Season 4 Kickoff: The Two Month Exhale

Episode 161 S4 Kickoff: The Two-Month Exhale

[00:00:00] This was everything I'd hoped it would be, plus everything that I didn't even know I needed. I'm Cinnamon, and this is After the Tones Drop.

All right. So hello, everyone. We are back for season four, and I've been thinking a lot about how I wanted to start this season. Because it's been about two months since I sat down and did this, and I could've come back with a guest. There's one in the queue. I could've jumped right back into the interviews and acted like we never left.

But that kind of would've defeated the purpose of why I dipped out in the first place. So before we actually start season four with the guests and the topics and all of what [00:01:00] you've come to know, I wanna tell you a little bit about where I've been, and what happened when I went there.

Now, I need to clarify something right away. I did not disappear to a tropical island for two months. I did spend a lot of time alone in the desert and in the water. I chose to spend the majority of the time somewhere that despite temperatures of 100 degrees every day, I felt like going into this, I was my best, most creative, most serene self.

Or at least that I had the potential of doing that when it wasn't a designated, quote, "vacation." But I still worked, I still saw clients, I still taught groups, I still had responsibilities, I still built things, I wrote things, I handled business, I [00:02:00] intervened when there were crises, and I prepared for conferences.

All of the normal Cinnamon things. But what I stopped doing was producing the show every week. And I intentionally started to create more spaces in my life where my time wasn't dedicated to something that needed to be accomplished. And that's very different for me, which I knew going into that.

But what I didn't know was how drastically different it was. Because while I was gone, my nervous system apparently had some opinions about it. Because there was a difference between not working and actually being off. I knew that intellectually. I'm a trauma therapist. I talk about nervous systems for a living.

I teach people about activation and recovery and survival responses and what happens when the body spends too much time preparing for the next thing. [00:03:00] And then I got this beautiful opportunity to discover that knowing all of that shit does not make you immune to it. Shocker. One of the things that I did notice pretty quickly that when I first stopped, I was not relaxed.

I was just not doing the thing I normally did where I normally did it, and those are not the same thing. So my schedule may have had space in it, but my brain didn't. I was still back here with my clients and my departments and—and all of the people that I think of when I think about who I serve. My brain was still searching for what's next, what haven't I answered, what should I be creating?

Is there something I could be getting ahead on? Should I check my email? Maybe I should write that thing down. Maybe I should work on that [00:04:00] proposal. Maybe I should make a video or create a graphic. Maybe I should plan how to make this thing that I'm doing into an episode or some other kind of content.

Maybe I should, maybe I should, maybe I should. Like, you know the drill. And so when we first hit the road, I was excited about not checking texts and emails, but I very quickly realized that while my email had an out-of-office setting, my text messaging service did not. So I found that I was stressing that people who were texting me may have thought I was ignoring them if I didn't respond to their texts.

And then I worried, and then I strategized, but I had to stop myself and remember that I have made it very clear that text messaging does not guarantee a quick response and my email and phone are public information. So I have to acknowledge that I couldn't [00:05:00] let it go, at—at least not right away. My body had stopped, but my brain just couldn't, and I was so consumed with how people would feel about my failure to respond. And that's when something became really obvious to me. You can take somebody out of the work long before you can get the work out of somebody's head.

And sometimes we think recovery begins the moment the stressor stops, like the shift ends, the vacation starts, the kids go to bed, the incident clears, the radio finally shuts up, the laptop closes, and now, poof, we're just supposed to be relaxed. Except nervous systems don't work like light switches, which hearing it out loud, the—it's an easy thing to say.

Like, of course. But sometimes we forget what we know when [00:06:00] we have expectations, right? So your body doesn't look at the clock and say, "Oh, it's 5:01. Excellent. Cortisol production has discontinued for the evening." No. Cortisol itself isn't the enemy either; we need it. It helps wake us up, mobilizes energy, and responds to the demands of our days.

The problem, I discovered, is what happens when our systems spend too much time preparing us for the demands that never seem like they can completely end. And I know when I first started this, I wanted people to think that I was available 24/7, and I wanted to be available 24/7. If there was a crisis, I wanted you to call me.

But I—I don't. And there isn't some magic number where I can tell you that X number of days off is what you need for the cortisol to reset. [00:07:00] The science isn't that simple, and recovery from chronic stress isn't one hormone number returning to a baseline, which, man, I have been trying to reset my cortisol long before I hit the road. But it's sleep, and it's nervous system activation. It's physical recovery.

It's the mental load. It's the rumination even while somebody who's visually looking at you doesn't see anything of significance. It's just really whether or not your body believes the demand is actually over. And one of the biggest pieces researchers talk about is psychological detachment from work, which basically means when you're not working, are you actually not working?

Not just physically not working, but are you also mentally not working? Are you disconnected? [00:08:00] Can your mind stop solving work problems? Can you sit somewhere beautiful without simultaneously drafting an email in your head? Can you watch a movie without checking your phone six times? Can you turn the radio off that you have in your house that you keep on 24/7 so you can stay abreast of what calls are going out?

Can you drive somewhere without turning that drive into a conference call? I'm guilty of that.

There was another reason that I needed to learn how to stop. One thing I knew I needed to do that I didn't talk about before I left, that I'm okay talking about now that I'm back, was that I needed to grieve. I wasn't just tired. I had grief suspended in midair waiting for [00:09:00] me to say, "Release the Kraken."

And I wasn't just grieving one thing. There were these three experiences that had happened almost 12 months apart for the last three years, and the truth is, each one of them was big enough to take me out. And I don't say that figuratively. I know what it is to be in so much pain that in that moment I could not see how it was ever gonna end.

I know what it is to want the pain to stop more than I wanted anything else. I don't need to tell every detail of those stories for that truth to matter. What matters is I survived all three of them, and [00:10:00] surviving was not the same as being finished with them. Any one of those things by itself would have been enough to justify saying, "I'm not okay right now."

And somehow I had been carrying it all for three years. That matters when I talk about why two months felt necessary to me. Because I think we look at someone who is still working, still showing up, still laughing, still producing things, and we assume they're doing fine. But functioning and being okay are not the same thing.

I know that clinically. I have said that to other people probably 1,000 times, but it's different when you're the one discovering how much your own body has been carrying [00:11:00] while your life still looks relatively intact from the outside. And to be clear, like it was. My life was good. My life is good. But that doesn't negate the grief.

It just didn't look like it was affecting me from the outside. I think I had been doing what a lot of high-functioning people do. I just kept going. I forged ahead. I handled what needed to be handled. I worked, I traveled, I made plans, I showed up for other people.

I did the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and the grief just kinda came with me. It sat in the passenger seat, and sometimes quietly, and honestly sometimes not so quietly. Somewhere during those two months, I stopped trying to outrun it. There were actually two full days, not back to back, but two full days where I just [00:12:00] permitted myself to stay in bed and cry,

not because something was wrong that needed fixed, but because I needed to give myself permission to be okay with my need to grieve, and respect that grief enough to give it its own time and space. There was also a day where I opted to just float in the water for three hours in silence at a water temperature of somewhere between 95 and 100 degrees.

It was like a bathtub. I didn't do anything but float. There was no music, there was no company, there was no distractions. It was just me and me. Well, and my little floaty, but thinking, feeling, processing, and respecting the gravity of the things that I had been pushing through. Because I hadn't had the time to respect the size of each of those things, [00:13:00] because had I, I wouldn't have been able to do what I thought I needed to do next.

So big lesson there. You cannot productivity hack your way out of grief. You cannot intellectualize your nervous system into believing something didn't hurt. Grief does not negotiate with shoulds or shouldn'ts, it just is, regardless of your opinion about it. You cannot keep stacking responsibilities on top of loss and call that resilience.

Eventually, the body is gonna be asked to be included in the conversation. For me, that meant time. It meant movement. It meant driving thousands of miles, but it also meant laughter. It meant silence. It meant being okay not getting out of bed and spending a day or two dedicated to just releasing all of the emotions that I had [00:14:00] suppressed, piling up for three years.

It meant floating in 100-degree water quietly for hours just to be with my feelings without distraction. It meant seeing places that I'd never seen before, and it meant doing things that had no professional purpose at all. And slowly I noticed that I wasn't just distracting myself anymore. I was actually processing.

And there's that difference, right? Distraction says, "Don't feel this." Recovery says, "You can feel this and still be here." It wasn't an escape from my life. In a strange way, it actually returned me to it. Not the professional version of my life, not the clinician, not the speaker, not the podcast host.

Those were the things that I [00:15:00] gave my whole life over to.

Not the person that is supposed to know what to do. Just me, a person who had been hurt, a person who had lost things, a person who was grieving, and a person who still had a capacity for joy if given the chance. Because when painful things happen, when several painful things happen, it becomes very easy to start organizing your entire identity around what you lost, and that doesn't mean that becomes the whole narrative.

It sometimes can be the gaping hole that you just keep walking around and keep saying, "I'll get back to that."

One of the things that this break reminded me is that grief and joy are not mutually exclusive. I could be heartbroken and still laugh until I couldn't breathe. And I [00:16:00] could still miss something desperately and still be completely present in a beautiful space. I could have things in my life that I wished were different and still genuinely loved the life I was standing in.

That, to me, isn't denial, it's integration. Maybe healing is not reaching some point where the painful things no longer matter or are no longer painful. We're not erasing it. We're not pretending I'm grateful that it happened. I'm just creating enough room around it so it isn't the only thing that I could see every day.

I also realize that I can have feelings about those events at any given moment, and that doesn't mean that I failed to grieve them. [00:17:00] Sadness showing up again is not proof that I did healing wrong. It's just proof that something painful happened. Proper grieving does not create amnesia, nor would I want it to.

So during this break, I traveled a lot. In fact, funny story, I was still about two weeks away from... uh, three weeks away from returning home, and before I left, I think I had 81,000 miles on my car, and I went ahead and did the 90,000-mile oil change and maintenance check that was recommended. And three weeks before I actually arrived home, I started getting the notification on my [00:18:00] dashboard that said, "Oil change in 4,000 miles."

I've never seen that before. It was almost like, "Hey lady, do you know what you're doing to me? Can you please put it in your schedule to fix this?"

But I did. I—I traveled a lot. I drove across the country. I drove back across the country, and in between I traveled up and down and all over the place. I traversed sections of Route 66. And let me just say there is a big difference between driving Route 66 and riding alongside Route 66 on a major modern highway. I turned 50. I stopped to look at weird roadside things and places that had absolutely nothing to do with professional development. I took detours, and I spent time [00:19:00] outside, and sometimes I stopped somewhere only because I wanted to know what was there.

There was no CEU attached to it. I didn't earn any kind of points for knowing what was there. There was no PowerPoint that needed to be made, no deliverable, no strategic objective. I was just curious. And I hadn't realized how much I missed doing things for no productive reason whatsoever.

So my home base was in the Mojave Desert off a dirt road in a community of about 350 single-wides that didn't have its own ZIP code. And to get to this little community, I had to drive 15 miles down a road that was dirt and gravel, and there were signs on the side of the road that literally said, no lie, "Caution, [00:20:00] wild burros ahead.

Do not feed or harass the burros." These donkeys were everywhere. In fact, I tried to leave the beach one day, and I had to wait for the donkey to get out of the middle of the road. There was one day that I drove to Oatman, Arizona, which is a former mining camp that's known for the wild burros running the town.

I was in a shop looking at things, and all of the sudden I felt, like, this hot breath on my shoulder. And when I turned around, there was a donkey hovering over me. And then I heard the store owner yell, "Ollie, go outside." I know it sounds wild, but I swear to God that's what happened. This donkey had walked himself right into the shop like he owned the place.

Ironically, I was informed later that Ollie is the unofficial [00:21:00] mayor of Oatman.

You could buy these little, like, bags of hay cubes that were what they did actually want you to feed the wild burros if you were so inclined. And I took my hay cubes out on the street, found a group of donkeys, and within this group there was this little baby that literally had a sign taped to its forehead that said, "Do not feed me."

Apparently everybody wanted to feed the cute baby, but it gave him a bellyache. I figured out which one was the mama of the baby, because every time I put a cube in my hand and went to feed it to her, she would knock it out of my hand and knock it onto the ground so the baby could hurry up and try to get it.

So this day was about joy, not about accomplishment or acquisition.

At some point along [00:22:00] the way, something changed for me. I eventually did stop immediately thinking about what I needed to do next. Not completely. Let's not get carried away. Like I'm still me. But there were like stretches of time where I wasn't thinking about work, and then those stretches got longer and eventually I noticed something incredibly strange.

I was bored and it was fantastic because boredom felt like freedom. It did not feel like space I needed to fill. Boredom meant that my brain wasn't scanning for the next responsibility. Nothing was on fire, nothing needed fixing, nobody needed an answer right that second. There was just space. And I finally figured out that if somebody texted me, I could have my practice manager respond. [00:23:00] 

Shocker. But it took me weeks to get there. Like, literally weeks.

There was another thing that I learned that I didn't really expect. The work didn't stop mattering just because I stopped feeding it every day. In fact, there was one week in the middle of this where this particular week had, like, over 300 downloads.

I wasn't recording. I wasn't releasing new episodes. I wasn't sitting at a computer making sure something happened that week, and the work was still working. That landed differently for me than any lectures about boundaries ever could. I also had to apply it to my clients. Like, if I wasn't immediately available, that wasn't a failure, because my job was to help equip them with skills to get through whatever crisis, [00:24:00] and I'm also not nearly as important to everybody as they are to me in the sense that I don't think about or need my therapist every day.

So I had to consider that not everybody was thinking about me.

I do not have to be a machine 24 hours a day for something I created to make a difference 24 hours a day.

While I was gone, there were actually two deaths that I normally would have responded to in person. I had this internal pull to feel guilty because I wasn't here for it, and therefore, I thought I couldn't do enough or do what I should. But I did do something, and that something ended up being enough.

So even when I gave less, [00:25:00] what I did give still profoundly mattered to the people that were hurting. Less than everything I had was still enough to make a difference for someone. I think maybe one of the harder lessons for people whose identity is wrapped around being useful is this. We confuse making a difference with being endlessly available, and those are not the same thing.

Sometimes the thing you built keeps helping people while you sleep. Sometimes the words you said months ago reach somebody today at this moment. Sometimes you can answer one call instead of 10 and still change the temperature in the room for everybody that's hurting.

Impact does not require perpetual activation.

[00:26:00] These are the things that I would have thought that I would be saying with wisdom and confidence, not shock and awe.

There was also one other pretty significant thing happening while I was supposedly taking a break and writing a book. After the Tones Drop found a new home. This season, the podcast is joining the Firefighter Nation platform. This show has grown far beyond what I imagined when I started it.

It began as a place to have honest conversations about first responders, trauma, wellness, mental health, and all the things that we tend to talk around instead of actually talking about. I wanted it to be a place where I could send my clients to do psycho ed.

I wanted it to be a place where [00:27:00] those disgruntled older first responders who, by God, were just fine, thank you very much, this mental health shit is nonsense, could quietly and on the down low listen and feel a little bit less alone and maybe start to understand why it was okay if they acknowledged what they were feeling.

Somewhere along the way, it became something bigger than me sitting behind a microphone every week. There are years of conversations now, stories, lessons, people who have trusted me with the details of the hardest parts of their lives, listeners who have reached out because something somebody said in an episode made them feel just, ugh, even a little less alone.

And now those conversations have the opportunity to reach an even larger community through Firefighter [00:28:00] Nation. What I like most about this is that this isn't about changing what the show is. The name stays, the host stays, the conversations stay honest.

I'm still going to ask messy questions that I want answers to. We're still going to talk about things that are uncomfortable and complicated and funny and painful and confusing and deeply human. And I'm not all of a sudden only going to talk about firefighting, to be clear. But we're doing it with a bigger platform behind us and the opportunity to reach people who may never have otherwise found us. And there's something kind of poetic about that happening during a season where I'm learning that I don't have to push everything forward by myself.

Because while I was practicing [00:29:00] letting go a little bit, the podcast was growing. While I was stepping back, new doors were opening. While I was learning that I didn't have to be a machine 24 hours a day to make a difference 24 hours a day, the show was finding another way to travel farther than I could carry it alone.

Growth doesn't always mean doing more. Sometimes growth means allowing what you've already built to be supported. And the last thing I wanted to do was to come back and just start doing the same thing the same way all over again. Like, all of the things that I had learned and the new ability to detach just went up in smoke.

Because I work with people whose nervous systems have been asked to do extraordinary things over and over [00:30:00] and over again. People who go from sleeping to adrenaline in seconds. People who walk into situations everybody else is running away from. People who must make decisions while other people's lives are literally hanging in the balance.

And then we hand them their keys at the end of the shift and essentially say, "Okay, you're off now. Go relax." What exactly do we think happens to all that activation? Like, where do we think that it goes? The tones stop, the calls end, the uniform comes off, but sometimes, you know, the nervous system is still standing in a bay waiting for the next run, or sitting in the cruiser waiting for the next call from dispatch.

And maybe you've been doing it for 10 years like me, or you've been doing it for 20 or 30. Maybe your phone has been [00:31:00] available to everybody your entire adult life, or since you joined the peer support team and now you think that you can't get help because you're a peer. Chuck that idea. But maybe you are the person that everybody calls.

Maybe you're the supervisor, the medic in the family, the person with the truck that everybody wants to borrow, the friend who is a good listener or always gives good advice. Maybe being needed has become so familiar that not being needed feels uncomfortable. I know that was a thing for me that I had to deal with when I was intentionally taking myself offline. And when work becomes your identity, which we're so guilty of in this community of first responders, sometimes we forget our worth is not measured in how many people need us or what we can do for [00:32:00] others.

Sometimes we're actually scared to say no because we don't think we have any worth beyond our service. If nobody needs you today, do you still know who you are?

There was another uncomfortable realization for me in all of this. I have spent a tremendous amount of time telling other people that wellness requires practice. That prevention matters, that you don't wait until everything collapses before you intervene on your own behalf.

That maybe we all shouldn't be measuring success by whether or not somebody is still alive. You know how I feel about that. Alive is too low of a bar. But if I believe that, then I have to model it. I can't spend 365 days a year talking [00:33:00] about nervous system regulation while running mine like a rental car.

I can't tell first responders that recovery matters and then brag because I haven't taken a day off or I regularly work 80 hours a week. I can't preach boundary setting while answering messages from everywhere all the time. And I definitely can't build a show about wellness that requires me to sacrifice my own wellness to produce it.

That would be absurd. And yet we do versions of this constantly, especially in the helping professions. We glorify the person that never stops, the person who answers at midnight, the person who picks up the extra shift, the person who hasn't taken a vacation in three years, the person who says, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

We even [00:34:00] have started to condemn people who only want to work their assigned hours rather than pick up every shift and every detail or want to actually leave on time. I hear so often, "These kids these days, they don't wanna work." And sometimes I think what people actually mean is they don't wanna work like me—like how we've always worked, to the point that we're so uncomfortable that when we aren't working, we pick up extra jobs or we relapse from retirement.

And then we're shocked when our bodies and relationships and our mental health eventually, you know, send the bill. Rest is not evidence that you've stopped caring or that you're lazy. Sometimes rest is what allows you to continue caring without disappearing inside that job.

I also want to acknowledge something else. Two [00:35:00] months is a luxury. I know that. Most people listening cannot say, "You know what? I'm gonna take the next 60 days and regulate my nervous system." We have mortgages, kids, departments are understaffed, there's mandatory overtime, there's court, calls, family responsibilities.

Maybe you're working two or more jobs. Maybe vacation time barely exists. Maybe taking one full week off would require an act of Congress. I don't know what your particular situation is.

And I'm not suggesting that everybody needs two months, and I'm certainly not suggesting that two months is some kind of scientifically prescribed nervous system reset. It's not. That was literally just what I took. What surprised me though was how much repetition it required before disengaging actually started to feel normal. [00:36:00] 

And that was useful information to me because I naively went into this thinking that the relief of the reduced responsibilities would just be something that I would organically embrace, and it wasn't. It actually did take practice catching myself doing the thing that I would normally do that I didn't wanna do while I was on hiatus.

Because the lesson wasn't everybody needs 60 days. For me, the lesson was that we dramatically underestimate how much practice it can take to stop. And if 60 days isn't available, what is? 20 minutes? An evening? One protected morning? A walk where your phone stays in the truck? A meal where nobody talks about work? [00:37:00] 

One day or month where you don't pick up overtime? An hour when you're not reachable? A hobby that you are knowingly bad at because it brings you joy and doesn't need to become a side hustle. Personally, I am a black thumb, and I love it. Come by my house and see all of my dead and dying plants, because I will show you, and I will brag about what pretty pots that they are in.

I also actually started collecting rocks while I was gone, but that's, like, a new obsession that probably needs to be discussed with my therapist before it goes live on a show. So maybe recovery doesn't always require disappearing from your life. Maybe it requires putting little endings into a life where nothing ever feels finished, or it doesn't feel worthwhile to acknowledge the finishing [00:38:00] because it's about to start up again.

Places where your nervous system can repeatedly get that message, the call is over. You don't have to do anything right now. You're allowed to just stand down, not only stand by.

So I did not spend all of the break alone in isolation.

The first 12 days of the road trip were with one of my oldest friends. I'll call her Tanya, mostly because that is her name. She does not need confidentiality. We met when we were four years old, living side by side in a duplex, and we went on to graduate high school together, and she is still one of my closest, dearest friends.

But let me tell you a little bit about Tanya. Tanya is as Type A as a person [00:39:00] possibly can be. She wanted to know what time she should set, she should set her alarm every morning. What time were we leaving one place for the next? What the plan was. And what I needed was freedom. So every time, my answer was some version of, "When we get up," or, "When we're ready to leave," or, "It doesn't need to be set."

I needed nothing to be asked of me, while my ride or die over here needed structure. And somehow we found our way and had the most blissful, conflict-free 12 days that I have ever spent with one person, [00:40:00] basically 24 hours a day for 12 days. So funny story. During the trip, we left Amarillo, Texas, and we were heading for Taos, New Mexico, and our GPS led us to this land grant road that was about the width of a go-kart, surrounded by woods, with no houses and no cell service.

And it was dirt or gravel. It had steep ditches on either side of the road. There was no way two cars were going to pass each other on this road, and if I did end up in a ditch, I would have needed a tow truck to get out. I would not have just been able to put it in reverse and get out, despite having four-wheel drive. We definitely started questioning if we were in the right place, but when that questioning started happening, we had already lost cell service, and so we [00:41:00] couldn't refresh Google Maps.

It even got so ridiculous at one point that I made Tanya record it as evidence so no one thought that we were exaggerating when we told them later about this road. And eventually, we ended up exactly where we were supposed to be. We were exactly where we were supposed to be the whole time. And we actually saw things that we wouldn't have seen had we taken a different route out of fear of not knowing for sure we were going where we intended—or that fear consumed us and took the joy away from the situation. In fact, it turned into a rabbit hole for me, and I learned all about land grants from the 1800s, and we got to see 150-year-old adobe houses. And that road became one of the best stories of the trip. Maybe one day [00:42:00] I'll post the video of it.

And maybe that's because it held a lesson that I didn't know I needed. Ooh, I hate those moments. But nonetheless, not every road that is right for you is going to look safe, familiar, efficient, or comfortable while you're on it. Sometimes you don't get confirmation until much later that you were in fact going exactly where you were supposed to go, and you still have to sit through the discomfort of the unsurety.

Somewhere in those thousands of miles of mountain roads, Route 66, coffee stops, ridiculous back-road adventures, conversations, laughter, silence, and both of us, and my car, becoming increasingly [00:43:00] questionable versions of clean and hygienic, I learned some things about relationships too. I have spent years thinking Tanya is one of the most remarkable people I know.

She's thoughtful where I'm spontaneous. She's organized where I'm creative with my spaces. She notices details that I fly right past. She brings the steadiness where I bring the momentum. And somehow, until this trip, I'd never really said all of that to her. Because I just assumed that she knew. And wow, that's such a—a small sentence.

I assumed she knew. Luckily, I became aware of that and had the wherewithal to take advantage of the time [00:44:00] that we had together, and I told her. But I started thinking about how many important things in our lives we leave sitting inside assumptions. We assume people know we love them. We assume they know we admire them.

We assume they know they're safe with us. We assume they know what they bring to a room or what they've made possible in our lives. But assumptions are silent, and people cannot hear what we never say. And I don't think that's separate from wellness. I think that's part of it.

When we talk about nervous system regulation, we sometimes make it sound like wellness is something an individual does alone. Meditate, exercise, sleep, breathe, go to therapy. All important. But human nervous systems regulate in relationship too.

Brené Brown has said that connection is why we're here, that it's what gives us [00:45:00] purpose and meaning to our lives, and I think I understand that differently now than I did before this trip. Because connection isn't just having people in your phone. And it's not just people knowing you. It's being known.

It's being able to sit beside somebody without performing. It's having someone who brings something different to your life and trusting that difference instead of trying to eliminate it. It's telling people what they mean to you instead of assuming that they already know.

And maybe that's why connection belongs in every conversation that we have about wellness. We are designed to not do this alone. There are people whose presence changes what happens inside of us,

People who don't require us to become smaller so they can be [00:46:00] comfortable. People whose strengths fill spaces where ours don't, and who let our strengths do the same for them. I kept thinking about yin and yang during this trip. We tend to think about it in terms of opposites, but that's not really the point.

It's about complementarity. Two things can be different without one of them being wrong. Balance doesn't require sameness. Balance happens because somebody else may be bringing something to the equation that I don't, and I know that I am limited. There are attributes that I don't have, and honestly, that I'm not really interested in developing.

But that doesn't mean those same attributes in another person can't help propel me forward. And maybe part of [00:47:00] wellness is knowing who these people are to you, not just who will answer when everything's going to hell. I like to think we're pretty decent at identifying these people in first responder culture.

Who can I call at 2:00 in the morning? Who will show up? Who will help me bury the body? Metaphorically, of course. I'm actually talking about something quieter. Who can you do absolutely nothing with? Who can sit beside you for 2,000 miles without needing to fill every silence with chatter, with the radio, podcast?

Who makes you laugh? And not where you kind of internally chuckle, but where noise comes out of your body and you express joy. Who notices when you're getting spun up? Who [00:48:00] reminds you that there's an entire world outside the things that you do for a living? I know for me, my personal communication with people outside my professional world has absolutely diminished over time.

Because the way that I've allowed my work to consume me. And maybe for different reasons, many first responders do it too. Sometimes it's about relatability. But when we cut those people out of our lives that don't wear the same uniform or do the same job, we're cutting off part of our joy, even if it feels different than that.

Who knew the version of you that existed before the uniform, the title, the credential, the trauma, the responsibility? And maybe an even better question would be, do those people know [00:49:00] what they mean to you? Because Tanya didn't, but now she does. One of the things that I came home believing more strongly than I did when I left was that wellness isn't only about reducing what's hurting us.

It is also about deliberately strengthening the things that sustain us. Connection—it's, it's one of those things. And connection requires participation. You have to call, you have to answer, you have to show up, you have to take the trip, you have to occasionally choose the ridiculous detour, the one that's less efficient.

And every once in a while, you have to actually say the thing that you've been assuming that somebody already knew. Maybe that's another form of standing down, letting yourself stop being useful for a minute and simply be known.

So if you listened to episode 160, the [00:50:00] last episode of season three, you may have heard that part of what motivated this was writing a book. And so this trip kind of was shrouded in the book, and also celebrating turning 50. I know. Like, I'm a half a century old. That's insane to me, 'cause I still struggle to...

Well, anyway, for another conversation. I've spent the last 10 years dedicated to first responders, asking who and how I can help. But I'm coming back on a mission to ask myself, what do I actually want my days to feel like? I'm making an active choice for the second half of my life, God willing, to not solely be measured by productivity and output, but also by joy and fun and a [00:51:00] different, more personal kind of fulfillment. I came back from this break with ideas, a ridiculous number of ideas actually.

So apparently we haven't cured that. But I'm also coming back much clearer, more focused, more excited about conversations again, and I think better able to do the work that I actually care about. Rest isn't the opposite of performance, but it supports recovery that supports the performance.

The part where you actually stop thinking about work matters a lot, which is mildly inconvenient for those of us who have perfected the art of going on vacation while bringing our entire occupation with us mentally, and possibly a laptop. And truth be told, I think I would have to go back a few years to actually think about [00:52:00] when I took a vacation and I completely 100% disconnected from work. Wow.

Yeah. And part of that is because I travel so much for work that I haven't really felt compelled or haven't really felt justified in taking traditional vacation time.

I don't want this show to only tell stories about people surviving their worst moments.

I wanna talk more about what makes a life worth staying for. So it doesn't always have to feel like white-knuckling through the day. Connection, curiosity, purpose, play, rest, relationships, identity outside of the uniform, identity outside of the job, identity outside of whatever role has [00:53:00] convinced you that your value is determined by how useful you are to everybody else.

Because wellness isn't something that you earn after you've finished all your responsibilities. You will never finish them. There will always be another call, another email, another person who needs something, another person who wants to borrow your truck this weekend, another project, another shift, another crisis.

If rest is something you're allowed to have only after everything is done, we are never going to get there. So we have to change that script.

So that's where I've been. That's what I've been doing. I've been away for a while. I drove lots of miles. I saw extraordinary things. I turned 50. I let myself wander around. I grieved things that still hurt. I laughed hard enough for [00:54:00] joy to take up space next to them. I remembered that curiosity doesn't always need an outcome. And somewhere in those two months, I got a little better at letting a day simply just be a day, no deliverable required.

And now I'm back. Not because I finally finished everything. I didn't. In fact, I can tell you I probably made more work for myself on the book simply because I was in a creative free flow and could not stop writing enough to actually edit what I had already written.

And not because my life suddenly became perfectly balanced. Absolutely not. It is something that I have to manage with intention every day. I'm back because I actually miss this. I miss these conversations. I miss [00:55:00] the people who come here and trust me with their stories. I missed asking questions, and I missed learning about you all.

And I think there's something fundamentally different about coming back to something because you want to instead of coming back or continuing simply because you're convinced that you have to or that's what's expected of you. That's the energy that I want for this season.

So if you're listening while driving to shift, driving home from a shift, sitting in a station, walking your dog, sitting in a cruiser, hiding from your children in the garage for 11 peaceful minutes, wherever you are, here's a question I wanna leave you with. When was the last time your nervous system actually believed that the work was over?

Not when your shift ended, not when you left the office, not when you went on vacation, but when did you actually stop carrying it? And when it is [00:56:00] over, when nobody needs anything from you, do you know how to fill that space?

Who are your people? What makes you curious? What makes you laugh? What makes you just feel like yourself or helps you remember who yourself is? And if you can't remember, don't make that another thing to judge yourself about. Just get curious. Where could you create one small place in your life where nothing is required of you?

Start there. You may not have two months, you may not even have two hours, but every nervous system needs somewhere to stand down. So maybe wellness isn't only about learning how to survive what happens after the tones drop. Maybe it's building a life you actually want to return to when they do.

So season four looks a little different. New home [00:57:00] with Firefighter Nation, new conversations, a few, okay, a l—more than a few new ideas, and hopefully, hopefully a host who is getting a little better at understanding that making a difference does not require being available every single minute of the day.

And I'm really glad that you're here for whatever comes next. So everyone, welcome to season four. I have some exciting stuff planned for this season, and I am so glad you wanna join me for this road trip. Season four of After the Tones Drop, let's see where we go.

After the Tones Drop is shared for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes. It does not provide therapy, medical advice, diagnoses, or treatment, and listening does not create a therapist-client relationship. The views expressed are those of the individual speaking. If you need support, please reach out to a qualified professional or [00:58:00] emergency services in a crisis.

Our theme music is Intentions by Abbynoise, licensed through Uppbeat.