A timeline for transformation

Not even close.

✍🏽 ***1 SPOT LEFT: June writing workshop is live! Register here (Sunday, June 26, 10am - 12pm PST).

❤️‍🩹 Lots of shifts to my professional life recently (oodles of details forthcoming!), which means Recovery Club is on hiatus for the month of June; stay tuned for updates which will be announced here and on Instagram.

Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.

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I found this image on the internet years ago and do not know the artist.

Here’s a question I hear a lot:

How long until I start to feel better?

People ask me this, and every time they do, I pause. I look meaningfully into their beseeching eyes. Then, I open a special drawer in my desk, gingerly remove one of my most precious tools: a crystal ball. I hold the ball up in front of the Zoom screen, close my eyes, and sort of…wave my hand about it with a unique and earnest flourish.

I open my eyes, stare into the crystal ball. A message is coming through, letters forming in bold relief:

HA. HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

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Occasionally, despite sincere and concerted efforts to eradicate every vestige of magical thinking—that fantasy-world mindset that dominated my thoughts, imagination, and decision making for decades—it sneaks back in. Inside of my own transformation(s), I long for my own crystal ball. I desire certainty, which is the problem, because certainty doesn’t exist in reality. I cannot point to certainty. I cannot touch it, see it, smell it, hear it; I definitely can’t wrap it in a tortilla and eat it. And yet, my brain! She keeps up the quest. She demands answers. Inside of Big Life Changes, like, say, quitting drinking, or changing careers, or ending an important relationship, my poor brain goes into overdrive, doing her best to contain the vast mystery (and all the inherent chaotic and messiness) of transformation right down into a neat and tidy to-do list that I can decorate with sparkly markers and post triumphantly to Instagram.

Of course this is impossible, and so what happens? When life rolls her eyes at my misguided efforts, my brain does the other thing it knows so well—she goes into full-on panic mode. In this place, I see only worst-case scenario. Possibility shuts the fuck down, and there I am, again, staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, eyeballs popping out of my skull, traversing that nighttime wilderness—where no weighted blanket will ever be heavy enough—alone again with my thoughts.

This is hella highly hyperbolic, I know. But I’m guessing that at least a few of you know exactly what I mean.

There is no timeline for changing your life. There is nothing neat and tidy about any of this. Our job is not to rush this process (which, hahaha, go ahead and try, I dare you), but to figure out how to accept it our own sacred (I know, barf, I can’t help it) timing, and then not only to accept it, but to then shepherd ourselves through it with as much grace, kindness, tenderness, and yeah, I’m going to say it, joy, as we can muster.

This shepherding is another way of talking about practice.

We are shepherds of our inner experience. When the old thoughts come, we do not beat them into submission. We do not berate our experience. We redirect. Sometimes (all the time?) we must corral ourselves, our thinking. Other times, we allow space for play, pleasure, delight. We discern when to push, to move our experience along, and when it’s time for rest (it’s also true that imagining my thoughts as sprightly little goats in need of my wiser, higher self to benevolently care for them is a fine counteracting belief to an inner world experience that often feels so self-absorbedly heavy).

Our brain is one aspect of our experience. But it is not the full picture. Here’s another metaphor: lately, I’ve been imagining my brain as a regal figure, a king or queen, watching over me. Kings and queens do not have their hands in every single last detail and decision. They step in only when necessary. They trust the systems they’ve created to keep everything running smoothly (aka practice, again). When I interact with my intellect in this way, it is a full body exhale. My brain is surprisingly grateful for the break. And then I get to continue on, interacting with what’s in front of me—that blessed present—instead of future tripping or ruminating or any number of brain activities that take me everywhere but right here.

Trying to force our timelines, or comparing our timelines to the perceived timelines of others, is self-harm. And we are in the business of harm reduction (harm reduction is recovery <one more time for the people in the back with their rules, please>).

Our work is to fortify our practice so that we can sustain ourselves through the long game of healing, self-discovery, deprogramming social constructs, dismantling shit systems, learning to choose things that make us feel better rather than worse, navigating grief/heartbreak/rage/disappointment/frustration/aka life being life-y. And before you get nervous, and think, ayyyyy, is that what I signed up for? I’m here to remind you (I will never stop reminding you) that we get to do all this with other people, who (here’s another promise, who do I think I am) I promise are the most gorgeous humans you have ever met, who will make you laugh until you piss and will wipe your inevitable tears when life does its life thing and meet you at the hospital when you have a weird health thing sprung up overnight and who get you, the real you, the squirrel/shepherd/king/queen you in a way that you have always wanted to be known but didn’t know could be possible.

I have no idea how long it will take for you to feel better (and anyone who claims they know is a charlatan, come at me), or for the thing you want so desperately to transform to finally shift. What I do know from my own experience and from working with hundreds of people at this point is this: though I cannot offer a timeline, what I do know, what I’ll go so far as to say I can guarantee, promise, even, is that if we keep showing up, transformation is inevitable. It might not look the way we think (in fact, I can also promise that it definitely won’t). But it will be true, and we will be so alive.

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From the archives ~ this time last year:

⭐️ The Best Part

⭐️ Today I’m Flying Low

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SELF MADE is a newsletter for fellow 🌺late bloomers🌺 with a focus on recovery, creativity and unconventionality. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, coach, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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