Is it Possible to Live Without Chronic Overwhelm?

Question of September

My body told me so.

Sixteen months ago, I was sitting on a playground under the sun at a preschool Mother’s Day performance. My daughter Bo was belting her song but I felt as vacant as a piece of cardboard. I commanded myself: Sit down on the picnic blanket, Take a sip of your water, Don’t forget to smile when Bo brings you the ornament she made.

Less than an hour later, a young male doctor at Urgent Care looked at me with the most tender eyes, gave me the results of the blood draw, and said, “I don’t know how you’ve been doing life. You need to go to the ER right now.”

This isn’t about what happened, though I will tell you.

It’s about what happened AFTER what happened.

Desert trip right before, my firstborn in her aerial art right after, receiving lifeblood, feet in the ocean, flower arrangements by kiddos, back to teaching again

My hemoglobin was 6.6, which is very low. How can legs feel nauseous? Well, they can when oxygen isn’t getting circulated through your body. Here’s the short version because the long story is layered and not the point of this newsletter. Two extremely heavy menstrual bleeds led to an amount of blood loss that required an emergency blood transfusion from two donors. I was lucky to have caught it before something worse happened. A surgery on the inside of my uterus followed a week later. Then I began a more serious process of building my lifeblood back. It involved taking a very sober look at my lifestyle and rhythms and priorities—and, most critically, being okay with the consequences of some changes.

First I asked myself: Can I live without overwhelm as my primary daily feeling?

It wasn’t a new wondering. I’d already spent decades exploring cyclical living in tune with my menses and nature. My writing practice was bomber in the sense that I had learned to be comfortable in the messy middle. But everyone geographically around me and beyond seemed to now experience chronic overwhelm as the new constant flavor of the air. Me too. Was it middle age? Climate crisis? Pandemic? Becoming a parent? All of the above, sure, but it also seemed to exist as a deeper and wider reality for people of this era from all life situations. I had witnessed the shift in my parents and elders too. I was reading about it everywhere. We know that societal structural imbalances create overwhelm—for some more than others. However, a new layer was at play: the fast pace born from tech. It was/is the gasoline poured on an already stoked fire. Somehow we’ve normalized overwhelm as just the way it is. I want to zero in on our domestic rhythms here. By domestic, though, I mean YOUR LIFE. How do you do your actual lived life?

I remember saying to a friend, “I just want a Monday Laundry day, you know?” I was speaking to the history of women across cultures dividing their weekly household chores into days. If you let go of the complicated gender context and focus on the rhythm of it, wow wow wow.

It has become my antidote.

As hard as I had tried, my life mostly felt like one big scramble up a scree field. I was writing this newsletter in stolen night-time hours. Folding laundry in little moments or letting the task swallow a whole work morning. Bringing grievances to my husband in sparky comments because we had no dedicated time for it. Organizing curriculum for workshops while making doctor appointments and doing the dishes. Looking in the fridge every night with a panic about what to cook along with a hyper-control over health and not letting my husband take over. Checking texts when I heard the buzz and then responding right then. Checking for emails, reflexively, when I got bored or worried or unsettled, even though I knew better. Exercising only when my body barked loudly. Tending to money only to pay the bills. Responding to work emails while making breakfast for my kids. I would try to organize but then even organizing had a sheen of exhaustion to it. Often traction and calm would find me for a few weeks but then too-muchness came back around. Some days, our dogs didn’t get walked. All days, I lived with a constant, low-level hum of “nothing is getting done and I’m doing everything all of the time.”

I was such a chill person to be around.

After the blood transfusion, though, my body drew the line. So began the project and delight of calling back my attention in a very real, on the ground, non-showy way. Everyone and everything being available all the time and ping-ing in has fucked us over. You go to take a photo and then see 4 texts and an email and then you are swept away and forget what you were even doing in the first place. We all know it. It’s one thing to know; it’s a whole other thing to do something about it. By necessity and curiosity, I had migrated over to the second act.

Okay,

I want to share what I’m learning and how I’m doing it all with the hopes that you all share what you’ve discovered about your own rhythms. The point is to make it your own. Mine is not a prescription or the right way. It’s just mine. I get excited about people uplifting each other’s ways, taking pieces of it, offering pieces of theirs, so that each person fashions something that WORKS.

Three notes:

• The shift is physiologically awkward and feels like a workout for my brain, as if I’m rewiring back to an older more durable way.

• If you rebel against what feels like “controlling” yourself, I get it. My backdoor framing was remembering that many spiritual practices align around how a container/boundary allows for more freedom and spontaneity.

• If you feel nihilistic and wonder why it matters anyway at this point, I get that too. But do you also want to feel VITALITY? It’s no longer adaptive to go with this current flow. Lauryn Hill sang it best: The current way is actually killing us softly.

HERE IS MY RHYTHM

It is relaxing me, revolutionizing my life, and radicalizing how I approach everything.

Simple scaffolding and it changes some with each season. I am an entrepreneur who makes her own work schedule, but everyone can do a version about their non-work life and maybe even still in their work day.

My question was: What is the art and arc of my workweek and family time?

First, compartments. We’ve been fed the myth that multi-tasking is healthy. It’s not! Not to the degree we do it now.

1. I identified my main work/adult responsibilities and put them into days. That gives me some gorgeous space to actually focus on “the thing” and not feel like I should be doing “the other thing” while I’m doing “the thing.”

2. I built in a Catch-All Day for any overflow.

3. Duo-tasking feels reasonable and ancient, much like talking to a friend while gardening. I wanted to pair some harder-for-me elements to support me actually doing them. For example, I wanted to balance cerebral money tending (which can activate me) with something tactile like cooking; so I move between spreadsheets and making broth or soups or cookies. Another edge for me is digesting world news without being emotionally taken out by it. I try to save reading long news articles for Friday morning right before I have a long hike with a friend.

4. Ultradian rhythms. These aren’t represented here on my map. I work for 90 minutes and take a 20 minute break that doesn’t involve screens and does involve moving and gazing up and out the window. I have to set a timer. I also don’t check my phone or go on tangent searches during these work times. It’s hard at first, but when you try it, it becomes clear how our attention has been deeply hijacked.

5. Family chores/responsibilities. They are written on a different board in our hallway. One Dad-friend shared with me his family’s practice of team-cleaning and that has transformed how we take care of our home. Sometimes we fall off it and the chaos ensues. But when we do it, those mountains of laundry, dishes, vacuuming and tidying become do-able and shared. It is no longer that continual incessant picky task that falls to the adults, or the adult who is home more.

6. “This is x time.” I use this phrase all day long to let my brain and body know that I am devoting myself to containers of time. Last night when I woke up at 3am to plot my next writing project, I said to myself, “Nope, this is sleeping time, we can do that later.” I swear it works. Same thing if a barrage of texts come in. Nope, this is eating time. This is teaching time. This is being-with-my kids time. And now this is texting time.

7. “I am calling back my attention.” Another phrase I sing to myself when I notice myself wander in the weeds.

I keep it loose. I am not aiming for a perfection that doesn’t exist. This week we had to switch our Family Night and I abandoned Money Day because other work took priority. A friend needed support and I was texting with her incessantly. Sometimes I get overwhelmed and eat honey by the spoonful. My old tide tries to usher me back into old ways and old neurology. But this rhythm is my sturdy home base. I return there.

What are the consequences?

They are real! Every choice we make results in an outcome. I view consequences as part of life and it’s my job to decide which ones I’m willing to weather.

I was NOT willing to suffer the consequence of an ailing body anymore.

I am willing to suffer the consequences of more Fomo because I’m not everywhere all at once, potentially less reach and less outward connection (no social media for me), and potentially less income given the less reach. I’m not soliciting those happenings, but I know they are possible.

What is the gain?

Vitality! My 10-year-old Eula often asks me why I say Um so much: “Can you just finish your sentence, Mom?” Her noticing is a cue that I’ve morphed into a multi-tasking tornado, so I try to shift back.

I am becoming the woman who courts her own attention so that she can be present to her insides and outsides.

Insides = soul and body

Outsides = people and environment

Two truths: I never want to evaporate a whole afternoon of this precious life to scrolling and the modern world will have screens.

I work on my computer all the time. It’s the least sexy version of me. I am the least in my animal body when connected to technology. That’s okay. Because I make so much space outside of it to be in my magnetism.

How about you?

How do you create a rhythm in your life? What have you found helpful? *Remember, that your ancestors lived completely aligned to rhythm. Your bones know how.

In two weeks, I will update you in a Vlog on the tangible and incredible outcomes I’ve had from this rhythm practice, others I’m learning from (articles, podcasts, etc) on this topic, and my stumbles and learnings.

Mystery and self-dignity for you on this equinox,