Stop Telling Me You Admire My Productivity

I’m not going to lie to you: I love being productive. Like, realy love it. It is quite possible that this is due to my Virgo rising and is an inherent, star-assigned part of my personality.

It’s also quite possible that because astrology is not science and because we live in the 21st century my slight obsession with productivity is nature, not nurture, and has been subliminally logged in my brain since birth.

And I do mean since birth. I vividly recall my mother bragging to her friends that I walked at months old and talked at 11 months. At three, I tearily asked her why she was buying pork lion, by 11 had written my own sequel to The Neverending Story (before there was an actual sequel), and by 13 had finished all of The Lord of the Rings books. Every year, a new brag was added (all about writing which I didn’t think was problematic until recently. More on that in another post).

At 13 years old, I cried to my mom, “I’ve done nothing with my life! And I’m 13!” What a long road I had ahead of me.

Fast forward to today. I’m 32 and the pandemic did nothing to help me learn to disconnect my productivity from my inherent value as a human. Not only did being quarantined alone at home all day, every day for a year and a half make me work harder, faster, and more than ever, it also fueled an…