Today, a session reminded me of the assumptions and projections we create when we lack information. I think back to October of ’24, post cross-country move, when up was down and down was up. I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t coping well. I was buried in my phone for hours on end, too-stiff cosmopolitan in hand, zeroing in on a cut on my leg lined with gnats. I remember sitting on the front lawn, or on the carpeted bedroom floor, alone. Instead of leaning on my support system, I withdrew. Months later, I picked up the memory like a Polaroid.
I believed I should be able to handle it—I was a therapist, after all. I offered myself overly simplistic ideas as to what was going on with me, while really, I was warring for my values, my sanity, and for myself.
Basically, I thought I needed a nail when I needed an entire construction team.
“This couldn’t happen to me” was my first major error. I wasn’t prepared. I’d stepped into one of the biggest transitions of my life holding beliefs that weren’t true—and when it came time to ask for help, I felt shackled.
We do this. We don’t understand our experience, so we make our best guess, turn it into a map, and follow it like it’s the holy grail—until we wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what turn we missed.
Life, I’ve learned, is a game of finding what doesn’t work—and then, like a scalding pan’s handle, dropping it.
So now, when something feels off, I pause. I don’t rush to solve it or explain it away. I widen the lens.
I check the map before I follow it; Is this true, or is this my best guess dressed up as truth?
Because getting it wrong isn’t the problem. Staying wrong is.
Love, Jaclynn