re-entering

May 7

Dear Reader,

I've been thinking about how often clients come into session having just gotten back from something. A vacation, a hard week at the hospital with a parent, a retreat, a funeral, a stretch of time that asked something different of them than ordinary life does. They sit down and there's a particular look I've come to recognize. They're here, but not all the way here yet. Their body made it back before the rest of them did.

I think most of us re-enter too fast. We grab the pace again the moment our feet touch the ground, because the world didn't pause while we were gone, and now it expects us to slip back into the rhythm of it.

I do this myself. I'll come home from somewhere that mattered and within twenty minutes be triaging emails on my phone. The emails aren't genuinely urgent. Moving fast just feels easier than sitting with the gap between what I was just inside of and the kitchen I'm standing in.

Here is what I've come to believe about this rhythm. When we skip re-entry, the experience we just had does not get to change us. It just gets archived. The hospital week becomes a story we tell at dinner parties. The vacation becomes a row of photos on a phone. The grief becomes a thing we hand off to the next quiet moment, which never comes, because we keep filling our quiet moments with work emails. Whatever was actually happening to us in that other place gets sealed off, and we go back to being the person we were before, except slightly more tired and slightly more confused about why we feel off.

I see this play out in the therapy room months later. A client will be describing some low-grade weariness, some general sense that something is wrong, and we'll trace it back to a week in February they never really came home from. The week didn't cause the problem but the fact that they sprinted through it did. Whatever happened during that time never got the chance to land somewhere inside them and become part of who they are now.

This is what re-entering slowly does. It gives the experience a place to land. It lets what you went through change something about how you're living. Otherwise it gets stored on a shelf next to all the other things you didn't have time to feel.

Yours in the journey,