The calm that was really absence.
On being switched off and calling it calm.
“I was told I had the calm heart of an athlete. I know now I wasn’t there.”
Somewhere in a set of blood test and heart rate results from early 2012, there’s a number I was proud of for years.
My resting heart rate: low, steady, unflappable. The calm heart of an athlete, my GP said. The kind of heart that conserves itself and doesn’t move unless its owner decides to move it, he explained. He delivered it as good news, a small strength of mine amongst some challenging circumstances, and I took it exactly that way. Whatever was going on in my head, my body was apparently a picture of composure.
I’d gone to the GP because I’d been low and flat for the better part of a year, and had decided to see a doctor and pour my heart out. He listened, said what I was describing sounded like it could be depression, wrote a referral to a psychologist, and ordered the tests to rule out anything physical.
The heart rate was just an extra check on top of the real reason I was there. But it was the part I latched onto, because it was the one piece of the whole exercise that told me I was fine.
I used the referral, and I’ve been doing that work ever since. It’s the reason I understand the number differently now. That low, immovable heart wasn’t calm.
I was feeling almost nothing, because feeling had become too much, and my body was showing that… I was congratulated for the exact thing that needed looking at.
We tend to treat ongoing calm as a good thing. Someone who doesn’t lose it and is composed. Plenty of the time that composure is real and hard-won, and worth having. But it can also be suppression, and from the outside it looks identical.
Two people can go quiet in the same hard moment, and one of them is fully there, holding something strong without being knocked over by it, and the other has left the building and pulled the door shut behind them. To others, they look the same level of calm, but are very much not.
Steadiness is a better term for the first one. It’s active, stays, can hold and observe a big feeling without needing to shrink it or slip away from it.
In 2012 I wasn’t steady, I was a mess. I’d become so good at suppression that I’d stopped feeling much at all.
Not long ago I was with two other people while they talked through something personal. They’d decided I was safe to have there, which I understood and didn’t take lightly.
What I couldn’t work out was my job. There were three options and I ran through all of them: present and observing, present and contributing, or physically present and mentally somewhere else. I chose the first one.
Present and observing has a look to it. Attentive. Nodding at the right places. The body moving with what’s being said, leaning in when it gets hard, adjusting to the person talking because you’re listening and absorbing closely and adjust. A heart that does the same, lifting when the thing being said is heavy, settling when it eases.
By the end of the evening, I could see what I’d actually done. Sat there, mostly still. Not adjusting to anything, because I wasn’t listening closely enough to have anything to adjust to. My eyes were on them and slightly past them at the same time, distant. Resting heart rate the whole way through, because not much was getting in.
I’d chosen observing and delivered absence, and the two look similar. Present enough to be counted as present. Absent enough that nothing could be asked of me. It took the rest of the evening to get back to myself, which is the only reason I know I’d left. Nobody in that room would have described me as anything other than calm.
That’s the part I find hardest: the tell isn’t available while it’s happening. From the inside, the two feel similar enough that I can’t reliably identify it in the moment. The answer comes afterwards, in the tiredness of getting back, or in whether the person I was with felt met or felt handled.
At this point in time, my heart isn’t that same athlete-level of calm. A regular check-up at the GP a few months ago showed my heart rate a little high, though nothing to be concerned about. It was in the normal range, and only stands out to me because it wasn’t always that way.
Which tells me the number moved, and I’m perhaps a bit better connected to myself than I was then.
Three things to try.
1. Ask whether they felt met or managed.
After a hard conversation, the question worth asking is whether the other person felt us in it with them, or felt us handling them from behind a wall of calm. The answer is usually available if we’re willing to look for it, and occasionally we can just ask.
2. Notice the two kinds of quiet.
Fully present with something, compared to being there but slipping out the back while leaving the lights on. They feel different once we start looking for the difference.
3. Let one feeling show that we’d normally smooth over.
Something small and low-stakes. Visibly a bit annoyed, or a bit moved, instead of even. Steadiness doesn’t mean being an immovable Easter Island statue.