131. What Six Months Away Taught Me

I'm gonna share with you five lessons, the five major lessons from this season.

So lesson number one, health is not just about pushing harder.

Now, you guys know me.

I am a go, go, go, go, go person, do everything at 200%, do it all [laughs] perfectly, and pretty much don't stop until it gets done.

I preach rest.

I preach listening to your body.

I encourage women basically every single day on socials and my one-on-one consults about the importance of rest and recovery, but my gosh, is that a bitter pill [laughs] to swallow when it's myself that needs that advice.

And so without question, this season taught me about the importance of rest and listening to my body, and unpacking that deeply ingrained belief that rest and recovery is not productive.

And I know for so many of you listening, the same as me, that that's what we were modeled by our own mothers as well.

I can even hear my mother's words, and keeping in mind I'm pretty estranged from her, and that shows how much my childhood upbringing is still imprinted in there, around her never getting a chance to rest, her never being able to stop and sit down, not being able to have five minutes to herself.

That if we weren't doing things, that it was seen as lazy and unproductive and not contributing.

So of course, if that is so imprinted from childhood, it is probably near impossible for us just to expect to be able to override that.

So in my case, it was a constant reframe.

It was a constant, "This is just what this season is requiring of me, and that if I don't get it, there's going to be some long-term ramifications." And this wasn't just in that initial acute period from surgery.

This has been six months, and probably indefinitely really, as I've come to [laughs] a greater level of acceptance.

I'm not going to say that I have accepted that I have a very serious lifelong health condition that requires management.

Because for so long I've just brushed it off as, "Well, this is structural.

This doesn't mean that I need more rest day in and day out," which is ludicrous.

I was thinking about this podcast and what I wanted to say when I was going for a walk, and if I look back over the last six years, nearly seven years, because Ray will be seven in October.

So in the last seven years I have had a third baby, endured COVID, kept a business running that entire time, which was the sole support for, at the time, was a family of five.

I have endured now three major neurosurgeries.

Three.

Countless, like actually countless small procedures in that time.

Also got separated, divorced, and moved entire cities, and have three boys in my custody, full, full-time custody, in seven years.

[laughs] Even if there was nothing else on the horizon for me, even if this condition was magically, quote-unquote, "fixed," as I say this, and as I was thinking about it, if I had a friend say that to me, I'd be like, "Girl!" You need more rest.