I recently learned that you can relax your vagus nerve by massaging your ears. (This sounds like a setup for a joke, but this time, it is NOT.) It seems to work.

I stopped stimming my ears as a small child, when my mom would freak out that I had an ear infection. There are a lot of behaviors I repressed because my mom thought it meant I was sick, and she'd give me prune juice or put something up my nose.

My body knew what to do.

My mom isn't quite Munchausen or by proxy, but she leans in that general direction. She has always been sick with something and always thought I was sick, and unless I wanted to get out of work, I did whatever it took to hide whatever she thought made me sick. Lately I've been learning that some of tho behaviors were beneficial.

And upon individuating, my reaction to that upbringing was to swing the opposite way, to suppress and deny when I was tired or sick. I hardly ever took sick days (not that work would have let me anyway), and just powered through until I got permanently sick, and still powered through. Even my burnouts had burnouts.

Weird that I ended up with my mom, caretaking her endless illnesses while she ignored my pleas – "I am sick, mom! I need to pace! You need to prioritize my energy! The yard is clean enough! Stop calling me for useless things after 9pm!" and that's when I *really* well and truly broke beyond repair.

#Journal #DarkSojourn #Recovery2026 #IGuessImProcessingInteadOfLookingForWorkLol