Rest

You may be wondering why a post on rest is published at 2AM.  I fell asleep earlier this evening, which has disturbed my sleep cycle.  After finishing my book, I tried a twenty minute meditation, then worried about not sleeping and why I wasn't sleeping.  When your bed becomes a site of hypervigilance, or just a site of "not sleeping" research suggests it's time to get up and do something else, so I got up, finished making my ivy basket and came here.

I wasn't born or brought up into the modern "self care first" mentality, which includes rest.  It wasn't common in Gen X.  I was brought up with a "duty" mindset that more typically belonged to my parents' wartime generation,  And yet I still see that "duty first" mindset in my Millenial friend who is ten years younger than I am. She is aware of that burden though and the other difference between her and previous generations is that she doesn't want it, or at least, wants more of a break, but with kids and family, that's hard. While people had more children in the past, and terry towelling nappies to contend with, parenting doesn't seem to have been as complicated or as demanding, or maybe expectations were just very different. 

A lot of Gen X, self aware in the 80s, were brought up, at least in the UK, on success, ambition, achievement and the house price boom. It was all about power shoulder pads and getting ahead  or in my case, after 2 gap years and two extra years at uni - about catching up with my peers. One of our contemporaries still didn't seem to have a "proper job" as parents called it, in the second half of his mid-twenties, which by UK standards was late, but he eventually became a lawyer, so it was "justifed".  I don't think most of realised we were part of a zeitgeist, but so it was for many of us.  I watched my parents make and lose money in the eighties boom and bust.  After surfing out the recession of the early nineties with those extra those years at uni, I eventually went into work during the dot.com boom and bust. 

Rest never featured on the agenda, not for me and not really for my generation. Now we are contending with children and parents and the care system.  When their parents were at care-stage, they just put them in.  That's how I remember it.  It was sad but that's how it was and that's what the new care homes were for.  The wartime generation were busy enjoying the wave of enormous good fortune that came with peace, a favourable economy, booming house prices, the invention of holidays abroad for the masses, stable careers and triple lock pensions.  There is not a single one of my parents' friends who I think had any qualms about their lifestyles, climate change, capitalism, any of it.  They were just happy to have survived Cuba and the Cold War.  Why on earth would they think any different?  They were riding that work hard play hard wave as though all that good fortune were causally brought about by that same hard work. We moved all the time.  I didn't know any different.  So I did the same: worked and travelled and moved house on repeat. I'd lived in forty houses before I was 35.  

Work had plenty of bullies and Machiavellian types in the male dominated global IT business. Women weren't paid the same, but after the recession we were just happy to be on the ladder. When I stopped travelling for work I studied for a degree at the same time all while pregnant. I had cold and flu at least three times in that pregnancy. I'd been diagnosed with severe depression and a cancer scare by the time I was 30, severe anxiety after that, though no-one told me, and was well on the way to burnout by the time I had my first son.  I didn't stop then either.  I just moved to a remote town with a small baby and an absent partner.

I still didn't consciously learn or decide to rest but as the children started school, I stepped back a lot from society, from being so much with people.  After much work-induced stress, more exploitation, betrayal and bullying than seemed normal, I wanted to choose who was around me.  I didn't see work as causing mental health damage at the time.  I focused on the travel, the work, the money but later I could see the patterns.  So I did stop, in a way by stepping back.  The Outpost blog started in those years. 

The demands of raising two small children mostly alone for twelve years, not sleeping, dry rot twice, taken advantage of repeatedly by tradesmen, managing a rental business, being flooded, all  took its toll.  I'd got away with in my twenties and my thirties, just.  By my early forties I was certainly carving out time for myself through tango but it wasn't enough and it was still lonely.  Then, nearly ten years ago, not long after starting The Outpost I was punished by those running the tango community, not as a paying customer, but certainly as a DJ.  That was fine.  It was a lot of prep and a long drive.  I knew my sets were what I'd heard in the traditional salons in BA and I was fine with that.   Virtually nobody knew what that was and fewer cared.  It wasn't about the music anyway.  It was the views.  Then I asked a friend for help with a technical issue and was told over and over that I wasn't following the instructions right though I did so over and over, to the letter.  We parted ways. Then I fell ill with what turned out ot be an autoimmune disease. I was diagnosed, eventually, got medication, got a bit worse over the next couple of years, stabilised, but its permanent and I've had health issues off and on ever since.

The pressure piled on again when my parents became older and ill.  I was trying to look after them, my children were going through important exams.  Dad died.  Pigface took control and started the attacks.  Eventually, mum came to live with us, the attacks ramped up, first by him and then by social services for him and that was that.  

After two or three months I finally accepted I had to get some help with mum.  24 hours a day unpaid care for someone with Alzheimers while managing a famaily and being traumatised by someone else and everyone they've got to help them is too much for anyone.  A local day centre was widely recommended, where she started three days a week for a few hours.  I felt desperately guilty but the first day she went I thought I'd go and lie down for ten minutes because I was bone tired. 

Footnote: Bone tired is not just a metaphor.  I've only felt it once so to use it here isn't quite right.  My youngest was very ill as a newborn, we were robbed while at home, I was ill and for weeks I barely slept. After a couple of weeks, I felt the world literally tipping to the side, or perhaps I was tipping.  I didn't realise for a while that my loss of balance was from lack of sleep.  Later, came months where my bones would hurt.  Eventually, I realised it was fatigue - bone tired.  End footnote. 

So I lay down, just after mum had been collected by minibus and I couldn't get up.  I tried and it was as though whatever connects your will to your body had been cut right through. I had been completely incapacitated through shutdown before.  That had been traumatically induced, a state of great stress caused by extreme fear. This was different.  I drifted in and out of consciousness for a couple of hours wondering why I felt like a dead weight. It wasn't about not having slept well. I was used to that.  Later, I realised I was totally burnt out to the point of shutdown, albeit of a different kind.   My thinking was foggy, my memory and concentration were poor.  They are all signs of things that aren't good for you: depression, trauma, exhaustion, take your pick.

The main thing I kept reading, was rest or rather allowing myself to rest. So I would lie down occasionally and wonder what I was supposed to be doing in the rest.  

That's when I turned back to meditation that I'd tried in a seated position when recovering from the stalker. I'd listen to my heart which was hurting, literally, so much at that time. That constant thud, thud, thud felt and sounded reassuring.  Meditation was rest with a purpose. Guided rest. Rest that wasn't empty and therefore possibly dangerous. I learned that you don't just have sit on your own and wonder why emptying your mind is so hard.  Guided meditations help with that. 

I also learned last year that I like to lie on the floor to meditate, or "rest" as I now think of it more.  I can rest more fully.  The floor supports me, which is useful input and much more comfortable.  My spinal discs apparently refill with spinal fluid which has certainly helped my back.  I do it midday if I can, so my discs and I get a top up halfway through the day. 

I learned most of all, that rest is "productive", though I didn't like the term, because in that word, the world of productivity that you are trying to get away from, hounds you.  Rather, rest is necessary.  It's necessary to life, to keeping going, It's one half of a necessary goal.  We think that sleep is when we rest, but sometimes we need other kinds of rest or more than sleep, or more sleep. 

Rest is not the reward after life is done properly.  That's what I've had to learn. It's a condition of continuation. I would push past time to rest so I could really feel I'd earned it.  Or perhaps it was that I felt, subconsciously, that I hadn't "done life properly" so I didn't deserve rest. 

Work is measured, has milestones, goals, validation.  There is no real cultural script for rest.  It's what we do after work / shopping / tea / kids / admin and maybe, on a good night, a bit of telly. It can be endlessly postponed because we don't really see it as of value, the way work is,  Rather than being something sacred, separate, something we make time for, rest just becomes the point at or before collapse. "No rest for the wicked".  Only the good get rest.  Even in the saying, rest is commodified and plainly stated, a reward. 

Rest allows the nervous system to complete a cycle of downregulation, of letting go of stress.  If the demands of the day or of anxiety or stress keep stacking up, that doesn't happen.  Sleep can complete that cycle but only if the body is already close enough to baseline, otherwise sleep is spent managing activation, for example, I think that's why I've had so little REM in the past year. 

I'm still not great with rest but I'm better than I was.  I stop when I'm tired.  I do lie down.  I meditate reasonably frequently.  I've gone back to sewing, because it's relaxing.  I read more and watch less Netflix.

But why do we get to the point of exhaustion and burn out?  Why don't we stop before then?  

It seems getting up might have worked because now I'm yawning and ready for bed!