what I want to tell you

I\’ve taken countless writing workshops and classes where, when you say \”I don\’t know what to write about\”, the facilitator will say: \”write about THAT.\”

Yeah.

It sounds like annoying response, but here\’s the thing: IT WORKS.

And I\’ve been thinking, for a while: there are all these things I WANT to write about-but I just feel blocked. Blocked from writing them, from sitting down at my writing desk and opening my laptop. So here I am.

I want to tell you about COVID, about what it is like to be alone in this. I\’ve lived alone a lot. I\’m used to it. I\’m comfortable with it. But until the pandemic, I thought I knew what lonely felt like. I want to write about how quiet it is, how every day seems the same, how I both miss being out in the world but also feel safer than I ever have, not having to deal with the world. I want to tell you that no matter how lonely you think you feel, that if you live with other people, even if you pod with other people, you don\’t know what it\’s like to be alone most of the time.
The winter was brutal. Because I couldn\’t be outside with people, for the most part, It was too cold to sit and eat, or sit and chat or go walking. My life has become one of staring at screens–working virtually, meeting with clients and colleagues on Zoom and Teams and Slack. Facetiming with family and friends, socializing via Zoom, and sitting here at my computer. Watching things on my TV, streaming Netflix and Hulu and HBO, alone.
I want to tell you this: I forget who I told what to, because I have a photographic memory but also an energetic one. So I remember things by WHERE I WAS when I heard them or said them. I have a picture in my mind and an imprint in my body. But when everything is on screens I don\’t remember who I told what to, or who told me what.
I am more comfortable being alone than a lot of people I know. I know a lot of folks who have never lived alone, ever. But I never intended to get so comfortable being alone that ultimately, in a pandemic, the isolation has become uncomfortable.

I want to tell you about doing some intense inner work on my trauma recovery, and taking tiny steps each day towards going public, like REALLY public. I feel like the isolation somehow makes this possible, that at least initially I\’ll be offering this public-sharing about trauma as education, as trauma-informed practice training-via zoom. Sitting in my own home on my laptop, trying to make an actual THING out of 30 years experience as a therapist, of years of training about trauma, and finally now integrating MY lived experience. I want to tell you that the inner work now is not so much about managing my PTSD as it is working up the kahunas to share my shit publicly, with a purpose. I can talk about trauma ALL DAY LONG if it\’s about clients or about how people can be more trauma-informed in the work that they do-but to add to that HEY GUESS WHAT I KNOW WHAT I\’M TALKING ABOUT is a step I honestly never thought I\’d be able to take.
And now I\’m working on making it a reality.

I want to tell you that there have been changes in my primary relationships, bit, tectonic-plate-shifting changes, people coming and going, growing apart and getting closer (sometimes, the same person) and people I love getting sick and me feeling helpless to do anything. I want to tell you that all of this is happening during fucking COVID and that means that the changes swirling around with the isolation is almost unbearable sometimes. That even the therapist *I* talk to has to be one on a screen, and yet I want it that way because I AM NOT READY to go back out into the world. Yes, I\’ve been vaccinated-yet there is still so much we don\’t know, and the consequences-regardless of probability-could be so dire. I want to tell you how painfully aware I am of the risks I can\’t measure, even more than I was before. (which was considerable.)

I want to tell you how tired I am, how scared, how lonely, and also how grateful. How I\’ve found a sense of safety that I\’ve never experienced before, where there is a real threat– but I can control my exposure. I have the ability to keep myself safe. That is new for me. I want to tell you that I am aware how privileged I am to have a job at all, let alone one that feeds me, and that I can do from home. So many have suffered-and were suffering before the pandemic-without jobs or health care or enough money or safety from violence or marginalization-and I don\’t take a second of that for granted. How grateful I am for the technology that enables me to see and interact with my people, even if it\’s virtual. Yes, I know I just complained about it up there. Things are rarely all good or all bad, I want to say. There are two sides to every coin. I can be achingly lonely but still grateful for the patchwork of ways that I\’m getting through this.

I want to tell you that getting through life has ALWAYS felt like a \”patchwork of ways\” for me, that I\’ve always smiled on the outside and projected calm and grounded while the abject fear of the next moment is ever-present, like an app always running in the background of my life. All the moments. All the time. I don\’t know what it feels like, otherwise.

I want to tell you that the reason I have a love of butterflies is that when Amy died, my life went dark for a long time….and when pinpricks of light began to appear, when I started to feel like I could breathe again and inhabit myself and open my eyes again, everything was different. Including me. I was not the same me I was the day before she died. I\’ve never been that me again.

I want to tell you that if you are lucky, that is how you will come out of the pandemic. That you will have been in this cocoon of whatever was taken from you, whatever you had to stay away from or give up or have more of….and that you will come out, as I did a year after Amy died, a different creature. The caterpillar, in the chrysalis, literally DIGESTS itself for the butterfly to be born. We are digesting ourselves now, in COVID, and the possibility to come out of the cocoon of this pandemic with wings when before we had feet is real, it\’s true, it\’s there. It\’s intoxicating.

It\’s also terrifying.
Most things that are intoxicating are.

I want to tell you these things, but I don\’t feel like I can.
Except I just did.

[image: orange and black monarch butterfly, still in the clear chrysalis]