✦ On your nervous system: 010

Photo by George C on Unsplash

They built the whole economy around it - the scroll that never ends, the notification that arrives the moment you exhale, the news cycle calibrated not to inform you but to keep you in a state of low grade alarm that makes you easier to sell to. Your nervous system was never the problem. It was the target. A regulated woman - a woman who feels safe in her own body, who can sit in stillness without reaching for stimulation, who trusts her own perception over the curated noise - is extraordinarily difficult to monetize (or control). So they made sure you’d stay deregulated. They called it being informed. They called it staying connected. They called it productivity. What it actually was, and is, is a system designed to keep your cortisol just high enough that you never fully land inside your own life.

The most radical thing you can do in a world that profits from your exhaustion is to actually rest - not perform rest, not optimize rest, but genuinely, unproductively, without complication rest.

Your nervous system is not broken. It is responding perfectly to an environment that was designed to overwhelm it. Which means the work is not to fix yourself - it was never to fix yourself - but to change the environment, quietly and without apology, one velveteen boundary at a time. Turn the phone face down. Leave the group chat on mute. Let the news exist without your witness for a single evening. Eat something warm. Sit somewhere soft. Let your exhale be longer than your inhale and notice how quickly the body remembers what it was before all of this (perhaps you’re old enough to remember a world without the never ending news cycle) before the performance and the pace and the endless ambient proof that you exist. That woman is still in there. She has been waiting, with extraordinary patience, for you to make the room quiet enough to hear her.