just because they fixed your heart, doesn't mean it's not still broken
some thoughts on the soft underbelly of spiral time
This coming Monday, I’m giving the third in my series of four Divergent Design Workshops online with The Glasgow Zine Library, this time on Disrupting Shame.
Revising this workshop, which I’ve given several times before, is proving pretty humbling. I think I may actually need to take my own workshop…
I’ve been having a hard time lately.
It’s disappointing, because after a really difficult year and a half of being diagnosed with heart failure—and a surgery and some complications and another surgery—I was finally feeling so much better. My heart is working at almost a normal capacity, and I have been feeling a lot more energy.
But still, I’ve been struggling.
Maybe it’s because my heart is physically working better that all the metaphorical broken parts are resurfacing. And they are resurfacing as shame, shame I thought I had worked through, left behind.
It’s really hard and humbling to realize (all over again) that healing isn’t linear. In both good times and in bad times, it often feels like, “OK, this is it—I’m going to feel this good (!), or this bad (…), forever!”
But the truth is, healing isn’t linear because time isn’t linear.
This is the soft underbelly of Spiral Time that I don’t often write about.
(NOTE: most of my content is free, but some more personal or in-progress essays are for paid subscribers only, including the rest of this one. If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you so much, and if you’re not, and my work has been valuable to you, please consider supporting it financially!)