I Was Feeling Better. Now I'm Not.

 

Hello Invisible Audience,

 

The last time I wrote to you, I was feeling better. It felt like this time it was going to last; that things were finally changing for the long term.

 

For several weeks since then, I have felt awful again. It feels this time like it’s going to last; that things are changing unavoidably for the long term.

Neither, of course, are true. Just today, I woke up, felt ok, then felt not so great, then felt ok again so I tried to go for a walk; then had to turn around six minutes in because I don’t feel so great anymore.

 

But I have some decisions to make, and it feels like those decisions depend a lot on how I feel.

 

Like, for instance, if I want to keep teaching kids.

 

I wrote a letter this morning to the parents of my students. It says that I am going to teach classes through the end of the school year, but I’ve decided not to teach summer camps, despite the fact that I already said I would. As much as I want to wait and see how I feel before canceling them, there are several reasons why it makes more sense to do it now. For one, March is the month when most summer camps open registration. If I’m not offering camps, parents have a better chance of finding other options right now instead of if I wait until, say, May to decide.

 

But more importantly, it’s because of this question that I don’t have an answer for: am I as tired as I am because I don’t want to teach summer camps?

 

It seems woo-woo and wishy-washy, I know. But ever since it became clear to me how much of my pain and illness seems to revolve around the state of my nervous system, I’ve paid more attention to how any number of things make me feel.

 

• Almost always, writing a blog post to you or my Semi-Invisible Patrons makes me feel better.
• Very often, teaching a class of kids makes me feel better.
• Saying no to an invitation that I didn’t want to do in the first place gives me some life back.
• Having a hard conversation that I was dreading makes me feel less anxious.
• And many, many times in the past, making a decision not to do something that I thought I wanted to do has filled me with not just relief, but also a renewed vitality.

 

The thing that makes this decision hard is that, as I said, teaching kids makes me feel better. But that’s mostly teaching kids after school, or once a week, like I do during the school year. That’s different than the burn out I can experience teaching week-long summer camps, even if they are only 3 to 4 hours long.

 

I keep trying to apply logic to this; to try to convince my body that week-long camps every other week is really not that much. But when I felt worse this morning, I was thinking about doing summer camps; when I felt better, I had just drafted that letter saying I wasn’t doing summer camps.

 

If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know that I’ve been questioning since last fall whether continuing my business teaching extra-curricular Spanish classes is sustainable, not just in terms of my energy, but also in terms of the money I bring in. It’s a tough balance: the amount of energy I have to teach does not equate to enough to cover all my bills. But I keep running up against a wall around this: I choose my own schedule now; if I’m having a rough day energy-wise, I can take it easy and just do the essentials. That means teach the classes, but otherwise lay on the couch if necessary. But are those short bursts of the intense energy it takes to facilitate a class of kindergarten to second graders costing me more energy than, say, a desk job, especially a remote one, even if it was more hours?

 

I love to teach, Invisible Audience. I really do. And I think that’s why this decision has been so hard. I get a lot of joy out working with my students. But is there a better fit out there for me? Something that feels as rewarding, and doesn’t take as much from me energy-wise? Or isn’t as rewarding, but covers the bills better and doesn’t leave me as zapped by the end of the day or the week?

 

It’s also not as cut and dry as giving up teaching, though, is it? Which is why I want to first try cutting out summer camps. Because it doesn’t have to be a binary decision: I can choose not to teach summer camps, but continue with classes during the school year. I can cut down on how many classes I offer during the school year, and do them in tandem with some as-yet-to-be-determined part-time job.

 

Or I could get partway through a summer free of summer camps and realize that I’m done teaching and needed the space to let myself realize that was true.  

 

Love and tired and confused kisses,

Morgan

 

P.S. I've had a hard time keeping up with my blog lately, but what writing I have done recently has gone mostly to my patrons on Patreon. You can check out my profile here. Pledge as little as $1.50 a month to get access to more of my ponderings and become one of my Semi-Invisible Patrons. When I can't find time to post both here and on Patreon, I prioritize posts on Patreon instead. 

I’m Feeling Better. I Think This is Why.

 Hello Invisible Audience,

 

I have a stuffy nose today, that started as a sore throat and a headache on Friday. But unlike other recent illnesses, this one feels different: it feels like it’s just a minor physical symptom that will fade, instead of the portent of an unending illness that will slowly erode my will to live.

 

It feels different because I am different, in some ways that feel remarkable. I want to share those ways with you, but not because I think I’ve figured out some hidden formula to help others get better. I want to share it with you first so that I don’t forget what’s been working, and second so that, if you chronically feel terrible, you know that the way out is not something you can adopt from someone else’s treatment plan. You have to find your own treatment plan that works for you.

 

The Nervous System

The biggest change in my life has come from learning something from a friend of mine who works with people trying to recover from chronic illness. According to him and the research he’s done, the reason some people recover quickly from illnesses and some just don’t has to do with trauma. If you’ve experienced trauma—like I have, and like my friend has—your nervous system is already jacked up, to put it bluntly. Add in a long-term bout of pneumonia, or a case of Lyme disease, long COVID, etc., and your body’s already panicked outlook on life is going to skyrocket and stay there. This is also true of chronic pain.

 

Learning this made my entire life make sense, Invisible Audience. I have been sick in one form or another for as long as I remember. I kept trying to treat the symptoms, or the illness. It would work for that one thing, but then I’d get sick in another way. One thing after another after another. So even though Lyme disease has been the latest and greatest, it was not even remotely the first thing.

 

Most of the following things that have worked for me have worked because I’ve been able to put things in the context of trying to calm my nervous system. After I found the things that worked for me in that framework, things began to change rapidly for the better.

 

Find the People Whose Words Make Sense to You

“Being a human is weird,” my friend says. I bought him a website domain name that ended in .guru as a joke, because he’s supremely uncomfortable with the idea of being lumped in with other healers or coaches who claim they have the one right way to help someone. He talks about the science behind the tools he suggests, but he also says, very often, “If this tool doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

 

There are undoubtedly others who do similar work, but use vocabulary around God; the Universe; Divine Light. None of those words or dogmas hit me where I need them to: in a way that I can take in and appreciate fully. So I don’t seek them out. I seek out more people who speak in the way my friend does, because what he says makes sense to me.

 

Stop Listening to People Who Won’t Listen to You, and Stop Trying to Convince Them of Your Validity

 

Boundaries are hard for me, Invisible Audience. It feels like I am risking death to tell someone how I really feel about how they’ve treated me sometimes. But it turns out this is a really big part of healing a jacked-up nervous system. It turns out that there’s more than one way to traumatize someone: the first is the act itself, wherein I learned that what I wanted or needed or felt didn’t matter. The second is learning from that trauma how to perform that same act on myself, over and over and over again. Staying friends with people who don’t listen to me, validate me or show up for me. Saying yes to things I don’t want to do. Spending all my energy trying to convince people that my experience is real, and valid, and that they should believe me.

 

Stop Doing the Things That Make You Feel Worse or Have No Impact

It is true that there are some foods that make me feel worse if I eat them. However, none of them have conclusively shown up on a blood test or stool test or any other test. I eat it and I don’t feel well. It sounds simple, but it took much longer than I wanted it to because I was too busy listening to what everyone else said I should be eating instead of just listening to my body. This led to some doctor-prescribed disordered eating, that connected nicely with an eating disorder I had in high school and continued body image issues I’ve had to make me feel awful and blame myself for not being able to eat well enough to feel better, or lose weight. Invisible Audience, getting a dietician who practiced Intuitive Eating was the very best thing I’ve done for myself, ever. Now I eat what sounds good. Period. I am less likely to choose things that make me feel like shit. I eat a lot of healthy foods, because they make me feel good. And so, so much less of my head space is taken up by thinking about what other people think about my body. It is the most amazing gift I have ever given myself.

 

Meditation makes me feel worse. So does focusing on my breath. This is not true for everyone, but there is a growing body of research that shows that many people with trauma and PTSD have similar experiences to mine. I have stopped trying to convince breath coaches and yoga teachers and meditation enthusiasts that this is real, even if it still enrages me that they’re shaming people like me for not “doing it right” if we feel worse instead of better when we try. But I’m no longer trying to get them to own that they’re wrong. I just don’t do the things that make me feel worse, because it was teaching my body that what I felt didn’t matter.

 

Writing

Writing makes me feel better, Invisible Audience. Last week I felt so, so tired. I wrote about it, and the feel immediately went away. I have no idea why this works for me. I’m going to keep doing it.

 

Safe Touch

I live with two, super-cuddly cats. I’m single. It turns out that I need human touch, and that, until now, I’ve only allowed myself to get it from people who were helping me recover from pain. The problem was that these people were aiming at seeing me less as I improved, when what I subconsciously needed was to continue to get the validation and touch they were offering. So I’m going to start scheduling preventative massages that aren’t dependent on feeling awful to go in. I’m just going to go because it feels so good to have someone I trust touch me. Hopefully, with time and more work, I will feel comfortable enough to try to find others I trust who I can enjoy even simple amounts of physical affection with.

 

Brainspotting

I have been in talk therapy for years, Invisible Audience. Recently, I started with a new counselor, who is fantastic. Not only do I feel like her general approach to therapy is helping me, we also started brainspotting recently. She describes it as a cousin to EMDR, and it is impacting me SO. MUCH. Some things can’t be talked out. Some things must be felt through. Brainspotting is helping me identify and clear those kinds of things that have been stuck for a long, long time.

 

This isn’t anyone’s pathway to health but mine, Invisible Audience. I hope you can find yours, too.

 

Love and better kisses,

Morgan

Where’s the Line?

 Hello Invisible Audience,

 

Have you noticed that I think a lot? It’s hard for me to gauge how much I think compared to anyone else—I don’t live in anyone else’s head, after all—but man, sometimes I wish I were better at shutting down the thoughts. Sometimes I wish things felt clearer to me, when, in reality, I think a lot of life just exists in murky gray spaces that are hard to define. And even as the world tends to lean more toward black and white, I’m finding myself standing in more of a gray area and trying to figure out how to be comfortable here.

 

I always want to know where the line is. It doesn’t even matter which subject we’re talking about, but that question constantly haunts me.

 

·      Where is the line of trying to stay friends with someone who frustrates me or doesn’t show up how I need them to?

·      Where is the line of how many lies is too many in a conversation with a potential new friend?

·      What is the number of times a promise is broken before it’s not worth keeping the promise-breaker around?

·      Where’s the line of how much I can exercise before I will tip myself into multi-day fatigue?

·      Where’s the line of number of voice memos it’s ok to send a friend in a day?

·      Where’s the line of trying to hold onto a job versus trying to find a new one?

·      Where’s the line of medical appointments that help, versus the number that simply exhausts me more?

·      Where’s the line where I start to feel better?

 

There are so many lines, Invisible Audience. And I don’t know what to do with most of them.

To be honest, I want someone else to define these lines. I want a concrete number of lies I can catch someone in before I give them the boot. I want the number of minutes I can exercise to be the same every time I try, regardless of whether I’ve had a busy week or a bad night’s sleep. I want to just clearly be making so much money that I don’t have to ponder whether it’s time to throw in the towel on the business I’ve built because I’m too tired to grow it but I don’t want to let it go. 

I want black and white lines, Invisible Audience, lined up in neat little rows, spaced exactly equidistant from each other.

 

But here’s the thing: when I have tried to live in that kind of black and white world, things have been worse, not better. People are shittier to each other. People judge each other more, because they say things like, “If I can do it, so can you. It’s easy,” because to them, it was easy. And that’s the kind of black and white thinking that has made things worse.

 

So I have to slog through each of these questions for myself, Invisible Audience. I have to decide for myself what works best. And dammit, that’s a lot more work than just deciding it’s one way or another, always and forever amen. 

 

I listened to a podcast last week with a woman who kept her father in her life, even though he was verbally abusive. The podcast itself was about how boundaries are not black and white, either: the question is not whether to cut someone out of your life completely or not; it can be much more nuanced than that. In this case, the woman would allow her dad to be part of her life as long as he didn’t drink in front of her or her son, and wasn’t mean. As soon as those things fell apart, she’d stop talking to him again until she was ready to reengage. 

 

She said something that I’d heard before, but it stuck with me this time: There’s no right way. There’s just the way that I pick.

 

Certainly, there are things that really are black and white. If you don’t eat, you will die. Children should be loved, not abused. Peas are disgusting.

 

But most things aren’t, Invisible Audience. And the more I try to make them that way, the less it serves me.

 

Love and gray kisses,

Morgan