Overworked

It’s been one of those weeks.

You know, the kind where you feel like everything your professors say is going right over your head, and you have seven different assignments all demanding your attention.

You’re one off-kilter comment away from a mascara-running meltdown. Or maybe you’ve already had two, but who’s counting?

A vast majority of us have hit that point in the semester where we’re starting to feel stressed out, stretched thin and tired — really, really tired.

At the Greasy Grill, I was notorious for working too much. My customers knew it, my co-workers knew it, and my family and friends knew it.

I had a special ringtone designated for my store. You know that one from the old googly-eyed GEICO commercials? “I always feel like, somebody’s watching me….” Yeah, that one.

It played so frequently on my phone that, to this day, I can’t hear it without getting an unpleasant feeling all over.

People would call in “sick”— even though Facebook showed otherwise — or there would be some kind of scheduling conflict and I would get called because my managers knew I wouldn’t leave them down a body.

That’s what we were commonly called: bodies. Sure makes you feel special.

Working a 10-16 hour day was nothing abnormal for me. Sometimes I would serve the same customer breakfast, lunch, and breakfast the next morning. There was a running joke that I had a cot set up in the basement and only pretended to go home.

On top of just not knowing how to say no, I think I have this “I can do anything” attitude. Which sounds awesome, except in my case, it’s less Dora the Explorer and more of Jim Carrey’s character from the “Yes Man.”

I have this mentality that if I technically can do something, then I should or I’m not working hard enough.

That’s about as healthy as the energy shots I’ve been living off.

I wish I could say this was a lesson I actually learned in the drive-thru, but unfortunately I’m still learning. If anything, it’s worse in college. I put so much pressure on myself; I think most of us do. There is always work to do, relationships to build, and deadlines to meet. In our haste to do all these things, we neglect our own health. I am so guilty of that.

While I feel like I’ve made some serious growth in other areas of my life this year, I’ve been completely neglecting physical wellness.

I’ve been averaging four hours of sleep a night and, at the same time, pumping my body with caffeine and sugar just to keep my eyes open. My 9:00 a.m. WTC notes have started looking like the attempts of a 5 year old trying to write the works of Shakespeare.  And worse than that, I’ve been so out of it for the past few weeks that I’ve found my truck drifting off the road one to many times to be comfortable with. Really, it’s only by the grace of God that I make it safely back to campus sometimes.

The only way I’ve survived these past couple weeks is with one hope in mind: Thanksgiving break. But even that is starting to weigh on me. I’m already feeling the pressure to catch up with everyone I haven’t seen since August, people whom I love and I want to see. But really, I just want to be with my family. And to be completely honest, I wouldn’t mind spending the majority of my break wrapped up in a mound of blankets with my dog, just being still.

I think God was on to something in the Old Testament — well, actually, I think He was on to a lot of things.

Rest is important, so much so that it was required every six days. Even though we’re not bound by the Old Law anymore, I think this is one of those universal truths. And I think as a whole, none of us are taking it as seriously as we should.

We need to learn how to how to take a Sabbath. If God rested after the sixth day why on earth do we feel like we don’t need to?