I am an inveterate overdo-er and overscheduler.
Rest and space? Naw. I’ll rest when I’m dead, etc.
Even when I’m not busy I can make myself important by thinking thinking thinking ALL THE TIME! Reading! Taking notes! Writing books! All about how I can Make Things Better!
Time off to do nothing or to engage in leisure activities makes me anxious, then existential (why am I heeeeere?), then depressed. The first thing I do when life calms down is look for some work to do.
Does this sound like you at all?
And did you have a reckoning?
Where you crashed, and HAD to take time and space, and let go of all the DOING and get okay with BEING?
Are you looking back at me from that wise vantage point, shaking your head, clucking your tongue?
Before you reach out to share: hey, I had a reckoning too.
I got sick.
One day about a month ago, every client I saw was in the thick of big emotions.
I threw open my heart and connected with everything I had. By the end of the day I was harboring a headache that Advil didn’t touch. I stayed up late anyhow, cleaning and organizing.
Woke about 2 am with the worst headache I had ever had. It was blinding, terrifying, throbbing, a 10/10. I had a fever. My worried partner tried to help. Finally I fell back asleep with the help of nighttime cold medicine. I dreamt of being wheeled down a hallway on a gurney and dumped off the front into an abyss.
The next morning I stepped robotically into chore world: laundry, cooking. Everything hurt my head. Throb. throb. Throb. I caved and napped on the living room floor. Added to the headache: renewed fever, aches in tummy, back, and neck. By the time the telehealth doctor told us to head to the ER, it was ten PM.
From the kind folks there, I received a bajillion tests: COVID and flu (negative), ultrasound (to rule out gallbladder infection), CAT scan (to rule out brain tumor). They drew vial upon vial of blood, gave me IV fluids and pain medicine.
(Please note that throughout this entire ordeal, my partner, Will, was right beside me, caring for me in every way, and I cannot begin to describe my gratitude for his tender attentions. He is the best nurse on the planet. Especially fun was his glee at observing the various medical procedures I underwent.)
Finally, some time very late at night, a lumbar puncture revealed the cause of my malaise.
Meningitis.
Meningitis is an inflammation of the meninges, which are membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord. It can be caused by viruses or bacteria.
Symptoms are headache, fever, and stiff neck.
Bacterial meningitis is fatal 30 percent of the time. Sometimes people die from it within hours. And it is contagious.
I had been around a lot of people. Therapy clients. Family. Colleagues. Friends.
Fortunately, at that moment, I was too tired to consult with Google, so all I knew was that I would soon be admitted to the hospital, and that I was being pummeled with IV steroids, antibiotics, and antivirals.
By the time I was brought upstairs—I had already dreamt this part with the gurney, so I kept my eyes closed all the way up to the room—the culture had come back. I was fighting viral meningitis, which is less serious and usually not contagious.
So thankful.
I laid around in a hospital room eating, listening to audiobooks, doing a little computer work, sleeping, receiving antiviral drugs round the clock. People came and went, checking vitals, changing out IVs. Will brought Thai soup and hung out. I figured I’d be good to go back to life as usual by Wednesday.
I hadn't quite gotten the message yet.
I went back to work within three days. By the fifth day after being hospitalized, my head throbbed so hard that I could not sit up for more than a few minutes. No drug could touch it.
A couple of days later I was back in the ER.
Turns out the hole in my spine was leaking cerebrospinal fluid. A noggin does not like to lose that cushion between brain and skull, and pain was its signal. I had a procedure called a blood patch (which involved another lumbar puncture) to plug up the hole.
Before the procedure, I had the nurse take me to the bathroom to pee, IV stand in tow, and I thought I was treading along with almost glacial slowness.
“Slow down, speed racer!” she said.
The procedure worked.
After lying flat for three hours to let the clot set, I went home and really rested.
I finally got the memo to slow down.
I’ll let you know how that goes, maybe, when I stop feeling like I just got off of a plane on a brand new planet where nothing makes sense.
Why now? And what have I learned?
This virus had been hanging around in my system for more than half my life. What had inspired it to flare up in this particular way at this particular time? When I had been so very busy and overscheduled for so many decades—a classic Capricorn: “Excellent! I climbed that mountain. Let’s start the next one!”?
When I entered school to train as a therapist, I had ideas about what doing therapy meant. I thought I would just have a credential affording me the gravitas to dispense advice like the stuff I talk about here: strategies, tools, opportunities, practices, and skills (STOPS) that can positively transform interactions within and between humans.
What I have come to realize, however, is that teaching STOPS to folks comprises only a teensy part of the therapist’s job.
The most important job of the therapist is to be a present, compassionate, empathic, trustworthy relational figure. To give the client the experience of being fully attended to, deeply heard without judgment, and being supported to grow in the ways that will improve their lives—which sometimes includes empathic confrontation and pushing people past their comfort zones to have new experiences and insights.
Being that person for people is both infinitely compelling and totally exhausting.
In order to be that person, one has to be calm, well-resourced, and present. In touch with their feelings. Which one is not if one is just DOING STRATEGIES, which maybe is what I have done, at least some of the time.
Leaning so heavily on this has made me extremely efficient—able to juggle a lot and manage relationships in ways that rarely lead to the inconvenience of conflict. This has served me well until now.
And then, my brain casing got inflamed.
My interpretation: that my thinky thoughts (thanks for that terminology, Anne Lamott) and my mouth-words (thanks for that terminology, Jenna Tico)—the cognitive structures that I have leaned into for so long—are overheated and need a rest.
Mind works fast. Body, soul, spirit, presence work slow.
Strategies and such must be balanced with far less predictable or efficient stuff: stories, bodies, experiences, emotions of all kinds, trauma, healing, longing, grief, pain. Thank God. That’s where all the beauty is.
I am grateful to get such a clear and non-lethal message that it’s time to shift.
To be a therapist who can be present to the mess that real life and real relating can be, who can hold suffering without being overwhelmed, I have to take much better care of myself. And that is the kind of therapist I want to be.
STOPS can often be about avoiding these things, or avoiding their impacts as individual folks experience them.
How armored and closed up does a person become when relating becomes about applying strategies, tools, opportunities, practices, and skills?
How much can a person seem like they have their act together when in truth, beneath the slick I-know-how-to-handle-you-so-this-goes-without-a-hitch strategies, the volcanic and/or oceanic truth of their being has no contact with the relational field?
So, I’ll continue to offer STOPS here, but please always know that they are offered in this spirit: not about avoiding the messiness of life, but about giving us a place to begin when we realize it’s time to clean up the mess, or where it is in integrity for us to avoid making one in the first place.
Yeah, I simplified my life. I’m making time and space. I’ve already felt moments where I pushed too hard and the headache started to return.
Slow down, speed racer.
❤️