the subtle art of processing

dispatch 41

Apr 19, 2023

hello all,

Writing this from my couch on a day that is 89 degrees in April…which is…fine? Everything is fine! This is zooming into your inbox while I’m on vacation for the week, taking some much needed downtime. I’m in one of those moments where you can feel change is coming but you’re not sure what it will look like. Big Goo Era energy. I’ve been challenging myself to choose joy where I can and that is a little of what today’s essay is about.

Especially jazzed about this dispatch’s recommendations so be sure to scroll to the end! This newsletter closes out April. I’ll be back in your inbox for May before taking a little break for June, possibly taking that time to revisit some past essays. I hope that wherever you are, you snag some moments of true rest today.

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a photo of a chocolate and vanilla swirl ice cream cone held in a hand. In the background is a sidewalk and a church. — Choosing weekday joy with the first ice cream cone of the year

the subtle art of processing

The sky is pastel in these early morning hours before anyone is awake and it feels like the sky has been painted just for me. The air is still cold and I snuggle under blankets and start the day gently. Coffee and writing have become a ritual. I notice that when I am focused on luxuriating in these parts of my life, rather than making them tasks to cross of a to-do list, I am kinder to myself. I eat breakfast and drink water and go on walks. I start my day with a little bit of movement. I resist the moment when I start to take in information, podcasts, the news, knowing that once I start I will not stop until I fall asleep. For now, this candy sky is the only thing I’m interested in taking in.

The weekends go fast, those short days and short hours that are only my own. I try to stretch them and make them longer and most of the time it works. But these mornings are my own too and I want them to count for something. I’m working on my book, I think, and meeting the characters of something else that doesn’t have a shape yet. On the weekends I learn about herbs and body systems and how to make a medicinal tea blend. I make salves and tinctures, lining up labeled containers in satisfying rows. I spend time in bed. I read, tidy, and cook. I walk through the early Spring air, heady with new life, and breathe a little bit deeper.

I don’t talk about my job in therapy anymore, a necessary component of tabooing work in my larger life. I try to carve it from myself at exactly 5pm, crumple it into a ball and put it in a small tin on my desk. I make this once big thing smaller and smaller to see what I become out of its shadow.

This is a kind of sobriety too, a quitting. A refusal to let this familiar thing grab a hold of an ankle to pull me under yet again. Lately, I have been reading Julia Cameron’s Finding Water, and in it she talks about emotional sobriety. I recognized myself in the ways that she speaks about engaging with drama, of making a problem or challenge bigger than it needs to be in order to revel in the feeling of it all. When it comes to work, I have a habit of weaponizing anxious thoughts and pretending they are reality when they are not. My job is an area of my life where I tend to dwell, but I don’t want to live there.

It’s nearly two years since I was laid off, and everyday I see an announcement for more layoffs at more companies. More people out of work, more lives thrown into precarity. Like so many of us right now, I am scared to be laid off again. I do not like my job, but I still obsess about losing it and about what that might mean about me, though I know that it wouldn’t mean anything. Or at least, I know that in theory. It might even make me happier in the way that it did the last time. But in the aftermath of that very public loss, there are still spots where shame creeps in. There are still places where my brain holds tight to conventional markers of success as validators of worth. There are places where I have yet to create new scripts.

I am both gay and sober, so I come from long lines of compulsive feelings processors on both sides of my lineage, a cliché I am okay with inhabiting. I love to talk about feelings, my own and those of others, at great length. I like to come out the other side of a conversation with more clarity on how to treat myself and others. I like to think that talking and processing helps me to understand the world better. And a lot of the time that is true. But sometimes, sitting in something I cannot change only causes pain. Sometimes processing only serves to be a stage upon which I can project my greatest fears as fact. Sometimes, it doesn’t help me understand anything more than my own deep capacity for worry.

I process because I fear that to not process would mean stuffing things down in the ways I did during the drinking years. I worry that to not say something I feel is a self-betrayal, but that isn’t always the truth. Sometimes not talking about things means not lending air to the balloon of their body, allowing them to become so large that you forget they are full of nothing. What I am seeking is more discernment between what is a useful act of seeking understanding, and what is wallowing in my own worst fears. Is there a balance? Maybe. I haven’t found it yet.

I am aware that this essay is fundamentally an act of processing my break from processing, an irony that feels right and true to me. I still am who I am, so often confusing feelings with fact and fear with intuition. But the recognition of this alone feels like a step towards change, if a small one, a moment of resistance against something that takes more of me that I am willing to give.

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