Permission to Rest
And why do I feel like I need it?
I had surgery last Friday, the 22nd. I discovered this spring that I have venous insufficiency, meaning that some of my veins don’t return blood to my heart like they’re supposed to. This is what causes varicose veins: the blood gets all backed up and they start clumping up just beneath the skin. So to fix this, the surgeon did two things: a radiofrequency ablation on both of my greater saphenous veins, and twelve phlebectomies on my left leg. Put simply: He burned shut two big leg veins and yanked out (his words) a handful of the smaller ones.
Ugh, I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. Sorry to put you through those horrific sentences, but I needed you to know, I guess.
Varicose veins are genetic. I inherited them from the women on both sides of my family. But I didn’t start noticing them until 2018, when my friend posted a photo of me from the Camino del Norte in Spain. In the photo I’m standing at the edge of the trail looking out to the water, and there on the back of my left knee is a thick, raised, squiggly lump. I was 25. I was so grossed out looking at that photo the first time I saw it. It seemed like varicose veins were a thing older people got, not people in their 20s. It threw me into somewhat of an existential crisis. Is this the first sign of aging? The first visible indication that I, too, exist in a finite body that will experience the degradations of time?
More started popping up over the next few years, all on my left leg. At first they were just unsightly to me, but then they started to become painful. It’s hard to describe. If I sit too long and stand up, the back of my left knee is heavy and hard to bend. Then it’s a burning sensation just beneath the skin. Hiking and running started to become just a twinge more uncomfortable than usual. I mentioned something to my doctor and she referred me to vascular, and now here we are months later, recovering from surgery.
The vascular surgeon told me to take a week off from work after the procedure, so I scheduled it for just before Thanksgiving break so I wouldn’t have to use more sick days than necessary. (Because America.) The prospect of over a week off work was the shining light that guided me through November. To be clear, I wasn’t looking forward to the surgery, necessarily—I hate needles; I shook, perspired, and cried so much in pre-op that two nurses had to guide me through deep breathing exercises before they could get the IV in—but I was in desperate need of some real rest.
This school year has felt so exhausting to me. I feel like I am never done with anything, like I am perpetually behind, and like the things that worked last year are not working this year. I’m having to build in a lot more intentional scaffolding than I have in the past, and that’s time-consuming. I can’t get people to turn things in on time. Intelligible words are feeling really hard.
And then there’s the additional fun flavor of pointlessness after the election. What good is critical thinking going to do in a world where vibes and baseless scapegoating win people presidencies? Where facts don’t matter? Where we never seem to learn from humanity’s horrific mistakes?
My life is good and my students are generally great and I do not want this year’s seniors to graduate but even still, I am just so tired of everything and it is all so overstimulating and I want every single thing in the world to just stop and shut up for five seconds.
That’s why I was looking forward to the surgery. It was an excuse to rest. As I was going under anesthesia and being wheeled into the procedure room I was just thinking, “Hell yeah. Time to stop existing for two hours.” I think I might have even giggled when they put the breathing mask on me. And when I came to afterwards and the nurse started giving me Sprite in a cup with ice and a straw I think I literally said, “This is the best Sprite of my life.” And I may have said the same thing with the vanilla pudding she gave me next.
For the next five days I lay in bed with my legs, bandaged from foot to groin, propped up on pillows. My oxycodone-addled brain wandered in an out of sleep. When I was awake, I played an ungodly amount of Tears of the Kingdom. (Shout-out to my coworker Tim for letting me borrow his Switch!) I finally finished reading The Haunting of Hill House. I listened to records. I ordered Christmas gifts. I ate food in bed. I didn’t even have my watch on. I got no notifications. I didn’t go outside for five days and I was perfectly fine with it. I had permission, for five days, to be an absolute piece of garbage.
I started thinking about this, and I realized it’s lowkey concerning that I felt like I needed rest so badly that I was looking forward to surgery just to get it. I’m really bad at relaxing. I feel like I have to be Doing Something all the time in order to have value. If it’s not my full time job, then it had better be my part-time job, and if it’s not a job at all then it had better be a productive hobby or at the very least a household task that has Demonstrable Results after an Amount of Time. I have internalized capitalism so thoroughly that my worth is tied up in what X amount of time can produce in terms of Y results.
Now that I’m feeling a little better I’ve started slipping back into this mindset, and I can feel the shift. I graded 25 essays earlier today, and now I’m writing a thing because it’s a goal I set for myself, and after this I’m going to crochet a thing that my friend is paying me to crochet, and after that I will decorate for Christmas. And to be clear, these are things I want to do (well, minus the grading—that’s a need), and yeah, there’s value in completing a task and setting goals for yourself. But the pressure, man. The constant pressure to be doing, doing, doing. It’s a lot.
I got fatigued last night putting Christmas ornaments on a tree and I had to sit down for a minute. It made me think about how privileged I am not to experience chronic pain, to be relatively young and healthy minus a few wonky veins. I have been forced to slow down this past week, to feel what it’s like to heal, to feel that need to recover. I am trying to give myself permission to exist in that space, to exist in a limited body that needs rest. Not just because I had a surgery or because I “deserved” it for a reason acceptable to capitalism—but because, simply, I am a human.
Look, we’re living in a messed-up society in late stage capitalism and as a result Things are Hard. You don’t need to explain or give an excuse. We live in bodies that can’t just go go go all the time. We are allowed to lay down and play a damn video game if we want to. Things can be tiring. We don’t have to feel bad about it. We can rest. We can rest. We can rest.
