What Emptied Out This Week
Where in my life am I ready to make more room?
On the body
I didn't have to think very long before my body answered for me last week.
For the past six weeks I've been going to physical therapy for my neck and shoulder as well as some intense TMJ pain, the kind of thing that accumulates quietly until one day you realize that eating a sandwich or turning your head to check your blind spot requires actual planning. Not dramatic pain. Just the low-level management of it. The constant, unconscious calculation of how to move through ordinary moments with the least amount of resistance.
Two weeks ago, it stopped hurting almost entirely.
What's surprised me isn't the absence of pain exactly — it's the absence of the thinking around the pain. Eating is just eating again. Looking over my shoulder is just looking over my shoulder. Those small movements have gone back to being background tasks, which means they're no longer taking up space they were never supposed to occupy. I didn't realize how full I was until something emptied out.
That's what making room actually looks like, I think. Not a dramatic clearing. Just the quiet return of space you forgot you'd lost.
On the work
This week at the gym I was doing heavy squats — one minute at a constant tempo, no resting at the top, no break between reps. At some point during that minute, I noticed I was wishing for the buzzer to sound. Not because I was failing. My form was solid, thighs parallel to the floor at the bottom, driving up through my heels, even and controlled. I was completing the reps. I just wanted to get to the feeling of having completed them.
There's something worth sitting with in that. The difference between I can't finish this and I want to already be finished is actually enormous, and it took a minute of heavy squats to feel it clearly. One is a body giving out. The other is a mind that's already moved on to the celebration — which means the body was fine all along.
On making room
I've been noticing this in smaller ways too. Doing some pushup reps on my toes before dropping to my knees. The deeper range in the squats. The longer continuous runs before feeling like I need to take a break. None of it arrived with fanfare — it's just quietly there now, the dividend of months of individual workouts that didn't always feel like they were adding up to anything. The body was doing the work the whole time. It didn't need me to be paying attention. It just needed me to keep showing up.
Maybe that's what making room looks like in practice. Not a grand gesture toward openness. Just showing up, doing the reps, staying in the minute even when the mind has already moved on to the finish line.
The question is still open. I'll be sitting with it all week.
Where are you making room?
Plant your feet. Open toward the light. This is how we grow.Talk soon, Britt ✿
A knot in my calf that I'd been carrying for years, a new weight that required more breaks than I wanted to take, and a toddler at the zoo exit who had a better plan than I did. Three things that loosened this week — once I stopped forcing them.