PEN TO PAPER / thumb to keyboard

I’m pretty sure I have text thumb. I looked it up, and I’m pretty sure I have it. My freaking right elbow and right thumb feel creaky and pain-y all the time, and it’s not even a badass injury to have. I’m equal parts embarrassed and tickled by this. On the one hand, what the hell (incredulous face emoji)? I have what is probably a chronic body issue because I was born in 1994 so I’ve had a smart phone in my hand or purse or back pocket for seventeen years. (If you’re reading this on a smart phone, use your index finger to scroll like you’re one thousand years old so you can save your sweet little thumb.) On the other hand, what the hell (crying laughing emoji, another sign of my millennial status)? Maybe I’m just a whimsy-chaser, but it’s a little bit wonderful, right? To belong to your environment so much that there is physical evidence of your culture in your body? Now I’m thinking of more examples, like the centimeter-long scar I have on my thumb (omg it’s the same thumb) from second grade when it was cool to play a game where we’d scratch each other’s skin in the same spot until we could name an animal for every letter of the alphabet. Or how you can tell a tiny piece of someone’s personality based on the tan lines on their feet or ankles (see: Birkenstocks, Chacos, crew socks, etc.).

When you have a website that you want people to look at, you’re supposed to “maximize SEO",” which is something I pretty much don’t want to learn. A straightforward way to do this is to keep a blog, which is another little cultural relic from my teenhood, though I’m sure people do still seriously write blogs. As a recovering overworked social worker, I had to set some strict boundaries around work projects after I graduated with my doctorate, which was actually really uncomfortable because I didn’t know how to sit still after years of seeing 35+ clients a week and being a full time student at the same time. Unofficially, I boundaried away my laptop, since a lot of doc work is writing (so much writing), so signing myself up for regular blog posts was not in the cards when I opened my own practice and, you guessed it, got a website that I wanted people to look at. Almost three years in to this new, much improved workflow, I will run into old papers, or journal articles, or hell, even Instagram posts, and miss reading my “voice” in text. It’s true that our brains use different neural pathways when speaking versus writing, or listening versus reading (I just had to stop myself from citing a reference in APA, so y’all just go look it up if you really want to see that research). And, in light of my gruesome thumb injury (read: text thumb), which I attribute to scrolling scrolling scrolling, I’ve been reflecting on long-form gratification, which incidentally is a really important concept in therapy. Reading my Kindle instead of spacing out on Instagram, lingering in my seat after a session instead of popping straight up to the next thing, valuing connection over efficiency. I’m an April Taurus, so all these cozy things are absolutely delicious to me, but I’m not so separate from my environment (urgency, scarcity, capitalism, patriarchy, WORK FASTER!) that I can do them without some intentionality.

So here I am putting pen to paper, or thumb to keyboard, and pursuing a cozy, unhurried way to connect with you. Maybe you’re my friend and you’re reading this because you support everything I do and wanted to see what this was all about (I love you endlessly, and I have text thumb), or maybe you’re looking for a therapist and want to see if my brain can match your brain. Or maybe you are neither of those things and you’ve stumbled upon this missive because I have become an absolute pro at SEO (!) and you were looking for unstructured ramblings of an online therapist in Kentucky. Welcome to the website I want you to look at!