Start Again

Staying in stride is easy. Stopping and coming back, starting over again is hard. I’ve been thinking about how to come back to my writing, how to post another blog post, after it’s been so long. So many thoughts to write about, so many things have happened. I can just stay inside myself, where I’ve lived for so long. Where I’ve developed a relationship with myself, where I know the dialogue, or start again to share my world. Where the words need to be heard, not just said. 

For the last two years, I’ve grown my private practice to full-time, which means on any given week I am listening to anywhere between 28 and 38 people, couples or families. Listening deeply, and entering into conversation that facilitates awareness and healing. I love my work. It’s satisfying and mostly it comes easy for me. It’s also very different from being in my own little world, with my own little (or big) thoughts and putting them on paper. So to switch over feels really hard, like moving a boulder. And so most days, I tell myself, “It’s okay that you’re just a therapist now, it’s okay to not be writing for a while.” And yet as these days start adding up into weeks and months and years, I feel sad, and I miss my writer self. I’ve been reading more books and articles and feeling that sad jealous feeling that this person is a published writer (and I’m not). 

So, here’s my attempt to come back, and I’m going to tell you some of the things I’ve been doing, instead of writing. 

Years ago, in a class on art therapy, I made a collage of myself with a very large head and a small body. Once it appeared, as art seems to appear as we create it, I thought, “Yes, this is how it is. I’m all in my head, not in my body.” And very much like the Dorian Grey story, the opposite of this collage was actually becoming true. My body was becoming bigger and bigger. I’d never thought much about my body for most of my life. I was blessed with a rather proportionate body that worked really well, and I took it for granted. 

While in graduate school, and working (sitting on my ass for most of the time), I gained weight and I lost flexibility. I didn’t eat well, I skipped breakfasts and I ate trail mix for dinner while sitting in a classroom. This was after nearly a lifetime of doing a lot of moving around with my body, whether it was chasing children, riding bikes with them, doing yoga and circuit training and even aerobics at times. Working full-time, and being in school meant that I sat all day at work, I sat in the evenings in class, and then sat more when I started my private practice in the evenings after work. I sat writing papers. I barely knew how to bend over any more, seriously. When I dropped something on the floor, it took work, serious work, to pick it up. 

So, I decided to move my body again. I started walking, I started doing yoga. Doing yoga after not doing yoga for years was discouraging. I used to be pretty good at yoga, not great, but good. Now, after about a year and a half, I’m getting some flexibility and strength back. It was like no one was home in my body anymore, like all the stress in the world had somehow found my hips and shoulders and decided since they were empty to just settle in there. I had to remind myself that little by little I would become strong again, flexible again, and to not continue would be to accept my body becoming even more rigid and weak. Not an option. 

I’m eating better now. I’m eating actual food, not trail mix. I’m counting calories, not just to count calories but to see if I can get all my daily nutritional needs met by eating the right food. Some days I can, some days I can’t, but I know I’m getting more nutrition than ever before. I’m feeling better, feeling stronger and I’m heading off the five pounds a year I’d been gaining. All this calorie counting and food preparing takes time, and so when I think I have time to write, and instead I make breakfast and lunch and enter the food items into the computer; I no longer have time to write. I’m flying out the door to one of my two office locations. 

I’m trying not to feel like I’m turning my back on my writer self, I’m telling myself I will get back there. I will start again, just like with the yoga. Life is stops and starts sometimes. Life is beginning all over again sometimes, when we’re like, “What the hell? I have to start again?” And life is like, “Yes, start again.”