Seth took this gem one morning in TN. This is how I look now.
Just to locate us geographically at the moment- Seth and I are in Atlanta, which from the last blog post makes it seem as though we went nowhere. However, we just returned from visits to Nashville, TN and Houston, TX, so there has been movement. I did end up going to Nashville by myself for a few days. I stayed in my sister's house and took care of my dog and her dog. I had the pleasure of spending quality time with my niece, who is a 17-month-old independent woman. Daily outings included lunch with my parents and seeing movies. Honestly, a highlight was going to the grocery store and cooking for myself. I had definitely been craving having my own space and making my own comfortable food, so it felt wonderful to have the space and time to do. I made my homemade chicken soup, which I swear cures some undetectable malady in my body because it's so satisfying to eat. Seth joined a few days later and hopped into the established routine of lunch outings and movies. We decided to visit Texas because Billie needed a vet visit and it seemed an obvious place to kill until September. I felt comforted just at the thought of being surrounded by my Texas people. The relief I experienced in anticipation of the visit highlighted how much Texas had become my home. It's a place where I don't feel an imposition and can just relax.
There aren't really pictures from this time period because it's just normal life happening.
But Billie is the cutest car traveler, so there are a number of pictures of her being adorable.
I did have some regret about the trail on the drive again. Damn car rides! There's just too much reflection time! I realized I had some fantasy of returning to Texas having had this transformative experience. I would present myself as some kind of new woman! Perhaps I am in the process of some kind of transformation due to this experience, but the change is too slow or minimal to register, so who cares at this point, amiright? I returned to Texas with the same sense of my personhood. Of course, my friends had no expectations for me and were just as happy to see me, (smiley face).
Once we arrived in Texas, I realized the thing about home is that people really know you- like, really know you. So if I was able to stay on the surface with myself emotionally in Nashville, my people in Texas would not allow it. I visited a fellow therapist friend and her new beautiful baby the day after we arrived and she asked me how I felt about everything. I answered superficially initially, but she went all Robin Williams a la Good Will Hunting on me and kept asking how I felt until I broke into tears. So I'm holding her new beautiful baby hoping not to infect her emotional wiring with my sadness and sharing again about the anger, disappointment, and untethered feelings. It felt different and important, however, to be sharing these feelings with a friend that is not Seth. I was able to soak in her compassion and advice and snuggle her baby, which was a plus.
Another big reflection I had about being in Texas was how special my former work colleagues are to me. They were my work colleagues, but they are also my actual friends and I don't think everyone gets to say that about their colleagues. I had lunch plans everyday and my former work place even arranged for a lunch to be delivered to the office so everyone could gather to visit with me. I thought about all the laughing and crying I had done with these people and all the life events that had occurred for all of us during the time that we worked together and I gained a new appreciation and gratitude for my connections with them. In the therapy world, we joke about how our family roles get played out in the office, but it's been totally true that I my colleagues have been my mother, father, husband/wife and siblings- in all the good and bad ways you're with your family. (This isn't crazy. I swear, this happens in your offices and companies, too- no matter where you work. You just gotta get woke.) My colleagues supported me as a newlywed, gave me confidence to do private practice, helped me grieve losses, challenged me to accept love more openly, and allowed me to impact them in kind. It's pretty incredible!
Being at my former office also allowed me to think about my relationship with work in general, which was a big reason I wanted to take a long adventure. My relationship with work has been fraught over the years mostly due to my struggle to feel "enough" in any setting of my life. I wrestled with the difficulty to feel enough most intensely in my work place because I was able to delude myself into thinking there were actual measurements of my worth there. If I get that fellowship, I'll be worth it. If the patients are pleased with my work, I'll be worth it. If I get my paperwork in on time, I'll be worth it. If my comment contributed to the discussion in that meeting, I'll be worth it. If I "exceed expectations," I'll be worth it. I could go on and on and on with all the little hoops I set up for myself to prove my worth. Mind you, all this is happening while I'm co-facilitating Dr. Brene Brown's shame resilience curriculum, whose research focuses on shame and perfectionism and tools to recognize your inherent worth. So that irony isn't lost on me. Intellectual understanding is just so different from emotional understanding, I find. Anyway, all of that is to say, working in the mental health field can wear a person down, but I don't think it would have happened as quickly if it hadn't been for the measuring stick with which I was beating myself.
Over the years, I gained more confidence in what I know and how I do things and learned how to stop sweating the small stuff. I became way more flexible in my acceptance of myself, but in some ways the damage had already been done in terms of burn-out. A motivating concept in my work is the idea that small interactions or small moments or small changes can lead to big, life-changing outcomes. My role in that process is also small, but essential. I am in a professional relationship with my clients and it is also happens that my professional self actually includes my self. When that goes well, even when it's hard, it's amazing. When burn-out is setting in, the cases where things don't go the way one would hope hit pretty hard and weigh heavily for longer. I did a lot of things to extend my shelf life in terms of prioritizing different parts of my work, but ultimately I wanted a long time away from work to reset. There's a lot to unpack about my relationship with work and the type of work it is, but I'll save that for another post (maybe). I was just reminded of my working self being in the office with my colleagues and I felt far away from her, which is what I wanted. I'm trying to get a very wide perspective of myself in this area of my life and I'm certainly accomplishing that. My brain has also been on this wavelength because I have been researching how to deliver online therapy services, which is an exciting new venture one day, and janky and inviable the next. I'm taking the steps to make it happen either way, so if you know anybody who wants online therapy, send 'em my way!
Other than all that, Texas felt like one big party time. I stayed up very late and wasn't able to sleep in much. I was smoking lots of cigars, hanging out around pools, rock climbing and drinking lots of coffee. I actually felt physically terrible a lot of the time, but in that way that says, "you're too old for this, but you're having so much fun!" Seth and I celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary at a French restaurant as a nod to our next adventure. I haven't really started to mentally prepare for that. We'll be there for two and a half months, so creating some kind of itinerary doesn't seem feasible. I'm doing a little research about traveling around, but we can just as easily wait until we're with our Paris friends to help us plan. I left Houston with a heart full of love for my connections there. We're going to spend the next month in Atlanta setting up an online therapy business, trying to get a regular sleep schedule, and getting fit so we can get fat in France.
