The Other Room

Trying to find the other half of a life

Over twenty years ago, I had a very clear vision.

I was in an airy studio space with high ceilings. There was a separate treatment room where I was doing healing work with people in a hands-on way. Some sort of bodywork, but I didn’t know the exact details yet.

And in another part of the studio was a desk with a computer. I could see myself sitting there, working on something that felt like design. I thought maybe it was some type of graphic design, maybe web design. I couldn’t see the exact form of it clearly, but it had that quality. I was designing something.

The vision seemed to clarify something I had already been feeling for a long time. My working life was being pulled in two directions, toward the healing arts and toward some type of creative work.

At the time, I felt sure I needed to figure out what that “other thing” was.
The one that would live alongside the bodywork.

I tried, in different ways, to find it.

Web design. Graphic design. UX. I enrolled in courses. I followed threads. But nothing ever fully took hold. None of it was compelling enough on its own to become a real path.

The vision stayed, though.

This dual professional life I’d envisioned had felt like an ideal. A life I was somehow meant to grow into, even if I couldn’t quite understand it.

Part of it was inspired by a visit I made to Boston in my 20s. I was in a relationship with someone at the time who’d grown up there, and we went to see his parents.

Their workspace felt like something out of another world.

It was a large loft space. There were small private offices for seeing clients built into the larger space. They were both therapists. And then there was the studio itself. His dad made large-scale sculptural pieces from found materials. Metal, objects, things gathered and reassembled. His wife did historical restoration work, painting gold leaf onto old buildings around the city.

Later we all drove to their home in a coastal town about 45 minutes north of Boston. They lived in a small cottage with a lush vegetable garden. We took walks through the neighborhood, down to a small pond. It was quiet, simple, beautiful.

I remember thinking, this is it. This is a life.

It wasn’t because of what they did, exactly.
But because of how it all fit together.

They had built something where different ways of working could coexist naturally. There was relational work. Creative work. A shared environment. A rhythm that felt both grounded and alive.

I also remember my boyfriend telling me that his dad had never really made much money. He was also a writer, philosopher, inventor, and more. Brilliant and deeply gifted. But not much of a moneymaker. They lived modestly, and at times struggled financially.

That stayed with me. It complicated the picture. I loved what I saw and felt, but part of me also wondered whether this kind of life was only possible if you were willing to live with a certain amount of financial instability.

I didn’t know what to do with that tension. I just held onto the feeling.

For a long time, I thought I was trying to recreate that life by finding the right combination of professions.

One part I eventually found. The bodywork. Craniosacral therapy, and the deeper somatic work that grew out of it. That stayed.

But the other part remained unclear.

What was I doing at that desk?

Writing is part of it, I can see that now. But it’s not only writing. There was always a sense that I was working with form in some way. Arranging, shaping, translating something into a visible structure.

I kept looking for the right category.

Design. Strategy. Systems. Something in the digital world.

Nothing quite felt like, ‘this is it.’

But looking back over the past few years, I can see that something shifted.

I began to understand more clearly the wholeness underneath my life. Pieces of it were slowly coming together in a way that I could finally hold tangibly. I could see that everything I was putting out into the world was coming from the same place. The different forms were not separate, but expressions of the same underlying coherence.

That’s what I’ve been circling all these years.

It was never about finding the second job.

It was about understanding that the work itself is not divided in the way I thought it was.

What I see now is that the same process has been there all along. It just takes different forms. I notice it in my Craniosacral work. I notice it when I’m writing, developing an offering, or teaching a class. I notice it when I’m figuring out how a website wants to come together.

The forms are different.
The underlying process is the same.

For a long time, I felt compelled to follow every thread. I’ve always been deeply curious. Someone with a lot of ideas and a wide range of interests. Part of that is just how I’m wired. But part of it was also the feeling that I was searching for something. The missing piece. The thing that would complete the picture.

What I’ve been realizing over time is that I do not have to follow every thread. I can be more discerning about what I give my time and energy to. I can recognize the wholeness without needing to express it in every possible form.

I can ask more directly: What do I want to make space for? What do I want to put into the world? How do I want to live?

Income is part of that too. It has to be. Not as the only question, but as one of them.

That feels truer to where I am now. Less like I’m still searching for the missing piece, and more like I’m learning to choose.

I still think about the life my former boyfriend’s parents built.

The studio. The garden. The feeling of a life that made sense on its own terms.

I know that I’m not building the exact same thing.

What I see now is that what I recognized then was a structure.

A way of organizing a life where different expressions could exist side by side, all rooted in the same source.

It’s taken me a long time to understand that.

And I’m still learning how to live it.

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