information and living through the emotional fallout. By the time I reached the gynaecology consulting room at the Royal Infirmary, I was back in practical, dealing-with-it mode.
A year later, in the depths of a dark Scottish winter, I’m almost wistful about that time of suspension, when my only job was to rest and recover. I didn’t have to worry about money because I was on full pay for the duration of my sick leave. I didn’t have to worry about finding another job when this hiatus from adult working life came to an end. This time was a gift, admittedly a mixed one.
Between finishing a master’s degree and finding a job, a friend walked the Camino. I don’t have the economic confidence to give myself a sabbatical. Whenever I’ve quit a job, it’s taken me a very long time to find a new one. Mostly, my job-abandonment has been about finding a better way of living, with more time for my own projects and interests. I used to imagine this could be achieved by finding the right job, so that work didn’t feel like indentured labour and time theft but the fulfilment of a vocation.
Doing a PhD was the end point of this delusion. All the academics I know—and I’ve been around universities for decades—are exhausted and disillusioned, if not totally cynical. But at least—a remaining perk of a much-debased job—academics still get sabbaticals. I don’t envy colleagues who have to spend weekends marking undergraduate essays or writing funding applications (with outcome rates similar to agent submissions), but I could do with six months on full pay.
In Australia, jobs come with ‘long service leave’, accrued according to the length of employment, at least seven years. In the old days, this allowed people time to return to the mother country by sea, to rest and recuperate from the rigours of colony life. Since I left Canberra, friends in the public service have had enviable three-month stints of fully paid freedom. I was too early in my career to appreciate this particular benefit, which was, at the time, almost as distant as retirement.
Even a one-month summer break, European style, would do. When I still sat through arty French films, I used to wonder at the taken-for-granted cessation of work that enabled family, friends and frenemies to all pile into someone’s ancestral country home for backstabbing, inter-marital shagging and the poking of old wounds. An impossible scenario for Brits, except for the sort of people who have second homes in the Dordogne or Tuscany and are not tied to the 9–5 treadmill.
I’m at the age where friends are beginning to reference retirement, not because they’re decrepit but because they’re simply fed up with spending the best part of their time doing largely tedious jobs in exchange for money. Even people with actual careers have often peaked by their mid to late 50s.
One of those office conversations: a lecturer in my department, who’d come late to her job, in her 40s, told me and another colleague that her partner had taken early retirement. He’s only in his early 60s.
‘But what does he do?’ we asked.
She shrugged. ‘He takes long walks, goes to talks and exhibitions, reads books.’
My colleague’s face mirrored my own: OH, THE UTTER BLISS.
I don’t want to become a full-time gardener or sit on a sunny Spanish Costa. I have plenty to do. Publishing is another job of work on top of writing. It’s far, far preferable to the grim charade of submitting query letters to agents, but it takes time. At my age, you can feel time vanishing beneath your feet like sand being sucked away by the outgoing tide.
(Despite her late ascent to the career ladder, this lecturer admitted she had no desire to climb further, already worn out by the bureaucracy, the impossible demands, the politics, the managerialism. These days, working for a university is like working for a vast, profit-obsessed corporation, except with no bonuses and minimal pay rises. But at least we get sick pay.)
Energy is another scarce resource, even for fit, active women. After a workout, I need a recovery day, not a concept acknowledged by my younger self. My joints ache and my muscles are depleted. Even a few hours of tango can wipe me out. I never used to regard that as exercise. The nature of my cancer means I can’t go back on HRT. Sometimes every day feels like a battle.
On a Facebook site for women who have undergone hysterectomies, I found stories of families who expected resumption of full service on their return from hospital, who were irritated and impatient with their wounded, broken service provider. Do some women only get feminism when they’re recovering from major surgery and husband and children are whining about not having any clean socks or cooked dinners? I wonder how many marriages fall apart when the uterus and its trimmings are evicted.
Of course, there are also stories of families who are faultlessly caring and attentive. It’s not all bad out there.
I didn’t expect to need any care or help, but I did, and kind friends stepped in.
*
I never make any travel plans for the turn of the year. Airfares are insane, and airports are sh*tshows. From the comfort of my couch, I watch news reports of frazzled travellers stranded by snow storms or system outages, clumped miserably beneath blank departure boards. There is no public transport at all on Christmas Day. If you don’t have a car, you pay taxi rates that would usually only apply to chauffeur-driven limousines.
I always look forward to this period of hibernation. Two whole weeks (or so) to do nothing. Everything shuts down. It’s cold and dark. People are preoccupied with their families. The usual round of programmed activities stops. The obligation to do something (because inactivity is a sign of social and personal failure) is suspended.
A few days into ‘Betwixtmas’, I was already counting down how many were left to me. Each one was precious. In the lead-up, I’d written a list of all the things I needed to do, including ‘relax’.
You may detect a contradiction here. I’m not good at stopping. Time freed from paid employment is quickly filled by my other life. The final edit of my next novel, formatting and re-releasing the first one with a new cover image, catching up on all the marketing books and podcasts set aside for exactly this down-time, along with personal admin (nobody else is going to do it) and, inevitably, my New Year’s resolutions/ grand strategic List of Things to Do. This hiatus becomes a dumping ground for all the tasks that banked up in the latter part of the year.
Permission to stop is not easily granted. One of my resolutions is to start breath meditation, just ten minutes a day, to lower my general stress levels and—here’s the catch—make me more energetic and therefore productive. Another contradiction. Will the scientifically documented magic of breathwork outweigh the micro-stress of one more thing to do? I’ll report back this time next year.
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