Shut down
As human beings, we spend our lives making sense of things, reflecting and sorting and pattern spotting. Psychologists have termed this process ‘sensemaking’. As an overthinker, it’s one of the primary ways I spend my time on this fair planet called Earth ;)
For a while now – a good four to six years, I’d say – there’s one thing in particular that I’ve been attempting to make sense of: why the way in which I bring myself to and express myself within the world has changed.
In the first draft of this post, I spent about 2,000 words exploring ‘then’ (a period of time between 2014-2017) and now, and what has changed both internally and externally in my life during my last few trips around the sun. For brevity, that’s all been edited out, but the key point is that a few years ago, I was putting certain things out into the world – a podcast, a newsletter, more frequent articles, courses and so on – that I am no longer creating.
I’m doing a lot of other stuff these days, but there’s a greater sense of restraint, cautiousness and fear about showing up and using my voice these days. I’m also much more aware of my whiteness and my privilege and the implications of taking up space in a world that needs to make room for voices far more marginalised and underrepresented than mine, more cautious about talking about my life and experiences, having experienced backlash and judgement that are so common on the internet, less sure that I deserve other people’s time with what I want to write about, and less open and trusting in multiple different ways that it’s important for the world that my writing gets into it.
But it hurts. Because on some level, however justified any of the above concerns are, it’s still important to me. When I withhold my voice, it perpetuates the same old patterns and stories that led me in childhood to believe that I was a burden, that I don’t matter and so on.
* * *
Then a few weeks ago, a wonderfully insightful and smart friend that I’d spent some really nourishing time with sent me this post about the trauma-based ‘Freeze’ response (thank you, Allegra):
Source: The Holistic Psychologist via Instagram
I realised with a jolt that this is often my experience. It may not look it to the outside world, but I recognise it. It is where I live so much of my life from. Not just now, but going way, way back. (I do fight, flight and fawn pretty well too, to be fair. Perhaps you relate to being able to mine the whole gamut of trauma-based responses!)
I think education is so important. It gives us language, maps and frameworks to understand ourselves, our lives and the systems that we’re part of, systems created and upheld by people.
A trauma-informed perspective has felt increasingly important to me over the last few years, particularly since I chose to put alcohol back into my life after 17 years of sobriety, cementing my divorce from the label ‘addict’ and from understanding my personality through the lens of having a disease.
Understanding my struggles, behaviour and personality through the lens of my nervous system and CPTSD has been enormous. And being sent this perspective, and having it resonate so much, reminded me that there’s still so much to learn.
How being shut down presents for me
There are lots of different ways that being in this dorsal vagal state presents itself in my life. Other people will experience different things, and I think it’s really important for there to be an ongoing conversation about this so that we can more fully understand ourselves, each other, and the impact hidden or historic trauma has on our lives, relationships and the systems we create, uphold or feel called to dismantle.
So, here’s a bit about how it’s shown up for me in the last little while.
On some level, even though I’m pretty engaged in my life and have shown up to certain parts of it really fully in the last few years, in other ways, I’ve been living through a kind of prolonged process of shut down and hiding, particularly in terms of how I show up in the online world, and the risks I take with my voice and creativity. So much to say about this, but it’s for another day I think.
Throughout much of the pandemic, I have been in an ongoing place that has felt very close to depression. There are multiple reasons for this, with lots of big questions about the direction I’m taking my life in bubbling away.
There have been multiple occasions when I’ve felt so bleak and desperate about life that I haven’t actually wanted to be alive anymore. This is hard not to edit out, because I would never want to talk flippantly or thoughtlessly about suicide or suicide ideation, but it also feels important to include. I know and know of a lot of people who have been through some truly dark days in the last few years, and I think we need to get much more comfortable with talking about how fucking bleak and awful life can feel, even when nothing external appears to be particularly ‘wrong’. I’ve felt very overwhelmed by the challenges so many people are facing, deeply unhopeful about the way the world is heading, incredibly anxious about climate change, angry with throwaway consumerism and the way we live, and very confused about my worth and value. As I’ve gotten closer to midlife, there’s been a gamut of horribly dark thoughts and feelings that have dug in and refused to let go, sometimes for weeks or months at a time. I’m really grateful not to be in that place right now. The point is, framing it as potentially part of the dorsal vagal shutdown complex helps me make sense of it.
It has been so intense at times that last summer, after being unable to manage a relational trigger, I cut myself for the first time in 20 years, which scared the shit out of me. I worried that I’d opened a door that I wouldn’t be able to close again. Thankfully, I have not done it since, although the thought has occurred to me more than once.
I’ve also found it so hard to feel fully connected to and engaged in the world around me. I’ve watched the world and all the people in it as if from behind a pane of glass, feeling unable to fully connect and a sense of pointlessness at the idea of doing so. I know many of us have felt removed from life over the last 19 months; we’ve lived through these surreal, prolonged lockdowns that haven’t exactly lent themselves to an experience of deep connection.
It’s honestly felt like a deep existential crisis, perhaps even a dark night of the soul.
I’ve felt estranged from groups of people who I once felt were my people, the communities in which I used to experience a sense of true belonging. At the same time, I’ve really struggled to reconnect.
The same friend who shared this post with me also reflected back that wherever I am, it’s like a part of me is always somewhere else. She said it with love, and it was helpful feedback. It helped me understand that other people can probably sense on some level when I am withholding.
TV shows, podcasts, movies and of course my social media feeds have at times stung as I’ve seen or listened to people – fictional and real – throwing themselves into their lives and the world around them, speaking up, making their contributions, and becoming visible and valuable to the people around them. My inner critic has used this as weaponry, attacking me with it, telling me over and over again that I don’t matter (that is the mild version).
And then this simple little perspective came along that helped make so much sense out of it.
* * *
At different points in the last couple of years, I’ve wondered if there was something biologically wrong with my brain, or if I needed a diagnosis of some kind. I really don’t drink much, but I’ve wondered if I’ve lost my way since putting alcohol back in my life. But perhaps that’s not the most helpful way of thinking about this struggle.
I am realising that my nervous system must have learned as a very small child to be in this shut down state as a way of coping and navigating certain terrifying and traumatising events that happened. If you stay small and invisible, no one can hurt you. No one can really know you. But they can’t single you out and tear you down, either.
The problem, of course, is the these defences end up creating the very thing they’re defending against in the first place. The promise of safety has only led me to feeling lonely and frustrated. Walking through the world with a frequent apology falling from my lips has stopped me from speaking up about things that really matter to me. And holding back my ideas and boldness has made me feel like a passive passenger in my life.
This isn’t 100% of the time, of course. But it’s frequent enough that I want to talk about it.
This shift in perception, this broadening of the way I understand what I’ve been going through, doesn’t fix everything and make it instantly feel better. Some of what I described above is real, and there’s more I haven’t said here.
But some of this, I’m now sure, is because of this dorsal vagal state that I’m apparently quite used to living from.
And I know for a fact that I’m not the only one. That there are so many of us in this world who have learned to stay safe by relating to the world from this place.
This is not just a mental or cognitive thing; it’s in the body, in the way our bodies have learned to be safe.
I’m not entirely sure what the antidote is (aside from more education and trying to recalibrate my nervous system), but I know what feels important and needed for me, and that is to move from shut down to showing up.
I need to show up in the world, to put my voice and my thoughts out there again. Regardless of what you think, or whether it’s popular, or whether anyone at all even reads this. I have to speak up, to take up space and to really claim for myself that I too deserve to have some of the exponential space that the internet offers.
* * *
So that’s why I’ve written this. It’s part of not abandoning myself, part of honouring and owning and stepping into one of the things that makes me feel most like myself, most alive. I can hear two divergent voices in my head, one that has re-read this and appreciates myself for trying to find the words to articulate my experience; the other, a sneering criticism of how wrapped up in myself I am, who calls me narcissistic, selfish, self-centred, shallow, and unworthy of anyone’s attention or time.
But you know, if we’re not wrapped up in our own experiences, what are we doing with our lives? I want to be enveloped in my life experiences. I want to be fully alive.
So I write.
I write because there’s so much inside of me, and writing is one of the few ways that I get to make sense of it all. I write because I don’t really know what else to do with all of this… life force inside me. I wish I could paint, but I’m terrible at it. Neither can I sing. Writing and to some extent dancing are some the only things that really help me process and understand and truly feel like myself.
And because I love it, I want it to be appreciated by others. I want the thing I love to be something I’m genuinely good at, something that is valuable to and valued by others.
But I need to make sure I don’t confuse the act of writing down the bones (to use the amazing Natalie Goldberg’s phrase) with outcomes and recognition.
Right now, I’m trying to write myself out of this shut down place. This is not the first time. I’ve written myself into being a few times, and it’s always been time well spent.
And this turmoil inside me, about whether anyone else has read this or whether it’s useful or valuable to anyone else in the world except me – maybe, just maybe, none of that matters.
Maybe what matters is that today, I wrote, edited, pressed published, and shared. That I dared, once again, just as I did back in 2015 when I was podcasting and creating and writing lots, to find what it means to live my life with a wide open heart.
(The excellent and hilarious photo is by Matthew Henry on Unsplash)