There was a fiasco of a trip once where I was traveling solo with two of my very young and overtired children, trying to make a 6:30am flight. The security line took hours, which meant we were sprinting through the airport as I carried a hefty backpack, a crying toddler, and lugged a suitcase behind me. The poor preschooler grasped my sweatshirt and tried to keep pace as I ran. Adrenaline coursed through my body as I tried not to imagine what felt like an unbearable outcome – missing the only flight option that day and being stuck with kids who’d been up since 4am. We ran and ran until we finally reached the gate. I couldn’t catch my breath as I looked pleadingly at the gate agent. She shook her head. The boarding doors had closed.
In that moment, I literally fell to the ground. It seems dramatic in retrospect, but it was all my body could do. I collapsed into a pile of kids and baggage, letting my tears flow for several minutes while the older of the two put tender arms around me. It didn’t feel good, of course, but at least it felt lighter.
We usually think of relief as a pleasant feeling. We might associate it with some level of happiness. But relief is more like a release, one that can come with a whole host of feelings, like despair, disappointment, grief.
And still, even when coupled with the painful emotions, relief usually feels so much better than the stress and tension that precede it. Because while it’s heart-achingly difficult to accept defeat, the desperate attempt to change a reality that you can’t – whether that’s a flight that won’t wait for you or a person who won’t change or an aspect of your body you don’t like or the egregious actions of an authoritarian government – always feels worse.
Recently our practice hosted Dr. Lauren Elder for a workshop on strategies for neurodivergent families, and one of the things she emphasized is that living as a neurodiverse family means letting go of the idea that things will look the same as other families, or even as the family you thought you would have. My own family, for instance, doesn’t really ever go out to dinner – something I really enjoy and wish we could do. But after enough bungled attempts that ended in spectacular defeat, I’ve given up on it. I’m sad it doesn’t work for us, but the feeling isn’t nearly as sharp at the cycle of effort and frustration.
We might think of this in the most simple terms as accepting reality as it is. It’s honestly not something I’ve ever particularly relished, much more inclined to want to change or shape reality. But the more I befriend reality rather than constantly push against it, I experience lightness. And wouldn’t you know, dinners at home – while still raucous – become a little more enjoyable.
Jessica Slice is a writer and mom of two who became disabled in her late twenties and started using a wheelchair. She recently published a book called Unfit Parent that might seem niche to disability, but is actually such a powerful reflection for all parents – and people – and what it means to let go of our attachment to how things should look in order to embrace how it can.
She did a beautiful interview with Anne Helen Petersen recently where she reflected, “Becoming disabled forced me to look at the awful truth of our frailty and temporality. It’s the last thing I wanted to do. But, eventually, after years of denial and adjustment and finally acceptance, that reckoning with our mortality was my way through. It was then that I finally started to live my actual life. I try to ease my own suffering and that of others. I seek to participate in a more just world. But I will not succeed. Scrambling to fix my life and thinking I could was obfuscation. Working to ease my children’s pain, while knowing I can’t, is being alive.”
Having someone in your family with a diagnosis is one way we might be thrust into accepting the reality of what is and giving up on what isn’t, but there are certainly others. It’s the same phenomenon that we experience when we look at our to-do lists and recognize that it’s not just incredibly long, but it’s infinitely long. It will not just be difficult, but impossible to complete. We can rage against the reality of that, or we can give up on the idea of doing it all.
I think many of us tense at the mere suggestion of giving up, particularly if that’s never felt safe to do. But maybe it’s the only thing that we actually can do when we are operating in the reality that is versus what we idealize it to be. I give up on the notion that my partner will meet this particular need. I give up on the idea that I can have as much energy as I want. I give up on the notion that my job will give me identity. I give up on this project that isn’t working. I give up on keeping my house clean. I give up on my parent being someone they aren’t. I give up on the idea that life is limitless and endless because, I tell you tenderly, she isn’t.
In Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman describes the teaching style of Hōun Jiyu-Kennett, a British priest who became a Zen Buddhist teacher. She used to say that her approach was not to lighten the burden of her students, but to actually make them so heavy that they had to put them down.
The painful but important gift of a missed flight, a difficult health condition, a lost job, or just an overstuffed, overwhelmed life on the brink is that they are invitations to give up in the very best way possible. They welcome us to lay down our fantasies and release our desires, which is painful and – the willingness to do so frees up our arms for what’s there. To feel the loving arms of a preschooler around your neck in a low moment. To figure out what’s worth picking back up.
