The difference between 'rest' and 'depressed'

Look, ma, I got out of bed: Another primer on the autonomic nervous system

Welcome to Wandering Grace. When I’m on my regularly-scheduled programming: I share essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing¹ every other Thursday, and bonus snapshots from the road on alternating Sundays. Read more about the project here. See an archived list of essays in-order here.

I have been on a less-consistent posting schedule since December because I was trying to move from Oregon to California and got waylaid by both a Craigslist scam and apparently the universe’s answer to my quest to gain more clarity about the whole [Bay Area vs LA] question. I am back in Oregon as of today — to mixed feelings, a renewed commitment to move, and the surreality of my own convoluted wanderings.

In my introductory essay to this project, I wrote:

It’s an expression of how the safety we sometimes need to create for ourselves in order to take the risks to change our lives can be beautiful in their inefficiency, creative in their unskillfulness, and poetic in their wild hopefulness…in the face of all the internal gremlins and on top of all of the external headwinds that would have us staying in place when that in-place-ness also means staying stuck and small and shrunken.

Here’s to the meandering path. I am breaking the ice on posting here again with today’s blogpost-turned-essay about rest.

I hope and intend to be back to posting essays about my Healing Pilgrimage stops in the coming weeks. Thanks for being here, and reading along, and supporting this work.

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lessons in rest

This morning, sitting in bed, I started a making a list of possibilities for my Sunday: errands amidst settling-in tasks amidst things I don’t get time to do during the workweek. Laundry, taxes, getting the bookshelf set up, biking around the neighborhood, getting a bike pump to be able to bike around the neighborhood, boba. Energetically: probably not getting to the thrift store today. When I started to put items like “get a jump on mapping the week, look at a work presentation for Monday, write a Wandering Grace post(?!), write a Patreon post (!!)”…my body started feeling tired again, and I pulled up the covers and lay all the way back down. Could I just go back to sleep for the rest of the day?

The thing is, I know I need to rest after the tumult of the past few months. It is one of my explicit goals for this time here in Oregon: Rest and Reset.

But I don’t quite know the difference between rest and depressed for myself. I don’t know how to actively rest (nourish, restore) without letting myself slippery slide into depressed numbness (avoidance, vacancy).

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In tayla shanaye’s Nourishing the Nervous System, she walks us through practices to soothe, reset, and restore the nervous system. Drawing from Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, we are invited to notice when our various systems are online:

• social engagement system (when one is feeling safety and/or in their “window of tolerance,” and includes access to one’s tools of connection, empathy, sympathy),

• sympathetic system (hyperarousal, commonly known as fight or flight, which can look like anger, panic, anxiety, fear, worry), or

• parasympathetic system (hypoarousal, commonly known as freeze, which can look like depression, numbness, dissociation, helplessness, collapse)

I am more familiar and have been habituated (or have habituated myself²) towards the protective mechanism of freeze — especially during my pandemic experiences in Oregon when I couldn’t run away and when I felt helpless to change the racial dynamics³ here and here and here and here…in my home and in my neighborhood and in my world and (worst of all) in my body.

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The invitations to ‘rest’ which look like bingewatching YouTube shorts, and escaping into a book and reading for hours on end, and eating lots of cereal and/or chips…some days, these sound a lot like avoiding tasks on my to-take-care-of list. To me, these are some of my warning signs of when I’m DEEP IN an avoidant parasympathetic hypo-aroused state, with little motivation to do anything that might get me closer to my goals (because then there is also the risk of failing to get closer to my goals, and today I just can’t deal with the fallout of yet another heartbreak, thank you very much).

In the past, I’ve associated these things with being in a depressive state. Or: I used to call it depression with an asterisk of “doesn’t really meet the criteria listed in online articles about depression caused by chemical imbalances,” and which I’ve come to learn is more a shutdown stage of burnout that comes from sensory overwhelm in an autistic mind-body-nervous-system.

The thing is, my autistic body and mind also need a lot of this kind of ‘rest’ to process life.

The thing is: I’m also coming to see that these aren’t actually restful states, as in they’re not necessarily restorative.⁴

For the way I move through life, and for the overwhelm of our world in general, I have found these to be protective states to be in, and I’m grateful for those instincts, and there’s no shame in being able to self-soothe, but/and I don’t need to live here.

There are ways to increase my window of tolerance and my connection with the world without tilting into overwhelm quite so easily (e.g. being more in my own power both personally and collectively, instead of believing in my helplessness). There are ways to change the circumstances that lead into these states (e.g. advocating for accommodations, changing up my environment, and/or tending to signs of burnout before I actually burnout).

When I’m in these ‘escape-from-the-world’ modes, I need to focus on re-regulating. And if I’m in a hypo-aroused state, I actually don’t need MORE REST. More stillness, and less movement actually sinks my body deeper into collapse. These are the times when having a pet friend around that you need to feed is helpful because it gets you out of bed. These are the times when routines around sleep, and food, and exercise are helpful — to just get you started and then let yourself go through the motions. These are the times when getting out of the house for even a just-one-loop-around-the-block walk is good for getting you back in your body. For re-regulating.

I’m coming to see that the items of my list of “things I can do to rest” probably shouldn’t mimic the items I default to when I’m in a dissociative state…or at least not without a lot of intention and choice. (As an example, I love to read. The first thing I do when I move to a new city is get a library card. I have piles and piles of library books in any home I’m actually settled into — and even in many I hesitate to call home. I read all the time: for work and for pleasure and before bed and for research and as a writer and as a comics lover and as my childhood go-to for escaping the overwhelm of life and as a coping mechanism for when I’m needing fiction to dull the pains of heartbreak. I want to be able to read as part of my vacations and weekends and FOR FUN…but I gotta distinguish between when I’m engaging and when I’m binging/inhaling the books. As examples go, this might be my hardest one to work with because: I don’t care; just let me read. I’ll probably just let myself read, but I can work on becoming more noticing, more curious about how I’m reading when I’m reading a bit too much.)

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Going back to my morning, curled up in the covers, wondering if I could just go back to sleep for the rest of the day. I realized that my overwhelm came online only after I started listing items that were related to my work lives (my non-profit job, my art business jobs, which includes writing essays for this here Wandering Grace Substack).

I made myself a deal: I won’t make myself do any work-related things today. I will give myself the day off.

But/and I could still DO things today — a lot of things even!

The invitations to ‘rest’ which look like sleeping in, and napping in the middle of the day, which look like NOT doing…some days, these actually send me from a parasympathetic freeze state straight into a sympathetic hyper-aroused anxious state.

Today the idea of “doing nothing” makes me feel anxious; I don’t want to avoid the things I need to do to take care of myself during this time. The life tasks on my list that are about taking care of myself, or getting a handle on the bigger-picture life-stuff feel energizing. Taking care of myself is a form of rest that I need today. Because those things are about: safety and homemaking and nurturance. (Yes, even laundry and taxes.)

For me, homemaking especially is a combo of doing what I can do feel at home here in my temporary place, AND working towards the longer-term goal of making a home for myself somewhere more permanent.⁵

My nervous system needs to know that I’m on it, that I’m taking care of her, that I’m actively building this safety for her…so that she can exhale, into other forms of actual rest. So that she can feel the relief of falling into her pleasure palace of choice today: whether books, or boba, or tears, or quilting, or that mythical mid-afternoon nap.

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lessons in temporary homemaking

Yes, yes, I know: here I am posting an essay on Wandering Grace, even though I just said I wasn’t going to make myself do work things today. Look: if reading is the hardest thing to discern between what’s coping mechanism, what’s work, and what’s pleasure. Writing is probably #2 right on her heels. Once I got up, and got myself breakfast, and got a load of laundry started, my momentum carried me into writing these 1500 words, and here to posting.

This is why turning my art into (reliable) income streams is fraught fraught fraught. But/and here’s my parallel insight from writing up this mini-essay: My writing needs a foundation of safety, which includes the feeling of knowing all my basic needs are taken care of.

The anxious mind externalizes that need into a fixation on: do you have a good-enough job, are you bringing in enough $$$, will you never get out of Oregon if you don’t make more money, can you please just market this substack so you can get more paid subscribers? I become paralyzed when I get into that last thought spiral around how I need to make more money on this substack by writing more consistently on this substack so that I can feel safe enough to write more consistently on this substack.

LOLOL, I’m working on it.

The non-anxious, regulated mind can focus on 1) nurturing internal feelings of safety and 2) actively working on tending to the “taking care of self / taking care of life” items on my to-do list, in order to 3) build self-trust.

The non-anxious, regulated mind can also welcome in connectivity and interdependence and trust in the world via inviting YOU into this work. If you haven’t already, please:

1. Subscribe to this Substack to receive more essays about place and (be)longing — in racialized America, in neurodivergent bodies, in a world on fire, in the fires of our souls’ vocational work;

2. Spread the word about this writing by sharing specific essays from the archives that resonate with you by sending a link to your friends and communities and other sensitive and/or sparkly souls; and

3. Become a paid subscriber if you want to contribute to the flow of resource that makes writing like this possible — and sustainable. (I’m just going to exhale a bit and sit with that word of ‘sustainable’ for just a second. Can you imagine?! How lovely.)

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1. In continued solidarity for a #FreePalestine, in action toward an immediate and lasting ceasefire, and in commitment to the transformative existential shit-busting work that we need to do in ourselves and in our bodies and in this country and in this world toward collective liberation…here is a conversation with Afeef Nessouli from Vibe Check, and a resource guide from Corvallis Palestine Solidarity,…for deepening journeying grappling.

I keep including these footnotes because I can’t be writing, in integrity, about place and belonging and the inherited ripple effects of the traumas of refugees running from war, on my own family and body and life, without also seeing how that is interconnected with the cycles that we are continuing to perpetuate and are karmically a part of in our lifetimes right now. Here’s a resource for Asian Americans understanding settler colonialism. Like we know multiple sides of this equation: we are complicit, and we have healing medicine from lived experience, and we also have the potential power of ‘never again’ humming in our blood — and so what can we and our ancestors offer to today’s questions in ways that are destabilizing and loving and frankly unexpected to imperialism?

2. For more about my experiences with getting out of the hyper-aroused sympathetic nervous system coping mechanism of workaholism, see my graphic novella It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay. (Or read it online here.)

3. Even if my helplessness/powerlessness was — and is — a myth, a limiting belief, a story I’m telling myself, it is still a powerful one. (And one I have the power to transform, sideslip, and/or transcend.)

4. Some of this post is building off foundational learning around boundaries, consent, and the difference between self-soothing rest + restorative rest in courses/resources from Mia Schachter over at Consent Wizardry. I can’t find the “rest vs. re-regulation” framework/course my brain is thinking of right now (and I’m going to get off this laptop to go eat some food soon), so I will stop digging and just link this IG post about self-consent and capacity.

5. Securing a home, (co-)owning(?) a home, being in a relationship with a home where I have both power and responsibility…