Heaven forbid I have free time

Don´t have smart friends, sporty parents, or a flexible university. If you´re like me and tick all the boxes, you´re in for wonderful things such as guilt, overthinking, and eventually lying to prevent further damage.

Let´s start with smart friends. It´s nice to have deep conversations. To know you have people to turn to for advice and to admire them. But with that package inevitably comes the fact that their university studies take up all of their time, the classes they´re taking have a name you can´t pronounce, and their homework sounds like they´re working for NASA. And if you do not live a life swallowed by your studies, they´ll give you confused looks. Especially if you say you have time to socialise, do sports, sleep, eat or - heaven forbid - breathe.

Sporty parents. An even more dangerous thing for your subconsciousness. They're out of the door the second there is a ray of sunshine. Not that I wouldn´t want to go out myself, but if I´m in the mood to stay indoors, they will be shocked and wonder how can you sit at home when it´s such beautiful weather outside?

If your dad is a social butterfly AND a sporty person, that´s practically a sign for you to dig a grave. Because if he finds you at home reading, watching movies, or doing any other relaxing activity, he´ll ask you questions like you have something planned for the evening, right? or if you didn´t have any activity, how come you didn´t become our personal slave and do all the errands for us?

The latter is more of my mom's kind of thing, and I´m clearly exaggerating, but eventually, you´ll become hypersensitive towards questions like this, so this is what you´ll hear when she speaks.

Lastly, a flexible university. I am a doctor´s daughter with many doctors´-kids-who-also-want-to-be-doctors friends. Yet, I chose journalism. And boy, am I glad I did so. But you'll eventually feel bad if you´re surrounded by people who don´t celebrate New Year´s Eve because of the amount of studying they must do. You´ll see your studies minor compared to others and diminish any work you do. Because how can you whine when so many students have it worse?

So, I started lying to my parents about my schedule for the day. I would make my errands seem more heroic and complicated than they actually were because I couldn´t bear to see the look in their eyes saying I have an easy life.

My friends would tell me how much free time I had, and I would get defensive because I didn´t want them to think I got my accomplishments served on a silver platter.

But we are putting an END to this toxic self-destructive behaviour!

We must CELEBRATE our possibilities to pursue hobbies, try new activities, and meet up with friends. We shall CHERISH when we rot, scroll on TikTok, or binge TV series.

So, in honour of spring and new beginnings, let me welcome the change in our mindset, and if anyone says we don´t work as hard as we could, let´s look them dead in the eye from the couch where we sip our iced coffee and say and?

Love,

Book and Tea Girl