Finding in Its Place

Human Nature| Murder of Mornings Series| Part Two

There was a time when my mornings began with movement. Before the workday, before the sessions, before anything else required my attention, I would walk the beach at sunrise. Those meditation walks were the kind of internal work that nothing else could replicate, organizing my thoughts, quieting the noise, giving me a way to commune with God and with myself before the world needed anything from me. Those walks were not just exercise, they were how I maintained my own interior life.

This lingering MS flare took that from me.

That loss created a kind of hollowing out that I am still navigating. Navigating a chronic illness like multiple sclerosis, and the mental health weight of simultaneous menopause and a growing awareness of my own neurodivergence, has changed the landscape of what my body and my nervous system can sustain in ways I am still learning to account for.The fatigue is not the kind that responds to rest. The insomnia that comes with menopause makes the fatigue worse. And the neurodivergence, that late and clarifying recognition of how I have always been wired, has quietly removed whatever tolerance I had left for masking, for performing ease in situations that drain me, for pushing through when everything in me is saying stop.

What this combination does to connection is something I did not fully anticipate. I received an invitation recently to celebrate someone I genuinely wanted to celebrate. I planned to go. I gave myself permission to rest first, just briefly, and woke up three hours later to a party that was already over. The guilt from that sat with me for days, not just because I missed it, but because I recognized the pattern. When you cancel enough, when you sleep through enough, when the gap between your intentions and your capacity becomes visible enough, the invitations begin to quietly slow. And the alternative, inviting people to you, carries its own weight. The preparation, the hosting, the energy required to make someone feel welcomed and entertained, that is also work, and work requires a currency my body is not reliably producing right now. So the thought arrives, gently and without drama, and it says never mind.

The desire for connection has not gone anywhere. What is gone, or at least what is significantly diminished, is the capacity to act on it in the ways I used to. And sitting inside that gap, between wanting and being able, is its own particular kind of grief.

To manage that grief, I have begun sitting outside with nature in the mornings lately as a small act of reclamation. It is not the same as the walks, but it is something in it's own right, and in the process of simply being outside, I found myself resuming a connection with the family of crows that has been visiting my yard. I wrote about that connection recently and it has continued to feel significant in ways I am still understanding, particularly because of what it does not require. There is no performance, no preparation, no hosting, no energy I do not have. They come on their own terms and I meet them on mine, and in that quiet unhurried exchange, something that had been feeling increasingly out of reach starts to feel possible again.

This morning I sat outside and thought about all of it, about what has been taken and what I am finding in its place, about the walks I cannot take and the bowl I can fill, about the parties I sleep through and the mornings I show up for anyway. The beach is still there, and the sunrise is still happening without my presence. And I am out here in my yard, still reaching for what's possible, still reaching toward something living, and still finding ways to continue onward.

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