Sometimes I do not feel like my whole self. When I begin to get depleted I can feel disconnected, fragmented, cut off from some of my parts, from some of my selves. It can feel as though they are hiding from me, or perhaps we are hiding from each other.
One of the signposts I have learned to notice that tells me that this disconnection might be happening is that I find myself seeking out distractions - often in the form of bad television, word games, and spatial logic puzzles. Social media was a very easy place to find this kind of distraction until I made a clean break from all of those platforms a year ago.
But deleting social media and removing game apps from my phone does not address the root problem. Of course, the apps that are designed to capture my attention and bury me in an avalanche of distraction do not help with my feelings of fragmentation and disconnection. They actively prey on those feelings and they certainly exacerbate the depletion of my energy, but they are not the cause. The cause is something deeper, so the solution must be as well.
When I find myself seeking out distraction it is usually because I know that there are feelings that I do not want to sit with. I know what sitting with grief and fear and rage feels like. I know the pain that welcoming those emotions in can bring. I know the energy that releasing them requires. And when my capacity is low I do not trust that I can handle that kind of emotional outpouring. So in those moments of depletion, when I begin to feel those emotions start bubbling up, when I begin to feel the discordance and the discomfort, I choose distraction, I choose compartmentalization.
But I do not stay there. I have learned that these strategies of avoidance can be effective in the short term but they come with an expiration date. If I don’t tend to the root issue, if I don’t sit with the grief, confront the fear, release the rage, then they will start to consume me, the fragmentation and disconnection will grow deeper, and the discord I feel in my body will get louder until I have to address it head on or disassociate from it completely.
My hope is that the distractions can buy me some time to rest, to defuse the intensity of the feelings, and to set up the conditions in which I can do a full confrontation.
These full confrontations with myself and my emotions often take the shape of a ritual. I light candles, I give myself journaling and meditation prompts, I play music to invite movement into my body, and I make sure to go outside, touch a plant, and look up at the sky. These connection points with my senses pull me out of my head, out of the panic-inducing thought spirals, and allow me to connect with my body, with my breath, with the wider world around me.
And in those connections I begin making my way back to wholeness. And in my wholeness I begin to feel at one with myself, my communities, and the larger ecosystems that my life is bound up in. And then my breath flows with ease.