A four-day work week

I’m finally working less. So why is it so hard to rest?

A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life. It’s for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again. Subscribe for free weekly posts.

Winter stillness, November 2021.

“Why would you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with where it comes from and where it is all leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

In my new freelance life, I have Fridays free. From Monday through Thursday, I write for clients. On Friday I write for myself. After 20 years of the nine-to-five grind, I have achieved the coveted four-day work week. I’m grateful for my good fortune. My Fridays spool out unstructured—no 7 a.m. meetings, no memos—an invitation to wander and wonder. It’s everything I thought I wanted.

But the first thing I do with my newly-free days is to fill them up. On my first Friday off, I begin the process of reclaiming my maiden name and give an interview on the choice to have a child. On my second Friday off, I start building a new website and talk to a designer about a new brand. On my third Friday, I tell my coach I’m struggling with both my new name and my new brand. I’m eager to make the changes but each step forward feels like a slog.

“Maybe you’re not stuck,” she says kindly. “This is all very new. Maybe you just need to give yourself some time. It’s OK to rest, you know.”

At these words, I promptly burst into tears.

Lenten roses (hellebores) at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. March 2021.

Why am I so resistant to rest? I adore slow weekends. I can spend hours admiring my roses or reading by candlelight. But weekdays? Those are for work. By the inflexible laws of capitalism and perfectionism, I must earn my coveted hours off. Rest, I was raised to believe, is granted in direct measure to one’s diligence. If I am not working for someone else on Friday, I must work for myself. I spend my first weeks freelance in an angsty flurry of inventing things to do.

“I haven’t had free time in 20 years, I’m in identity free-fall,” I text the pharmacist.
“You know you’re priceless, right?” he replies.
“But am I priceless if I’m not producing???” I wail.

I am joking—and not joking.

I am fully aware of how manic this sounds. I understand that I am transferring my over-performing tendencies from one area of my life to another, filling up the very space I have just worked so hard to create. The whole point of going freelance was to extract myself from the cult of productivity, but I’m finding it insidiously hard to leave.

It is the blank space itself that scares me, even though I have created it deliberately. I have unhooked from full-time work and shoved off from shore, trusting in the small boat of my own talent, but I can’t yet see my next harbor. I am adrift in the Great In-Between. I hate it here.

I also know it here. Leaving my marriage was the ultimate journey through liminal space. I recognize the feelings: the dislocation, the anxiety, the itchiness of shedding a skin. My old ideas about myself no longer fit. I am easily unsettled, unaccountably exhausted. I find myself napping on the couch in the middle of the day and crawling into bed by eight.

But in the breakup of my marriage, the liminal space was defined by my divorce. For a year I hung in legal limbo, no longer married and not yet single. The courts moved at a glacial pace and I had no choice but to burrow in and wait. I allowed myself a period of just existing: eat, sleep, move, phone a friend. Everything else was extra credit.

In this breakup with full-time work, I have launched from one life to the next with scarcely a breath in-between. Yet I cannot outrun the groundless place, cannot tame it with my to-do list. It feels like a growth spurt in adolescence when I was changing so fast my bones ached. Each morning I would check the mirror to see if I was taller. The change was invisible but undeniable.

Here I am again, at 41. I look the same but I am growing into someone very different.

The first daffodils, April 2022.

On my third Friday freelance, after my call with my coach, I finally take a true day off. I don’t do any of the things I have planned. I don’t work on my new website or get my new Social Security card. I don’t clear out my email or make my bed or send that last “Christmas” card.

Instead, I head for the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Whenever I feel unrooted, I gravitate to the steady peace of growing things. In winter the gardens are still. The roses are sleeping and the cherry arches are empty, their branches stark against a steel-grey sky. I wander and wonder at how soon this barren scene will fill with blossoms and swarms of selfie sticks.

In four short weeks, the snowdrops will poke their gentle heads through the ice. In eight, the forest floor will come alive with Lenten roses. In ten, a cloud of pale-pink cherries. In twelve, a blaze of tulips. It strikes me that the flowers need not earn their rest. They rest because winter is also a liminal space, a time of retreat and renewal. They have stored the past season’s sun in their bellies and wait patiently in this intermission.

Maybe I, too, am like the tulips, not a machine made for making. Maybe my work right now is not to work. Maybe I can grant myself another fallow period to just exist.

I walk in the silent gardens and make a deal with myself: I, too, will be still until spring. For the next eight weeks, I will take on nothing new. I will leave Fridays unscripted. I will nap when I feel like it. It is time to burrow in, like the bulbs in their beds, and be patient with the quiet crossing from one season of my life to the next.

Spring will come again, as it always has before. Now is the time to rest.

A blaze of tulips, April 2021.

One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!

Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.