I gotta be honest, I haven’t wanted to do much this week.

Losing my brother has hit me hard, and I just feel like laying around and wallowing for a bit.

Luckily, I have family and friends who are always there to keep me busy if I want to be. But in between spending time with them, I’m just hanging around not wanting to do anything right now.

Guess what? That’s okay.

I’ve had to do some work on this, but I’ve decided that it’s okay for me to be a lazy butt, watching movies, hanging with my pups and kitties, reading, knitting… you get the picture.

When I was a Scientologist, this kind of thing would be UNHEARD OF.

The concept of someone wanting to deal with grief over a period of time is just not done. Particularly in the Sea Org, where PRODUCTION is everything.

Here’s how it goes:

1. You experience a loss.
2. You go in session as soon as possible to “run out” the loss, meaning you go over the moment of the loss again and again until it has no effect on you.
3. You go back on post, i.e. to your job.

The whole process lasts a few hours at most.

“Get your stats up!” — OR ELSE.

In the Sea Org, nothing is more important than production. Not family, not friends, certainly not something as ridiculous as feelings.

Everything you do is based on a system of statistics, or “stats”, and those stats had better be rising each week, or else.

Every job has one or more stats associated with it. When I was a magazine editor, I had about 20 different stats associated with the job I did. Each one could be measured, and we kept track of every one of them every day to make sure they were up at the end of the week.

You’d think there was some really important global reason for everyone to get their stats up every week, but it was much more personal than that. If your stats were up, you were safe. If they were down, you were fair game.

What do I mean by this? If you were “upstat”, you were given privileges that “downstats” weren’t. Often, those whose stats were down ate rice and beans for every meal, while the ones whose stats were up ate regular meals (such as they were).

Also, if something was going wrong, it was the downstats who were looked to first, interrogated first, punished first.

So getting your stats up became a really, really important thing.

That meant there was no time to NOT be working. Every waking hour of the day was focused on getting something done that would lead to a raised statistic.

It feels so weird to write about this now, because I haven’t thought this way for so long. Over the past eight years, I’ve managed retail stores quite successfully, with none of the anxiety that came with the constant fear of not getting my stats up.

Who knew?

How strange to be able to lead a team with no threats, no fear of punishment, yet we were always one of the highest-producing stores in the company. Hmmmm…. perhaps Scientology has no f-ing clue what they’re talking about when it comes to working effectively.

And the concept of work/life balance? HILARIOUS. There was no work/life balance in the Sea Org, which I assume you’ve figured out by now.

Anyway, today, like most of the days this week, I’m resting. I’m grieving. I’m not worrying about getting work done. And I’m feeling fine about it.

Suck on that, Scientology.