Learning to Rest // Learning to Heal
Separating my worth from what I produce, and seeing rest as a kind of revolution.
I spent most of my twenties completely outside of the world I live inside of now. I was convinced I’d never be a writer— I didn’t have the education. I wasn’t talented enough. I knew no one, was connected to no one who financially supported themselves as a writer. Instead, I spent the majority of my time nannying, fighting forest fires, partying, and telling myself I’d eventually go back to school.
That I am living the life I have always dreamed of doesn’t go unnoticed by me for any period of time. Being able to get up and sit at my desk (when my body allows me to sit) and write to pay my bills feels like I’ve won a kind of lottery. My work day isn’t dictated by anyone’s demands but my own, and my work load increases and decreases depending on how much I take on.
Yet, there was something easy about getting up and going to a job where I was required to arrive on time and did not have to use a significant portion of the intellectual part of my brain.
I’ve always loved manual labor. Maybe it’s because I was raised as a Buddhist, always tagging along to temple with my grandfather, and manual labor reminded me of meditation. Maybe it’s because I had undiagnosed CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and I was constantly dissociated from my body, and the only things that brought me into my body were sex, manual labor, and exercise; three things I did a lot.
After years of therapy and trainings in embodiment, yoga, and somatics, I am now firmly grounded in my body. Sometimes too grounded. I’m hyperaware of sensations throughout my body and things happening near me. I used to mute my body and my surroundings with hard drugs, alcoholism, and constant sex with people I barely knew. My several years of alcoholism, waking up without much memory of the night before and having to rely on friends to recollect events (if I hadn’t abandoned them for someone who offered me drugs or sex), poisoned my body. Only in the past five or so years have I worked diligently to sort out my addictions and what kinds of habits and ways of being in the world I want to cultivate and discard. It’s taken a lot of work.
And now I live with chronic illness. Recently, in recovering from my surgery, I find myself struggling with a backlog of work and an absence of energy, whereas before the surgery I had an excess of energy but couldn’t move or sit and therefore was capable of less work than usual. As someone who often heard the phrase “how do you do it all?” from people in all aspects of my life, this absence of energy feels like a failure and makes me anxious for the future. I know my PhD program will require a lot of my energy. How do I create boundaries to take care of myself.
That’s what I’m navigating right now— boundaries. Understanding that my energy is finite is important, yet the world doesn’t care. My bank account doesn’t care about my energy levels. My rent doesn’t give a shit if I need to rest. But I can only take on as much work as I can produce, and finding that perfect pitch as a writer and freelancer is difficult for everyone, but especially those of us whose energy fluctuates greatly from day to day and week to week depending on our health.
Nannying and fighting forest fires are clearly difficult jobs. I nannied for twin boys in the first year of the pandemic and lived in a cute little apartment in Beacon Hill, yet I honestly barely remember any of my time there because my job was so exhausting. And fighting forest fires? Yeah. Not easy.
But both jobs had clear boundaries.
On the hotshot crew I clocked in for fire season in April or May, and then clocked out for the season in October. My life wasn’t mine for those six or seven months, but that was fine. It was a time frame. And I knew that when October came around I’d be free (though this transition was always challenging). Ditto with nannying. I liked the job because I didn’t have to bring it home with me, and because, for the most part, my mind was mine during the day. I wasn’t tasked with intellectually challenges, which left my brain free for writing when I wasn’t working.
Now I’m living my dreams, but I’m fucking exhausted.
I understand that, if I were a healthy person, I would have more energy, but I also wonder what the definition of “health” is, and if any of us are really able to maintain both mental and physical health in a culture that asks so much of us.
I understand that I take on too much work because I am terrified of not having enough resources to support myself, and because I am still learning how to manage my money; something I was never taught (or something I was taught incorrectly).
I understand that my scarcity mentality and fear of not having enough keeps my body in a heightened limbic state which only increases my sense of exhaustion.
I understand that I am healing from a spinal surgery.
I understand that, in order to thrive in my own life, I need to create habits for myself that are nurturing.
A long time ago, when I had just turned twenty (in August 2000), I was driving back across the country from Chicago to Oregon. I’d gone to Chicago on a whim, after my first fire season, and driven there with a friend a decade older than me. Back then I was a creature who appeared whole but was actually a void encased in a hard, nearly impenetrable shell.
My friend and I bought a bunch of methamphetamine and hopped in my car and stayed awake from three days till we got to Denver with raw noses and bodies so tired our bones ached. I drove in snow for the first time, coming over the western passes of Colorado. We got lost on a dirt road in Wyoming (no smart phones back then!).
It was stressful as fuck.
In Chicago my friend and I stayed with her semi-famous musician boyfriend and did a lot of drugs. I did whatever was given to me, including crack. That’s how I was. Anything to escape the present reality of my existence. I spent a lot of time walking around Chicago, listening to music on my Walkman; a habit I picked up very young in order to escape the small apartments I shared with my unpredictable mother.
We went to various clubs, me with my fake ID, and sold ecstasy and cocaine. I found a new person to sleep with most nights. I got a job with a catering agency and decided to stay in Chicago, then changed my mind and decided to drive back to Oregon by myself in late October.
On Halloween night I stopped in Madison, Wisconsin, specifically to party. Driving was lonely, even with the Ritalin I crushed up and snorted in rest stop bathrooms.
I met two men, a graduate student and his older friend, both of whom were good people. We drank together and ended up in the older man’s basement snorting cocaine. I remember so vividly when the man, whose wife was sleeping upstairs, said, “you have the tools to live the life you want, you just don’t know how to use them.” He was a professor of some sort. We’d been talking about Buddhism, about kindness, about living a good life, and I’d told him I couldn’t do it because my primary drive was to destroy myself.
We’d been talking about Buddhism, about kindness, about living a good life, and I’d told him I couldn’t do it because my primary drive was to destroy myself.
That’s not who I am now.
I am fairly meticulous about what I put into my body, get ample exercise, overly obsess about the way I treat people (always wanting to be kind and do right by others), and drink a lot of water. I have been sober from alcohol for nearly two years, and before those two years hadn’t gotten drunk for several years.
I have a very different relationship with myself than I did ten or twenty years ago.
Perfectionism was the root of my self-destructive drive.
I thought I needed to be someone else. I didn’t think I was good enough. I’m grateful to say that I know I am good enough now, but there are little remnants of those self-destructive qualities that will always remain inside of me, and these are what I navigate as a chronically ill person living in grind culture.
And it’s funny, because I frame these things— this need to produce a ridiculous amount of work, to be a perfect presentation of myself rather than someone who is flawed and entirely capable of hurting others and myself— I frame them as personal shortcoming when in reality the shortcoming is cultural.
The culture of white supremacy, the culture all of us live inside of whether we admit it or not, promotes violent perfectionism. It orders us to police ourselves and each other in order to maintain a perpetual sense of failure.
That sense of failure is often instilled very young, and is maintained in uncountable ways. Once we are sure we’re fatally flawed as human beings, our culture tells us there’s a way to redeem ourselves: hard work. We must work hard. Work hard doing what? Your choice. Dieting. Making money. Creating art. Beautifying. Dominating.
Last August I began yoga nidra training with Tracee Stanley, a former Hollywood producer who decided to leave Hollywood and study (you guessed it) yoga nidra.
Yoga nidra is the yoga of rest. It’s done almost entirely supine, eyes closed.
In my training there was a lot of emphasis on creating space. Noticing and expanding the space inside of transitions we ordinarily encounter throughout the day. The transition between waking and sleeping. The transition between sitting and standing. Transitions between meetings or conversations.
Think of how many transitions we have throughout our days and how revolutionary it is to ask yourself to pause in those spaces and expand them.
In my training I came to understand, in a felt sense, the ambient level of limbic arousal I had learned to accept in my own life.
Limbic arousal is also called the fight or flight (or freeze) response. It’s inherently dissociative.
I came to understand that I often reacted from this space of fear and scarcity, and that my reactions were rarely grounded in reality. I still react this way, but less often now.
Yesterday I went to see my doctor and asked her why I was so tired. She told me what I’d hoped to hear: “you are tired because you just had spinal surgery, and you need to let yourself rest.”
I needed that permission. I believe wholeheartedly that one of the catalysts for my autoimmune disorder was an inability to rest.
But I still need permission.
Today I am at a coffee shop. I am sitting, which feels amazing after a month of not being able to. And I woke up this morning with the permission to rest. Whatever rest looks like for me in any moment. I remind myself that this is in direct opposition with what my social training tells me to do. I delete my social media apps because they’ve been sucking my energy and keeping me anxious.
I let myself sleep in until I wake up naturally, because why force myself to wake up at 6am if I don’t have to?
Having experimented with rest for the past two years I’ve found this to be true: rest results in increased energy and well being. When I allow myself to rest, I am a better person. When I don’t, I get sick.
I am learning that, in resting, I may disappoint some people by not showing up in the way they want me to, and my priority continues to be rest. Without rest, everything will eventually explode in one way or another, and I will lose myself. I know that from experience.
Beautiful. I am coming to terms with my limitations/abilities and how much rest I need. Perfection and permission have been a big for me lately. Your work always inspires my own and hits on themes that swirl around in my life. Thank you for sharing!