Behind Me, Enough

If I don’t sit down and actively take stock of my year, I can quickly slip into a self-denigrating narrative that tells me I haven’t done much and that I need to do much more to pull my weight in the world, earn my keep, and be to be worthy of the support I have received and that I ask for from others.

So, this is my 2022 year in review, looking back over the distance I have traveled, the services I have offered up to my community, and the terrain I have covered in the past year. This is as much, or more, a reminder for myself – with my fuzzy mid-range memory and limited skills at quantification – as it is a gesture of accountability to those who have made donations to support my labors in 2022.

Practice:

I conducted five hundred and fifteen individual therapy, spiritual direction and/or coaching sessions. About a quarter of those sessions were in support of other’s living with or negotiating cancer diagnosis and treatment or living with some other significant disability. Another quarter of these sessions were supporting women from around the world who live in communities of religious sisters. Another twenty-five percent were supporting other psychotherapists as they cared for themselves and their caseloads and considered their relationship to their profession. The remaining quarter were consultations with adults who sought short-term or intermittent support negotiating significant life-transitions such as bereavement, job loss, career changes, burnout, disruption in their personal social circles.

Two thirds of these individual consultations were pay-what-you-can/by donation for people experiencing financial hardship. These donations ranged between $0 and $100.

I facilitated two hundred and forty group sessions in 2022.  

That number includes two rounds of the Living Intentionally with Mortality Workshop, one in the spring, and one in the fall that is just coming to a close now. We grieve together, and wrestle with our fear, hopes and fantasies, tell stories of our dead, pay attention to the way that those we love stay with us always, and share our wishes that the love we have sent out into the world will remain when we are gone. This is some of my most favorite work, creating a space where we can speak frankly of realities that are unspeakable in most of our relationships.

I led four rounds of a ten-hour Dream Workshop for folks who want to tend to their dreams in service of healing, contemplative or creative processes. One of these was for a group of students from the California Institute of Integral Studies who approached me themselves and asked me to supplement their course work in dream studies.  Here, we work to make respectful space for our non-rational aspects, and to help our rational thinking learn to collaborate respectfully with our intuitive and instinctive lives, and we pay attention to the ways we all dream together.

I started a twice monthly, ten session peer support group for people with conditions that put them at high-risk for significant covid complications. My goal is to help people experiencing extreme isolation in one of the hardest and least supportive phases of the pandemic eventually find, build, and sustain community for themselves. It has been incredibly strengthening to sit in the presence of those that gather there to lift each other up in a world that dismisses the deaths of members of the disability community as “acceptable losses.”  Happily, the first group I gathered has continued to stay connected on their own after the group closed, and the second group is still meeting.

Over the summer I developed and launched a seven-session workshop on building community groups and am leading a second session currently. It has been frankly thrilling to watch these groups strategize and refine their vision of community together, and I am eager to hear about what grows from the seeds that have been planted and have found everyone’s visions for connection absolutely inspiring.  

I also facilitated two on-going weekly dream circles, a twice monthly vocation and discernment group for helping professionals and a study group where a few of us gather to read archetypal, metaphysical, and mystical literature together. Dreams or books, or our professions may be the theme that calls us together in a circle, but each of these on-going groups have become kind and sacred spaces where we are able to wrestle with meaning, service, compassion, connection and calling in a world that feels increasingly challenging and driven by crisis. These groups are communities that I am so proud and so pleased to be a part of, and that I truly love.

In 2022, about one-half of all group participants were able to contribute the “suggested donation” amounts, the other half were experiencing financial hardship and were encouraged to attend for whatever donation was feasible for them, even if that was nothing.

In the spring, I started hosting what I call Evening Discussions – recorded public conversations on selected Wednesday evenings for a nominal fee – when I noticed a collective dilemma that I might be able to create a framework to discuss constructively. I did this five times in 2022, hosting conversations on building community, negotiating moral injury, living though uncertainty and on the recent social media shake up.

Organizational Work:

I was honored to be invited to lead two in-service trainings for The Kings Fund  in the UK, focused on mortality and death denial as it impacts medical and social care provision.

In May I began volunteering with the  Climate Psychology Alliance of North America and began helping on their media committee. It is an extraordinary group of committed clinicians offering up their skills and resources to support clients, journalists, climate communicators, and communities in contending with the escalating climate crises and locate their agency in the face of it all.

Learning:

I started the year imaging that I would be just over halfway through the two-year Living School program at the Center for Action and Contemplation by now.  I loved the syllabus and literature that anchored the program – focused on Christian mysticism – and deeply appreciated the opportunity to sit in discussions and ask questions of teachers like James Finley, Richard Rohr, Dr. Barbara Holmes, and Mirabai Starr. The time I spent in online classes and on remote intensives and retreats through the Living School were rich nourishment, that still feeds and sustains me months later. Unfortunately, they decided to eliminate hybrid remote/in-person options for the summer intensives and gathering with several hundred unmasked enrollees in one conference room in a hotel was not a safe or viable for me with a rare and unpredictable presentation of chronic lymphatic leukemia.

I spent a few weeks advocating for the inclusion of disabled folks, myself included, and then realized that although I felt listened to and respected during these meetings the bottom line was that they couldn’t promise me that those that needed remote access would be included.

I decided my time and energies would be better spent building the communities envisioned rather than trying to press this community into becoming the space I hoped for.

I remain grateful for all that I received and all that emerged, directly and indirectly, from my too brief time at the Living School.

I participated in several retreats at Upaya Zen Center even though it is just a few miles from my home, I was grateful for the safety of remote access.  I sat in contemplation with and breathed in the wisdom, kindness and teaching of Tony Bak, Joan Halifax, and Joanna Macy.

I fulfilled my continuing education credits to maintain my NYS licensure and took other trainings simply to complement my own practice and thinking with teachers such as Michael Meade, Dr. Joy DeGruy, Morgan Stebbins, Donald Ferrell, and others.

House-holding:

Between our two teenagers who have had to attend classes and work in largely unmasked spaces we have negotiated four rounds of Covid infection and one bad flu. Because of the way our home is organized, and because we set up a tiny house at the beginning of the pandemic, we have been able to quarantine from each other so that none of these infections spread through the household, which is its own kind of privilege and miracle. My husband and I have not been infected by Covid so far.

Over the summer I became aware that a teenager who is close to my children and often in my home, was living in unsafe circumstances and inadequately cared for by local child welfare services. We were able organize necessary legal support to help them become legally emancipated and them find a healthy, safe, loving de facto foster family.

I took all three kids on a road trip to California to tour colleges (including my alma mater), to visit my hometown, to swim in the Pacific Ocean and to visit with old friends, both living and passed on. And it was a personal victory that we did so safely so that no one caught Covid on the adventure.

We added a big goofy way too smart puppy named Moose to our household, and said goodbye, several months apart, to the two elderly cats – Gracie and Luna – who we inherited from my mother when she passed.

I had six months of extra Covid protection after my first and as it turned out, only Evusheld injection. Unfortunately, the preventive antibodies in Evusheld have been largely nullified by newer Covid variants (although probably still useful for those severely immunocompromised) My hospital stopped administering to those with moderate impairment due to this nullification.  I had three annual oncology follow ups, tests, scans etc.  The first two were “perfect” and the last one in October was a wee bit “iffy.” I have had these marginal test result before and they resolved, and I’m hoping they will do so again. I continue to feel strong and well in my body and took three-hundred and fifty long walks this year and stopped to watched three-hundred and sixty-five sunsets.

Writing:

I wrote eighty-five essays (including this one but not all the things I plan to write over this vacation week!)  Twenty-four of them were for the Seminar Essay subscription series that I write as a personal folly and discipline to keep my sword sharp and that almost no one reads. The other sixty-one were for this newsletter. One essay that I wrote to try to validate the experiences of so many people now contending with brain fog was picked up and published by Slate.  I received many kind letters from people living with post-Covid and chemotherapy induced brain fog thanking me for sharing and letting me know it was helpful to them in explaining to their friends and family what they were going through. I can’t even tell you what that meant to me.

I’ve been particularly grateful for the support, likes, comments, and subscriptions to this free newsletter. I started it in April, as I felt that it was important to find somewhere else to put my morning thoughts and reflections as Twitter began to feel more aggressive and agitated to me, and as Musk first began to make offers to purchase it.

I’ve spent the last month or so working hard to diversify and re-establish online community. I’ve largely stopped providing content at Twitter, but still acutely feel the loss of the true friendships, support networks, and twenty-thousand-member community that existed for me there. I have been trying to find my way and my voice at other platforms – Mastodon/Project Mushroom is the space I feel most myself. I am also at Post but not as comfortably, sharing program information and newsletter links at  Instagram when I remember.

I cannot articulate how much it means to me to open my “doors” and to offer services without financial barriers.

This has been possible, in part, because of those who have attended workshops and contributed more than the “suggested” donation to support others, and from those who have donated as they can to support my work and freely shared writing. When I think of the extraordinary souls I have been privileged to encounter, that I have been touched by, and taught by through our work together - and that I would never have met if I held to a firm fixed fee structure – I feel even more committed to sharing my work, writing and services on a by-donation model.

I couldn’t do any of this without your support – whether they have been shares, referrals, likes, kind words or financial contributions.  Thank you for all your support in the past year, in whatever form.  

So: my year was not a year of nothing or not much.

It was a year of just exactly enough.