Healing Hearts While Yours Breaks

You have been postponing yourself for a while now.

Not because you do not value your health. Because the healer's story makes your health seem like a lower-priority item than your patients'. You have been taught, and you believe, that the people in the waiting room come first.

They do come first in the clinic. They do not come first in your life. The clinic is part of your life. You are the whole of it.

I turned away from something in my own body for eighteen months once, using the logic that I would know if it were serious. I would have known. That is exactly the problem. Physicians manage their own symptoms with the competent authority of people who should not be managing their own symptoms. The objectivity required for good self-care is not available to the person who is both the physician and the patient at the same time.

Make the appointment. Not next month. This week.

The healer who is also a patient is not a weakness. It is the wholeness the work requires you to protect.

— Job