In just three weeks it will be six years since I was a CEO. I’m still in therapy for it. Not real therapy, mind you. Self-therapy. You know, the kind where every once in awhile you need to escape? Yep, that’s me.
I was supposed to travel this past week for work. Instead, our gig got pushed back into December. Since I absolutely hate traveling in December for work, my stress went through the roof and it resulted in my need for self-therapy. How have I indulged? Well, alcohol plays a part, for sure. A nice drink before dinner to transition from work to home didn’t go amiss last night. But the bigger self-therapy treats? Hmm… that would be doing some decorating for my niece’s new house and a couple of Hallmark Christmas movies over the last few days.
Now, here’s what most people don’t get about my guilty-pleasure love of the Hallmark Christmas movies: they’re not just an escape, they tap into all of the things I need and want to escape from. The work stress, the feelings of being unsuccessful or overwhelmed, and feelings of being unfulfilled in my work. As I pivot into the holidays, hit my annual billable target and have the opportunity to just escape into an easier and simpler life, the Hallmark movie is exactly the script I’m looking for. You get the idea: woman quits her high-stress, high-powered but unfulfilling city job, moves home and takes on a new job running the annual Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony? In the meantime, she reconnects with a lost love or connects new with the town’s all-around “good guy” and they fall in love? Yep. That’s the kind of escape I’m looking for.
Even today when I’m six years out from my old job and work part-time from home, I can still find myself all wound up. Some of my part-time work is very stressful, my husband’s job is super stressful and the mix of recent travel I’ve had is just the mix of things that get my pulse racing – and not in a good way. Luckily, it’s the right time of year for a Hallmark Christmas movie.
(Now, if I’m completely honest, I don’t watch the Hallmark movies throughout the year. Genuinely, they just can’t compare to the Christmas movies and I honestly think that it’s because the holidays are still so magical to me.)
Lately, I have to confess: I’ve needed a few Glen Cairn glasses of chartreuse, a couple of Hallmark Christmas movies and a few home decorating catalogs to get me out of my high-stress funk. Today, my goal is to push through a significant amount of work so that between the rest of this week and next week, I’ll have just a small bucket of hours I need to work to finish out my year. If I do that, I really feel like I can put my life into that lower gear and just relax for awhile.
And then? My life will be about our own personal Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony… or something painfully like it. I’ll do the hard pivot to home and holidays. More than anything, that will cure my working blues.
So, what does the therapy look like when I’m back in the center of my own “real-life” Christmas movie? Oh, that’s easy to envision: enjoying a cup of coffee or a glass of wine in front of a roaring fire; reading a book on the couch while the Christmas tree glows in the background; going out to select and cut down our own tree and then decorating it while Darryl plays Christmas music and grabs himself a bourbon (he’s awful at decorating the tree and leaves me to it). The season this year will be filled with helping my niece set up her new house and baking or cooking with my nieces and sisters. The sisters will also do our Christmas shopping and wrapping together. Darryl and I will celebrate our annual “Cat Decorating Day,” a holiday we created where we drink margaritas and put holiday hats on the cats. (The margaritas are for courage.) And generally, while I will work, it will be low key, low stress and low volume.
The older I’ve gotten and the farther away I’ve gotten from being a CEO, the more that this break between Thanksgiving and New Year’s means to me. The recovery it provides – not from any particular rigors of work but from the mind space that work takes up – is essential to my well-being. So, bring it on today and next week. Let me rack up the hours and get even closer to my annual goal. And then, let’s shut this puppy down. It’s time. Between now and then, I’m going to enjoy my Christmas movies, an occasional spirit and what little bit of escape I can carve out of my regular life.
The Yuppie Homesteader 