On hot monks, bowls of cereal, and doing our best.
Sometimes, the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is lowering our expectations.
Content warning: Discussion of depression/burnout & eating disorders.
Way the fuck back in the day, I used to be a big Christian nerd with a boner for monks, and no monk was hotter than Thomas Merton (IYKYK.) There are lots of stories to tell there (like the fact that MY VERY FIRST BLOG IN 2004 OMG was titled Weeds Of Contemplation, a play on the title of his book Seeds of Contemplation, even though I was not even smoking weed at the time—such a shame—I DIGRESS) but I am thinking about him today because he wrote something that I come back to a lot, especially now when I am in a season of very low capacity (AUTISTIC BURNOUT AMIRITE???):
Pray as you can, not as you can’t.
-Thomas Merton
If you: have a chronic illness or chronic pain, and/or are disabled, and/or are burnt out, and/or are in a season of your life where you can’t even for any and all reasons, you know exactly what I am talking about: everything is a fucking struggle. I’m now officially on team Showering Is So Hard Ugh, a team I didn’t even join when I was out of my mind with postpartum depression. My oldest kid is now 12 years old and doesn’t seem to need me for almost anything anymore, and yet showering has become one of the many banes of my existence, along with such rude and horrid tasks as making food and eating food.
You get it. You live it. It sucks.
Almost every day I’m finding myself filling out yet another self-assessment online for some condition ending in D—chasing all the wrong Ds, amirite?—in which I am clicking some box that says, Do you have less interest in the things you routinely enjoy, like hobbies, friends, movies and such? How about no interest? Life these days does not spark joy.
Which makes life hard, because “spark joy” is another way of saying “produces dopamine,” which I like to call “make-brain-go juice,” and when that shit runs low (fellow ADHD-ers, I salute you) it feels like everything grinds to a halt.
As a fairly new kid in the neurodivergent class, I remember a lot about how life used to feel. These days, eating is an odious chore, but I remember the days when I used to read food memoirs, when I used to read cookbook head notes while eating, when I used to relish meal planning and prepping, when cooking and eating were a joy.
And remembering gets in my way. Autistics famously have a hard time eating, and often will have ARFID1 as a comorbidity, as I do. And a scene that plays out multiple times a week, if not multiple times a day, depending on how I’m doing, is the one-act, one-woman show I like to call Ok But Seriously WTF Do I Eat?
This is a very boring scene in which I scan my memories and the mental map of my neighborhood fast food joints hoping to find something, ANYTHING that I might be tempted to eat. Can I find a food item that will give me a jolt of make-brain-go juice?
Back in the day, that used to work. I would get excited to pick a recipe, to find a creative way to reuse some leftover or lingering ingredient in my fridge, to go to some drive-thru because those were a relatively rare occurrence in my life and they hadn’t yet lost the shimmer of novelty as they have now.
This will go on for anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour. Sometimes I come up with something that feels tolerable and go eat that. Sometimes I spin my wheels (and spend energy I don’t have) trying to come up with something, anything that I might even remotely be excited to eat; fail; and end up eating a bowl of cereal, or making a smoothie, or something similarly passable but drab. Sometimes I just protest and don’t eat.
What does this have to do with hot monks? you might well ask. Don’t worry, I’m getting there.
To me, Merton’s words are about honoring our capacity. Pray as you can, not as you can’t tells me that yes, we are holding an ideal in our mind about how said task (eat, pray—love?) should go, but that for whatever reason we don’t always have the resources we need to live up to that ideal, and that’s ok because there is probably some version of that thing we can do that may fall short of our ideal, that may be boring and drab and flat and yet that might also be perfectly serviceable and acceptable.
My point is: the kindest thing for me to do is to eat the bowl of cereal. That is eating how I can eat. And often, the wishful thinking and hoping that I’ll find something shinier and more exciting to eat is trying to eat how I can’t. At least not right now, not today.
I also feel like Merton’s words are about being kinder to ourselves. It’s ok that you can’t eat, pray, love, write, work, cook, clean, parent the way you want to. You still deserve kindness and nourishment and connection.
It’s tempting to think that healing is about getting the dopamine back into eating, about coming up with new strategies and systems to get more, better food into me. And maybe one day that’s what healing will be about. But in this season of my life, healing is about lowering my standards. It’s about not looking for the better, shinier thing, because that costs a lot of energy, and I’m in conservation mode for survival reasons. It’s about eating a damn bowl of cereal and calling it good.
Yet another monk comes to mind—also hot, much less well-known, actually a woman Zen priest named Karen Maezen Miller who wrote my favorite all-time book about parenting. She is a fount of compassion, on the page and in person, as I’ve had the distinct pleasure of experiencing. She said this:
You’re always doing your best. You just don’t think it’s your best.
-Karen Maezen Miller
I’m gonna let that sink in.
.
.
.
What happened in your body when you read those words? Did you feel relief? Did your shoulders unhook from around your ears? Was it easier to breathe for a moment? And/or did a story come swinging out like a troll from the dark recesses of your mind to say that sure, maybe other people are doing their best but surely not you, wretched lazy slob that you are? (That’s what the troll says, not me. I think you’re doing great, and that you deserve a nap, a snack, and a forehead kiss.)
Who among us—the depressed, the burnt out, the chronically marginalized for our low capacity—actually believes we are doing our best? And—more importantly—what about our lives would change if we did?
What does best even mean? Best according to whom? Poet William Stafford, who for portions of his life wrote a poem every single day, once said that he did not believe in writer’s block because when he felt stuck in his writing, he simply lowered his expectations.
We deserve kindness, even—especially!—when we’re in a season of low capacity, and lowering our expectations of ourselves, as well as honoring that we are, in fact, doing our best, even—especially!—if we think our best should look different, is the kindest thing I can think of for us.
And not only is it the kindest thing—it’s what will help us repair trauma as well.
Earlier this month, I taught a workshop in my group program, The Resourced Healer, about low-capacity living, and it felt so good and so timely to be in community around this topic that I decided to offer it as a public workshop.
Small Spoons: Trauma Repair + Low Capacity Living is rooted in the belief that repair is possible inside of every interaction we have with our bodies, and that our relationship with our bodies, no matter how fraught, holds the possibility, and is deserving, of repair.
During the workshop, I will take you through the genesis of shame and the survival function of internalized ableism; offer a gentle framework for trauma repair for low-capacity bodies; as well as suggestions for ways to ease the burden of care tasks in day-to life. My teaching style emphasizes autonomy, consent, and the sovereignty of lived experience.
This workshop is for you if you experience one or more of the following:
Chronic pain, chronic illness, and/or disability
Neurodivergence
Burnout (for any reason)
Pregnancy & postpartum
Long Covid
Recovery from acute illness/injury
Grief & loss
I’ve intentionally made this as financially accessible as possible. There are three price options, $22, $44, and $66. Choose whichever option best suits your budget. If the cost of the workshop is prohibitive for you at this time, please email me at hello@thetraumawitch.com with the subject line Small Spoons to receive free access, no questions asked.
🥄 Small Spoons: Trauma Repair + Low-Capacity Living 🥄
Saturday, May 6th, 12pm-3pm, Central Time on Zoom
🥄🥄🥄 Register for $66
And because it was so lovely to brush up against William Stafford’s work to look up the quote mentioned above, here’s one of his poems, just because.
Why I Am Happy
Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is.
― William Stafford
ARFID stands for Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder.
Maezen is one of the finest teachers I've ever had. What a joy to see her name pop up here.
Just want to thank you for putting these words into the world. I’m grateful they found their way to me.