I remember seeing a physiotherapist a few years ago when I was recovering from my back surgery and also still trying to heal what I now understand to be a bunch of birth trauma just stuck in my body (along with all the other trauma, amiright? hahahanotsomuch-dot-com), and the women’s health physio I was working with asked me to stand up and take some deep breaths. Within a few seconds she stopped me and said ‘wow, you’re not breathing properly, do you know that you’re not breathing properly? You’re not breathing into your diaphragm at all’.
I had been ‘shallow breathing’ for so long my body had actually forgotten how to breathe. She spent almost an entire session teaching me how to breathe.
I was 33 years old.
I started doing Pilates after that and trying to be more conscious of my breathing. I started walking more alone, if I could. Not always easy with small humans. I started listening to meditations. I felt better in myself. Not longer after that, I decided to blow up my entire nervous system once again and have a second child, despite my previous birth and post-natal experiences reducing me to a traumatised, sleep-deprived, trembling, monosyllabic, utter shit-show of a human.
My second baby was a horrific (torturous) sleeper, which we discovered (far too late for my mental health tbh…) was down to her huge tonsils and adenoids. Breathing was very much an issue for her, in that she would literally…stop doing it. Sleep apnoea in your baby/toddler is, quite frankly, terrifying. They stop breathing in their sleep and then suddenly gasp loudly in terror and scream/sob. As a mother you never really sleep deeply anyway, but when your kid’s breathing ‘pauses’ 15/20 times a night….you really cannot ‘rest’. So I chose to just co-sleep with her for years (judge away…) so that every time her breathing paused I could nudge her if I was awake myself and encourage her to inhale, or if I was asleep I’d immediately be there to comfort /reassure her so she didn’t wake the entire house up too.
She slept a lot better with me next to her but it took a its toll. It was not peaceful at night. I dreaded going to bed, to be very honest. This all coincided with us being in lockdown so I was also trying to parent - and educate - a very bright six year old alongside this whilst also trying to protect them both from the bizarre new reality outside our home and keep my own increasing anxiety (and depression, probably?) under control.
I started waking up feeling so unwell and sore everyday. My neck and shoulders ached, my lower back, as ever, was sore and stiff. But also I was getting pain and stinging sensations in my hips and pelvis and around my rib cage. My entire body felt riddled with trigger points and knots and once again I noticed I was breathing into the top third of my chest again. Not deeply, not properly, not restoratively. Like so many of us, in so many ways, I just fell into some sort of survival mode, and never climbed out. Running on empty, never ever feeling like I have control, the endless hamster wheel. (Is that ‘just’ what motherhood is? Is that ‘just’ what existing in late stage capitalism is? Is that just….life? Can it please not be ‘just’ the way it is? Do we get a say in this?)
I’ve been paying more attention to my body, and it’s quite scary to realise what has become my default: clenched jaw (often grinding teeth unconsciously), shoulders tight and raised up by my ears, stomach bracing, shallow breathing. It’s like a caricature of someone in fight/flight mode. Literally braced to either run or fight. But I’m not fighting or flying. So what I believe I am is stuck in these days is ‘functional freeze’.
The not so great thing about this (for me) is I look mostly fine on the outside despite the chaos inside so I still function and nothing changes.
The great thing about this (for everyone else) is I look mostly fine on the outside despite the chaos inside so I still function and nothing changes.
I am functioning. I do what needs to be done. The children have clean clothes and get to school on time and I’m there to collect them afterwards, and during the hours in between I do my day job and deliver what is needed there and keep a running checklist in my head of what I need to buy for dinner and who eats what and which clubs we have today after school and who has PE tomorrow and which child has a party to go to this weekend and what present to buy and which family birthday is coming up and did I book the MOT/dentist/eye test and I make the small talk at the checkout and I smile on the playground and I’m there with open arms and as much patience and ‘space holding’ as my burntout nervous system can muster for a tween and a small child who both want more from me after school than I can ever give - but I try, I really try - and then before I know it I’m putting the plates down for dinner, having managed to keep the peace and hang out the laundry meanwhile, and all that’s left to do is that daily marathon of their bedtimes and when I finally get to collapse at 9pm (if I’m lucky) I just want to burst into tears of relief because I can actually stop now and BREATHE.
But I don’t, I don’t breathe. Not yet, because what about my actual life? All of this was just duty and work…if I don’t do something else I’m literally just a cog in capitalism and that’s all I am. And that gives me all the panic. Allllllthepanic. So I write something, or I try to to make progress with music or just respond to the friends who messaged me 8 hours ago, or two days ago…and then its 10pm and I need to go to bed but I realise the dishwasher wasn’t put on and I forgot to clean out the kids lunchboxes and even if I do get to bed before 11pm there’s a high probability I will be woken by a cortisol/adrenalin-inducing child’s cry within a few hours anyway…and I’m clenching my jaw and bracing my stomach even as I write this….
There is no lion chasing you. Stop it. Breathe.
Breathe.
How did we get here? Has it always been like this? Is this just what life is?
I saw that same physio again last week, weirdly. It’s been years since I saw her. She said her job used to be so simple. Someone comes in with a problem or a pain, you figure out the root physical cause, give them the exercises they need, and within a few weeks you’ve fixed it. These days it’s all ‘so much more complex’, she said: ‘everyone is carrying so much’. And to those in the medical community who actually care about really helping and healing people, she says, its becoming undeniable that chronic back pain, digestive issues, pelvic pain, frozen shoulder, migraines and so many autoimmune diseases are rooted in stress that is held in the body. And once again she said those words: ‘breathing is SO important, but so few of us are breathing properly.’
We are living in a reality where the ‘normal state’ is now to not just really breathe anymore. To be so stressed out, so overwhelmed, so over-stimulated, so dysregulated, so hyper-connected to everything outside of us and so hyper-disconnected from ourselves, so under pressure, so busy - so fucking exhausted - that we just cannot even breathe. (Yet still….we persist).
Well, not anymore. I’m making a conscious effort to take full, deep breaths whenever I can. Whenever I feel my jaw clenching or my shoulders creeping up, I’m noticing it, dropping back into my body and taking several deeeeeeep breaths, right into my belly. And it helps. It really does help, just, know, breathing.
It’s quite literally the very least I can do for myself - and I’ve quite literally not been doing the very least, for myself, for years.
So if any of that resonates with you, take this as your permission slip and reminder.
Breathe.