Launching an e-guide made me depressed
Maybe it was because the month I’d chosen as launch month ended up being one of the most chaotic months. From a death in the family, the death of a childhood pet, massive career changes, huge edits needing to be turned in for a magazine article I was working on, health struggles for multiple people close to me and doula work that pulled at the strings of my own story that is woven into all of the work I do, it turned into a month of unpredictability and exhaustion.
I found myself spending too many hours staring at a screen, finalizing details on font and graphic size, not talking to a single human being and clinging to the bizarre shred of faith that somehow the hours I spent pouring my heart into this launch wouldn’t be for nothing, even if it wasn’t “perfect.”
Maybe this is how it goes. Every time I’ve ever flung myself into the unknown, there’s always been this moment before where everything becomes disorienting and off balance.
Creation always requires something from us. It is never energetically neutral. Only I seemingly forgot this fact, when I was pouring hours upon hours into the creation of this guide without spending an equal amount of hours pouring into myself. I wasn’t resourcing myself in the way that I needed to actually hold the shape of creation.
I wrote recently about how without adequate resourcing to hold a new shape, we collapse. Whatever the default shape is, the default identity, that feels safer, that feels less metabolically taxing, that feels easier, this is where we go. Trace the roots back far enough and for most of us that default expression came somewhere in childhood. It emerged because that was the thing little you thought would keep you safe.
We love little Ali. She tried her best to stay alive. And in order to do that, the most brilliant solution my child brain could think up was the path of least resistance was to play dead. It was to collapse, to not take up too much space, to be quiet and agreeable.
So under pressure - like the pressure of creating an entire framework - without giving myself adequate opportunities to be nourished and resourced, that shape became the one I took. Curling in, playing small, staring at a wall for hours because I can’t get out of bed.
It makes so much sense.
It wasn’t that my framework was wrong, or I’d taken too big of a leap, or that this launch was an epic failure. It was that my demands didn’t match my resources. Or I was living depleted.
One of the things I work with clients on, and that I teach in workshops and classes, is the inputs and outputs model. Your outputs are what your life requires from you, and your inputs are what you are receiving from your life. In seasons of high output - deaths in the family, changes in a career, run of the mill stress, or launching a new project - there needs to be more of an emphasis on what we’re taking in. The problem for me, and most people I’ve run across, is we don’t factor that into the equation. There is no adjustment to the inputs, and instead we wonder why we aren’t stronger, why we can’t handle more, why we’re anxious and depressed.
Spoiler alert babe: that’s the way things go. Undernourishing your body literally mimics anxiety in the system. A collapse response because there is no available energy to support being a functional human being can show up exactly the same way as depression. You’re not doing it wrong: you’re working outside of your capacity.
Maybe I wasn’t actually depressed. Maybe I just needed to go touch grass. Maybe I needed to eat enough calories to sustain an actual adult human body. Maybe I needed to move my body in a way that wasn’t forced and linear but creative and in flow.
If I could teach people one tool to completely rewire their relationship with life, and their bodies, it would be this one. How you feel makes sense. It makes more sense than you probably realize. And once we know how it makes sense, we can work with it. You’re not as complex as you think you are. You’re literally just a human.
Drink some water, get some sunshine, give yourself some grace and begin again.
