Busy
I got my first job at fourteen.
It was my choice—or at least that’s what I told myself. My parents had to sign a permission form. I took a cashier position at a dairy farm down the street and spent my weekends there, ringing up milk and ice cream, learning to make change, and watching the clock. There was plenty to do, but I never felt truly busy. Time stood still between customers. Minutes stretched longer than sixty seconds when I was cleaning the inside of the fridge for the second time that day.
By sixteen, I’d moved to waitressing. Cash tips beat minimum wage every day, and I liked the math of it. Waitressing is pure organized chaos—a clear exchange of effort for outcome. Every shift is a complex equation of human psychology and organization. On a good shift, you’re running in so many directions that time passes in whole chunks, not minutes. I waitressed all through high school, squeezing shifts between dance classes, homework, and a busy social life. I was good at fitting things in.
When I left for college, I dealt with my anxiety the only way I knew how: I arrived on campus and marched directly to a nearby restaurant. I had a job before my parents finished moving me in.
Each of those jobs taught me something. The people I met, the skills I learned—they were valuable. But I can also see the pattern now.
When things get uncomfortable, I hide in work. Ideally chaotic, unpredictable, messy work. Like waitressing. Or growing a business.
I grew up in a world of structured activity. School, dance lessons, sports, homework. There was always something next, always somewhere to be. But even with all that structure, there wasn’t support for some of the things that mattered most. Emotional intelligence. Processing what I felt.
I was a highly sensitive child, the kind who felt everything too much and had no idea what to do with the overwhelm. So I learned to hide, usually in books. I could disappear into someone else’s life for hours, falling into that hypnotic trance of a good book. The end always brought grief—I had to return to my own life.
My fondest childhood memories are of the unstructured time. The hours spent playing outdoors with my siblings and neighbors, making up games and rules. Summer afternoons on our bicycles, no agenda, no purpose—just curiosity and discovery. But as the window of childhood closed, the open spaces felt too scary. I stopped seeking them out and craved constraint instead.
Years later, I spent early motherhood checking boxes. Number of feeds. Diaper changes. How many milliliters of milk they ate. How many times they spit up. The exact times they napped—thirteen minutes here, nine there.
Documenting everything gave me a false sense of control, evidence that I was trying hard enough. Even when they didn’t sleep. Didn’t eat. I was trying.
I returned to work right before the pandemic, when the twins were six months old. What was supposed to bring relief—routine, schedule, deadlines after months of chaos—soon dissolved. My business, a tourism company, was barely breathing. Once lockdown lifted, we had a nanny, technically, because I was still working. But working on what?
The open space was utterly terrifying. I started creating constraints out of thin air. Working hours, even though there was no real urgency. Deadlines for projects. Arbitrary rules about when I could check my phone, when I had to be dressed, and when the workday officially ended. I treated these self-imposed boundaries like life or death. Because in a way, they were.
Without them, I dissolved. The days bled together. I couldn’t tell if I was productive or useless, present or absent, a mother or a professional, or neither or both. So I built walls. And inside those walls, I could breathe again. I didn’t see it then, but this was the same pattern. Discomfort. Constraint. Productivity as emotional management.
Later, I sold my business and became an employee for the first time, with externally imposed meetings and deadlines. A routine 9-to-5 structure. It felt like relief.
Someone else set the rhythm. I showed up, did the work, and for the first time ever—logged off. For a while, that structure saved me. I needed that strict boundary between work and motherhood. Unstructured time led to too much guilt. The agency I usually craved was rejected in favor of something easier.
But now, something’s shifting. The same constraints that once felt stabilizing feel heavy. Rituals that used to ground me feel unproductive. The clean rhythm that gave me balance feels like it’s blocking something trying to emerge.
The constraints are the same. I’m different.
Not because I’ve outgrown productivity. If you look at my calendar right now, I’m damn productive. But I’m being called to something beyond productivity. Less structure, more impact.
And that terrifies me.
Motherhood forced my values into the light in ways I can’t take back. But here’s the part I don’t say often enough: what mattered most wasn’t always them.
I value work. Not in the “I care about my career too” way that’s acceptable to admit. I mean I value scope and building things and freedom more than I value being available to my children every moment they want me.
I consciously choose work over my kids. A lot.
But I’m also starting to understand something more complex—I don’t just value work. I use it as protection.
I intentionally create constraints around my time, my energy, my attention. I like being stretched so thin that my minimum productivity is what most people would call overachieving. And if I’m busy enough, productive enough, useful enough—I don’t have to sit with what I’m actually feeling.
If your boss tells you you have to work from 9 to 5, you feel less guilty for working 9 to 5. I’ve known this for a while now. Intellectually, at least. But knowing it and changing it are different things.
The call I’m hearing now isn’t to do more. It’s to do less. To cancel meetings. To say no. To sit in the discomfort instead of organizing a closet or listening to a podcast or finding some other way to optimize my time. When I quiet the distractions, I hear it clearly. But half the time, I fall back into my old ways anyway.
Last week, I opted out of a meeting I didn’t need to attend. It wasn’t dramatic. No one even noticed. But I felt the guilt immediately—the sense that I was being lazy, uncommitted, that I was wasting time I should be using productively. I sat at my desk for twenty minutes, unsure what to do with myself. My instinct was to fill the space. Open my email. Start a project. Catch up on my open tabs. Instead, I just sat there.
And after a while, something subtle surfaced. Not a revelation. Not clarity. Just the faint outline of a question I’ve been avoiding for years: Who am I when I’m not busy? Not who do I want to be. Not who I should be. Who am I, right now, when I stop moving?
I don’t know yet. And for the first time, I’m not trying to turn that into something productive.
I’ve been thinking about those summer afternoons on my bicycle. No agenda. No purpose. Just motion and sunlight. I used to think I missed that freedom because life was simpler then, lighter. But I think what I actually miss is the lack of self-consciousness, the ability to exist without having to prove I was useful. The person I’ve built my life around being—the one who’s always productive, always moving, always stretched thin—she’s gotten me pretty far. But she’s also kept me from finding out who I’d be if I stopped sprinting.
I’m not there yet. I still default to busy most days, still fill space before it has a chance to challenge me. But every once in a while, I cancel the meeting. I sit still. I let the discomfort stretch longer than feels reasonable. And nothing dramatic happens. There’s no clarity waiting. No plan. No version of myself suddenly revealed on the other side. Just the quiet realization that I’ve been using motion to avoid meeting myself.
And that stopping—even briefly—might be the hardest work I’ve ever done.