“I slowly found a way to be in the water without drowning — a place in the middle. Even though I couldn’t always stay there, now I knew how to find my way back.” -Mylo Choy, Middle Distance, page 99-100

                There’s this phrase in the USA’s imagination of therapy: “I’m working through some stuff.” Working through. To the other side, I guess. In my own therapy (which was wonderful!), I definitely started wanting to work through and come out to somewhere past my hurts and confusions. And I don’t think it works that way. Choy and I like imaging our deep emotional worlds as water, as ocean. Reading Choy, for me, this kind of healing feels less like a going through and more like a habit of sometimes going into the water. Swimming out, or swept out unexpectedly. Learning that, as this is a place we can go to, this is also a place from which we can learn ways back to the sand when we’re ready to lie on the beach and rest.
                There are so many examples I could take up, but writing is a close one. I’m writing now. And all day, in the back of my head, I’ve been unsure how I would write this post. For a little while before I started I was looking to find a calm place, where the post was all laid out in front of me. Without any emotional waves. And I like feeling calm (it’s lovely), but writing this does have emotional waves. That’s why I want to write it. Sitting down to write about this isn’t a matter of finding some mythic place where there isn’t the water that washes me, carries me, or sometimes feels like it might drown me. It’s about finding ways to be in the water without drowning. To swim down. To feel the current. To know there are ways back—back to the beach, and back to the waves, as I need them. Fear and hopelessness (Mylo Choy reminds me) aren’t pitiless seas where no one could possibly breathe. They’re currents and creatures in the oceans where we swim