A love letter to the women who do not have the luxury of rest...

I will preface this love letter with a little love note to the women who do have access to and can afford the luxury of rest - To all of you I say grab it with pure unabated abandon, go on every retreat, holiday as much as fucking possible, travel to every corner of the earth, go to every practitioner who offers any form of self-care, self-exploration or self-empowerment under the sun and do so with absolute glee, for many of us you are the women who allow us to do the work we do so please keep supporting the women to whom this letter is aimed by living the lives that we cannot - I love you and appreciate you and do not begruge your access to rest for one moment, now go and have a long languid nap or book your next trip, you are loved and appreciated, sincerely. 

For the rest of you, I want to talk about the luxury of rest. I don’t think this is something that is discussed enough in our current narrative of “self-care” and “nervous system regulation,” which is touted at every turn. 

Every where I look there’s another usually well off and generally well meaning young woman or middle aged man telling me that I need to make time for self-care and here’s a list of ways to regulate my nervous system - I mean I was that fucking young-ish woman 10 years ago (perhaps even 5 years ago), who truly believed I could meditate, yoga, Pilates and breathe my way out of total internal system collapse. 

And at the time, I still had enough financial support and backing from family and friends that it wasn’t entirely a lie, because I had access to the thing that actually makes all of those other things (meditation, yoga, Pilates, etc) work—the luxury of rest, I could litterally afford to rest and so the practices that I could also afford and access resulted in the experience of self-care and nervous system regulation. 

Today, and this isn’t a cry for help or the lament of a martyr, it’s just the simple truth for myself and so many other women, I/we don’t have access to or the ability to afford the luxury of rest. 

Rest is not as simple as getting a good night’s sleep (which thankfully I still do for the most part) or being able to take a day off here and there - which I also do, but not really because when I’m not actively seeing clients or even sitting in front of my laptop writing and creating (which again don’t get me wrong I absolutely love all aspects of my work and find it deeply fulfilling) I am still thinking about, plotting and planning how we’re gonna make it through this month, and then the next and the next. 

I believe that this is the reality for most women, we literally just don’t have the privilege to rest - the last time my husband and I went away together on a little holiday was for 3 days to celebrate our anniversary in 2019. In 2020 the 3 of us (myself, hubby and son) spent a week on a dear friend's farm, and I still consider myself blessed that we had those experiences. And no, I am not trying to imply that the only way to access rest is by being able to go on holidays, but fuck me, they certainly do help and travel is a balm for the soul. Since then, though, besides a night or two away, which generally ended up being more stressful than it was worth, we haven’t had the luxury of a holiday. Never mind any other weekly or monthly aids to self-care and nervous system regulation, like massages or yoga classes, etc, etc. And yes I know there are free classes online - I am a trained pilates and yoga teacher amongst other nervous system regulation modalities, the point is not that I could practice myself, the point is that there is a big difference in the effect of having an hour a week or if you’re really lucky a few times a week where someone else takes the reighns and you get to simply follow instructions or lay down for the massage or experience travel or a holiday from your every day life and routine. All of the above create the potential for novelty, and novelty or novel experiences help create new neural pathways, which in turn build greater access to nervous system regulation and resilience.

So, where does that leave us, the ones who don’t have access to the luxury of rest? 

How do you “self-care” when you quite simply cannot afford it? 

And don’t worry, I’m not about to take the unfathomably privileged stance of “because you can’t afford not to” here…

For me, it’s been one of the biggest lessons that menopause and living with complex trauma have had to offer - an absolute shattering of delusion and a hard landing into the reality of my life. 

How to navigate from there, once you’ve stopped trying to escape and given up on trying to staple and white-knuckle hold the delusion together for just a little longer? 

Well, you find the place of greatest self-compassion available in your current circumstance.  

Simple statement - fucking difficult practice! 

But I’m going to try to unpack it for those of you who didn’t stop reading 3 paragraphs ago and went back to doom-scrolling Insta. 

Also, this is just what has kinda worked / is working for me - so take it from the menopausal bog-witch from which it comes. 

1. You get real honest about the reality of your situation - this part sucks btw. 

2. Once you’ve gotten through the negotiation, tears, fight, flight, fawn, freeze of it all you observe, imagine you can float above your body, above your whole life - I like to imagine I’m a Kite (the bird not the toy on a string) and look at myself and the situation from above. And then I do the opposite, I let myself drop beneath, into the earth like an earthworm and look up from the fertile soil. Lastly, I imagine that I can walk just a little behind myself and observe the situation as if I were my own dear friend.

   As always, I'll be honest and admit I haven’t yet learned to fully access these states in a moment of stress or the instant my deep trauma, pain body is triggered, but I’m becoming pretty proficient at accessing them at some point of the spiral into complete collapse. 

3. Once you’ve given yourself a chance to observe from these different perspectives and taken the lesson of each, you begin to plot out where the space of greatest compassion would be to place yourself in relation to the reality of what you are dealing with. 

4. And then you try to place yourself there in that place of greatest self-compassion and take the realistic, appropriate actions available to you in that moment based on that position.

   
   

   So, currently, if I were trying to place myself in the position of greatest self-compassion without being realistic, I would say, “I need a month in a cabin in the mountains away from everything and everyone to simply chop wood and carry water”.

   
   

   Whereas when I place myself in the space of greatest self compassion and realistic available action I would say “I am going to spend a few hours in my much neglected veggie patch clearing and preparing the soil with what I have available to me at this moment and I am going to practice a bit of conscious isolation from people and spaces that currently feel draining, threatening, unsafe or overwhelming for me without projecting too much into/onto those people and or spaces and simply acknowledging that, the veggie patch and isolation is what I can access in this moment” 

5. The unrealistic place of compassion creates an ever-deepening sense of lack; the realistic place of greatest compassion creates a greater sense of sovereignty, support and potential to access rest or whatever else it is that I may need at that time. 

And that’s it, that is what I am working with, that is one of the many, many, many lessons that the combo of menopause and complex trauma has taught me - Work where you are! Stay in your lane and seek out the place of greatest compassion.

I hope that just maybe this article will land for one other exhausted woman to help her feel a little less alone or even a little less ashamed of the depth of her exhaustion and her own inability to earn enough to afford the luxury of rest. 

With love and compassion from just another exhausted woman.