41

To say the past year went according to any sort of preconceived notion of how my 40th year might go would be, frankly, a fucking lie. 

It started off with a bang. Like a human equivalent of a popper full of confetti bang. My best friend came to town. There was cake and mushrooms and champagne and dancing and laughter. I received vows from my Vow Muse partner, which I am tearing up even mentioning because it’s so precious it’s on my “grab in case of a fire” list (and on my refrigerator). Dear friends shipped rose pink wine glasses, a sparkling charm shaped like a envelope with a letter, bouquets of flowers and beloved books. One friend wrangled several folks to create yearforty, a long-term art project about me (whoa). I felt loved—and maybe more importantly, witnessed—on a level I hadn’t before. 

A week later, I could barely get out of bed. 

My muscles ached. My limbs were heavy. My days involved waking up, caring for Maizie, slogging through work, and lying back down come 5pm. I slept 12-18 hours a day. I was too tired to read a physical book, and could only listen to audiobooks. In July, I tried to take a vacation to British Columbia only to be too tired to leave my Airbnb so I gave up and came home early. It was not uncommon for me to sleep all day on the weekend, wake up and eat a fig newton, and then go back to sleep all night. 

This level of fatigue continued through January. 

Medical doctors took blood, assured me I was so fine an endocrinologist couldn’t put me into their schedule, and essentially shrugged. No one wanted to talk about long Covid.

Thank god for mental health professionals. My therapist took on some of my executive functioning, tracking how I was doing, helping me follow up on potential physical reasons for my fatigue, and asked how my psychiatrist was doing. 

“He seems stressed,” I told her. “Distracted. Tense. And I can see how over the last year he just doesn’t look…healthy. Like he’s both lost weight in his face and gained it elsewhere.” 

“Actually, I meant how is he doing with your care—not how is he personally,” she said, before referring me to a psychiatrist who not only showed up to our appointments on time but actively listened to my history and symptoms. I saw my old psychiatrist on a dating app a few months after I’d made the switch, and realized he’d been going through a divorce as we worked together. No, I did not swipe right. 

My coach encouraged me to sleep whenever I needed it, to play and be wild and witchy, to not discredit the things that feel true and real to me (like how maybe we were all dew drops together before our water molecules turned into humans). My stylist made sure that when I could get dressed and go out, I looked (and felt) fantastic. My financial advisor assured me I was financially secure enough to afford all the mental health professionals and pretty clothes. Everyone encouraged me to stop giving away my now very limited energy, to actively figure out what was actually taking energy from me and make changes. 

And dang it if it wasn’t the most unexpected things siphoning energy out of me like gremlin hummingbirds: responding to texts; socializing on any level; driving; intaking information. Literally even the neighborhood I lived in was pulling energy out of me, which meant every time I stepped outside with my dog I was draining myself. 

My diagnosis wasn’t severe depression or a psychotic break—it couldn’t be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM for all you cool healthcare cats). The simplest way to say it was that I have been putting my body under severe stress for basically my entire life without meaning to or knowing it: and my body had kept the score. My nervous system had been chronically ratcheted up to 11, and step one was recognizing that enough so that I could learn what it felt like to not be triggered all the freaking time. 

Under the advice and supervision of my healthcare team, I did what some probably saw as shrinking my life. I stopped saying “Yes!” to invites. I stopped being in other people’s feelings with them. I stopped answering the phone, responding to messages, or making plans. Every day felt like I was crawling on my hands and knees up a concrete wall. I actively chose to continue working. I have a job I never dreamed I could have at a company I’ve wanted to work at for years—I wasn’t, and am still not, ready to give that up. 

Friends said things like, I thought I’d never hear from you again and I tried to keep up better. It never felt good enough, and eventually, I stopped having the energy to care. 

My life became me, my dog, my plants, my work, and whatever small things could bring me joy. This didn’t happen all at once—it took literally a whole year to whittle down my world, and only in the last month have I really felt like perhaps I can actually almost hear myself. 

“I feel like a bad friend,” I told my psychiatrist at one point. “Are you sure I’m not depressed?” 

“You know how your friends who have kids disappear for awhile to tend to their families? That’s what you’re doing—you’re attending to yourself.” 

I began seeing a craniosacral practitioner and started to untangle some deep seeded muck that was stuck in my system. At one oddly powerful moment after a session, I started sobbing in the shower uncontrollably, realizing that in the last decade the profound loneliness I’ve felt wasn’t that I had a twin who died in the womb but was actually that I had a person inside of—myself, without input or influence—trying to be seen and heard. I was—am—my own twin. 

I did ketamine assisted therapy, cultivating what inputs I had leading up to and afterward for weeks on end. I slept through parties I should have attended. I became a perpetual maybe for any invite. I moved to a different neighborhood—a feat I still don’t know how I undertook given where I was at. I had panic attacks at work and in public. I kept finding new lows to hit…and somehow, I kept recovering from those lows. I saw Cambodian Rock Band and Come From Away, even though the energy it took was astounding to recover from. 

I began lying in a completely dark room for hours, listening to the soft ambient noise that homes and neighbors make, noticing how different parts of my body felt. I called it sensory deprivation; my therapist called it meditating. I began noticing that every time I start to feel rage, there’s a Care Bear in my head trying to tamp it down, to disassociate from it. I held up a real book, read it, and did not fall asleep. 

This story does end with and then I was all better! but instead with I am still in the middle of all this. I’m still pretty tired. I’m still blocking out a lot of stimulus. I chose to not celebrate my birthday with anyone but myself and Maizie this year—because damn it do we deserve to snuggle. 

It ends with a realization I had yesterday while practicing the piano: you can’t play the notes in the measure ahead of the notes in the measure you’re on; in fact, you almost can’t even think about those notes lest your fingers try to play them. All you can do is be where you are in the music. 

And all I can do is be where I am in this life. 

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Forever grateful to my therapist, my psychiatrist, my coach, my stylist, my financial advisor, Jess Samuels for all her audiobook recommendations (esp. the authors Chloe Liese and Abby Jimenez), every book by Sarah J. Maas, anyone out there making Twilight jokes, What My Bones Know, The Lonely Hunter, and How to Do Nothing. 

For reference: 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, and 30.