You know how when you buy a new car, you suddenly start seeing it everywhere? The same is true when you start having language for what you’ve been experiencing.
You start seeing it everywhere. In the woman next to you at the school pickup line. In the conversation at dinner where someone laughs a little too hard at a story about her dog being more emotionally available than her ex. In yourself, in a hundred small ways you previously categorized as just how you are.
The language doesn’t change what’s happening. It just makes what’s happening visible.
That’s what we are going to do here. There are four states your nervous system moves through when it has been carrying more than it could carry for longer than it should have. I gave them names because they didn’t have any.
This is going to be the longest piece in this series, so hang with me. But I promise, I’m not going to clinical it up on you. I’m going to walk you through how I landed in each one of these and let you tell me whether you recognize your own porch.
Cool? Cool. Let’s go.
Ashes
I spent ten years in the Ashes without realizing that was where I was.
Not metaphorically. Ten actual years. There were periods inside those ten years where things were more or less intense, but the baseline was a kind of grey numbness that I had decided was just me. I’m just lower-energy. I’m just a homebody. I’m just not a very emotional person. I had so much language for what I was experiencing, and none of it was accurate.
The Ashes is the state in which the nervous system realizes that daily function costs more than it has. So it cuts the power. Emotions get filed away in a drawer the body can’t open. You can still function. You can still hold the job and feed the kids and answer the work emails. You just do it from a few steps to the left of your actual body, watching the performance play out.
The reason Ashes is so hard to recognize while you’re in it is that nothing is technically wrong. There’s no crisis. There’s no breakdown anyone can point to. You’re not in the ER. You’re not in bed. You’re upright. You’re functional. You look fine in the photos.
Ashes is quiet. It’s efficient. It’s convincing. The system has done such a thorough job of conserving power that even you think the flat is who you are. That’s why people stay in it for a decade. There’s nothing to leave from. Nothing is wrong enough to require leaving.
Ember
A nervous system doesn’t move from numb to alive in a single moment. It happens in tiny little flashes. The first time I noticed one, I was drinking a Pumpkin Chai Latte at Starbucks in October. (Yes, I am basic. Let’s move on.)
I was doing an assignment for a church class where I needed to list the people I’d wronged. My dad’s name came up. He’d died six months earlier from cancer that took him before I could say what I needed to say before I even knew I needed to say anything. Then my mom’s name came up, and with it a memory of a hospital recovery room and an accusation and a couch and a flight home that I had been carrying for years in some compressed file the body finally cracked open (the whole devastating story is in Spiraling Into Control). I sat in that place for maybe thirty seconds and felt something I would later understand to be I am not okay. And then I shook it off, closed my laptop, picked up the kids from school, went to church, made dinner, and did not think about it again for two months.
That is what an Ember is.
A brief flash of recognition that something isn’t right. Lasting seconds. Not enough capacity to stay with it. The system opens a window, you see something through it, and the window closes before you can name what you saw.
The trick with Embers is that they feel obnoxious and inconvenient. The body has been doing such a good job of not noticing for so long that when noticing starts to leak through, the first impulse is to seal the leak. Get back to functional. Pick up the kids. Make the dinner. Pretend you didn’t just feel something.
Two months after the Starbucks moment, I was standing in my living room with a tangle of Christmas lights in my hands, watching my husband at the time snap at our toddler with an anger that made her freeze and our son go still. And I had another Ember. When did this become normal? When did I become the one who manages the emotional temperature in the house? Same shape. Brief flash. Few seconds of clarity.
This time I didn’t dismiss it.
That’s what an Ember is too. Not the first time you notice. The first time you let yourself stay with what you noticed. Which is a different thing entirely.
Flame
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, and I want to be honest about that. There is like nothing fun about the flame. Sorry.
Once you’ve had enough Embers that you can no longer pretend you didn’t see what you saw, the system shifts, just a little at first. It stops conserving. It starts refusing. Things that used to be tolerable become intolerable. The marriage you’d been performing for years stops accepting the performance. The friend group that requires you to shrink stops being a friend group you can stand to sit with anymore.
The Flame doesn’t show up as confidence. It doesn’t show up as finding your voice the way Instagram coaches like to package it. It shows up as I literally cannot keep doing this and I don’t yet know what comes after.
I literally cannot keep doing this and I don’t yet know what comes after.
For me, the Flame showed up when I realized that I had spent years putting on an eighteenth-century gown in August heat to attend battle reenactments because my then-husband loved them. Girl. I have churned butter. Voluntarily. Or so I told myself. I have stood in full costume in a field pretending to be a colonial-era housewife while my body screamed at me that I would rather be literally anywhere else doing literally anything else.
I am not, as it turns out, a person who likes hiking, camping, cosplay, or musket demonstrations. I am a person who loves being at home and values quiet and craves peace. So once my system had enough capacity to start saying no to the things it had been saying yes to for a decade, it could not be talked back into saying yes.
That is the Flame. The body refusing to keep performing what was killing it. The terrifying part is that the refusal arrives before you know what to replace the performance with. So you’re standing there in your life with the costume off in your emotional birthday suit.
The Flame is not comfortable. It’s not supposed to be. It’s the system burning off what doesn’t fit anymore. The clarity isn’t soft. The clarity is sharp. Sometimes the clarity costs you the relationship, the job, the friend group, the version of yourself everyone else liked.
If you are currently in the Flame, you already know. Nobody has to explain it to you. You’re just looking for someone to tell you it has a name and you’re not losing your mind.
It has a name. You’re not losing your mind.
Rise
The Rise is the one I have to write carefully, because every wellness writer in America wants to turn Rise into and then she was healed. That is not what Rise is. Rise is not the finish line. Rise is not the moment you graduate from your nervous system and become a person who never struggles again.
Rise is stance. The ability to hold loss and clarity at the same time. To have a relationship with your own internal weather that isn’t run by panic or shame. For your own voice to come out before the I’m fine machine starts up.
It’s often totally invisible. From the outside, the woman in Rise might look like she’s doing the same things she was doing in Ashes — going to work, feeding the kids, answering emails. But she’s doing them from inside her body. She’s not watching herself do them from somewhere outside. She knows what she wants for lunch and she eats it. She notices when she’s annoyed and decides what to do about it. She disagrees with people without disappearing. She lets her own kid be mad at her without immediately collapsing into guilt.
The Rise honestly feels kind of boring and like a total let down after the emotional wreckage of the Flame. Once the system isn’t running constant background calculations on whether everyone in the room is okay, an enormous amount of bandwidth comes back. You stop being tired in your bones. You stop performing presence and start being present. The exhaustion that you thought was just life turns out to have been the cost of the performance. You do what needs to be done and still have the capacity for more.
The Rise is not where you stay though. The Rise is a state you can access, lose, access again, lose again, access again.
You don’t graduate
This is the part that broke open the whole thing for me when I hit my second massive identity collapse and found myself back in the Ashes.
The four states are not a staircase. You don’t climb Ashes to Ember to Flame to Rise and then you’re done. There is no done.
The four states are not a staircase.
These are places your nervous system moves through — and it will keep moving through them, in different orders, with different triggers, for the rest of your life. You can be in Rise for two years and then a parent gets sick or a marriage ends or you have a baby or you lose a friend, and you find yourself back in Ashes. Familiar Ashes. Recognizable Ashes. The same flat-grey quiet you spent ten years in before.
This is where I so often see people just utterly destroyed. I did all that work. I’m right back where I started. The work didn’t take. I am fundamentally broken in a way that cannot be fixed.
That’s not what’s happening.
What’s happening is the Spiral. Which I’m going to write about next, because it deserves its own room to breathe.
For now, just know this. The four states exist. You have moved through all of them, multiple times, probably without language for any of it. The point of naming them is so that the next time you find yourself in the flat, or in the inconvenient clarity, or in the burning, or in the quiet stance — you know where you are. You stop blaming yourself for being there. You stop running the diagnostic loop. You stop trying to skip the part you’re in to get to the part you think you should be in.
You start treating your own internal weather as something you’re navigating instead of something you’re failing at.
That’s the entire shift.
The map makes the terrain legible.
That is so much more than nothing.