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: