Carrie Link

HEALED BEHAVIOR

"A blossoming tree becomes bare and stripped in autumn. Beauty changes into ugliness, youth into old age, and fault into virtue. Things do not remain the same and nothing really exists. Thus, appearances and emptiness exist simultaneously." HH the Dalai Lama

My friend, Deb, used a term with me only once, but it so resonated that I've never forgotten it, have now stolen it, and use it approximately 100 times a day.

Looking across from the table at me as she nibbled on her wilted spinach salad, she listened as I described a particularly upsetting encounter I'd had with an individual. "That's not healed behavior," she simply said.

Just that. No judgment. No blame. No solution, just a deeper layer of understanding to help me see what I was seeing and hear what I was hearing.

Five years ago I set off to write a book. Instead I wrote a series of pieces, threw them all together and named it Fully Caffeinated. Then I started a blog and called it Fully Caffeinated. I wrote all over my life, the beginning, the middle, the now, the ups the downs, the spiritual and rants. After spending a few weeks alone the summer I turned 44, my "Power Year," I came back and wrote a memoir about that transformative time.

However.

I wrote it immediately after that summer. While all the emotion of that time is there on the page, the healing was not. Quite simply? The book is not an example of healed behavior.

It is with great thought and no small amount of grief, that my agent and I have decided to stop pursuing the publication of UNSTRUNG, at least in its current state. There are parts of it that still bring me to tears, those parts are beautiful. Those parts are helpful. Those parts are healed. And perhaps it is those parts that will find their way into the new book, which for at least now remains nameless and faceless.

I'm not good with open ends. I'm not good with uncertainty. I'm not good with change.

I'm working to heal that.

So it can be on the page.