The Day I Stopped Trying to Fix My Anxiety and Started Listening to It

For seventeen years, I taught high school English. I want to start there because I think people assume somatic coaches arrived at this work through some serene, candlelit path. Lol, no. Mine started in a classroom with a caseload of 152 teenagers, a stack of essays I'd be grading until midnight, and a body that had stopped telling me the truth about how tired I was.

By my eleventh year teaching, I had a system. Wake at 5:15. Meditate, do yoga, or walk whether I slept or not. Track my food, my steps, my output, my worth (though I wouldn't have called it that at the time). I thought I was disciplined. What I actually was: A woman whose nervous system had been stuck in "handle it" for so long she'd forgotten there was another setting.

It was September. The light was doing that dark morning thing it does this time of year, and I was sitting in my car in the school parking lot at 6:45 am, unable to make myself pull the key out of the ignition (cars still had those back then). Not crying, exactly. Just — stuck. Heart pounding for no reason I could name. A to-do list in my head that wouldn't stop generating even though I had nowhere left to put it.

I remember thinking, very clearly: Something is wrong with me.

What I tried first

I did what most of us do. I tried to fix it. More sleep when I could get it. Better food. A meditation app I used for a month and abandoned. I read about stress management like it was a math problem with a clean solution, and when none of the solutions stuck, I sorta decided the problem was my own lack of willpower. 

What I didn't know yet, what nobody had ever told me until I worked with my somatic practitioner and teacher Veronica Rottman, was that I wasn't broken. I was activated. My nervous system had spent a decade reading a job that genuinely required vigilance, output, and constant availability, and she had responded exactly the way an intelligent system responds to sustained demand: By staying ready. The racing heart in the parking lot wasn't a malfunction. It was a system still scanning for the next thing to handle, because for years there had always been a next thing.

The shift

The change didn't come from trying harder. It came from a somatic practitioner asking me a question nobody had asked before: not "what's wrong with you," but "what is your body trying to tell you right now?"

I didn't have an answer. I'd spent so long managing my body from the outside schedules, all kinds of metrics, willpower…that I'd lost the ability to just notice what was happening inside it. So we started small. Noticing where I held tension. Noticing what happened in my chest before grading. Noticing, for the first time in years, that my body had been communicating with me the entire time. I just hadn't been listening.

This is the part I want you to sit with, especially if you're heading into this slower season feeling like I felt in that parking lot, because our anxiety isn't a flaw to eliminate. What it is, however uncomfortable, is information. My nervous system wasn't failing me. She was doing exactly what she was built to do, and the moment I stopped fighting her and started listening, things began to shift. Not overnight. In fact, it was really slow at first, but for the first time in years, I felt like I was on the same team as my own body instead of at war with it.

What this season taught me about cycles

I started paying attention to more than just my daily stress response. I noticed how my capacity changed throughout the month, too, bright and expansive in the days after my period, steady through ovulation, and then, in the week before bleeding, something fiercer and less willing to perform. I came to think of that phase as my Wild Woman, the part of me with zero patience for pretending. And menstruation itself became something closer to a Crone phase: quiet, clear-eyed, uninterested in proving anything to anyone before giving way to the excitable Maiden and nurturing Mother.

Understanding those rhythms didn't make my life smaller. It wasn’t an “eat this before you bleed” or “do that during ovulation,” though that advice is great when you have the capacity for it. But understanding these rhythms of mine made it sustainable. I stopped scheduling my hardest weeks during my body's softest ones. I stopped calling the softer weeks lazy.

Where I am now

I’m still teaching, but everything I do now exists because of that parking lot moment and because of every woman since who's told me some version of the same story: An activated, exhausted nervous system mistaken for a personal shortcoming. (Modern-day oppression is sneaky like that.)

If any part of this sounds like where you are right now, if your own version of October has you sitting somewhere unable to remove the key, I'd love to talk. That's exactly what 1:1 coaching is for. Not fixing you. Just finally listening to what's already trying to be heard.