Overuse syndrome

A few weeks ago I had a “staycation,” because the clay camp I’d signed up for was cancelled. Though I was sorely disappointed, I’ve been reading a book recommended to me by one of my somatics coaches, The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, which suggests practicing letting go of personal preferences and surrendering to what life offers. My declaration from 2012 that I’ve continued to practice with, “I am a commitment to opening to the sacred flow of life,” has now been modified to “I am a commitment to opening to and trusting in the sacred flow of life.” So, shortly after I heard the news about the cancellation, I began thinking, “What does it mean? What am I “supposed” to do instead of ceramics this week?” Or, as my friend Jean M. who is so wise, reframed it for me, “What is most aligned with life?” Instead of immediately telling everyone I was still in town after all and re-filling my empty calendar, I decided to go slow and see what would emerge.

A number of interesting things worthy of writing about happened during the week. And, one of the possibilities I was very cognizant of was more time to write; to really dig in to the possibility of turning these blog musings into a book. I (coincidentally?) received the 2nd round of feedback from my wonderful developmental editor Jess Beebe during the week, and asked her, okay, if I’m going to write a book, where do I start? Do I start with all the blog entries combined as one big rough draft? She suggested that instead I do more fresh writing, in response to some of her inquiries. Skim them, pick one that jumps out at you, open a fresh document, and write whatever comes. So, I tried it, and here’s what emerged (and thanks to those named for their permission to share this with you):

Jess asks:

I’m curious what exactly Becca meant by “burn too brightly… and burn out.” was it a sense of exhausting herself physically and/or emotionally? I wonder whether it goes even further than that, somehow. As if she had a finite amount of something (self? life?) and might use it up too quickly?

Fears of “burning too brightly” – this seems like it relates to the tentative assessment I received from Mark Mooney early on in my somatic training, that I may be “over-contained”. It seems to be a “perfect storm,” a combination of being afraid of hurting others and afraid of getting hurt myself, and / or exhausting myself. Conserving my energy, pacing myself, in order to avoid burnout, or physically being so sore I can’t move the next day… or actually getting a repetitive stress injury, or, as the doctor called my inflamed hip after my first backpacking trip in 1988, “overuse syndrome.”

This was my first-ever backpacking trip, with my then-boyfriend Gene. He was a serious outdoorsman, and a hardcore environmentalist. At the time I knew him well, in the mid 1980s, he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, in exile from his beloved Washington State or easy access to any wilderness whatsoever. I had met him in an environmental ethics course, and was drawn to his thoughtful, long-haired kindness and playfulness, and the gentle presence he brought to a conversation or a hug. When Gene showed me slides of his wilderness expeditions, I caught a glimpse of a kind of relationship to the natural world I longed for. I don’t think I’d realized until that point how deeply I yearned for it, and I felt alive with the possibility of being that kind of person.

When Gene saw my reaction, he spontaneously invited me to go on an already-planned 10-day canoe trip to the Boundary Waters with him and two other couples. I accepted, even though we’d only kissed a couple of times, and I was not yet completely disentangled from a messy set of love relationships with my live-in boyfriend and my gay-but-not-yet-out best friend and housemate.

The Boundary Waters trip with Gene marked the wonderful beginning of a 4-year relationship, where I grew in many deep and important ways. Gene was 11 years older than me, which at the ages of 20 and 31 is quite a lot. Gene’s longer life experience and “hippie” background made him a good partner for me as I was emerging into adulthood and “eco-feminist” consciousness more fully. He was a safe person to explore many things with; reflected in his eyes and supported by him, I could be a scholar, a bicycle-commuter, a do-it-yourself-bread-baker, a birder, a goddess-worshipper, a body-aware yoga practitioner, a go-off-the-birth-control-pill-and-use-“natural”-methods-of-tracking-basal-body-temperature-and-cervical-mucus-lover. And I could (barely) portage a 70-pound aluminum canoe by myself in my newly-purchased Vasque hiking boots with Gore-tex water-proofing. (I recall, but can’t find at the moment, a poem he wrote about / for me on the back of a large piece of birch bark, that included a line something like:

a woman walks by

growing by

step s

Despite my many car-camping trips and occasional canoe trips with my Eagle-scout father as a child, and the 10-day wilderness canoe trip with Gene, nothing had prepared me for our next trip, a 4-day hike in the mountains carrying a 40-pound pack. I remember the Cascades being beautiful, the indigo color of the lupines and the little butterflies drinking from mud puddles everywhere. I remember being in pain, and the emotional turmoil that resulted when we realized we had dropped a washcloth somewhere between where we were and our previous campsite.

Now, Gene’s relationship to material objects was complex. His idea of dressing up was to wash & re-braid his waist-long blonde hair, or perhaps leave it combed out loose, and to put on a colorful woven belt (no thought of trimming his bushy beard and mustache, much less shaving). He lived cooperatively, and was loathe to purchase high-tech, resource-consuming items. He made things, and made them well; 3 decades later I still have and use remnants of a cutting board he & his dad made for me, and until my recent mold remediation efforts in the basement, had a backpack he designed and sewed for me with emblems of our “3 anniversaries” (lilac, loon, and warbler) hand-embroidered on it. The consumer items Gene did own, he cared for lovingly, almost as if the objects were people or pets. He had reluctantly purchased an early-model Apple computer for use in his dissertation research, and was determined that if he had to own such an item, he would steward it well, and upgrade it rather than landfill it for as long as was humanly possible. I remember him taking time on one of his vacations home to Seattle to sand away rust spots on the body of his little tan Datsun and repaint them himself, to make it last longer in the face of its exposure to Chicago winter road salt. (This was the car I learned to drive stick-shift on, on one of our trips across the country. What was the pet name he gave it…? Was it Spotted Sandpiper, due to those patches? Gene emailed in response to the draft of this post that I sent him: Yes, that was the name, and he elaborated: “spotted, lightweight fuel-efficient long-distance migrations, and liking to hang out along rivers.”) Around ten years later, at his wedding to our old friend Mardi, I asked about the car, and he said he still had it, though he no longer used it much!

Occasionally, back then, Gene’s feelings about environmental issues bordered on the pathological. His deep pain at the extinction of species and the destruction of the wilderness could plunge him into a funk lasting for days. On a later canoe trip we took, when we decided to forgo the complex process of getting permits for the Boundary Waters/Quetico and instead try our luck in the less-protected areas of Ontario around Quetico, he was deeply dismayed at the level of building, litter, and overuse we found. His upset came to a head when we were camped on a high, rocky island without other human habitation. He was attempting to get water for us to purify by throwing a pan attached to a string down towards the water to fill it. It wasn’t going well, and in his frustration at the process and at the despoliation, he enjoyed repeatedly bashing his poor camping cookpot against the rocks. Fortunately this venting calmed him after a bit, just as I was beginning to worry about being trapped on an island in the middle of nowhere with a crazy man!

So, when it came to our backpacking trip in the Cascades and our discovery that we had dropped a washcloth somewhere behind us on a wilderness trail, Gene’s deeply-ingrained belief in stewardship and the dictum to leave no human artifact in the wilderness meant that he wanted to go back for the errant piece of cloth. I was trying to imagine how I was going to make it to our designated ending point at all, given the increasing pain in my left hip, much less adding the extra miles it would take to double back an unknown distance to retrieve the washcloth.

I don’t remember exactly what happened. I think Gene’s sympathy for me outweighed his environmental angst, and he went back a ways by himself to no avail, and reluctantly gave up in defeat. I made it home, and when I went to see a doctor, the doctor prescribed ipuprofen and said “don’t do that again.” Apparently neither he nor I had at the time heard of physical therapy or sports medicine, and with the exception of one other hiking trip a couple of years later, I basically didn’t try it again!

As I reflect back on what I’ve written, I am surprised and amused by the deeper themes – the yearning for aliveness, strength, body-centeredness and connection with nature that my relationship with Gene expressed and supported; and the perceived dangers of “overuse” of myself, of the environment, and of burning out by caring too much without equanimity/balance. And it has been delightful to exchange memories and reflections with Gene in the process of asking for his permission to post this.