Therapy Works
We just flew back from Puerto Rico and wow, are my arms tired!
That’s a lie. We didn’t just fly back. We arrived home late Saturday night after a week of exploring the northeast corner of the island. We spent all day, every day, outside, soaking up the sun and stockpiling vitamin D. We wandered the streets of Old San Juan, discovering historic forts and stray cats (that Luke was desperate to snuggle). We dug giant holes and collected broken pieces of coral at the beach. We hiked to a swimming hole with a rope swing and splashed through muddy puddles on ATVs in the rain forest. We ate our weights in sweet plantains and drank gallons of mojitos and virgin pina coladas. I spoke Spanish and translated signage on the highways and in the grocery store. It was great. Busy, exhausting, and great. Adventuring is not for the faint of heart.
Now that I have settled back into my routine and my body has returned to its normal sleeping and eating schedule, my brain is churning with reflection on what exactly made this trip so great. Usually I’m ready to murder everyone in my tribe on day 3 or 4 of a family trip. And by the end, I’m often tempted to push them all off of a cliff so I can fly home in solitude to live a quiet life as a cat dog lady. But I didn’t feel that way this time.
Yesterday, during my bi-weekly session with my therapist, Dawn, I uploaded all of this data so we could focus on my very favorite thing to do…over-analyze everything. (Side note: does anyone else have a mental block regarding the word bi-weekly? I have to google it every time I use it. Isn’t it weird that it can mean every other week OR twice per week? How confusing. In this case, I mean every other week.) Anyway, back to over-analyzing. After an hour of discussion, here’s where I landed: therapy works.
The end.
Just kidding.
Historically, the three major themes that ruin vacations for me are:
The fact that I insist on planning every component of a trip and then get pissed off when no one appears to be as grateful as I think they should be;
The fact that I suck at relaxation and cannot turn off autopilot so I continue to do everything for everyone at every moment, which leads to me getting angry at hubs for not helping more when, in fact, I have a) never asked for help or b) ever been still long enough to allow him an opportunity to offer help; and
The fact that eating and drinking items that I do not typically eat or drink cause me to feel like garbage, which triggers unhealthy thought patterns about my body, ruining my mood (and likely to moods of everyone around me, too?).
Magically, none of those things happened in Puerto Rico. I think we all know that none of this happened, or didn’t happen, because of magic. In my last blog, A Quiet Mind, I wrote this little trinket:
“For two+ years, I have worked tirelessly to become this quieted version of myself. Somewhere along the way, however, I stopped being conscious of the choices I was making to become this me. It just kind of happened, like the autopilot feature in my car that I refuse to use. So while I planned, and attended therapy, and listened to the podcasts, and read the books, life took hold. My brain became quieter. I didn’t even notice it was happening.”
So yeah, therapy works. But there’s more…
For years, my dear friends (who happen to have traveled around the sun a few more times than me) have told me that when I turned 40, I would slowly begin to release ideas that I had previously thought were important. It’s similar to the message my parents repeated to angsty middle school me about, well, everything. And you know what? They were all right. I think this shift in thinking might be something called wisdom.
The last secret to my success is exhaustion. I don’t have any witty remarks about this part. Suffice it to say that when my body and mind (and probably your body and mind, too) is super, duper, awesomely tired, the idea of expending additional energy on unnecessary tasks is a non-starter.
So here is the formula:
Therapy + Wisdom + Exhaustion = Apathy? Indifference? Non-Attachment? Yes. Thanks, Oprah.
When I write new blogs entries, I like to think about the purpose of each piece. Sometimes I want to provide education. Sometimes I want to tell a funny story. Sometimes I want to pontificate. Sometimes I want to dump out the rocks inside the big, dumb box on top of my neck and shoulders. Not today. Today I’m bragging. Today I’m really fucking proud of myself. For decades, I allowed the chaos inside my brain to rule and/or torment my life. Literal decades. I had no idea that becoming a freer, more peaceful version of myself was possible. But here I am. 🧡
