What We Set Down, What We Still Hold

Four Mondays ago, I asked myself what I was carrying that didn’t belong to me. I sat with that question each week, like a stone I kept turning in my palm. Now, as June closes, I find I’m still holding it—lighter, maybe. Warmer from being handled. But still there.

We began the month inside the noise: the expectations, roles, and rituals that medicine wraps around us until we forget how to hear our own pulse. We moved through courage—the real kind, the kind that costs. We walked into simplicity, not as an aesthetic but as a reckoning. And this week, we dared to ask who we are when all the scaffolding falls away.

And now we rest.

That’s not a metaphor. July is for rest.

No book to dissect. No themes to weave. No curated prompts or polished prose. Just breath. Just rhythm. Just being.

Elise calls July my “mud season”—a reference to that soft, messy time between thaw and bloom. It’s when the garden looks the worst and the soil is richest. Things are happening under the surface. Quiet things. Unseen things. Necessary things.

In medicine, we are rarely granted that kind of season. There’s always something urgent. Another chart. Another code. Another call. Rest feels like rebellion. Like risk. But I’ve learned—through illness, through motherhood, through too many almost-burnouts—that rest isn’t the opposite of work. It’s part of it.

So in July, I’ll be quieter. You might still hear from me—a photograph, a phrase, a note scrawled from the porch. But mostly, I’ll be listening. To birdsong. To my daughter’s laughter. To the way my breath changes when I stop trying to prove anything.

And come August, we’ll begin again.

Another book. Another set of questions. I won’t tell you which one just yet. (Let’s keep something wild and unplanned.) But I will say this: it’s a book about thresholds. About standing at the edge of something unfinished and stepping forward anyway.

For now, I’m grateful. For the silence you allowed, the space you made, the stories you carried alongside mine.

If June was about essentialism, July is about enough.

You have done enough.

You have been enough.

Let the noise subside. Let the roles slip off your shoulders. Let yourself become someone not for show, but for real.

We’ll be here when you return.

Still becoming.

Still noticing.

Still nobody.

And that, somehow, is enough.

—Doctor Nobody