The Abscission Zone

The leaves are just beginning to change colour when I realize something is wrong. It’s too hot for September, and my friend tells me she’s worried the leaves will fall off the trees before the weather turns. I don’t seem to have the energy to worry about the state of the climate. Instead, I carry a kitchen chair into the backyard and spend my evenings reading under our pine tree in the fading sunlight— any book except the ones I’m assigned for class.

I’m in the third year of my undergraduate degree. All of my courses should excite me. I’m stage managing a play for the first time; I spent the entire summer waiting for rehearsals to start. But now that I’m here, I can’t seem to make myself do anything. I’m behind on my readings. Every assignment I’ve completed has felt like pulling teeth. I start skipping class to stare out the window. My intention for this semester was to be social, but now I spend most nights on the couch, scrolling. I do a lot of crying over my failure to accomplish anything. I do a lot of crying, period. Unfortunately, my brain does not register crying as a productive activity.

I went to class today. Now I’m so exhausted I can’t get off the couch. My chronic pain, which is flared up by typing, writing by hand, and sitting for long periods of time— i.e, every task required to accomplish my coursework— has me in tears by the end of each day. I’m not sleeping much. The persistent eye twitch and stomach cramps that appear at stressful points in the semester are already here, though September isn’t even over yet.

An Instagram reel shows me a list of symptoms and asks how many I have. The answer is almost all of them. Apparently, I’m not lazy. I’m burnt out.

Abcission is the process by which trees lose their leaves. The place where a leaf connects to a branch is called the abcission zone, and the cells in this zone grow specifically to be broken. When the days begin to shorten, trees don’t have enough chlorophyll to make food for themselves. The abcission zone hardens, preventing nutrients from being carried between leaf and twig; a tear forms and the leaf falls. Instead of struggling to produce chlorophyll through the winter, the tree shuts down. Abcission is a natural process— it allows a tree to conserve energy, keeping it alive through the winter and helping it to bloom again in the spring.

Humans aren’t designed to function in winter the same way we do in summer. We need to sleep longer— our bodies produce melatonin earlier in the day, in accordance with the earlier onset of darkness. Our energy dips, and so does our ability to accomplish things. Yet productivity under late-stage capitalism demands a consistent output. We slog through an endless list of tasks, hoping that if we reach the end of it, we’ll finally be afforded time to rest. Our work-life balance tips. Though what work-life balance is there, really, when our worth is measured by what we accomplish in a day?

This is the precedent I set for myself, and for what others expected of me, in my first two years of university. I took a full courseload, always. I took courses above my year level and my marks had to be scholarship-winning high— because I was trying to prove my intelligence, and because I was worried about money. I got COVID in my first week of classes and was incapacitated for a month. I started a part-time job while still trying to adjust to university, catch up on all the work I’d missed, and deal with post-COVID fatigue. I was lonely. I felt out of place. I didn’t consider that my loneliness did or could have an effect on my productivity.

That winter, I was dealing with chronic pain, though I didn’t yet have the language for it. My chronic migraines— which appeared daily, in cycles that lasted for weeks— left me with no energy. My muscles felt as if they were being wrung between my shoulder blades. I had five hours of class in a row; on the days I didn’t have class, I worked all day.

I spent the summer working from home as a research assistant, frantically drafting a novel so that I could take a thesis course in the fall, sleeping off migraines, starting physio for the chronic pain, and beating myself up for not doing enough.

In my second year I got sick so many times it became a running joke. I completed the thesis course. I wrote 40,000 words in one semester, then ended up in the ER with the worst migraine of my life. I spent so many hours in the theatre and at work that my social battery combusted and I ran on autopilot for weeks. I won two scholarships. I stopped writing. I decided I needed more unstructured time, and didn’t find any. I beat myself up for not doing enough. I set standards for myself and I failed. I beat myself up, I set standards, I failed.

I’m writing this to communicate to others that my current state is justified. I’m writing this to communicate to myself that my current state is justified. I was not, am not, failing. I want to believe— against what I’ve been subtly told, against what I see in the people around me— that pushing past one’s limits every day isn’t okay; that this kind of stress is not, and shouldn’t be considered, normal.

There are more leaves on the ground now than there are on the trees. It’s too dark to sit outside in the evenings. I live on the couch until midnight, when I lie in bed and watch car headlights flash past on my ceiling. I’ve lost the ability to retain information, and am therefore useless as a stage manager. The production coordinator sits with me for hours, helping me think because I can’t do that, either. I can’t process my emotions. She tells me my body is saying no. She tells me it’s okay to take a break for a while.

I switch to an asynchronous management role. I drop a course. I make a doctor’s appointment, and get medication to help me sleep. I start therapy again. Later, when I gaslight myself into thinking things were never that bad, my friends will remind me that I can’t remember most of October. “You were not okay,” my roommate says, and I’m relieved.

Why do my struggles have to spill out, be witnessed and confirmed, before I can believe what my body is telling me?

Burnout, my friend asserts, is the body’s response to prolonged stress. “I think chronic stress is a kind of trauma.” I think about what living in fight-or-flight mode has done to my immune system, the muscles in my neck and shoulders, my cognitive functioning. I think it’s been a long time since I felt calm or safe in my body.

In the face of a system that demands we perform with machine-like perfection, accepting that our best looks different on different days is a radical idea. For people with a chronic illness, it’s an inescapable fact. Unpredictable flare-ups mean days or weeks might pass when all we can do is take care of ourselves. And even when I’ve done my best on a bad day, I feel guilty because I expended what energy I had on self-care when I should have been working.

In a 2020 article for The Guardian, memoirist Katherine May writes, “Everything about me changes in winter – and I let it happen... It opens up a space in which I can mass my energies, to restore and repair.” Slowing down is a luxury that isn’t afforded to those who need two jobs to pay their rent, people with caregiving responsibilities, students supporting themselves through school. It’s also a necessity. Without breaks, we become overworked. Overwhelmed. Our bodies rebel and we burn out.

I use the word “break” here to refer to something more significant than a fifteen-minute pause from one’s computer, though those are also important. I mean days or weeks in which we step out of the productivity cycle and take time to reconnect with ourselves. I mean the radical act of self-care— of not breaking one’s body in service of a system that, ultimately, takes so much more from us than it gives back.

I want to be honest. Someone will read this and compare themselves to it, as I compare myself to everyone I read/watch/know/see on the street. I think I’m undoing the work that I’ve already done. I think that because I feel better, nothing was ever wrong.

How can I take time for myself when I’ve accomplished nothing? I don’t want responsibilities, so I don’t have to worry about letting people down. I’m supposed to be resting for the times when I can’t take a break, but instead I did nothing and I’m drowning. This safeguarding system no longer works, and I don’t know how to replace it.

How do I recover myself while shedding what no longer serves me?

“We both say ‘I don’t know’ a lot,” my roommate tells me. “But I only say it once. You like to repeat it three times.”

Three times. A number, I learn in a course I’m taking about fairy tales, that in the Western world means magic. It’s an incantation. As if by repeating my unsurety enough times, knowledge might present itself. I’m stumbling my way through a kind of self-care that extends beyond yoga and bubble baths. I’m attempting to rewire my brain into gentleness. “I still care about trying,” I tell my roommate, “but if it’s hurting me, I give myself permission to quit.”

It would be more accurate to say that I’m trying to stop trying, to say no before my body does. But maybe honesty would defeat the purpose of the claim. If I speak something into the universe, like so many fairy-tale characters do, will my wish also come true?

Things I gave myself permission to do today:

Ignore the mess of half-completed tasks on my bedroom floor. Ignore my approaching midterm. Run into the decomposing leaves barefoot after a cat I saw through the sliding door. Watch five episodes of a TV show. Lie on the floor waiting for the cat to come back. Take deep breaths. Try to let the expectations go. Try to relax my shoulders. Cry. Move like I’m breakable. Move and speak as if too much pressure will make me fall apart.

Katherine May asks, “Is this, then, our human version of [abcission]: a thoughtful mode of being that’s profoundly restorative, brought about by the conditions of winter?”

Is there a narrative here? Does it matter? I want to read essays that have been written from inside the vortex. I want to write from the depths of it, where the work has no shape but honesty. I don’t want carefully placed sentences and the hindsight of distance. I want to take the rage and anxiety and exhaustion and throw it at the page until I have an unfiltered, present truth. Today, this is how I feel. Today, this is what it is to live in my body.

We keep going, even when we’re overwhelmed. We keep going when our bodies tell us to stop. We keep going when the world is on fire, and we’re grappling with ever-present grief and the privilege of our distance. In many ways, this essay feels like an indulgence. Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, says in an interview with Socrates in the City that in North Korea, “they don’t give you the word[s] ‘depression’ [or PTSD]... [Seeing atrocities] was normal.” She asks us to question the idea that having the language to describe our mental health, being able to talk about our struggles and to seek support, is, in this world of deep inequalities, a privilege. Slowing down is a luxury that isn’t afforded to those fighting for their survival.

I watch kids be shot in the streets for playing, parents carrying their blown-apart children in plastic bags, people being displaced over and over from places they were told were safe. I read the names of Black people shot by the police simply for taking up space. I watch Bill 223, which will close 10 of Ontario’s 23 safe injection sites, pass. Then I watch Cree activist Mskwaasin Agnew disrupt provincial legislature, declaring, “Bill 223 is the continued genocide of Indigenous people. Your laws will never stop our resistance.” I listen to a panel of journalists discuss why it’s almost always women of color who speak out and resist. And I’m acutely aware of my privilege as a housed, educated white person, who gets to watch these atrocities happen from a safe distance. Who can afford to disengage, to take breaks.

Marcescence is the explanation for why some trees don’t lose their leaves in the fall. The abcission layer in these trees doesn’t fully harden, allowing nutrients to continue passing through. Scientist speculate this is because the dead leaves rattle and scare away herbivores, keeping the buds hiding on the branches safe. When these leaves fall in the spring and decompose, they release nutrients into the soil, helping the tree flourish.

Our bodies are built to help us in similar ways. When part of us is ailing, the rest of our body compensates. Our nervous system wants to protect us. When we’re stressed, it sends us into fight-or-flight mode; when we’re chronically stressed, we get stuck there. Our bodies are far from perfect, but they’re trying their best to tell us what’s wrong. Maybe it’s our brains’ neural patterns— our tangled ways of (over)thinking— that prevent us from listening.

Many of the neurodivergent, chronically ill people I know, myself included, experience the brain, body, and self as separate entities, each with a different agenda. So much energy is spent getting these disparate parts to work together in some semblance of a unified whole. What we need instead, I think, is fluidity: the ability to shift between different physical states and emotions, to move from work to rest without guilt. To move through our bodies’ seasons, and the seasons of the world around us. To begin putting some of our limited energy towards resisting the systems that keep us immobile.

Here I am, here we all are, at the confluence of mind/body/self, carving out a space to exist in.

Emma Russell-Trione (she/her) is a writer from Toronto, Canada. She is in her fourth year at the University of Guelph, majoring in English with a double minor in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies. Her play Fractures premiered at the Ward One Acts Festival in 2024. Her fiction and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Fusion Fragment, The Spadina Literary Review, and Apprentice Writer, among others. You can usually find her curled up on the sofa with her cat and a good book.