Embracing The Down Cycle

I drove across country alone with my dog, listened to lots of audiobooks, and reflected on the past few years.

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Today’s post is focused on what it feels like to slowly inch out of a depressive period through practicing self-compassion. I’ll be honest, it’s coming so late on a Sunday because I was afraid to send it. But it’s a topic I had plenty of time to think about this week, because I just finished a cross country road trip. Alone.

Well, not totally alone. I was accompanied by Olive, my perfect Pit-Mix rescue who is so curious and brave.

But unfortunately she can’t drive, which means I had to do it solo, clocking 8-10 hours everyday, for 5 days, going to our nation’s great dog parks each morning, and staying at a Days Inn, a Hampton Inn, whatever dog friendly hotels were between Des Moines and Iowa City or Toledo and Cleveland, or wherever I found myself that day.

This was my fourth cross-country road trip, my first alone. It was harder than the others, faster. I wish I could’ve slowed down for Olive, but I was driving with purpose, without the luxury of time.

I observed the otherworldly rock formations of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado, the gorgeous, rolling hills of Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

You must feel so connected to the soul of the country, living in these places, I thought. Yet, the majority of people here fight against protecting the earth. I blame capitalist corporate greed for turning people against the soil that feeds them, though, not the strangers I drive by.

I thought about how much longer I can live in a place where I can’t see the sky this clearly, in a way where it seems to extend forever, perfectly blue, every crevasse of the clouds reaching out to me.

And I listened to audiobooks. So many audiobooks.

My Goodreads has never looked so colorful.

I finished four audiobooks, all via Libby, the library’s free app. If you don’t have a library card, stop reading this right now and go get one.

Here’s the roundup of my listens:

• Day 1 & 2: The Vanishing Half

  • The narration of the audiobook does not live up to the prose. If you haven’t read it yet, skip the audiobook and opt for a hard copy. But definitely worth reading.

• Day 2 & 3: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

  • FIVE STARS! The best audiobook I listened to. The narrator matched the character and tone so perfectly. If you haven’t read it yet, the audiobook is a wonderful choice.

• Day 3 & 4: True Biz

  • Four-star book & audiobook. I liked that you could hear the sounds of ASL, but I didn’t love the narrator. The book felt like it was written to educate hearing audience, but that being said, I did learn a lot.

• Day 5: The Lost Daughter

  • Five-star book with a four-star audiobook. The narrator is not the mysterious Italian woman I was hoping for, but god this book is so emotionally honest and blunt and brave and weird, I loved it.

Thoughts on these books?

When I wasn’t listening, I was observing, the innate beauty of the land, the preciousness of Olive as she saw the world for the first time, and my own thoughts and emotions.

I’ll be gone from LA for the next seven weeks, embarking on big adventures: Time with family, my Tuscany retreat, my wedding, friends’ weddings, travels in Europe. This is a huge, exciting time in my life.

Yet, I am in a down cycle.

Or, more accurately, I am slowly emerging from the longest down cycle of my life. A period of perceived failure, of feeling lost, of not knowing what was next in my career for the first time in my life.

We all experience the ebbs and flows of life, but when my ebbs arrive, my judgment, fear, and inner critic have a tendency to react like this is a very bad emergency situation. Yet, it’s not. It’s simply a routine part of life:

"There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down cycle is bad, except in the mind's judgment." — Eckhart Tolle

I have not thrived in two years.

I have not fully emerged from the hole I fell into during COVID, when the world shut down, when I started caring for a close family member who became sick, when a project I’d worked on for years didn’t sell, when we woke up one morning and found our dog dead on the living room floor, when my fiancé and I lived in our childhood bedrooms as I became a caretaker, and our relationship hung on by a thread as the stresses of our circumstances rushed in like the Star Wars trash compactor.

Some good things happened in my career during this time. I got nominated for a WGA Award, The End of Us went to SXSW, I launched my own business. In fact, this year I will have held retreats in Costa Rica, and in Italy, where I’ll live for a month. Starting my retreats is a huge light leading me toward happiness, and the life I dream of living. I started this newsletter in a dark period, but it now brings me creative joy.

Some good things happened in my personal life, my sick relative had a surgery that helped them improve, we moved back to LA, rented a nice home, adopted Olive, and rebuilt our relationship into a source of safety, comfort, and joy.

But I’m still not thriving. The weight of the past two years pulls me down like a switch has been turned off and can’t come back on. I’m not making a lot of money. Nothing feels like passion, ease, arrival, except for the weeks I’m on my retreats. Otherwise, I feel stuck. I grasp at the memory of daily creative flow. I wonder why I can’t do more, be more, make more.

For about a year, I was mad about this every day. Mad at myself, mad at the world, mad at everything. During much of this time, I was very hard on myself and found no space for self-compassion. Acceptance? Absolutely not. Gratitude? Nopeeee. But slowly, I committed to doing the work. I went back to therapy. I went on Lexipro for a few months. I meditated and practiced Yoga regularly. I worked on accepting my reality.

Nothing like 5 days alone with your dog to get into a massively reflective mindset and share your soul with the internet.

My favorite Yoga teacher Julian Regulus (of Costa Rica retreat fame) says that Yoga is the practice of accepting reality as it is.

There is nothing wrong with receding so that you can once again flow, it’s only judgment that convinces us of that.

Instead of judging our down cycles, can we practice accepting reality, instead?

It was only a year ago that I was in the most emotional pain of my life. That really isn’t that long. What if I accept that I’m not 100% thriving right now, just a year later? What if recognize that as normal and okay, instead of punishing myself for not getting better faster, feeling better faster, using my time better? Better faster better faster better faster.

It’s only from acceptance that we can find true self-compassion.

An incredible day in the worst down-cycle of my life.

I’ve worked on quieting my inner critic for a long time, but only now am I achieving genuine self-compassion. I’m only now able to adequately quiet the voice that shouts WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU YOU’VE WASTED SO MUCH TIME! by responding, Actually, nothing is wrong with me. Things are hard right now, and that’s okay. I’m gonna go meditate babe, you aren’t needed here, but thanks for checking in. I know you mean well, xoxo.

It takes time and effort to let go of what does not serve you. It takes time and effort to recreate yourself based on who you truly are, and not who you thought you had to be.

Embracing my down cycle led to a seismic internal shift. I don’t want to give the impression the cycle is over, and EVERYTHING IS GREAT NOW! The past weighs on me, but I breathe into my body, into the emotional place I’m in today, and ground myself in the reality of my circumstances. I feel gratitude for the incredible experiences I’ve created during this difficult period of my life. A retreat I created, a wedding I planned, traveling the world, making some of my dreams a reality.

If that all sounds too dreamy to be part of a down cycle, may I remind you, life is messy. It’s joy and it’s pain thrown in a blender and mixed together, it is everything all at once. We ebb and flow, transform and emerge.

The trick is to let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.¹

To read more about self-compassion, I enjoyed this article from Vox about how it can literally make you a better person.

Due to 16 years of starting school in September, I often think of this time as a chance to check-in on our year’s resolutions and allow ourselves a reset.

The next few months feel like the final push of 2022.

Instead of beating yourself up on what resolutions you didn’t keep...

• Can you accept where you are right now?

• Can you appreciate how far you have come this year, in both ways expected and unexpected ways?

• How can you practice self-compassion to reframe the resolutions you’ve set?

• Where have you been putting your attention and energy? How can you turn your focus to what matters most as we close out the year?

I’ll meet you in the comments to discuss these questions! Or, as always, you can use this as a journaling prompt instead.

Have a wonderful week!

Xo,
Ali

1. Yoga For Creatives is on hiatus! I’m in Italy for the rest of September, where I’m hosting a writing & Yoga retreat. I will still write Little Things, because I’m committed to the cause (of sending email.)

2. I’m teaching an awesome character workshop as part of Script Anatomy’s Craft Festival. Use my code EARLYPASS for $70 off a Festival Pass — the code expires tomorrow, September 5th!

3. I had so much fun as a guest on The Alarmist podcast, a show that scrutinizes history’s greatest disasters to figure out what went wrong, and, most importantly, who’s to blame. You can listen to it here!

1. The last three sentences are from Go To The Limits of Your Longing, by Rainer Maria Rilke