Letting myself fall apart
Because convalescence is all part of the process, and isn't a dirty word
This will be a bit of a ramble, a stream of consciousness. As you’ve probably noticed, this newsletter - for the time being - has no real rhyme or set schedule. I adhere, mostly, to my prescribed amalgam of topics but (as is discussed in today’s piece) for years I have been in a cocoon, turning into primordial goo one imaginal cell at a time. This requires a lot of flexibility. So we proceed, loosey-goosey, into the void together.
There’s a bargaining that every human body engages in before it collapses into torpor. Some call it ‘running on fumes.’ You can be in burnout, treading water - or like Wile E. Coyote, treading air above an unforgiving chasm - long before it actually claims you. When it catches up and enfolds you in its ghostly embrace, it can feel shocking despite the fact that it was chasing you for a very long time. Perhaps you ignored the signs. Perhaps you didn’t know what the signs even were. Perhaps you lived behind a mask for so long that there was a deep disconnect to the body and its myriad (albeit sometimes nebulous) communications.
Whatever the case, it never ceases to amaze me how long the body can go on for in arousal, hyper-vigilance and survivalism before it says no. Many people with my condition (Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, with a lil AuDHD mixed in for funsies) know this collapse all too well. Those of us with hEDS have the added humour of quite literally ‘holding it together’ with our overly tight muscles as our joints don’t know how to handle themselves - and so the muscles quite literally have to buttress the whole damn thing.
Skeletons covered with meat hurtling through space. That’s all this is and all it ever will be.
I can’t tell you how many videos or memes I’ve come across over the last decade reminding the audience to relax their jaw and drop their shoulders. We’ve collectively forgotten how to breathe and simply be, and for very valid reasons. Instagram feeds and Substack posts galore reminding us (because we desperately need reminding) that we’re still human - and now with AI, we are caught in a moralistic battle with defending our humanity against computers. It seems that each and every day there is some fresh horror, some vital way that humans in power have lost the plot, directing us towards ruin, and so collectively we are like Wile E., attempting not to look down into the abyss.
Because that is the rule in cartoons, after all: you may defy gravity and maintain your illusion so long as you don’t acknowledge the predicament you’re in. Collectively, this is where we are. And this is why we’re so fucking tense. We’re all doing some manner of holding it together - whether you received your connective tissue from Temu like me, whether your body has already said ‘no’ to this macabre circus, whether you’re sensitive to it or not - it doesn’t matter. We’re all a part of this earth and so we all feel it to some degree. Those of us with any level of sensitivity just so happen to be canaries in the coal mine. Canaries are not feeble, but they are fragile. The sensitive among us, ditto.
Never would I have considered myself feeble. I was a track and field star when I was younger. I played every sport, I went to the gym religiously, I compulsively rearranged all of my furniture in ADHD fits of feng shui passion, I carried many children on my hips, I held aloft about thirty spinning plates for many decades. Yet it all had its reckoning in time. Who knows when the gas finally left my tank and I was running on fumes - what a gift it would be for god, or whomever runs this show, to hand me the exact date. Was it my father’s heart attack in April of 2016? Was it my concussion in 2018? Was it navigating cancel culture and a novel pandemic in 2020? The great shipping disaster that my business endured in 2021? Or did it begin brewing long before? I’ve spent time speculating. We map backwards in order to chart better navigations forwards.
There are always triggers - things that shift the body from one iteration of itself into another. Not everyone experiences it as intensely as those who become chronically ill, of course. But triggers nonetheless - like the collapse of the clay wall of a vase moments before it gets fired in the kiln. It’s set now. This is who we become. And it is time to accept the new normal.
Except - the question always is: how is that possible in this world, when every single message we receive from the outside reflects ableism’s ideologies? How can we allow ourselves to fall apart as we need to?
When my beloved cat, Baboo, died in early 2018 I was fortunate enough to have enough entrepreneurial success under my belt to grieve and convalesce as needed, not under some other employer’s timeline. The grief of losing a pet can often be labelled as ‘disenfranchised’ as many don’t understand - or care about - the love of an animal. They have no empathy for the fact that this grief is tantamount to losing a human beloved. Had I been working for someone else who lacked this vital empathy, my grief would have been suffocated daily under the guise of pleasantries. I would have had to suppress it, like we suppress many of our grievances that we are forced to carry daily.
We do not allot ample time for convalescence anymore - in fact, I’d not be surprised if the younger among this readership are unfamiliar with the term. Even the expression of the word itself: con-va-les-cence…feels like an unfolding, an unravelling. I picture velvet or satin fabric being unrolled to allow the body to collapse into its sweet textural embrace, making ample space for rest until the weariness has left the bones.
People used to convalesce by the seaside, the fireside, deep in primordial caves, in cocoons or wombs of their own creation. This is the only way to replenish what was siphoned so egregiously from the body, mind and soul. Fatigue, weariness, depletion, exhaustion that a protein smoothie, a good night’s rest, and a HIIT workout will not fix. But a body that cannot access these deeper levels of rest where fewer plates are spinning overhead will enter a state of hyper-vigilance and survival. There is simply no other channel for the body to switch to. We have palaeolithic nervous systems that have not caught up to the demands of modern life. And they never will! Never! Not likely, at least, before we stamp ourselves out of evolution utterly, which seems to be our trajectory. Our brains and our nervous systems remain miraculous, complex, awe-inspiring and magical, but they are not modern technology. They’re not meant for this. We’re not meant for this. And the more exposed we are to it, the more hyper-arousal ensues, which can only lead to burnout. The body will say no. It’s just a matter of when.
A few years ago, thanks to Tricia Heresy, we learned about rest as resistance to capitalism. As an act of defiance against the system which is hellbent on sucking every last bit of marrow from the bones of its exhausted populous. A veritable fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me to corporations and governments who do not care about us. But defiance in and of itself is an act based in arousal and tension - the very energy that depletes the gas in our tank in the first place. We need to be operating from a place of true surrender to what the body will (and wants to do). We need to conjure normalcy in resting, in doing less, in falling apart. We need to extend our time in grief, in convalescence, to its natural edges instead of these truncated, severing timeframes that are ‘offered’ to us by capitalism.
There is nothing natural about how we operate now, except in the softness we find in the moments in between spikes in cortisol. We must remember that softness and encourage it to grow. It has atrophied, nothing more. It’s not dead, it’s not hopeless. Resistance to capitalism is wonderful if you have the energy to put up towards said resistance. Surrendering to the softness and the collapse of the body, giving it the time it needs to feel safe - this is what is on offer for those of us who no longer have the energy reserves to resist. Those who are disabled, exhausted, burnt out, ill, or those who just sense, deep down, that this way of life isn’t okay.
But first, we need to acknowledge our predicament. Like Wile E., we need to look down into the abyss. We need to greet it and shake its hand.
“Hello, abyss.” We can say. “How are you? What is it that you’ve been wanting to say to me for some time? What do you have to teach me?”
Chances are, it will speak. And from the gaping maw, a different body will emerge. This is scary, I know. We’re so used to running on fumes. We’re so used to squeezing it all together. We don’t know another way. But the body does.
The body does.
The body does.
It is a skeleton covered in meat hurtling through space.
And that is all you need to know.
Until next time,
Love and wolves.
D xx
P.S. It’s worth mentioning that in disability circles, one’s lovability is constantly called into question due to one’s output and productivity being the measure of one’s validity in this world. But given that softness and surrender are actually vital to life, and many people are waking up to this basic fact - we no longer need to call our lovability into question as we once did.
Recently, Jimothy The Raccoon has been making big waves on social media. He’s cute as hell, he’s disabled, and he’s a fucking icon. The internet is swooning over him - and lo and behold, that is because being disabled doesn’t make anyone less lovable. We do indeed have a long way to go before that kind of pure love and acceptance extends towards disabled humans, but my desire is that we’ll know our worth and lovability deep in our hearts sooner rather than later, because softness isn’t simply a rebellion anymore - it is our birthright.
thank you <3 feeling the need for rest and downshifting so much this week
Beautiful and exactly what I needed to begin this weekend. Thank you.