The Art of Sinking and Rising

(Life 2.0) Into the Depths

LIFE 2.0: This is part of my series where I share shit I’ve learned about the hard way so you don’t have to.

Hello fearless readers! It’s been a while. I’ve been in the deep, so to speak. My move in January really threw me in the deep end, on top of the second semester of my MA. I was sinking for a while and have only recently been able to come up for air.

I have so many things that I want to share with you about the journey I’ve been on these past weeks—in my life, my course, and my writing. I thought I’d start with it’s been like to fall into a deep hole and start to emerge again, in case it might help someone out there who has been sinking as well. There is a lot to say, so this will be part one.

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Going Deep

I wrote to you in January that my word of the year was going to be DEEPER. Well, I had no idea what that really meant. I was thinking of it as a voluntary thing, like I was going to dig beneath the surface of things. I did not imagine that I was going to be pulled down to the murky depths.

One thing I’ve learned on this journey since I quit my life in 2022 is to get more comfortable with falling. Have you ever fought like hell when you felt like a sinking ship? Because if you let yourself go, you might never come back. That’s what it has felt like to me.

So you grip the edge of whatever canyon you’re clinging to and keep trying to pull yourself back up, until you just can’t anymore. And then you’ve worn yourself out and you’re lying at the bottom, wondering, how the hell do I pick myself up from here? And how hard is it going to be?

What It’s Like Down There

So you’ve sunk and you’re at the bottom of the ocean. You’ve drowned, in a way, but you’re still breathing. The air is different. You can’t just start swimming around. So you’re just lying there.

What this looks like in practical terms is that you can’t seem to get up off the couch. Or the dishes are piling up. Or you have emails scrolling into the next page and you can’t seem to face them. Friends are maybe messaging you and you don’t respond. You can’t be bothered to go out and you’re subsisting on microwave meals.

Most likely you’re getting through the days by distracting yourself with TV, social media, the news, computer games; and/or you’re numbing yourself with alcohol, pot, CBD; and/or you’re soothing yourself with sugar and comfort foods.

And then on top of it you feel like shit, like you’re a bad person, like there is something really wrong with you. So you hide. You don’t want anyone to see you like this.

Then one day you want to break out of it, so you get up and get dressed and head out and meet someone new. Maybe you call an old friend. You “make an effort.” But soon you find yourself overwhelmed by the waves again, and so you go back into your cave.

The waves, in my analogy, are emotions, thoughts, stories, beliefs—that inner turbulence that is difficult to identify or name because it is complex and has no clear source. It’s not just, oh I got a divorce or I’m miserable in my career or I can’t find a job. It’s never just that. It’s also that you have these scripts running in your head telling you that you are no good, alone, unlovable, unworthy, stupid, broken, and on and on.

You are in the deep, and you simply can’t see your way up to the surface again.

You’re Really Frozen

What I’ve learned is that we are stuck at the bottom not because we are bad or weak or too broken. And yes, we’ll need to address those beliefs. But first we have to stabilize our nervous system. We are simply dysregulated or off-kilter. I am convinced that a lot of us are. And probably more and more of us are all the time, because our phones and the internet are designed to keep us in this state, wallowing like an addict in the sea of distraction.

The thing is, when life and your emotions overwhelm you, you freeze. That is exactly what happened to me. My body took over when my psyche couldn’t take anymore.

FREEZE is the sympathetic nervous system’s reaction to the fight-or-flight state that is only supposed to last for a short period. The freeze state is a form of protection; it feels like numbness and depression. In my last post--five weeks ago now--I talked about feeling stuck. I see now that I was in FREEZE.

The hard part is that the only way out of it is back through the waves. (This is complicated, but it has to do with how our nervous system developed in stages over millennia. We have to cycle through the branches of our nervous system in stages as well.)

Understandably, we don’t want to go back into the waves. So we go back into the numbness. It feels safer there, but are we really living?

Here’s the thing that really got me: We can be cycling from FREEZE to FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT and back to FREEZE over and over again, for years even! I’m pretty sure I was, to some degree, in my old life. I remember discovering that my muscles were so clenched and tight because of this. (I had been in and out of physical therapy for years!) I had lost the ability to relax my muscles because I had become so detached from my body. I had to learn to inhabit it again (through yoga, Pilates, and meditation) to start to down-regulate my nervous system.

(I shared this before, but I found this video really helpful in recent months to help me stimulate the vagus nerve and down regulate. I did these mutlitple times a day for a while. Now I do them in the morning and at night.)

How to Start to Rise Again

It’s really hard to get up off the bottom of the ocean on your own. You simply have to call for help, which is something you probably don’t want to do. In fact, if you’re like me, every fiber of your being may rebel against it. If you’re a mom or a boss or an entrepreneur, you may feel like the last thing you can do is admit defeat. You’re the one holding the whole ship together. As a mom, I held my shit inside for so many years. I clung to the edge of the canyon or the Titanic or whatever and refused to admit that I was falling. Until I went crashing down.

Coming back up again begins with that point when you’re at rock bottom and you finally admit to yourself that not only are you sinking but that you need help to get back up. It’s about being honest with yourself.

A momentary rant: It’s not about simply “letting go,” which is a kind of mantra in the spiritual world. I love Michael Singer—he wrote Untethered Soul and Living Untethered—but just letting go wasn’t doing it for me. Every time a wave crashed over me, I closed my eyes and imagined myself letting go of a rope, like in tug-of-war, and I felt the other side fall away. But the waves kept coming, and they started to come too fast and furious for me. I tried to let them wash over me, another form of surrendering. But I could hardly breathe at times.

Then, after my move, I drowned. I was having one vertigo attack after another. I’ve been dealing with Meniere’s for 7 years now. When it flares up, my whole life stops. I was having vertigo for 2-3 hours, sometimes multiple times a day.

Coming Back Up . . .

I’m happy to say that although I still have some dizziness, I’m not trapped in my apartment anymore. I am exercising again and able to feel myself moving forward again, finally. A whole new space has opened up inside me, and I actually feel hopeful again.

Another wonderful thing that is happening is a big breakthrough in my writing. As I breathe again and come out of the freeze state and back into life, I have felt so much energy flowing into my writing. I am present for it again, able to immerse myself in the scene I am writing, in a way I haven’t done before.

So how have I been able to do this? First, admitting that I was drowning and needed help. Second, seeking out the help and finding the right help. And third, opening myself fully to the process of healing my unresolved traumas. I had to go DEEP, and I’ll tell you about it next week.

I will have some wonderful news to share with you: rising again, even through our childhood traumas, isn’t as hard or as painful as we think it will be. And it doesn’t have to take years! Really.

I hope that things in your world have been much less doom-and-gloom. How have you been? Have you felt yourself at the bottom of the ocean? Do you think you’ve been in FREEZE? And how did you manage to thaw?

Until next time,

Anne

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