It’s a meme I saw a long time ago that I can no longer find, but I’ve made it almost my entire work personality, awkwardly. So much so that I use it in my consultation calls to explain my style as a therapist.

I typically follow it up by explaining “well, if you tell me you want ‘x’ in life, but then you tell me you’re doing ‘y,’ which directly conflicts with ‘x,’ I’m gonna ask you if you realize that hey, what you’re doing is not gonna get you where you wanna be.”

[From there, we’d then unpack why you were doing ‘y’—it almost always has some “benefit,” or did at one point and if you really wanted ‘x’ enough to stop doing ‘y’, and it’s OK if the answer is no!]

As a Regular Human, I try really really hard to figure things out for myself before I bring them to my own therapist. But the reason therapists have their own therapists is because schooling and thousands of hours of practice still can’t take away [all] of our blind spots.

A few weeks ago, I realized I was doing that exact thing—saying I wanted x but doing y.

I have been saying, probably since high school, that I want to play more tennis. Last year, I started taking LiveBall classes, and that’s done a decent job at scratching the itch, but I still can’t get enough. So I started looking up leagues/teams (still confused by that process), and I found UTR and USTA flex leagues—essentially, you self-schedule the matches.

You’d think that I’d therefore be ALL ABOUT THEM, right?

Wrong.

Record scratch—what??

I totally am when I sign up! YAY TENNIS! ALL THE TENNIS PLS!

Then, the matches come, and I find every reason excuse to cancel, reschedule, whatever.

It’s too hot, it’s too cold, I’m too busy, etc.

I wait a really long time to cancel because when I sign up, I have every intent of playing them…and then I freak out in the days before the match, convinced I’m just going to make a massive fool of myself, losing every single point, somehow being made a laughingstock of by…?

By whom?! As I write this, I rationally know that these silly little matches are completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of ANYTHING, but those pre-match anxieties are far too loud.

And more importantly—they lie at worst, have incomplete information at best. They don’t know all the LiveBall classes I’ve felt awesome at or the literal muscle memory dating all the way back to the 90s. They don’t know how much fun I have, how alive I feel when I’m out in the sun, wearing some cute lil dress or skirt, strategizing how best to use my leftie advantages against opponents.

They don’t know how tennis has kept me going in this past tough year of anticipatory grief followed by actual grief followed by endless estate admin followed by followed by …

They don’t know how it’s subtly been a bridge from a childhood pursuit my dad taught me (until I got better than him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) to a real adult hobby that I play for both my physical and mental health.

So they don’t get to dictate whether I run away in fear of failing or if I show the fuck up, which is also winning in and of itself.

Showing up for my first match on Friday. All the excuses are still there, but they don’t get to run the show any more.

“OK, please don’t confirm or deny, but without looking, I can tell you that it’s probably about 1:30 right now.”

I was in the middle of a plant medicine ceremony1 and I could tell the time, yes, by the sun, but also by the ~ feeling in my body. ~ (But it’s actually a real thing2 that our bodies do/can know what time it is and how much time has passed—AND our emotions also very much affect that perception.)

I was feeling a familiar mix of both tired and restless, and, reader, I did not like it. I told my guide that typically this was a very uncomfortable time of day for me.

“I will usually either have another coffee or take a nap around this time,” I told her. “Essentially: I will either fight to push through or I will give in, but either way, I don’t like it.”

Often, a client will bring up something to me that they then immediately try to downplay. “Yeah but there’s bigger problems in the world, what a first world problem.”

YES, AND.

There’s often a lot more to unpack there than appears on the surface. (And I’d also venture a guess that if they’re bringing it up in therapy—even if immediately trying to downplay it—that there’s a part of them that does want it to be validated or wants help unpacking it.)

Coffee, Collapse, Or…?

Our brains want things to be simple so we can neatly file them in the filing cabinet of our brain. We ache, YEARN to categorize things. Homie, emotions don’t play that game. They are real fucking messy, which is why you’re reading this, which is why I have a job, I’d even wager to say that is why we have wars (a man will start a war before he’ll go to therapy but I digress...)

Let’s go back to: I feel uncomfortable mid afternoon. My reptilian brain3, which is focused on survival, just thinks “ok, NEED ENERGY. Coffee or sleep?”

I immediately go to that this is a problem that needs to be fixed, not that maybe this is just something giving me information.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and I am just tired and do need a nap, and sometimes there’s also more there.

Oftentimes, it’s because I’m feeling overwhelmed, and I’ve either not made a to-do list for the day because I don’t believe I can finish everything on it so why make it at all? Or I did make the to do list and I’ve reached the point of the day that I don’t think I’m going to finish everything. I 10000000% have the ADHD time blindness thing4 where I vastly over- or under-estimate the amount of time something will take versus the amount of time I have—and in the afternoon, I’m starting to stare down the barrel of the amount of time I have left before I see clients.

The Third Option Is What Gives Us Freedom

My first therapist told me to make a ”to-do list with emotion,” and at the time I thought it was the hokiest fucking thing in the world. Here I am 13 years later, and I get it.

The third option—sitting with the emotions—is the most uncomfortable part. Which is why we don’t do it. Which is why maybe we should do it. It’s where the restlessness lies. The urge to do any-fucking-thing else in the world. Why we would rather reorganize our sock drawers than write.

Maybe your socks are gnawing at your soul, I don’t know, but if that were really the fix, would you still feel that leftover disappointment when you were done? The voice that says OK cool my socks look great, but I still didn’t fucking write.

I can hear you now—“but I don’t have time to figure out the emotions under my to-do list!!” And if you can just bust through your to-do list without anything on there tripping you up or giving you pause, then,

1. I’m a little jealous, not gonna lie!

2. This part ain’t for you.

But for the rest of us. I promise you that if something on your to-do list is tripping you up and getting you stuck, you(/we) do have time to figure out what’s under there because we’re spending time not getting it done anyway.

Let’s take me writing this newsletter, for example. While yes, I legit had a very busy spring, and maybe I really didn’t have the emotional space to create/find the time to write this newsletter, there were at least 10 times this spring where I wrote “substack” or “write substack post” on my to-do list. (I think the former was avoiding writing the word “write” in an effort to trick my brain into getting scared by the word.)

If I’d taken time to unpack this then, I would have realized that OK, it’s not as easy as sit down, spit words out, release them into world. And sometimes you’re on fire, and sometimes you’re a potato.

I would have let myself realize that, yeah, I write vulnerably, and that part of my internal process of writing one of these posts is: finding something that feels both resonant to me and hopefully has some universality to it > believing I have something interesting and/or unique to say > making sure it passes my internal filter of “would I feel comfortable if a client read this?” > sitting through my internal critic yelling at me > doing it anyway.

There’s days when my inner critic is asleep at the wheel, and while I like those days better, obviously!, that bitch Eunice does NOT get to win.

Oftentimes, that block exists, and feels so debilitating, because there’s something there that we’re refusing to feel. And do I really want to sit with all my insecurities about writing? Oh fuck no, but I’d rather let them co-exist with my writing than have them drown out my writing before it ever has a chance to reach the surface.

I couldn’t help myself as I refreshed the estate liquidator’s online listings, seeing my family’s belongings up for sale.

How would someone else describe our belongings, devoid of their stories? How do you put a price on pieces that once meant something to someone?

If you’ve read here for a while, you know I think a lot in song lyrics, and the one ricoche…

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hey December
guess I’m feeling unmoored
…
I’m out on waves being tossed

I thought that losing my mom was disorienting. She was my North Star, consistently shining for me so I could find my way. She was there for me in the overt and obvious ways, like being my constant cheerleader in life and on the sidelines of my races.

But …

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This post was originally written last year, just a week or so after the fires, for another site. It was…

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My mom had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and although we were all scared, we also were delusionally trying to convince ourself that, no, she’d be di…

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If you’ve never served as the executor/executrix1 of an estate, oh good god. It is torturously tedious, and I swear on my dead dad’s life that the tasks and decisions multiply like rabbits. I…

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Why am I feeling so unsettled and anxious right now?

I feel it in my body, as its interior channel is stuck between the same, two staticky channels: utter restlessness and sense of being fully depleted.

I live on both overdrive and under drive. Can’t I just drive?? I’m either on a racetrack or I’m stuck on the 405 during …

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Last night, I was cleaning in my kitchen, and I found some notes I had scrawled out about three weeks ago about stuff I wanted to write here. I had ideas for more regular features/“columns”, including “Caregiver Chronicles.” At that time, being a sometimes-long-distance-sometimes-hopping-on-a-transcontinental-flight-last-minute caregiver was all that was on my mind.

The reality of my life at that time was managing a full caseload of therapy clients while serving in the fullest meaning of the phrase “power of attorney”—making all of his health, financial and legal decisions for him as he could not any more—while also caring for his house and learning trial by fire what a pain in the ass being a homeowner can be, while also being his daughter, while also while also ad infinitum.

Of course, we make plans and sky daddy lols, because my actual dad died one week later.

I wrote both his obituary (he paid for my journalism degree, least I could do was send him out with a good obituary) and a eulogy that I delivered graveside that I will also share below, because, honestly, I’m proud of it.

I’ve strayed from writing in the past few years because of all of the insane shit I’ve been managing with him during that time (kept private then for his sake but wowwww you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me), but writing those two pieces, albeit sad, reminded me of how writing is such a big part of me and I want to get back to it more.

I watched a somewhat-hokey seeming movie last week: The Life List. It’s about a woman who loses her mom, a mom who was absolutely the protagonist’s North Star the way my mom was to me. The mom was a successful owner of a beauty company and the daughter originally expected to inherit the company, since she was working with her mom there. But the mom sends her daughter on an epic adventure, essentially, for the daughter to reconnect with what makes her her.

I think I’ve really struggled with writing online after the early aughts, when everything transitioned from super vulnerable and raw to super-polished and optimized etc etc. And I want to be successful writing online—and tbh I know *how* to do it—but I also wanna be me, who’s as polished as the silver in my parents’ dining room (my dining room? grief makes grammar weird) that hasn’t been touched since 2015.

All of this to say: thank you for sticking around? I’ve certainly not written as regularly as I’ve wanted to and lol HERE’S WHY! But I was reminded this morning, in the context of something else: surviving both of my parents’ deaths was pretty fucking hard and I survived, so I can survive basically anything at this point. (But hey universe, maybe not any more major trials until at least 2026? THANKS. Losing my soul dog and my dad in one year? I’m good.)

Below, his eulogy:

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content warning: suicidal ideation/attempt mention1

As I sat in the dingy light of the ER in Lenox Hill Hospital with several of my closest friends surrounding me following my first suicide attempt, this [reforming] people pleaser’s heart dropped. I realized how worried my loved ones were about me and the pain that my pai…

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Maybe this is a little too making-of-the-sausage, but I’m going to give you a little look inside my brain as I’m trying to write this. I’m sorry, and you’re welcome? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, I’d say I have at least three or four ideas every week for what I could write in this space, ranging from the totally random and frivolous (usually related to something materia…

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I had no idea how close I was to the ocean floor or to the water’s surface, and I panicked and tried to claw my way to the surface, only to be pinned down yet again.

Surely, here was where I was going to die if I couldn’t get another breath in. Spoiler alert, I’m writing this, so I did, indeed, ge…

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That was me, the night of the 2025 AMAs, convinced that NO REALLY, tonight was really the night when Taylor Swift was going to announce the release date for her re-record of her reputation album (Rep TV, for Swifties.)

But to be a Swiftie in 2025 is to be a little addicted to the drama (I …

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One of my favorite parts of writing has always been learning.

Whether that’s through interviewing someone, researching, access to a cool event/product, or even just learning what’s going on inside this weird little noggin’, I almost always walk away from something I’ve written knowing at least one thing I didn’t know …

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You would think that in a Lyft back to JFK—after a week coordinating elder care for my dad—on Mother’s Day, of all days, that I’d feel devastatingly alone.

After all, I’m a single, only child whose mom has been gone for eight years. I’m flying back across the country away from my family, and my dad’s ultimate care decisions rest solely in my hands.

Instea…

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The year my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, my dad bought us all 23andme DNA kits for Christmas.

I’m not sure if he ever specifically shared why, but I would have to imagine that it was wondering if my mom had the BRCA mutation (she didn’t) and wondering what he and I might be predisposed to.

He probably thought about it a few times over the int…

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“But Theodora, that sounds like so much fun!” you say.

It does…unless you are on any medications—particularly any sort of psychotropic medications—and your body and brain will not be OK without them for a day.

T…

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OK, I’d like to know why there isn’t a word for the feeling you get when you learn the perfect word exists to describe what you’re feeling1?

I was minding my own business the other day, occasionally wondering what the aching in my soul was, when I came across an article about solastalgia2 following the horrific LA fires back in January.

While my buddies Mer…

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