Life on a Loop

HOW HEALING WORKS

I had a dream a few weeks ago that I was living life on a loop. I was walking from what seemed to be some kind of communal mountaintop campsite, down a hill, through a village, and then back up the rocky path of the mountain. I was moving in a group of others who were scattered over a mile of the route, each moving at different speeds. I was in the back, and every step I took was effortful and slow. Each pass, I was the last to climb, the last to arrive, the last to start again. Until the last climb of the last pass in my dream, when I noticed I wasn’t panting with exertion the same way I had been. I noticed I was walking faster, gaining ground between my position in the group and the next in front of me. I felt a strength and vigor in my legs that I used to know from my days hiking in the high Sierra Nevada mountains. And in the dream I remember thinking to myself: huh, I must have gotten better. The repetition had won its progress. And in the dream, I smiled.

The fact that I could have this dream at all is remarkable. For long years, it has not been that way. Sleep felt shallow, frustrating, pointless, and so often I would awaken on the other side of it feeling as though I hadn’t slept at all. Or instead I would awaken at 1am or 3am and then sit, bleary-eyed but buzzing and unsettled until morning, waking to a stressed body that would struggle even more. These days, sleep is one of my most prized (and hardest won) treasures.

In one of the earliest healing steps, I read somewhere to design my days for sleep, which seemed like a good place to start since dead-tired days didn’t feel like much use in and of themselves. I started with one healing habit and than slowly added others. I’d step outside into early morning sunlight or use a full spectrum lamp inside for 30 minutes in the first hour of the day. I’d avoid over-taxing my body, which was the surest way to spend the night wired and awake. I’d meditate if I had enough energy and focus. I’d stretch or move a little if I could. I’d walk once up the block in front of my house and back if I could, slowly. I’d time my meals for consistency and to train the clock in my body. I’d watch videos online that made me laugh: animals cuddling, babies doing adorable baby things, feel-good TV show episodes, knowing that laughter and lightness manufacture the good kind of neurochemistry in my brain. Sometimes I’d even just sit, desperate to do something that felt like it might change things, making myself laugh artificially until the reflex of laughter took over. Once I tried laughter yoga, but in my novice enthusiasm I managed to hurt my neck and never returned to the practice, as delightful as it was. (This was neither the first nor last time I would dive into something in such an extreme way that I negated its healing benefits.) I journaled every night at 8pm, writing down my tiny wins from the day (I walked a half block, I ate healthy-ish food, I laughed a bit, I was kind to myself about what I still couldn’t do) and reflecting on the day or an inspiring quote I had copied onto the journal pages. I turned off my phone or TV after 8 so blue light wouldn’t interfere with my depth and quality of sleep. Some days I did every step as I planned; other days I managed what I could. And more and more often, little by little and between ups and downs, the nights got richer and deeper and a bit more restful.

As I slept more, I started to value the day more. I could add in more tiny joys. I could bear the boredom a little easier. I was alert enough to have a conversation with a loved one, to throw in a load of laundry, maybe to stand long enough to take a shower—each their own kind of joy. Being able to do so little for so long reveals the joy in doing anything, even housework. In time, and through all of the ups and downs every one of us knows, reminding myself again and again to keep going, healing habits like these have become an important part of my health puzzle.

Most nights now, I cut the lights by 8 or 8:30pm and spend a beautiful (or tedious) hour in however much light the world offers me. Sometimes I read under a red lamp. Sometimes I meditate. Sometimes I star gaze. Sometimes I sit impatiently, too tired to be anything but bored, nostalgic for “normal” times before I fell ill when I’d watch TV late into the evening, feeling ready for the day to end but not yet ready for sleep. But once I am in bed, I often think about all the healing that can happen in those 7-8 hours ahead of me and it feels a little like the eve of a holiday or the first day of school. The world—and my body—might just surprise me tomorrow. More health might just be waiting for me tomorrow. And though it happens less now, sometimes I still go to sleep grieving for everything that feels lost, for years that feel wasted (even though I know they weren't), trying to comfort myself as I lay awake, awash in a suffocating uncertainty, trying to breathe my way through it, anyway.

And in a way, this dream I had was remarkably on point—I have been living life on a loop. I suspect many of us feel that way. Since the first days of illness, I have been fixated—probably too fixated—on climbing the mountain ahead, putting all of my energy into figuring out how to manage even a few steps toward the top and how to get there faster, only to find myself so often at the bottom again weeks or months later, all of my efforts seemingly wasted. At least that’s what I thought at first.

But as time has gone on, I've noticed more of the purpose in that repetition. In the progress and in the setbacks. In the practice of new healthy habits, and in their frustrating dissolution when my conviction sometimes wanes. A lived day is the building block of an entire life; a healing day is the building block of a recovery. I found in time that I would commit once, then fail, then find something like grace and forgiveness for myself for all the ways I was an imperfect patient, thinking, thank goodness for another day. Tomorrow, I’ll try again. Even if I had managed nothing else, if I could end the day with kindness toward myself and something like hope, I had healed in some tiny but important way. And sometimes, I’d lose track of a healing habit for weeks or months, only to remember much later what I had forgotten to do or was too overwhelmed to do. And I’d spend days reprimanding myself: you should be trying harder. And then, again, I’d remember my own forgiveness. I’d remember that sometimes we need breaks, even from healing. We need time to integrate a new way of seeing ourselves and the world around us, time for our bodies to rebuild from new raw materials. I’d remember that no healing is every wasted, no matter how far we wander away from it—what we have done will be there, waiting for us to find it again and to continue the path. And in my experience, the tracks we lay down for a healthier, fuller life are a little easier to travel the next time we find them.

I’m learning to let go of the race back to health, or the race to anywhere, at least for now. (There are many races I'm still hoping to run.) This one is particularly hard for me. Most things I want sooner than they come, and that has been especially true of recovering my health. I had heard others talk of “flow” or “surrender,” but if I’m honest I have always much preferred trying like hell to control even those things that part of me knows could not be controlled. If I had a destination in mind, I'd convince myself I had to plan out every inch. I’ve surprised myself that sometimes now, after learning to paint myself with layers and layers of my own kindness and acceptance over these years, I can start to let go of trying so hard. And by trying less, by struggling less against the current of illness and letting myself run with the river, by accepting where I'm starting today, by starting to add in more moments of joy to however today is, I find that I seem to make more progress more reliably, or at least I can stay more afloat through the ups and downs.

And from this pattern of day-after-day, of living life on a loop, of climbing and descending and climbing again only ever as fast or slow as I can manage, that voice that screams at me that I need to fix everything now gets quieter. I can start to see that sometimes the path from A to B looks like an incomprehensible mess and that I should keep going, anyway. I can start to trust that wandering might be exactly the right way to travel for now, or that sometimes stopping for awhile might be exactly the right kind of progress. And sometimes in the slowness of all of this, I even fall in love a little bit with a different kind of scenery, with what this quiet day has to show me of what is still possible for healing. And some days I start to fall almost as in love with the gentler pace of today as I do with the epic, adventuring tomorrows I hope for.

I'm learning that wherever we are on the rise and fall of the mountain's path is the only place to be. And whatever we learn along the way and whatever we forget—sometimes again and again—we'll learn again, and next time maybe more fully, when the next loop comes around. And day by day, practice by practice, lesson by (sometimes infuriating) lesson, forgiveness by forgiveness, rekindled hope by rekindled hope, that's the way we heal.