Willow Space

Feel It Finally Let Go.

At our Fourth of July barbecue, my husband told the whole patio, "Patti doesn't have an off switch. Never has. She came from the factory like this." Everybody laughed. I laughed. It's a good line. He's been polishing it for thirty years. Then I carried a tray inside, set it on the counter, stepped into the pantry, and shut the door. And I stood in my own pantry, in the dark, between the crockpot and the paper towels, for six minutes, while my family laughed on the other side of the wall at the joke about how I am. I want to tell you what I figured out in that pantry, because I'd bet money there's a version of that joke about you. My name is Patti. I'm fifty-five. I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I have been the punchline of the same joke since approximately 1994. The joke has editions. "Patti doesn't sit, she hovers." "The Energizer Bunny called, she wants her batteries back." At my in-laws': "Don't bother offering Patti a chair." My own mother had a version — "that one was born vertical" — so the joke actually predates my marriage. It's affectionate. I need you to understand that. Nobody is being cruel. It's the kind of joke a family builds around a fact the way a tree grows around a fence post. And here's the fact. At every gathering, I'm the one at the counter while everyone's on the deck. I watch entire movies standing up, folding laundry that could wait. On vacation — and my family will perform this story on request — I was seen power-walking the rental cottage's driveway at 6:15 A.M., because apparently even the lake gets inspected on my watch. Four years ago my kids bought me a hammock for Mother's Day. As a joke. A nice one, the kind with a stand and a spreader bar. Everyone laughed at the vision of me in a hammock, and I laughed, and my son strung it up between the two maples. It has hung there for four summers. The warranty tag is still zip-tied to the bar. I have never once been in it. I used to tell that as a funny story about myself. I'm about to tell you the unfunny version, which I only learned this year, standing in a pantry. Here's what nobody at the barbecue knows. They don't know that I have left yoga class early four times — always at the same point, the last five minutes, when the teacher turns the lights down and everyone lies flat and lets go. There's a name for that part; I looked it up after the second escape. It's the resting pose. I have fled the resting pose. Four times. I told the teacher I had somewhere to be. I sat in my car in the parking lot with nowhere to be. Who fails lying down? That was the exact sentence I used on myself, driving home. Who fails LYING DOWN? They don't know that "Patti's up doing her laps" — the family's name for my evening circuits of the house — is not a habit. A habit is something you could skip. I have stood at the top of the stairs at 10 P.M., dead tired, negotiating with my own legs about one more pass through a kitchen I had already checked, and lost. And they don't know about the vacation mornings. Not the power-walking — they know about the power-walking, it's in the act. They don't know that I'm out there at 6:15 because lying in bed awake next to a sleeping person while your whole body idles like a truck at a red light is lonelier than a driveway. For thirty years I have had one private explanation for all of it, and it's the same explanation the joke offers: this is what I'm like. Born vertical. Factory settings. Wired this way. Which means that every one of those failures — the yoga escapes, the hammock, the laps I can't skip — got filed in the same drawer: character. My character. And you can't return your character, so I laughed at the jokes and did my laps and understood, privately, in the specific way you understand things you've never said out loud, that rest was a room other people could enter and I could not, and that it was somehow, in a way no one would ever say meanly, my own fault. Standing in the pantry on the Fourth of July, at fifty-five, I finally asked the question thirty years overdue: What if it was never a personality? The person who answered it was my sister-in-law, Deb, in August, at the lake, at the kitchen counter — where I was standing, obviously — while everyone else was down on the dock. Deb married in twenty years ago, which makes her family enough to know the joke and outside enough to have never found it entirely funny. She was quiet for a while and then she said, "Can I tell you what I notice, every year, from the dock?" I said sure. She said, "The whole family relaxes on a schedule. Beer at noon, naps at two. And you match the schedule — you sit when sitting is happening. But your body never arrives. You sit like the chair is a bus stop." Then she said, "Patti. Nobody is born like that. I've raised three babies. Babies are the least vertical people on earth. Somewhere, somebody learns it." I started to give her the joke — factory settings — and she talked over me, gently, which Deb never does. She said, "You were the oldest of five, and your mom worked doubles, and you ran that house from the time you were what, eleven? You didn't come from the factory standing up. You were STOOD up. Posted. And every year the family needed you, the posting got renewed, and now the reasons are gone — your kids are grown, nobody's shift needs covering — and the posting is still there, and everyone calls it your personality, including you." I looked down the counter at her. She said, "There's a difference between a woman who won't sit still and a woman who can't. From the outside they're identical. You've spent thirty years taking credit for the first one because nobody ever told you the second one existed." I want to tell you what that sentence did to me, standing at that counter. It did what the pantry started. Thirty years of failed relaxation reclassified in one stroke — from character flaw to standing order. Not "Patti is bad at resting." Patti was posted, at eleven, by a household that needed her, and no one ever came back to end the posting, because the household that issued it doesn't exist anymore. You cannot resign from a post by wanting to. I had been trying to WANT my way into that hammock for four years. And Deb, it turned out, knew all this the way I know the joke — from the inside. Youngest of a different kind of family, posted a different way, and two years further down the road than me on the way back out. She told me what she uses that night, on the dock, after everyone went up. I'll give you the short version of my resistance: I said I didn't need another thing to be bad at. I have a drawer with a resistance band, two mindfulness books, and a gratitude journal with four entries. Every one of those items asked ME to do the resting. I am the wrong person to ask. The part of me that takes requests is the part that's been standing since 1981. She said that's the whole reason this one worked. "You don't do it. It's done to you. You lie down — and yes, you can lie down for four minutes, you lie down for X-rays — and it talks to the part of you that's standing post, in the only language that part ever spoke. Not words. You couldn't cooperate if you tried. Trying isn't on the menu." It's called The Somatic De-Armoring System. Small company, Sacred Willow — one woman, Amanda, builds them. Thirty-seven dollars, once. Here's what's in it, translated out of catalog language by a fellow punchline: The Jaw-to-Belly Connection, four minutes. Where "I'm fine, I'll sit later" actually lives. This is night one. The teeth come apart and the middle lets down, and you'll notice it the way you notice a noise stopping — by the quiet. The Pelvic Floor Drop, three minutes. A post you didn't know you owned. I have no joke for this one. It's been holding since the Clinton administration. The Psoas Release, three minutes. The laps live here — the deep spring-loaded brace that fires you up off couches. The part of me that sits like the chair is a bus stop. Three minutes for the part that never actually boards. The Shake-Off, ten minutes. For the days that wind you tighter — the ones that used to buy my legs three extra circuits at 10 P.M. Out the same night instead. The Deep Delta Melt, twenty minutes, for going under. You're supposed to fall asleep during it. Read that again. There is a relaxation practice on this earth that you literally cannot flunk, and I own it now, and the woman who fled savasana four times would like a word with whoever kept that a secret. Every track has a twin with no voice, for the nights you're all out of listening. There's a plain-language map, and a two-minute self-scan that finds your posts for you — mine found the jaw and the middle in about ninety seconds, which is faster than three therapists and a yoga teacher, none of whom I'm knocking, all of whom were talking to the wrong department. $37 once, files are yours forever, no app, no subscription, no streak — nothing to be good at, which in my case is the entire product. And the guarantee is a full year. 365 days, refund with one email, keep everything anyway. I have failed relaxation on thirty-day timelines my whole adult life. A year with no way to fail felt like it was designed by someone who had met me. If you already know you're the punchline: 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/5 Scoreboard, kept honestly, by a woman who keeps honest books for a living: Nights one through four: I did it lying on top of the made bed, fully dressed, like a person waiting for a bus, because that is who I am. Nothing to report except the teeth. Fine. Noted. Night seven: I sat through a movie. An entire movie, on the couch, with my husband. No laps. Dale didn't say anything during — smart man — but at the credits he looked over and said, "huh," which for a Wisconsin husband is a standing ovation. Week two: the top-of-stairs negotiation at 10 P.M. — I won one. Then most. The impulse still knocks; some nights I still do a lap for old times' sake. The difference is it's become a choice, and I'm the one making it, which after thirty years is the whole revolution. Week five, the yoga rematch. Same studio, same teacher, same lights down at the end. I stayed. Flat on the mat through all five minutes of the resting pose, and somewhere in minute three, tears ran sideways into my ears, quietly, which nobody saw, which is exactly how I wanted it. Not sad tears. The other kind. The kind you get when you walk into the room you were told you couldn't enter and it turns out your name was on the list the whole time. And then Labor Day. Same patio, same crowd as the Fourth. And at some point Dale stood up with his beer and told the yard, "Well — Patti found the switch," and everybody laughed, and I laughed. But here's the part I'll keep. Later that afternoon, my son took a picture, because — his words — "it had literally never happened." It's me. In the hammock. Book on my chest, eyes closed, one foot hanging out. There are now two photographs in existence of me at rest. Both from the last month. He captioned the first one "proof." The tag's off the hammock. I cut it myself, with the kitchen scissors, four summers late, and I'm not ashamed to tell you I kept it. It's in the drawer with the retired night guards of my other failures. Evidence closes. Case reopened. Verdict overturned. Deb, two years. Me since August. My neighbor Lynn since September — she watched me in the hammock over the fence for a solid week before she cracked and asked. Our text thread is three women and the nightly message is one word: "Down?" So here's the mirror, punchline to punchline. If your family has a joke about you — the hoverer, the Energizer Bunny, born vertical, no off switch — and you laugh at it, and it's a little bit true, and lately it's been landing somewhere it didn't used to land. If there is a piece of resting furniture in your home you have never once used — go ahead, name it; everyone owns one; mine had a warranty tag on it for four years. If you have ever fled the resting pose, or lost a negotiation with your own legs at 10 P.M., or stood in a pantry in the dark while people you love laughed at the joke about how you are — Then hear the thing Deb told me at the counter, because it's yours now: there is a difference between won't and can't, and it's not a character difference. It's a posting. Somebody stood you up a long time ago for reasons that were probably good, and the reasons ended, and nobody came back to stand you down. That's not a personality. That's not factory settings. And it is absolutely not your fault — you cannot resign in a language your body doesn't speak. Four minutes tonight, in the language it does. Headphones on. $37, once, forever, and a year to decide. 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/5 P.S. My mother was born vertical too — that's where I got the line. She's seventy-nine now, and last month she watched me get out of the hammock and said, not joking, quieter than my mother says anything: "How did you do that?" I showed her. She's on night twelve. Eldest daughters, if you're reading this: it goes back generations, and it can stop going. 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/5 P.P.S. The audit, before you close this: walk through your house in your mind and find the resting furniture you never use. The chaise. The recliner's recline function. The porch swing. The tub that's held exactly plants. That object is not a purchase mistake. It's a monument to a post you never chose. Four minutes is how the post ends. 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/5