I know I've built a bit of a reputation through this newsletter as someone who gleefully casts herself as a human wrecking ball.
If that’s what you think of me, I don’t entirely blame you. Just look at what I’ve been writing about in the past few weeks.
I’ve been calling on you to:
I stand by every single word in those essays. Every. Single. One.
But the actions I’m always pushing you toward almost always start somewhere quieter. In fact, they have to.
Moments where I have to sit in the quiet and put names to emotions and urges I don’t yet know how to name, but I can feel the friction of them as they move around my body. Moments where I force myself to stare at situations in solitude and be honest about what is really happening.
I hate those moments.
I cannot tell you how much they suck.
I like movement and action and taking ideas in my head and making them real. When someone tells me to slow down, my first reflex is to be annoyed. Why are we stalling? Why are we waiting? Why are we dicking around, when there’s shit to do? Make a choice and get to work. If you don’t want to commit to a path, you’re a barrier to progress. So please, get out of my way.
I was a real peach in my 20s.
But what I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that slowing down and sitting in the in-between to figure out what’s what is the most important part of the work.
Without that step, our potential for inspired action distorts itself.
Instead we:
- “Manage to outcomes” that give us short-term relief, rather than the chance to work toward real solutions.
- Create chaos in our lives, rather than engineering the kind of purposeful, necessary “destruction” that makes way for meaningful creation.
- Fundamentally stunt our capacity for growth and to achieve great things. To build lives that make us feel genuinely fulfilled.
- Choose “safety” and reduce the chance to experience a love that lights our whole body up; that feels like we’re in a true partnership with someone who fully sees us and loves us for who we are, not who they wish we would be.
But the “messy middle” is called “messy” for a reason.
It’s uncomfortable. At best.
For example, sitting in silence with your own big thoughts about life can be very jarring at first, which is why I used to avoid it.
I didn’t like that stillness made my mind get louder with all of the things I was trying to hide from: memories of embarrassments and mistakes would come rushing in, followed quickly by my worst beliefs about myself yelling at me:
- I’m already too late. I’ve made too much of a mess.
- I'm already a disappointment, no one's going to change their mind about that. What's the point in trying?
- There’s no way I can fix anything. Everything I’m feeling is wrong, invalid, or inappropriate.
- Every idea I have is stupid, impossible, and primed for humiliation.
- Everything I want contradicts everything in front of me, the architecture of the life I’m supposed to want. The things I said I wanted before.
- The fact that I want anything different is a sign there’s something wrong with me. I shouldn’t be having thoughts of “different” at all. A good person would be trying harder. A good person would be happy.
This is the point where most people reach for relief rather than resolution:
- Sometimes relief looks like motion. Do something. Fix something. Decide something. Movement steadies the nervous system.
It feels like progress.
- Sometimes relief looks like patience. Give it time. Let the fog clear. The answer will come on its own, I’ll just know. Don’t force clarity. You give yourself a soothing permission structure to remain calm and unmoving on purpose.
It feels like restraint, maturity, and peace.
Both can feel good in the moment. Both can be understandable.
Here’s the problem, though.
If your motion isn’t actually inspired, and your patience isn’t actually wise, you don't achieve resolution.
In fact, you don’t move forward at all.
At some point, you'll realize you're still at the same starting point, holding the same questions, the same tension, the same unnamed desires and goals. Except now you’re more confused, because you spent time doing something (or doing nothing) in a way that you defined as “the right thing to do,” but nothing has changed.
And now you’re more annoyed.
Because you can feel you’re looping.
This is where we’re going to be focusing our efforts over the next few issues together.
We’re going to take a step back from the action and destruction and force, and we’re going to focus on sitting in the still moments of:
- How to name feelings you can’t name. (This is how they usually start, you aren’t defective.)
- How to feel safe in articulating what you really want just to yourself, without spiraling over the potential “consequences” of what your wants imply. (Don’t worry, your thoughts and feelings aren’t grenades.)
- How to identify when staying and repairing are the brave choices. (Sometimes staying is actually the right call. Not everything hard in your life needs to be cast aside or blown up.)
- How to deal with the friction of polarity in our connections, where one of you says “Go! Turn on all the lights! Let’s smoke the truth out and address it now!” and the other says, “Slow down, I need space to think, stop trying to force everything!” (You know I love polarity in my relationships, but you’ve got to work together to find balance, so you’re genuinely “better together” as a team.)
That way you can stop looping and start moving.
If those four points made you excited, but also made you want to puke a little at the same time, this pleases me. That means I’m not alone, because they also make me want to puke.
I also have good news.
You don’t have to figure out how to address any of those four points today.
They’re problems for Later You, not Today You.
For Today You, I only have one piece of homework, and it’s something you can do right now (and it only takes 30 seconds):
- Step 1: Close your eyes.
- Step 2: Take three deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
- Step 3: Turn inward and ask yourself, without any expectations, “What do I already know?” Not about anything in particular, just ask it generally. (This is my favorite question to ask myself.)
- Step 4: Observe what happens, without judgment.
There are no wrong outcomes to this exercise.
You might think of nothing. You might hear “I don’t know” and mean it. You might not get words at all, just an uncomfortable surge in your body: a tight chest, a heat rush, a sudden calm, a flinch.
You might get something small and simple.
You might get lots of answers rushing out all at once.
You might get something so unexpected, it startles you with its size, strength, or subject matter. It might delight you. It might freak you out, like “Where the did that come from?” It might feel wildly off-topic.
For those of you who declined to even try this exercise, even your resistance is data. Why not try?
Whatever you found on the other side of this question, it doesn't matter. All of it counts.
And you don’t have to do anything with it right now.
Just let the truth tap you on the shoulder.
Let it be in the room with you.
Let it show you how it’s not going to ruin your life by having the audacity to exist… because it was already alive (and not hurting anything) before you acknowledged it.
Even if what you thought was, “I already know that I want pizza because I’m hungry.”
That’s progress, even if nothing changes yet. Because you can’t begin anything if you’re not willing to look around and see where it is you’re starting from.
So, if you completed that exercise (or at least acknowledged that you chose not to), congratulations!
You are beginning.
You are becoming.
See you next issue.🖤
