Invincible Summer

A lot of people lost someone, or several someones, dear to them in 2022. It was the year my dad’s journey with Alzheimer’s came to an end. And if you’d been touched by that or any other such long-lasting, debilitating disease you know there’s a certain amount of relief on the other side of it. To know your loved one no longer is encased in something no one would willingly choose for themself, no longer lost from themself, is to experience wave after wave of relief right there in the middle of grief.  Even after the thread of a story was impossible to hold onto, he still loved to read One of my favorites from the baby days of Beatrix I lost my mother to a long-lasting, debilitating disease twenty-six years ago at age twenty-one. (yes, yes, do the math: I either look young or old for my age depending on how much sleep I’ve been allowed lately). And that grief experience also came with relief but I didn’t have any of the right tools to be okay with that relief. I only felt guilty and supe

At the beginning of 2022 I chose a word for the year, inspired by others who did the same. I wrote it in a journal and mostly forgot about it until the fall. But it worked its magic in the background. My word for the year was INTEGRATION.  I first learned about self-integration in my late twenties when I was also first discovering the transformative power of therapy. Loosely it means seeing all the parts of yourself and your personal history as part of the whole story of you. Being intentional about integration for me has meant being honest with myself about what I want to keep and what I no longer want to carry from previous parts of my life.  2022 had so much beauty and love and positive growth in it for me. But it was also the most challenging year of my life I think, at least of the last two decades. I know I’m not alone in that – I’ve heard from so many friends and family and coaching clients about how the sheer accumulation of challenges in our post-2020 world have taken an extra