Today I did nothing.

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. My head was full of thoughts, anxiety, things going around and around without really going anywhere. Eventually I moved from the bed to the sofa, and somehow that is where most of the rest of the day happened.

Normally I have a routine. I wake up early, I get ready, I go outside, I walk. I like starting my day by moving because it gives some kind of structure to everything that comes afterwards. But today I couldn’t start. I kept thinking that eventually I would get up, have a shower, get dressed and begin the day. I just needed another few minutes. And then another few minutes. And somehow the morning became afternoon and I was still there.

I felt like a zombie. I cried. I stared at things without really looking at them. My mind was simultaneously completely exhausted and incredibly busy. There were so many things I could have done and so many things I actually wanted to do, but there seemed to be an enormous distance between thinking about doing something and physically getting up and doing it.

And the strange thing about doing nothing when you are someone who is usually always doing something is that doing nothing becomes an activity in itself. You lie there thinking about everything you aren’t doing. You notice the hours passing. You calculate how much of the day is left. You think, okay, I’ll start at twelve. Then twelve becomes two. Then four. At some point you realise that the day you kept expecting to begin has almost finished.

I could probably turn this into something inspirational. I could tell myself that my body needed rest, that stopping is productive too, that we need to learn to listen to ourselves. Maybe some of those things are even true.

But honestly, that isn’t what today felt like.

It didn’t feel like self-care. It didn’t feel restorative. It didn’t feel like I had made a healthy decision to take a day off. I wasn’t peacefully resting. I simply couldn’t do anything. And it was horrible.

But this is an Artist Diary, and if I am going to document what it means to live and create, then I don’t want to document only the days when something interesting happens. I don’t want every difficult experience to become a beautiful lesson by the final paragraph. Some days have revelations. Some days have music and strange little moments of catharsis. Some days I make things, discover things, understand something about myself or suddenly feel completely alive.

And some days I lie on the sofa and cry.

Today was one of those days.

Today I did nothing. There is no lesson. It is simply what happened.