Pastel Mud

I spent years writing a book about my life. Thousands of words of memory, dug up and arranged and revised until I could recite whole scenes from it.

I still could not read some of it without my body reacting.

That is why I started EMDR. And once I did, my brain began handing me things I had not thought about in decades.

I came to it after a long stretch with a therapist I could not connect with. She canceled about as often as we met, and when we did meet, she often let me out fifteen or twenty minutes early. For a while, I decided this was fine. Eventually, I decided it was not. I had also been curious about EMDR for years, so I went looking for someone new.

The mechanics are simpler than I expected: bilateral stimulation while carefully revisiting an old thought or feeling, followed by a deliberate return to somewhere calm. My eyes flutter. That is most of it.

I have a treasure box in my mind. We take out a memory, look at it, and put it back. I end in a calm, safe place.

I have been in some form of therapy for more than a decade. Before I started, I thought my inability to think my way into feeling better was a personal failing. I believed that if I were disciplined enough, grateful enough, or simply stronger, I could will myself well.

I no longer believe that.

I am also still healing, which used to feel like evidence against me. Now it just feels like the shape of it.

After my most recent session, I had a free day. I put on clothes I could ruin, pulled out my oil pastels, and made soft, simple landscapes. Nothing I needed to make useful. Just color under my hands for a few hours.

Healing has been the through-line of my adult life. It does not have to be all of it.

I want to play. I want to live. I am lucky I found both in the same place.

I am not here to tell anyone what to do with their brain. But EMDR is working for me, and if you have been curious about it for years the way I was, that curiosity may be worth following. Find someone who takes your insurance if you can, because it is an investment, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Sometimes I briefly wonder whether the investment is worth it.

It is.

I am worth the cost of maintaining.

And some days, that means an afternoon with nowhere to be, playing in pastel mud.