Old Habits Die Hard

Overwhelm, success, and the old monsters with their old, ugly heads

I knew this week that I was in over my head when I missed my therapy appointment.

I’ve been in therapy on and off for years — almost a decade at this point — and I’ve never forgotten about an appointment before. There I was, though, on my bedroom floor, licking and stamping 100 envelopes for 100 poems I’d written over the course of two days to be mailed to strangers. For the entire hour that I was meant to be telling my therapist about these weeks of really applying myself, and feeling the edge of an uplevel, all my little pits of grief, my overwhelm, my trying and trying and trying, I was peeling American flags off their sheets and adhering them to the right-hand side of so many postal addresses. I mean, I was in the zone. I mean, I was totally available for a mental health check-in that I probably sorely needed.

When I came out of the work-hole that I’ve associated since I was a child with seasons of extreme momentum paired with stress paired with a somewhat-unhealthy work ethic — I’m usually hunched over and creating something on the floor, my body is usually screaming, my brain is usually hell-bent on just completing the task at any cost — I looked at my phone and saw a text from my therapist — Hey, are you coming? Oh no! What a horrible feeling! I was not, in fact, coming, because it was hours later, oops, and I was probably hungry, so I became only more overwhelmed, and also guilty, plus I had a wild first-kick instinct that my therapist was mad at me, and actually this might apply to all of my friends, everyone was annoyed, I had dropped one of my spinning plates and so was bound to drop all of them.

It's interesting to witness an old pattern rearing its ugly head in real time. This one of mine is made up of a lot of habitual trappings: all-or-nothing thinking, fear of letting others down, fear of imperfection, overwork to the point of it being physically impossible for me not to mess up, I am only one person, I have only one brain, and to think of it I haven’t been taking very good care of it. I have a history of struggling to accept myself in my own messy humanness and a stubborn conception that I should be the exception to all the rules.

I don’t adore these parts of myself, and I thought that perhaps, in all the deep self-work and journaling and forgiveness and accountability and spine-growing and letting go of things that I’ve done in the last six months, five years, decade, I had healed these things in me.

The thing is: I think that in a large way I have. I know that I’ve made so much progress and I know I am doing my best. Nothing is linear, but especially not healing. These are traits that I will probably always carry — they will go dormant in some seasons, and spring up in others. It makes sense that some of the parts of myself that I struggle with would come up now: I am doing more with my creativity than I ever have before; I am putting myself out there, I am gaining momentum; every day it feels there is more on my plate.

I have a hard time knowing when to pump the brakes — when to say, “Enough,” when to wander out into a field and lay down and do nothing.

Which is funny, because it seems almost every day I am writing a poem for someone who comes to me in this exact headspace, and the poem tells them to do just that. Unplug. Stretch the shoulders. There is no rush, the poem says. There is time. You have breath in your lungs and what a gift that is. What a wonder. Slow down and sit in the sun.

I am remembering something my therapist said to me back in October, which was: You cannot work yourself out of burnout. She said it in a way and at a time that it was able to get through to me, it struck such a chord, I mean obviously you cannot work your way out of burnout but the pesky little exceptionalist in my brain whispered in my ear But YOU, you can! So I took three weeks off, and in that time realized what I’d been working so hard to avoid: that I had to leave my relationship. That I had to leave my job. Both were sucking me dry and I’d been moving at a hundred miles an hour for years so as to prevent myself from actually noticing this.

I’m not at all in the same space now — I’ve freed myself from those weights that were making every move I made feel heavy, dreaded — but it’s worth considering those words of my therapist’s now, again, because I was not present for our appointment this week, so I’ll have to dig into the archives. The potential weight I now have to contend with is in my own self, in my fear, in the way in which success and busy seasons might trigger my worst instincts. I need to be conscious of this and not fall into these quicksand pits.

Because in an ideal world, I get to keep growing, getting bigger, in this way that I have been. And I have to learn how to do this sustainably. Which will require me to ground. To breathe. To spend plenty of time wandering out and resting. It will require me to look up from where I’m hunched over at my typewriter and remind myself that the point of all of this is not stress, is not check-lists, but awe. Reveling in this life I have made. Savoring it.

And I’ll tell myself this, now, too: My therapist is not mad at me. She got paid and if anything, I gave her a tiny moment of pause: 45 unexpected minutes during which I hope she kicked up her feet, took a sip of a cold drink, and put on her favorite TV show. Or went outside with her dogs to look at the sky. Or called her mom. It was a beautiful day. A real proper spring evening. I hope she loved every second of it.

I hope that I then will let myself do the same.