Lately, I’ve been having nightmares. Most of the time I can’t remember the details, but when I feel into the memory in my body, they’re winding. They feel like webs, like cloaks — thick, heavy, layered. They weigh me down and then wake me up with a lurch.

Most nights I get up at least five times. Sometimes nine. It’s often more than every hour; I'm a newborn again, unable to link together my sleep cycles, lumbering through a staccato of disconnected horror reels. Then there are nights I stay awake for hours. Every part of me that feels anxious or sticky or resentful rises up and parades through my consciousness, demanding attention. I replay all that plagues me — all my resentments and pains. It’s a long, stressed line of people in a government building, waiting for their moment to deal with some painful but necessary piece of bureaucracy.

When I wake up exhausted in the morning, I try not to resent my mind. It’s calling attention to everything that needs to be seen. It’s saying: notice me.

I have a strong desire to take melatonin and force myself to sleep, but I know my body is asking for more than sedation. Less escape, more presence.

I’ve gotten to the point where I can no longer ignore it. The patterns I’ve lived with no longer work.

My resolution this year was to address my longstanding physical issues: a persistently painful gut, a dysregulated, weak menstrual cycle, almost constant, debilitating fatigue and brain fog. After rounds upon rounds of bloodwork, gut protocols, and the ever-glamorous pooping on a tray — and relentless reading, podcast-listening, and self-advocacy on my part — I learn through my naturopath that (theoretically) the root cause of so much of my agony has been an underfunctioning thyroid along with myriad pathogenic bacterial infections and a deluge of low-grade food allergies that slowly corroded and inflamed my intestinal lining.

The road to recovery has been more than non-linear. It’s been an exhausting, swirling scribble. I just want to feel good. I want to be better.

I’ve been on so many rounds of anti-microbials and supplements. I’ve done a low-FODMAP diet and then low-histamine diets. I’ve edited out corn, soy, wheat, dairy, sugar, legumes, peanuts, sesame, and eggs. I’ve eaten only homemade organic, whole, unprocessed foods. I’ve sat in front of the red light, meditated, written in my gratitude journal, grounded, been in bed at least eight hours a night, created boundaries with my phone, exercised, and breathworked. At last I’m on thyroid medication; after a lifetime of avoiding pharmaceuticals, I would do most anything. Everywhere I turn, there seems to be a suggestion that if I just did one more thing, I’d be better.

But somehow still, riding an e-bike with my boyfriend for an hour on a sunny day feels like completing an Ironman. Everything is draining. I feel like I’m carrying my own dead body through the mud most days — lugging a corroded sack of organs through the waste. I’m exhausted, fuzzy, cranky, and bloated. I don’t need a nap. I don’t need a good night’s sleep. I feel like I need to be in a coma for two years to catch up with whatever is happening — to climb myself out of the pile of emails and dishes and sibling arguments and constant self-flagellation that has somehow rendered one of the primary drivers for human wellness into giving up entirely.

My thyroid gave up because I pushed myself too damn hard for too damn long. Because I want to be good. Because I want to help everyone and do everything perfectly and not feel any of the weird, inconvenient things that come with being human. But now life seems to be insisting I feel it all. It's dredging up every unhealed part of me for that nighttime parade of processing.

One evening, I could feel it all simmering. After a year spent really attuning to my body, I felt her — the pressure, the pushing, the responsibilities, how it all stacked up. I could feel that if I didn’t let something move, I was going to snap. I told the girls I needed to cry. That it would probably be long and loud, but I was okay. That the tears weren’t about them, and they were safe, and I would stop eventually. Then I closed myself in our room and sobbed.

I heaved for at least thirty minutes, not about anything in particular — just pressure and sadness leaving the body. In these moments, I can picture the little girl in me. She's always at the base of an old oak tree, situated in a little nest I've made with a fluffy golden blanket. When I'm at peace, she rests. But much of the time, she's suffering. I feel her grieving loudly when I cry.

At one point, Melby brought me water and tissues. Bonnie asked if I wanted a hug. And then they both curled around me while I cried. Usually I hide my face when I cry. I’m embarrassed to be seen in my tears, but with my girls I could cry freely. I wasn’t afraid of being ugly to them. When it passed, they asked why I was so sad, and it felt very true and simple to say that there’s a very little girl in me who often feels like she’s not good enough.

There was something in that moment — the three of us looped together in my bed, my face blotchy and wet, their arms around me — that felt like the opposite of collapse. Something like permission. Something like being allowed to be a person instead of a performance.

As I’ve leaned into that permission, I find myself falling apart more often. Just today I crumpled and cried again. I cried with my face in my stupid dirty rug, convinced that crying would make me feel better — release some of this garbage I’m carrying around as a personality — until I felt it tighten in my chest. It felt like an orb, and the more I wanted to push it through me, the tighter and worse it felt.

And just then something I’ve set as an intention in ceremonies many times, but rarely bring into my everyday life, came screeching back: my work is to not rush toward or away from anything.

Don’t push away the pain, don’t avoid it, don’t suppress it, don’t fear it. But also don’t reach for it, don’t clamor to feel it all at once, don’t insist it means something, don’t grasp it. Just let it be. Let that ball of wobbly, tight, wounded energy in the chest be just that. Let it radiate there for a moment. Just be with it.

I got up from my sobbing and reclined on the couch. I put my hand on the orb and then asked José to do the same. I breathed. It didn’t go away. It just loosened. I felt that pain — the pain of trying so hard, this year and always, and still suffering so much. The pain of my body not reflecting the immense amount of effort I put into her well-being, that somehow my gut just won’t work and my body’s still limp and drained and most everywhere I go I’m the biggest person in the room and somehow that’s bad and it all feels like a punishment. I heard a voice that said, “Let it be a path to greater gentleness.”

In a world obsessed with GLP-1s and injectables, a world that wants to edit our biology, shrink us, paralyze us, squeeze us into some kind of perceived perfection, I’m standing on the other side saying: I’m going to feel this all. I’m going to feel the exhaustion I’ve heaped upon myself for decades. I’m going to feel all the places I don’t have healthy boundaries, where I abandon myself to maintain some level of comfort. I’m going to feel my speed, my constant urging toward perfection — and how unachievable it is for anyone. I’m going to feel my discomfort, my impatience, my longing. I’m going to put my hand on my heart and breathe.

I’m also going to give up thinking that if I breathe and allow and cry and stay present, anything will change. That then I’ll be good. Because there’s still pressure there. Instead, I’ll be gentle.

I think what I’m learning is this: healing can become another performance. Another way to prove my worth. Another ladder to climb. Even the desire to “get better” carries the implication that who I am now is not enough. For so long I thought healing meant movement, effort, progress. But maybe healing isn’t something I do. Maybe it’s something I stop doing. Maybe the work right now isn’t to become better, but to finally allow myself to just be — tired, imperfect, cranky, lumpy human — without demanding anything more.

I'm going to just spend the rest of my life breathing, doing this one simple thing so necessary for existence. In and out, in and out, with whatever comes. Not rushing towards or away from any of it.

And maybe the nightmares will keep coming. Maybe I’ll keep waking up startled, pulled from whatever dark narrative my mind is spinning in the night. But I think there’s space now — to meet the fear inside those dreams the same way I meet the fear inside my body. To notice it. To breathe. To feel the heaviness without trying to escape it or decode it or fix it.

Maybe the point isn’t to stop waking up.

Maybe the point is to be awake.