He's Not Here Anymore: The Case for Sitting Still
Image by Unsplash artist, @karishea
I have needed lots of treats to get through this past week.
I took a sick day on Monday, got a bagel and coffee Thursday and Friday morning, and rolled through the Dairy Queen drivethru on my way home from work one afternoon for a hot fudge sundae. I didn’t go to the gym, not even once, and I can’t wait to tell my personal trainer who will surely be impressed by my go-get-’em attitude.
I spent most evenings cleaning up the clutter from the mornings, taking a hot shower by 7:00 PM, and sitting on the couch to watch TV until bedtime. It’s what my brain and body have needed, treats and rest, and I tried to just do and be without guilt or shame, my two least favorite uninvited party guests.
On Wednesday evening, I had therapy. I got comfy in an armchair by the window with my laptop on my lap and if putting your laptop on your lap causes cancer then they need to fucking rebrand.
Just saying.
My dog brought me his octopus squeaker toy and when I told him, “In a little bit,” he huffed and laid down at my feet. I listened to the wind as a rare winter storm blew in over Arizona and I waved hello when my therapist, Rebecca, popped up on the screen.
She asked me to tell her what has been great about the past week and what has been hard, just as she starts every session. I told her that I made a new writer friend this week and we had a beautiful coffee date and settled right on in as if we’d known each other since our pre-teen years when posters of Britney Spears plastered the walls of our bedrooms.
Then I told her that the past week had really reinforced why I’m glad to be back in therapy - I cannot sit still and it’s making me crazy.
You know, that frustrating endless middle stage of enlightenment and growth where you know exactly what your problems are and why you have them, but you simply cannot stop doing the problematic things and you drive yourself absolutely pistachios?
That’s where I’m at. I’m sitting right smack in the middle of island Can’t-sit-still-but-definitely-really-want-to.
Rebecca asked what my self talk sounds like when I sit down on the couch and get right back up after six minutes because I can’t stop picturing the dishes in the sink and also I just remembered that if I throw in a load of laundry now, I can have it finished and folded before bedtime. She asked me what thought runs through my head that makes me get up and do and sit down and then get up and keep doing.
I told her that it isn’t a thought at all. It’s a feeling, a prickle. An anxious current of have-tos and shoulds and how-dare-you-relax-when-I-have-been-working-all-day?
While I know the prickle is anxiety and guilt and shame handed directly to an unsuspecting child me in a package labeled “HERE!” that was shoved into my arms by my father and his father, still, up I go. (Why are you just sitting there? Go help your grandmother do the dishes.)
I can’t sit still because I don’t deserve to sit still because that’s what several somebodys told me.
I haven’t done enough today or yesterday or last Tuesday or ever in order to simply sit on the couch. Haven’t done enough to earn rest of my heart and brain and body. Haven’t done enough to appease all of those who watch me intently and take my rest personally.
I don’t sit still because the prickle says I absolutely can’t and shouldn’t. Shouldn’t listen to my own needs or trust myself that I have done enough and can ignore someone else’s opinion of enough.
“Hm,” Rebecca says, having become accustomed to my monologuing. “What would happen if you did sit still? Did try to actually rest?”
“I would explode,” I say, instinctively. “The prickle and discomfort would get so loud and intolerable and I would have to probably sit on my hands in order to ignore it and then I would explode.”
Even though the explosion of oneself should be avoided at all costs, obviously, I told her that I wanted to try it. I wanted to interrupt the loop and have the explosion so that I could get over it, could stop the busying and the answering of demands that are only really ghosts of spoken and unspoken expectations from long ago.
She has an answer, as she always does.
“This upcoming week, whenever you feel the urge to answer and appease the prickle, say the following to yourself in your head: He’s not here anymore.”
“He’s not here anymore,” She says again, asking me through intentional repetition to really listen and absorb it.
I say it to myself in my own brain, turn it over once or twice as if examining a shell on the beach and I decide that I love it, so I stick it in my pocket for when I need it.
And need it, I do.
He’s not here anymore, I tell myself as I stand in line at the counter of my favorite coffee shop even though I have coffee at home.
He’s not here anymore, I repeat as I don’t get up from the couch at the commercial break. As I sit for one episode and then another.
He’s not here anymore, as I reach for a clean water glass even though I know I have one from yesterday sitting on my nightstand.
He’s not here. He’s really not here.
As I repeat and sit and repeat and listen to myself, I can feel myself emerging slowly to take up the whole space of my life. Space that was once his.
As if I have dared to turn an untouched room that has a treadmill used only as a drying rack into my own personal yoga studio or napping room or writing room or whatever the fuck I want. I turn the doorknob slowly, see the dust float up the streams of sunlight coming through the window.
I close my eyes and will it all away, envision the next more beautiful thing until it appears, then sink into the plush new bed of the room I designed and willed and dared to imagine.
And he’s not here anymore.
He really isn’t.
Yours,
Emily Rose // Miss Magnolia