Making Space For All The Feelings

You only have so much room in your brain and your heart and your body. When your body gets clogged with emotion like fear and anger, it seeps into your heart and your head, leaving less space for things you actually want. I spend a lot of my time clearing space. I cry at least three times a week. I do that free write thing where you sit down for ten or twenty minutes and keep your fingers typing constantly, so that whatever is choking your brain can be laid out on paper for you to delete or burn. If something is pressing on my throat or my chest, I determine what it is and what it's trying to tell me.

In my younger days, the manic pixie dust of the mantra made me scoff, but I'm learning how deeply valuable a good mantra can be for reframing situations and popping my brain out of its habitual negativity. Like when I catch myself worrying about some new relationship possibility and why he hasn't called, I've trained my brain to call up what I want instead, using a phrase that reminds me that he doesn't need to call, that's not where we are now, and all I need to do is hold a light, curious space for both of us to discover what this is. Usually, when I dissolve whatever is knotting up in my chest, he calls. Or I call and he picks right up and says he was just thinking about me.

Using whatever causes pain - often a thought your brain is convinced is the most deeply true thing in the universe but has no real truth in anyone's world but your own - as a trigger for investigation rather than a trigger to shut down can change your life.

Investigation allows you to instill new habits. New habits can shift the Pavlovian response of your brain so it tips toward positive thoughts rather than negative. In the end, your brain just isn't that smart. It's a tape recorder that only knows what has gone before. In order to expand and create and experience new things, you need to move out of your brain and into your body. Because your body registers emotion in a very physical way and that emotion is where change happens. When you dive into an emotion and feel it until it shifts and dissolves, space opens. When you track a negative thought and reprogram your brain to shift toward how you want to think about a situation rather than how you've thought about it in the past, space opens.

When you create that space, you get to decide how to fill it. Love and joy and progress need room. You can't try to paste good stuff on top of bad and hope it all works out okay. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the good stuff dissolves the bad. But keeping it good requires cleaning. Your emotional life needs just as much attention as your career and your relationships and your home. At first, this pissed me off - the last thing anyone needs is one more place to tend. But when you tend your emotions, everything else gets exponentially easier.

The more space I create, the less cynical and more creative I become. When I'm not so bogged down in fear, there's more room for wonder and awe. When I'm not constantly dodging how I feel, I have the space to notice that it truly is an amazing world, full of tilting giraffes and ballet dancers and people who strap wooden boards to their legs and go spinning off cliffs. Humans flying through the air on wings made by hands. Music that can touch the emotion you didn't know you had. Words strung together in just the right way. Actors who reflect feelings you recognize and offer them up from a different place, a place of story, so that maybe you can understand yourself in a new way.

Our favorite things - movies, music, books - often evoke our own emotion. Because they're a safe space where our feelings can be reflected back to us and maybe begin to heal.

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This post came from watching this video. My favorite part is at minute six where everyone starts dancing. My least favorite part is where the dude at 6:41 punches a stuffed giraffe. 

Anger's Pure Burn

For most of my life, whenever I was confronted with extreme emotion - especially the loud, yelling kind - I would shiver like a chihuahua and search desperately for the nearest exit. Not this time. There were some opinions this weekend about how I live my life and they were vehement. Maybe I shouldn't be proud of standing up, shouting straight in someone's face. But I am proud. I gave as good as I got and I didn't sit there and take what was thrown at me - something I did in different situations for a reasonable portion of my twenties. Taking someone else's story as fact, especially someone else's story about you, can be poisonous and that poison can eat away at your soul. I know, because I had to spend the first half of my thirties collecting pieces of myself from where I'd abandoned them, chewed up and forgotten. Obviously, someone else's opinions and stories won't bother you unless you see a nugget of truth in them. That's when other people's opinions - as infuriating as they can be - are valuable. They can shine a light on a part of you that needs attention and love.

What needs attention and love right now is me.

You can't ignore a child and expect them to flourish, you can't ignore your career and expect it to expand, you can't ignore a houseplant and expect it to be all perky and green. You can't ignore yourself - your real self, whatever that means to you - and expect to thrive.

I need to surrender my habit of allowing my worth to be determined by outside factors. I need to surrender the fear that makes that possible - the fear of not being enough, the fear of not doing enough, the fear of not doing it right. Because when I judge my value by based on what I've written, the zeros in my bank balance, how my family thinks of me, how men think of me, it detracts from me.

When I get caught in a loop like this, it's like I float out of my body. I go about my life. I look before I cross the street, I answer email, I do the dishes. But I'm not conscious of any of it. My brain is so far lost in what has happened or what might happen that I have no idea what is happening.

That's why I'm proud of myself for being angry. It took me a long time to learn how to be that present with my emotions or that willing to share them. I dropped right into what was happening and anger is was what I found. It felt pure, somehow. It was a pure emotion that burned through me and I allowed the fire to the surface, instead of letting it blacken my internal organs. Without even trying, I fought fair. I was mad, but I didn't hurl accusations or character denigrations. I just let how I was feeling in that moment fly.

Now when I think about how to let go of identifying myself through other people's stories, I start to worry. Worry about how I can change that, how I can do it right, how I can be right so I can get what I want. Doing exactly what I'm trying to move away from.

But if I drop into the present moment, things start to feel clear. It's a crisp, sunny day in San Francisco. I'm sitting in a cafe with a latte and a bagel. I can see the sun shine on dark blue and bright green and warm orange. I can take a deep breath, my fingers can type, I have legs that can run, and a brain that can think - and then accept when it's time to stop thinking. I have plenty of money for the moment and ideas on how to extend that moment into the more socially acceptable future. I have a home today, I'll have a different home on Saturday, and I have several good options for homes in the future. I have friends who love me and things to look forward to. I have so much and, when I focus on that, it's hard to remember why I was worried in the first place.

What Lies In the Beyond

In December, I was dating someone I really liked. The night we met, there was a ring around the moon. We gazed up at it, the water behind us, and it felt like that might mean something, something good. And it did. But not the way we thought it might. Instead of marking the beginning of an us, that ring marked the beginning of a me. A me who can walk away for the right reasons, something I'd never done before. I would swallow what I wanted in order to not be alone. Or give him what he wanted and push aside what was best for me because I thought that's what love meant. But the more you give yourself you, the less you can give up for another. So on New Year's Day, I walked away. As I drove home, it didn't necessarily feel good, but it felt right.

That ring around the moon did mark something special - but for me rather than for us. I want the us, but I won't take the us without it being right for the me.

Walking away is scary, because you don't know what lies beyond. So far, what I've found in the beyond has been better. But it doesn't matter, really. Because whatever I get - whether it's a me or it's an us - will be exactly what I need.

Freelance Writing: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It

One of the things I've been lucky enough to do in my life is flit around the globe like a wandering gnat, parking myself in Costa Rica or Amsterdam for long enough to learn that I probably shouldn't drive anywhere south of San Diego. When people ask how I do that, I reply, "Because my laptop is my office." Living in the digital age is sweet - and if you like to write and don't mind hustling, you can make a pretty good living from anywhere with internet access. (I love writing, I love traveling, I hate hustling. Two out of three isn't bad.)

But when Chris Guillebeau asked if I'd be interested in creating something on freelance writing for his series of unconventional guides, I said, "YES, PLEASE, ABSOLUTELY" - while feeling like a complete and utter fraud. Every single reason why I shouldn't be the one to write this guide filtered through my brain. Do I know every step of the process for living this life? Yes. Do I know how to talk to other people who have deeper insight into each piece of that process? Yes. Do I still have a brain that is ready and willing to give me a complete and seemingly accurate list of why I shouldn't be the one to do this? Yup.

Any time you push your boundaries, there will be growing pains. The key is to dig deep, understand what you bring to the table - and effing bring it. If you have the desire to be a freelance writer, you can do it. You aren't given the desire without also being given the aptitude. So if this is something you've ever wanted to try, I encourage you to start. Start today. Whether you use this guide we just spent six months creating or by pulling up the google search bar and getting lucky - just begin. Anywhere. Because if you want to do it, you can do it. Sure, you may feel like a bit of a fraud, especially at the beginning. We all feel like frauds sometimes. Even those of us who've been doing it for years. You just have to keep pushing.

If you ever have questions, feel free to email me. I may have an answer for you, I may not. But if writing is something you want to do with your life, I will share anything I've got with you. Writing can be a lonely road sometimes - and we should stick together. Because it's when you find your people that the road starts to get fun.

Since Everyone Else Is Talking About New Year's Resolutions, I'll Go Ahead and Talk About Sex

I like sex. Who doesn't? We're programmed to like sex so that the human race doesn't die out. On some level, sex is a matter of life and death and our bodies and emotions respond accordingly. To any of you who have ever felt crazy or been called crazy for something you said or did after sleeping with someone: it's hard to swim against the stream of thousands upon thousands of years of biology.

My ex and I had some pretty serious problems with sex. It just didn't work, to the point where I spent years thinking there was something wrong with me, years seeing doctors who had no idea what the problem was, and finally years in physical therapy.

Yes, Virginia, your vagina can go to therapy.

After we broke up, I spent the next five years trying to prove to every guy I liked that sex would work, assuming that, once it did, we could happily go about the business of building a life together. Because five years of conditioning led me to believe sex was the only obstacle to a good relationship and if I proved the sex is great as soon as possible, we were poised for happily-ever-after.

Wow. Yeah, you can go ahead and say it with me: WOW.

I was acting out a belief buried so deeply in my subconscious that I didn't even know it was there. Unfortunately for me, you know what doesn't work? Sleeping with people too soon. It sets the space for sex, rather than a relationship. It leaves women vulnerable because most of us attach during sex in a way men don't. It left me feeling emotionally unsafe with most of the people I was dating.

Every dating book in the world will tell you this, not that I read any of them. Now, I don't believe that's always the case. I think you can sleep with someone on a first date and go on to have an amazing relationship because you found your person. But it's the exception, not the rule.

I haven't found my exception yet. So it's time to play by the rules.

But it's also time to remember that I'm always safe. Safe in my work, safe with my friends, safe with my family, safe with myself. No man can give me safety, but I get to choose the man who wants to help me find it for myself.