It’s slow, like the days when sleep has eluded for hours and your waking precludes the dawn as you watch the room slowly, oh so slowly welcome the morn.

There are steps and leaps, but none of the slingshot that has plagued me these last few months. The high looks lower, and I am still climbing. It’s a relief to skip that stomach dropping lurch to the top, even though the view is so splendid. I’ll gladly wait longer to take it in, if it means I don’t plummet back down on this endless bungee cycle.

The block is cracking. That elusive, oft-spoken of block sufferered by writers of all kinds, brought on by traumas of all kinds. I’m sticking a spike in it today and it feels good. It is a start. The face of that baby boy I see every time I open my eyes tells me it doesn’t matter if I ever write another word. Somehow that helps, and the words come.

My bubble becomes so small when I hurt. My world shrinks and draws in until it reaches a size I find manageable. It feels like it is expanding again, I can check in with friends and reply to some emails. I am poking my head out from under my rock. Maybe tomorrow a stray hand will follow.

And it is all in large part to the love and support I receive so freely and so beautifully from a family who never wavers, a tireless mother, friends who will listen to things that are terribly hard to hear and this endless stream of webby friends who keep emailing and tweeting and refusing to let me believe I could be invisible if I tried. Thanks for letting me rest, and letting me know you care. Thank you for giving me space to shrink my bubble, but always letting me know you’d like back in when I have breath to blow it up again.

I’m coming back. And somehow this slower feels so much better, and so much more me and so much more permanent than the rocket I’ve been riding. I never said it would be easy, thanks for sticking around for the ride.