“Just a few more paddles,” my surf instructor shouted back at me, as the waves lapped my board.
“I CAN’T!” I yelled back, defeated. Why didn’t she understand that I was closer to running out of energy than my car I always drive down to 1 mile to empty?
Even as I yelled that back, I knew as much as she did, that, yeah, I could make those few more strokes. I thought of the movie Nyad and the real-life Diana Nyad swimming just a few more strokes over and over again, until, finally, she finished her 100-mile swim. “OK, Theodora,” I said to myself, “yes, you can paddle just a little bit more.”
Had I just quit there, I might have ended up in the impact zone—where the wave breaks right on you.
I often tell clients that it’s the things we do to try to run away from the pain that hurt us more—self-medicating, stuffing our feelings down, etc. Sure, tough feelings are not fun, but a feeling never killed anyone.
By giving up before I got to that wave, I would have actively been putting myself in danger. Or, at least, I would have been making things harder for myself than necessary. Something I neeeeever do, clearly.
“You need to lean into it!” Kelly shouted.
“Life lesson or surf lesson????” I shouted back, rolling my eyes at her, knowing, of course, that it was both.
I am smack fucking dab in the middle of a real liminal space with several things in my life, feeling stretched between two different existences, with my footing firm in neither of them, leaving me feeling like the earth could give way underneath me at any minute. Oh wait, I live in Los Angeles. The actual earth could give way underneath me at any minute!
I spend more time than I’d like to admit spinning my wheels about this, digging in my feet and saying how hard it is to feel stuck, how I wish some situations in my life were different. And all of that is valid to feel and express—AND it is in the moments where I’m not trying to change anything and accept things for how they are that I find specks of peace.
I wrote furiously in 2017 after my mom died, overflowing with emotions that needed to get out somewhere. I recently found a piece I wrote about my grief-cations—my traveling to try to heal grief.
“I began to get an idea of what healing could look like, how my mom’s death and illness wouldn’t always be the only things on my mind.”
When you’re Going Through It, it can feel like you’ll just feel that way forever. That’s your new state of being.
This myopic thinking—much like many of our brain processes—is an evolutionary holdover from when our threats were life-or-death, like being chased by a cheetah. Your brain makes you think that so that you take action and aren’t breakfast for a cheetah. Luckily, most of us aren’t in danger of being cheetah breakfast (though I hear cheetahs can really get after a good brunch)—but our brain still behaves although that is the danger.
Some of us (not me, tbh) listen to our brains better than others and make the changes to adapt to the situation sooner than later, thus moving out of the stuckness.
This note is for you as much as it is for myself:
I know how hard this is, but I promise that leaning into and embracing the suck for what it is will make all of our lives easier. There’s so many trite therapy aphorisms I could throw in here: what we resist persists, name it to tame it, etc, but accepting that something sucks is what will help us find a way forward.
accepting that something sucks is what will help us find a way forward.
EVERY DAMN TIME AROUND HERE, TOO.
<3