Sunday morning I woke up certain of one thing: come February, I did not want to find myself sitting in an auditorium for six hours of my life, taking a test to practice acupuncture in the state of California.
Ten years of joyful practice will do that to you, have you believing that you can recreate it again, for the third time. First NYC after graduation, then New Jersey and looking back on those early discussions of leaving the east coast, I felt sorry for myself that I'd be starting at square one again. I've been struggling to muster enthusiasm to begin a practice again ever since, and it has become a sneaky round of woulda, coulda, shoulda, cloaked in reverie.
Eighteen months a lifetime ago, when we decided we were leaving New Jersey for L.A., I couldn't fathom when Mdeclared,
"you won't be an acupuncturist for much longer anyway, you don't have to go through the process. Ten years in a profession is a respectable amount of time, you can do something else..."
It's just that I really thought Chinese Medicine was it. And it would have been it, (or some semblance of such), if every ounce of joy that I had for this amazing healing art, wasn't sucked out of me in some form or another, culminating, (along with life changing verdicts), in me having a nervous breakdown. A combination of extreme mental and physical fatigue, I'm not being melodramatic when I say I hit rock bottom last January because it is what it is.
Amazingly, I found the courage to face a core fear seven weeks later, even though I knew the results would not be in my favor. The only way I could continue forward out of my hole of despair was to face that fear head on, full steam ahead, and I did it.
I was so proud of myself for showing up. I'd sobbed and wailed during my breakdown that it was beyond any possibility that I'd be able to give it a go. For seven weeks I cried and talked and cried a lot more before I got to a place of momentum and acceptance and faced fear miraculously grounded.
Try as I might, I can not muster the energy or enthusiasm to do what it takes to prepare for this exam. In fact, I could give a rats ass about any of it, because the joy I find in practicing acupuncture is gone, sucked right out of me. The way the CA test is set up is not how I practice or even want to think about this medicine. I have no interest in spending the incredible amount of time required to memorize information that is stripped down of anything other than how to cram four + years of information into a two hundred, multiple choice questioned test.
If I really cared about practicing again, I would be able to do it. If I'm honest with myself, I have to wonder if I didn't retire when I closed my practice in NJ. This is so much more than the test. It's the idea of figuring out where to practice in this vast city. It's the promoting myself, the drumming up business that is a huge portion of being an acupuncturist, (in terms of making a living), that I have zero interest in. It's the final component that closes the the deal on everything that has brought me to this point: retire.
M is the biggest supporter of this decision. He's the one that suggested the idea last week with,
"if you're ambivalent about being an acupuncturist, than I'd rather you not take the test than take it because you don't know what else to do..."
I don't know what this looks like and I am here to say that it's scary. Ten years of practice plus four years of graduate school has been a huge portion of my life and it's all my girl has ever known of her working mama. I've worked since I was fifteen years old and even though I haven't worked these past eighteen months, it was always a temporary situation.
I am so incredibly lucky to be able to figure this all out, with my love and his offer to take this next year as a mental health break, to figure it out the next step. His belief that until this door is closed, no other doors will open.
It's no different than the place I found myself fifteen years ago, when I turned down an ideal design job opportunity in favor of acupuncture school. This time, it's not irrevocable like passing on a job interview was. If I decide in the future that I have to practice here, I can. My books and gear are boxed away and that's how I know this decision is right. Less than 24 hours had passed before my shelves and storage nooks were free; open for what's next, whatever that may be.
