This past weekend, I stood at a fence in the Texas Hill Country and watched the sun sink behind the trees. The sky was painted in shades of orange and gold, and for a little while there was nowhere I needed to be. No emails demanding a response. No office politics or drama. No laundry. No mental checklist scrolling endlessly through my brain. Just a beautiful sunset, a good friend, and a quiet moment at the end of the day.
As I stood there, I felt something that has become surprisingly rare in my life.
Peace.
Not excitement. Not distraction. Not the temporary relief that comes from checking something off a to-do list. Actual peace. The kind that settles deep enough that you don’t realize how tightly you’ve been holding yourself together until you finally let go.
Since coming home, I’ve been trying to understand why relaxing has always been so difficult for me. For years, I assumed I was simply bad at it. Bad at vacations. Bad at long weekends. Bad at sitting still. Even when I’m exhausted, there is a part of me that resists slowing down. But I think I’m finally starting to understand why.
Maybe I don’t struggle to relax because I don’t enjoy it. Maybe I struggle to relax because I know what comes next.
The truth is that when I genuinely relax, re-entering my normal life feels catastrophic to my mind, body, and nervous system. Within hours of getting home, my stomach was in knots. The headaches returned. My thoughts started racing ahead to Monday before Sunday was even over. It felt like my body was rebelling against being asked to step back into a life that had suddenly become much louder than it was two days earlier.
And that made me wonder if this is why vacations have always carried a strange anxiety for me. Not because I don’t want to go. Not because I don’t enjoy them. Quite the opposite. Maybe it’s because somewhere deep down I know the bill is coming due when I get back.
When you’re living inside stress every day, you adapt to it. You normalize it. You convince yourself that the tension in your shoulders, the knot in your stomach, the racing thoughts, and the constant feeling of bracing for impact are simply part of adulthood. Part of work. Part of life. You become so accustomed to carrying the weight that you stop noticing how heavy it is.
Then something happens. A girls’ trip. A vacation. A long weekend. A sunset over the Hill Country. For forty-eight hours, you set the load down.
The problem is that once you’ve remembered what it feels like to put it down, picking it back up feels almost unbearable.
I used to think that meant relaxing wasn’t worth it. Why spend two wonderful days away if you’re going to spend the next several days paying for it with headaches, nausea, anxiety, and exhaustion? Why look forward to vacations if returning home feels so difficult?
Lately, though, I’m starting to think I’ve been asking the wrong question.
Maybe the problem isn’t that relaxation makes me sick. Maybe relaxation reveals how sick stress has made me. Maybe those forty-eight hours didn’t create the contrast. Maybe they simply exposed it. Maybe standing at that fence watching the sun disappear beyond the trees wasn’t an escape from reality at all. Maybe it was the first honest glimpse of what life feels like when my nervous system isn’t constantly running a marathon.
I don’t know exactly what to do with that realization yet. What I do know is that if two days of peace can feel that good, and returning to normal can feel that hard, perhaps the goal isn’t to avoid relaxing. Perhaps the goal is to build a life that doesn’t feel so impossible to return to once I’ve remembered what peace feels like.
Blessings y’all – Amy
