A few other working titles I had for this one:
-"When time isn’t yours anymore (and maybe it never was)”
-“Weeks that bring you to your knees.”
Or
-“OK, fine. I give up.”
dialoguing is a newsletter from an off-duty psychotherapist keeping the conversation going on how to make sense of this life thing we’re all doing. if you ever wondered what your therapist does off the clock—which, who among us hasn’t?—this is like that. think of it as the adult equivalent of seeing your elementary teacher at the grocery store picking out lemons. 🍋
what to expect from this edition:
mine: personal essay about what I learned this week–the power and clarity in giving up
ours: dialogue of the week–hopelessness
yours: the thing I’m on-exploring the lymphatic system
Inner-dialoguing–I am surrendering
If you want more info and my full disclaimer check out the about page here. Abridged version: I’m a therapist, but not your therapist—even if you are a client of mine ~hi!~ this isn’t a session. dialoguing is an educational and informational newsletter only, not a substitute for mental health treatment. If you’re new here, a great place to start is my first ever edition of this newsletter.
Content Warning: Discussions around parenting, grieving, and as the title would suggest, lots of hopelessness …and it’s explicit, as always
dialoguing with myself: what I learned this week
The power and clarity in giving up…
Before I fully gave up, I had been picking up steam and defining structure. I started implementing new parameters around the writing of this newsletter. Entering into my google calendar times when I planned to work on this. Instead of fitting it in where I could, I set aside time. Protected. Last Friday I worked for a few hours at a cozy little coffee shop here in downtown Denver. Feeling legit and making progress. I even looked ahead to the beginning of the following week, using breaks in my practice schedule to get ahead on this.
By that very same Friday night, I was just barely holding on through bedtime routine with our son, Archie, before collapsing into bed pre-9PM. When Saturday morning came, I was shaking with chills. A heinous cold had made it’s way to me and an atmospheric cold front had made its way through the country closing my son’s school for 2 days.
Being sick when you have a child is a special kind of hell. You feel like shit because, well, you feel like shit, but then also the guilt. Some of which is guilt that is not your own (the voice that says you need to be everything to everyone at every moment, aka Martyrdom Central Station), but then there is the guilt that is your own. Missing cuddles, play, and what I felt this time, for maybe the first time, was the inability to be close to him. Usually we are sharing the same cold he brought home from school so I have never really “quarantined” from him. This time, I tried to take as much distance as possible because I was the only one sick in my house. This cold had every bone in my body aching and I was sweating off fevers left and right. I don’t sweat much because of my skin condition* so this was truly alarming to me. I didn’t want anyone else to feel this if I could help it.
I couldn’t do anything other than simply get through. I felt distant from my thoughts. I tried writing a few times and just couldn’t. I did my best to rest and let my husband take over with childcare, but as anyone with kids knows (1) you just feel the aforementioned guilt the whole time and (2) there is no full rest when there is a young child in the home.
I would just be slipping off to sleep and Arch busts into the bedroom, “MOM I GOT A KEY CHAIN. LOOK! ARE YOU BETTER?”
For the most part, he absorbed I’m not at full capacity and has been uncharacteristically “yes sir”-ing (note: not a thing we ask him to do, just a thing he takes upon himself to say in response to requests). He even brought me food in bed one day 🥹. But, then also moments where I’m literally over the toilet puking up phlegm (this is the only way I can get it out, am I alone here?) and he’s yelling at me about how fruit snacks are actually called gummies that veer us into the absurd.
When I get this sick I am, let’s just say, for a throw away example, a ghost. Or as my dear husband said to me a year into our relationship, “a ghost of the person he fell in love with.” Woof. Gentle reminder to never say that kind of stuff to a person because they will never forget it and get to bring it up forever and ever ad infinitum.
Then I start to spiral. Will I ever feel better? Will I feel inspired again? Will I ever come back online in my own mind? And then I start realizing I probably will get better this time, but someday I won’t. Will I have more acceptance then?
I’ve worked through versions of this with clients before–the end of a partner’s life or my client’s own life-changing diagnoses. What always strikes me is while there are lots of Kübler-Ross approved feelings in the mix —denial, anger, depression, bargaining, all the typically assumed grieving feelings—and then there is also eventually a genuinely found acceptance. As time passes, if they give themselves space to feel all the edges of it–the sadness, the loss, the rage, the unfairness–they get to a place of adjusting to this new reality and acceptance so they can respond to what is, not what they wish was the case. (And then cycle through all of the previous feelings again. Healing is anything but linear)
Obviously having a garden variety cold is nothing like a permanent loss/change, and yet I do often wonder if my series of reactions when I’m sick, and ones I see in others, has something to do with preparing us for how to be less well, or well in the way we are used to. To surrender to the parts of life that don’t rebound. And that those parts are just as much a vital part of living as all the others. In a lot of ways, maybe a sign of a life robustly lived?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to dialoguing to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.