It comes up early, usually within the first few sessions, phrased almost the same way every time. I just want to get back to who I was before. Before the affair, before the diagnosis, before the year that took the whole thing apart. The person being described is always described generously, and always by someone with a reason to describe her that way. She's also the one who walked into this without seeing it coming.
The drive from Columbus to Dayton was eerily still. No traffic. No highway patrol running speed. My route took me past Wright-Patterson, where the quiet broke open for the low growl of a caravan of military humvees moving down the interstate, and then closed back over the road behind them.
Twenty-five years later, there's a generation of first responders who have no morning to describe. They carry the day anyway.
The notebooks are back in the grocery store, and plenty of the people buying them haven't been in a classroom in twenty years. September has that pull. The plan comes out again, gets a new start date and a better app, and this time it's going to hold. Starting over is free, though, which is most of why it's so appealing. Continuing costs something, because it means going back to the week it stopped and looking at what was happening there.
What does it mean to be present with your most core self? This will elicit as many answers as people you ask. Just like when asking people to define poetry, each person will present an operational definition specific to them, and each answer is the truth. Sometimes connection with ourselves can come through access to our emotions.
