Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
It was a typical Tuesday in June and I was trying to work. My son had already asked for a snack twice, because summer is just one long and constant negotiation about goldfish crackers.
There was a bag half-packed on my bed for a trip we would take the next day and a laptop open to something with a deadline on it.
I could feel it starting right then. The waves of responsibility, the flood of overwhelm. A rising pressure that starts to seep out of my body through tiny cracks of irritation and rage.
So I did what I have always done. I started to triage. Finish the work thing first. Then make another snack. Then the packing. One thing at a time. Keep all the plates spinning and task switch just fast enough to get everything done one thing at a time.
It looked like focus. It looked like efficiency. But, what I realized in that moment was that this instinct wasn’t diligence or competence at all.
It was armor.
Too Many Hard Things
When your whole personality is about doing hard things, you spend most of your time in survival mode. Survival mode is great if you’re actually trying to survive something. But, for living and enjoying your life…not so much.
Too many hard things under your belt without enough rest, play, fun, and joy and your nervous system starts to go on the defensive. It builds spectacular, high achieving, results oriented, armor and narrows your life down to something defensible.
You see armor only covers one front at a time. It protects you from your single greatest threat; from each threat individually. But its restriction and weight rob you of the flexibility and adaptability that you need to handle multiple things at once.
So, when the multi-front war of snacks, packing, and deadlines descends – your “built to brace” body reads all requests and needs as incoming missiles. Trying to rapidly switch between tasks while armored up and crushing you with its burden. The result is being frazzled and getting worn out way too fast.
As I stood there, mid-flood, reaching for the next thing to triage, something in me stopped.
I don’t know how or why, but it dawned on me that I did not need to task-switch between all my responsibilities. I needed to expand.
Instead of holding up each thing separately, guarding it, finishing it, clearing it off the board before the next one was allowed to exist, I needed to allow everything to be in the room at the same time.
To stop bracing against each thing as it arrived and open up to the fact that all of it was mine, all at once.
It is hard to describe what this perspective shift did. Nothing got crossed off faster. The snack still got made. The bag still got packed.
What changed was inside me. I suddenly remembered I didn’t need to protect against anything on my to do list. I just needed to hold more than one thing at a time. No, more than that. I got to hold more than one thing at a time.
I could have a kiddo who interrupts me for snacks. And a career I love. And a community that is overflowing. And travel that lights me up.
I did not have to pick one and survive it before I gained admittance to the next level of my life. This is not fight club. This is Tuesday.
I could open my hands and have all of it at the same time. Acknowledging this felt really vulnerable. It also felt a lot like relief.
Expansion As A Way Of Life
Expansion is different from capacity. Capacity says “increase what you can hold”. Expansion says “make room for everything you love”.
Capacity says “you are what you achieve”. Expansion says “you are so much more than your output.”
Capacity says “choose the path that gets the most done”. Expansion says “choose yourself for once, you little overachiever.”
We have to stop holding what we have gratefully chosen as though it were a stack of threats. Because even a big, beautiful, miraculous life can feel like demand and burden when that’s all you’ve ever really known.
But you built this life on purpose. And, you want all these things that are in it, because they are good. Your child is not clutter that needs to be triaged and managed. Your work is not a bomb you have to neutralize before it goes off.
You’ve already achieved and succeeded and broken the cycle and burned the sage. Expansion is not about adding to what you’ve already done. It’s about dropping the armor that isn’t doing you any good so you can carry the life that actually is.
Stop treating your chosen, beautiful, magnificent life like a series of emergencies. That’s just your armor talking. And that armor has a shelf life.
Taking Off The Armor
Survival taught us to narrow. To triage, guard, and protect. Expansion teaches us to do the opposite. To widen. To allow. To deepen.
And you know the ironic thing about that? As any 1,000 year old tree could tell you, deep roots and wide presence is a far greater defense than all that armor ever was.
So, drop your shoulders down from your ears. Take a slow breath that goes all the way down, and instead of pulling your attention onto a single task, let it spread out to hold the whole field of your life.
The kiddo, the work, the house, the friends. Allow all of it to be present at once with none of it flagged as danger.
Your body might tell you you’re not safe. That you have to clamp down or everything falls apart. That if you don’t defend each task, each person, each goal independently you’re just asking for it to be taken from you.
But, the truth is that when you let yourself have it all at once, hands open, not guarding any single piece, you actually stop preparing for it to be ripped away and it’s far less likely to leave.
You stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. Stop hearing hooves and expecting a stampede.
I definitely do not have expansion locked down every day. I still get frustrated, frantic, and stretched to thin from time to time. And, I’m more than a little irked at how much goldfish cracker dust adorns my beautiful life.
But, expansion is my practice now. When I find myself bracing against a perfectly good Tuesday, I take a deep breath instead. I open my hands, widen my presence, and let my whole life be in the room with me at the same time.
I’m dropping the armor whenever I can. And, I’m doing more and carrying less than ever before.
What could you hold if you set the armor down? Try it this week and let me know.
This is the kind of thing we practice together inside Monarch. Holding the life you already have with open hands. If you want company while you learn to expand, follow along. And, join the waitlist for our new community, Kaleidoscope.
