A slow start to the year
This year I noticed that my two worlds, pottery and therapy, ask very different things of me. Pottery is my extroverted child — loud, messy, visible, proud of itself, happy to show its progress in photos and shelves and finished pieces. Therapy feels more like my introverted one — quieter, private, harder to capture in a single picture, and impossible to measure by counting anything. Clay dries and gets fired and turned into mugs you can hold. Therapy doesn’t show its results quite so neatly.
And because of that, reflecting on my clay practice at the end of the year felt easy and natural. I could point to what I made, taught, built, offered. Therapy requires a different kind of looking back, and honestly, it took me longer to be ready for it. A client and I recently laughed together about the pressure to do all our reflecting and intention-setting precisely at midnight on December 31 as if the body cares what the calendar says. The nervous system does not celebrate January 1. It rests, or spirals, or opens when it opens. Sometimes you’re ready to look back on the year on January 8, or 18, or sometime in March.
So here I am, taking inventory a little late, and starting with what actually stays with me. One moment has been replaying in my mind from this past year, and it didn’t come with fireworks or goals or any kind of plan. A client I have worked with for a while, someone who arrived full of armour and self-critique and a dozen “reasons to fix himself,” suddenly found a different door. Through parts work, he reached his small boy — the one who had endured far more than any child should — and instead of analysing or pushing it away or talking around it, he simply held him. In imagination, but real enough that every cell in the room knew it. He sat with the boy on his lap, and for a few minutes, everything softened. No tools, no worksheets, no clever insight. Just connection. We both wept. And I knew in the way you sometimes know things without evidence that something in his system was reorganising itself. Not solved. Not perfected. But changed.
Moments like that are why the work is impossible to measure on a spreadsheet. People often arrive wanting to fix a behaviour — procrastination, being late, being “too emotional,” not emotional enough — and together we end up discovering that the behaviour isn’t the problem at all. It’s a messenger, or a protector, or a loyal part carrying a story that was never acknowledged. And sometimes, when the system finally trusts the room and the relationship enough, the part lets us close enough to hear what it has been trying to say for years. That shift doesn’t always come with a dramatic moment. Sometimes it is barely noticeable until life feels different. But every now and then it is unmistakable, and I get to witness someone turning toward themselves rather than away.
So this is my reflection for the start of 2026. Pottery shows its results on the shelves. Therapy lives in the nervous system, in alignment, in courage, in the small, invisible movements of a person coming home to themselves. And timelines belong to the person, not the calendar.
If you haven’t done your looking back yet, maybe it isn’t late at all. Maybe your body knows exactly when the time is right.
