This feels like a fitting title both for what I’d like to share, as well as for a post after again having taken some time away from this project. Welcome back if you’ve been following along!
I could begin several places for this one.
I’m going to begin here:
I feel like I’ve had decent stamina for most of my life.
This can be both a wonderful, supportive part of my experience of myself and it can also be a force towards running myself too hard or thin.
I’ve been aware for a while that I’ve been living without an entirely full battery. I’ve been in active, mindful process with this awareness and in turn my energy and needs repair system. I pay fairly regimented attention to how I take of myself, to what’s working and what’s not and most of the time I’m able to shift the things around I need to, to choose sustained wellbeing. This can look like knowing when I need to receive care and support from others, when I need time alone, to making changes to what and how I do things in a day based on what drains me versus fills me up. When I feel tired, I move further towards a more balanced work, leisure and rest ratio in my days, make supportive changes to my nutrition and exercise practices and I engage in my own therapy regularly.
Despite all of these efforts, I still haven’t been able to get myself to a place that’s as whole and filled up as I know I’m capable of being - if I really think about since the pandemic happened.
I do live with an ADHD diagnosis and have had to accept some ongoing fatigue as part of this – but I also haven’t been willing to accept that ADHD was all that was going on here. Or furthermore, that this background hum fatigue was something I had to just live with, at least not before trying a few more things to break through it.
So, I did what has worked really well for me at other, less responsibility heavy times in my life, and I went on a trip! By myself!
And it very much worked to restore so many aspects of not only my energy levels in really sustained way (I feel more fully rested than I have in months), but also my relationship with myself! And it has had lasting effects these ways as well as on my perspective that I’m very excited about and wanted to share.
If this speaks to you, or your someone who fights the tiredness fight in any sort of recurrent way in your life, I invite you to read on and I’ll walk you through the core parts of the renewal process as I experienced them…
I took myself to Cuba for my 31st birthday.
I have travelled solo before, but not in a while. Not since before the pandemic.
It was strange going to a country right after it had experienced a major hurricane. Hurricane Ian touched down four days before I got there. Before I left, all the travel advisories assured me the major power systems had been or would be restored by the time I arrived, and that it was safe to travel there.
‘Vacations’ going ahead as planned, following a natural disaster (that it turned out had not hit the areas I was going to as badly as some other parts of the island), felt like a major magnifying glass on the privilege most of us have in Canada that I know I so often take for granted. I got feeling decently guilty and wasn’t entirely sure how much sense it made to go ahead as if everyone there was just immediately ready for tourists. But I decided to trust that if I their doors were saying open, that I could proceed with my time away in decent enough faith.
The beauty of the scenery, the weather and the welcome embrace of the people I met once I got there, assured me of my decision’s merit. And that challenge and wonderfulness can coexist at once.
After I’d gotten a few days of meaningful rest under my belt – and was just thinking how carefree and relaxed I felt, more so than in recent memory, an interesting shift in my internal landscape started to become noticeable.
A building rumble of anxiety and the sort of mixed emotional blur that most of us will default to call discomfort or tension started to make itself known from within me. And then one afternoon it just hit me. And a lot of old stuff started coming up at once.
Rationally I know that this (repression resurfacing) is more likely than not to happen when we have more space and focus on that space than we usually do. In particular space devoid of distraction, pressing responsibility or the clear direction of a mapped-out day that tells our mind where to go and what to pay attention to. This sort of space, which is what I was fully in, offers our subconscious the chance to revisit important needs, previously set aside or suppressed/repressed. Repressed need resurfacing will often feel like emotions or memories coming up ‘out of the blue,’ – but it’s far from random.
Whatever surprise mental content that is going to come up in a time of greater space, just equates to needs and experiences that have been in you, often for a long time, that have needed more consideration than they’ve gotten. And now enough of you feels safe and otherwise unoccupied enough for that to happen. It’s actually a pretty cool thing – but can be altogether disarming when it happens.
I’d suspected some baggage might get unearthed for me on this trip. I think I was in part inviting it to. A lot has happened in the past few years. And it wouldn’t be fair for me to let myself think I’d processed all of it, despite my best attempts to.
At first, I wanted to resist the thoughts and emotions that were bubbling up. A lot of what was arising was deeply uncomfortable - anxiety, anger, sadness, rage, despair, grief, fear, shame – with lots of stories and urgings for problem solving all mixed together. I considered trying harder than it seemed I had been to distract myself from all of this and to just ‘enjoy my vacation.’
But I knew dismissing these emotions and the needs connected to them would just be passing the buck down the line, to future me. And I care about future me. I don’t want her to have to suffer any more than she might already have to because I was scared today.
I know deferring is not how healing works. I know as well that we can’t get rid of our needs. They don’t go away when we dismiss them – they just shapeshift and then come back up again. So the fairest, kindest, most effective thing we can do when old needs come up is to listen to them and see where were still might need to bring support to them.
And while I know all of this in practice, I was still uncertain and fearful as to whether I’d be able to handle the full weight of what was arising for me. That day. In that moment. Yet enough of me had accepted the importance of honouring these revisitations as important, especially given that my instinct system had felt like now was the time, alone, so I wouldn’t dare miss them, that I was committed to staying their course and finding out what they needed.
So, I did the very best I could to just be with, listen to and understand what was going on inside of me. This looked like me ‘sitting with my feelings’ on and off for about 4-6 hours, reflecting, journaling and not being able to do much else. Yes, that’s sometimes how long it takes.
I am aware it is a privilege to have that much undivided time for myself.
But I also know I fought for this time. And that it didn’t necessarily feel easy to carve it out, but also that it was well worth it. And I’m so glad I did.
What I’ve just described, in as much detail as I felt made sense, given what I’m also aware is an interesting professional-personal vulnerability boundary I’m treading–were a few of the most emotionally painful hours I’ve experienced in years.
The emotional contacting I allowed myself, resulted in a deep catharsis. I was tired for the first few hours afterwards. I was a bit disoriented and had to do some fairly active grounding work to fully come back to myself.
Once the wave of all those old hurts and needs had crested, been understood and listened to, even made plans for, but if nothing more allowed to be with and be in me with as little judgement as I could muster (there was still some judgement in there, I’m not perfect at this,) I was flooded with an expansive sense of relief and clarity. Of heightened acceptance towards myself and others, of a sense of peace, possibility and patience and most importantly of even more trust in myself than I’d had previously.
And it has lasted. I have felt clearer, kinder, more discerning and more hopeful with and about myself and many core parts of my life since. I have been more present to the moments in my days, with renewed intensity, and less active effort than mindfulness normally takes for me.
And I am left with the sense, strange to the rational part of my brain, that I am grateful for being able to experience the pain I did. Or at least my willingness to be open to it in the way that I tried to be.
I suspect I will be less afraid of similar sorts of pains when they arrive in the future. This has at certainly given me renewed trust to welcome them.
I would understand if one might think it strange that I would go through what I’ve just described while on ‘vacation.’ Trust me I also felt joy, elation, wonder, calm, peace and gratitude while I was there. Interestingly, while these sensations were pleasant, and I enjoyed them– these emotions didn’t have as much to teach me about myself, and didn’t seem to be what my deeper needs were connected to.
While writing this post, an act I often find helps connect mind and body for me, it occurred to me what my ‘vacation’ really was from. It was a vacation from pretending (intentionally or not) that I’m more ok than I have been, from hiding from parts of my life and self that I didn’t want to face because I knew it would hurt to do so, and from not letting myself realize how ok it was to feel all that so clearly needed to be felt.
In my gratitude for what this has done for me, I want to emphasize for anyone who might be ready or able to hear this, how ok it is to be afraid of your feelings at first. In the moment that these suppressed wounds resurfaced, I wasn’t thinking about how much clarity I’d have once these pains settled. It honestly didn’t even occur to me. Only the pain seemed real. But the pain did pass. And as it did, this renewed my trust in the process of facing our wounds. In just breathing. In believing in ourselves even when we’re not sure it makes sense to.
I know how many reminders I’ve needed to trust enough in this path to risk trying care in the face of my own pain. It really is one of the greatest paradoxes of our lives – the whole leaning into our discomfort thing. Trying to love ourselves when we’re hurting. It never really feels like it makes sense to – but then it’s the only thing that really works. And lasts.
So I wanted to share my experience, in case it might either be validating in it’s familiarity or reassuring in the value of trying even when it’s scary. I promise, listening to and showing up for yourself with gentleness and care works eventually. Whether you’re home home or out in the world trying to come home to yourself - know that your trying matters and will eventually work.
I wasn’t always this willing to be with myself. But I’m so happy I am.
And I guess that is the resounding confirmation that I’m left with from all of this - that sometimes we have to go away to have enough space and perspective to know what we need - in our selves or in our home. A going away to come back so to speak.
Being in the truth of this as I was and still am, affirms so deeply how there is and has to be room for all of it; the starts and the endings, the space and the busyness, the easy and the painful, the soft and the hard. It can all be welcome if we want it badly enough. Know, you are capable of loving yourself not in spite of, but with, everything you’ve lived through. And that’s a more beautiful thing than any vacation will ever be able to offer any of us.
Renewed in this truth, I’m more home at home now than I’ve been in a long time and I’m so grateful.
With this welcome lesson from my heart to yours, big hugs,
Carly
