Restlessness
Whatever it is, the hum of wanting to move is always there: frustration when I act, restlessness when I don’t.
Hello Everyone,
It’s fall — the leaves are turning bright yellow, swirling in the wind. I love watching my almost two-year-old son, Barney, pick them up on our walks, examining each one like it’s magic. Everything captivates him. I, on the other hand, feel restless — more so than usual this time of year. It’s as if my mind wants to move faster than my body, faster than life itself, will allow.
My Facebook feed keeps feeding the itch: sharing videos of local history, hidden gems, and places I long to see. My local bucket list includes Smith Island — founded in 1686, accessible only by boat, home to its own dialect, and famous for Smith Island Cake — and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, a dead zone where cell phones don’t work for miles to allow satellites to study space.
Before kidney disease and motherhood, I would have jumped in the car without hesitation. I’d drive for miles, away from the outside world — a true escape. With each mile driven, each step hiking, each new place I discovered, I’d feel a sense of satisfaction and some self-insight. The restlessness would ease for a bit.
Now, even a short trip to a local farm with Barney feels like a major expedition — focused on him and completely exhausting for me. Maybe this heightened sense of restlessness comes from parenthood — having to focus on someone else. Or from the narrow window of energy life allows me while living with kidney disease, and the sense that I can’t get enough done. Or from the subtle shift in seasons — the way the frenetic energy of fall pulls something inside me. Perhaps it’s a mix of all of it.
Whatever it is, the hum of wanting to move is always there: frustration when I act, restlessness when I don’t.
Writing feels the same way. I can think about something for hours, but putting it on paper is different. Thoughts come faster than I can capture them. Shaping them into something coherent — something interesting — takes time, energy, and patience. Hours can pass on a single paragraph, leaving me drained. Yet I keep returning to the computer — after overthinking, after a Facebook distraction — to wrestle my ideas onto the page.
Watching Barney brings an interesting insight. He has endless energy, repeating the same words, retracing the same movements, mesmerized by the newness of the world. But even he has moments of frustration — too much inside time, too much park time, or something refusing to bend to his will. His restlessness is occasional. Mine feels constant.
Sometimes I think the restlessness comes from my unwillingness to confront something within myself. It tends to surface in the fall, after things have built up from summer. When I finally face it — through therapy, meditation, or simply making space to listen (like the insights I used to find on my road trips) — a few layers loosen. There’s some self-honesty, some release, some letting go. But it always resurfaces, reshaping itself again and again each year — which is probably why restlessness keeps finding its way back, though my physical and life limitations make it harder to shift right now.
It comes from the mind — the wish to travel, to write with more ease — but also from the body, from energy that wants to move, like the leaves swirling in the wind. Like Barney, it can be too much of the same thing, or something not bending the way our minds want it to.
I long for adventure without exhaustion, for writing without blocks, for the kind of escape that brings self-insight and clarity. And yet, almost every year around this time, I feel this way — though this year, it’s a bit more intense. Like the leaves that will eventually fall, my guess is the restlessness will wane too.
For now, I’m just in the cycle, not sure when it will shift, but I feel it will — in its own time.
Love, Danielle
PS. The photo attached to this post is of Barney and me visiting a local farm.
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