Slow Days Are Holy Days
Unhooking from urgency and returning to slow dopamine.
Dear reader,
I’m practicing how to be a relaxed woman.
I’ve been patiently returning to my journal, and looking more closely at my relationships, especially with my parents. As I enter perimenopause and near forty, I find myself explaining less. Not fighting for my place. Not working so hard to be understood. Just quietly stepping away from what no longer feeds me.
I’ve been doing some of the exercises from It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn on inherited family trauma. I’m not sure how I feel about the book overall, or if I agree with all of it, but the prompts have been helpful. They’ve opened small windows. Let in a bit of light.
My thoughts often return to my mother, how I’ve held her stories, how they’ve shaped me. Much of it is tender and painful. But I keep circling back to how I don’t ever remember her being a relaxed woman.
Then I look at myself, especially over these last few years. I look at the women around me. My friends, my kin, the ones who carry so much. How many of us can truly say we’ve known what it means to feel relaxed, not just for a moment, but deep in the body? A lasting, rooted ease?
Yes, there are glimpses. But I don’t think I’ve ever fully let go of overthinking. The survival mode. The vigilance. The anxious looping. The worry about being perceived, about being liked. The thoughts for the future. The tracking of safety. Genocides. Climate change. Fascism. The way our bodies are trained to scan for harm. And I cried. Because I knew it wasn’t just mine. It’s in my lineage. It’s in all of ours. Patriarchy has not given us a moment to exhale.
The only time I come close to feeling like a relaxed woman is when I’m making art. When I’m with trees. When I’m lying in the sun with Aki in my arms. When I’m listening to birdsong. When I’m walking barefoot in the wild. When I’m in conversation with the more-than-human world. And even then, there’s still the possibility of a psycho jumping out of the bushes. Even in beauty, something clenches.
Last week, my dear friend Bryonie turned fifty. We gathered at her place, a house on the great lake, where time seemed to stretch and soften. There were alpaca farms nearby and wildflowers everywhere. We cooked dinners together. We baked cakes. We laughed in the kitchen, wrote quietly beside each other, held one another, sang under the trees, and made offerings to the land. We tended to the fire, and in the mornings we blessed the water before it touched our skin. Something in me stirred that hadn’t stirred in a while.
In that space of celebration and care, I realized something I hadn’t been able to name. When I became a mother—because my own mother wasn’t able to show up for me—I stopped caring for myself in the ways I once did. I gave all of me to Aki. Every last bit. I became determined to be the kind of mother I needed. And in doing that, I slowly disappeared from my own care. How this way of giving, while rooted in love, was also shaped by grief. And fear. And a deep hunger to make something whole again.
Spending these few days with friends, gathered in joy and slowness, reminded me of the parts of me that have gone quiet. I remembered what I love outside of art-making and writing. I remembered the pleasure of tending the fire, of washing fruit slowly, of walking with no urgency, of being held in a way that asks nothing of me. I remembered how much I miss being cared for. How much I long to feel like I belong, not just as a mother, but as a woman. As a friend. As a being with a body and a name and her own needs.
I wanted to write this list to remind us of small but meaningful and replenishing ways we can return to slow dopamine living in a world where speed has become a currency that extracts from our souls.
Slow days are holy days :
First thing: walk slow wherever you go.
Stop to listen to birdsong.
Take pictures of flowers just for yourself.
Take off your shoes and kiss the earth with your feet.
Wake up and stay in bed for a while, keep your phone in another room.
Kiss your body everywhere your lips can reach.
Commit to a long-term project with no deadline.
Water the garden, caress the plants, say thank you a thousand times a day.
Hold hands with your friends.
Drink tea next to a river.
Speak genuinely with locals, neighbors, service workers.
Gift the things you make with your hands, or the things others make with theirs.
Color beside your child or a child in silence—no teaching, no rules, no lessons.
Make a simple soup.
Be silent for a whole day, no talking, no music, no headphones, no screens.
Stare into a fire, into candlelight.
Rub herbs between your palms.
Get rid of restrictive clothing.
Stop sucking in your belly, let her hang out, breathe, and be filled with life.
Relax your jaw.
Bleed into the earth, pee into the earth, release into the earth.
Sunbathe naked and open your legs to the sunshine.
Make eye contact often.
Collect fallen leaves.
Memorize the shape of a bird in flight.
Name things often and share your findings, your wisdom, your knowledge.
Listen to an elder speak and ask questions about their life.
Read a book.
Sit with your back against a tree, or hug it, or straddle it.
Pick a rosemary or mint sprig and make it your blessing stick. Bless yourself, everyone, and everything in sight.
Speak out loud to nature as if you’re with a dear friend.
Bake something simple from scratch.
Handwrite a letter to yourself or someone.
Make something with your hands and let your emotions spill into the colors.
Let your nipples feel the wind.
Give something precious away.
Name your scars, stretch marks, and wrinkles as holy.
Walk naked in your home and feel the power in not hiding.
Weep without hurrying through it.
Take up the whole damn bed.
Laugh too loud, too long, too much.
Touch yourself like the lover you always wanted.
Lick honey from your fingers.
Dance like you’re conjuring a storm.
Moan when you stretch.
Nurse your child in public.
Break the rules.
Don’t smile when you don’t mean it.
Tell bedtime stories that aren’t in books.
Go makeup free.
Turn rage into radical action.
Speak truth in quiet rooms for Palestine.
Howl at the moon untamed and free, like a feral woman shedding a burden held for thousands of years.
Love,
Vanja
With you dear sister. Thank you for these writings. Love.
I love this Vanja. it's something I think about often, being a relaxed woman. I keep saying that I used to be so unbothered before becoming a parent and now I'm always bothered, always near an edge. I hope the relaxed woman revolution is contagious <3