The Life You Built to Survive

There's a line on my homepage that resonates with me. Your nervous system isn't broken, it's just stuck. I understood it on the surface. I had the tools, I did the practices, but I was too busy in my head to give it the deep attention it needed to actually heal.

‍Being stuck isn't merely a passive state of being. It's the body working to hold a pattern in place, protecting something whether you can name it yet or not.

I didn't understand this until Covid forced the world to stop. Before that, my calendar was jam packed, color coded, and busy down to the minute. I intentionally scheduled my life that way. Looking back, all that busyness was its own kind of avoidance. It was a way to keep from feeling the swirls and storm underneath. When everything came to a sudden halt, it was a shock to my nervous system. Everything I'd been avoiding came crashing into full focus, right there in front of me with nowhere to go. I found myself in a three week intensive outpatient program, done virtually from home. One practice I learned there was Leaves on a Stream, which I shared in a prior post. Most of the exercises were useful, and some I still revisit today. One of them cracked something open I wasn't expecting.

We were given a list of values and asked to pick the ones that mattered most to us. Simple enough. Among those I chose were belonging, freedom, simplicity, and connection. Values can shift over time and across different chapters of life. When I looked at how I'd actually been living, I realized I wasn't living the authentic, values driven life that was the focus of that session. Freedom meant moving again, which up until then had only been a daydream for several years, stuck in the logistics. Simplicity meant admitting how much of my day was just noise. No wonder I felt so miserable and depressed. I was going through the same motions day after day on repeat.

This led to changes I hadn't yet found the courage to make. Ones I'd been hesitant to leap into, even though what mattered to me underneath had been asking for them all along.

Many of us didn't choose the structure we're living inside of. We built it while we were surviving something, whether that was a childhood that asked us to hold everything in, a job that rewarded giving more until we burned out, or a relationship that worked only if we weren't fully ourselves. The nervous system doesn't know the difference between the danger that shaped it years ago and the ordinary Tuesday you're living now. It just knows the pattern worked once, so it keeps running it to protect you.

‍Regulation alone isn't the whole answer, even though it's where I recommend people start. A slow inhale and exhale with a hand on your heart and diaphragm, a five minute meditation, time spent present in nature, these are a few ways to begin settling your body. Regulation isn't the end goal because it doesn't answer the deeper question of what you've actually been protecting. It only makes it possible to finally see what's underneath.

What's often waiting on the other side is a life you built to survive, not one you actually chose. That recognition can catch you off guard, expecting relief and possibly finding sadness instead. You mourn the years spent protecting a pattern that felt safe because it was familiar.

I'm not advocating an overhaul of your whole life once you gain some clarity. Start asking questions. Whose expectations are living in my day, and which parts of my routine are old armor instead of real values? What would this week look like if my nervous system already knew it was safe? Then write down small shifts you could make towards what matters the most to you.

‍I'm working on a values-based tool to help walk through those questions more slowly. When it's ready, you'll find it on the Offerings page. For now, if you're looking for a place to start settling your body enough to ask these questions, you can find some of the practices I return to on the Rooted Wellness page.

‍So much of this gets patterned early, in childhood, tucked into the subconscious long before we have words for any of it. We can name some of it today, but most of it stays hidden.

Some parts of the life you're protecting were never yours to protect in the first place. That's where the real work begins.