🦀 Simply scuttling

On softness and sharpness and safety

Sometimes I wonder how other people seem to have all this energy. Seem perfectly content to go from morning workout into day of meetings into childcare pickup into dinner with friends. I can’t for the life of me understand how others seem to sustain themselves this way. I admire them for their moxie, their drive. I wonder what it feels like to exist like that.

My more critical parts might whisper in my ear, it’s because you’re made of softer stuff and you can’t hack it and everyone is doing better than you, but I know by now those parts have a tendency to lie to me. Have a tendency to hyperbolize and see others as having some answer that I don’t and maybe can’t ever find, which makes my confusion feel rightsized and manageable. Oh, it’s just because I’m irrevocably BROKEN, oh okay! And yet, I know the truth. That others’ lives often don’t feel as shiny as they look, not just because I have heard that spoken over and over, but because I have experienced it firsthand — how when people get a little space or a little safety or a little unfiltered, it all starts spilling out. How much they hate their job. How hard it is raising a kid. How they don’t even know if they like their partner anymore. How directionless they feel. How they feel like a fucking mess. The loneliness and the overwhelm and the heartbreak of what it means to be alive and juggling too many plates. Most of us are just treading water whichever way we can.

I also know what it feels like to exist like that, having been in eras of leaving my house by 7am to tackle a two-hourlong commute, to greet a day stacked with meetings and facilitating a workshop and oh, why not throw in prepping the deck for Monday in there too, before racing back home to walk the dog and head back out for dinner, for drinks, for a concert. Being at work and being so social absorbed such a large portion of my time and energy, I’m not sure how I managed. Youthful energy, perhaps? But how did I settle myself enough to get anything produced, on mere minutes stolen between conversations? How did I survive with so little quiet?

Now I see how I was merely living at the surface level, not allowing myself space to settle in a layer deeper, inch by inch. Sometimes, survival mode is all we can handle. There’s too much to manage and too few things can give. But sometimes, we also get stuck in the pattern of singing to ourselves the song of survival, of scarcity, and we don’t actually spread out into the space we could. We don’t take the space because it will for sure be uncomfortable, will bring up the ways we’ve betrayed ourselves to keep ourselves in a comfortable rut, a shape intended for the convenience of others, to impress some rapt imagined audience attuned to our every foible.

A handmade intuition card

I created this intuition card about a year ago, guided in practice by the magical Or Har-Gil. It might’ve even been the first one I ever made. I didn’t fully understand it then, my hands moving by their own wisdom. Here now, I see here a song about comparison, about imitation, about the shape of the thing not being the same as being the thing. The background is burnt bits of incense. This card feels staticky and sharp and unyielding. Maybe its meaning is about how imitating a hard exterior leads to hardening through and through, for the sake of what, productivity? Optimization? A shiny, impressive and useful exterior? Maybe that hardening leads to an outcome of brittleness and ash.

I have started writing for myself a history of how I got here, how I got to this point, made it to this point that seems inevitable and unturnbackable. I am revisiting what forces shaped me and opened my eyes. I am tracing a lineage of my influences as best I can, which, let’s be honest, is via tangents, free-wheeling and lyric and abstract.

I see now how many times I had to abandon myself to reach for success. How many times I had to turn up the music so I couldn’t hear the voice insisting something wasn’t quite right. How many times I found safety in aloofness, in concealing myself in plain sight to protect my tender heart from the churn of dating in a big city, or being subjected to the decisions of unthinking and unfeeling leaders, or just surviving in our general culture of urgency and impatience and immediacy. I work best with space, with slowness. I work best unhurried. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

What might it be like to be truthful about that tenderness? What might it be like to bring forward that earnest part, without concealment? I am trying to be more fluid and freeform and truthful about my multiplicity, my indecision, my ambivalence, my harder parts, themselves guards at the gate for a soft interior that has, for a very long time, needed to sing its gentle tune.

This is a metaphor I have been sitting with lately, of being in harmony. Singing a countering melody that offers more balance, more texture to the main line. This feels true to my practice of integral coaching, offering richer shades of deepening meaning to help my clients develop into the kind of people they are. This feels true of my practice of writing for others, helping them find the words to share what animates their work with care and passion and life. But for me to do that effectively, for others, it requires familiarity with letting my own varying tones and shades come forward. I say familiarity and not comfort because it is anything but.

I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day and writing came up. I mentioned how frustrating it is to realize, again and again, that it’s simply better if I keep writing regularly. I resist it and yet, I’m so much saner if I stay involved in this process. They asked, “is writing torture?” since it sounds like many writers have this experience. It’s not that it’s torture per se, but about having the tenacity to keep throwing yourself at the thing, knowing that the thing transcends language and you’ll never get it right. You keep throwing yourself and the best words you can imagine at the thing, so others might experience the thing too. Might see how it’s like for you, and might see how it’s like for them too. Might have their experience witnessed for what it is and really feel that thing we ultimately want to feel certain of: that we’re not alone.

You’re not alone. It’s hard. We each carry burdens and histories that are unseen and unrecognized for what they are. It has been necessary to keep our eyes closed to our own experience, for our safety, for our sustenance, for our survival. And yet, even though it is hard, we do not have to harden. What might it be like to let that tender, unseen part step forward sometimes? Softly, in safe spaces. But you’re not alone if only because you’re here, and I’m with you.

Be well and stay tender out there, friends 🌸

Stray thoughts (mostly music)

🤔 Is writing in Substack a safe space? Another question for another day.

🤍 I heard this song recently and it transported me back to an old version of myself, singing with a friend in an echoey campus bathroom in 2004. The emotional transportive quality of music, amirite?

💿 To the surprise of absolutely no one, I was absolutely a ravenous post-Britpop fan. I recently picked up a Travis’ Good Feeling and The Invisible Band on vinyl, which were hard to find for a good long while because music produced between the late nineties and the teens wasn’t pressed. Once I find The Man Who, it’s over for you bitches (the other records in my collection).

🐭 Actually no, that’s a lie, because I recently picked up this INSANE record on VINYL in the bins at Sonic Boom and I’ve listened to it daily since. I did not know I needed lofi version of Disney classics but apparently I do? There is a Chill version too. Extremely fun to put on without reviewing the tracklist too closely and play guess the title.

🔥 Also been listening non-fucking stop to the Saltburn playlist, despite not having seen the movie. Extremely good for dancing and getting shit done.

🪄 Speaking of dancing and getting shit done, I run a free weekly co-focusing session, Mondays at 1pm ET / 10am PT. Come join! It’s fun for writing, but also for completing stuff that’s been dragging on your to-do list. I play music, you get shit done, we vibe.