From the ashes.

Spring is almost here. Earlier today, I stood next to the pond that my parents built many years ago and tried to catch a glimpse of the returning newts. We already spotted a few of them here and there. With the cool breeze and the sallow sunlight on the water, I was transported back to last year around the same time, where I started to sit outside in small increments, often only a few minutes at a time because I physically couldn’t handle more. I spent most of my recovery over spring and summer close to that body of water, observing insects and small critters and trying to let go of any expectation. For a while now, I had almost forgotten how I damaged had felt and how existential all of that was - today, I remembered.

It’s been a solid six months since I recovered from ME/CFS. Needless to say after everything I’ve already shared, this illness and my journey through it have profoundly altered how I look at my life, myself and the people around me. While I was still going through it, I had the vague sense that some things had to change in order for me to be better in the long run. I simply didn’t know what I had to do just yet.

While I was still sick, I went through the painful process of learning to live without most of the things and relationships that had been important to me before. Over the course of these many months, I went through my divorce, lost important friendships, had to give up both of my jobs because I was unable to work, and eventually had to live with the fact that I needed caretaking from my family for extended periods of time. I gave up going outside because my body couldn’t handle it and I hardly had any conversations with anyone due to the long recovery time and the painful symptoms afterwards.

Beginning of April last year, I had my family, a few close friends I could sometimes text (and sometimes not), and a roof over my head. That was about the extent of it. As for the future, I had absolutely no idea. I wanted to get better, but I didn’t know what kind of a life I had to build in order to facilitate that. All I knew was that in the past, parts of my life had been cause for profound feelings of fear and lack of safety, and I didn’t want to get myself to that place again.

Safety is this broad and big word, and these days I often notice how virtually all of our decisions are infused by it in some way. Obviously. Survival is king. But it’s also more than that, because our ideas of safety are greatly influenced by those who came before us - and by our own experiences in the past. Those of us who have had experiences of being extremely unsafe, physically, emotionally, otherwise, often either try to prove to themselves that they need no safety whatsoever (which leads to recklessness and difficulty in bonding) or look for safety in arbitrary and single-minded ways through control, micromanagement or seclusion. Letting go and seeing what happens isn’t really our thing because in the past, this hasn’t worked out so well for us and our bodies have adapted to that, sending signals of danger as soon as there’s something out of the norm.

As I continued to lose most things that held meaning in my life until that point, including my remaining health, I noticed something. In this stripped-back version, my existence between sleep, food, rest and nervous system work revealed a profound emptiness that had previously been filled with various surrogates. Habits, people, responsibilities - many of them were good, but I had used them to try to tell myself that it was all fine now. Safe. Except that what I actually needed to do was to find this feeling within myself, not through the attachment to other people or cultural norms or aesthetic standards.

It’s natural to associate your peers, your home (if it’s a good one) and your daily routines with a general sense of safety. If everything is new all the time, you are overwhelmed and can’t judge if you are, well, safe from harm. The problem is that if you rely on outside factors for these ‘all good’ signals too much, you become dependent on them for reasons other than their innate quality, and you will have a hard time letting them go, even if they don’t actually serve you - and even if change in life is natural and not a sign that something is broken.

I realized that in order to build a life that was safe enough, I first needed to establish this feeling on my own. Through long and dedicated trauma-informed work, a feeling of profound trust and peace within myself that I hadn’t known before started to build up. As there was nothing outside, I focused inwards and built what might best be described as a garden where I can always sit, no matter the circumstances. (If you’re curious how I did that, I still highly recommend checking out Curable - I derived most of my ideas and practices from there).

As I was going down that path, which continued well into fall where I was physically already back to ‘almost normal’, I found that the pressure to ‘make the right choices’ in life started to dwindle. Yes, this was probably the biggest new beginning my life had ever seen, but I now knew that it was a lot more about being good with myself than making ‘perfect’ choices about where I would live and what I would do. As these things no longer had the same power over me as they used to, I had the sense that no matter what I chose, it was going to be okay, and if I had to undo it later, it was going to be okay, too.

The latter was especially important since the first few months were very daunting. I was working again but I couldn’t possibly know if I was ready for it. Sometimes when I came down with a headache I feared that I might fall ill again. Any time I said yes to a project I felt like an imposter a little bit. But as I learned more and more about safety, I also understood that we feel safe when we make the choices we want to make, not the ones we feel like we have to make out of fear. Paradoxically, the path to safety is neither control of external factors, nor caution. For me, it was bravery.

In November, I tried out for a job in Hamburg, six hundred kilometers away from my home, simply because I wanted to. Initially, out of fear (TM), I said I was only going to do two days, to see how my body was going to cope. I ended up working six days in a row without the slightest issue. By the end of that week, I decided to officially apply for the next open position. A few weeks back, I signed my contract and I will be moving across the country in less than a month. (I’d also like to mention that this is my first regular employment - I have been self-employed my entire professional life.) I’m still waiting for my lease on the apartment I found just a week ago. I haven’t packed a single bag.

As I’ve been processing all of this, going back and forth between Hamburg and my current opera project, not really having any free days until this week (hence the delay in blog posts), I found myself smiling quite often. It’s a scary thing, starting a new life like that, and while I was generally playing around with the idea last summer, you know, maybe going somewhere else some time, I hadn’t really considered it. It felt safer to know that my support system was there, just in case. I’ve also been at my current opera house for over ten years. I love the Black Forest. Etc.

And yet I decided to go forth with it, and everything fell into place beautifully. I will officially be the family member that lives the farthest away from everyone. I will live by myself again, go to work in a new place, spend a ridiculous amount of money on rent. The ‘What if’s in this situation don’t really frighten me anymore and my health has been very stable the last few months. As I lost so much while I was sick, I gained the one important thing that I had been missing all this time: I now trust myself. That I am able to make decent choices. That I can handle their consequences, even if some of them are unpleasant. And that nothing is so overwhelming that I can’t get through it eventually.

I’m ready. So much more is yet to come. Will share more soon.