I could have been on that boat and felt none of it

This was last week. On a small boat off the coast of Maine. My whole family was aboard, and I was finally at home in my own body and my own life.

Three years ago I could have been on that exact boat and felt none (or very little) of it.

In September 2023 I went to bed in a life I had fought for years to build, and felt dishearteningly flat. We'd finally gotten help. New childcare, and she freaking made dinner that night! I know. Steve worked one day less and got his hobbies back. I'd spent over three years deep in somatic nervous system repair and study.

This was after years of the kids waking four to eight times a night, of Steve grinding day in and day out with no breaks, and of me holding all of it on the back end. The night shift and the day shift.

We finally had a new reality.

I lay there and thought, "Is this it?" I had fixed everything I believed was breaking me, and I felt nothing. Not the relief I'd worked so hard for. Not even sadness, which at least would have meant I was still in there. Just flat. All that effort, and somewhere in it I had gone missing.

It makes sense to feel bad when life is hard on the outside. It is completely disorienting to feel bad once you've fixed the perceived holes and life looks like one big privilege. The cliché of it is ironically isolating.  Who could get it? Who would ever empathize? And underneath that: where do I even go from here?

To be scared usually comes with an activating charge. This felt more frozen. Exhausted. Some people would call it burnout.

That December we went to Costa Rica for Steve's 40th, the place I've told everyone I feel most alive. Where I studied yoga in 2005. Where I felt my grandmother's spirit come back to give my grandfather a message. Howler monkeys. Torrential rain. Scorpions. The forever waves surfers cross the world for. The place I finished my 500 hours of training and stayed on staff to teach my own anatomy course- the scariest and most fulfilling work of my life. Dancing at the discoteca, rides on the back of dirt bikes, attempts at my best Spanish.

The edge of life.

The last training I taught there was December 2013, the year before I got pregnant with Sophia. Ten years later I was back, watching my whole family have the time of their lives, seeing the gifts, and a sense of aliveness everywhere but within.

I told myself it was because I was the one caring for the kids. But my parents had come along. I could have taken more time for myself and it wouldn't have changed a thing. I no longer had any idea what made me feel alive. (Another sign of burnout whether from work or life circumstances.)

Here's what I understand now.

My nervous system had been running on survival, and goal-pursuit at the very same time. It's like pressing the brakes with the gas still floored. This is called functional freeze. And freeze is not selective. My joy was frozen exactly as much as my anger and my resentment.

There was nothing left to fix on the outside. The work was slow, unglamorous, and from the ground up.

And it had an order. I want to be honest about the order, because if I'd still been in the thick of chronic sleep deprivation, or had not been working on nervous system repair, what came later could not have happened the way it did.

First it was just Resuscitation. Pacing myself. Relearning that I exist, that I have desires, and that I'm allowed to claim them out loud and say no to things I'd normally say yes to. (Boundary Repair)

Second was Tracking Joy. What actually brings me alive? And then follow it. It turned out it wasn't a solo hobby. Steve can walk out the back door with his mountain bike, his bow, his surfboard, his weights, and come home filled. Mine was women. Rooms full of them. Deep conversation. Ceremony. Gathering, again and again, was the thing that did it.

Third was Generative Expression: And then came the part my body had been waiting for: More dance. Shaking it out. Wrestling and pillow fights with my girls, instead of trying to control them or calm them down (the calm and connection naturally follows). Lifting heavy. Making funny faces and sounds. Learning to send a clear on, then a clear off signal instead of running both at once. (This is the work of unfreezing a stuck fight response, and a lot of what we practice inside Juice.)

The argument I used to swallow at the dinner table found its way out of my mouth with more clarity. The family vacation that used to flatten me started to have breathing room in it.

And then one day a black squirrel stops you cold.

Mine was in the middle of a New York City park, a city I'd visited twice this past year that an earlier version of me didn't even think she liked. I just stood there in complete awe. Over a squirrel.

Then I discovered I love sheer blouses. Who knew? I started coaching lacrosse and I freaking love it. Obsessed. We got a composting machine that turns last night's dinner to dust by morning and I lost my mind with delight. How is that even possible? The way the sun glows through the autumn leaves at sunset. How much more sky I see in early spring before the leaves fill in. And then that absurd, fluorescent green when they finally do.

It looks like an outside game, and enough money and enough health do matter, deeply. But I know in my heart of hearts it's equally, maybe more, an inside one.

The inside game is specific. It's the resuscitation. It's noticing what brings you alive and actually following it. And it's resourcing yourself enough to feel the full range again: rage, sadness, grief, every bit as much as joy. When a system comes back online, all of it comes back online.

So when I looked back this birthday on a whole year of small things lighting me up, it was no small thing to me.

And last week, on that little boat off the coast of Maine, my family all around me, and feeling at home in my own body and my own life. It landed all the way down.

These days, the ability to cry, laugh, rage, and even feel safe with neutral, is the real gift.