06: You Don’t Have Energy For More

Written By Denisa Nica

What do you do when you’ve been pushing through for so long that exhaustion starts to feel normal?

If you’ve been feeling emotionally tired, stretched thin, or quietly overwhelmed by your own life lately, this episode might feel familiar.

In this episode of Walking Anyway, I talk about a season of burnout that slowly forced me to face my own limits — and what I’m learning now about exhaustion, ceasing, and why slowing down felt much harder than I expected.

Here on Walking Anyway, we practice staying with our lives in uncertain seasons, without rushing ourselves past what is real.

In this episode, we explore:

  • why exhaustion is not always visible

  • the difference between numbing yourself and actually resting

  • what faithful living can look like when life feels emotionally unsustainable

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  • I’m Denisa Nica, and welcome to Walking Anyway. You’re listening to episode 6. This is a podcast about living faithfully in uncertain seasons— when life feels unclear and nothing is quite settling yet.

    If you carry questions and you’re not quite sure how to move through this in a way that feels steady and true, you’re in the right place to keep walking anyway.

    Each week I offer a reflection and a simple way to faithfully walk one more step. I’m an author and spiritual director, and the founder of The Table— a contemplative space shaped by a weekly rhythm, where women practice this kind of faithful living together, at their own pace, in the middle of their real lives and faith.

    I live in Spain, where life moves a little slower, and that has changed the way I pay attention, and the way I live inside my own life.

    This week I’ll share what happened when exhaustion caught up with me, why depletion is not always visible and what I’m slowly learning about exhaustion, limitation and faithful living. Listen in.

    It was the end of 2017, after a really big work project. We had also just moved and downsized temporarily, and I was trying very hard to keep up with life in the way capable people do. Or at least the way I thought capable people did.

    I remember one morning waking up around six so I could fit in a workout before driving my daughter to school. I rolled out my yoga mat in the middle of the living room and pushed the coffee table out of the way. It had been raining for weeks, which,

    if you’ve ever lived in Vancouver in the winter, it basically means it had been raining since 1997.  Honestly, there’s probably a reason we ended up moving to Spain eventually, and I don’t think it was only the midlife crisis.

    And I remember doing this online leg workout in our semi-dark living room while drinking my first out of the 5 daily coffees at the time, and answering work texts at the same time. I was mentally moving through my entire day while trying to keep up with the instructor on the screen, and I could already tell the weights were too heavy for me that morning. But I kept going anyway.

    And I remember having this overwhelming feeling that the day hadn’t even properly started yet and I was already behind somehow. Already defeated. Already tired in a way that sleep didn’t seem to fix anymore.

    At first I thought I was just tired. I thought I needed one good night of sleep. Or a slower weekend, or worst case scenario, a whole vacation - I had always wanted to visit Rome. Or maybe just one day where nobody needed anything from me.

    But the strange thing was that the project ended and ..I never really recovered from it. Over the next several months, I became more and more exhausted. Noting dramatic at first, just slower somehow. Like my body was moving through water while the rest of my life kept moving at full speed. And eventually it got to the point where I could barely get out of bed.

    Looking back now, I think that was the first time I really came face to face with my own limitations. And when I sat this, I don’t mean as an idea, or as something wise people write about in books. I mean in my actual body, in my actual life.

    And honestly, I don’t think I had much of a framework for that growing up.

    I grew up in Eastern Europe and I genuinely don’t remember seeing people rest. People sat down, yes. People ate soup, tended gardens, made dinner, sat down with the neighbour for a half an hour and then got back up again and kept going until bedtime. There was always something else to clean or fix or prepare. Rest always felt a little suspicious somehow. A little too close to laziness.

    I think somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that rest happened after everything important was finished, which of course meant it almost never happened. Ask my husband, who is still occasionally washing dishes at two-thirty in the morning after we’ve had people over for dinner, because apparently I remain deeply unconvinced that anyone should go to bed while there are cups in the sink.

    And maybe that’s why it took me so long to notice how exhausted I really was, because exhaustion is not always visible.

    Sometimes it’s physical, yes. But sometimes it’s emotional. Or mental. Or social. Or spiritual. Sometimes it’s the exhaustion of making too many decisions for too long. Sometimes your body keeps moving, but some quieter part of you has stopped arriving.

    And just to be clear, what I’m not saying here is: take a nap and you’ll feel better.  I mean honestly, sometimes a nap helps. I support naps wholeheartedly. But this feels deeper than that.

    I remember reading something from Brené Brown years ago about the difference between stress and overwhelm. Stress says: this is a lot, but I can keep pushing through. Overwhelm is different. It’s more like the body saying: things are happening too fast. We cannot sustain this pace anymore.

    And I think for many of us, especially those of us who are thoughtful or responsible or caring or used to carrying a lot, we become so accustomed to functioning that we stop noticing when we’ve crossed over from tired into depleted.

    We keep pouring. We answer the email, fold the laundry, finish the project, check in on someone else, keep producing, keep caring, keep moving. And meanwhile, somewhere at the center of us, an alarm bell is quietly ringing. It’s hard to know what is ours to do when we’ve been depleted for too long.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about how often we try to pour infinite expectations into finite hours.

    We want more from ourselves than our actual humanity can sustain. We imagine worlds to conquer, people to care for, drawers to organize, meaningful work to create, souls to tend. And then we feel surprised when our bodies or minds eventually stop cooperating. The hours don’t multiply.

    And I sometimes wonder if part of the grief of adulthood and especially midlife, is realizing we are spent long before everything is finished. Especially if you care deeply, and if your work involves people or creativity or presence. Because, sometimes exhaustion is not only tiredness. Sometimes it’s sorrow we haven’t had space to feel yet.

    For me, one of the strange ironies is that the very work I do — accompanying others in spiritual direction, writing about God, the soul, and ordinary life and paying attention — actually requires spaciousness in order to remain true. It requires silence, reflection and actual calendar time to notice what is happening inside me before I try to turn it into words.

    And yet the fruitfulness of the work… can slowly consume the very conditions the work needs in order to stay alive.

    I’ve noticed that when I start trying to create more and more without enough space to receive, something in the work changes. It becomes more performative sometimes and less honest. Less connected somehow to my actual life with God. And I think that’s true for any church leader, writer, poet and for any vocation that involves teaching or leading others spiritually in some way.

    Because the work is not only producing. It’s also containing. It’s allowing life and the Spirit of God to to move through me slowly enough, that I don’t miss my own soul while trying to speak about the soul. And that kind of work cannot be rushed.

    There’s an old image from the 12th-century Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux where he talks about the difference between canals and reservoirs. A canal pours out constantly. A reservoir receives first. It gathers and holds and waits, and eventually it overflows from what it has first received.

    He says: become a reservoir, not a canal. And I think for a long time I believed faithfulness meant being a canal. Keep pouring. Keep helping. Keep showing up. Keep proving my usefulness to the world and maybe even to God. But now I’m not so sure. Because eventually the canal runs dry.

    And maybe faithfulness sometimes looks less like constantly pouring yourself out and more like becoming receptive again - which I realize sounds less impressive and far less efficient, but might actually be closer to the truth.

    For a long time stopping felt lazy to me,  and I realize now that some of that is probably old conditioning and old stories about worth and usefulness. But stopping also felt strangely empty and disorienting, like if I stopped producing for too long I might disappear somehow.

    But I’m slowly learning about what some spiritual writers call the practice of ceasing. Not quitting life or avoiding responsibility, but interrupting the endless pressure, to keep pouring long enough to receive again. To receive God again. To receive my own life again. Or to get back to myself honestly enough that I can also return to other people more honestly. And maybe part of being human is realizing not everything is ours to carry. God remains God even when we reach our limits.

    For me, what usually gets me back to myself is silence and solitude. And when I say that, I don’t mean disappearing from my life or isolating myself from people. I just mean enough quiet to hear my own life again.

    And strangely, silence and solitude are also what tend to bring me back to God and to other people too, which feels backwards at first, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe we can’t keep offering presence to the world while remaining absent from ourselves.

    There’s a poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado called “Caminante, No Hay Camino.” It translates loosely to “Traveler, There Is No Road,” and the poem basically says that that the path is made by walking.

    I love that. Because I think lately I’m learning that faithful walking is not mastering the road ahead of time, and learning as we go, what it mean to remain human .Which to be fair, may still be good for your heart. I’m not against cardio. But moving through life too quickly is not always very good the the soul. Sometimes walking faithfully looks like slow down enough to notice our limits pausing long enough to breathe again. Sometimes ceasing is part of walking too.

    So maybe the practice this week is not figuring out how to have energy for more. Maybe it’s simply taking five quiet minutes and sitting gently with the question: what gets me back to myself?

    And maybe for you it really is taking a nap under a heavy blanket in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe it’s leaving your phone at home while you go for a walk, although yes, I realize I’m technically telling you that you may miss this podcast episode if you do that. Maybe it’s finally keeping Sabbath in a real way and not spending half the day scrolling on Instagram or watching episode after episode on Netflix, which I say with absolute no judgement because I personally tried to convince myself that six straight hours of televisions counted as rest, and somehow I always feel more tired afterward.

    Or maybe it’s saying no to brunch because what you actually need is sleep and quiet and one hour where nobody asks anything from you. Maybe it’s talking honestly with a spiritual director or a trusted friend. Maybe it’s making a small list of what you are simply going to care less about this week.                           I think beginning to pay attention to what restores us is actually part of faithful living.

    May we learn to recognize that our limits, as much as our gifts, can shape what is ours to hold and ours to do. And may we slowly release the exhausting illusion that everything depends on us.

    May the God who cares for all things take care of what you cannot carry today, and may that same God, take gentle care of you too.

    Thanks for listening to episode 6 of Walking Anyway.

    I hope reflecting on the spiritual practice of ceasing and learning to notice both of what is really happening inside you and what gets you back to yourself again, helps you keep walking away - even in seasons when you don’t have energy for more.

    Because the way you’re walking through this—right in the middle of what hasn’t settled yet—and right un the middle of your own very human limits, is already forming something steady in you.

    If you’re wanting a place to actually practice this—not just think about it—you can begin with a 21-day guest seat inside The Table.

    It’s a quiet, slow space where you learn to stay with God in your real life .without needing to push yourself past your limits to belong, and where you don’t have to do that on your own.

    As always, you can find me at denisaonica.com., or on Instagram at denisa.o.nica where I post almost daily either a photo or a video on Instagram stories. I’d love to see you there.

    As you step back into your day, notice what stayed with you… and let that be enough for today. And just like light moving through a room—you don’t need to see everything at once
    to keep living faithfully here.

    I’ll close with a line from Psalm 143, and if you’re in a season your soul feels tired in ways you can’t quite explain, maybe these short words could be prayer that will feel true for you too.

    “Teach me the way I should walk.” Amen.

    Thanks for listening and  I’ll be here with you next time.

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