I haven’t written much lately– not here, not anywhere except my journal. In the spirit of complete transparency, and the knowledge that many of you out there feel the same, I’ve struggled lately. I’ve struggled with stressful situations and changes at work and connecting with my students virtually. I’ve struggled to contain my work and parenting lives in a single space, all day, all the time. I’ve struggled with grief over not hugging my parents or being able to visit my brand-new nephew yet.

When I’m struggling, it looks to others like I’m staring into space, lost in worry. It disconnects me from my family. It sometimes looks like tears, but often not. I try to hide my inner struggles from the world. I try to heal on my own, because I can’t verbalize how it feels to be in my worry-filled mind or my tension-filled body or my grief-filled heart. An inability to express oneself sounds odd, coming from a writer– but I generally write about things that are past, after I’ve processed them. It’s hard to find the words when I’m in the middle. I hope I’m doing it justice here; I’m only able to write about it now because I’m partway through the healing process.

I’ve taken this winter break to do some healing, and I thought today I’d share what that looks like for me, in case it’s helpful to any of you. If you are struggling, please know that you are not alone.

Write

Little fragments of ideas, connections. A camel stores water in his hump for long, dry journeys. What did I need to store for this long, dry journey? Resilience. Grace. Toilet paper. Ideas come into my mind, almost unbidden, and I jot them on the corners of notebooks, sometimes type them into a file for later. 

I write, but I also don’t write. I stopper the ideas in my head, hold my ambition back. I tell myself I’m letting things marinate, but I also feel like I’m deliberately damming myself up. Maybe so that when I allow the waters to break, it will rush out in a glorious flood. Maybe because I’m afraid of what the waters contain.  

Bake

Measuring ingredients makes the world take shape again. A half cup of flour. An exacting teaspoon of baking powder. A rain of chocolate chips in the batter. When I bake, I am elemental. 

I don’t just bake, though— I bake for. For my dad. For friends who helped me through the worst of this year at work. When my husband bites into the first fresh batch, I watch his face, the joy spreading across it. I bake for myself, so that I have delicacies to gorge myself on in the quiet afternoons and tired evenings.

Eat

Eating is its own ritual. Cookies, mostly— if I’m going to eat, I’m going to eat only the best, my own bakes. A cup of tea is the perfect accompaniment— it heats the mouth just enough to make the chocolate melt, the powdered sugar turn into a crinkly paste. I eat because I’m bored. I eat because I’m sad. I eat to enjoy, to savor, to connect with my body. I am not eating my feelings; I am feeling my eatings. I do not regret the eatings. 

Read

I gorge on words. I have two, three books going on at once— a memoir for listening on my phone, a memoir on my kindle, a memoir in hardcover for nighttime. I am gorging on other people’s lives. 

Snuggle

My children’s bodies curl into mine in the margins of the day— morning, noon, and night. My girl always wants another story. I read picture books with my arm under her neck, her forehead against my shoulder, her little knees in my side. My boy creeps to me in quiet hours, coming in for a tight hug and a hard kiss, too old to snuggle, but still too young to not need his mother’s body. At night, he asks me to “bake” him in bed. I pretend to chop him into pieces and make him into a stew, a hot dog, a cake. His laughs fill the room as I mangle his boy-body. It always ends the same, with me pretending to eat him and then puke him up. This is how I hold my boy: by devouring him whole, then letting him escape. 

Plans

I don’t make any. I don’t fill up my bullet journal with goals. I take things one day at a time, feeling my way through. When the day feels too big, I just think about the next thing and the thing after that. Sometimes I feel a spurt of creativity. I try to capture it before it withers.

Fear

I read the New York Times for my daily dose of fear, and it’s full of questions. Are vaccines effective against the new strain of coronavirus, the mutation that’s even more contagious than before? How can it be more contagious? Will the stimulus bill happen, or will Trump derail it again, in a last-ditch effort to be a hero? Joe Biden hides in the pages, our next president so proverbially boring that it’s a relief. Once he’s president, maybe I can stop consuming news. 

Hope

My father-in-law is getting the vaccine next week. My husband says we’ll be getting ours before February. There is a saving grace in being a teacher right now, in being “essential”. The idea of being able to hug my parents before spring is intoxicating. I plan celebrations in my mind. I think about summer. I think about travel. I think about airplanes. 

What does healing look like for you?

You are not alone.