Growing into myself
It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’ll be 41, which feels like a beginning. Like I’m dusting off the cracked eggshell of ‘young’ and stepping forward into new territory. Something sturdier. Something braver.
It took a minute for me to enjoy this age. Turning 40 last year threw me for a loop. I had to grieve that girl I no longer was, grieve the girl I had been. I had to lay concepts of myself in the earth. Let them rot and compost.
Aging is wild in a culture that reveres youth. We’re not given any rituals or rites to guide the transition, not given models for how to grow into ourselves. These are all the things I wish I could tell 21-year-old me. All the things that helped her grow into herself, and continue to help her emerge:
Prioritise the process. There is no arrival. No finish line to cross after which things freeze in some weirdly static finalised state. There is only the process.
Your body is not a machine. You are not superior or inferior to anyone. Unlearning the dominance and extraction taught to you by capitalism and colonialism will transform your relationship with your body and the world. It’s an act of personal and collective resistance and it will free you.
Creating something - art, a business, a spiritual practice - is a cycle of loving it and hating it. And loving or hating it means very little, the important part is to create, iterate, experiment, and get it out into the world.
Letting yourself be as you are (yes, even that part) will soften and expand your life immeasurably.
We are practicing worlds into being with our actions and choices every day. This is sometimes intentional, often not, but it’s happening either way. Get clear on what you’re practicing.
Diversity and difference are a source of resilience. This applies to ecosystems of all kinds.
If it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a no. And if you let your brain talk you round into a reluctant yes, you’ll almost always wish you hadn’t.
You’ve got to feel your damn feelings. Numbing one thing numbs everything. Having a life in which you actually feel alive requires that you get vulnerable enough to let your feelings move through you.
Cool is not a personality trait or an aspiration, it’s a trap. Cool will have you shunning real connection, self expression, and joy for the false belonging of fitting in.
You are as terrifyingly powerful as you secretly suspect yourself of being (thank you, Yumi Sakugawa). We are even more so collectively.
Expand your capacity to be with discomfort. Pushing away the unpreferred seems like you’re creating safety but it only creates fragility.
We move in cycles and spirals. Life, death, life again. The same lesson returned to with new eyes. It’s a cruelty to expect straight lines of ourselves.
Just because you have the capability to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you have the capacity.
There are no quick fixes and no silver bullets. Things take time and it’s often way longer than your ego/mind would prefer.
Constraint is a gift. It saves you from getting lost in the vastness of all possibilities all the time. Create containers to hold yourself.
Release the force. Loosen your grip and try not to grind through life with gritted teeth. Intensity feels like the only way because it’s the way that you’ve trodden for so long, but you can forge a softer path.
You get to find ‘right size’ and ‘right pace’ for you. It will probably look different to other’s and it will probably (read: definitely) change. In any given moment you’ll find that ‘right size’ and right’ pace’ by listening to your body.
Fear is no way to live. There’s a difference between moving away from what scares you and moving towards what you love.
Consider everything an experiment (thank you, Sister Mary Corita). I know you want the simplicity of absolutes and someone else’s answers but you’ll only figure out what works for you if you wade out from the shores of certainty. Try, fail, and learn.
Everything is delicately interconnected. You are in constant relationship with it all. When you forget this, slow down and pay closer attention.
It’s vulnerable as hell but let yourself be witnessed and loved as you are. Unshiny bits, mess and all. There are many wounds that you can’t heal alone. We heal in relationship (thank you, bell hooks)
