How to Heal on a Budget
Healing from trauma (or burnout, which is a kind of trauma) takes time. So much stupid, agonzing time where it feels like you’re doing nothing and going nowhere. I’d say it’s meditative, your inner self finding a stillness as it waits for the tide to creep back through the mud and marsh grass of yourself. But then picture yourself as the dried mud, the cracked earth, imagine the plants ripped out by the root, shriveled in the sun, and you’ll see why it’s agonizing to call it “meditative”. Before I knew what to expect, I had hoped that it would be easier, more aesthetic, and that it would go faster. Unfortunately healing is hard, slow, and ugly.
Over time, I’ve also noticed that more than trauma can pull the water out. It’s the ebb and flow of life, truly. Acts of great or sustained emotion, service, even love, all pull the tide out. Writing. Mothering. Getting a new job. All of those things use up my resources of self. What becomes traumatizing to myself on some level, is to try to keep going as if the tide is always high. Better to wait for the water to come back in—but most of us can’t stand the wait.
There’s no rushing it along. No hacks. God, I wish there were hacks. But there are ways you can invite it and help yourself stay patient. I started making these lists for myself a few years ago, when I had no money and no resources and had to figure out how to nurture myself with nothing. After this incredibly traumatic year, I am making them again for my low-tide self, so I figured I’d share:
Sad Mom Walks
Long before the internet dubbed anything “sad girl” or “hot girl”, my kids had declared my daily walks “sad mom walks”. I’ve always walked and always been outside, but I think I started walking more intentionally when I first read that walks mimicked EMDR therapy for PTSD.1 At the time I couldn’t even get through a workday without multiple panic attacks and I had no treatment options. I lived in a little fishing cottage by the Chesapeake Bay and I would walk around the wintered boats in the marina. I had my fixed little points I’d check on. I made playlists of music and listened to them. I thought about the strike of my foot on the earth and imagined the earth curving away in each direction. I stood for a long time and looked at the stars. Sometimes I followed the fox trails in the marsh grass that grew higher than my head. It’s sort of like therapy—going on a walk once won’t fix anything, but a walk every single day somehow makes space inside yourself to process, to survey, to stay in a feeling long enough to experience it. I miss living in a more wild, desolate space. My walks now are just around the block of my neighborhood, and I push a stroller, but they are just as important. Just as needed.
An original sad mom playlist:
Making Something
There are so many different ways you can do this one—but it has to be something physical you make, with your own two hands and you don’t really share it (aka, there’s no performance aspect). If you have resources you could do something cool like a pottery or painting. If you are crafty and can afford materials you could pick up knitting, cross-stitch, woodworking, scrapbooking, model building.
But if you’re poor and uncrafty, like me, you can bake bread. Cooking works too, but there’s something specific about making bread. I think it’s the kneading and waiting. It mimics the work of healing and magic. Yeast, after all, is the world’s oldest magic.
Most of the time I make the same yeast bread recipe that was my mother’s and grandmothers. Its the most basic yeast, sugar, salt, flour, water, bread but there really isn’t a better tasting white bread in the world. But I also like an Irish soda bread.
Hot Showers/Baths
The key here is to do it mindfully, make a ritual of it if you can with the hottest water you can withstand. I love a salt bath, but I didn’t have a bathtub during my hardest years, so I’d just stand under the shower head and let myself feel every drop at once, waiting for the water to slough off the panic so I could emerge pink and shiny like a newborn. Occasionally, on a Friday especially, I’d bring a shower beer. I did have two nice towels my sister bought me, and no one was allowed to use them. They were the white, fluffy hotel like towels. I recommend that. I’d also hoarded Sephora samples for years and began using them when I needed something extra. Hell, I still have some L’Occitaine I stole from a hotel in New Orleans that I whip out when things get dire.
Don’t skip the lotion afterwards. Layer them even. When you are healing you need extra moisture, I can’t explain it. You need a skincare routine. You need what feels like a crucial facial massage. You need to pluck your eyebrows by hand and spend a lot of time looking at yourself in the mirror, without judgement, just becoming familiar with this person who has lived through what you have now lived through. My face and body change in grief and healing—partly because my weight always changes for some reason, but it’s not all due to weight. Extra care helps me put my hands on myself, as if I can somehow hold the new person I’ve become and am becoming.
The Uses of the Erotic
Eroticism is so out of fashion these days, but it is vitally important for recovering from trauma, especially from abuse. As Audre Lorde teaches, “We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”
The simplest way to describe it is to find what brings you pleasure—making note of them, allowing yourself to feel the fullness of them. I teach my children this way—I ask them, “what makes you feel the most like you?” My earliest memory of the erotic was getting off my twelve hour overnight shifts at the plastic extrusion factory I worked at when I was eighteen, eating “breakfast”, showering, and then sliding into bed. It wasn’t just the feel of crisp, cool cotton sheets sliding over my over my exhausted, overworked body. It was the slight squeak of the mattress on the metal rails, the day-dark of my basement bedroom, the quiet hum of the fan, the stretch of my youthful muscles that still carried the heat of work. I noticed all of these things. Savored them with my eyes closed. They, for whatever reason, made me feel like me.
But eroticism is also much bigger than the feeling of pleasure. It’s like the center soul you find in pleasure, when you go so deep into the feeling, so surrendered to yourself inside it, where your soul is on the cusp of dreaming and awake, and you find something that is as large as the universe. It is hungry. It is longing. It is sharp-toothed and sharp-eyed and powerful beyond measure.
And then finally, the more complicated way of describing it is that I have found the erotic even in the course of misery. I have found it late night cleaning marina bathrooms with the scent of bleach on my skin. I have found it on the silent drive home in the dark, the smell of a strange man still on my hair and fingers. I have found it nursing a cigarette on the deck, listening to a dark wind in the trees. In those moments, the erotic is knowing I have full agency of my life, that there was no one who could oppress me, that no one could make me their victim, even if I had been victimized, and that there was no circumstance that could change that knowledge of self.
I recommend reading Audre Lorde’s classic The Uses of the Erotic.
Daydreaming
When I say daydreaming, I mean any use of the imagination into the future. It could be reading, watching TV, literal daydreaming, visiting museums, or even making Pinterest boards. Once, my therapist asked me if I had thought about what I would like it to look like if I ever chose to have a partner again, what kind of life I’d like to have, and I sat there kind of flabbergasted. I had not considered it at all. I was so traumatized by my marriage, I couldn’t even begin to imagine myself with another person even though I wanted one. So, I went home and started—of all things—a Pinterest board. It was a free, easy way to put a collection of images around feelings I couldn’t get into words.
I titled it “A Fucking Vision”
Reading is hard during recovery, sometimes you just can’t, even if you love reading. I always find myself resorting to genre romance. The conventions and predictable nature allow my brain safety. The fact that there are so many books by the same author also helps add to the sense of safety. I loved Eloisa James Regency series and read them many times when things were hard. Very early on in my divorce, for some reason, I watched the first six episodes of Outlander about ten times (my canon ends when they get married).
I think there’s also a frequency of trauma…this year I’ve found COPS and Dateline to be very soothing. But I think it’s because the frequency of the worst trauma on television equalized with the buzz of trauma in my life and canceled each other out.
Right now, I’m not so deeply dried out I can’t read, so reading for pleasure is at the top of my list. But so is daydreaming and making Pinterest boards and coming up with some new goals and ideas about what I might like to do.
Witchcraft
I say this half-joking and half-serious. And look, I am a very logical, rational person and also consider myself still a Christian, so I know this whole section sounds kind of banana pants. But I have faith that since this existed for my ancestors without conflict and exists within me without conflict, it doesn’t need reason or theology to make sense.
I pull a lot more tarot cards while recovering. Their mirror nature helps me sort through my feelings and be honest with myself. I also use herbs and nightshades—everything from weed to help with the physical effects of PTSD (though I couldn’t previously), to things like a blend of belladonna, datura, henbane, and mandrake that I can’t tell you does anything in particular but I still find a lot of comfort using.
Healing is a lot like the thread of working in a spell, the string that’s alive that connects me to the prayer or the twist of smoke. I try to spend more time finding that thread in everything I do. In the walk, the kneading of bread, the music, the book, the shower, and then expanding to my work, the ways I mother and love.
When I first did spells, I did them with my whole self in this wild abandon because I did not know what I was doing or whether I thought I was crazy. That proved dangerous both to everyone around me and myself. I’d end up incredibly sick and then whatever I did sloshed way over it’s edges into unintended consequences. Over time, I learned to keep my whole self to my self, and feed a spell only a living, breathing, golden thread. Doing that kept me from getting sick, kept my work within their confines, and also allowed me to do bigger, longer stretching works. In some ways, this is how I also learned I must live. You don’t need to be a witch, but think only of keeping yourself to yourself and feeding the things around you one single, golden thread of your power, your energy, your life. That is more than enough to sustain the work.
Audience of One
It’s important to resist the public performance of any of it. Not that the erotic nature of living can be shared on instagram (It can’t!! I’ve tried!!). But that trying to contain it and put it on display will be fruitless at best, stagnating at worst. I think this is why I grow tired on Instagram. I know that to heal and grow in the way I want, I have to turn my focus away from the performance of self.