Why resting feels so wrong

Fucking restlessness.

Resting feels wrong. Distraction feels wrong. Even when things are going “right,” celebration is short-lived.

And so here we are, old friend. My own damn resistance to being.

If acceptance has always been the answer, why is it so hard?

Acceptance gets a bad rap. We’re taught accepting a compliment means we’re full of ourselves. We’re taught accepting that our bodies need rest means we’re lazy. We’re taught accepting things that we don’t like means we don’t have the strength to stand up for what we believe in.

We’re taught to think in black or white, in the extreme ends of right or wrong, yes or no, when the truth we live in is always somewhere in the middle.

For a long time I fought myself on everything. How I looked, how I thought, how I spoke. I pushed my body to be the way I wanted, hating it for having needs, for slowing me down. I stopped my period for nearly a decade on purpose. I chose drugs and alcohol over food and sleep. I avoided conversations that eluded that I needed to change.

My emotional vocabulary consisted of happy or angry. Everything else felt weak.

I wanted to move through the world not feeling so damn scared all the time. What was I so scared of? Ridicule. Being found out. Rejection.

Fear makes us so self-absorbed. Everything becomes a threat. We find what we look for. We see what we are.

Every once in awhile, when things are going well, the restlessness wants to start up again. My mind will drift back to, “But remember this? That thing you used to love? How fun it was?”

There are so many weed stores near my house. Like holy fuck give a girl a break. And they’re so…pretty, some of them. So inviting.

And I find my mind saying, “What’s the harm? It’s just a little weed. It’s relaxing more than anything.”

If I let the tape end there, it makes sense. Good justification, mind.

But then begs the question, why do I think weed will help me relax, more than just…relaxing?

When I think back to it, weed was my permission. My permission to check out. My permission to not let anything bug me. My permission to be slow. To not feel obligated to keep producing, keep performing. It was also a great way to keep me “out of trouble” with perhaps what I viewed as more dangerous or destructive substances or behaviors. I told myself it made everything more enjoyable. It made conversations funnier, it made movies more captivating.

I romanticized it in all the ways I’d seen it portrayed in things I’d heard or read or watched.

But if I am honest with myself, it didn’t make conversations more funny. I was just too checked out to follow along. It didn’t make movies more captivating. I was just too numb and heavy to move. So I’d sit there, staring at images and listening to words that seemed to be happening to somebody else. To this day, I’ll rewatch movies from my weed era like I’d never seen them before. It’s concerning how completely wiped from my memory they are.

Ultimately, I’d probably never really liked how weed made me feel. It was just a more comfortable alternative to not being high. The anxiety, the irritability, the exhaustion. The answer was simple. Just relax. But I couldn’t. Not when every day was anticipating stress, problems, fixing, rushing, a blur of expectations and complaints and disappointments and this constant need to feel in control of it all.

Eventually, I decided to let my period come back. Eventually, I decided to get sober. Eventually, I decided to stop being so hard on myself. Eventually, I decided I had to stop confusing performance and achievement with satisfaction and peace.

Eventually, I stopped rejecting the parts of me I saw as weak.

This year, I’ve noticed something different every day on my walks. A flower I’ve never seen before. Shapes I didn’t know existed in nature. Shades I didn’t know could be in the same tree.

I’ve lived in the same house for the past 17 years. And I’m only noticing these things now. Not because they’re only appearing now. But because I’m only allowing myself these pleasures now.

It took me 7 years of saying, “Okay, maybe something needs to change,” to get to this point. It took 7 years of learning how to exhale. And I don’t think the learning ever stops.

It does get easier. Easier to see through the illusion that relief is outside ourselves. Easier to see that satisfaction and peace are decisions, not results.

Writing this felt better than smoking a joint.