Mother’s Day. A family tradition I’ve been holding onto for years now, because traditions are something I’ve learned to love deliberately. Not the way I was taught to love them, the perform-them-because-the-calendar-says-so way, but the we keep coming back to this and that means something way.
There was a lot going on. Family dynamics had been loaded going into the day.
My body knew first. Before I knew. Tight stomach. Heart picking up its pace. The fast that says something is happening and we should already be doing something about it.
Years ago, I would have sat in that and said nothing. The old version of me knew exactly what to do with a body that was warning her: ignore it. Smile. Keep the peace. Be the one everyone could relax around. People-please my way through the entire afternoon and then collapse on the drive home, exhausted in a way I couldn’t have explained to anyone, including myself.
But I’m not that woman anymore. Ok, well, that’s the dishonest version of the sentence. The honest version is: I’m not only that woman anymore. She’s still in there. She still has access to the controls. But she’s not the only one driving anymore, and most days, she’s not even the one I’d hand the keys to first.
So I did the new thing. I named what was happening, out loud, to a family member.
I’m having some real physical symptoms of anxiety right now.
It was a small sentence. It cost me something to say. It was the truest sentence I had access to in that moment. But, the woman I used to be doesn’t say sentences like that.
This time, I said it plain.
What I was hoping for, even though I couldn’t have named it in the moment: any small acknowledgment. I hear you. That makes sense. Is there anything I can do. The body doesn’t need much. It just needs to know it has been heard. One sentence back would have been enough to land me.
What I got was four words.
Oh just stop it.
The move you probably expect next would be to villainize the speaker, turn her into the antagonist, build a whole essay about how some people will never get it and you don’t need that kind of negativity in your life. Then we’d bring it to an end by telling you to choose yourself.
That’s not what we do here.
Those four words came from a person who is doing her own work, or not doing it, or has never been told there’s any work to do — and that’s not the part that matters. I can’t (never could, but that took me longer to learn) control another person’s nervous system responses.
What does matter though? My Machine came shrieking back to life.
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know what I mean. The Machine is what my nervous system has been producing for decades — the automatic I’m fine, I’ve got this, I should be doing more, what’s wrong with me output that was built to keep me alive in a system that didn’t have room for the real version of me. The Machine is loud. The Machine is fast. The Machine speaks before I do.
I’ve spent years learning to catch the Machine. Years filing deposits into the Safety database — small, body-sized moves where I let someone see me actually being me and they didn’t punish me for it. Years building evidence that the world is bigger than the rules the Machine learned. Years.
And four words from someone at a horse race on Mother’s Day sent the whole thing right back to where it started.
The Machine wasn’t subtle. It started running its script before I could even register what had been said: You shouldn’t have said anything. You made it weird. You always make it weird. This is your fault. She would be fine if you hadn’t brought it up. You ruined the day. Everyone is going to feel it now. Fix it. Smooth it over. Apologize. Make her okay. Make everyone okay.
I knew, intellectually, that nothing the Machine was saying was true. I knew it the same way you know that the floor is solid even when you’re standing on a deck above the ocean and your eyes are telling you that you might fall through.
Knowing doesn’t stop the body from doing. Knowing didn’t stop the Machine. Knowing just gave me one thing the old version of me didn’t have: I knew what was happening.
I was sliding into the Ashes right there in the elevator at the horse races.
But like I say over and over and over again.
The work doesn’t make you bulletproof.
The work doesn’t make it so that someone can tell you to stop it and you stay regulated and serene because you’ve been doing your breathwork. You haven’t developed some kind of armor that other people’s dysregulation bounces off of. The work doesn’t mean you stop sliding into the Ashes when someone close to you dismisses what your body is doing.
The work means that when you slide, you can name where you are. The work means that the Machine can still scream, but you can still hear something underneath the screaming. The work means that the slide doesn’t last as long as it used to (this time it lasted about 3 races), and you have somewhere to go from the bottom of it.
So I sat there at the horse races with my whole nervous system screaming and I did the only thing I know how to do anymore.
I started looking for the Ember.
The Ember is the second of the four states I write about in my framework. The Ashes are conservation, numbness, the I am underneath everything state. The Ember is the first flicker — not action yet, not movement yet, just the smallest possible signal that something underneath the Ashes is still warm.
The Ember is findable even in the loudness. That’s actually one of the things that makes it the Ember. It doesn’t require quiet. It doesn’t require a meditation cushion or a podcast playing or a perfectly designed self-care moment. The Ember exists in places you wouldn’t think to look for it. It exists in crowds. It exists in family dynamics. It exists at the busy table at a Mother’s Day horse race after someone has just told you to stop it.
You just have to know how to look.
I looked. I just remembered I was in the Ashes and that meant the Ember was somewhere nearby. The Ember is always nearby. That’s the whole structural promise of the four states — they’re not stages of healing, they’re locations, and you can find your way between them once you know they exist.
It took me a minute. More than a minute. The horses ran another race. People around me cheered. I was inside my body but watching it from a small distance, the way you can sometimes when you know exactly what state you’re in and you’re waiting for it to shift.
The Ember came in small. A pull on my attention toward something specific — I don’t even remember what now. Maybe my daughter laughing at something. Maybe the way the sun was hitting the track. Maybe the recognition that I had said the true sentence even though it cost me. Maybe it was all three at once. The Ember doesn’t have to be dramatic to count. It just has to be evidence that something underneath the Ashes is still warm.
I let the Ember be small. I didn’t try to fan it. I didn’t try to use it to get back to my baseline or recover the day or any of the wellness-industry phrases for the move I was making. I just noticed it, and I let it be there, and I trusted that noticing it was the work.
By the next race, I could feel the Flame starting underneath the Ember. By the race after that, I could feel myself wanting to be present with my family again — not performing presence, not pretending the slide hadn’t happened, just actually wanting to be there. Because in the past I would have plastered on that smile while silently reeling inside in shame and anger and hopelessness. This time there was nothing fake about it.
I enjoyed the rest of the day.
What I want you to take from this, if you take anything.
Someone telling you to stop having the experience you’re having is not a moral verdict on you. It’s not a sign that you said the wrong thing or that you should have stayed quiet or that the work hasn’t been working.
The Machine wants you to make those four words mean something about you. The Machine is selfish. The Machine is wrong. The Machine is always wrong about that, actually — that’s part of how you know it’s the Machine talking and not your actual voice.
After sitting with this for two weeks now I’m able to accept that oh just stop it wasn’t aimed at me. It was aimed at her own discomfort with what was happening. My body was saying something out loud that her body probably also had an opinion about, and she didn’t have anywhere to put that opinion in the middle of a horse race on Mother’s Day. So she handed it back to me, broken.
She wasn’t trying to silence me. She was trying to silence her own discomfort with what was happening, and the easiest way to do that was to ask me to stop bringing it up. Same mechanism, different surface.
I can know exactly what she did and not need her to know that I know (although I’m pretty sure she reads my Substack, so… Hi). The work isn’t her business. The work is mine.
The Safety database got a deposit from this day, even though it might not look like one.
The deposit wasn’t people received me well. The deposit was I said the true sentence. I didn’t get the response I wanted. I slid into the Ashes anyway. I found my way back. I enjoyed the rest of the afternoon. And nothing about this day proved the Machine right.
And even though it isn’t as clean or fun as other deposits, it’s actually one of the more useful kinds of deposits. It shows that the nervous system, the slide, and the recovery can coexist with the rest of the day. That you can be in the Ashes and at a horse race at the same time. That the people-pleasing pattern is no longer the only available move when someone you love hands you something broken.
I went home that night, and I didn’t think about the day. I didn’t journal it into the ground. I didn’t text anyone about what had happened. I just let my body file what it had filed.
Two weeks later, I’m writing this. Which is its own kind of evidence: that the moment was real enough to need this, and far enough away now to handle being looked at. Both things, again. Both things, always.
If you’ve been doing this work and you had a moment recently where you thought I shouldn’t have said anything, I want to say something to you plainly.
You should have said something. You said the true sentence. The response was about them, not about you. The slide was not a failure. The recovery was the work. And nothing about the moment they handed it back to you broken says anything about whether you should keep saying true sentences.
Keep saying them. Keep filing the deposits. Keep finding the Ember in places you wouldn’t think to look.
The Machine wants you quiet. Your Voice has been there the whole time.
It’s not about who hears you. It’s about whether you can hear yourself.
💜 Lauren