How to change your life
What do you want and WHY do you want it?
Hello + happy Tuesday!
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Today’s inspiration:
"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed."
- Terence McKenna
In the safe, humdrum bubble of pre-adolescence, I believed that once I became a grownup, it would all be up from there. I would only get better, smarter, richer, happier. I’d have my own money! A house, a spouse, kids, a dog—maybe even a cat. There’d be frequent vacations, sophisticated adventures, a glamorous career. I’d be surrounded by friends and family, all of whom were also on their own upward trajectories. A cornucopia of choice would be readily available at all times, anything I could dream or want or imagine just sitting pretty on a platter for my own personal taking. I believed adulthood to be synonymous with happiness and I spent much of my childhood wanting to hurry up and get to some preordained arrival.
Even into adolescence, when things started to get hard and confusing and at times quite dark—when evidence started to accumulate that the adults in my life definitely did not have everything figured out, and it became harder to ignore the holes poking into my little girl belief system—I bored down deeper into my imagination, stubbornly holding fast to the belief that as long as I got to adulthood, I’d be guaranteed the inner sense of having “made it,” and that life would be better from there.
Imagination is a powerful force. In my case, it kept me so deep in fantasy that I began opting out of the present moment. And yes, I’m talking about substances, but also, by living in a constant future trip, I could move through my life without taking any action in the here and now. Subconsciously, I believed the wanting was enough for a dream life to be delivered to my doorstep, and I continued to wait for something external to bestow upon me everything I’d projected onto the fantasy “arrival” I’d been waiting for since I was a kid. So you can guess how singularly terrible it felt when, over a decade into adulthood, I looked around at my peers hitting all kinds of milestones while I was still sort of shuffling along, waiting for my life to start.
A constellation of crises occurred between 2015-2017, making the cracks in my cosmology harder to ignore (though, damn, did I try to ignore). Managing my emotions had already been a full-time gig for much of my life, and now the dial was turned all the way up on the familiar shitstorm, a trifecta of anxiety, insomnia, depression, and now panic, sitting all smug at the base of my throat, threatening to choke me the hell out at any time.
And you know where this is heading, don’t you.
I quit drinking, and yes, queue all the trumpets (when I stop and remember, I can still hear them singing, and the song is a joyful—if utterly exhausted—relief). Nothing that I am or have now would have been possible without this choice, the prerequisite that had me finally turn and face my life, the act around which the before and after spins, the nexus demarcating the death of one story, the birth of what is now being written.
It sounds pretty! I know. Reality was (is)—you guessed it—messy as hell.
Here’s how it went:
I was out there in the after, a recently hatched chick, a snake in mid-molt. I was obsessed with more life, I wanted to wrap life in a tortilla and eat it. Urgency tinged everything and there was no time to waste. I got to work. After so much time treading water, I was desperate to start swimming. I got a decent dog-paddle going. I was so fucking grateful my teeth were on the verge of falling out of my skull. I didn’t know how to do anything but I was learning. I committed to that most exquisite thing: a practice. Glimmers of what it might be like to be a person who could trust herself shivered up my skin and became the lanterns that guided me through the mess(es). The how was less important than the why, and at first the why was, I never want to feel that way again, until it too was transformed, and what remained was a single word, and that word was liberation, and suddenly I had a north star—clouds be damned—suddenly the wait was over, giving way to full permission. I had no idea how I’d fire up the tin-can I was piecing together, but I finally had a direction.
Ok let me slow down.
Seven years ago, the want was this: to quit drinking. The why was self-preservation. That was it. That was as far as I could see. It took time for what was next to reveal itself to me
Discovering my wants and desires was a process. Not knowing what I wanted, let alone why I wanted what I wanted, had kept me chasing shadows for a very very long time. I had to learn that it was OK to want things for myself. I had finally listened to that long-silenced inner voice, that thing inside me that had me turn and face my life, that part of myself that had me make the choice that returned me to the land of the living. My only job was to nurture this part of myself, to extricate myself from other people’s trajectories and culturally sanctioned markers of success in order to step into, or at least toward, my potential as defined by nobody but me.
I knew that I wanted to feel more free. I wanted to have a say in my life, instead of only ever tolerating it. The closer I got to the what, the less important the how became; indeed, getting hyper focused on the how often scraped away at the wound of perfectionism and only served to distract me from the what and the why. When I focused on the what and the why, it was then that the how naturally opened up. Why did I want to change? Once I knew what I wanted, and why I wanted it, it was much easier for me to figure out how to get there. If I was to remain a puddle on the floor, it would be much harder to get organized, to mobilize, to have any sort of conscious direction.
The how is less important than the why and the what. So how do we figure out what we want? Or why we want what we want?
My inclination here was to Google, like, a quiz or something that would have me figure out my values, which is another way of getting closer to the why and the what. And this is definitely a helpful tactic. If you know my values, it’s easier to make decisions because you can weigh the decision against whether or not it aligns with who you say you are. But linking to a quiz would be disingenuous of me, because that’s not how I figured any of this out.
If I tried, I could sit and list off some values. Integrity comes to mind. Friendship is in the top three. Joy, beauty, goodness, and self-discovery are big ones. But I’m not walking around with these words in my head. Instead, I know my values because they show up as a feeling in my body that translates to yes or no, signals I trust as those inner lanterns I’m always referencing.
And I think what I’m getting to in this essay, in what has turned out to be a very stressful excavation, is that part of this work is going beyond knowing our why and our what. We have to feel it, and the reason we have to feel it, physically, in our bodies, is so that when that thing shows up—the “thing” being a “yes”—there is an internal recognition. Here’s an example: when I’m at a table with friends, and we are sharing food and talking shit and laughing, laughing, laughing, I feel joy. It shows up in my body as an effervescence in my skin, a warmth in my chest, water at the corners of my eyes, a lightness in my big dumb head. This is important. Now, when I’m out in the world—and not inside a planned moment that is curated for joy to emerge—and joy shows up, I can name it, I can pause and let it in, let the good imprint into my bones. This is important, because this is the way our body points us in the good directions. Tapping into feeling reveals the how (it’s also an important reawakening for those of us who maybe spent hella time low-key (or major key) anesthetized).
The opposite is true, too. I also want to recognize when no shows up in my body. I know so many of you reading this, maybe all of you, know what it is to erase your no, to “go-with-the-flow,” to cede your knowing to another, to “not make a fuss,” at best, and at worst, to abandon yourself completely. Your head will get you into trouble far more often than your body and a big part of this is practicing putting your intellect on the shelf, recognizing when it’s getting in the way. You focus instead on developing enough strength in who you are to no longer talk yourself out of tour knowing. To honor yourself with your no.
I don’t know if I can list how to develop this knowing. I wish I could say it was meditation (I SO badly want to be that person). I don’t know if the way I experience a “yes” or a “no” will feel the same to you. I don’t have your same history or lived experience, so for me to prescribe a set of steps to take to get there is probably a waste of all of our time.
Here is what I will say: if you want to change your life, you have to befriend yourself. If you feel like shit all the time, none of this matters.
For me, befriending myself means spending hella time alone. It’s words on the page, thousands of pages, 99% of which I will never read again. Early bedtimes, the same meal over and over, so damn boring. It’s flipping the bird to the inner voice who wants to convince me that I am fucked up, and instead being relentless in my practice of speaking to myself the way I would to one of you, until one day I’m running up a hill all sweaty and grunting, and who is this person referring to herself as “mi amor?” It’s reminding myself that I’m a human and not an android and that one of the things that makes me most gorgeous and dare I say lovable are my mistakes. It’s transforming a little more every day into a redwood tree. It’s setting my sights on a future direction and then forgiving myself again and again when I fall short (dios mio, do I fall short). It’s rest. It’s sticking up for myself. It’s letting myself have a voice, it’s staking the claim of belonging right here.
I want things that make me feel good. I want satisfaction. I want my general feeling to be satisfaction over everything else. Life will hand me all the other feelings, plates of hot steaming shit I will have to navigate. And, I want the feeling of being satisfied to be the baseline. If this is what I most want, then it follows that I might start to consider what I need to help me feel that way, how I might cultivate satisfaction on the regular. Yes, a certain, baseline amount of money and security is helpful (as my friend Nicole says, “Money doesn’t buy happiness but it can provide freedom”), if not required. But satisfaction is also how I practice fine tuning my knowing to even NOTICE the feeling.
Here is satisfaction, currently:
Laughing with friends
That spent feeling after a workout
Eating just enough, not too much
Savoring the moments when I do indulge and not judging myself or assigning moral value to food
Reading fiction
Having conversations with certain beloved humans that reorder my inner puzzle pieces
The fifteen seconds after hitting “send” on these newsletters
Rolling around on the floor with the Tater, giving him scritches under his chin, behind his ears.
Being inside a coaching session with another human
A tidy home, a home that is every day more and more an expression of me
The (rare) good night’s sleep
What I am present to, rereading this list: none of these things have anything to do with productivity. None of these things cost money. All of them are the most precious.
Growing up, I thought happiness was a given. I thought that life would only become easier to navigate as I aged, and that my own evolution and growth would be linear, organized, simple. So much of my pain, which I know now to be universal pain, was caused by bumping up against reality, which is the opposite of linear, organized, simple. Indeed, I had to learn the hard way that life only gets worse, more complicated, more difficult. I had to learn to work with reality, rather than fighting against it (or, more precisely, checking out of reality completely).
It so happens that this is a fundamental law of the universe.
Entropy is a very complex situation that I am not smart enough to describe. But basically, it means that everything that exists is shit and will only become shittier.
I’m kidding! (sort of).
I found this article helped explain it in a way that didn’t break my brain:
Here's the crucial thing about entropy: it always increases over time.
It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Ancient ruins crumble. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even mountains erode and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized.
This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease…
In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pull of entropy is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases.
If you want to change your life, you have to create a daily, forever practice to stave off your own entropy.
I’m laughing so hard, because this sounds so terrible! But stay with me.
In order to change your life, you have to assert effort. You have to put systems, practices, structures in place to counter entropy. Otherwise, everything will carry on devolving and breaking down. This doesn’t mean that you stop entropy. That is impossible. Part of this process is acceptance of a baseline futility—you know, that no matter how healed you are, how healthy you get, you and everyone you know and love are all going to die.
You accept reality, and then you create an ongoing, daily practice that fosters conditions in which change can occur. It helps to fall in love with tour practice. It is this love that will sustain you when you hit life’s inevitable plateaus, losses, struggles, disappointments, it is this love that becomes the refuge you sought outside of yourself. Your practice gives your imagination a job. Your practice helps you recognize the what and the why, so you can feel into the how. Practice is what has you actually do the work of becoming responsible for your life—and even allows you a say in how you might design your life. It is what helps you create community and beauty and meaning in the face of knowing that you have no control over any of this. It is what holds the burning, and let it be known, this is a forever burning.
I am still me. I have changed so much in my life but I am still me: messy, judgmental, jealous. Wild in my raging, minuscule in my fears. The difference is that I know who I am. I know how to work with myself, and I don’t let anything keep me from the only thing that means anything, the only thing that works, that makes any sense at all, and that is showing up and practicing, on an on, forever, until I do arrive, because it turns out that there is an arrival after all, and it’s right here, right here, right here, only this road, full of all these lanterns that light the way, so long as I pay attention.
Workshop reminder! We begin next week (sliding scale <3)
SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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