Not superhuman, after all
On unreliable bodies—and learning, slowly, to take a break
I thought I’d been learning a lot, over the last several years, about listening to my body. About taking breaks, resting, not trying to go-go-go and do-do-do all the time. (So much to unlearn from capitalism’s training—and evangelicalism’s.)
But I don’t know. I mean, I do think I’ve learned a lot. And I also think these things are often easier read about, understood, and spoken about than actually lived.
I think about the time, just last year, when I was invited to guest preach via Zoom at a particular church on the East Coast for the first time.
I’ll share an open secret: Like most preachers, I generally do not prepare a whole sermon more than a few days in advance. Usually it works out great. Often, I wouldn’t have even wanted to prepare farther ahead than I do; after all, you never know what’s going to happen in our world until it happens, and it’s nice to be able to prepare a sermon with the most current events in mind.
When I came down with COVID—I held out for three whole years, y’all!—it was the Tuesday before the Sunday I was scheduled to guest preach online at this church. I had definitely thought about the sermon before I got sick. But I wasn’t anywhere near fully prepared.
And I was very sick. Not in a life-threatening kind of way, but in a pretty-darn-miserable-and-can’t-really-do-much-other-than-sleep-and-watch-TV kind of way. For several days.
Saturday rolled around, and I was still sick. I sermon prepped anyway.
Sunday morning arrived, and I was still sick. But I gathered what I could of my voice and energy and preached anyway.
Did I mention this church is on the East Coast and I live in the Seattle area—so their service, which started at a very reasonable 10 am in their time zone, began at 7 am for me?
The sermon actually went great, as far as I can tell. The church was full of lovely people who expressed deep appreciation for the message I had to share. I don’t exactly regret doing it; I’m so glad to have met everyone there, and I’m so glad to have been able to share something meaningful to me that was also meaningful to them.
At the same time, though—What was I thinking? I was very sick. I had been sick for days. I could have canceled. I think they would have understood. They would have come up with something else to do.
To be fair, when I first got sick, I didn’t know that it was COVID. And I didn’t know how long it would last, lingering in malaise and fatigue for a good couple weeks. I kept thinking, Tomorrow I’ll feel better.
I also thought, of course, I don’t want to let these people down.
And it was partially about them. I didn’t want to inconvenience the people who had graciously invited me to preach by asking them to change their plans last minute.
If I’m quite honest, though, this kind of thing is also usually at least partially about me. I don’t want people to see me as unreliable. As weak. Flaky. Infirm. I don’t want people to think I’m lesser-than in any way.
It’s also, of course, about culture, society, capitalism. It’s about the ways we’re trained to push through pain and illness as if we were machines rather than organisms. We are not machines.
(So much appreciation to
for thinking through this so well. Rest is resistance, indeed.)
Fast forward a year and a bit. In the last few weeks, in the midst of the sporadic nerve pain issue I’ve been having, I had to tell the project leader for a chunk of contract work—work I had committed to before the nerve pain got so bad—that I wouldn’t quite be able to make some of the deadlines we’d agreed on. I stayed in communication and tried to update them as often as possible regarding what I was and wasn’t able to do.
The act of admitting that I couldn’t quite do everything I had planned to do on the timetable I had planned to do it was difficult. I had committed to this work, and I didn’t want to inconvenience the people who had hired me by delivering the deliverables late. And, of course, I didn’t want my physical fragility to reflect negatively on me.
On the days when I was able to work, I focused hard on the contract project, and I ended up only missing the final deadline by a wee little bit. I don’t think it inconvenienced them much, and to the extent that it did, they were so patient and understanding.
I feel good about the whole thing—I’m glad I communicated as much as I did, and I’m thankful that they were receptive and kind. I’m also very glad I didn’t push myself to make deadlines I couldn’t healthily make.
Because really, no one—except my ego, perhaps?—actually wants that.
If I put myself in the shoes of the people who’ve invited me to preach or signed me on for contract work, I see that while sure, in an ideal world we would set deadlines and stick to them, I also recognize that our world is not ideal.
Bodies are fragile. People get sick, or injured, or overwhelmed. Deadlines often need to shift.
I feel intensely uncomfortable when I am the cause of this shifting—and yet, isn’t this part of what it means to be human? Why do I so strongly prefer to be the one who adjusts than the one who needs adjusting to?
No reasonable human is under any illusions that any of us is infallible. But sometimes I’d rather pretend to be.
The point, here, is not to swing to the other side of the how-much-responsibility-do-I-feel-toward-my-commitments spectrum and duck out of preaching or miss deadlines without any qualms. Maybe the point is to find a balance. To act in ways that honor the needs, strengths, weaknesses, gifts, and unpredictable life stuff of everyone involved in a project, a church service, or anything else we collectively put our minds to.
I can honor my own needs by choosing to take a break when I need it. And I can honor the needs of everyone else involved by communicating what I need, what I am and am not able to do, taking their needs and timelines seriously and honoring these things as much as healthily possible. We can work together to figure out the best possible outcome for everyone involved.
We can push back, together, against our society’s deeply-ingrained expectations of superhumanness—for ourselves, and for others.
I think part of learning to live as kin is learning to push back on these things. And I think part of how we push back is by learning to say what we need.
For those of us a little too reluctant to inconvenience others, perhaps we can learn to accept that we are in fact sometimes inconvenient. This is part of being human.
And for those of us who find ourselves on the receiving end of someone else communicating their needs, perhaps we can learn to offer grace—whether that’s the grace of making a back-up plan, or of extending a deadline, or of offering a listening ear.
Making and keeping commitments is part of how we build kinship, how we build trust and community. And, at the same time, sometimes we need things to be flexible. We need people to be flexible. We need to be flexible with ourselves and our own understandings of our abilities.
While I wouldn’t wish the pain issues I’ve been having on anyone at all, and I am not at all saying that everything happens for a reason—I do think I’m learning in the midst of it. And maybe these are things we can all learn together.
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What have you learned about asking for what you need? About taking breaks when you need them? About being a fragile human whose body is not always as reliable as you might prefer? I’d love to hear.