The Lid Off the Thing
Why exhaustion turns into numbness when the crises don’t stop
She hadn’t slept all night. Again.
On the Friday call she described the last year. An accident. A stretch with nowhere to live. Five moves in three months. A place she left before the contract was up. Her horse attacked and badly hurt. Her cat attacked. A new place now, lovely, but something in the energy of it not quite right.
“I feel the stuffing has gone out of me.”
“I’ve made a huge mistake, I feel.”
I asked where that sat in the body.
“No, it’s just a feeling of tiredness and fatigue.”
“It’s more a disconnection of my body. It feels like I’m not even in my body anymore.”
Was that true?
“I don’t know anymore.”
Sometimes I don’t know is the most honest response available, and it can be allowed to stand.
What came next was apathy. She named it herself.
I asked her to feel into it. Not to explain it, not to answer from the mind. Just to notice how apathy shows up, and to give it more room than it was asking for. Then: is that you, or are you the one aware of it?
Nothing came back for a moment.
Then: “There’s a huge resistance. There’s a whole blockage. I don’t want. I don’t want anymore.”
The resistance was not instant. There was a gap first. A silence, and the refusal arrived into it.
That gap is not an absence of the work. It is what the work is standing on.
So I pointed her at the silence rather than the refusal. Notice the space. The openness. The emptiness. Then notice the resistance, and notice where it is appearing.
“I think it’s going up a notch, going to anger. But it’s more like an F off.”
Good. Exactly. And the anger and the F off are also appearing on that silence.
“Yeah.” Then, quickly: “It’s not towards you. This is more about life in general.”
Even with the anger. Even with the apathy. Even with the thoughts going round in circles and a story of doom that was a hard story to hear. Is there still silence. Is there still space.
“More of a feeling of relaxation has come up.”
Call it what you want.
“And a bit of a smile on my face. A little bit of happiness. And instead of F off, it’s like, I don’t give a fuck.”
The same words, near enough. No weight left in them.
People come to releasing wanting the problems gone and the feelings swapped for better ones. Fair enough. What tends to happen is stranger than that. The problems are still there. The emotions are still there. And so are the quiet, and the space, and the smile. Not instead of. Underneath, and the whole time.
“It felt like I needed to get the lid off the thing and unwind. It’s unwinding now.”
“I just haven’t had a space to. It was one thing after another. One deadline after another, one crisis after another, one emergency after another.”
Welcome back.