On Integrating the Self After Loss

I’m recognizing a pattern in my life, one which I feel could be helpful to talk about, but the conversation is probably going to weave in and out of loss, trauma, emotionality, self-reflection, and that sort of thing. If that feels too spiky then maybe skip this one.

The last few weeks have been the same: I start Monday with renewed hope after having an exhausting weekend, not because I did too much, but because my emotions were all over the place. I get to work Monday and it feels like some form of resolution happened over the weekend. The week progresses, the usual things happen, I have feelings, and then it’s Friday and I fall apart again.

To explain what I think is happening, I’ve started viewing my days in terms of both time and energy units, or rather, the relationship between the two.

Since we have 24 hours in a day, imagine also having 24 units of energy. In a balanced hour, it takes one unit of mental energy to travel through one hour of time. Typical mundane daily happenings that aren’t particularly taxing or particularly exciting. You drive to work and traffic is light, nobody cuts you off, the lights change when you expect them to. It’s boring but it’s low effort, it just happens and you barely remember the drive.

Events that are exciting or make us happy might take less than one unit of energy per hour: those experiences of playful distraction where it only feels like a hour has got by but it’s three hours later.

Events that are upsetting, taxing, emotionally draining in some way take more than one unit of energy per hour. Those days at work that seem to drag on forever and get increasingly frustrating and harder to endure, for example.

My theory is that our quality of sleep isn’t measured in the number of hours we sleep: it’s measured in the leftover energy we can pour into our restoration.

In other words, if you have the day from Hell at work, then traffic is bad on the way home, and you’re supposed to go to the gym but you just can’t, and instead you get a burrito on the way home and slump on the couch, so now you’re mad at yourself as well - so far in our 24 hour day, we might have spent about 12 hours since waking, but we might have also spent about 20 units of energy getting here. Even if we go to bed early on this example day, we’re still going to wake up feeling drained and cranky, because we don’t have enough units of energy left to restore ourselves during sleep. If we keep having days like this back-to-back, the drain on our units of energy is what eventually causes burnout.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Well, of course!” because this is not new, but - for me at least - visualizing it as a relationship between units of time and units of energy has given me a new way of thinking about it. I’ve already started asking myself how many units of energy it took to get through each hour as the hour happens, and that’s already causing me to be more aware of how I can compensate throughout the day.

With that out of the way, you might also be asking, “Okay, so, all this makes sense, but how does it apply to integrating the self after loss?”

For me, this realization about the relationship of time and energy has caused me to realize that too often I’m forcing myself to do the things that “should” be fun, instead of listening to what I actually need.

Why have I been in this cycle of feeling okay at the start of the week, and emotionally collapsing completely by the weekend? It’s because I haven’t been tending to myself during the week, and the borrowed energy of forcing myself to do everything I think I should be doing instead of listening to myself and doing the things that would restore my energy eventually gets repaid in these awful weekend collapses.

The thing I keep thinking I’m working on but have realized I’m not actually being successful at is integrating the self back into myself after various losses and other emotional happenings. It turns out I’ve been working on different aspects of it, but haven’t been addressing it directly, even though I genuinely thought I was.

I’m going to work on that this week and we’ll see how it goes.