Healing is so boring.
When a latte or a chocolate bar sends your cortisol blooming into an event that prevents you from sleeping more than two hours at a stretch, you have to be absurdly careful about what you eat.
When your energy is so low that doing the dishes feels like one of the twelve labors of Hercules, you end up watching a lot of TV.
When one conversation with one person requires three days of recovery time, you stop having friends.
Sure, we’re in the golden age of television and it can keep you pleasantly entertained for months, but at some point you start to want to have your own fun instead of watching fictional people have theirs.
But there’s often an interlude between “Maybe having some fun again sounds fun” and being able to actually marshal the resources to go out and have fun. Sometimes that interlude lasts a year or two. That’s when things get really boring.
Honestly, it’s still a little unclear what exactly I was healing from.
Neurodivergent burnout?
Probably. But the executive function required to get a diagnosis eluded me for years. By the time I was finally ready, the one person at Kaiser who assesses neurodivergence had just quit. No diagnosis for me.
Perimenopause?
Definitely. I started really struggling physically around 42. I’m 48 now. There’s a lot of correlation between undiagnosed neurodivergence and extreme perimenopause issues, and that would explain so much. But the majority of my experience in trying to find a diagnosis, a reason, was mostly just handing over a lot of blood in return for a perplexed shrug.
I do believe that mental, emotional, and physical health are intrinsically linked. We’re holistic beings, and separating everything out into symptoms isn’t doing anyone any good. That said, when the doctor I went to see about vulvodynia in my twenties suggested that I see a psychologist as the only form of treatment, as in, “It’s all in your head” - that was my true villain origin story. Especially after I found a specialist - luckily, one of the top specialists in the field was in San Francisco - and told him what my primary care doctor said. And then I watched as a 73-year-old man gently banged his head against the desk.
Which is to say, there are nuances.
The challenge of healing is that it, for the most part, isn’t a lot of fun. There are fun moments. You’ve got to find them, whatever rocks they’re hiding under, in any season of your life regardless of what’s happening. When you’re exhausted, watching Shrinking for the fourth time can be genuinely fun. When you’re exhausted, putting the release date of your favorite novelist’s new book in your calendar - and then reading the whole thing in a day - is genuinely fun. When someone else does the dishes for you because you can’t get off the couch, it’s maybe not fun, but that heaving sigh of relief is its own brand of joy.
Healing seasons can be long. You can go for ages without answers. You can go for ages where living out those answers - eating an anti-inflammatory diet, being ruthless about your sleep hygiene, saying no to so many things that everyone thinks you’re a jerk - are the only things you’re doing with your time.
I’m not sure where my tipping point was. For me, it was more mental than physical. I spent years doing the physical things. Though it’s hard to stay on an anti-inflammatory diet and, I regret to inform you, croissants and lattes and chocolate have slipped back in. (I don’t regret it at all. Unless the airline won’t let me board on Sunday because the weight listed on my driver’s license is so obviously wrong at this point.)
Once I had done enough of the physical things and was sleeping at least enough that my brain began functioning again, I was able to see where the internal patterns of my brain were perpetuating my symptoms.
Yes, you need some measure of financial stability so you don’t jerk awake at 3 a.m. over credit card debt anxiety. Yes, you need to make sure your cortisol is supported and your hormones aren’t taking you on an ancient wooden rollercoaster ride that leaves you jumpy and psychically bruised. But eventually you’ve got to address the places where your own habits of thought are swinging a baseball bat in a back alley.
For me, I would just be so mean to myself. Like, if you don’t have the money you need, it’s your fault. Never the fault of a failing system, never a consequence of health issues or long-unknown things catching up with me. But my fault and my fault alone. 100% responsibility for your life is a beautiful thing - unless you’re really mean to yourself about it. Self-flagellation does nobody any good.
So I learned, again, how to quiet my brain.
My favorite way, the way that worked beautifully even in the midst of the worst of the physical and financial stuff, was to imagine myself as a little ball of light that rose up to join all the other little balls of light until we were just one great sea of golden light where I could rest. Where I could allow my brain to quiet for awhile. Just a little break in the pattern. I don’t know what neurolinguistic programming has to say about pretending to be a little golden ball of light, but it sure worked for me.
I had to stop writing. For a writer, that’s rough. I had to let the meltdowns be okay, which was harder than it sounds when they happen around other people. I had to tell myself things were getting better even when the evidence was thin. And eventually, I had to lean into joy when it showed up.
Like when my cat would meow at me to give her preferred brand of pets in her preferred location. She likes hard pets from head to tail tip with a little bit of a tail yank at the end and she likes it on one specific window sill and under one specific plant. Occasionally I would try to pet other cats the same way and they would stare at me over their shoulder as if I had just violated them.
Joy could also look like writing a newsletter I was proud of, or lying in the grass and staring up into the branches of the pepper tree framed against the sky, or reading in the hammock. Joy could look like having the energy to build one friendship again. Joy was in getting the house decorated for Christmas and basking in the goddamn holiday cheer. Joy could look like going for a drive through the redwoods or a walk on the beach on a sunny Tuesday.
For awhile, it was simple, easy joy.
And after I had filled myself up with enough nature and enough quiet and enough distance from the things that endangered that quiet…I started wanting to actually have fun again.
Years. It took years. Roughly from the pandemic to now, 2026. Six years. Over half a decade.
And that’s okay. It was a season. And it will continue to be a season.
Just because I can make plans again without doing the energetic math a la “If I leave the house and talk to people today, I’ll need at least two days to recover” doesn’t mean I won’t ever need recovery time again.
Just because I can go to the city to meet a friend today and go to a movie screening tomorrow and go dancing the next day and get on a plane a few days after that doesn’t mean I’m not going to need to take a few naps and turn in early and avoid talking to people for awhile.
Did you know that on Sunday, I had three long conversations with people? Three! I was exhausted, I had to go to bed early, but I didn’t collapse under the weight of all that interaction. This is progress.
I will need to find some balance. I might crash in the middle of all these things. It might be inconvenient. But it’s such an enormous joy to say, You know what? I will go to that movie screening even though I had plans the day before. I will give myself permission to go dancing the next night if I have the energy even though I also need to be getting ready for a two-week trip.
I probably won’t collapse into a pile of goo.
I’m done being done with life.
Love, Amber
This was my first essay for Substack. If you would like to receive my writing in your inbox, you can subscribe here.