The Reset Letters episode that got more responses than anything else we've released was about the moment you realise the hard thing isn't over yet. When you thought you were through it and then something, a conversation, an unexpected trigger, makes clear that the body is still processing what the mind thought it had dealt with.
The responses were remarkable not for their variety but for their sameness. Woman after woman writing: I thought it was just me. I thought I was doing it wrong. I thought this meant I wasn't healed.
Those 3 sentences are worth reading again, because they are not 3 thoughts. They are one thought, and it is the one that does the damage.
The thought is: this is going the wrong way, therefore I have failed at it.
That is what I most want the podcast to do. Not teach. Not prescribe. Make women feel less alone in the specific, honest, unglamorous experience of being a woman doing the work.
Because the work is not linear. It doesn't follow a schedule. And the moments where it feels like you've gone backwards are almost always the moments where something is completing rather than repeating.
Completing rather than repeating is the whole of it, and it deserves more than a sentence, because it is the difference between carrying on and stopping.
A repeat and a completion feel identical from the inside. Both arrive as the same old feeling, out of proportion, at an inconvenient moment. Neither of them comes with a label.
What tells them apart is not the intensity. It is what you can do while it is happening.
A repeat has all of you. You are inside it and there is no part of you watching. Afterwards you can describe what happened but not what you felt, because you were not there to notice.
A completion has a sliver of you outside it. You are in the middle of the old feeling and some small part is saying, oh, this again, and I know where this is from. The feeling is not any smaller. The company is different.
That sliver is the thing that was not there the first time, and it is the most reliable sign that something has actually moved.
Which is why the moments that feel like going backwards are so often the opposite. You are not meeting the thing again. You are meeting it with slightly more of you present, and more of you present means more of it is available to be felt, which is exactly why it can feel worse rather than better.
Here is how that lands in an ordinary week.
You have had 6 good weeks. You have genuinely been fine. Then somebody says something in a particular tone and you are 10 years ago, in a kitchen, and the whole afternoon goes.
And the second wave is worse than the first, because the second wave is about you. All that work and I am still here. It was fake. I have wasted a year.
That second wave is not information. It is the old thought turning up on cue, and it is the thing worth getting better at spotting, because it is the one that makes people stop.
What people try first is measuring. Am I better than I was. Keeping a quiet score, comparing this month with last.
Measuring is reasonable and it reports badly, because the scale is wrong. A line that is supposed to go up will read every ordinary dip as a failure, and most of what happens in this work does not show up on a line at all.
The second thing people try is going back to the start. A new method, a new practice, beginning again from the beginning, on the assumption that the last one did not take.
Sometimes that is right. Mostly it is the same impatience in a new coat, and starting again is how a person avoids the slower business of staying with something.
The third, and the most common, is quietly deciding that the good weeks were the real you and the bad afternoon was a lapse. Which sounds generous and is not, because it makes every bad afternoon from now on a piece of evidence against you.
What is more use is a different question. Not how far have I come. Just: how long did that last, and how long did it take me to come back.
Those 2 numbers do move, and they move in a way you can see without having to flatter yourself. The thing that used to take 3 days takes an evening. The thought that used to be a fortnight is a walk.
Nothing about that is linear and nothing about it is a schedule. It is only ever the gap getting shorter.
It also helps to know what to do in the afternoon itself, which is almost nothing. Cancel what can be cancelled. Eat something. Go outside if there is any outside available. Do not make any decisions and do not have the conversation. An afternoon like that is not the moment to work anything out, and the instinct to work it out immediately is part of the same reflex that made it a bad afternoon.
And if you are in one of those weeks right now, the thing worth hearing is also the least satisfying. You have not gone backwards. You have gone far enough in that the next layer is within reach.
More like this.
Why I do this work https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/why-i-do-this-work-nervous-system-regulation-and-somatic-release
Building a daily practice that you'll actually do, including the times you won't. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/building-a-daily-practice-that-you-ll-actually-do-including-the-times-you-won-t
Why I started making videos, and what I was most afraid of. https://www.annalouwellness.com/reset-stories/why-i-started-making-videos-and-what-i-was-most-afraid-of
The letters go out once a week and they are mostly about this. resetletters.substack.com.