#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

“Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

A swim, without ambivalence and then a lovely walk with Charlie in the warm rain and all the ice gone. Change. The weather brings change. And there is change in my household. I am reading my friend Nicky Mendenhall’s book, Leaving Analysis: A Year Finding Freud, Rediscovering the Sacred, in which she writes about her year of closure on her years of psychoanalysis. I think the process and experience of saying goodbye properly, meaningfully, is so important when we have the chance, even when that goodbye involves a natural evolution of growth and change. A family dinner tonight, all except my son, around our round table by the fire. The special one eating his dinner, meatballs, curious about the dinners on each of our plates (we ordered out). Tasting all of them. It’s a sweet meal with lovely, intimate conversation about our lives here together over the past three years and all the moments we’ve each most enjoyed. So many many many moments of enjoyment; a time to appreciate all of those.