Back in my Body
Or why I'll be wearing my floatiest clothes and listening to the most poetic songs until I feel myself.
Looking around at our house, my garden, and myself in this covid induced mess, all I see is defeat. I’m forced to be resigned to my garden not being what I hoped for this summer. I am not what I hoped I would be either. We are down again, it feels, to the bare bones of survival and exhaustion.
I feel completely lost as I try to come up for air after what feels like a lifetime of intensive mothering, of denying myself, of resignation to impossibilities. On the horizon rises all my children at school for the first time in 14 years. But now I face expectations, cheery queries. What now? A job? Of course, since I’ve been sitting here parasitically, I’d better finally contribute. Or: Now it’s time to choose yourself, Danielle. Go to school. Hustle to prove my brain cells aren’t dead, (except what if my brain cells are dead? They feel dead). Earn my place of belonging. What do you want, they ask. It’s all dizzying and I am tired of even fielding the questions.
____NO ____
In this moment of assumptions and overwhelm, the antidote is to stop all the noise. And connect to my own self again. Whole. Who am I right now? I don’t know. And it’s right to be feeling unsure. It is no failure to not know as I approach a gate to a life I have never lived before. I quiet all the expectations and demands and judgements and other people’s plans. Tapping into my own essence, however simple and slight the action may be, to feel anything that IS fundamentally whole about me. What feels good right now? Back in my body as Maggie sings. That’s all I need to know.
Covid induces the same dizziness. Upside down and back into survival we go, when we live in a state of near maxed out baseline because we do this child rearing alone, and with trauma, and deep depletion, and under-resourced. We have to pick ourselves up from here. Again. With such an unsurmountable, it feels, catch-up ahead that same tired survival narrative seeps in. Overwhelm as we take the inventory of weary bodies and minds. Maybe our spirits are sapped too? But, oh, aren’t we eager to make plans and get back to living?
____SO____
Quiet all the noise. All the expectations. And back to what FEELS like us again. However silly and small. Because that is the weapon to fight the hollowed-out survival narrative. The antidote. It is wholeness. Joy. Pleasure. Expression. Paint on the walls. A beautiful loaf of bread even if you can’t taste all of it. Every layer of prettiest clothes that feel like YOU. Arms out lost in music you love and can feel in your blood. Back in our bodies. That’s all we need to do.