How to tolerate what happens when you stop

an ending, an addiction, a plateau, a completed project

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Pexels

Hey there everyone —

I keep reading articles and listening to podcasts telling me to stop. Stop valuing productivity and efficiency. Stop overscheduling myself. Stop setting goals and evaluating myself on my achievements. Stop trying to be so damn healthy because I'm going to die anyway. Stop checking to see if my stomach sticks out too much in that shirt. Stop buying shit I don’t need and renting storage bins because there’s nowhere to put it. Stop valuing transcendence and rationality over embodiment and feeling. Stop eating inflammatory foods. Stop using fossil fuels. Stop burning gas in my home. Stop focusing so much I can’t remember who I am or notice that my body hurts. Just stop.

Which, of course, is kind of a “go” in the guise of a stop. Stop this, but do this other thing, the thing our webinar tells you how to do, or the thing we have no clue how to do either, but know we all need to do, as soon as we can. Just not in an efficient or productive manner.

I’m persuaded by these arguments. I want to stop doing all of these things. I don’t know how. Or, more accurately, I am trying to learn how to stop.

One thing I’m curious about is the space between stop and go. I don’t know about you, but when I actually stop something, I feel awful. When I finish a project, or reach a plateau in a process of personal growth, or accomplish something big, or a collective endeavor is finished, I’m cranky and listless and exhausted and brain foggy and I need a nap and I need to move and nothing is satisfying and all I feel is need and want and pain which makes me feel fussy and powerless and generally disgusted with myself.

I’m in withdrawal from whatever that thing gave me, whatever coping strategy it was. Whatever that behavior, food, substance, thinking pattern or accomplishment did for me? As soon as I stop, everything it was blocking comes flooding in. 

I’m not curious about the first layer that comes in. That’s mostly self-loathing, judgment, criticism, petty complaints, cravings for things to be easy, or quick, or shiny. 

I’m curious about what comes after, if I can just keep on staying in the place where I’ve stopped but have no clue what’s coming next. It’s really hard for me to tolerate that groundlessness, that ambiguity and not knowing. I feel the coping strategy I had is out there and I could reach for it, take a hit of it, relapse. 

Some days it takes everything I have to refuse the old coping. Most days I notice how much of what I tell myself I should be doing, or even want to be doing, isn’t mine. It’s not real. It’s not attached to any true feeling of embodied desire, or curiosity, or wonder. It’s just me, recirculating what I’ve been told I should be doing to be valuable, or acceptable, or safe, or interesting to someone else. It’s “me” as the dominant culture represents me to myself. 

I don’t believe there’s a “me” I can find that isn’t already shot through with patriarchy and white supremacy. I don’t think I’m going to find an authentic self, a self before culture. I can’t fully escape. But I can track the scent of something that gets through the cracks in the culture’s armor, if I can stay long enough in that place between stop and go. I can keep watching my thoughts and how boring they are. I can keep feeling my muscles and bones and fibers and watch the emotions show up, until I get a feeling that has some spontaneity to it, something that doesn’t feel habitual, or precious, or acceptable. I would use the word “wild,” here, except I think that word has been stripped of its power. Even wildness has been sold to me as a form of self improvement. 

I’m noticing I want to give you a template for how to do this, this what-comes-after-stopping. If you have one, I want to know yours. But if I give you a template I’ve destroyed it. I’ve turned unknowing into knowing. I’ve made a graphic you can pin on your mirror. I want that, too. But then I’d be back in the “go” box. I’d have my secure path forward. I’d be congratulating myself on how much more self-actualized I am, now that I’m doing the new thing.

If we’re going to stop so that something visionary and truly revolutionary shows up, something that lets us maybe survive and halt the violence and destruction, I think it might come from sitting together and trying to find some way to communicate this unknowing, collectively, in a way that preserves a tentative sniffing at something, rather than a fixing, a certainty. I want you to share your version of that with me, in whatever way feels best to you. I long for it, because I want to know you, and because you hold my survival in your hands.

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca