How to not make decisions

It's OK to swim parallel to the shore for a while.

❤️‍🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club: Monday, November 15. Register here.

🙋🏻‍♀️QUESTION for you writing workshop regulars: would you come to a workshop on 11/21, or will you be holiday-ing?

❄️ WINTER SOLSTICE writing workshop is Sunday, December 19th. This is the last writing workshop of the year! Please sign up in advance here here (Sunday, 12/19, 10am - 12pm PST).

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

---

Photo by Lance Asper on Unsplash

Hi Dani,

Thank you so much for this newsletter, it really helped as I'm also going through a really horrible breakup.

I was wondering if you had any tips and tricks to ease the pain a little. It feels like the pain will never leave.

All my love,
R

Dear R,

Oh, R. I'm so damn sorry. It's such a terribly acute pain, made all the more lonesome by the fact that even if we have the most kindest most listening ears at our disposal, this is a fire we have to walk through alone. I’m hearing you, and please know I'm right there with you.

I had already planned to write this week about what it looks like to press pause, to slow down and go inward, to actually observe the change in seasons, to remind ourselves, as Lao Tzu said, of how, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

And then, your heartfelt email in my inbox.

So, while not all of us are experiencing a break-up right now, I know you and I are not alone in walking through our own personal fires. So I thank you for this frame through which we might ramble around for a while. What *are* some tricks and tips? How do we get through the fire?

Here we go.

Part One: Care + Attention

The thing I’m noticing that is the hardest about a breakup isn’t so much the pain, which, let’s be clear, is plenty, but the way my brain is doing everything to convince me that I should be feeling other than how I am in this moment.

Despite plenty of awareness and best efforts at deprogramming, I, like the rest of us, have been socialized to be a Productive Little Capitalist. I feel the engine running inside me now. I am desperate for a way out of my feelings. I want an answer to the question of “what’s next”. I want to figure this out so I can put a plan in place. I want this very difficult and utterly uncomfortable moment to be neat and tidy and easily compostable, I want the proverbial lotus growing out of the mud to hurry up and bloom, already, so I can whip this up into a shiny, wise narrative.

This is an unhelpful approach in general, and especially when applied to the messy reality of being human.

What's sort of working for me right now is acknowledging that this *is* painful, and that the only way through is to be in the pain. Not to control, or manage it, but to instead—to the best of my ability—bear witness to it. I am trying to interact with the machinations of my overactive brain as if it were an entity separate from me, and to push back on the engine that wants me to DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. It goes something like this: Oh, look at my brain, doing that brain thing it does. Or: Dani, it makes sense that he’s on your mind all the time - he’s been taking up space in their for almost two years! Or: Brain, your longing is true, but the object is misplaced.

To counter the looping thoughts, the desire to understand, I am taking action. While I can’t change the situation—I can’t force Sad Eyes to suddenly have a different personality, I can’t undo, or redo anything that’s happened, I can’t force the lotus to bloom—I can take care of my body. I can take care of my body instead of fueling my tendency, which would typically have me hooked into my obsessive thoughts, pouring gasoline on them at every turn.

How do I do this? It’s lots of rest. It’s getting to the gym/getting outside every day even when it’s cold out or I’m grumpy and I don't want to. It’s taking baths, and using the fancy oil and lotion instead of “saving it.” It’s eating well, which for me means mostly home cooked food with the occasional pizza to myself. It’s water and tea and probably too much coffee. It’s my beloved nail art. It’s washing my face and brushing my teeth and flossing every night. It’s being social with friends, deep belly laughs and subsequent serotonin releases.

I’m also forcing myself to reach out instead of isolating. I’m journaling a whole lot, and letting myself write and write and write about the fire as much as I need. I’m reading fiction! I’m listening to the Dear Franny podcast to help me with my mindset in this interim time before I am ready to wade back into the dating waters (I also recommend “Unfuck Your Brain” podcast as a tool to practice new thoughts).

I’m allowing for the fact that all of these good things are going to be tinged with sadness. And I’m doing them anyway.

I don't have control over the situation, but taking these small actions helps me do...something.

Part Two: Swimming Parallel to Shore

Growing up in Southern California, and spending summers at the beach, we are taught to recognize and extricate ourselves from the freaky phenomenon known as rip currents. Rip currents can be absolutely deadly, usually due to a person getting caught in one and trying to panic their way out of it.

From Le Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

A rip current, often simply called a rip (or misleadingly a rip tide), is a specific kind of water current that can occur near beaches with breaking waves. A rip is a strong, localized, and narrow current of water which moves directly away from the shore, cutting through the lines of breaking waves like a river running out to sea. A rip current is strongest and fastest nearest the surface of the water.[1]

Rip currents can be hazardous to people in the water. Swimmers who are caught in a rip current and who do not understand what is happening, or who may not have the necessary water skills, may panic, or they may exhaust themselves by trying to swim directly against the flow of water. Because of these factors, rip currents are the leading cause of rescues by lifeguards at beaches, and are the cause of an average of 46 deaths by drowning per year in the United States.

I’m sure it’s not at all surprising that I’m leaning on yet another water-themed metaphor as a way to ground my lived experience. Focusing on the granular, day-to-day tasks is vital, and, I’m the type of person who also needs to create meaning out of what I’m going through as a way to stay connected to the bigger story, the bigger arc of my life.

Let’s see how this works:

Rip currents make a menace out of enjoying a simple swim in the ocean. They are sneaky and hard to spot. And unless you know what you’re doing, unless you can recognize what’s happening, it’s easy to panic. There’s a moment when you’re caught in a rip current where you’re fighting to get out and it’s so scary because despite all effort you get stuck in that heavy, immobilizing, sucking-back-from-shore white water.

Floating is a way out: You stop fighting, and you let the current wash you out. This can be scary, too, because you might get washed out farther than feels manageable. But what we were trained to do as young people learning ocean safety was to swim parallel to shore.

Yet again, this is me, reminding myself, reminding all of us, reminding you, dear R, that right at that moment where we want to keep fighting, what is actually helpful is to…just stop. To practice what I call staying in the messy middle.

This is something we will save ourselves from, just as we’ve saved ourselves so many times before. We’ll eventually make our way back to shore, shoulders shimmering with newfound strength, breath spent and body all relief. But we can’t force that, either. If we do, we’ll exhaust ourselves. And this shit is exhausting enough, isn’t it? So instead, we swim parallel for a while, for as long as takes for more friendlier waves—which, I promise you, friendlier waves are on the way—to carry us gently back, and before we know it we’re sinking our feet into warm sand and falling asleep under the sun.

Part Three: Embrace the fallow

So: we’re watching our minds. We’re tending to our animal bodies. We’re swimming parallel to shore. Stir these elements together, and do you know what you get?

A shift in the default. An unwinding of patterns. Evidence that we are people who can break cycles instead of staying looped forever at the mercy of them.

We got caught in the rip current, because we are people who “…do not understand what is happening, or who may not have the necessary water skills, may panic, or they may exhaust themselves by trying to swim directly against the flow of water.” The fallow time is a time of learning from our experience. It’s responding, rather than reacting (it’s forgiving ourselves when we react instead of respond). It’s building new skills! The ones necessary so that when we are inevitably caught in a future rip, we can partner with the water, rather than push our way through.

In the fallow, the shape of learning is softer. It’s more passive. It’s not “figuring out.” It’s quieter than that. It’s revelation, and epiphany. It’s listening. It’s creating conditions in which serendipity and happenstance might arise, those magical signals that remind us that even though life is so hard, it’s also rife with beauty at every turn.

To an untrained eye, fallow time looks like nothing time. Internalized capitalism urges us to believe this lie. But we are curious. We are committing to a different way. One that honors us at both our shiniest, and most messy. Inside of this new way, we practice rest. We lie fallow, we are replenished, restored, integrated. We return to wholeness.

Part Four: Permission to make no decisions

Let’s be still, just for a minute. Just till the end of the year. For the next six weeks, let’s slow down. Let’s stay in bed. Let’s read, let’s catch up on the eleventy billion shows everyone else is watching.

Let us be so very gentle. Let us nurture our hearts as we would a fallen baby bird: make a makeshift nest for it, nourish it with round-the-clock attention, sing to it, urge its feathers to grow thick and full, rich in color, all our favorite colors. Feed it treats from our surrounding environment, all it’s favorite seeds and nuts and grubs and bugs. Sugar water, too.

Let’s track all the new space inside us. Let’s relate to it not as an emptiness, but as pure potential, full of possibility. Let’s traipse about our neighborhoods, feel the rain on our faces, no destination. Let’s make friends with not knowing. Let’s consider that joy and delight might walk alongside us, despite ourselves—fire be damned. Let’s look up at the stars, and that ridiculous crescent moon, low slung on the horizon; let’s scritchy-scratch the tops of dogs’ stupid little heads, every chance we get; let’s listen for the high pitch of hummingbird, the hoot of owl, the sharp call of hawk; let’s make chit-chat at the deli, in the checkout line, with the nurse giving us our boosters; let’s buy ourselves flowers, let’s light candles, incense, ideas, dreams. Let’s notice what is already on its way, that butterfly in our stomach, AKA, hope, right there, a flutter in the guts, not erasing the pain, but buzzing alongside.

---

From the archives ~ this time last year:

⭐️"It’s still a miracle to me" (Angela's story)

⭐️A Catharsis of Emotion

---

If you have a question for the advice portion of this newsletter (whether you’re a paid subscriber or not!), reply to this email, or send your own to urbansagesf@gmail.com.

Ask SELF MADE a question | Follow me on Instagram

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. 

SELF MADE is reader-funded. The small percentage of readers who pay make the entire publication possible.

You can also support me for free by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others and letting me know how this newsletter helps you. Thank you.