Homecoming: Burnt out

Athens welcomed me home a few days ago with blackened, empty slopes from the summer’s wildfires that nearly broke my heart; with stifling heat followed by violent thunderstorms that rolled around inside the mountains causing torrential rain and power cuts. I am spending the finals days of August with a permanent headache, wondering why I feel so tired and sluggish. Why I can’t just throw off my lethargy and throw myself back into ‘real life’? is it the heat? The caffeine withdrawal? (I went tea-crazy in my native UK and cold-turkey when I got home.) Or is it the after-effects of the covid I had a few weeks ago? (That made me so tired - the first few days after I was ill, I was falling asleep every time I sat down!) Perhaps it is simply the frantic summer where I juggled work and socialising in a completely different country for two months on about four hours sleep a night catching up with me?

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not complaining about this summer; it was a blessing and a privilege and I mean that sincerely. I met up with so many old friends and family I hadn’t seen for years. Of course, there were faces not seen, friends not hugged, gossip not shared, places not visited… Two months sounds like a long time, but it wasn’t long enough for everything on my list! I had a wonderful, adventurous, busy summer full of love and laughter (and a few tears, of course) - and FULL is the operative word. Why did I think, after all that, I could fling myself back into a full-on routine - immediately?

I’ll tell you why - because I always have done.

My whole life, I’ve never slept enough. I’ve always amazed people with my seemingly endless energy. I’m a night owl and an early bird. I can work multiple jobs, raise kids, keep a house, work out, plan it all - appointments, trips, parties, you name it - and I will never say no.

Suddenly, it all seems like a lot.

I feel like my fire has burnt out and I just need to rest. Like, literally. Yesterday, I went upstairs and laid on my bed in the middle of the day and fell asleep. Last night, I went to bed when my kids did, while my husband and my teenage daughter watched a movie. I haven’t done a workout for weeks, or been for a run. All I can manage are beginner yoga classes and walks. I know all that is totally normal for some people, but it’s hard for me to let go of my own expectations of myself.

It’s hard for me to surrender to my own weakness.

It’s strange that I think of it like that. I wouldn’t call the same thing weakness in anyone else. Isn’t it weird how we hold ourselves to completely different standards to those we apply to others?

At the moment, I feel like my inner landscape has a lot in common with those burnt mountainsides I drove past the other night on the way back from the airport. There is something about being ill and recovering, being away and returning, that makes me think of scorched earth. Everything is gone, and there is only an empty, eerie wasteland - a hush, a lull, before green shoots begin to push their way through, each like a tiny miracle.

It will take a long, long time for our poor forests to regenerate - if they ever get the chance. If this violent rain doesn’t wash the soil away; if another wildfire doesn’t tear through the same place in a few years’ time. But I can recharge and recover… all I have to do is surrender.

It sounds so simple, but this is a new edge place for me: a place where I let other people do things for me, where I say, No, I can’t. I won’t.

Have you been there?

Liminally yours,

K