It was the Sunday after my aunt passed. Our dryer was full of forgotten and wrinkled laundry. My daughter — with yogurt in her hair and a flame inside her heart — toddled around and single-handedly destroyed every cabinet and corner of the house. I sat paralyzed at our antique table underneath a mountain of cookbooks, wondering who would ever finish my grocery list? Who would ever cook the meals? My head hung limp and I cried, confessing later to my husband (who does more around the home sometimes than me) that “all the normal stuff just feels impossible.”

I have a beautiful life where dreams are nurtured and flowers grow, but somehow I found myself here, decorated with the red flags of burnout: obsessed with the negative, sequestered on my sad, lonely island, misinterpreting every task as sacrifice, reacting rather than responding, feeling disconnected, on edge, overwhelmed, and irritable.

I know what you must be thinking: “Lady, you’re tired. Cry me a river, take two Advil, get a full eight hours, and call me in the morning.” And trust me, I’ve been there, but that specific version of rest wasn’t resonating with me this time. I felt rested, truly, in the sense that my physical needs were being met, spiritually I was being fed, my marriage was intimate, and so on. I was just waterlogged and joyless in our domestic day-to-day, and I felt guilty that I couldn’t be grateful instead. Surely I’m not the only soul on earth to know what it’s like to be rested and still burdened.

David Whyte says, “The antidote to exhaustion is not rest: it’s wholeheartedness.”

Oof. As I’ve been teasing apart the nuance of that statement, I’ve come up with one question, which is how do we cultivate a whole heart? Brené Brown offers us an insightful answer: “Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”

If I’ve learned any one thing from Life School so far, it’s that we will spend it swinging from broken-hearted to wholehearted, and if we make peace with that inevitability, it lessens every blow. It makes what feels final just a temporary blip. It makes the sweetness sweeter. We re-emerge each time with new empathy and understanding. We are able to encourage those whose spirits are crushed or whose hopes are deferred because we have sincerely seen the other side and know that there is more joy, more freedom, more fullness to be had. We experience tension and then release. We are driven by our values rather than our obligations. We are fulfilled because we are already and completely loved.

No amount of rest or self-care or quiet time is going to keep us intact while the world spins madly around us. We are not meant to remove ourselves from that reality and neither are we meant to give ourselves in fractions. It is only when we devote ourselves to grace, when we open ourselves back up after grief and despair, it is only then that we can walk the path marked out for us with full and abundant and undivided hearts.