Announcements:
🧺BAY AREA! We are having a picnic this weekend and you should come hang. It’s this Sunday, April 3, starting around 1:30pm at Dolores Park in the Mission. Bring a snack and something to sit on and if anyone has a decent speaker please bring that, too.
❤️🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club: Storytelling Edition is Wednesday, April 6. Register here.
✍🏽April Writing Workshop is live! Grab your spot here (Sunday, April 24, 10am - 12pm PST). I’ve reduced the overall capacity so please be sure to sign up in advance.
Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
Despite not feeling a day over 26, as of two weeks ago, my body is 38 years old.
Thirty-eight! I’m into it.
Birthdays are a big deal to me (as evidenced by still writing about mine even though it was already two weeks ago). I have good reason, I swear: in 2015, thirty-four minutes into my 31st birthday, I alone sat beside my dearly-dearly-most-beloved-if-highly-cantankerous grandfather in the final moments of his life. Then, in 2017, on the day before my 33rd birthday (hello, Jesus year!), I got hit head-on by a car while riding my Vespa home from teaching a Sunday afternoon yoga class. These experiences had me see that it is no small thing to make it another year, had me connect in the most visceral way possible to the truth that any one of us could go at any time. Pandemic time has reinforced this tenfold, any by “this” I mean this preciousness. Our time here is so precious.
I’ve spent the last four weeks away from social media. One of those weeks was spent completely off-grid on retreat over my birthday (I had to turn my phone in upon arrival and spent seven full days screen-free). Since returning from this retreat, I’ve felt like a martian trying to pass as an earthling, like I’ve arrived here from a different planet and am doing my best to pass myself off as if I am someone who belongs here. I thought I’d come back from my social media break, and certainly this retreat, with some INSIGHTS.
Ha.
Instead, my brain is strangely empty. I’ve been sitting here squirming for over two hours, and it’s all alphabet soup, and I’m stirring and stirring, trying to glean some words, and all I’m getting are too many vowels, not to mention hella typos, and all this stirring threatens to turn everything to mush. I feel like I’m supposed to be worried? That my words are gone. But if I’m honest (and here is where I’m most honest) it’s kind of nice. So I’m going to bask in the swirl. I’m going to rest in the emptiness a little longer.
Back to birthdays: yes, the actual day of someone’s birth is an occasion worth celebrating (if you are my friend I will MAKE SURE you have a candle to blow out and someone to sing to you on your day, even if it’s only me off-key). But I also approach birthdays as a personal new year. The end of one cycle, the beginning of a new one. This is why I went off social media a month before the retreat, because I wanted to prepare myself. I was craving emptiness, I wanted to make some space inside so I might receive what is up next.
I’m still in the space of receiving. And instead of pulling something out of my somewhere, writing something I think you’ll want to hear, I’m honoring the receiving. I’m trusting the swirl.
Anyway I adore you all and thanks for being here (the “this time last year” posts👇🏽 are particularly juicy, if I may humbly suggest a revisit).
See you Friday for hopefully something less weird 👽 🖖🏽🔮.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️ “The margins are the great generative space.”
SELF MADE is a newsletter for fellow 🌺late bloomers🌺 with a focus on recovery, creativity and community. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, coach, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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Awww. Happy two-weeks-ago birthday, Dani! I love humans who love birthdays. I honor every one of mine! XOXO
Happy birthday Dani!