I’ve recently learned that the healing (and growth) process can be thought of as a series of concentric circles. Innermost circle, response to pain. Fix immediate, obvious, acute pain. Body, mind, spirit, whatever, but if any of it is in acute pain, first priority is to fix it. Then, we can travel out to the next circle, then the next, then the next.
Obviously if you get hit by a bus during this process, then you go back to fixing the immediate pain problem, but depending on how practiced you are at healing, exploration, and growth, you can then move fairly quickly back out to the circle where you were before the wheels came off the bus, as it were.
As with all things in life, this is not always the pretty picture that you just imagined:
Often, it looks more like this:
Weirdly enough, the process of writing a book is remarkably similar. I cracked my knuckles and sat down at my keyboard, and 95,000 words and lots of therapy and time and binge watching shows like Sons of Anarchy later, I finished. YAY! And then I had to find a publisher, and then I had to question myself about that entire process (had to? Not at all! But I did.), and then my editor at my publisher (who I LOVE) basically told me to find my themes and make sure they lived in my book (UGH THE WORST), so then I spent months doing that, and now we’re going through the manuscript line by line, which is making me question everything about my book, my life, and all of my decisions for the last five years (UGH EVEN WORSE).
But it’s happening! So stay tuned.
