One day there would be a click
On letting yourself be who you've actually become
I stopped writing here mid-February. I was supposed to take a week off to relax before a silent meditation retreat and then a trip to Jamaica to prevent a Shining situation.
But a few days before the retreat I started digging into my ancestry, and then during the retreat my ancestry started digging into me, and now it’s May and I’ve not written a newsletter but I have addressed multiple centuries of intergenerational trauma and maybe accidentally found a profound healing I didn’t know I needed, and I don’t know how to explain all that, so I’m not going to try, at least not in this essay. But that’s what happened.
Of all the revelations I’ve had in the past few months—and there have been many, and they were only made available to me by not being here, which is a type of actual and necessary creative work we don’t talk about—the biggest is that I’m not ever going to be the person this newsletter and all of my previous work promised me to be; that I’ve been operating under the assumption that I would, should, and had to be her; and that so much of my energy and creative work here has been steeped in that assumption, rendering much of what I have done here a flavor of apology for what I am still not.
The reality of my life is that most days I wear flannel and wool socks and usually what I wore yesterday, consider my Jungmaven Buttonfront Jumper to be my “nice outfit”, and don’t really care that I’m aging anymore because it’s already happened and it’s just going to keep happening. That I don’t use my phone that often and never look at social media and have no idea how to even “use” social media well anymore, or use AI well, or use anything made in the last five years well, or know what is in fashion, or if we even say “fashion” anymore; that I am ambitious about pollinator gardens and the health of my soil and spending time with my partner and our pets and talking on the phone to my best friends; that I don’t care about the things I used to, like status, wealth, achievement, external power, accumulation, or how I’m perceived by strangers and friends and family and that guy I dated ten years ago; that I just want to do my good work, and live a kind life, and love well, and be at peace; that I love to write and love what I write about and that I love to write to you, whoever you may be.
The world order has changed at least a hundred times since I last published anything, what took decades takes minutes, and all I’ve felt for so long now is a futile instinct to keep up and run faster because it feels like everyone else is keeping up and running faster—when nothing about my existence, values, morals, or ethics aligns with either of those actions.
I really did imagine that one day there would be a click, and that all the sudden this person I have become—who is nothing like who I used to be and maybe more of who I’ve always been, eons wiser and exponentially less employable—would jump back in to the same machinery; that I would know I was me and that I was healed when I could teach and write and sell and promote and market and hustle without hurting. It didn’t occur to me that the click would be the opposite, and that I’d know I was healed not because I could once again do those things, but because I no longer felt like I had to.
As I’ve probably written dozens of times here: not being able to be who I used to be has felt like a failing and a tell of my dysfunction, instead of the real dysfunction, which is the belief that if I were actually healthy, I’d be doing what’s painful to me.
In a newsletter I wrote almost three years ago about “apologizing all the time for being where you actually are which is never where you want to be,” I lamented that I kept promising people a different version of myself that would be available shortly. That I was waiting for her to emerge, instead of realizing she’s been here the whole time, patiently waiting for me to stop apologizing for her, and let her do what she actually wants.
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It's become embarrassing how much I use your essays to explain to people in my life what is happening to me. You just say it much better and I'm grateful. Thank you for staying true.
Welcome home to yourself, Holly.