Restoring Life, Part 3: Throwing away the script

Winter.

Welcome to Part 3 of the Restoring Life series. The most heartfelt thanks to the lovely folk who have messaged me about these pieces. When you send deeply personal musings into the internet abyss (hellooo vulnerability hangovers), it’s reassuring to know that what you’re writing is finding and resonating with the right people. It’s an opportunity for connection I haven’t experienced before, but I am finding so nurturing.

This is a longer one than usual, but I couldn’t find a way to explore this topic with the sensitivity it deserved without giving more detail - I hope it’s a helpful read.

If you would like to see earlier posts from the Restoring Life series, you can find them here:

Part 1: An offering (introduction)

Part 2: Meeting yourself where you are (Autumn)

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Life, interrupted

That moment, or series of moments, when we realise that we’re struggling and not feeling like ourselves, can be incredibly scary. To look around at a world you can’t quite connect with, to be around people who may want to help but can’t seem to quite reach you. To wonder why everyone else seems to be getting on with life with relative ease, but for you the most basic tasks feel like wading through treacle.

One of the saddest realities of being in this kind of headspace – whether we label it anxiety, depression, burnout, or something else – is that our brains (handily hardwired with a negativity bias and a need for control) have a habit of blaming us for ending up in that situation.

We tell ourselves to not be so sensitive, or try to push through when we don’t have any more energy to give. And even if we do give ourselves some of the stillness our bodies are craving, we often resist it with restlessness, and guilt. Everything feels urgent, but we have no motivation to do anything.

And when it becomes too much, the brain changes tack and unplugs completely to try and numb itself against the overwhelm.

Well, that’s been my experience at least.

Last January, I was really struggling mentally and knew that something needed to change. Life as it was wasn’t working for me, but I didn’t quite know how to do things differently - to create my own ‘blueprint’.

I’ve written quite a bit already about this period, which was soon after moving back home, burnt out from working in the conservation, grieving the loss of my identity as a conservationist and disillusionment with the sector, followed by the acute grief of losing a loved one.

As we know, humans are well known for their ability to handle uncomfortable emotions (*cough cough*), so rather than sit with these feelings I was lured by the idea of scrambling into action and making huge life changes – but it would have been a stab in the dark and unlikely that more peace would follow because I was so disconnected from myself.

Pushing for change vs excavating

It feels quite fitting to have been working on this piece over winter, through the fetishism of new year and aggressive pushes for ‘self-improvement’. While reflecting on our lives and what changes we might want to make can be a helpful exercise, this time of year can come with big pressures to reevaluate our lives in a self-critical way, often focused around achievement. More specifically, we’re fed messages that to be happier we should be adding more to our already full lives – new gym memberships, more clothes, more holidays…more, more, more.

If we take this approach, we may find that these ‘quick fixes’ are just plasters over bigger problems, and ultimately adding more noise and complication, while failing to make changes in the parts of our lives which are draining us the most.

Put it this way, if you were in a boat with water filling up the deck - would it be better to rush to the bucket and frantically slew out water while it continued to pour in, or find the holes that are causing the problem?

To look at nature recovery as a mirror, which is the theme that runs throughout this series, we would identify the causes of degradation first (for example pollution, habitat loss, poaching, invasive species). The intention would be to remove these sources of negativity before (or at least alongside) introducing new solutions.

This approach trusts that once those negative impacts have been removed, ecosystems know how to regulate themselves. All nature needs is a little breathing room, and it will take care of the rest.

I really believe our own bodies are not too dissimilar - if we can cut out some of the noise, we might be able to hear what our bodies need for long enough to act on it.

Many of us (myself included) are out of the habit of listening to ourselves. We follow the script so carefully – we work hard at school, we may go onto university, we may go onto ‘good’ jobs as we’re told to.

But as we get older, the script becomes less clear-cut - especially when it comes to a career or finding your ‘purpose’ in life. We might realise that maybe what we want out of life doesn’t align with the ‘script’, if we know what we want at all.

This is where it can be helpful to consider what is draining us - what beliefs are keeping us from living a life that aligns with what we want. Because then we can look to stop them at the source, giving our own nature the space to express itself and live more authentically.

Peeling back the layers

We might not realise it until we come to reflect on questions like “Where is the pressure to have everything together all the time coming from?”, or “What narratives, expectations or actions in my day-to-day life are draining me?”, but pressure can come from many different areas of life.

When I started trying to write about what beliefs might have underpinned the causes of my own burnout for this piece, I quickly realised there was no way that I could do it in a meaningful way in one blog – firstly because I would only be talking about my experiences, but also because there is so much nuance needed it would end up being a book!

What I will say is that the causes of being out of alignment with your own values happen at many different levels – some are societal, some from the cultures we grew up in and our demographics, some are down to the sector we work in, as well as how we internalise expectations of ourselves.

The same goes for ecosystems – if we find a landscape in a degraded state, we would consider all the different levels that it is facing pressures. Maybe there are impacts specific to that area, such as tree felling, poaching or human disturbance, as well as wider pressures such as demand for natural resources, a lack of political will to protect spaces, and far-reaching climatic shocks and stresses like flooding and drought.

I had a go at listing some of the expectations I felt from others and myself which may have contributed to burnout and apathy towards my career a couple of years ago, to see if I could group them. I wonder, how many feel familiar to you?

Society had told me:

• Be productive at all times – if an action doesn’t result in an outcome that someone else can judge, then it’s not worth doing.

• Resting is lazy, and you’re just procrastinating from doing something more worthwhile (i.e. productive) anyway.

• As a woman, the most important thing is to be liked – don’t disagree with anyone (but don’t be a pushover), don’t be so sensitive (but don’t be brash), don’t ask for a raise (but why didn't you ask?), don’t cause a fuss (but why didn’t you say something?).

• Being mentally well is your responsibility – don’t burden other people with your problems.

The conservation sector told me:

• Have more work experience to land your first job, but don’t expect to be paid for it. Can’t afford to take an unpaid internship because you don’t come from a wealthy family? Tough.

• No the pay isn’t great, but that’s not why you do it, right? Wanting to be paid more is crass, and if you take a better paid job in another sector you’re a sellout.

• If you’re struggling with your workload, you must need better time management skills. Work harder.

• If you’re struggling with your mental health, just be more resilient. Or come to this one-off mental health talk (it’s during your lunch hour, lol).

• You should be comfortable working more hours than you are contracted – the world needs you to work, constantly and urgently, to fix this mess.

• We don’t want your boundaries, and don’t point out where we need to do better – there are hundreds of other people who would do your job without complaint. Be grateful.

• Expect to write bids to save your own job if you’re on a fixed-term project, but don’t do it during working hours.

• Being a conservationist is your identity. If you change career you’ve given up.

My upbringing told me:

• It is your job to make people comfortable and emotionally well, and fix their problems.

• You have to be the strong, stable one.

• You loved the most easily when you are easy to be around.

• You’re too much when you’re excited, and a bit weird when you’re quiet – you need to fit in.

So I told myself:

• I have to be perfect all the time, and everything I produce has to be of a high standard, or they’ll find out I’m not supposed to be here.

• I’m not supposed to be here.

• If I don’t get everything ticked off my to-do list then I’ve failed.

• If I disappoint my boss then I have failed.

• I should know what my purpose is, I should be making more of a difference.

It’s vulnerable for me to write this out, but as I’ve said in earlier posts I really do believe that it’s only when we bring these dark thoughts and narratives out into the light that we can all see them for what they are – stories.

Thankfully, I no longer believe almost any of these stories and I have done a hell of a lot of work on myself over this last year or so to work through them. They still catch me out occasionally, but most of the time I can rationalise them.

And of course, what I’ve written above applies to my own individual experiences (and I haven't gone into the detail of work environments, cultures and relationships which will also vary person to person), but it's a universal truth that the stories we tell ourselves and each other is how we make sense of the world. And the most dangerous ones are those that go unspoken.

The important word here is meaning. What meaning do we attach to these narratives? If I re-read any of those examples of the beliefs I carried above, most of the suffering came from the meaning I was placing on them. When I asked for my role to be re-graded because the responsibilities were above what were in job description, was I really being entitled, or just fair? If I couldn’t identity birds or trees as well as my other conservation colleagues, did that really make me stupid or a fraud, or just indicative of growing up in an urban environment?

One of the most freeing things I learnt from my experience with coaching last year is that all narratives, all organisations, all jobs, all social norms…ARE MADE UP. A person, or a group of people, created them.

So if you find that your workload is too much, maybe it’s not because you “just need to be better at time management” – maybe it’s because not-for-profits tend to be under-resourced and there is just too much on your plate for any one person to be expected to do. And if you find that you’re wishing for a higher salary, maybe you’re not being ‘ungrateful’ or ‘greedy’, maybe you’re just trying to live comfortably in a cost of living crisis and an increasingly expensive world.

A tough pill to swallow

When I handed in my notice in my conservation job in 2022, and when I contemplated my future thereafter, I know that there was no going back. Not necessarily turning away from conservation forever, but I felt something deep within me switch. Something that said, Not this, never like this again.

I found myself outside of a familiar circle, looking back in and knowing that I could never subject myself to that eroding of my confidence again. But if I still cared about all the same things, where did that leave me?

That was where acceptance had to come in, and boy was that a tough pill to swallow. I always thought of acceptance as a kind of reluctant admission of conceding, to give up.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve taken away from working with my coach is that acceptance is not about shrugging your shoulders and saying “well, that’s just the way it is I guess” and pretend that it doesn’t bother you.

The beauty of true acceptance is that you don’t have to like how things are. You can want it to be different, but you stop wasting your energy railing against yourself at how they ‘should be’.

Having dealt in recent months with the fallout of a breakup that I did not initiate or expect, I can tell you I am very au fait with accepting (and yet very much not liking) something.

When the early, all-consuming emotions - the sadness, anger and fear – of grieving this loss had released their grip, they gave to more nuanced emotions. I realised that, similar to my feelings of leaving my conversation role, I felt defeated.

The root meaning of the word ‘defeat’ means ‘to unravel’, which I think is such a gorgeous analogy. By surrendering myself to letting that unravelling happen, peeling back the layers to remember who I was, I gave myself more space and energy to make positive changes.

This is how we learn to build ourselves back up again after what feels like a defeat, and realise that there might be many things we can’t control – but we do have a choice over our relationship to them.

It’s incredibly hard and there are no quick fixes, but we can take comfort in knowing that underneath all layers of noise and crap, we are still there waiting to be excavated.

We can remember in the depths of winter that the sun will shine again, the frost will melt, and we will still be there.

As Tolkein said (and I will never not take up an excuse to quote Lord of the Rings):

“Deep roots are not reached by the frost”.

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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 next piece, I’ll be looking at how I started to slowly build my confidence again, by removing barriers, and making small but consistent changes. I’ll see you there.