Resignation

I’ve been watching my 13-year-old daughter transition from a pre-teen confused about the world and anxious to begin new things to a young adult with a plan. She wakes up every morning at 7:30—even though school doesn’t start until 9:30—and brushes her teeth, washes her face, gets dressed, eats breakfast, and makes her way to her desk for virtual school. She does all of this while I sleep. Somewhere, in the middle of a pandemic, she found a way to be accountable and not let her isolation and days that never seem to end change the course of the path she would have been on otherwise.

I’ve been watching this from the sidelines—from my desk while working 16-hour days. I didn’t realize it until this morning, but I envy her. She has something that I lost these past few years. She has motivation. I might not know what that motivation is, but it’s there. She has recently started getting herself ready for bed well before she needs to because she has found through extensive observation and experiment that she feels “terrible” when she goes to bed late and wakes up late.

I, on the other hand, find myself crawling into bed around 2 a.m. after working nonstop (I call myself the machine, but I need a cleverer name), cooking dinner when my husband can’t, loading the dishwasher, folding the laundry, answering emails, making appointments, watching a tiny bit of TV with my husband, and trying to find a few minutes in the middle of all of it to make house and yard repairs. (We bought a time capsule house—virgin everything from 1969 except a few appliances that were upgraded in the early ‘80s. It’s exhausting but thrilling.)

In that list I just made, I didn’t mention anything that I do for my well-being. Aside from the occasional TV show, I really just check off boxes and make sure everyone has made it through the day with minimal inconvenience—all while being terribly inconvenienced. Motherhood is a selfless state of being. But it doesn’t have to be every single fucking day.

This morning, I finally identified the word that describes the state in which I’ve been living: resignation. I have resigned myself to bloodletting my empathic state like an 18th-century cure-all for disease.

I’m a naturalist—a humanist who sees the value in what the planet has given us—and my sole purpose for living is to ensure my children’s footprint is light and gentle but inspires the human race to endure. But I’m also cursed with a strong tendency to internalize my loved ones’ feelings and make them my own. Some would label me an empath, which sounds like something you claim when you’re 15 and you’ve just discovered astrology and swear that your sign dictates your future and completely defines you. But my therapist and I have broken it down into scientific terms to normalize my general state of being. I am what some would call “a highly sensitive individual.” Somehow, I manage to focus on others’ needs and feelings and can completely set aside my own.

I’ve considered it a strength, especially given where my choices have taken me. I cared for my dying mother for years, rescued every animal I could, nurtured a man returning from war, birthed and raised two children, and remarried, this time to a man who needed my support just as much as everyone before him.

The past 20 years have felt like a day on a 1980s playground. I climbed the tall steps of the slide, bitching all the way up about how hard and steep it was, and slid down the solar-ignited metal, burning my skin but screaming about the thrill all the way down. I did this over and over, and usually the climb up wasn’t a choice but a necessity to propel all of us away from poverty and depression.

I look back on my time on the actual playground of my childhood with fond memories. It was a wild and dangerous place back then with few safety measures in place. It gave me the freedom to test the limits, which sometimes ended in a sprained ankle or getting the wind knocked out of me after dropping from the monkey bars. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been able to carry on as long as I have without losing my shit.

Well, I’ve lost my shit.

My therapist has been going through my cognitive distortions with me, and we have located many sources of anxiety that I really wasn’t aware I actually had. I mean, do you—the one reading this—realize I have an anxiety disorder? I suppose it’s typical for highly sensitive individuals to suffer from anxiety as we don’t really know what to do with the weight we carry as there’s nowhere to dump it without perpetuating the litter.

I’ve eaten too much food, drank too much wine, stayed up entirely too late—all things most of us have been doing while trying to survive this pandemic. But I didn’t do them by choice. At least that’s what I told myself. I felt like a victim of circumstance and a product of generations of hardworking descendants of immigrants who never became successful enough to pass on anything but recipes and love. Living with resentment has been my albatross most of my adult life. I have tried to demolish any thoughts of self-pity with a gratitude approach—grateful that I don’t have to suffer racism like so many of my friends, grateful that I have a college degree and can sit at my cozy desk for work, grateful that I’ve never lost a child…the list goes on.

My therapist told me last week to consider reinstating my gratitude practices. When I lived in South Carolina in 2012, I began writing weekly gratitude emails to a handful of friends. I picked something I was grateful for that week, even if it was just a good night’s sleep, and elaborated on it. It really put me in a positive place where I could focus more on what I could do with my day, rather than what my day would do to me. It was a nice place to be. Maybe I’ll do it again. Any takers?

I keep my private life pretty private, despite everything else about me being an open book. My kids are now disgusted by my exhibitionist tendencies, even though I taught them to love their bodies and to be comfortable in their skin. Now I realize they don’t have to be comfortable looking at my skin. I used to walk around the house with no clothes on after a shower, preaching about how all the women in my family peed with the bathroom door open and didn’t care who saw them do what with their bodies. It’s a liberating way to live, but I realize not everyone has the ability to feel so free. I nurture my gray hairs and regularly inspect the wrinkles on my face, wondering which intense day of sunshine and glory caused each one.

How can I love myself—my body—so fiercely and not love my mind with the same vigor? This is the challenge I am tackling in therapy. She asked me last week if I felt shame about anything in my past or present. I struggled to find something and couldn’t. Every choice I made contributed to each positive thing in my life right now. But that doesn’t mean that I’m stable and healthy.

I don’t know why more people don’t seek therapy. The things I’ve learned in the past 3 months have completely changed me. They have tested my romantic relationship, changing the rules of that game and illuminating the cracks that need mending. Now I try to steer myself away from codependence and needing to fix everything and everyone so badly. My therapist said, “If something happens in any of your relationships that drives them to end, will you be okay on the other side of it?” “Yes—yes, I would,” I said. Strangely, that makes it easier to sit in complications and let them work themselves out.

My progress has also helped me take a step back from my children and let them fail, make bad decisions, struggle, and slowly transition to a new way of living with a parent who doesn’t rely on her empathic weight to carry them across paths of burning rocks anymore.

Sometimes all of this self-discovery happens a little too quickly. I become overwhelmed or step too far away from responsibility so that I require very little accountability, especially from my romantic partner. I’m learning to balance my strengths with my weaknesses. And I’m handing over my resignation, trading it in for a bit of accountability for my own happiness. I might fail, and that’s okay.

I have a deep fear of death because I do not believe in an afterlife or anything remotely resembling any form of consciousness or soul after my heart stops. Can you imagine nothing? No, you can’t. And that’s terrifying. I thought I was living like each day could end that way, so I was making the best of it. But I wasn’t. So here I go.