My Potato Season

I’m just returning from a much-needed work sabbatical.* It’s my first extended break from work in my entire career and the first time I’ve not pushed through burnout. As my therapist and I discussed how I should approach this time off, she said, “You’re a potato. Potatoes can’t make to-do lists. Potatoes can’t work on projects.” I scoffed to hide the fact that she’d just somehow teleported straight into my brain, which was already formulating a plan for the six weeks to come.

It’s hard work being a potato. The first few days were easy. Sleeping in, playing puzzle games while listening to audiobooks, and binging TV was a joy. I was content to press mute on my brain for once. But then the new wore off and my brain fell back into well-worn neural pathways of increasingly panicked thoughts:

I really should go make the bed. Well, actually I shouldn’t.

What should I do today? Wait, wait, I need to not do anything, so what can I do that’s not doing something? 

But I really should do something. Maybe re-structure my writing portfolio?

Nope, nope. Potato. 

Am I even a good human? Am I a good worker? WHO AM I IF I’M NOT WORKING?!?! 

It took at least two weeks for me to “detox”, as my work friend called it, from habitual multitasking, planning, and doing, doing, doing. When my brain eventually realized that it wouldn’t die if it wasn’t Being Productive At All Times, I was able to begin to rest. I was finally able to be a potato. I was finally learning how to rest.

My church talked a lot about “rest”. Most probably do. I heard countless sermons admonishing us that if we just waited on the Lord we would “run and not be weary.” That we would “walk and not faint.” I’m not here to get into the Biblical exegesis of Isaiah 40. I could, but that’s not where I want to go with this. I was taught to take this passage literally. If I literally “waited on the Lord”, then I would never have to rest, and, if I needed rest, it was a sign that I wasn’t waiting on the Lord. Forget the fact that what it meant to “rest in the Lord” was never really explained to me beyond “stop trying so hard.” So, I tried not to try in hopes that God would somehow make everything turn out OK. 

Sunday was always referred to as “a day of rest”. This moniker is taken from the book of Genesis, where the narrator says that God created the earth in six (literal) days and on the seventh day he rested. We were supposed to follow God’s example and rest every seventh day. We weren’t allowed to go to restaurants or do any form of shopping, because Sunday was a day of rest. We were keeping those people from worshiping and resting, like us, by making them work on Sundays. We were even told not to make meals on Sunday, but rather to prepare all of Sunday’s meals on Saturday so no work would have to be done.

In theory, it’s not a bad idea. Take one day a week and rest. Here’s what a typical “day of rest” looked like for me:

• 7:00 AM - Get up

• 8:45 AM - Be ready to leave for church (full makeup, hair curled, formal clothes) 

• 9:15 AM - Arrive at church (if you’re not at least fifteen minutes early, you’re late)

• 9:45 AM - Sunday School

• 10:45 AM - Sunday Morning Church

• 12:00 PM - Commute the 30-minutes back home

• 12:30 PM - Discretionary time

• 3-3:30 PM - Start preparing to return to church

• 4:00 PM - Leave for church

• 5:00 PM - Choir Practice/Bible Study

• 6:00 PM - Sunday Evening Church

• 7:30-8:00 PM - Commute the 30-minutes back home

It was a day of rest in name only. So, you can see why when my therapist told me to “be a potato,” I scoffed. Potato, indeed. 

The universe continued to send me potato messages throughout my leave. My sister sent me a meme extolling the virtues of potatoes, not knowing that I was on leave and not knowing that I’d been told to be a potato. She just sees me for who I am: someone who appreciates a potato product.

the meme in question

Rest has always been psychological for me. If I could somehow ignore my body and my mind, I could get superhuman abilities. In fact, I once convinced myself that I did my best work on three hours of sleep. Meanwhile, people around me burned out right and left. We never called it that, though. These were just people who were simply called to other ministries or who disappeared from the congregation. I’ve met a lot of former church volunteers and employees who have told me how the organizations they worked for ran them into the ground in the name of God. People who didn’t see their families in the months leading up to massive conferences in the name of God. People who decided that it was easier to start their own church than continue to have all their time taken up by ministry. Rest, they implied, was for the less spiritual. 

It was only a matter of time before the algorithm caught on to my growing potato-ness. Near the end of my leave, I was served up an Instagram post from the Sad Potato Club showing my astrological sign as a potato. The Aries potato, it said, is “the sweetest until you cross them, always tells the truth, zero tolerance for idiots, acts first, thinks later.” It was a silly thing to get so emotional over, but I felt a weird camaraderie with this sad, knife-wielding potato. It seemed to be telling me that potatoes didn’t always have to be of the couch variety. On the contrary, being a potato could be an act of strength. 

the sad knife-wielding potato

I think most of us could agree we need a break. It’s been a series of unprecedented years that seems to be the norm. But normality is a myth–there is no “golden age” to return to. All we can do is learn how to stop the cycle of Always Producing and make a point to rest, to have potato times, however brief, where we can focus on this moment instead of always darting ahead to the next. We can choose to not beat ourselves up for being tired or for needing to say “no” to things.

As I return back to my nine-to-five, I’m trying to retain some of the good habits I developed during my potato season; keeping my to-do lists short, going to bed early if I need to, drinking more water, taking more walks, seeing more friends, and just generally trying to be kinder to my self. I’m also learning that rest is not just a state of mind, it’s actually, physically taking a break. And, if I ever lose my way, I just ask myself, “what would a potato do?”