The Healing (Burnout & Breaking part II)

Back in September I wrote on how I got so burnt out my body was breaking. This is a piece of how I healed from that and for my future.

Before I even went on medical leave, I was resisting the idea of rest. I was arguing with my board about when, exactly, I would start my medical leave. I was trying to delay leaving until the end of the school year, trying to just take the summer. I wanted to leave after the students left and come back before they did. I wanted my rest to be convenient, to still see myself and to be seen as a productive member of society.

After all, who are we if we’re not producing?

Who was I if I wasn’t pastoring?

It was terrifying, thinking of not going to work every day, being stuck with my brain and all of the voices inside of my head telling me I am not working hard enough, not doing enough… simply that I was not enough.

I disconnected myself from social media (except instagram because it’s mostly puppies and babies for me), said good-bye to my students and colleagues, and went home, scared as hell for what it would mean to do nothing for two months.

For the first few weeks, I just slept. I collapsed into my couch and barely moved. The whole time, thinking to myself, “I don’t deserve this. I’m not *really* sick. It’s not like I have cancer. I should be at work.”

Slowly, I began to realize I had done something I am always warning colleagues against. I had confused who I am with my work as a pastor. I had begun to believe that the success or failure of the ministry was also my success or failure as a human being. My ability to draw students and donors and board members into the work of The Sanctuary was direct commentary on who I was as a person. Decline of the ministry meant I was losing value as a human being. No wonder even when I took time off I didn’t really feel like I was resting; I couldn’t take a day off from work because if it failed, even if it stopped growing, that meant I was a failure.

I was no longer Elizabeth the friend, Elizabeth the partner, the daughter, the writer, the dancer, the activist. I was no longer Elizabeth the human being, valued for the mere fact that she exists, the face that she is a beloved child of God. Under the influence of the way our world works, the stories that capitalism tells us from the time we are small children, I believed my only worth was in what I produced.

The ironic part about this is that I am a Lutheran pastor. I spent week after week telling my students that they are not their grades, that they are beloved children of God, that their worth in God’s eyes is based on that and only that. Existence is enough to be worth of love. All of that time teaching God’s love for us and connecting that love to the important work of radical self love and self-compassion to young adults and yet I heard none of it. I was living as though I had to earn God’s love, my love, the world’s love. I had internalized and was living out the gospel of capitalism even as I preached a gospel of grace.

I didn’t believe I was worthy of many things, particularly rest. I hadn’t worked hard enough to rest. I hadn’t completed so many things I wanted to complete before I left, hadn’t finished putting things together, hadn’t earned the right to rest.

Rest is necessary for human functioning. It allows our bodies to repair themselves, allows our brains the space needed to come up with new ideas, to focus, to actually get things done. Rest is at the base of the hierarchy of human needs. And yet I had convinced myself, we have convinced ourselves, that in order to rest it must be earned. We must do enough of the things to deserve rest. So long as we look at rest this way, as a thing to be earned, we will never do enough, achieve enough, have enough or be enough to get to that point where we deserve rest. Doing enough is especially difficult for those of us in helping careers: there is always someone else who needs us, always another grant proposal to write, always another protest to go to or meeting to attend. The need never ends. We are never enough to fill the gaping holes in our societal support networks. So we keep pushing and pushing and forget that rest isn’t something we earn. Rest is something we need. Its a basic human right.

As I began to allow myself to rest, to really rest, I began to heal.

A few years ago on the podcast “With Friends Like These…” host Ana Marie Cox was talking with a friend about mental health. She recounted an interaction between her and her therapist, in which her therapist was encouraging her to do positive affirmations, a suggestion at which Cox roller her eyes and insisted they wouldn’t work. Her therapist replied, “Well, how are those negative affirmations working for you?”

I had begun to practice mindfulness and, as the fog cleared out of my brain (thanks rest!) I became aware of how absolutely mean my inner dialogue was. A lifetime of negative thoughts about myself, my worth, my intelligence had worn patterns into my brain so deep and strong that I didn’t notice them anymore. When I began to notice, to really pause and pay attention, it was a shock how negative my inner monologue was. I needed to break up these patterns, to create new neural pathways in my brain to combat the way I spoke to myself.

To a punk kid with a sarcastic streak like myself, this felt stupid af. But Ana’s therapist was right — years of negative affirmations had clearly worked. Time to try something different.

I got up in the morning and said to myself, “You are loved. You are worthy. You are wanted.” Every three hours an alarm went off on my watch and, along with the physical exercises my therapist gave me to re-pattern my brain, I said some version of these words to myself. Over and over and over again. Every day.

As I did this I got better at interrupting my negative inner monologue as it was happening. “You don’t deserve rest,” it would say. “I am, in fact worthy of rest and love and joy,” I would respond. Eventually, the kind voice, the nurturing voice, the voice that spoke to me like I would speak to a friend began to take hold.

Healing, real healing, had begun.

Books I read as I began this process:

The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate

Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Bruggemann

The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

Also helpful: The Instagram accounts of The Nap Ministry, #traumainformed, #polyvagaltheory. Seriously.

I also want to be clear I could not have done this without medical leave and a generous pay out from my former ministry. I have incredible privilege in that I had the financial support, communal support, medical resources and so much more in order to heal.