I am writing this during a silent writing session with A Writing Room, an online writing community I have been a part of for the past year. I have been more of a lurker than a participant, but they hold daily silent writing sessions where people gather on Zoom, and then write together for 60 minutes in community. It’s so cold here today, and the news from the weekend was hard (again- it’s so hard to be a human in this current world of ours). Because of the darkness that we feel in the way our country is operating both domestically and globally, and because this is my hardest time of year ANYWAYS just because…winter, I know we all could benefit from prioritizing allowing for some care towards ourselves. I have been taking a 7 am barre class on Monday mornings, but gosh, it’s so cold here in Chicago this morning that the idea of lifting anything heavy was just too much (lol). So, here I am, tapping into this 9 am silent writing session where I know that 28 others are writing with me.

I have some scattered comments to make here this morning, enough that as I was getting ready for our day, bundling up to drive my son to school, I realized I had enough in me to feel chatty. And with this chattiness, I should write. I am writing to you, and to me, as well. Getting my thoughts out of my brain is always a cathartic process. So here goes!

It was freezing here on Friday as well, enough so that school was cancelled for my kids. Being home on a super cold day is such a joy sometimes. I always feel SO MUCH gratitude for not forcing ourselves outside when we don’t need to (but again- mental health-wise, sometimes at this time of year we HAVE to get ourselves out of our heads and our spaces). I do not write about my kids here on this blog, but in terms of what the day was like for me, I will share that one of my kids started off the day a little off-kilter (it happens to all of us, right?), and we had some conflict between how they wanted to start the day and what my husband’s and my expectations were for them before they pursued those interests. We weren’t saying no to those interests, we were delaying them, since we had the entire day ahead, and there were some other tasks we asked them to complete first. That’s all I will say there- but it resulted in a fair amount of big feelings, and it had such an impact on me that I ended up really struggling to get through the day, and those same feelings for me bled into Saturday.

This is what I was feeling- I am taking a business class for coaches which is really great, and the timing for me taking this class now is perfect in many ways, for example, I feel like I have so much guidance on how to get started with a private practice. That feels so comforting. However, I am a good 2 months away from doing many of these business start up tasks, so much of this is information that I know I will need, and I now HAVE. But then, this past week, the class focused on finding your niche, and the emphasis was on how health and wellness coaching practices often need a specific target population to work with, and that coaches need to define their process for reaching specific outcomes. This is very different from where I am now in my training, which is incredibly general, and more meeting people where they are in this moment, and not creating a program. There was something about thinking through this that brought on a sense of being slightly off from where I need to be, and also where I felt like what I’ve been doing with my coaching practice with others hasn’t been good enough. I feel suddenly quite insecure. I know that I am not going to be perfect and I also don’t have this as a goal or expectation. And this allows for me to keep pushing on, because I know I will be fine-tuning what I do for months and years to come. Still, it planted this seed of not-enoughness which, dangnabit, I am working really hard to overcome.

I went from taking the coaching class which introduced these concepts that fed into my self-doubt on Thursday, and then our Friday ended up being hard from a parenting perspective. And those challenges on Friday brought up even more fears. How can I plan a life of working with clients from my home when we have days like Friday. When, even though my kids are older, my parenting needs still usurp anything else that I have planned? I couldn’t even get through a ten minute tapping meditation on Friday morning- how on earth can I be in a solid and regulated frame of mind to serve others as a wellness coach, of all things?

Soooo- yeah, I had a bit of an internal meltdown on Friday going into Saturday. Saturday morning one of our kids had a soccer game (indoor!!!) in the morning, and I felt grateful for the fact that it got all of us out of the house. We needed that. Similarly, we had tickets last night to go to the Chicago Blackhawks game. After a full day of sitting home and watching the snow fall, we needed that as well.

My whole point here is to say that I am treating myself today as being in recovery-mode. Saturday morning I was proclaiming to my husband that I was quitting everything. That none of what I have been planning is going to work. And this was all before ICE shot and killed yet another human up in Minnesota. These are hard times.

I have been in a women’s group since June, and we met last week and achieved connection on the need for the collective to meet the patriarchal chaos of this time from a regulated place, from which we rise to the challenge embodied in our wholeness. When my reserves and capacities plummeted over the weekend, I remembered that I was a part of this group where I was accepted and included, and this left some wiggle-room for my negative thoughts to settle and for that wholeness to be located within me again. It took time for sure, a good 24 hours to feel that possibility again, and this morning I am building myself again. I am here, sitting at my laptop, and engaging from this part of me that wishes for goodness to pour into this world. All of us, creating and expressing, conjuring up our anger and rage at the injustice of these times, uniting in our quest towards what is right and humane.

There is a fabulous parenting book that was pretty life-changing for me. It’s called “Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors” by Robyn Gobbel. In it, the author talks about how each day we strive for connection, regulation, and felt safety. For being regulated, she offers the tip of each day looking for connection, embracing playfulness, noticing the good, and leaning into self-compassion. That is where I am today. I have written these four tips in my planner, which is what I do when I know I need a bit of a reset.

For noticing the good, I looked out our window this very cold morning and saw a portion of the Chicago River which is freezing over, and some birds, it looks like some ducks and gulls, were standing on the ice. This section of the river is just beyond a new construction site, where they have been churning the earth for what seems like the entire past year. It is very possible that this time next year, whatever they are planning to build will finally be made incarnate. And that means that we will lose our view of this little sliver of the river and the birds that settle on the ice when the river freezes. It made my viewing of them feel extra special today. It’s the small things that build us back up.

Ducks on Ice

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