I still feel the pain. Things are getting better – there are more moments of freedom, more moments of fresh air. But I still wake up most mornings after a not-so-great night of sleep, after my subconscious has done its thing for an entire night and built up the sick feeling, has impacted my dreams and my emotional state. I wake up anxious a lot of mornings. I lay there, trying to breathe and calm myself, as the anxiety that built up throughout the night continues to build up. Finally, like this morning, I am driven out of bed. I jump up, feeling that feeling of not being able to calm down, of being uncomfortable in my own skin due to the anxious feeling I can’t escape. 

Except that I can escape it, by now. At least for a little while. I know it will come back. But I have done enough therapy and learned enough strategies that by now, I am able to dig myself out of the hole in the mornings pretty effectively. Usually. Granted, I am a high school teacher on summer break. I have the luxury of making emotional healing my main job right now. I know most of you who are reading this do not have that luxury. I know how much harder I had to fight, and how it felt like I would never have a break, during the busy school year when I was fighting being devastated. It was hard. Doing whatever I could each day made a big difference for me. I am a firm believer that there is a huge difference between, for example, finding five minutes of self-care time each and every day, for a long period of time (months or years), versus finding no minutes of self-care each and every day, for a long period of time. 

This morning, I got out of bed. Put my shoes on. Did what I knew I needed to do – went for a walk outside. There have been mornings where the anxiety has gotten me up early, and I have wandered for more than an hour. And over the last nearly six months, wandering beside creeks and through woods has been part of my therapy. Long walks. An hour, an hour and a half. 

Even during the busy school year, I chose to prioritize my self-care, and barely show up at work. After school got out, I would oftentimes leave as soon as I could, to go walk for an hour or more at a path in a local park. Mentally, I put work on the back burner. I just showed up. Somehow, it feels like prioritizing myself and barely showing up made it so that I was actually able to show up for my students in unexpected ways. Yes, my curriculum was minimal last semester. Yes, I still look back and struggle with feeling like I let my students down in terms of what they learned. But I have to remember that prioritizing my own well-being is non-negociable. I have to sustain myself, in order to be able to make any lasting impact on others. And even if they didn’t know what I was doing, I want my students to see me role modeling self-care in those crucial moments. 

There is something vitally important about being outside and moving, to regulate my emotions and free me from, or temporarily reduce, the anxiety and the sadness. I was in a health program one time that taught us this (from some scientific / credible study or source), and I have also seen the effects of being outside in my own life. I made walking along creeks and through woods a form of therapy. I wandered to a particular bridge multiple times, taking a picture in the same spot to record the way the scenery changed, and to remind me that I am slowly changing, too. Slowly healing, even if the change is so small that I cannot see it on a daily basis. Even if all the walks and all the things I do do not ever feel, in one given day, like enough. 

What activities have been most useful to you in the healing process?