It's never the right time to be who you are
Lessons from a month of mayhem
Hello + happy Tuesday!
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Today’s inspiration:
My mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating eggs without salt
Which is a better way of saying—take the scenic route. Say I love you when it’s true. Drive 12 hours just to touch. Buy kumquats because they’re called kumquats. Call someone you love a little kumquat. Write letters. Recite poems. Be verklempt. Rise early to hunt the moon. Eat pastries whose names you can’t pronounce. Astonish everyone. Haunt everything. Sing, even if poorly. Press the peel for zest. We’re nothing but brief bodies. Hearts, fragile as parakeets. Spit, lips, and longing. All we’ve got is this skin. This necessary salt.
I’m forty years old and it was only three years ago that I discovered what I wanted to do with my life. For a long time, the story I told myself was that I was a late bloomer. But a conversation with a friend a couple weekends ago had me consider something different.
“Sweaty Saturdays” at my gym are for partner workouts, and lately Jenny and I meet up to workout, and then walk three blocks to Arizmendi on 24th Street where we order iced dirty horchatas, sit outside in the sun-drenched (if we’re lucky) parklet, and catch up. Jenny is also a small business owner, and we were riffing on the state of our businesses, and what we’ve been thinking about and experimenting with, when it hit me that mine and Jenny’s career pathways were more similar than I’d realized. I blurted out, “If we wrote a list of all the jobs we’ve ever had, it would be the longest, weirdest list.”
(Jenny’s: moving to Dubai to be a live-in tutor to the son of a wealthy family; mine: spending summers as a kennel assistant at a facility for retired animals—dogs, cats, birds of prey, and six penguins—that had been in film and television).
In that moment, a shift: wait a second. Jenny has had a nonlinear career path, too. And it’s one of the things I love most about her, one of the things about her I look up to most. Jenny inspired me to pursue what was in my heart, rather that what was pragmatic.
What if I’m right on time?
🤯
So I spent the rest of the weekend with the mind-blown emoji having replaced my skull, and inside a fresh perspective: Perhaps I’m not as much of a late-bloomer as I’d thought.
I’ve attributed that distinction to the tangled period of my adulthood where I was anesthetizing myself with just enough alcohol to maintain the sad, stuck-in-place status quo instead of figuring out how I might start to have a say in my life instead of only merely tolerating it. I’ve been telling myself that if I hadn’t gotten so mixed up in such a strange direction, I would be somewhere different than where I am right now. The somewhere different is always an ambiguous, abstract idea of “being further along.”
I’m realizing right this moment, in real time, that there’s still some shame mixed up inside me.
When I quit drinking in 2017, the ceiling opened up so dramatically that it’s been hard not to believe that if only I’d quit earlier, I’d have gotten to that aforementioned somewhere different sooner. I have been hammering away at that story for almost seven years, grinding it into my overworked and exhausted neural pathways as an undeniable, 1+1=2 type truth.
But the conversation with Jenny made me start to question whether the late bloomer story is as accurate as I’ve been believing. To be clear, I don’t mean to minimize my experience with alcohol. There were long periods of darkness and confusion, and there are significant swaths of my twenties that are utterly wiped from my memory. I still wish I’d had enough imagination as a young person to picture an adult life without alcohol, I definitely still wish I’d disentangled myself sooner.
And. Perhaps it could also be true that my issues with substances didn’t quite have the influence over my overall trajectory I’ve spent the last seven years convincing myself they did. Because what I’m realizing is that there’s as much a chance that my path would have been just as full of spirals and walkabouts as it has been, whether or not I ever took a sip of booze. Because maybe that’s who I am. Because maybe who I am is someone who cannot go in a straight line. Because maybe I drank because I didn’t fit into a linear trajectory, and I didn’t have the capacity at the time to accept that my way was bizarre and circuitous and—
—dear god, what would it be like to own that about myself, to learn to move and bend and glide with where my life is taking me, to stop it already with the shoving myself into boxes inside of which I will never fit, and then berating myself when my attempts never, ever work.
Because truly, this is what has caused me the most pain—not so much the not fitting in, but the story I tell myself about not fitting in. What I make it mean about myself that my life has gone differently than I was programmed to believe it was supposed to go.
People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
Thomas Merton
“Three years ago I discovered what I wanted to do with my life.”
This statement implies that there was a moment of discovery, an “aha” that had me see something new and different from one moment to the next. But that’s not true, actually. Becoming a coach was a twenty year process for me. Those twenty years were full of experiences that when looked at all together create a constellation that coalesced as coaching. But if I look at any individual experience too closely, all I see are the fits and starts. It doesn’t tell the whole story.
Because what does it even mean to “figure out what I’m doing with my life?” I have always been a writer. Writing is not how I’ve ever earned a living, so does that mean it doesn’t qualify as what I “do” with my life? I have never made money on my creative work; does this disqualify me from the claiming myself as an artist?
If you look at my calendar on any given weekday, I am “doing coaching.” There are individual sessions, blocks of time that make up a day, a week, and so on. But when I scan out, coaching includes so much more: it is a vehicle through which I get to show up as fully self-expressed as possible. It is a way I get to explore the different facets of my humanity. It is an ongoing invitation for clients to consider their own self-expression, their own life experiments and explorations, and all the messiness inherent and in between.
And lest this sound more glamorous than it is, it also means that I don’t have much of a playbook for how to sustain this, for what this looks like over time. Anyone who spends any time on the internet knows that you can’t scroll for ten seconds without a coach’s profile sliding by. And now everywhere you look there are coaches coaching coaches (we are nothing if not prolific). There’s advice galore, endless marketing and business trainings. There are formulas I can follow from creators who promise me multiple six figures! $100k launches! Sell your programs while you sleep!
…but what if what I really want is to go down deep into the subterranean wilderness inside myself, to live in a way that allows me the space and time to do so, even though that means relinquishing the hustle and grind lifestyle that would be required to have the huge income and fancy life and all the glitz and shimmer that coaching influencers display online?
…but what if who I want to walk alongside and invite to work with me are people who are less interested in getting better at becoming more productive and efficient, and more curious about exploring their own inner wilderness, and creating something beyond the systems that so many cling to even as they crumble?
One of the things that struck me about the conversations I had throughout May’s coaching project is how so many of you are also questioning your stories about yourself and your life. There seems to be a connection between an external landscape gone increasingly chaotic, weird, and uncertain, and an inner experience clamoring for your attention with greater than ever urgency. As the external structures from which you’ve historically assigned and derived meaning grow more dysfunctional, you are recognizing that safety and any semblance of reliability must come from within. The call is coming from inside the house.
Government is not going to save you. Religion isn’t either. Fancy degrees aren’t quite the stability guarantee they once were, and cushy corporate jobs can dissolve overnight. I could go on, but I won’t, because I know you are as informed, if not more, than I, which means you’re as stressed, if not more, than I, so suffice it to say that reality is super strange right now.
Certainty went out the window back in 2016. For some of you, it was never there to begin with. Since then we’ve lived through a pandemic and now we’re witnessing nonstop death matches between old world fossils who are clinging to power like geriatric barnacles on the rusted out hull of the Titanic.
There is never, ever going to be a right time to be—to allow yourself the space and time to become—who you want to be.
You long for your creativity to occupy a greater space in your life: you want to make things with your hands, to experiment on the page, to start your own business, to explore the natural world. You are tired of constantly shoving your spark to the back burner. The consensus reality we’ve heretofore agreed upon as a collective has failed in its promises but you’re scared to pursue what’s in your heart—and wow, how you long to discover what’s in your heart—because that would require venturing into the unknown, and yeah, there are already so many unknowns right now.
But also,
“someday”
is never coming.
It’s 9:15 on a Saturday night, and I’ve spent most of the day writing, by which I mean, staring out the window, watching the way the late spring wind blows through the trees, slingshots the overhead lines, the way it shudders my single-paned windows. As I close out this already too long missive, I am present to a profound and surprising optimism.
We are living through such extraordinary times. As someone who has slowly, slowly, and extraordinarily painstakingly patched together a creative life and is able to support myself from my work, I am inviting you to center your creative longing. Even if only a little bit. It doesn’t have to be “full time;” it doesn’t have to pay the bills; it doesn’t have to take up much time. But take some time. Do whatever you have to do to create tiny buffers around your obligations so that you can practice a new way of being with yourself, your beliefs, and to create space around what you believe to be possible and true.
Not two weeks ago, a thirty second exchange with a trusted friend literally changed my worldview. I was able to release a burden I didn’t know I was still carrying. I became more myself, because I was able to accept a part of my story that I’d assumed was a glitch, rather than a prerequisite of the curriculum1.
I’m inviting you to consider that your beliefs about yourself and the world might be due for some curious and gentle questioning.
It’s hard to go against the grain, swim against the stream, ditch the present state of affairs and make different choices. I’d be a liar if I said it was easy. It’s not! I wish it were. I have moments of ease, of tenderness and satisfaction. But mostly I’m staring into the void, careening through space on this pale blue dot like everyone else, doing my damndest to hold on and stay close to beauty and love and friendship and joy and all those extraordinary aspects of life that help fend off despair.
It’s hard to live by your values. It’s hard to know what your values even are because most of you can’t slow down enough to be with these types of questions. You’re afraid of what you’ll discover, not because it will be bad, but because you know that there’s a bell inside you that once its rung, there’s no going back.
Next week I’m announcing a chill little hybrid course where you’ll be invited to:
turn down the dial on the noise;
create some gentle structure in your summer;
connect with other Self Made renegades;
and
have some fun with a creative project.
Stay tuned!
Friendliest of reminders that you are always invited to grab an hour of my time.
Sending you lots of love and care.
xo,
Dani
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.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!
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Yes, I’ve been listening to Ram Dass talks every day lately.
Love love love
This whole piece is beautifully expressed and written. I love your wisdom!