“Yeah,” Julie said, wondering if he would recognize that she had been doing all that for him for a decade.
“I’m a good dad,” Jeremy insisted, apparently trying to remind himself as much as her.
Julie took a deep breath and let it out slowly, not letting the wave of emotion stick inside her. “Yes,” she said. She hesitated, not wanting to pick a fight, then added, “We’re both better parents when we get to take a break sometimes.”
With a tiny laugh at the happy memory, she mimicked his Flynn Rider “smolder” look at him, then said, “The thing about emotions—what I’ve learned is, you have to complete the stress response cycle that’s activated but unfinished because you were staying in control of it. Then you can move to the next thing.”
“Yes,” Jeremy said. Then he said, “What do you mean, ‘complete the cycle’?”
* * *
—
Speaking at Smith College in January 2017, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow answered a question from the audience (full disclosure: from Emily) about how she deals with burnout. She said, “I leave [work] and come [home] and spend time outdoors, and I have the world’s most perfect family and great dogs and I go fishing and I chop wood and I use different parts of my brain. And that’s the only cure that I really know of; when you are burned out, it’s because you burned a specific gear in your brain, but the Lord gave us a lot of different gears. When you use the other ones, you regenerate.”
Most of us have spent our whole lives being taught to believe everyone else’s opinions about our bodies, rather than to believe what our own bodies are trying to tell us. For some of us, it’s been so long since we listened to our bodies, we hardly know how to start understanding what they’re trying to tell us, much less how to trust and believe what they’re saying. To make matters worse, the more exhausted we are, the noisier the signal is, and the harder it is to hear the message.
Without rest, you are not fully yourself. Without sleep, you will literally die.
And beyond mere survival, rest is a first step to listening to and believing your body.
The next step is learning to live peaceably with that wildly noisy voice in your head that tells you not to rest, tells you you’re failing. We call her “the madwoman in the attic,” and she’s the subject of the next, and last, chapter.
tl;dr:
? We will literally die without rest. Literally. Finding time for rest is not a #firstworldproblem; it’s about survival.
? We are not built to persist incessantly, but to oscillate from effort to rest and back again. On average we need to spend 42 percent of our time—ten hours a day—on rest. If we don’t take the time to rest, then our bodies will revolt and force us to take the time.
? Human Giver Syndrome tells us it’s “self-indulgent” to rest, which makes as much sense as believing it’s weak or self-indulgent to breathe.
? Getting the rest your body requires is an act of resistance against the forces that are trying to rig the game and make you helpless. Reclaim rest and you reclaim sovereignty over your own life.
8
GROW MIGHTY
To understand Sophie, you need to know about the series finale of Star Trek. It’s called “Turnabout Intruder,” and in it we meet Dr. Janice Lester, an ambitious woman driven to madness by her failure to get a captaincy because “the world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.” Lester forcibly switches bodies with Captain Kirk so that she can finally be a captain, but of course she is foiled, because: Kirk. At the end of the episode, having been forced back into her own body, she sobs, “I’m never going to be the captain,” a textbook image of a woman pushed away from her Something Larger, off the Monitor’s emotional cliff, into the pit of helpless, hopeless despair.
After she’s escorted away, Kirk muses, “Her life might have been as rich as any woman’s, if only…if only.”
The end of Kirk’s thought, we know from things he said earlier in the episode is, “if only she hadn’t hated her own womanhood.”
Sophie’s relationship with Star Trek became more complicated when she finally got to the end and discovered that’s how the whole series ends. It makes Sophie slightly bananas that the series ends with this fatalistic message about the intractability of the patriarchy (ugh), locking women out of the highest leadership positions even in the twenty-third century!
Sophie told us, “When I’m doing that progressive-muscle-tension-and-relaxation thing, what I’m imagining is Janice Lester beating the shit out of Kirk. She runs back after that ‘if only’ comment and is like, ‘IF ONLY WHAT, BITCH?! If only I hadn’t “hated my own womanhood,” you misogynist asshat? I don’t hate being a woman, I hate that I only wanted the same thing you wanted, but because of my body, I couldn’t have it! And yeah, it made me crazy, and then you said I couldn’t have it because I was crazy!’ And she beats him to a bloody pulp and everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, he had that coming a long time.’?”
The Janice Lester part of Sophie’s mind looks at the chasm between reality and hope, and it craves change. Lately, Sophie’s been thinking that this part of her might be worth listening to.
This chapter is about why that’s such an excellent idea.
* * *
—
Imagine you walk into a room and you hear your best friend in conversation with a stranger.
The stranger is saying, “It’s your own fault you got hurt. Why were you so stupid you let that guy near you?”
Or, “Just shut up. Nobody cares. You’re not even worth listening to.”
Or, “You’re a fat, lazy bitch.”
How would it feel, to hear this mean stranger say those things to your best friend? Would it be comfortable? Would you ever say these things, in this way, to your best friend?
Of course not.
So why do so many of us say such things to ourselves? Like, every day?
You deserve respect and love; you deserve to be cherished. You deserve kindness, right now, just as you are. Not when you lose ten pounds, or a hundred. Not when you get a promotion or finish your degree or get married or come out or have a baby. Now.
We are surely not the first people to tell you that, and yet the mean stranger in your head is still beating you up. In this chapter, we’ll talk about where the mean stranger came from and what you can do about her. As with body acceptance, we can’t say you’ll end up living a life free of self-criticism. But we can say you’ll live a life of more self-kindness, which will lead to greater joy, better health, stronger relationships, and greater capacity to cope when you’re struggling.
Let’s learn how.
The Madwoman in the Attic
Amelia’s favorite book is Jane Eyre. When she first read it as a teenager, she couldn’t have articulated the metaphor in the book that so resonated with her: the madwoman living in the attic. Rochester, the hero, has—spoiler—his insane wife locked in his attic. And when you think about it, who doesn’t? A demon in our past or our present that taunts us and tries to stop us from doing the things we most want to do. The metaphor is both so ubiquitous and so resonant, whole books have been written about the madwoman as a literary symbol of women’s entrapment in dichotomous roles of “demon” and “angel.”1 Activist and scholar Peggy McIntosh wrote about hers in 1989, describing her madwoman this way:
She is alternately off the wall with anger at those who have made her feel like a fraud, and off the floor with a visionary sense of her own elemental connection with the universe….[She writes,] “I MAY NOT KNOW WHO I AM BUT YOU SURE AS HELL DON’T, YOU GODDOM [sic] PHONIES, SO DON’T YOU TELL ME WHO I AM.” The other day she looked at me and said, “You need me. I’ll be here for you.” Now, I spend a lot of time taking care of her, and when I do it is very hard on my family. And here she is telling me I need her. Thanks a lot.”2