I’ve been on vacation for the last two weeks. I didn’t go anywhere, I just stopped doing anything that looked like work. I didn’t intend to not work, it just sort of happened. The 4th of July was on a Thursday, so really, that whole week was shot. Then my birthday was the following Monday, and my mother came to visit. We planned our family celebration for Thursday night, so I spent that week hanging out with my mother and sister. I did have a project to do and a meeting with a client, so it wasn’t like I didn’t do anything at all for two weeks – but it was damn close.
I’ve found that the whole vacation thing is one of the most difficult concepts to get my head around in this new way of working. It used to be very clear-cut; vacation was a proscribed number of days that had to be carefully planned and approved by others. I never had the ability to just not work if I didn’t feel like it. I can do that now – at least until my work picks up.
I’ve also found that I have a hard time allowing myself to enjoy my self-created “vacations”. There’s always this vague sense of guilt associated with them, a feeling that I really should be figuring out how to find more clients, or networking, or writing industry articles. I felt pulled in two the entire two weeks. I enjoyed the time, sure, but not as much as I remember enjoying my time off when I had a regular 9 to 5. There’s a sense of virtue in taking your allotted vacation time when you work a normal job. There’s a sense that you’ve earned it, you deserve it. I struggle with feeling like I “deserve” the time off, since I haven’t worked steadily since I finished my part-time gig a year ago. It’s one of those things that is so different about my life now. It seems strange to me (although I don’t know why it should) that I’m still re-programming how I think about work and vacation and life three years after getting laid off. I wonder if I will ever stop feeling guilty about not working like I used to.
Every Day is Saturday 
I so relate to this. My first real test is about to start
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