The Fifteenth One.
Morning, Subheading: On not being ok, and the stress response cycle: fight, flight, and freeze. Hello, friends! I apologize for dropping off of the face of the Earth, but my life has been in a constant state of change and upheaval for the last few months. Many of you have reached out to inquire if I am ok, but a lot of the time the answer was, "No, not really." I am sure I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable when telling someone I'm not ok, especially if I know there is "nothing anyone can do to help", right? However, this is a socially conditioned response. I could have welcomed people to sit with me so I wasn't alone through all of this, but some things I started thinking more and more were, "I want to be alone. There's nothing anyone can say. I am inconveniencing people with my problems. No one will understand me." As a reasonably emotionally intelligent woman, I know that none of these things are true. You know all of these things are ...