I haven’t written in awhile and I’m wondering – it is over?  Is this part of my writing journey over?  What’s going on here?

Let’s see, it is almost one year since the silent retreat that sent me home with a desire to get it all down.  Since then I’ve written almost two hundred articles – this is number 199.  Since then I’ve left the treating patients part of my physical therapy career behind.  Since then I “cold called” the behind the scenes people at my job and asked for something to do that was not direct patient care.  Since then I have become the person who trains the clinicians to use the computer program out in the field for documentation.  Since then I have been part of a team that educates staff regarding the new Medicare guidelines.  This is a never ending job because Medicare continually has “new guidelines.”  (Welcome to government bureaucracy.)  Since then I have been positioning myself deeper into the back office as the rehab expert at the agency in hopes of having a full time position in the future.  Since then I have connected with an old MU friend who in turn connected me with a woman who has asked me to contribute to her website blog and perhaps in the future carry forth her mission to help caregivers take care of themselves. Since then I have volunteered at Friendly Visitors, a subset of Meals on Wheels and have been paired up with an old dude – we’re trying to get fishing off the Martinez pier but the weather hasn’t cooperated.  Anyway, it fills my need to be with and be helpful to the geriatric set.

Since then I have opened myself to other possibilities.  The idea of “being” a physical therapist for another ten years made me sick to my stomach, not because I didn’t love it, but because it has become too stressful and somewhat boring.  I have seen many women my age and older who are just doin’ the time now, waiting to retire, not passionate anymore about being a physical therapist.  I couldn’t bear to be that person.  It was a grieving process to be sure – how did that enthusiastic 26 year old get here so quickly?

So now I have decisions to make.  I need to make time to grab the opportunity to write a blog on a real website.  I need to really look at my curriculum vitae and write down some of the things that are not physical therapy related.  I need to start my outline for the book I really do want to write about what it takes to be in a long marriage (Mom, are you ready to be interviewed?)

I need to clean off my desk.  (Oh boy, THAT again).

So I’ve been feeling guilty about not writing here, and so I will place this on hold.  Will I be back?  Will it become something else?  Will what I’ve written over the last year be the seeds for something else – written or otherwise?  Who knows, but I need to push something off my plate, and I think this may be what gets set aside for now.

I know some of you have followed this blog fairly regularly.  You know, it is hard to describe, but one of the things that I note about writing for me is that if I have an imagined audience, it all comes flowing out so much more easily.  I recognized that years ago when email came onto the scene.  Emailing people about daily life as a mother sounded so much more interesting than what I wrote in my journals to myself.  So anyway, for you silent readers out there, I can’t thank you enough for reading what I’ve written here.

It wasn’t just about the writing, it was about the journey.  You helped change the course of my life, the way I think about the next half of my life, allowed me to open my brain on these pages and thus open the possibilities beyond a great career that paid well and for that reason seemed inescapable and my “destiny.”  Turns out, my “destiny” is still unknown, but writing this blog helped me in some crazy roundabout way that there is more out there for me, deeper potential to be realized, more to write about someday.

More to write about someday.  Don’t unsubscribe. This may just be a temporary hiatus – actually I hope that is the case – but I felt I wanted to explain why it’s been so deserted here.  Have a great summer everyone!  Perhaps Alaska will have some great stories that I can share (“I didn’t expect when I went on the whale watching boat that I would get so excited I would fall over the side and end up looking into the big ol eye of a whale…)