celebrating one year and taking a risk

reflecting on the first year of committing to this practice & all the fears as I push just a little further.

Welcome to this tiny corner of the internet where an off-duty psychotherapist keeps the conversation going on how to make sense of this life thing we’re all doing. If you ever wondered what your therapist does off the clock—which, who among us hasn’t?—this is like that. Think of it as the adult equivalent of seeing your elementary school teacher at the grocery store picking out lemons. 🍋 I typically oscillate between long-form psychoeducation pieces and narrative essays—sometimes I smush them together. I also do a biweekly podcast with my husband, roundups and a segment of brisk thoughts on music, TV, and film.

One thing before we jump in, I show up very much as myself here. Myself first, and all my other labels are secondary. If a therapist speaking candidly feels like too much to your system, that is absolutely is OK and this may not be the best particular newsletter for you.

Last week marked one year since I started dialoguing. 

Like most milestones, I looked forward to this moment with weighty anticipation. Expecting, despite knowing better, to cross some threshold into enlightenment adjacent emotions and insights.  

Now that I’m here, the prevailing feeling is…bloated. Not physically, but more emotionally. I have so many feelings and thoughts clamoring for attention. 

When I read that first newsletter now, I definitely cringe a little on things I could have cleaned up—graphics, spacing out my paragraphs, I didn’t yet know the joy of editing. I also can see my heart right there on the [digital] page. The through line of what I’ve wanted to try to do here: say it, whatever it is, unflinchingly. 

I recently read devoured

Maggie Smith

’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. In it she writes, 

“The question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon, is this: How can this story–this experience–be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use?

To talk back to myself: experience is instructive. People make connections on their own. When I make a metaphor, I offer the comparison, but the distance between vehicle and tenor is distance the reader must cross. I can’t carry you from one to the other. I can’t carry you from the nesting doll to the self, or from the boat to the life–you have to get yourself there.

I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it. 

Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.”

When I read this, something shifted inside me.

There will always be a psychology/mental health tilt to what I write because of what I do for work (and what gets me geeking), but if I zoom out across this year, I see myself moving further from the psychoeducational and closer to simply writing about an experience. My experience.

I wrote last week about my parts who feel they need to effort, and effort hard, to be enough. I can see how much that has shown up here. Trying to prove the worthiness of my words through couching them in what I know as a professional. What I have to say about life, just as a human person, couldn’t possibly be enough, be of value. 

And yet, I know it is. 

There is what I tell myself and then there is what I know. 

Now that I’ve aired all that, the emotional bloat has dissipated. Here, I can see the pride, the power, the joy in this last year.