Hello Beautiful Human,
I don’t want to be showing up here today with this news. But I must. It seems I have bit off more than I can chew with FEARS Camp. It has been a longtime dream of mine to share FEARS Camp with you and I tried my darndest to do everything in my power to make it happen. I actually even did everything my neurodiverse brain hates; I mapped out the entire course of the Camp, organized the many sessions, and prepped the entirety of the project before beginning. I legitimately sliced and diced and meal-prepped the shit out of it so I wouldn’t find myself here, proverbially choking.
But even with all that prep — even with a lot of the work done and the certainty of structure and its inherent safety — my body still pulses with violent dysregulation and has done so since I kicked it off two weeks ago. The few emails I got from licensed clinicians about how harmful such a project would be didn't help either, but no matter the reason, my PTSD has kicked into overdrive and my body is suffering the repercussions in full. This past week alone, I’ve already had seven incontinence accidents and 2 fugue states — both symptoms representative of my body being pushed beyond its limits.
Writing that little tally of symptoms has me in tears. I am just so darn tired of fighting this body of mine — of trying to teach it that it’s safe — that the harms done to it in my past are in my past and that we, together, body and mind can live in the present moment safely and do what we want to do. But clearly, no matter how much I want that safety of body and mind — no matter how much I work for that by growing through the pulsing discomfort of consistent exposure therapy — nothing can change the truth that I must honor my body’s boundaries and pace in order to actually arrive there.
For the past 37 years of my life I have not listened to my body at all. I have stubbornly pushed it — hard — so darn hard and prided myself on that very fact. Everyone has, for that matter. Over and over, as if ruining myself was a worthy badge of success, I have pushed it to near, if not absolute breaking-point. It’s how I learned to read and write. It’s how I graduated college mid-psychotic break. It’s how I proved the doctors wrong about living in a locked residential psych ward. And it’s how I built a career, two viral social media pages, and ran a successful start-up in NYC after all of that. Quite simply, it is how I have done just about everything in my life.
However, perhaps expectedly, it is also my hard work — my die-hard discipline to go above and beyond my own limits and push through incontinence, chronic dysregulation and regular fugue states — that has landed me here — to this place where my body no longer trusts me, the present moment, or its safety.
This, of course, is also the nature of complex PTSD. To live in a body with PTSD means to live in a body that is stuck in the past — a body that holds pain in its cells, violation in its bloodstream, and reacts as if the dead Tyranasorrus Rex of trauma is alive once more, about to murder and eat me whole. But when my doctors taught me how to manage this, I think they got it wrong. They encouraged me to apply the same fight, tenacity, and unwavering effort that I used to slay the T-Rex in the first place. But complex PTSD is not the T-Rex. Complex PTSD is the ghost of it so the relentless fight against it only furthered my body’s confusion and suffering all the more.
I now finally see that I never needed more fight. I never needed more effort. And I certainly never needed to push myself past my boundaries of safety and security relentlessly. My T-Rex is dead and gone. Dead and gone. Instead, I needed to get curious, hold space and accept it in its painful truths. Yes, instead of fighting my trauma, I needed to befriend it — to honor it fully.
Of course, befriending pain is hard work too but work of a different kind entirely. Work that takes safety, mind-body connection and the ability to be here now in the present moment in order to do it.
So, as much as this disheartens me, saddens me, and also infuriates me — I am postponing FEARS Camp indefinitely. Or maybe, because my body is always listening – I am canceling it because canceling it is what my body needs right now to be safe. Yes, it is what my body needs right now to do the work that will allow me to one day have tea with my T-Rex.
~
As clear as I am about this now, I won’t pretend arriving here was easy. Coming to this decision felt nothing short of failure. And even though I know it’s not, there is still quite a sting to it. There is also a lot of fear bundled in with this decision because of how very different my life will be if I choose to respect my physical limits.
But, as much as I hate writing this, letting you all down, and accepting that my life might have to slow down quite a bit — in an equally bittersweet way, I’m proud of myself for making this decision. I am proud I am finally listening to my body and its needs.
It’s actually quite fitting – especially as I begin this new phase of this newsletter – that I am finally beginning to respect my body and prioritize it as I step into exploring what it means to live well with mental illness. Because — let’s be honest — if I can’t listen to my body and honor it, how on Earth can I ever expect to live well in it at all?
Of course, I cannot and that is why all of this will be part of this new chapter. The pursuit of exploring, adventuring, and redefining well-being of both body and mind while living with serious mental illness is what this next chapter is about. That is the invitation of Healing Out Loud.
Now, I will formally launch Healing Out Loud in October. But for you, my beloveds, I will be kicking it off over the next few Thursdays sharing some of the articles, podcasts, books and most notably, questions that landed me here in this place where I am finally ready to honor my needs and re-define well-being on my own terms, not those determined for me by community, clinicians, and society, at large.
However, before diving into all that, this week Healing Out Loud celebrates the practice of slowing down. And below, I invite you to join me and do the same.
I hope this invitation offers a moment of refuge and restoration in your day and you can one day forgive me for my need to break the promises I made about FEARS Camp.
Until next week and with love.
Kindly,
Kate
This week’s invitation
Carve out time outside, ideally in nature. Take your shoes off. Take those socks off too. Dig your toes into the ground. Feel each toe on grass or gravel or whatever it is you stand upon. And then, sit or lie down. Find a position of ease and comfort and be there. Fully. Wholly. Entirely — in slowness, grounded to earth honoring its own pace right there beneath and beside you.
This week’s writing prompt
When was the last time you gave yourself permission to slow down? What was it like? Was there an ease to it — a warm welcome and deep, sighing breath of homecoming? Or was it wholly uncomfortable, entirely consumed by what you thought you “should” be doing instead? Remember, there is no right or wrong way to experience life or be human. What is simply is.
Write about your last experience with slowness and what comes up as you do so.
Go gently today, don’t hurry
or think about the next thing. Walk
with the quiet trees, can you believe
how brave they are—how kind? Model your life
after theirs. Blow kisses
at yourself in the mirror
especially when
you think you’ve messed up. Forgive
yourself for not meeting your unreasonable
expectations. You are human, not
God—don’t be so arrogant.
Praise fresh air
clean water, good dogs. Spin
something from joy. Open
a window, even if
it’s cold outside. Sit. Close
your eyes. Breathe. Allow
the river
of it all to pulse
through eyelashes
fingertips, bare toes. Breathe in
breathe out. Breathe until
you feel
your bigness, until the sun
rises in your veins. Breathe
until you stop needing
anything
to be different.
~
The Cure for It All by Poet Julia Fehrenbacher
And that, with Tug and her ever-attentive paw alert, is everything from us today.
Thank you for being here with us. It is such a gift.
We wish you a day.
For it — just like you — is enough. Entirely entirely enough.
With love.
Kindly,
Kate
No need to ask for forgiveness, you’ve done nothing wrong. Keep ploughing forward as slow or as fast as you can. I believe the healing will come.
Kate - we all love and support you. And we support you taking care of yourself first. Your health and well-being is so much more important that anything else. Take what you need. We will be here when you're ready.