My friend Carla has been writing about consistency, and her words have wormed their way into my brain, as they often did in ye olde days of blogging. (Is Substack the new blog? If so, I don’t hate it?)
One of my fears as a therapist, of course, is that I’m not helping my clients enough.
Unexpectedly overcome with emotion, I choked out “I just want to help my clients as much as you’ve helped me” to my therapist a few weeks ago. In my own therapy, I usually have a moment of “omg fuck her for saying that,” when she’s pulled at a thread I hadn’t realized was so visibly unraveled—or unraveled at all!
Or, more palatably, I’ll have a moment of “omg, she’s totally right,” and it makes me happy to realize it and everything feels great.
However, my therapist has been doing this 20+ years, and I’ve been doing it for three, so this is also an unfair comparison. But she reminded me that the work is done in the consistency of showing up for my clients week after week, session after session.
The a-ha moments are great, sure, but she reminded me that not every client will show them, and certainly not as visibly as me.
I am a very impatient person living in a very impatient society accustomed to instant gratification, and I fear these qualities are only becoming stronger in myself and society.
One of my Achille’s heels is keeping a consistent schedule. I can chalk it up to ADHD, my background as a journalist/working in social media, where every day is different…but the bottom line is that I really struggle with a consistent schedule.
Consistency asks us to sit down and stay for a while, not to dip in and out. (Ask me about my love life…)
Consistency shows the cracks in the armor—but it will also patch them up if you play the long game.
Consistency is a promise—to myself, to others. To showing up through imperfection.
The fear of consistency, which leads to the inconsistency, is that I put in the time and/or work, and it’s all for naught. Even though experience has shown me that’s not actually true.
The two things in my life I’ve been most consistent with have also been two of the most successful things for me: running and blogging.
With this being the beginning of the year and all, I’m sure you know where this is heading. I’m making two commitments to consistency right now:
to show up weekly (gonna play around with the day of the week right now, but with the goal to have sent something out by every Sunday night) in this space
to commit to as many days as I can of the Yoga with Adriene 30-day Flow Yoga Journey. I’m shooting for all the days, but giving myself fierce self-compassion around giving myself grace if I miss a day AND not abandoning ship just because I missed a day or two. I plan to do it in the morning after I walk Lucy but before everything else…because I know how much better my day feels when it starts with movement, and these 25-minute-ish videos are a very accessible start for me. Anyone else doing this journey?
What are you committing to be consistent to? Also, since I’m planning on writing more regularly, let me know more of what you’d like to see here.
oof. keeping a consistent schedule. you know I struggle with this so much for many of these same reasons. oddly, I can go all-in for a short period of time, like a month-long challenge. But it's the long-term that's hard and this new job situation is really challenging for that reason!! Also - HI LUCY.
Count me in with Carla in loving the personal updates best! I miss that about blogging, and Substacks seem to be more didactic rather than people unapologetically sharing the messiness of life.
As for what I'm committing to being consistent to, I have a bunch of New Year's goals kicking around (read the news daily, track my water drinking, strength train daily) but am currently in the middle of moving house, so I told myself that I would wait until January 7th to start my new year's resolutions. I looooove consistency and I knew that it would discourage me to do a crappy job with them this week, so I decided a late start would be better than abandoning some goals just because this week is too hard. I definitely need to work on self-compassion in allowing myself to miss a day of a goal and then jump right back into it...