If you needed a gentle poke to Do The Thing, here you go. 🫵
Yesterday, in a job interview, I found myself telling the story of meeting my birth mother. (As you do. Therapy job interviews are weird, but I digress.)
I received an email from her on a Sunday morning, and by Sunday evening, I had called her. As a 22-year-old who was still prone to major binge drinking, I can’t say I was very in touch with my emotions.
Yet I knew that the longer I waited, the more the anxiety would build up in my head. The scarier it would get. The more scenarios I would make up in my head, both idealizing and catastrophizing the potential experience. (In therapy, this is called fortune-telling and it’s what gets so many of us stuck in our heads, in our stories, imagining an outcome that may never happen.)
As it was, holding in this big secret from my parents that morning, and then from my friends on the five-hour drive back to D.C., where I was living at the time, felt like it was threatening to eat me alive. If you’d looked in the window of my blue Jeep on I-95 South on that Sunday, you’d see a jumping bean disguised as a blonde chick in a North Face fleece.
Finally, alone in my Bethesda apartment, I sat down on my bed, picked up my blue see-through landline cordless phone (hello 2005), dialed the first nine digits, stared at the phone, as if to summon strength from those little chips about to connect me to her. Finally, I gingerly pressed that little button and then drew my hand away like I’d just touched a hot stove.
Was the actual call terrifying? Not at all, although it obviously was a life-changing call.
Yesterday, a grad school friend called me. She hasn’t yet started seeing clients, but she’s about to real soon, and is incredibly nervous. The afternoon I was to see my first client, I remember walking a confused little shih tzu on the greenway overlooking the ocean, as I was on the phone crying to this friend about how scared I was to see my first client.
In order to let her site know that she is able to see clients, she has to put her name on a list to indicate as much. She’s going through Some Stuff right now…but as a therapist in our cases, or just being a human, there will always be Some Stuff. It’s rare the perfect moment exists to take a deep breath and Do The Thing.
“Rip the band-aid off,” I told her. “You’ll feel much better after.”
I wrote this because maybe you could use this reminder today to just Do The Damn Thing that you know you’ve probably been building up in your head.
Unless it’s contacting your ex. Maybe wait on that one a little more.