I have been writing a lot, but I haven’t been doing it here. I don’t want to repeat myself. I want to be relevant, and not write here just to write here. That said, the habit of writing that I began every day when I started blogging in earnest in 2018 made a huge impact on my skills and self awareness. The biggest impact all the writing has had is the ability to observe myself honestly.

I have made a commitment to myself and to my writing to write a memoir this year, about the last 5 or so years of finding myself and coming to who I am for real. With Lucy, beginning again, changing my life, endings and beginnings.

Thing is, absolutely the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

So far.

There have been so many times that I’ve thought that I was doing the hardest thing. And for all intents and purposes, I was in my hardest moment up until then. Now I’m asking myself to take a healing journey of re-reading my old blog posts, being explicitly honest with myself, writing it all down, synthesizing it, and creating a story to share about how I have experienced my healing.

Every experience I’m having now is filtered through the conscious awareness of my healing path. I’m really hard on myself. I also am amazing at procrastination. My avoidance is impeccable. I come up with urgent things I need to attend to around the house, ask Google, look at on social media, or read to distract.

But it’s like an elephant is standing on my chest all the time. I know this is necessary to really move on. But the weight of all that work is exhausting. I know it’s what I need to do, but it is so hard to go there.

This weekend I sat down to write and the sheer emotional and cognitive load made me fall asleep, every time. It’s like my body (really, my amygdala) has a rip cord to pull me out in case of emergency. My body just shuts it all off and I fall asleep. Pen in hand, note cards falling on the floor, or being eaten by my pets, I wake up confused and disoriented.

So this is my reality right now. A writer, writing, feeling and remembering, allowing myself to mess up, holding myself accountable, and doing the work. I’m so very living in the arena, the underworld, jumping from the flaming tower. Sometimes it feels like everyone else left, it’s down to me and the demon I’m fighting on the arena floor.