I have recently found myself dreading going to bed. Physically, I’m tired after spending the day walking to and from class. Socially, I’m drained from holding conversation after conversation with my friends. I can even feel my eyelids getting heavy, but I just can’t bring myself to go to bed because I know it means I’ll have to wake up and start the next day.
I’ve struggled with depression and insomnia for most of my teen and adult life. I’ve tried meditating and yoga. I’ve been off and on medications more times that I can count. There’s no shortage of melatonin bottles on my nightstand. I count my sheep, and when that doesn’t work, my blessings. Sometimes I’ll even call my night-owl mom for some words of wisdom. No matter what I do, though, I am exhausted.
I’ll admit that I’ve always been jealous of people who can snap themselves out of their funks—the people who have figured out how to relax even in tough situations. Sometimes I think I have things figured out, but two assignments later and I’m back where I started. I would wonder if it is a fault in my personality, that maybe I’m just not someone who can survive without stress.
It was around the end of February that I finally snapped. I sat down on the floor of my apartment’s living room, face covered in tears, and called my grandmother. My grandma has lived through a few hard times herself—she grew up without much money on the outskirts of Virginia, she sewed all her own dresses and helped her mother in the kitchen, she was a cheerleader and then a wife at a young age, she worked in an office for a telephone company until she had my mom. Now, she spends her time reading, cooking, and dishing out the realist advice a modern woman could ask for.
I told her that I was exhausted. That I didn’t want to start my days anymore because the thought of another 24 hours filled with work was paralyzing. I told her that I was worried I wouldn’t graduate and that I’d loose my friends to this horrible feeling. I spent an hour telling her every single worry I had and spared no detail. It felt great just to get these thoughts and feelings out.
After my rampage, she was silent for a few moments. Then, she asked me “Have you ever stopped to think that maybe it’s okay to be tired? Overwhelmed?” She told me she’d spent more than 50 years working, and not once did she ever feel bad about feeling bad. She said being down on yourself is what exasperates those horrible feelings, and you have to allow yourself to feel your pain. Sometimes, you just have to sit with your sadness, like an unwanted but important visitor.
She told me that by ignoring the exhausting negative feeling, I would only be allowing it to grow. She recounted how she would make her blue feelings comfortable, that she would pour herself a drink and sit down on the comfiest of her living room couches and just exist with it. In those moments, she’d think about the good in her life, and then the bad. She’d make a mental list, but never compare them to each other. She was allowing herself to validate each experience that impacted her emotionally, regardless of connotation.
“You have to rest yourself like you’d treat a crying child,” she said. “You coddle your feelings, hold them gently, then shush them by telling yourself that it’s okay. Not in a way that detracts from the magnitude of these feelings, but in a way that allows you to find peace with them.”
I learned it is okay to cry. It is okay to be upset. It is okay to be exhausted. My problems wouldn’t be solved by sitting with them, but they would be blunted. Instead of avoiding the realities of my life, I would have to embrace them. I would have to pull out a chair and allow them to sit at my dining table, I would have to offer them a place to rest, I would have to confront them. I couldn’t let them take permanent residence inside of my head and heart, but I could acknowledge them.
When you ignore a broken bone, it doesn’t heal on its own. It gets worse, becoming mangled and infected by all that you force it to endure despite its obvious pain. Your emotions are just alike: ignoring them doesn’t not absolve you of their pain. You have to give yourself some grace in order to overcome what plagues you. You have to allow yourself to be okay.