I am moving slower these days. It is a very different experience and reality for me.
I am used to (feeling like I have to) move and do a lot in one day.
But, this new reality is also very good for me: it is positive, a promising sign of healing.
After I shared this with my best friend, that I was moving slower, and while we both agreed that it was good for me, she also said: “That must be hard for you…you’re used to going, going, going.”
And it is. I am.
I have done this for a long time, because I needed to, and for a long time, it served me.
I had to do it and I developed it as a survival mechanism.
When people asked me how I finished my doctoral program while my father completed suicide and my mother had a mental breakdown and fell apart, this is how—
I adapted survival skills, of moving faster and doing more in one day, and I had to rely on these adaptations for a long time to power through.
I understand now that is a trauma response, and the byproduct of it is that I have struggled to learn to relax.
This is also because for so many years I was in a constant state of fight or flight mode. My parasympathetic nervous system as always on a high alert status. I was constantly hyper-vigilant, my cortisol—the stress hormone—surging, very high. (This is supported by science—those with PTSD often have the cortisol levels of those if—when spread across 3-4 individuals would still be considered ‘higher than normal’.)
But now, that I have undergone some somatic healing, done therapy and various methods of trauma healing, my body and mind is calmer, but my energy levels are much more like that of a normal person.
It’s healthy, and yet it is strange to me.
This is not how I have lived my life for the past 8.5 years. That is a long time, and so I have to mentally adjust my standards of normal productivity, allowing myself not to be uber-productive and in super busy mode.
The result: I take a while to wake up in the morning. (Partly also due to a new insomnia medication which means that I am sleeping better than I have in years.) But, at home, I spend a lot of reading and relaxing, staying cozy and warm, safe and secure in my home. Alone.
Just being.
That’s important, because I don’t always relax well. I don’t know how, or I’ve forgotten.
Sometimes, even still, I hear the annoying, nagging voice, chastising me that I ought to be doing something else, something more, being more productive.
But—it’s my trauma and the voice of the inner wounded child, the child of the alcoholic, who learned that she was to be the great beacon of hope for the family by performing well and succeeded. She didn’t learn well that just “being” and existing was enough for love.
So I have had to re-teach her that: I [will] still work and accomplish endeavors, but I am also working to give myself permission to relax some. And enjoying the benefits of a calmer state of being, a more relaxed state of homeostasis.
I tell myself, even when I have sometimes repeatedly remind myself, both, it is okay, that I have earned that with everything I’ve been through.
And even then—you don’t need to earn rest. The great capitalist lie: that just ‘being’ is just fine. It is enough.