Making peace with peace in a chaotic world
On remembering hard years, embracing the quiet ones, and the vulnerability of feeling peace in a chaotic world.
Welcome to the next installment of Gifts to Yourself: A Holiday Season of Letting Go, my series on small gifts to make the season a little saner. So far, we’ve talked about the gift of being unapologetically yourself, opting out of body talk, building a kinder relationship with food and your body, and allowing yourself better sleep.
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This week’s gift is a quieter one, and, at least for me, harder to accept:
The gift of peace.
What happens when life finally feels easier, but the world still feels heavy? When you’re no longer just surviving, but you can’t seem to accept that it’s okay to be okay?
This essay is about holding the tension between peace and guilt, joy and vulnerability. It’s about learning to feel okay, even when everyone around you isn’t.
And if you’re in a place where peace feels out of reach, dare I say skip it. This piece isn’t meant to be prescriptive or to tell you how to feel. You own that.
It’s the week before Christmas, and all through the house, the creatures are stirring. Well, one of the two cats, anyway.
My youngest child has already left for school. She’s the first one up these days. I set my alarm at 6:30 a.m. just to make sure she’s actually awake, so she will make it to school on time. But my actual school duties are mostly done. I usually go back to sleep after my first alarm until the second one an hour later. This one is to make sure said daughter is now ready and on her way. She also likes for me to set out her sandwich (already prepared) and fill her water bottle. Then she drives herself to school. And I’m off the hook.
It’s all so easy now, and that still surprises me.
A different kind of morning
I remember the hard days, the mornings when I was getting three kids and myself ready for school and work. And then I remember the really hard days, when I was doing that plus dealing with a severely depressed child, one who didn’t want to get out of bed, let alone go to school.
Getting to school was a kicking-and-screaming affair that often ended in tears. Not triggering crying was always the goal, because when you get to crying, it’s game over. For the better part of a year, I would do this emotional tightwire act of trying to get my middle child, who absolutely hated mornings, dressed and in the car, and on the way to school. I’d hold my breath the whole drive, only to find out once we arrived that no matter how much I begged, pleaded, screamed, and occasionally threatened, we’d end up sitting in that car long after the first bell had rung. She should have been in class. I should have been at work.
Some days I’d be fuming, gripping the steering wheel through gritted teeth, other days I’d be resigned, head forward, shoulders slumped, as I drove both of us to my office, where my child would sleep the day away on the break room couch, with me waking her when it was time to eat lunch and then again when it was time to go home. It was a routine I got so used to, I could do it on autopilot.
The gift of slowing down time
I don’t know how I got through those days. Actually, that’s not true. I do know how I got through them.
I slowed down time.
“One day at a time…”
“One foot in front of the other…”
These sayings are nice platitudes, until times of extended crisis, when you realize they’re actually means of survival.
You’re not thinking about tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year because you’re so damn exhausted, so worn to the bone, that you can’t possibly imagine surviving long enough to reach those kinds of milestones. Many of my fellow parents who’ve cared for ill children know exactly what this is like. Time shrinks, because it is necessary for survival. Priorities become clear. When a child is suffering from mental or physical illness, their survival is the only thing that matters. Things like schoolwork and outside activities fall by the wayside, because they aren’t as important as living.
I still don’t know how we got through those days. I’ve blocked out a lot of them. Not because I want to forget, but probably because they’re too heavy to hold onto.
I know we never gave up. None of us. Even when everything felt impossible.
I also know I did everything in my power to assemble the best care team I could. Therapy and psychiatry visits were prioritized over everything else. For a long time, I had no idea if it was working. We just kept showing up. And eventually we got through it. Survival stopped being the priority. Life got back to normal. The scissors and sharp objects could be brought back into the house again.
What peace feels like now
I sit here today and hardly remember the details of those days. Our lives don’t remotely resemble them. My life is easy now, comparatively speaking.
I have it easier than most people I know, easier than probably most people in the world. And that realization doesn’t feel like comfort: it feels like worry and guilt. Because I know, I remember, just how hard life can be.
I wrote about this last week as it relates to sleep. With the recent purchase of a $10 sleep mask, I went from grumpy and groggy to sleeping so well I thought something must be wrong with me. I was sleeping so deeply, I woke up in a state of guilt and anxiety. Because many of us don’t have the luxury of sleep. Yes, I’m setting the alarm to help my youngest child, but I’m more like her human backup alarm.
It’s a kind of survivor’s guilt, the discomfort of having a life that now feels easy.
How do you enjoy peace without feeling like you’re betraying the version of yourself who fought so hard for it?
I think the answer begins with feeling.
Brené Brown and the vulnerability of joy
I listened to a podcast interview with Brené Brown this week, discussing vulnerability. She described her childhood, growing up in a home that was explosive and chaotic, where anger was the only safe emotion. It sounded similar to mine. As she put it:
“Vulnerability was not a thing. Vulnerability was weakness and scary and put you in jeopardy.”
Like many of us, I wasn’t allowed to feel sad or vulnerable.
So I developed armor. We all do, to some extent. Donning our armor is a coping strategy, a survival mechanism. But some of us who’ve experienced serious trauma are never able to fully put it down. And yet, to really feel the richness of this life, we have to. We have to allow vulnerability.
I’ve spent the last few years stripping down the armor, allowing people in slowly. Feelings too. I’m learning to build trust, and, when appropriate, showing vulnerability.
To be vulnerable, you have to feel. To allow emotions, all the emotions, even the ones you spent a lifetime trying to push away. Sadness, fear, grief, longing, uncertainty. These are emotions I’ve felt this last week. But also love, appreciation, gratitude, and hope.
I was puzzled when I heard Brown say the most vulnerable emotion is joy. I was certain it was love, until she explained it:
“Joy is so vulnerable that when some of us get close to it, we dress rehearse tragedy to prepare for disappointment. It’s so vulnerable that we don’t even let ourselves feel joy because we’re so afraid someone’s going to rip it away and we’re going to get sucker punched by disappointment.”
Though my life feels easy right now, I don’t feel like I’m bracing for emotional doomsday or that sucker punch of disappointment. But maybe I am holding back joy, moderating my feelings out of fear. It’s hard to feel fully okay when the world feels anything but.
And it’s not that I don’t have struggles of my own, but lately it feels like I’m carrying more of the weight of others. So many people are going through it. And every day, I wake up to a new worry about the state of the world, but especially what’s happening here in the U.S. These are dark days. I’m deeply affected by what’s happening around me, but by comparison, my troubles seem small.
What does it mean to feel okay, especially during what is, for many, the most stressful time of year? How do we hold peace, guilt, gratitude, and vulnerability at once?
Maybe this is the hardest thing: to let yourself feel joy without bracing for pain or worrying over all the people who do not have it. To be okay, even when everyone else isn’t.
Living fully means honoring the good times as well as the bad, allowing ourselves to feel joy and gratitude as deeply as we do our pain and sorrow. Anything less isn’t really living.
This season, I wish you peace and joy.
If you feel like sharing, I’d love to know …
How are you feeling these days? How are you taking care of yourself? More importantly, how are you finding—or, ahem, allowing—peace and joy in this increasingly chaotic world?
