Leaning in to the uncomfortable

Proactive counseling -- and some self compassion -- helped Ruth Farfel overcome her life-long fears and recover from her mother's untimely death

Ruth Farfel

Ruth Farfel was a shy, sensitive child with oversized anxiety. She grew up in an idyllic neighborhood within Baltimore where kids spent their time playing outside and everyone looked out for each other, but she was always the child who was reticent to try new things or participate in activities she was unfamiliar with.

“I wasn’t a kid who would go out and climb a tree,” says Farfel, 31, now a social worker for a Baltimore nonprofit that helps schools develop resources and solutions to problems. “I didn’t do a ton and I didn’t put myself out there because of my fears. I wouldn’t say it disrupted my childhood, but there were just things I felt held me back as a kid.”

Despite the support of a protective sister, six years older, once she entered school, her anxieties exacerbated. She was bullied and couldn’t keep up with her peers academically, to the degree that she was nearly held back a year, causing her even more distress. Her parents, noticing her struggle, decided to transition her to a smaller, charter school, which could provide a more nurturing environment.

But on her first visit to the school, she was introduced to a tai kwon do class that substituted for gym class and it completely unhinged her. When the teacher invited her to join the other students on the mat, she fled, sobbing.

“That was sort of my defining moment,” she recalls. “I was just so overwhelmed and scared. I’d never done anything like that and I was just put on the spot. And the teacher always remembered that about me later, like ‘Ruth is a scared little child,’ you know? And I never liked that. I felt it held me back in so many ways.”

Though her family didn’t talk about mental health or have any history of seeking counseling, by the time Farfel entered middle school, she knew she needed help. She reached out to the school counselor and found, in her office, a safe space to “talk about the things I hadn’t really talked about…or didn’t know how to talk about.” That included everything from self-esteem, to navigating relationships with peers, to her outsized phobia of participating in sports.

The counseling “kind of opened up my world a little bit” and by the time she entered high school she was feeling marginally more confident and comfortable. Then, when she was in 11^th grade, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and Farfel watched her go “from a functional human to laying on the floor of the bathroom crying.” The thought of losing her mother was terror on a whole new level.

“I didn’t really understand how to navigate all that,” says Farfel. “I remember sleeping a lot and being on the computer a lot and just dealing with it with a lot of distraction. Just kind of tuning out.”

After serious treatment, her mother’s cancer went into remission. Farfel graduated from high school and enrolled at Washington College, a small liberal arts school in Maryland, to pursue a degree in sociology. Her choice wasn’t a surprise. Both of her parents had careers in social work and it was an area she’d always been interested in.

“I was that person that person who always thought about the world and how people functioned and society,” she says.

Given her history, she decided to reach out -- even before her first day of college -- to the school’s counseling department.

“I remember emailing them and saying, ‘I’m going to need someone, this is going to be hard for me, I’m really scared,” she remembers. “I think I just knew I couldn’t do it alone. I knew there were these things I struggled with and I needed to take care of myself and the only way I knew how to do that was to have someone else helping me. So looking back, it was a way to make sure I would be ok.”

She was especially anxious about other students’ use of drugs and alcohol. Because of her reticence to try anything unknown, she’d never experimented with them in high school  and she worried that she wouldn’t fit in or find any friends in college because she wasn’t interested in partaking of either.

Thanks to her proactivity, however, her college experience was, overall, a good one. She came out of her shell, began to develop her interests and her voice and took some first steps toward independence. Despite her intimidations, Farfel was determined to push herself out of her comfort zone.

One of the obstacles she surmounted during college was to participate in the school’s “semester abroad” program, which sent her to a small town in South Africa. Though she spent the first two weeks “in my room, crying, wanting to go home,” she managed to “power through” her time there and tick one more item off her mental list of “scary things I never thought I could do.”

She also found a romantic relationship that helped convince her she was desirable and worthy of love. It was during her senior year, when she was 20, that she met Hasan, a native of Jordan who had come to America to study at her college. She introduced him to her family and she, in turn, met his. In the 11 years since they met, they have rarely been apart.

After graduation, Farfel worked for a service organization, AmeriCorps Vista, helping students from Towson University engage with community members in South Baltimore. The experience cemented her desire to dive deeper into social work and to “be more intentional with the work I wanted to do in my life.” So after two years, she enrolled at the University of Maryland to begin working toward a master’s degree in social work.

While in her first semester of graduate school, however, her mother’s cancer returned, this time with a vengeance. Farfel stayed in school as her mother continued to decline, but “it was a lot to handle and I didn’t know what to do or how to show up for my Mom or my Dad.” She missed classes, slept a lot and was constantly fearful and anxiety-ridden. For whatever reason -- inertia or avoidance -- she also stopped seeing a counselor.

Surprisingly, when her mother died, just six months later, though obviously heartbroken and distraught --- “Grief is like a whole other wild ride”  -- Farfel did not “crash and burn.” She became more motivated and focused, determined to stay on the academic path her mother had encouraged.

“It hadn’t really hit me yet,” she says. “So whether it was intentional or I had no awareness, I was like, ‘This is not going to stop me.’  I knew my Mom would have wanted me to finish grad school and she was really proud of me, so I felt like, ‘I’m going to do this for my Mom.’

By coincidence, just after her mother died, the counselor she had stopped seeing reached out. It was “perfect timing,” Farfel says and she welcomed the resumption of their sessions, which helped her managed the pressures of finishing her degree.

It wasn’t until Covid hit in early 2020 that she realized she hadn’t really overcome her pain, she’d just buried it. When the pandemic began, she went from working in an office all day to being home alone five days a week and from coping to experiencing panic attacks, horrific nightmares and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Terrified of being alone, she begged her husband to stay home with her, but his job wouldn’t permit it. Farfel began to spiral downward.

“I slipped into a pretty difficult mental state,” she says. “I was sad, I wasn’t sleeping and I didn’t know how to be alone.”

Even though she continued her therapy, what eventually helped most was discovering what “self care” was really all about.

“I used to beat myself up about everything, it was my go-to response,” she says. “I had zero self compassion. I’d experienced a lot of shame about my anxiety and a lot of self-deprecation, beating myself up for things I couldn’t control. I began to realize I have this thing and it’s hard, but it’s not my fault.

“Having compassion for myself has been life changing. Now my go-to response is ‘Well, how can we take care of you right now, Ruth? What do you need?”

She spent hours in her basement painting, with just her cats for company. She took long walks around her neighborhood, trying to notice the small things that brought her joy. She meditated, something she’d struggled to do before, but now found helped “make room and space for awareness--  and when I’m aware, I’m automatically better.” She started an informal, online writing group with friends, as a way to be creative, but within a nurturing circle of community.

She also learned to connect her thoughts to her body and nervous system. Before when her therapist would ask: “What do you notice in your body? What do you feel?” Farfel would simply say, “I don’t feel anything.”

“I didn’t even know what she was talking about,” she says. “Prior to Covid I was so detached from my body and I spent so much time in my head, not understanding even my basic needs, like ‘Am I hungry? Am I tired?’ I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years understanding how my mind and body work together and that’s been huge for me.”

A year after her mother’s death, she and Hasan were married. And last year she started a Substack blog called “Ruthie Writes.” In it, she often explores her mental health journey and shares the discoveries she’s made and the new consciousness, coping skills and curiosity she’s cultivated.

“I think about all the little things we bump up against in our days and don’t realize take us off balance -- whether it’s a stressful phone call or an argument with your partner,” she says. “We just expect it will be OK and we don’t need to fine tune thing. But for me personally, if I don’t tend to that little wound -- because it is a little wound to my nervous system -- then I’m going to be off and it’s going to spiral.”

Today, Farfel says she’s “in a really good place” — though she’s still reluctant to say that out loud.

“It’s hard for me to say because my anxiety immediately says, ‘And you will not stay there long.’ It’s always been like, what horrible thing is going to happen next? But I’m trying to live in this space of gratefulness and curiosity and finding joy in little things and the skies have just opened up. It was dark for so long and I’m think I’m just learning to lean into the uncomfortableness and tend to it more.

“I’m proud of myself. Before I would always rely on other people to make me feel better -- which they can. But if I can do it myself, it’s a little more sustainable.”

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