the queue in my head may or may not be from january and june
I woke up this morning as I do many mornings with ideas that came to me the previous night. This morning’s list was:
Call the dentist
Call the insurance
Text my friend back
When I looked at the dates everything on my list was from January or June. It was like that was a moment where time stopped outside of everything else that I was juggling at the time.
Burnout messes with my sense of time. It pushes things to the side that don’t feel pressing at the time but suddenly become urgent when they resurface months later.
I went to my calendar and saw that January was a time that I was working a part-time job and balancing a schedule that made it challenging to get in a flow. My days off were often spent catching up on emails and admin and any two day stretch I had I was spent trying to get as much done as possible and somewhere in there I squeezed in time for rest. It makes sense that there were some things that started to get pushed to the side.
I looked back to June: Everything paused right before I went on a meditation retreat which kicked of a summer of camping, a family trip to Hawai’i, came home to go to work at a retreat, landing back home my birthday week and then launched my skincare line.
Phew. That makes sense.
When I was at the height of my burnout, I used to feel like I was always running behind, sometimes I still do. I used to feel like I was always showing up to things knowing half the info, and like I missed something. But really, it’s about coming back into presence. It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced the presence I’m starting to feel now. I used to think healing meant doing absolutely nothing. Having no plans and keeping it that way. But that only built resentment.
When I got invited to something, instead of feeling grateful for the invitation and empowered to politely decline, I would think “don’t they know I have a lot of work to do? Why are they inviting me to this?” I would go back and forth and either rearrange everything to go, or say I can’t make it at the last minute and worry that they hated me. At their core, these fears of “what will happen if I go, what will happen if I don’t” weren’t because I actually as a result of anyone outside of myself. It was the feelings of being underwater, the “if this, then that” cause and effect thinking, that led me further and further from presence.
I remember having conversations where instead of fully processing and receiving and invitation or idea, I was already mentally triangulating how I could or couldn’t make that work to prepare my response. That was far from presence.
Catching up on things it’s just about catching up on emails but about having the capacity to be present and have the brain space to take in information and have it feel accessible, not in the soup of the million other things on my mind. It’s about not feeling like I’m dropping the ball but learning my limits of what I can handle at once.
I’ve always felt like I can’t put things down for big moments in my life. Everything was business as usual as I was writing my thesis, working full-time and maintaining a pretty full social calendar. I used to wonder why people didn’t check in to see if I was still in the thick of burnout. But how would they know?
Part of it was wanting to be there for all the things and the other part of it was a fear of saying no. I didn’t want to disappoint, I didn’t want to let anyone down — so I would say yes and figure it out (often to my own detriment). The more I’ve been able to tune into that yes and no, the more I’ve been able to lean into presence every chance I get.
What does a ‘yes’ feel like in your body?
And how does it differ from your ‘no’
This 15-minute guided meditation helps you get clear on where a ‘yes’ lives in your body so you can make decisions from an aligned place. By taking a moment to feel into your ‘yes’ without external opinions, you cultivate a deeper connection with your inner knowing. Your body is giving you cues, it's time we learn to listen.