Welcome to the second part of the ‘Restoring Life’ series, where you can find me reflecting on what I think nature recovery can teach us about our reviving ourselves. Life continues to be messy and the universe has thrown me some fun (in no way ha ha) curveballs to juggle in recent months, hence the hiatus, but here we are. A big hello also to the new subscribers who have joined recently – I’m so glad you’re here!
A fish out of (polluted) water
In my last post I mentioned that I had observed a mirroring between how we approach nature recovery and my own recovery-in-progress from burnout during this last year. In hindsight, I’m not quite sure ‘burnout’ is the right word, but it’s a lot more succinct than ‘a general, continuous feeling of existential dread and disillusionment, in which I try to reject the productivity-obsessed capitalist nightmare as a way of living, whilst also recognising that I need to operate in it to like, buy bread and stuff’ - so let’s maybe stick with ‘burnout’.
Before we dive in though, let me clarify what I mean by this comparison. Nature recovery (also known as ‘landscape or ecosystem restoration’, or ‘rewilding’ – though I’m not getting the rather sticky semantic debate here) is broadly the act of reviving damaged land or seascapes, so that they can function and support life as they are supposed to.
This what my work in Cambridge with the Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Programme focused on - an extraordinary initiative which funds large-scale restoration projects across Europe. It was an unusually positive part of the conservation world to work in, focusing on how to make things better, rather than the traditional approach of trying to desperately cling onto what wildlife we have left.
“We often forget that the environments humans are expected to succeed in are not healthy for us.”
And if you’re not scientifically inclined - don’t let me lose you here!
If you were to find a lake with an unsettling green colour and no apparent marine or bird life nearby, only clumps of algae choking the lake’s oily surface, you wouldn’t need an ecologist to tell you that it was not a healthy environment and a tough place to live, right? Similarly, if you put a plant in a dark cupboard and left it without water or sunlight, would you expect it to thrive?
We often forget that the environments humans are expected to succeed in are not healthy for us either. If we wouldn’t expect a fish to thrive in a polluted lake, or a plant to flourish in a dark cupboard, why do we expect ourselves as social, curious, cooperative animals (as that’s how we have evolved) to thrive in systems which often value relentless productivity and competitiveness over everything else, and leave us feeling not good enough?
I believe there is a lot we can learn from approaches to nature recovery and applying it to improving our own wellbeing - something I have found in my case to be true anyway. The first step is recognising where we are (and being honest with ourselves about that), looking at where we want to be, and then working out how to cross the space between these two places.
All about that base(line)
In the field of ecosystem restoration, we start by taking a baseline – in other words, assessing how things are now in an ecosystem, compared to how we might expect it to be if it were functional. We might take measurements that help us answer questions like:
Can life be supported here? What pressures are animal and plant species here facing?
What is missing that we would expect to see? And what is here that perhaps shouldn’t be?
Is this ecosystem resilient to shocks and stressors, and does it what it needs to bounce back?
We can do the same for ourselves, but first we need to acknowledge that there is a problem to begin with - and to recognise that we are not weak or broken to be struggling in an environment we were not built for. It can be easier to spot a problem in something external like a polluted lake or a wilted plant, or perhaps even in a person we know well – but often much harder to admit when we are struggling.
And of course, this looks different for everyone. One person might avoid their problems with self-protective positivity (“I’m fine! Everything is under control! If I use another exclamation mark, maybe I’ll convince us both that I am 100% a-okay!!”). Another person under the same stressors might ruminate and become paralysed with indecision and procrastination, or feel apathetic and hopeless.
Life is a rollercoaster, as a wise Irishman once said
A little over a year ago, I was packing up my life in Cambridge and ready to make the move back up north. Handover notes at work were written up, belongings boxed and packed, and weepy goodbyes to the friends I’d made over the last four years were imminent.
What helped to keep me grounded and calm(ish) was the reminder that this was an adventure I had chosen for myself. While it was a hectic time full of uncertainty and fear (“What will people think about me taking off a couple of months from work?”, “How should I use my time, and what if I don’t find the answers I need?”), I knew in my gut that I was making the right choice, even if I couldn’t see quite how it would pan out. That quiet, wise part of you that waits patiently for you to listen while your fear and anxiety scream over it had finally won out. I didn’t have the answers, but all I knew was ‘not this’.
Sadly, my Nan passed away suddenly and unexpectedly around the same time I moved home, and the turmoil of the grief means that it’s hard to disentangle those feelings from the burnout, and the depression which came later in the winter. But if I were to try and paint an honest picture of where I was last autumn, it would look something like this: apathy, fatigue, brain fog, sluggishness, disillusionment, irritability, hopelessness, anger, frustration, resentment. Feelings that I do not hold comfortably, and are rarely felt when my cup is full.
“That quiet, wise part of you that waits patiently for you to listen while your fear and anxiety scream over it had finally won out. I didn’t have the answers, but all I knew was ‘not this’.”
Being burnt out is often made out to be a frantic, anxious experience – a feeling of urgency. In my experience, burnout is what comes when you have actually been in that urgent, ‘survival mode’ state for too long. Where stress and anxiety might feel like a series of sharp peaks or lightning strikes of urgent thoughts, burnout is like a heavy, immovable fog that tries to numb you to those strikes.
The problem is that it numbs you to the good stuff, too. I felt like the polluted lake - inhospitable to joy, creativity, and hope. I had been missing the warning signs for too long, and when I had finally seen them I put them down to there being something ‘wrong’ with me.
Befriending fire
When I moved home with my Mum, and the practicalities of losing a loved one that keep you busy in the first few weeks had passed, I knew rationally that my body was crying out for rest.
And yet that seemed the hardest thing to do. When stress hormones have been coursing through your body for that long, actually allowing yourself to lean into resting feels alien - perhaps even unsafe.
So, if you’re anything like me, you end up not being able to do very much - all while feeling guilty for not resting ‘properly’. Who knew it was possible to feel like you were failing at doing nothing! This mindset can be particularly difficult because your brain can also trick you into thinking that you’ve never felt any other way.
What followed in the weeks and months was a storm of sorts – like clinging to a rickety house while a tornado rages outside. It was terrifying, and disorientating. Writing this now, I wish I could have sat with myself back then and reassured her that it was all going to be okay, that it was possible for things to get better. That they would in fact get better, even if she couldn’t imagine how.
Even back then I had a memory of being confident, optimistic and motivated - I had to believe that part of me was still in there. When the storm passed a few months later, I looked around and found that I was indeed still standing - and that what I had built around me before needed to come down in order to rebuild something better.
I recently read a literal description of ‘burned out’ as “something that has been destroyed by fire”. Because what happened was indeed a burning, a destruction of something that needed to change. Just as indigenous people used to burn the ground to help encourage new life to grow, so it can happen for us too. It’s as much an evolving as it is a returning, a remembering.
Last week I took a walk through my local woodland and saw the last of the autumn leaves strewn on the ground, and took a moment to acknowledge what the trees they once belonged to had lost. I also realised that the trees were now free to take a stronger root in the ground.
They were still holding on, too.
Next in the Restoring Life series
My hope is that writing this series can be a reassurance to anyone that feels lost or alone - and to know that things can get better. We all need and deserve to take time out to question if our lives are aligned to what we need, but it can be a scary process. It is a brave thing to choose something better for yourself, especially when it seems to go against the ‘norm’.
In the following two articles, I will explore how I began to identify what led me to burning out and remove barriers to recovery, and making sustainable changes for the long-term - just as we would for an ecosystem we wanted to support returning to itself. I’ll see you there.
Hero image: By Timothy Eberly on Unsplash