I asked for a session with Katie because everything is great but I’m not feeling it in a deeply meaningful way. It’s like the feeling box in the center of me is gone, and I have no idea where it is.

I told her that my perfect life that I am living feels like a popsicle, only when I go to lick it, it’s wrapped. It’s not that I’m walking around licking my life, to be clear. We are talking about METAPHOR.

Katie asked what would happen if I took off the wrapper and tasted the popsicle. I looked up to the ceiling and thought. My brain hit a cement wall. That’s for other people, I said.

What’s for other people? Katie asked.

Life, I said.

I sat on that for a minute. When I was separated from my mother, I said, I was separated from life. I became other.

Since we’re talking about metaphor, Katie said metaphor is a great way to be in the world when you can’t figure something out. Metaphor gives you a chance to feel without being able to directly articulate what it is you are feeling. Because you are describing the thing from an angle (a wrapped popsicle), the subject isn’t going to take you over because you haven’t named it. Yesterday I was talking to the artist Cristina Link and she was saying that sometimes she has to get a lot of color on a page before she can even begin to think in words. It can be such a relief to see what you mean without having to KNOW what you mean in words. And then it can also be maddening because you often want to be able to know and share.

Speaking of knowing and sharing, Katie said that as a world post-COVID we are more than ever in a place of not-knowing, and it’s a place that would be helpful to become more comfortable with since things are moving at such a fast pace (suddenly you can’t be sure if I wrote this or a computer did—suddenly you can’t be sure if the voice on the phone is really your beloveds or an IA copy), we human beings are in the valley of I Don’t Know. The most efficient body is a relaxed body, and if you are tensed up against not knowing and fighting to find your footing in the Land of I Know What’s Going to Happen Next you will suffer unnecessarily. Or so I believe.

Back to the feeling box that is missing from the center of me. I told Katie it was like a lego I could snap in if I had it, or the black box on a plane. Katie said what if my journey is not to look for the old box but to find a new box, or pieces of a new box that will gradually come to fill the hole. She said instead of me looking for something I lost in the past, wholeness then becomes about the present, it becomes new and vital. She said finding the old piece would be superficial anyway because it’s the old piece—it’s not alive.

This resonated with me. I’m pretty sure I jumped around in my chair when she said this. I have spent my life looking backward trying to find what’s missing. Going home, visiting familiar places, my parents, was a way for me to touch base and refuel. I got high on safety, on knowing. All the while, almost every time I approached the front door, something in me would sink. This is not it, I would think, and this was a terrifying thought. If this wasn’t it, what was?

Now I am a body without parents, and I can’t go home to touch base to know if I am okay. I have created this new home for me that is grounded in the now and is looking forward to the future. This is like being thrown into a lake only to discover the raft in the middle I’ve always depended on to crash and rest is gone.

This is where I think I might die. I’m in the middle of a lake and my raft is gone.

This is where I look up and see the other side and realize I wasn’t meant to stop in the middle. I was meant to keep going, to get to the other side where life is, where other people are, where the popsicle has no wrapper and I can taste the sweetness.

This is where I find out I am finally no longer a child.

Since I’m in the Land of Skip Around, I want to get back to when I told Katie I’d become other when I was separated from my mother, separated from life. What’s another possibility? she asked. I thought. That I dissociated, I said. What’s another? she asked. That part of me died, I said. What’s another? she asked. That I curled up and waited for it to be safe to wake up, I said. There’s always more than two possibilities, Katie said. It’s important to remember that we can be living many lives at once, at least according to string theory. Maybe you are doing all these things at the same time. You don’t have to let any of them go. You can have them all.

I can have them all.

I like that.

Then this thing happened—years and years and years ago Katie gave me the assignment to buy a comfortable chair, something I had not done. But. An hour earlier than expected, five minutes before our session was to end, I got a notice that the deliver truck was here. My comfortable chair had arrived.

An hour later I was walking back from Pleasure Point Market with a lime popsicle. I unwrapped it and took tiny bites as Bird sniffed everything we passed.

As you know, it was delicious.

I may have radically misquoted Katie because I was scribbling like mad during our session to get everything down and a lot of my notes are incomplete. You can learn more about her at https://www.katiepeuvrelle.com. I wish I could have recorded the session so you can hear it because I’m just giving you a drop of the ocean here. Katie is amazing.