What would happen if you decided to do nothing for a day? How would you feel about yourself? Lazy? Useless? Incompetent?

I’m pretty sure I would. I’m absolutely awful at doing nothing all day, not just because I’m a compulsive do-er, but because my sense of value is inherently tied up in what I do. Not who I am.

It’s a fine line, the “Who I am versus what I do” line.

Which one comes first? Does the doing come before the being? Or the being come before the doing?

Valuing what you do

Admittedly there is a certain sense of value that comes from what you do. You love your job, you love your family, you cook, you clean, you paint, you write, you make beautiful garbage cans, whatever.

You’re proud of it. You’re proud of how hard you work, how much you do every day. You’re not lazy, no sirree. You are a Hard Worker.

But if you decided to take a day off, to do absolutely nothing, does that suddenly negate everything you’ve ever done in the past? What about a whole week? Does that suddenly make you lazy, worthless, useless?

If you’re anything like me, illness and exhaustion has to practically beat you to the ground to get you to stop moving. You’re stuck on your back for a week, and that’ll tell you pretty damn fast the way in which you value yourself – if you spend the whole week hating on yourself, you my friend, like me, are someone who values yourself only by how much you do.

Yeah, it’s not pretty, is it?

Nor should you blame yourself – we live in a society that only cares about what you do, not who you are. Get those flat screen TVs, and fancy cars and that high powered job, and look at you! You’ve got worth! You’ve got worth coming out the wazoo. I mean, how else are you going to separate yourself from the great masses of lazy unwashed, right? You’ve got something to prove here. And by god, you are going to do everything possible to prove it.

Valuing who you are

I am not advocating laziness here, although I’m sure all of us could do with a vacation.

I’m not saying that we should all just drop everything and do nothing ever again. That’s not useful or effective. In fact, it’s downright stupid. We can’t all move to shacks and live on rice and beans for the rest of our lives. We live in a material world and we are allowed to enjoy it.

What I’m talking about here is the way that you look at yourself.

When I got sick, my identity was ripped away. It was an identity based on doing – I was a straight A student, I was one of the top dancers in the region, I was active, alive, doing lots and lots of stuff.

Well when you’re stuck on your back, none of that exists anymore. The ways in which you defined yourself are gone. And because I was young, and didn’t have any kind of coping skills to speak of, I continued to define myself by what I could do – which was, essentially, nothing.

My sense of self worth plummetted. I couldn’t see that I was still the same person whether I could dance and jump around or not. Being sick never changed that I was still intelligent, creative, and fun, but because I couldn’t express that in the same way and to the same degree as before, I felt like that had changed my value – it had taken it away.

You do what you do because of who you are.

You didn’t become a creative person by picking up a paintbrush or pencil. You didn’t become a great mom by having kids. You didn’t become a great wife by getting married.

You were awesome first, and then you went and did stuff and that awesomeness came out. The things that you do are ways for you to express how wonderful you are, but they are not what makes you wonderful. The things you buy are things that you find amazing and love, but they are not what make you amazing and lovable.

As far as I’m concerned, the being comes first, the doing comes second. Even when it comes to changing habits – they say that you should fake it till you make it. For example, pretend that you’re confident in social gatherings until the confidence comes naturally. The thing is, you still had to make that choice to let more of your wonderful shine through. It still came from you being you.

So no, you don’t  have to drop everything and spend the rest of your life meditating on a mountain, just “being you”. But in those still, simple moments of your day, when you pause for a second to catch your breath, remember that it’s who you are that’s lovable (and what I probably love), and not just what you do.