Sometimes a reset takes years. It takes months of the same cycle and breaking it and syncing in again and small steps up and up and you don’t know when it happened but everything is finally different, a new beginning.
I’ve lived those resets.
I used to read my warning signs as the inevitable slide into seasons of depression. I read them so clearly my senior year of college, was so horrified by those early signs that I wasn’t okay, that I watched myself sink deeper for months, paralyzed.
But I move a little faster now. I can, after an odd week peppered with some very early warning signs, shake it off without panic. I feel sometimes like an objective observer of my own life. It must be the years of therapy but I diagnose my feelings so reasonably that I wonder why I don’t follow my own advice. Intellect and emotion are different beasts, they don’t always speak the same language.
Intellect says, you are feeling tired and out of your skin and perpetuating a short cycle of insomnia by being sedentary and you’ve trigged some old patterns by indulging in copious pizza and alcohol and now your brain thinks this is your old life so you don’t want to get out of bed … and on and on.
Emotion says, I would like to keep reading my book and stay in bed and fuck it I’m having a glass of white wine even if I’m tired and have a headache and I don’t want to go to seep . . . and on and on.
So it was an interesting few days, a lot less dramatic in reality, and shaken off with a couple of good decisions to restart my old routines. The main one is to go for a run, after skipping for three days, even though it’s over 100 degrees after work. But I skipped that morning, to sleep in because I couldn’t sleep and it’s so easy to feed that cycle. It needs to be broken. I wanted to break it.
I skipped the alcohol. I facetimed with a friend. I slept for eight hours. I went to my boot camp conditioning class. I baked cookies. I worked on my story. I got a haircut. And without effort, I’ve slid back into my normal routine, the slightly off-rhythmic week already being what it was: off-rhythm, not a disaster.
Early warning signs are effective with early action. This isn’t the first time I’ve caught myself in a mini-rut. I’ll do it again and again. So I cling to the bedrock of my contentment: the sleep, the exercise, the meditation, the reading, the writing. Non-negotiables, so I do them every day.
I can’t afford to be inflexible though. I can’t afford to beat myself up over breaks in my routine. There’s no need to. It’s okay to not be okay sometimes. It’s okay to cut myself some slack and then pick myself back up not out necessity but out of a desire to feel like I do when I’m following my curated habits. And it’s not a long slog to get back to where I want to be. Sometimes it only takes a day.
With Love,
Natalie