We are sharing this chapter of Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat by Katie Hodgetts for members of our Hopeful Book Club.
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Chapter 13
If the Act is our spirit, the Rest is our soul, the Reset is Growth is not linear; our mind, then the Repeat instead, we move is our humanity. We repeat through perpetual because life will be an cycles of becoming endless journey of meeting and unbecoming. and re-meeting who we are in response to changing external conditions. Inside and outside of changemaking, we will meet stress, sadness, despair, hope, love and wonder. Growth is not linear; instead, we move through perpetual cycles of becoming and unbecoming. You may identify from your own life a time of great difficulty, when you made changes to better serve your life and minimize your own suffering. Then later in life, when meeting difficulty again, you may have slipped back into deep psychological patterns that furthered suffering. Common patterns changemakers struggle to escape include self-sacrifice (martyrdom), people-pleasing and tying achievement to worth.
A second reason for suffering is that sometimes we change, but everything else stays the same. Jade was one of the first young climate activists to move through our eightweek programme and attend the Resilience Residential.
For her, it was life-changing. It catalysed a break-up, a change of job and a deepened understanding of who she is and how she shows up in this world. What she wasn’t anticipating was that while she’d changed, the world and her communities had not. Jade emerged from the programme feeling empowered and revitalized, but landed back into the same family unit (who didn’t believe in climate change), the same toxic activist group (who glorified burnout) and the same routine (which lacked access to nature). We can change our inner landscapes while our outer container might remain the same. Naturally, when loneliness and sadness overwhelmed her, it felt like a personal regression, like she was back to square one. It took Jade time to realize that the “real” work was not simply uncovering emotional, social and psychological learnings during the programme, but how she could stay true to them throughout the stress and complexity of modern life. She had to learn not just to talk about different ways of campaigning, but to model it. She had to protect her fire and find out how to integrate her new learnings into her same life, within her financial, social and cultural container.
Why Do We Repeat?
What’s important to recognize is that when we absorb a changemaking blow or feel a great sense of regression after proactively engaging in work to support ourselves, we aren’t back to square one. Rather than growth being a straight line, it’s a spiral. We move round the spiral from a central point, and any set back doesn’t move us back to the beginning, rather we jump back to a lower rung. This rung is still outwards from where we began, but not back to the beginning. Integration and how we transition back into the world becomes paramount to ensure that resilience isn’t confined to the eight-week programme, and that it becomes the connective tissue that underpins our lives. These guideposts become less of a toolkit for action and more of a framework for living.
Consider the way we tend to our exterior life, such as our homes and our bodies. We stay in shape through routine and sustained physical exertion. We cut our hair regularly, clean our kitchens almost daily and make our bed each morning. These repeated rituals support maintenance, balance and presentation. Yet when it comes to our interior life, we offer far less attention. We then act surprised when we find ourselves getting into the same situations. Activities that support mental fitness, such as retreats, peer support programmes, meditation and philosophical frameworks, are still fringe activities. They also sit behind enormous paywalls. We have few readily available structures for internal maintenance and therapy is expensive. It’s no wonder that our sense of resilience erodes. It’s no wonder Jade felt deflated after the programme. Repeat therefore, becomes essential, not as a step we tick off but as an integration into the rest of our lives. How will you weave mental fitness maintenance into your own life? Will you start your own Resilience Circle? Or devote yourself to journalling, peer support or another routine exercise that reveals your essence? We repeat because sustained effort reaps rewards.
We also repeat because life is unpredictable. What keeps you strong and stable now will change in response to changing conditions. You may be thrown a curveball that compromises your changemaking. You might experience a crushing setback, inside or out of the Arena. I learned that during my second burnout.
My Second Burnout
At age 26 I had designed the Resilience Residential, bringing together 14 youth activists from across the UK to a weeklong immersive retreat. In between the wild swimming, campfire singing and nature time, I was training them to deliver our Climate Activation model in their local areas. They’d be building and facilitating their own Resilience Circles, though I’d guest facilitate the burnout session as I was considered the resident expert after my own burnout and my long investigation into it. The idea was that I would lead the session for all seven Circles, working my way around the UK to visit each. But it didn’t work out that way.
The Residential a group of 20 somethings met in the year after the global pandemic. We were hashing out the expectation placed upon us in 2019, the experience of being arrested and detained and the feelings of isolation from friends and family who didn’t “get” it. As you can imagine, it was incredibly emotional, with all the participants exposing their scars to the light and finding the beginnings of deep healing. We cried together every single day – in sadness, in grief and in gratitude.
I will never forget sitting in the kitchen with one of them one late afternoon. We talked for so long that the sun set, and we sat speaking softly in the darkness, barely able to make out each other’s faces. In the anonymity of darkness, which felt more like the womb than the grave, they confided in me how they had been suicidal the year prior and that they’d never, until this moment, told anyone. Being trusted with something like that is a memory I’ll keep with me forever, and it pressed into me the knowing that spaces where we can feel seen and understood have a nurturing power beyond any workshop, mnemonic or podcast. That moment all those years ago was life-changing for both of us.
During the Residential we sat in nature, and I listened to the fears and frustrations that I too felt as a 26-yearold. Holding this space, teaching the course and keeping everything on time was an enormous undertaking, but one I felt ready for. Eustress enabled me to feel focused, energized and extraordinary, every single day. Recognizing that I’d run an emotional ultramarathon, a crash began to feel inevitable.
Fortunately, I’d been through my own Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat and I knew that I needed rest, acceptance and a huge helping of joy and laughter. I intentionally decided to travel back from the Residential via the funniest man I’ve ever known, voted “funniest boy” two years running in his sixth form – my wonderful brother, Chris. He is not an activist. Chris is a larger-than-life character who, unlike me, wears contentedness like a well-fitting jacket. He has always been the light in the room, has always injected joy into any group setting. His life is playful, and his company and lightness have kept me grounded for many years. Going to his house and watching wrestling together has always been a welcome escape from the busyness of my mind, nourishing the angry bit of me that just wants to sit and watch one man bash in the head of another with a metal chair. Being with Chris was exactly what I needed in response to a week of peering at existential doom.
When I arrived, I dropped my bags on the floor, gave big hugs and waited for a cup of tea. Chris stood in the kitchen and said to me “So … how was it?” I clearly remember the way his eyes crinkled as he smiled, nervously tapping his fingers on the table. I fumbled my way through the sensemaking process I hadn’t yet begun. How could I summarize such a magnanimous, transformational experience? It turns out that I didn’t need to, because a few sentences in, Chris interrupted me and in true older brother style said, “Yes, but I have something I want to tell you.” I threw my head back with a knowing and welcome laugh. On the car journey down I’d been playing out the scene on my arrival: he’d ask me one question about the Residential, say, “Well done, I’m proud of you”, then launch into updates on his own life, in the way only a sibling could.
“I knew you’d do this! Go on, tell me!” I cackled.
He looked down at his hands and then into my eyes. “I’ve been diagnosed with lymphoma.”
Time waivered for a moment as my mind tried to recall if lymphoma was cancer or some kind of Latin word for the flu.
I said, “Okay” and sat there, quite stunned. A pause hung in the air as he said “You … took that very well.”
Denial took the reins and I batted back nonchalantly, “Yeah, honestly I don’t know what lymphoma is.”
The word cancer was gently thrown back to me, and without knowing what to do, we both started laughing in the way that only siblings can. There is no rule book for when your only sibling tells you he has cancer off the back of a week where you feel like you’ve been living in a utopian community, where the possibility of life seemed unlimited. There is no guidance on the tremendous amount of emotional whiplash you will experience when you’re dragged back into the finite limits of life itself. I asked him if he could find me a cigarette to smoke even though I was not a smoker, and we sat outside playing house music thinking through if he could reasonably ask the Make a Wish foundation for an Xbox 360 at the age of 29. No tears spilled. I asked questions. He answered. I asked him questions only a sibling could: whether he was a little bit excited to confront his own death. On the drive home to Bristol, I started screaming in my car halfway down the M4. I could not stop. I could not stop screaming.
The next three months were a whirlwind. The first month consisted of a further investigation, which found that unfortunately an error had been made and fortunately Chris did not have cancer. Relief flooded through our bodies, even as my mum was firmer in her conviction that it had never been cancer to begin with, something I had assumed was denial. But the stress on our bodies had already been sewed into our skin. No misdiagnoses could undo the fear and tension our nervous systems had been storing all these weeks. Life and work continued, but my body was still playing catchup. In the second month, Chris, still struggling, was admitted back into hospital and the c-word began creeping back into conversations. That week, after a semi-diagnosis we were told again that it was unlikely it was cancer. He stayed in hospital for further testing.
Finally, when Life had exhausted its will-they-won’t-they performance of summer 2021, Chris was formally diagnosed with a rare form of neck cancer, in the third month after his crinkled eyes had shone in his kitchen. While I sat in stone at home, Chris, Mum and Dad were sitting with an oncologist who said that if his treatment plan didn’t work, there was nothing the doctors could do for him.
As a founder, I didn’t take off this time of backward and forward diagnoses. I didn’t feel I could. In fact, I threw myself into work. I knew that if I stopped, the work stopped, and I needed to assist those 14 individuals and the 7 support communities they were building across the UK. Though I’d worked to break patterns of prioritizing others over myself, this experience resurrected old coping mechanisms. As my own world crumbled, I needed to engender these warm, soft and loving communities to meet an unmet need in myself.
The burden to keep going fell solely on my shoulders, as I moved closer to 2022, with no funding on the horizon and no team around me. At the same time, I was still doing my volunteer activism preparing for COP26. I was meeting my team weekly, knowing full well that Chris would start chemo on the first day of the conference in Glasgow – the very same day where this book begins, finding myself in a meeting room with a senior negotiator, out of patience and ready to take more risks. During this time, life evaded me. Life moved around me and about me, but not within me, a feeling I imagine is exclusive to ghosts and those of us who periodically slip through the cracks. Time slowed down and time sped up. When I partied, I partied hard. I slept late. I didn’t shower. But I also put into practice all the things I knew helped. I signed up for therapy, engaged in more yoga and started saying no to most things. I was doing all the “things” I delivered workshops on, but they didn’t provide the anaesthetic I was craving, adding on layers of guilt and imposter syndrome to an already complex picture.
Around the second misdiagnosis, and on the back of a very heavy hangover, my body moved into a state of breakdown. The crying seemed endless. My emotions seemed three steps ahead of me: I’d be laughing one day, motivated to sign up for meditation and exercise classes the next, yet on others my body lacked the energy to get out of bed. My mind and body started moving with disharmony and I felt like I’d cracked. I took two weeks off work and stared longingly at the Welsh sea, envious of the waves that were forever granted the grace to break and begin again.
When Chris’s third and final diagnosis came through, I started to feel not just better, but counterintuitively the best I’d felt in ages. We had a roadmap and I had a motivation: resource myself to be the best support I can be. I started a meditation course with a meditation tutor, began therapy and asked my friends for support. As Chris moved through chemotherapy and radiotherapy we bought him small presents for each week of treatment he completed and gathered as a strong family unit. When I was alone, I allowed myself to say yes to sadness and grief, stepping back from activism and making a pact with myself to be okay with falling short of others’ expectations.
I breathe in gratitude from the bottom of my toes that Chris responded positively to treatment. Almost one year later, he was cancer free. Now three years later, he delights in a life of marriage and children. I know this is not the same outcome for all. In the long journey of holding my breath, I needed to fill my lungs. I left the city and made a bold move to the Scottish Highlands, where I didn’t know a single person. Because sometimes when we look inside, we find that the tools we have fall short. This is why we repeat again and again and again like rolling tides. Sometimes you must find more strategies to meet your deficiencies. Unlike previous years, where I’d needed connection, in
2022 I knew deep down I needed space and anonymity, so I was able to move to the middle of nowhere where nobody knew me, to cry in the mountains. In that space I found that I was the wave, and I had the strength to break and begin again.
The grace to Begin Again
This experience taught me many things. Changemakers do not exist in a vacuum. Your viewpoint may feel global, but your day to day will be impacted by your relationships, your mindset and your life circumstance. With this in mind, we must give ourselves grace. We don’t step into the Arena and leave the rest of ourselves at the door. We bring our scars, sadness and struggles. Our triggers and our wounds. They impact how resourced and resilient we feel, so sometimes we need to adjust our expectations of ourselves as changemakers in response. I did not. I separated myself into Katie with the sick brother and Katie at The Resilience Project. And the dissonance led to my body breaking down.
I learned that saying yes to grief did not end me. Prior to this experience, Grief didn’t get a plate of food at my Emotional Banquet. Why? Firstly, because exploring feelings of grief could potentially destabilize me, which would have negatively impacted my ability to keep going and keep productivity high. Secondly, my privilege of not living on the front lines of the climate crisis invalidated my right to feel Grief – it wasn’t mine to hold. Thirdly, speaking with Grief was a waste of time, and time needed to be spent on the urgent matter at hand: environmental cataclysm. Finally, Grief sounded sad. Sadness wasn’t something I wanted to cultivate in my life. So, Grief was banished to the back room and her plate of food was given instead to Rage and Anger.
The uncertainty of losing Chris saw Grief surface from the back room like a storm. It was not invited into my house as a guest but showed up at the front door with a baseball bat. In doing so, crowds of sorrows violently swept my house.
In saying yes, there were downpours of tears. I had to ask for help a lot and jump off any perceived trajectory I had decided for myself. But something that felt like rock bottom became a stable platform on which to build. I felt the positive by-products of more sleep and The real danger hibernation, deeper connections of grief, sadness to my friends and closeness to and anxiety lies my family. Inside Grief I found in avoiding them. purpose. Inside Loss I found appreciation. Only through saying
yes to this pain did I surface the next season with the ticklings of motivation, to appreciate my family and my life at a deeper level. It became the backbone for my changemaking. I started seeing Grief as an integral part of changemaking for all the hard and cold bits of wisdom it contains too. Navigating the uncomfortable parts of change – the disillusionment, the headlines, the death – can offer a depth and clarity to the work we are doing, as it did for my personal life. In fact, the real danger of grief, sadness and anxiety lies in avoiding them. These too are welcome here. Or in other words, fight the dragon, get the gold.
As a youth activist or a changemaker or an advocate for a kinder world, you often will not have a line-manager or a tutor or even a senior who is directly responsible for you. You won’t have someone to tell you that it’s time to pull back or take the week off, or that you haven’t used your annual holiday allowance. It should therefore be part of your own contract, that when you step into changemaking you sign up for being your own kind and compassionate senior advisor. If you are reading this as a 25-year-old, think of how you would speak to your 18-year-old self and the kindness and grace you’d give them. Then try to embody what your 30-year-old self would say to you now, as a 25-year-old.
What is also important is finding a community of care where you feel able to express the vulnerability that maybe you’re not doing okay. We can catch each other’s early burnout warning signs and offer each other the permission to rest and step back, which is often so difficult to give ourselves. My own community took care of me at COP26, and my friends cooked dinners, created plans for me and kept me laughing. They sent care packages and cried with me. Like planting crops, what you sow in community returns not just in beauty but feeds you when you’ve forgotten you were hungry.
Bending and flowing to the rhythms of life is the essence of this stage of Repeat. Learning tools and tips to counter exhaustion may help you in one season and fall short in another. For my own story, my toolbox – rest, joy, professional support – was not enough for 2021. I needed an inventory upgrade. I had to add in the deeper tools that support and sustain me all these years later. This included learning to detach burnout from failure. Considering I was a “resilience practitioner”, getting to a point of burnout again felt like utter failure, regardless of what was going on in my personal life. I was also expected to be delivering seven burnout workshops during the period of my brother’s treatment. I managed to deliver three of them only by making peace with the fact that I would be checking in and disclaiming that I was in fact, very much burned out. Once I started to untangle burntout from failure, I began to shed some of the shame. I also started to feel more human to my peers and colleagues. Showing up as messy and imperfect while leading a personal development course gave everyone else permission to also be somewhere on that journey too. Acceptance became key: accepting that knowledge about burnout did not protect me from it; accepting that being burned out and speaking about burnout did not invalidate me as worthy; accepting that burnout prevention tools couldn’t be used to distract myself from pain. And, no matter how in tune I was with myself, there was inescapable pain when considering life without my hero, my brother.
