You are allowed to Veg.

You are allowed to veg.

You are allowed to moodle. Putter. Loaf.

You are allowed to lie on your bed and do nothing but wiggle your toes.

Or put on all of your fancy running gear and get outside only to decide that it sounds nicer to sit on the bench and stare at the trees than to run three miles.

You are allowed to watch too many tv episodes. Or webisodes.

Or while away the hours checking out beautifully photographed pictures of food on a blog of a woman from Minnesota you’ve never met.

Or wear old stained sweatpants and sit on your couch reading romance novels.
You are allowed to do nothing that is at all productive.

You are allowed to “waste” a day.
Or two.
Or two hundred.

For a long time, I didn’t know this.

I mean, I kind of knew that “vegging” could be a thing. A thing that had to be crammed in between other types of things.

Things like reading assignments and test prep and writing essays and doing lab reports. And then things like being excellent at work and having friendships worthy of Instagram and networking.

I eventually discovered “deeper things”—journaling, meditation, asking myself “Who I Really Was” and “What I Really Wanted”—but it wasn’t until I learned how to veg that it actually took root.

Which was odd, because I always thought of vegging as decidedly un-deep. I mean, how is spending too long on celebrity gossip sites a meaningful endeavor?

But I eventually realized that the thing separating me from my truer self (as hippy dippy as that sounds) was that I didn’t know what my truer self actually wanted. I had spent so long forcing her to do things, and the only thing it had led me to was a bad relationship with food and a job that I didn’t actually want.

So I let myself do whatever “I” wanted.

And it turned out that I wanted to veg.

And once I let myself veg, let myself do nothing of any import at all for months (beyond showing for my job), that’s when the magic started happening.

That’s when my eating started to right itself. That’s when I started to get a kernel of an idea.

Out of the messy hair, old sweatpants, wasting a really incredible amount of time came a life more interesting or meaningful than all of that striving and pro-con lists and strategizing.

The vegging wasn’t the destination. But the vegging let me relax enough that I could connect with what I truly wanted.

What would you want if you stopped trying so hard and let yourself veg?