The Weather Inside

I’ve talked to three women today, and every single one of them is tired as sh%t. Of course, each of us is living our own version of a crazy life + lately it feels like the whole world is operating at a tilt shift of madness. But I keep wondering how much of what we’re feeling is actually ours alone.

Look at what is happening around us. Flash flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, extreme heat. The natural world is under enormous stress + somehow we’ve gotten very comfortable talking about the human body as though it exists separately from all of that. It doesn’t.

We already accept that the moon moves entire oceans. We understand that light affects our circadian rhythms and that seasons change our bodies and behavior. We know hormones move cyclically and that our nervous systems are constantly gathering information about our environment before our conscious brains have even decided what to make of it. We are mostly water ourselves. None of this is particularly mystical.

I think women understand this intuitively because so much of our experience is cyclical. Our bodies have always required us to pay attention to changes that aren’t necessarily visible from the outside. We’ve dealt with internal physical wars while also making sure dinner was ready.

So when water is surging across the planet + temperatures are weird, when the weather patterns are behaving violently + entire ecosystems are responding; I don’t think it’s ridiculous to wonder whether our bodies register that instability too.

I’m not suggesting that a flood three states away directly made you need a nap. I’m wondering whether the line we’ve drawn between ourselves + nature is far more artificial than we realize. Maybe the body is receiving information all the time that the thinking mind doesn’t have language for yet.

So when three different women tell me on the same day that they are inexplicably exhausted, I’m curious. Maybe some of this exhaustion is personal. Maybe some of it is collective. Maybe we’re living through an extraordinarily dysregulated moment on this planet + our bodies know that even when we’re busy pretending it’s just another Wednesday.

Food for thought.

xoxo,

🧘🏻‍♀️🧪🍑