Falling out of practice—and presence

I haven't been able to find my joy these past few weeks. I've been doing most of the things that I've learned that help me. I read in the morning. I walk Ruby. Okay, so maybe that's only two things. I haven't been journaling, or tracking my energy based on my cycle. I haven't really been meditating. Instead, I’m going on mute and working though my twice weekly group sessions, or putting on a yoga nidra meditation and falling asleep.

I feel very drifty; a little bit untethered I suppose. I know this feeling. It's not necessarily stuckness, because there's no heaviness or shoulds, or feeling of captivity weighing me down. Feeling stuck, for me, carries the weight of guilt, or shame, or not living up to expectations. It feels tight and confined. What I'm feeling right now isn't that.

This feeling is more like floating. Maybe floating outside myself? It's a very tangible, perceivable disconnection. A lack of presence. Which is especially unsettling for me since presence is one of my core desired feelings (I'll go into core desired feelings more in another post).

I can't put my finger on where or when this most recent disconnection happened. But it does feel like I'm missing some of the ingredients in the recipe that I know puts me in a more open, receptive, and present state.

One of these ingredients, maybe the biggest one, to be honest, is rest. These last few weeks at work have been overwhelming. I've done really well at maintaining my boundaries, for the most part, of not working before 9 or after 5:30. (Nope, that’s another lie. I’ve been online by 8:30 most mornings.) But the hours in between, with either ten meetings a day or a litany of tasks to complete that fall into my shoulds category, have taken their toll.

I've been having to carry a lot of emotional weight for the people on my team, too. They're all working through their own frustrations and self doubt, burnout and overwhelm. They know I understand this, and I’ve made myself available to help them though it. So while it's entirely of my own doing, helping them carry their weight makes mine even heavier.

Then there's my family. It's taboo to talk about your kids being a burden, but when you're so depleted from everything else life is throwing at you, that's honestly what it feels like.

My 11 year old daughter was diagnosed with ADHD earlier this year. We've been trying to get the medication and the dosage right. Switching to a new therapist. Working with her teachers on classroom accommodations. Leaning to approach her patterns and behaviors differently at home. Rethinking her bat mitzvah (she doesn't even want to have one, which breaks my heart). I'm handing all of this much better than I would have a year ago, but that doesn't mean it's still not exhausting.

Then there’s the constant drama between her and my 7 year old son. The arguing over the most trivial things feels like it's reached a new level of intensity and insanity. My husband's MO is to be rational for the first few minutes, then to break out the wrath-of-god parent voice. And shit, I get that, because it's what I want to do most of the time, too. But all the personal work I've been doing these past few years tells me that that's not going to make anything better, so I end up being the good cop. The mediator. I try to work things out through talking, empathy, compromise. And I wind up being the one who consoles them, or tries to convince both sides to apologize, when the yelling backfires. (I recognize and accept the resentment in that statement.) I guess you could say I'm carrying a lot of emotional weight for my family right now, too.

Here's where the core of my untethered feeling lies. With all of this doing and carrying for everyone else, I don't have anything left to keep myself grounded.

Maybe we float outside ourselves when there's no energy left to be present. Being present means acknowledging how hard things are. Floating above it all has to be less taxing than recognizing and feeling it, right? That's numbness at its core. Disassociation, the great self preservation mechanism.

I don’t want to be disassociated. Although I would like to be disconnected—in the sense of disconnecting my energy from everyone else’s and finding a place to rest. Time and space that is just mine. Long hikes in the forest. No alarm clocks. No kids. No deadlines. Just sunrises. Afternoon naps. Eating whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it, without cooking for anyone else. But life doesn't have room for those things at the moment, so I'm going to have to steal whatever small bits of rest I can find, and hope they're enough to get me through. I'm been meaning to try the chakra/energy cleanses my coach taught me. But I haven’t had enough time, ha.

There's an amazing quote I have on my bulletin board from yung pueblo's book, Clarity & Connection:
"maturity is knowing that when your mood is down you should not trust the way you see yourself."

I come back to this quote often, and take great solace in it. A year ago...hell, six months ago, I would have described my current mood and this moment as despair. Depression. Failure. Being broken. Stuckness. Shame. I know today that it's not any of those things.

I am not my feelings. I am not broken. I am, in the most basic physical, emotional, and spiritual sense, exhausted.

I know this will pass. Just writing about it helps (although I have been interrupted by my kids needing to tell me about slime 6 times now). And if you're feeling any of this, too, please know it's not forever.

So maybe it's not that I'm out of practice with meditation and journaling. Maybe those are shoulds for me right now. Maybe I just need sleep and peace and solitude. I'm not sure how I'm going to find those, though. Is simply recognizing what I need actually a step in the right direction?

We'll see. I keep coming back to the core understanding that I am not my thoughts or feelings. That is my anchor right now. The place that feels most real. And I am grateful as hell for that.