The Thimble
One of the hardest things to admit is when you’re body is no longer functioning and your quality of life scrapes the bottom of a barrel you never agreed to crawl into the first place.
Yesterday I admitted to my physical therapist that “my life fits inside of a thimble right now”. That’s a phrase I’ve never really uttered to another human before. It’s a dark thought I keep to myself when my body enters a flare state and I have to retreat from living. I imagine therapists hear that sentiment more than often, their job is to identify what is making the thimble a reality. And sometimes their job is to push someone towards healing in a way that contraction is the only answer and the thimble is where healing occurs.
As I said those words out loud, I felt an internal resignation. A surrender. I’ve been surrendering to what is for a long time now. I'm familiar with the act of surrender, but it is never desirable or comfortable. And the reality of how I ended up trying to peer out of this thimble is dark.
A few years back, I sadly stumbled into a dangerously toxic workplace that lead to a detrimental neck injury (which happened while working) and was violently spit out at the peak of my care because I was whistleblowing against the bad actors in that cesspool of a corporation, and was left navigating the aftermath with nothing and very few who could hold that dangerous space with me. I had my first PT session in 2024, one day before those golden handcuffs were ripped off and my insurance was yanked. I had to pause my care for almost two months while I secured private health insurance at $650 per month, on severance, while job hunting with a serious and debilitating neck injury and a completely decimated nervous system.
Have I mentioned how much I hate capitalism? Yea, that hatred runs long and deep. My lived experience intensifies the hatred, but it expands far beyond myself. I’ve talked about the toxic workplace plenty since leaving, I keep the darker side of that story, the health impacts, to myself (sort of). The really dark stuff is mine to process until it becomes light enough to be a story that I share so others can find solace or feel seen if they sit in a similar place.
Oddly enough, my academic training prepared me for this exact situation. I entered Naropa to finish my undergrad and begin working towards an MDiv in Eastern Religions and then a PHD. I obtained a degree in Yoga Studies, which is essentially a degree in understanding the nervous system. I specialized in conscious leadership. Seeing the collapse of higher ed looming on the horizon and a chance to make an impact with my new leadership academics, I decided to reenter tech at the director level and see if I could bake “compassion into the code” through dev community building. Silly me, right?
Want to find out how resilient your support networks are in midlife? A serious chronic condition or illness will lay bare everything you’ve built to that point. Your support networks, the strength of the ones you trust with your life, your fiscal resources, your threshold for pain, your ability to navigate a health care system designed to deny you the care you need to live, your physical home, your sense of self, your identity, the strength of your nervous system, your sense of embodiment, your ability to say “no, I can’t right now”, your understanding of your physical and mental boundaries– all of this and so much more will be tested when you have to navigate the intensity of healing at scale.
And when that shifts from “injury” to “chronic condition”, you really find out the depths of who you are and where the foundations you thought were resilient infrastructure simply aren't as strong as you imagined. Is your infrastructure load bearing enough to withstand a Category 4 storm or will it collapse in a high wind? Those are some hard truths to swallow. You wake up one day, swimming in pain, resentment and resignation and you see that your entire life, in fact does fit inside of a thimble and you hope your infrastructure will carry the weight while you crawl out of the thimble, one treatment session and mysterious symptom at a time.
I’ve spent most of my adult life building a sovereign existence. I chose long ago not to marry or build a family. I came close, but the men I chose to take that adventure with couldn’t handle all of me. Hell, even I couldn’t handle all of me, so I stopped trying to build the domestic life society holds as the gold standard of adulting. I don’t need legal paperwork to define domestic obligation as “love”. I don’t need a legal document that ties me to a piece of property until death, which is the origin of the word “mortgage”. I don’t need society to define how I love someone. I don't need my life to revolve around a number that states I am a “trustworthy” person with the colonizer's levers of debt and credit. Spoiler alert, I am not.
My identity is defined by me, not society and its false constructs of obedience or its contractual obligations disguised as societal acceptance. I sometimes falter on that last part, I am human after all. But at the end of the day, I am also sovereign.
And I regret none of those choices. I celebrate my friends who built beautiful marriages that surpass a legal document with homes and/or children that anchor into something deeper than societal boundaries. They are few, but I love that they exist. I grew up in a home anchored in such things and it was a beautiful childhood to experience. I know that was not my journey though, and I chose the left hand path and am grateful for that choice.
But, and it’s a gentle “but” because of my current state of affairs, there are definitely times where I now see the boundaries of a sovereign life built inside the containers of late stage capitalism. In a society built on regeneration and grounded in community, I wouldn’t be alone in my thimble, or at least it wouldn’t feel that way. I wouldn’t have to build an entire healingOS to navigate a fractured health care system designed to deny me care or to kill me once my bank balance slips into the red. I wouldn’t have to choose between keeping the lights on, keeping food in the fridge and my pain medications or an extra PT session so I can sit in a chair for longer than 20 minutes.
In a regenerative world, we’d have community built into the core of our personal infrastructure. Sure, your body may break and you end up in that thimble at times, but someone would be there to just say, “hey, you good in there? Can I roll you a joint, walk the dog or cook you some stir fry?” In a healthy ecosystem, when a node is broken and needs repair, everything around it absorbs the dysfunction and provides extra resources to restore the node– unconditionally and without question.
In an extractive world, the broken node is tossed into the dumpster or just left in the shadows alone and replaced with a newer version. Once the node is not functioning at full capacity and the extractors of the world can no longer suck the marrow of life from it, the extractor moves onto the next node.
Colonizers know how to suck the host dry of its resources and then move on to the next healthy ecosystem.
And while I’m just transitioning into the chronic side of my reality, and its one I’ll get to navigate the rest of my life, I now have a front row seat to the depths of destruction that’s possible when a node is no longer necessary, or when it dysfunctions to the point of debilitation.
And for my fellow community builders who are the ones who hold the space for others when they are in phases of contraction, restoration and healing, please be mindful of the fact that when YOU slip into the abyss and need someone to hold the space for you, it might be hard to find. If you’re usually the anchor, people might not notice that your anchor is now untethered. That’s probably one of the hardest parts about contraction at this scale. It is lonely if you’re the one who usually holds that space for others. Try not to internalize that part (and if you figure out how not to, please let me know). ;)
That is a reality that requires full acceptance and surrender. It just is what it is. And its very messy, let it be so.
We will all experience the thimble at some point. We usually crawl out when recovery surfaces and expansion occurs, but what emerges may be a new you. Expansion and contraction, also called spanda in yoga world, is necessary. As we contract, we’re able to explore the depths of ourselves and the world around us in a new light. That contraction is necessary for growth and I have no doubt that this period of forced inward introspection is producing something beautiful. And expansive.
Ram Dass would often say, “I love my pain”. I could grok that intellectually, but now I understand it from experience. I might not be at the wise old sage phase of loving my pain, but I appreciate the lessons and boundaries that I’m forced to learn now. I know what's load bearing in my life– and what is not. I hold the hope that such an appreciation can evolve into love, but my tantra practice isn’t there yet.
My life is spent mostly on the couch these days during my latest round of PT (2 months & counting...) and I’m spending most of that time becoming an expert in building operating systems for communications (and beyond) using AI. I can already see the beauty in what we’re building with commsOS. And my first client commsOS build as a practitioner of our methodology is for a 501c3 that is working relentlessly to disrupt the very health care system I am stuck within. I also built my own healingOS to navigate my “broken node” eras and turn this shitshow into a yoga anatomy experiment, as I was trained to do.
I’m in the messy, desolate part of a healing/recovery cycle and I share this publicly not for sympathy or false platitudes, but to show others that they aren’t alone. The struggle is real and we’re all in it at some point.
If your life is also fitting inside of a thimble right now, for whatever reasons, know that there are millions of other humans right now contracting into a tiny container as well. Or, they just crawled out of one.
And if you’re the one who usually holds the space for others when their life contracts or the node slips into disrepair and dysregulation, and now you’re the one needing someone to help you hold that space for yourself, I see you. The discomfort of that reality is intense, but it does find resolution. And eventually, the strength will return and your anchor will be tethered again.
There's no ask here. Just share this with someone who is slipping into or emerging from a thimble as you peak over the edge to see if they're ok. Hit the share button at the top. It matters.
