When life gets crazy, having a single clear thought can feel impossible. Not only are your own thought-lings turning their teeth on your insides but you soon realise that the rope that tethers you to sanity is also being gnawed through, and that big, beautiful brain of yours now resembles scrambled eggs, or possibly an omelette.
And when this happens, there’s one thing that can make your situation even more intolerable: Being told by someone demonstrably not in the same position as you that you need to look after yourself.
Some PinkleBuster telling you to take a moment and just, relax.
People love telling other people in precarious positions that they need to take care of themselves. I know this because I’m guilty of it too, and for that I’m truly sorry. No doubt, I’ve trilled my well-intentioned look-after-yourself opinions through the earpiece of an emergency WhatsApp call to people I genuinely love, with the kind of questionable calming resonance you’d use on an official Help Line for panicking teenagers who’ve got in a spot of trouble but don’t want to tell their parents.
And we all know being told to look after yourself in such situations is as effective as convincing Americans that New Zealand is different from Australia, or being asked to stabilise inflation using mind control alone, or expecting your children to go to sleep at night just because you asked them. Not only that, but it makes it all feel that much worse because yes, you’re in this crappy situation but now you must also deal with the feeling that, if only you just approached it differently– indeed, if you took care of yourself– you could be better at it.
The only bug-a-boo being:
We know that the Take-Care-of-Yourself-People are also kinda, sorta right.
And yet we also know, for any of us who’ve been in a shit- hitting-the-fan situation- and you’re human, which means, of course you have– that winding back the internal hamster wheel and resting your feet for a second, even if that’s still standing up, is not that easy.
It’s understandable that the frazzled and discombobulated and strung out amongst us feel so enraged by the well-meaning offerings of the non-frazzled and non-discombobulated (is that just bobulated?) and not-strung- out because our anxiety has convinced us that staying in our adrenalized state of motion is the safest option. That we must continue in our waking fever dream lest the proverbial plug hole be opened and we, along with everyone we love, all drain out.
Which means: to do, be or move in any way other than full steam ahead really takes some hard convincing.
I’ve just left the hospital after visiting my husband, who’s developed an infection following an accident, and I take a call from my dad to discuss my mum, who’s also in hospital, but in another country. I’m about to head home to my boys, who have been patient but no doubt bored, where the little one at least will greet my entrance with a flurry of energy-expending requests that I feel limp at the thought of.
My head is also full of things on the list for work, which I feel guilty for thinking about when people around me are so poorly, but then the need to make money and pay bills and not let people down has a funny way of not becoming something we are exempt from just because things have gone temporarily tits up.
But for now, I sit. In the front of my car. In the five-minute parking space outside the hospital and both insanely and necessarily, I draw spirals. Can you believe it. I draw carefully, with the focus of a small child learning to hold a pencil, trying to make the lines close enough together they almost touch, but wide enough that a very industrious ant within the normal weight range might find their way through.
In the beginning, there is a noticeable wobble to my line but soon my hand catches a rhythm and assumes the lead. I fight the urge to put the key in the ignition and just drive. You would assume that would be in the direction of home, but for a few moments, anywhere but that destination seems appealing. For the next few minutes, the world will not end, the sky will not collapse, I will remain upright if I keep sitting and draw a few more lines.
I can give my hands something to do while my brain is struggling to know what to do next. All I need is a crack, a chink, a moment of movement that has a direction and a purpose.
And so, here in the front seat of my car, with a half-drunk coffee and an assortment of semi-eaten biscuits, I am a conjuror, an overseer, a wrangler, my crappy biro pen scrounged from the car door pocket and my notebook that I extracted from my bag accordion-squashed under the weight of my drink bottle have both course-corrected me to a more useful kind of motion.
My favourite definition of rest goes unattributed, although I have my suspicions it is the words of poet, David Whyte.
Rest is doing what you want, when you want, in the way you want.
I love this, because I feel, especially for the creative brain, it’s right. And if I may be so indulgent, I’d say it’s the same for any kind of rejuvenating activity we would file under the category of “looking after ourselves”.
It has only been three minutes, and I have not bathed in oil nor lit a candle nor napped nor made a smoothie with a shot of Match Katcha Bingo. I have not indulged any of the common ways self-care is flogged to us.
Instead, I’m still here, outside the hospital with two minutes left of my parking allowance, bartering a few loops of biro for a little room to think, hurried thoughts for more orderly ones. I’m here for the self-soothing of the line-filled scrappy kind.
It may not be exactly what I want, or when I want, but it is in the way I want, a form of autonomy that within the out-of-control-ness of it all feels quite important. I have my pen and paper and I can draw this line.
And don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that drawing spirals or sketching or writing lines fixes the world outside. But it is organising somehow. A way to take my own hands, rethread the rope and grab at least a slither of lost sanity back, if only for a moment. An exhalation of the papery, inky kind.
Because we’ve all been here before, you and I. We’ve all had times where things are bonkers, and the bad news just piles up, and we feel caught in a vortex of drama not of our choosing or making.
And perhaps, we’d do ourselves a favour to remember when things feel scurried and hurried and scrambled that we can use our hands to guide ourselves back out.
That we can turn to someone having a moment and be the kind of TootWhistle who might say:
I’m so sorry for what you’re going through. You know, I find drawing lines on a page so very helpful.
xx Jane
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