A Breath Released
*I wrote this several years ago but you almost wouldn't know it, it feels so fitting for the last year we've all lived through.
Remember the end of the Lord of the Rings? After Frodo and Sam finally completed their task to destroy The Ring and were rescued by eagles? Remember the scene when Merry and Pippin jump in bed with Frodo for that weird tickle fight while the others in the Fellowship stand around watching? At that moment, Sam quietly enters the room, staying at the doorway, at the edges. He and Frodo look at each other wordlessly, exchanging meaningful looks. Sam looks exhausted, like he’s marched through Hell and back, which in a way of course, he did.
I relate to that look now more than ever. My world was turned upside down and now the chaos has subsided. How do you pick up the pieces of yourself in the stillness after the storm has passed? How do you live on high alert, body and senses tensed to react at a moment’s notice then suddenly relax? I am an exhalation, the long slow release of breath. I don’t know how to be a person anymore. I sat down with a book I’m reading as research for my thesis and it took me an hour to get through six pages. I put the book down, went to take a hot shower, and sat down in the tub, letting the hot water run over me.
I can’t focus. What do you do when your tendency to assume the worst comes true? I spent a year living on call for another person, holding my breath and hoping the other shoe wouldn’t drop. When the stakes are literally life and death, moving on trying to do a school assignment is paralyzingly mundane.
For a year my priorities were different from everyone around me in my life. Classmates, workmates, friends. Don’t get me wrong. I know we all have our dramas and demons. But I would walk into class and sit down at the table feeling catatonic. I spent the hours of class barely able to articulate my thoughts, with a tightness in my chest like I could burst into tears at any moment. Something like, “How are you?” becomes impossible to answer. Any moment not in class or at my internship was devoted to caring for this other person and I sacrificed caring for myself in the process. Trying to make small talk about midterms or professors or the latest Game of Thrones felt impossible when all of my “free” time was spent researching trial studies, reading cure rates, acting as nurse and therapist.
Being a grad school student conducting research for a thesis is in itself a full time job. This is something I don’t think many people who haven’t actually been through it truly appreciate. Being a caregiver is also a full time job. I gave up every part of myself for school, for this person. So much of my emotional and mental energy went towards caring for this person that I had nothing left for anyone else, including myself. I drank my calories in beer and coffee, sometimes orange juice if I was feeling “healthy.“ I did the bare minimum I needed to keep myself alive for the next day. Eating whatever was fast and easy and would fill my stomach. I did what felt like the bare minimum to get by in my classes. I stopped putting in the extra work I did to stay on top of readings and be prepared, diverting my energy elsewhere, like white blood cells to an infection.
I was already sleep deprived living the student life but now it went into hyperdrive. I napped, like a cat, multiple times a day for ten or twenty minutes at a time whenever I could lay down and close my eyes. During this chaos all I wanted more than anything was quiet. I wanted peace and stillness. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to lay on the couch and do nothing. I wanted to spend a weekend inside my apartment alone with the cats. I wanted to press pause and stop time just for a few moments to myself.
This is funny to write because now I find the stillness unbearable. That tightness in my chest is back. I distract myself with television and chasing endless links online. I refresh pages and reopen closed tabs but it’s never enough. Trying to read that book for school, sitting still in a chair with the static words inked on the page was too much. What did I do before this? What did I think about? I can’t remember who I was before but in a way that’s probably for the best. We have all been changed by this and I couldn’t go back to that person even if I wanted to.
I don’t quite recognize this new version of myself. Of course it doesn’t help that she’s depleted, a shell running with battery power in the red. I don’t know what this new version needs to be taken care of, to feel full and nurtured. I believe that stress and exhaustion are cumulative, building up in our bodies like acids in our muscles during a long run. So, how to recover from a year of stress and exhaustion? How many naps or full nights of sleep does it take? How many leafy green meals and glasses of water? I feel like the things that worked for the old me aren’t quite going to cut it now. The needs of my body and spirit have changed too much and I haven’t figured out how to tend to them yet.
It hasn’t even been a year. In this narrative I tell myself, I keep saying that it’s been a year but it hasn’t.