For part one of this series, “Your own personal wilderness survival map, click here.
Hello + happy Tuesday!
Register for this week’s group calls here:
🌀 Group Call #1: (Tuesday, 3/5/24 @ 6pm PST // 9pm EST): Register here.
🌀 Group Call #2:** (Wednesday, 3/6/24 @ 9am PST // 12pm EST): Register here.
**This call features structured breakout groups of 3-4 people.
✍🏽 March writing workshop is live! This generative writing workshop is based off the Amherst Writer's Method. There will be two prompts, and two opportunities to write. Then, you'll be invited to share your work aloud if you like (no one is obligated, you can pass at anytime). Readers receive feedback on what listeners like and remember from what they heard; there is no critical feedback (critique is great and can be very helpful—it's just not part of this style of workshop).
Learn more and register here. (Sunday, 3/24, 10am - 12pm PST. $33)
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“My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. ‘Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?’ they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, ‘Look at me, I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you…you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.’ And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, ‘Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.’ So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every year.”
Tom Waits
Early pandemic: My gym, like everything else, shuts down. I, like everyone else, am pent up at home, and my number one baseline-maintaining tool—movement—has vanished. I’m doing my best to expend energy by doing bodyweight workouts on the back deck, in the garage; I’m taking the dog on increasingly long walks; I’m yoga-ing online every morning. I buy a pair of sneakers and, you guessed it, I take up running. I trail run through the backside of McLaren Park, the side that overlooks Visitacion Valley and the hulking mass of Cow Palace, where there are less people and more coyotes, and I’ve never run before, I mean I have, but not really, not like this, feet pounding the dirt, music as loud as I can stand it in my ears, taking it seriously rather than just getting it over with. Slowly, slowly, I am almost to the point where I can run the entire three-mile loop with just one pause halfway through. Halfway through, I pause and gaze at the most southern-point of the city, the bay shimmering, the sky never not moody. I pause, I catch my breath, I keep going.
There is another part where I usually have to pause, a small section on the loop that is particularly steep. One day, I am running up it. I am breathing hard, heaving my body up the dirt. I am just about to the top when a voice drowns out the music playing in my ear. The new voice says: “Come on, mi amor. You can do it.” That day I would have made it, I would have made it up that tough stretch of hill for the first time without breaking to rest, but instead I paused, for an entirely different reason, I paused to have a blink-and-its-already-over spurt cry, because I am in disbelief: did I just refer to myself as mi amor?
Here’s another story, one you’ve heard me tell before:
I’m eighteen months alcohol-free, and I’m checking all the boxes. I’m waking up early to commence what is now registered in the Guinness Book of World Records’ as the Most Elaborate Morning Ritual the world has ever known. My days have structure. I am obsessed with my routine. I’m spending an abundance of time at home, writing, futzing with my house plants, drinking so. much. coffee, staring at the walls. There are countless Friday nights I crawl into bed before the sun is even down because I don’t know what else to do, and sleep is the wisest choice I can think of. I’m slowly ditching bummer friends for more wholesome ones. I’m attending a recovery group. I’m reading the Quit Lit, I’m always listening to sobriety podcasts. I’m sort-of-kind of figuring out how to be social. And then, one day, eighteen months in, there’s a lightbulb moment in the shower:
What’s the point of any of this if I still hate myself?
I don’t know about you, but I expected all my problems to go away once I quit drinking.
This was not how it went, not at all. Instead, everything amplified, and on top of that, there was an accompanying sense of urgency: After so long being high-key anesthetized, I was terrified of wasting even a moment more. I wanted the transformation to hurry up, already. I wanted to be delivered. I wanted an arrival, full of fanfare, arriving me to some place where my hair was shiny and my skin was glowing and I spoke eloquently like a professional adult woman and look at me, hitting all those milestones I was trained to want, here I am, spinning around in a circle, arm outstretched, finger pointing at all the measurable successes surrounding me.
(Are you laughing yet?).
That moment in the shower had me *finally* understand on a skin-muscles-bones level that any success I might have in sobriety and in life would mean nothing if I didn’t fundamentally shift my inner experience. I had to go to work on my shitty thoughts, the ones that were always at the ready to point out to me my flaws and failures, the ones that compared me to my lightyears ahead of my peers (hello, my fellow late-bloomers, I love you), the ones that would have me forever rubbing my face in the stench of past mistakes. I feel a pit in my sternum open up as I write this, as I remember the pain of self-hatred.
That moment running up the hill made me cry because it was proof that the work was working. It was also the purest relief: After decades of berating myself, to then be able to track the difference I felt in my body when I was kind to myself instead is a moment I will never forget.
If we want to create lives that feel good more often than bad, lives that we might design instead of tolerate, lives defined by freedom and wildness and self-expression and connection, yes, we need routine, and to shift bummer habits for more helpful ones, and to drink the damn lemon water, and to nurture all our baseline practices. But those things are insufficient on their own. We also need to change the way we think.
I’ll say it plainly: Our self-loathing/self-hatred, the ways we believe the lies our brain tells us about ourselves—that we are broken, or messed up, or irredeemable, or unworthy of goodness, the ways we talk to ourselves the way we would NEVER speak to a beloved friend—these are all ways we enact self-harm upon ourselves. And remember: We are in the business of harm reduction.
I think about this a lot, because every single person I’ve worked with (and I include myself in this equation) has had to reckon with this. All of us, at some point on this journey, if it is to be a sustainable one, must turn and face the shadowy parts of our psyches, to bring out into the light all the strategies our brain has concocted thinking that it’s keeping us safe, when really all that’s happening is that we’re staying small.
Enough with being safe, and can we be done with being small?
We are here to be ALIVE.
I think about this all the time, almost nonstop, y’all. And by “this,” what I mean is the how. HOW do we do this? How do we go from shitty thoughts to kinder ones? How do we own our stories, instead of letting them own us? How do we *actually* practice befriending ourselves?
Over the next three weeks, these Tuesday emails will focus on three areas I believe make up a great little Venn-Diagram, the center of which is a picture of you acting out your own unique Care-Bear-Stare.
Here are the three areas:
Thoughtwork. These are actual strategies for practicing new thoughts: Frameworks, experiments, worksheets!
Self-Compassion. I’m guessing this is NOT a surprise for any of y’all. How do we practice self-compassion in a way that it lands authentically for us, and doesn’t feel cheesy?
Boundaries. Both with yourself, and other people.
SO MUCH IS COMING. And I’m so excited to dig into this with all of you.
In the meantime: Begin noticing. Notice the ways you still demean and diminish yourself. Catch yourself in the comparison game. Observe when the cruel thought loops are running wild. Notice, and, you know, maybe take a little gander at Baseline (couldn’t hurt, right? 🤓).
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+ If you are curious about working with me, (or if you just want to connect and say hi) you can click the button👇🏽 to get on my calendar and we can talk.
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SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
Thank you for this. I read a lot about this and share you question as to how to actually do this. Why are we this way? This seems so ubiquitous that it makes me wonder if this is what it is to be human. Or is this what it is to be a human under capitalism that tells us every single day in about a million different ways how garbage we are so we buy more stuff we don't need to fill the God sized hole in our souls?
I recently had a light bulb moment ( I love that term, btw) which was, I am not my thoughts; they don't have the power to define me they are just thoughts and I decide whether to identify or not. This has helped me take the power away from the self-loathing thoughts that inevitably pass through and that is a wonderful feeling, so much better than a drug or alcohol fueled buzz :)