The therapist is a both traditional therapist and an art therapist. She has good energy. She asks me a bit about me. Noticing how I kind of move and hold my body when I talk about traumatic things, she teaches me tapping. Either butterfly hug or on legs, bilateral stimulation, hitting firmly, fairly slow, aiming for 50-60 bpm. It’s a good grounding technique.

It’s up to me what supplies I choose. I pick clay, chalk pastel, alcohol markers, and the smaller paper. She gives me what I need to not overthink or plan but just start exploring, even if just testing to see the different colors. I feel blank and a little uncomfortable for it. But then I just start. And we talk while I somewhat mindlessly follow my intuition. Which outside of this moment I recognize is so so difficult. She asks me questions and I ramble, go off on tangents and don’t remember why, very much about the trauma. I feel a little guilty for it, for saying so much and being heavy and also not easy to follow, but also she is giving nonjudgmental and it helps me just go with it.

Both the art and the words feel like free association. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this, and not in a bad way at all. I realize how using my hands in an expressive way while speaking out loud things that are stuck does feel like a therapeutic thing, a way to truly just discover what is coming up and what is coming out and more than usual just accept that. To have a space where it’s okay to be feeling these things and thinking about these things and expressing these things. I know it’s not the case that once spoken aloud, the thoughts will be gone, but there is a feeling it perfectly complements all of these other services that are grounding me in the present, having this space for me to also acknowledge what is stuck in me and do something with it and say something about it. It feels like a balance. I’m curious how doing more of this will feel, how it will change as I continue.

Some of the things that come up are about perfectionism, in part with honesty. How I’ve had to think about how everything can be interpreted, especially medically. How there’s some relief from that but some continuation of it. Like yesterday when I couldn’t get myself just simplify the answer to the question when asked by an MRI scheduler “are you claustrophobic?” to “no” when I understood the reason for the question was to see if I would need any accommodations to help with that phobia, because it is so deeply ingrained in me that it could be inconsistent for me to say I’m not claustrophobic when I’ve talked in therapy about being anxious in crowded spaces, and then the lawyers can use that to attack my credibility.

We talked about self injury and how the lawsuit in ways could be a form of that. Talked about whether I ever believed in justice, whether I ever believed he could change. How I don’t believe he could now but I want to. The guilt that led me to fight so hard. Remembering I did what I could.

At the end, the therapist tells me about how the top half of a portrait often represents the conscious thoughts, the lower half the subconscious, the left side the past, the right side the future. She also interprets the top and bottom of my piece differently than me in terms of what is top and bottom based on how I created it, which is really fascinating. The way I see it, the top half of my piece is cloudy, has less going on, sprinkles of stuff. The bottom half is chaotic. Visceral, veiny. The very bottom is fiery and dark and hellish. The sub-subconscious. The left and right sides are pretty symmetrical, maybe an expression of how I don’t believe things will change in the future.

I go straight into a meeting with a program coordinator to talk about future appointments and mapping out the program and I’m a little frazzled. But I am confident I want to continue the art therapy weekly for now. I feel in touch with myself in a different way. I don’t leave triggered and upset even though I talked so much about what feels like some of the more unfortunately transformative parts of the pain. I can’t quite explain why I leave hopeful, but I do. And I’m learning to hear and trust my gut, and I do not in this moment have doubt that I want to keep exploring in this way.

(A beat later)
One of the things I said was that I’m a perfectionist in some ways but I’m also very comfortable with failure.
I’m thinking more about that.

Especially in racing, but not just in that environment. It’s something I really like about myself. Not being afraid to shoot my shot. Not self-limiting for fear of failure. This is in fact maybe one of the things I like most about myself and a thing I attribute much of my success to. It also goes hand in hand with the unabashed enthusiasm I value that I learned from George Parks and again from Aidan.

So what if the failure of the lawsuit, even as unexpected and unjust as it was, and the time spent trying, can be filed instead into the category of things I tried, gave my all to, and discovered what was and was not possible for it? What if I admire the fight I put up, which is the only part I had control over, and don’t regret it based on the outcome? In the immediate aftermath of my victim impact statement, I felt I had done everything I could. Even if it feels like I should’ve had control over whether it ended this way or not, even if it feels like it’s portrayed as a decision when it was forced, even if it’s true that in hindsight I would’ve done things differently, when it all came to a head, I still made the best choices I could make with what options were available to me at the time.

This goal was bigger than me and bigger than any other goal I’ve ever had, so even without the betrayal, the failure would be harder to swallow. But can I reframe this to say I believed in this, this was the most I’ve ever fought for something, this is the hardest I’ve ever tried to accomplish something, this is the most I’ve ever cared about something and I chased it and showed up and gave it everything I had, so the self-respect I’ve earned should be that much greater for it, not worse. No regrets. How I feel about myself should only be a reflection of me and my choices, not the choices of others and how they impacted me and mine.

I’m remembering when I talked with a friend about whether to try to reopen discovery, I made a promise that I would not regret whatever decision I made. No matter what. I didn’t make promises like that every step of the way, but I can promise here and now that I did my very best. I know that I did. There were times I was wrong. There are times that in hindsight I wish I saw or understood things differently. There are even times I wish I had just been different, and better. But I know, I know, in my soul, in every cell, in my heart, in something even deeper, that I really, truly, completely did the best I could. I promise I did.

(7/28 later that evening aside: it’s probably too soon to say this but I think it’s actually possible my digestive issues have noticeably improved. It seems crazy to think that kind of thing would happen so quickly. May be completely coincidental but wanting to make a note of the thought.)