I hold a lot of stress in my hands.

I always have, but I wasn’t aware of it until about a year ago.

My hands are my tell:

If they’re dry, and raw, and my fingers are calloused, it’s for sure that I’ve been biting, stressing, and somehow forgetting to take care of myself in the simplest of ways…like drinking water or using the very lovely lotion under my bathroom sink.

About a week ago, I noticed a blood blister on my left ring finger.

I don’t remember pinching, or burning, or hurting it – but still it came.

For a moment, I considered taking care of it.  But, I didn’t actually know how to take care of it.  Was I suppose to pop it?  Cover it?  Leave it alone?  I could, of course, just turn to Google, but even that felt like too much work.  So, I did, what I often do when my body is begging for my attention: I ignored it.

Until this morning.

When I came back to work on a post about a friendship I thought I could never go back to, because of the degrees that we hurt each other when we were young and feeling (and not feeling) our way through.

I was nearly finished the piece, when my blister popped and blood shed over three letters on my keyboard.

W-A-S.

I stopped typing.  Mended my finger.  Treated the rest of my hands to that lovely lotion, and started again.

For me the story about the friendship was my attempt to answer the question: “can you go home again?”  Can you return, go back, make it how it was…and I think my answer is yes, and of course not.

Yes, you can always go back.  It is never too late.  You can return to what WAS.  But, going back, and going deep, will almost certainly bring some brutiful stuff to the surface, open up ignored wounds, and possibly draw blood.

And all that messy WAS is good.  I think it may be the only way to a clean start.

So, of course, we can always go home.  To our family.  Our friends.  Our hands.  Our stories.  Our art.  But it’s sure to be different on each return, and maybe that’s how it should be.