The Deer Shook It Off and Went Back to Eating Grass. I Did Not.
From the Sunday Self-Care Chronicles | 4/12/26
Hello dear one,
I'm writing this from a poolside chair in the Val d'Orcia, in Tuscany, on what has been — by almost every external measure — one of the most beautiful weeks of my life, and I want to lead with that because I mean it genuinely and not as a setup for complaint.
We have had nothing but sunny days in the low 70s, cool nights where we sleep with the patio door wide open just to smell and hear the dark, and breakfast and dinner included at the kind of place where showing up in your bathrobe is not only acceptable but actively encouraged. It has been, as some would say, the life.
I also want to say, before I go further: I know what's happening in the world. I know many of you are holding things I am actively choosing to set aside for a moment, and I don't take lightly the particular privilege of being able to sit here without a TV nearby or phone glued to my hand while the news keeps telling what it does.
I'm holding that awareness, too — just with a bit more distance from here. And actually, that distance and the peace that comes with it, is exactly what I want to talk about this week, because it took me far longer to find it than you might expect.
It wasn't until nearly midweek that my nervous system got the memo.
Which is to say: I still had bills that exist regardless of my coordinates, emails sitting in my inbox waiting for me to read them and respond, family members dealing with some genuinely heavy shit, a long list of professional work I want to accomplish over these next months, and a brain that — even with all that time stretching out in front of us — kept insisting that everything needed to be handled immediately.
Not because any of it was actually on fire. But because I have spent years living in a state where the low hum of a complicated life has trained my body to treat everything like it might be.
This is not a character flaw. It is biology. And it is worth understanding — because vacation, as it turns out, does not actually fix the nervous system. It just changes the backdrop.
The deer in the headlights
I want you to picture something with me for a moment.
You're driving — probably somewhere familiar, maybe at dusk — and suddenly there is a deer frozen in your headlights. Your brain, in the span of about half a second, starts running calculations: do I brake? do I swerve? do I hold steady and hope? And before you can actually decide, the deer makes the decision for you and leaps off into the dark.
If you could follow that deer — which of course you cannot, because you are a human in a car with places to be — you would see something remarkable. You would see it stop at the side of the road, and give a great, full-body shake — a literal physical discharge of all the cortisol and adrenaline that just flooded its system — and then, with what I can only describe as impressive nonchalance, go right back to eating grass. It does not lie awake replaying the moment. It does not feel compelled to call someone and tell the story. It does not carry the encounter with it down the road. It mobilized, it survived, it discharged — and it moved on.
Meanwhile, you — heart still pounding, palms still cold, possibly still swearing a little under your breath as you pull into wherever you were going — carry it with you. Your legs feel wobbly when you get out of the car. You need to tell the first person you see. The physical effects of something that lasted three seconds are still very much with you fifteen minutes later, and sometimes longer.
This is the fundamental gap between us and the deer, and it comes down to how our nervous systems are designed to function in the world we've actually built for ourselves.
Fight or flight — and sometimes freeze, which is its own whole thing — is our sympathetic nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do: redirecting blood and oxygen to the heart, lungs, and muscles so that we are ready to either run or fight, while temporarily deprioritizing things like digestion and reproduction and immune function, because when something is chasing you, none of those things are immediately relevant.
The deer's threat was real and then it was over, and its nervous system knew the difference. Ours — living as we do in a world of inbox notifications and medical appointments and news cycles and bills that feel catastrophic even when they technically are not — has been so continuously flooded with input that it has slowly lost the ability to distinguish between immediate danger and the ever-present, low-grade possibility of discomfort.
Which means a lot of us are walking around in some version of fight-or-flight most of the time, not because we are dramatic or broken, but because our nervous systems are doing their best with an overload of information.
And for those of us with a cancer diagnosis or history — or for anyone for whom the next phone call genuinely could be life-changing — I want to name clearly that this is not just perceived stress we're talking about. The stakes are real. Your body is not overreacting. It has learned, correctly, that it needs to stay a little ready. Which makes the work of finding safety even more important, and also, honestly, a little harder.
I also want to note — because I see this correlation constantly in my practice — that the clients who tell me they're living at an 8, 9, or 10 on the stress scale are almost always also the ones dealing with chronic digestive issues, which makes complete sense once you understand that digestion is one of the first things the body deprioritizes when it believes it's in danger. There's also a reason people sometimes finally conceive after they stop trying, or after they've started adoption proceedings and something in their body — some long-held tension — quietly releases and the body is able to do the thing it couldn't under duress.
The body responds to the experience of safety. It just needs to believe it.
What I've learned from the table
Almost without exception, the first thing my clients say when they get off my table — even when they've come to me for something specific, something medically necessary, something that requires real focused clinical work — is some version of “I'm so relaxed.” And what I've come to understand over more than fourteen years of doing this work is that this is not incidental. It is the point.
The greatest thing I can give someone in an hour is a little bit of time inside a body that feels safe — time where the world can wait, where the only thing happening is someone attending carefully and kindly to them, where their nervous system gets to experience, even briefly, what it feels like to not be on alert.
That is not a luxury. That is medicine. And you do not need a massage table to access it — which is something I have believed for a long time and have been working, slowly and carefully, on ways to put directly into your hands.
One of those ways is my dry brushing workshop, which I created several years ago out of a genuine conviction that this practice — done correctly, done safely, done with the specific needs of a breast cancer experience in mind — is one of the most accessible and meaningful things you can do for yourself at home.
It is not a trend. It is not about glowing skin or reducing cellulite, which is what most of the tutorials you'll find online are selling.
It is a 90-minute deep dive into your lymphatic system, your skin integrity, how breast cancer treatment affects both, and how to build a ritual — a real one, not a performative one — that gives you a few minutes each week of caring, intentional contact with your own body.
The people who have taken it have said things that genuinely move me, about feeling like their mind and body became a team again instead of adversaries, about having a sense of control they didn't expect, about their body feeling — and this word comes up over and over — awakened.
If you've been curious about it, I'll leave the link below. It is $65 and it is yours for life, which feels like a reasonable trade for a practice that can go the distance with you.
More from Tuscany next week and until then, I'm working on actually believing I'm here, and making decent progress.
P.S. The dry brushing workshop is here: amyhartl.com/dry-brush-workshop — if your body has been through something hard and you're ready to start being gentle with it on your own terms, this is a good place to start.