If my feelings could talk, what would they tell me?
Giving Discomfort some attention so that it stops annoying me
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
🌺 Happy end of April 🌧
At the end of last year I wrote, "I'm feeling a strong urge to be settled- to cultivate some sense of home, routine, consistency, safety." ha ha ha little did I know.
I told myself that if 2019 was transient, then 2020 was going to be grounded. I promised I wouldn't travel for at least three months (very painful sounding at the time) to be in one place for the altMBA, focus on health and writing and other projects, be with family, etc.
Almost four months in one place and I'm finally starting to get antsy. For someone who wasn't anywhere for more than two weeks at a time from July to December of last year, it is highly unsettling to be so settled.
I knew then and I know now that travel is no cure for the mind, but that doesn't stop the habitual escapist thoughts to arise.
So this week, I asked myself what my antsiness is telling me. If Irritable, Uncomfortable, and Restless had voices and thoughts of their own, what would they say? (I got this exercise from Amber Rae's 30 day journaling challenge. Her podcast interview with Chase Jarvis is also worth listening to).
What I realized is that they're trying to protect me, to nudge me back in my own comfort of escaping, avoiding, and numbing. Now that I know this, I can politely thank them for their concern and invite Acceptance, Flow, and Focus back to the table.
What about you? Are there any feelings that have been trying to make themselves heard? They might just need a little bit of attention.
Have you allowed them the space and credit they deserve? Once you do, what could you make space for instead?
Much light and love,
Amy
et cetera
very low qual picture but look at the babiesss 😍My daily walks (and not-so-daily runs) these days consist of me being sad over how quickly these cuties + all their friends are growing up
👀 watching
'2 lizards,' by the artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, an Instagram docu-diary about living under quarantine. In the words of Jenna Wortham, NYT culture writer:
It's surrealist, it's whimsical, it's noir, it's amusing, it's deeply intelligent. It's not a distraction from the pandemic -- rather, it's a way to help process the enormity of the moment, and watch people unfurl their grief, confusion, joy and collective spirit in real-time.
This tip I got from Stay Home, Take Care, the Girls' Night In virtual self-care kit 🥰
📚 reading
I Miss a Feeling I’ll Never Get Back. Oh Mari, always speaking the truth:
Now I know that it was a luxury to have that feeling: the delusion that anything is within my control, that anything can be predicted. Like the other comforts that have slipped away, it’s something I took for granted because I assumed it would always be there.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb was SO good. It taught so much in a fun, gripping, narrative manner. I found myself highlighting every other page. Some quick snippets:
We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can't yet see.
We can't change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.
Who wants to think about [death]? How much easier is it to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we'd been skating by on the project: our lives.
Re: people going to therapy / wanting psychiatric medications: People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what if their moods had been driven down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives? They imagined that they were rushing now in order to savor their lives later, but so often, later never came.
🖊 writing
Background for the newcomers— I’m writing a book with the title of Reclaiming Control: Looking Inward to Recalibrate Your Life slated for publication in July 2020. Thank you thank you thank you to those of you have supported and preordered.
I sent my intro to a first batch of beta readers! I will be sending this more widely to my beta reader community tomorrow. Even though I write publicly here (almost) every week, this is still scary 😬
🙈 playing
The Infinite Monkey Theorem Experiment: this was deeply appealing to the music / math / data viz nerd in me.
Some Edition: cool art / website! ngl it was quite soothing to move my mouse around and play on the home page of this for a couple minutes.
🎧 listening
I first listened to Glennon Doyle a while ago on Elizabeth Gilbert's podcast recorded in 2016 (which is beautiful and you should also listen to it) "Show Up Before You're Ready", which has pretty much been my philosophy for everything I'm currently doing.
Glennon Doyle is getting a well-deserved spotlight with her new book Untamed. This podcast with Brené Brown, "an honest conversation about walking away from the lifelong training that keeps us small, quiet, and afraid, and embracing our wild, brave hearts" is what I needed this week.
That's all, thanks for reading 💛Wishing you all the light, love, safety, and health.
If any of this resonated with you, feel free to share or subscribe below to keep up with more musings. You can read past letters here. If you want to chat about anything, anything at all, feel free to reply to this email or schedule a time here.
Well written and engaging! Relaxing to read...