Leave, phase one: rest

I set out with the plan described here, and also detailed weeks one, two, and three.

I'm at the end of the first quarter of my leave and it looked a bit different than I expected. Before it began, all I could imagine doing was laying on my rug and staring at the ceiling until I felt like a person again. It turns out that action was more nourishing, at least at first. Now coming off of three weeks of building a nest for myself, I am ready to climb into it for the next three.

The reality of living with a chronic illness is that you get in this pendulum swing of not having the ability to do things, then feeling okay and trying to catch up, which can cause an attack if you push too hard, et cetera into forever. I was so desperately behind on so many pieces of my life! Nothing that caused too much strife in isolation, but so many little things that together formed a massive amorphous untenable blob.

I've lived in Portland for eleven years, and in my current apartment for seven. As a result, it was full of ghosts of my old self: unfinished projects, various hobby graveyards, books and records and magazines about which present Gina is ambivalent. The first order of business was a massive purge of things that are no longer serving me, and a reorganization of what remained. I spent my time making tons of donations, giving stuff away to weird strangers on r/PDXBuyNothing, sharing with neighbors, reselling to local stores for credit that I spent immediately, and gleefully recycling.

The net effect is that I've traded a lot of things that I wasn't very excited about for a lot fewer things that I'm currently thrilled about. A sort of winnowing! It's very satisfying and the amount of room to breathe I feel in my space now is totally unexpected.

This sort of unintentionally became the actual shape of the first quarter of leave, but now that I'm on the other side of it I can totally see why it had to happen first. My space now feels functional and tidy, purpose-built for current me. I am significantly less overwhelmed by clutter, even if it was sort of hidden away before. It was cleansing! And it also aligned with the moon doing something important, which no less than 5 people have pointed out to me. Thanks moon, thanks friends! I guess I got got by the dang moon again.

Coming to the end of this marathon I am tired, and I think that now I am actually ready for the rest part, because now I can actually rest comfortably in my home. I described it to a neighbor last night as “nesting” in that I had to prepare my space to make room for rest before it was possible, and now it is.

My goals for the second phase are now more about rituals and offline time.

• experiment with rituals around regular movement, but make it joyful: swimming, riding bikes, sunset walks, etc
• try a mindfulness practice (in alignment with the somatic work we’ll be doing in therapy throughout leave)
• continue working with dietician on a scaffolding that supports nutrition
• more rest, true rest, more passive rest in nature (laying under a tree)!
• more analog media: books, records, puzzles

And of course, time is fake and words can mean a lot of things, so everything on my initial list is still in play. At the end of the first phase, I can say for sure that my body and brain are both recovering, slowly but surely! I have support from some lovely people and some new insights. I’m excited and curious to see how this phase plays out, and what the next phases bring.