SUNDAY SEEDS OF THOUGHT: The World Doesn’t Stop When Yours Does

Dr. Carmela Maxell: Welcome back to Sunday Seeds of Thought on Rooted in Rising. I'm Dr. Carmela Maxell. There's something profoundly strange about having your life change while the rest of the world remains completely unimpressed by it. I don't mean that cruelly. I mean literally. Something had happened inside your family, inside your home, inside your heart. Something so enormous that it divides your life into before this happened and after this happened. And the next morning, the sun comes up. Your alarm still goes off. There are emails waiting for you. Somebody needs an answer. The laundry is still sitting exactly where you left it. The coffee maker still makes that stupid little sound it always makes. Your bills do not send a condolence card. Your calendar does not look at what happened and say, you know what? Never mind. Tuesday is still Tuesday. Life just keeps going. And recently I found myself standing in that exact place. Something happened in my personal life that I'm not ready to tell the entire story of. And honestly, maybe parts of that story will never belong to anyone except the people who lived it. But it hurt. It hurt deeply. And for a little while, everything that usually makes me feel like myself went quiet. I wasn't thinking about productivity. I wasn't thinking about building something. I wasn't thinking about the next podcast episode, the next chapter, the next class, or whatever ambitious little thing I had scribbled into my calendar. I was trying to understand what had happened. I was trying to understand what came next. And maybe more than anything, I was trying to understand who I was supposed to be after it. And here's the weird part. While I was hurting, good things were still happening to me. I had an author event that went really well. People showed up, they bought my book. People stood in front of me and handed me something that I had written and asked me to sign my name inside of it. And then I found out that my book sold out. Sold out. And ordinarily. You couldn't tell me shit. I would have been celebrating, posting everywhere, calling somebody, refreshing the page 17 times, walking around like I had personally won the Nobel Prize and paperback distribution. And I was happy. I was incredibly grateful. But I was also hurting. And I remember holding those two things at the same time and realizing, ⁓ this is adulthood. This is life. This is the part nobody really prepares you for. Because we like to imagine our lives in chapters. We tell stories that way. I went through a difficult season, and then I healed, and then this wonderful thing happened. Nice. Clean. Beginning, middle, end. Except actual life rarely has the decency to organize itself like that. Actual life stacks things. You can get a promotion during a divorce. You can welcome a baby while grieving someone you desperately wish were there to meet them. You can fall in love while you're terrified of being heard again. You can achieve something you've worked toward for years while another part of your life is completely falling apart. You can get the thing you prayed for while simultaneously begging God to fix something else. Human beings like clean narratives because clean narratives make us feel safe. If pain has a beginning, a middle, and an end, maybe we can control it. If grief follows a predictable sequence, maybe we can prepare for it. If healing happens in stages, maybe somebody can hand us a map and say, you are here. But life has never promised us narrative convenience. Sometimes grief and joy occupy the same room. Sometimes gratitude and anger sit right next to each other. Sometimes you are heartbroken at 10 o'clock in the morning and laughing your ass off at something stupid by 10:17. And then you feel guilty for laughing. Because somewhere along the way, we learn that emotions are supposed to take turns. If I'm grieving, I'm supposed to be sad. If something good happens, I'm supposed to be happy. Pick one. But human beings don't work that way. I can be devastated and grateful. I can be angry and hopeful. I can miss what was and still be curious about what comes next. One emotion does not invalidate the other. Joy does not mean the pain wasn't real. And pain does not mean the good things aren't good. I think I needed to learn that again recently. Because eventually I started functioning again. I answered emails. I started preparing to teach again. I worked on the podcast. I started thinking about book two again. I handled things that needed to be handled. And from the outside, that can look a lot like healing. Maybe sometimes it is. But I think we make a mistake when we assume that functioning means someone is finished hurting. We do it to other people. And maybe even more dangerously, we do it to ourselves. I opened the laptop, therefore I must be better. I went to work, I must be better. I laughed today, I must be better. I recorded an episode. I must be better. No. Sometimes you're not better. Sometimes you've simply become capable of carrying more than one thing again. And that is different. I think healing is not always the moment the pain disappears. Sometimes healing is the moment your life becomes large enough to hold something beh besides the pain. Pain might still be there. But now there's something next to it. There's work. There are people you love. There's a book. There's music. There's coffee on the porch. There's something ridiculous that your kid said. There's a friend who makes you laugh at exactly the wrong moment. There's an idea. There's an appetite. There's curiosity. There's a moment when you realize you've gone 20 minutes without thinking about what happened. And then maybe an hour. And eventually you notice my life is getting bigger again. Not because the painful thing became smaller, but because other things are beginning to exist alongside it. And I had another realization recently that was considerably more annoying. I have built an entire podcast around conversations about boundaries and grief and identity and rest and resilience and becoming. And eventually I had to ask myself, Carmella, do you actually believe in any of this shit when it's your turn? Because it is remarkably easy to tell somebody else to give themselves grace. I can talk about self-compassion all day. I can tell you that grief doesn't have a timeline. I can tell you that rest is productive. I can tell you that you don't have to earn the right to stop. I can tell you that surviving something doesn't require you to immediately turn it into a lesson. And then let me fall behind on something. Suddenly I'm looking at myself like, okay, but are we done being sad yet? Because we have shit to do. Apparently, all of my beautiful advice was for everybody except me. And I had to confront that. Because I don't want Rooted in Rising to be a place where I teach you how to be human while pretending that I somehow transcended being one. I haven't. I struggle with the same contradictions. I know better and still don't always do better. I understand boundaries and still occasionally blow right past my own. I believe in rest and still sometimes feel guilty when I take it. I understand grief and still occasionally get irritated with myself for grieving. It is much easier to give people grace than it is to live inside your own unfinished story. But if I believe the things I say here, and I do, then I have to live by them when they're inconvenient. Especially then. So I stopped demanding a dramatic comeback for myself. And recently. I opened my book again. I hadn't been able to really be there for a little while. My mind was somewhere else. But I sat down and opened the manuscript, and there we were. My characters were exactly where I left them, which sounds ridiculous. I know they're fictional. They weren't sitting inside my laptop tapping their watches like, girl, are we finishing this book or what? But there was something incredibly comforting about returning to a world I had created when my world felt a little unfamiliar. So I wrote. Not brilliantly. Not for twelve hours. I didn't emerge with 15,000 new words and a motivational speech about discipline. I just wrote a little. And somewhere in that process, something inside me said, There you are. And that's when I realized that coming back to yourself doesn't always feel dramatic. Sometimes there is no breakthrough, no swelling music, no moment where you stand in the rain and scream at the sky and suddenly understand the meaning of your suffering. Sometimes you just recognize yourself doing something familiar. You cook something, you sing, you write, you make somebody laugh. You become interested in something again. You notice yourself making plans. And there you are. Not exactly the person you were before. Maybe you'll never be exactly that person again. But you. Still you. So if you're listening to this while your world feels very different than it did a month ago, I want to tell you something. You are allowed to be changed by what happened. You do not have to manufacture meaning from it immediately. You don't have to forgive anybody on command. You don't have to find the silver lining. You don't have to turn your pain into purpose before you've even had time to understand what the hell happened. And you certainly do not have to become productive again just to prove that you are resilient. But when little pieces of yourself begin coming back, please let them. When you laugh again, Laugh. When something tastes good again, enjoy it. When you want to go somewhere, go. When you feel like writing, write. When you find yourself excited about something, let yourself be excited. You do not have to feel guilty for experiencing something good while something painful still exists. Joy is not evidence that the pain wasn't real. Laughing again does not betray the version of you who cried. And moving forward does not mean pretending you were never hurt. Maybe something happened to you that you still don't have language for. Maybe everyone around you has returned to normal and you're wondering why you haven't. Maybe the world kept moving while some part of you stood completely still. I don't know when normal comes back. Actually, I'm not convinced normal is always the goal. Because some experiences don't return us to who we were. They introduce us to whoever comes next. And right now, I'm meeting her. She's writing again. She's teaching. She's recording this podcast. She's laughing again. Some days she's tired. Some days she's angry. Some days she's incredibly grateful. And some days all of those things happen before lunch. But she's here. And maybe that's enough for right now. So wherever you are in your story, don't rush to become the inspirational ending. You don't owe anybody a triumphant comeback. You don't have to show everyone how strong you are. Take care of yourself. Let the people who love you love you. Let the pain be painful. Let the good things still be good. And when something inside of you finally whispers, I think I'm ready to come back, you don't have to sprint. Just turn towards it. One sentence, one conversation, one cup of coffee, one ordinary moment at a time. Because sometimes rising doesn't look like climbing. Sometimes rising is simply realizing I'm still here. Until next time, stay rooted in who you are and keep rising into who you're becoming. Don't forget to like, follow, and share, as it helps this program reach a wider audience. Take care.