My Body and Other Crumbling Empires by Lyndsey Medford

Author:Lyndsey Medford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781506484327
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

HEALING IS PRICELESS

In 2021, when I began writing this book, the world was in as much disarray as ever. California was decimated by wildfires, Louisiana and Tennessee by storms. The Taliban retook Afghanistan. My friends were organizing to lobby the state legislature about education and COVID-19. People were scared. People had real, urgent needs.

Every day, I got up and wrote words and took care of myself.

I’d take a walk and do yoga. I cooked for myself. I cleaned my house to keep my own spirits up. I scheduled calls and dates with friends. I called this success.

For most of my adult life, I considered every one of those tasks “personal time” and tried to cram them in between work, volunteering, writing, and trying to comprehend the entire world and what to do about it. Now, they consumed my days. I’d decided to live as if this work of writing was work enough; as if my own sacred being was worth stewarding well—even in the midst of tragedy and chaos.

I instinctively reach for a defense of my limited “productivity” while the world is so full of need. I could tell you about the exact cytokines the body produces in response to chronic stress, which have been directly linked to increased severity of my particular disease. Or I could simply say I’d decided to experimentally confirm my sneaking suspicion that I feel better physically when I am happier. Or should I tell you that we wanted a baby, and I was supposed to reduce stress for that reason too?

In the end, my only “defense” is an intuition: that I really must unhook from the belief that the world will improve in proportion to my productivity, that oh-so-much depends on me at all times. I am trying to resist the internal need to defend my rest at all.

As my experiment unfolded, I was surprised to find how quickly and naturally my determined lack of activity actually affected the world. I invited my neighbor to join me for yoga in my yard, bringing respite to her weeks of tending to students, parents, and teachers. I had time in an afternoon to bring some tea along to another friend in the midst of important leadership work. A third friend sat on my porch on a different morning reciting a litany of tasks and projects she wished she could cancel, “but things still have to happen,” she sighed with bone-deep weariness. I caught her eye. “Do they?” I said, trying to be gentle. “What if, in the midst of an ongoing global emergency, nothing has to happen besides surviving?”

“No one has margin, everyone is in despair,” headlines and friends said alike. For so many years I’d taken statements like this to mean that I don’t “deserve” to be the exception. When so many people have no choice but to be under constant stress, how could I sit back? How did I dare to pursue peacefulness?

Trying it now, for the first time in my life, I quickly

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