Blank Space
A couple of months ago, I made a semi-unconscious choice to wrap up work with several clients. At first, I just felt intuitively like I was at a great place with most of them and a few who I knew would probably be better served by someone other than me.
What I didn’t understand until after returning home from vacation and getting the kids started back in new school year, is that I cleared away a hella lot of space for myself.
In this space, I was crying, like ugly crying, almost every day. There I was, with a full day of nothing some days, reading books, walking, and sunning myself at the pool, and I would burst into tears. “Am I going crazy?” I thought one day. “Am I depressed?” I asked another day. “Is this boredom?” “Perimenopause?” “Senior year of my oldest child sadness?” WTAF?
The tears kept coming, and I kept allowing them. Until about 10 days in, I woke up from a nightmare in a dead sweat. I sat up and realized that the dream wasn’t a dream, it was an event that took place back in February. Without too many details, my ex-husband almost died, and I was the one who found him and took him to the hospital. It was one of the more traumatizing events of my life, but because life has been so extra in 2024, it didn’t hit me how deeply it affected me. I could barely breathe replaying the whole event and watching it six months later in my mind.
I was running between multiple clients a day, kids, supporting my niece with cancer and going to chemo, and then my partner, who had lost his job in January, lost his father two weeks after the near death of my ex. Then preceded to lose four more family members. And still doesn’t have a job. 2024 has been EXTRA.
The merry-go-round of life events just kept coming, and all the while I was holding space for clients and their growth and healing. I never took a break. Just kept pulling the weight of a single mom, a loving partner, and a supportive ex. I just kept the balls in the air and kept it moving.
I was describing this whole thing to my niece, and she said to me, “This is you. You don’t process things until you have space. And you never have space.”
Do most of us ever have space? The inherent load of parenthood is so heavy that anytime more than that happens, we just must keep stepping it up and keeping the train moving. Making dinners, shuttling kiddos, helping with schoolwork, social calendars, and the emotional support we lend regularly. We just keep moving.
I’ve been working with teenagers for the last six months and each of them for the first two to four calls, have cried. A lot of tears. They are all boys. Crying. When asked why they are crying, each of them say, “I don’t know I just feel sad.”
We keep saying things like “I’m depressed. I’m anxious. I need medication,” and I’m beginning to wonder if what we actually need is a good dose of space to reconcile the insanity that has been our world particularly since it shut down four years ago and turned everyone on their heads. What teens need is a place to connect to themselves and to be listened to rather than staring at a phone and trying to avoid. What we need is someone to say, “there, there,” and just hold space for all our big feelings.
Maybe we just keep pushing, scrolling, drinking, sexing, shopping, eating, and controlling because if we stopped it all, we might not get out of bed for a few weeks. We might just sit there and have our stored grief slap us in the face and make us ugly cry for days.
Maybe our lives are so insanely packed as mine has been for years and these emotions that we are carrying around with us that we aren’t aware of, maybe they are causing a depression like scenario. Maybe we’re anxious because to not be anxious, we must at some level believe we aren’t alone and many of us just feel alone.
Maybe what we need to be aware of is our SPACE. Are we giving ourselves space to feel and be? Do we allow our emotions to be in our bodies and present or are we constantly trying to do something with them, so we don’t have to feel the excruciating pain?
I believe even in coaching and therapy, sometimes the talking it all out and staying ‘in the work’ is just a way to bypass the sitting in the hell of what it feels like to feel.
From someone who took SIX months to feel her feelings about the traumatic event that happened for us in February and the loss of my father-in-law, and how hard it is to see your closest people in suffering and in grief, trust me when I say, I KNOW how hard what I’m asking you to consider, actually is.
I’m light and free after three weeks of allowing myself space. I feel connected to myself, to my people and I feel healthy and more able to give to my people. The “depression” is gone. I’m sleeping like the dead and I want to have fun. All good signs that the space I indirectly created for myself, worked to get me back to level.
I hope you will take some time to consider your own space. Consider giving yourself some room to explore and face and ultimately relieve your body of whatever you are carrying around. In doing so, I think you will be amazed at how much healthier and sane you feel.
Until Next Time,
