Moving with, not against.
Step right up to the Adaptation Station
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This past Saturday I came home from an afternoon catch up and walk around Lake Merritt with a dear friend who recently popped out her first baby and upon arriving at my front gate was delighted to find that my backordered coffee table that I’d purchased back in early September (#supplychainissues) had finally arrived.
I moved in here last May with everything most needed—bed, kitchen table, couch, work setup. And since then, I’ve been slowly filling out some other things, being thoughtful about what I want and mostly foregoing IKEA or things found on the sidewalk (no shade there—I have plenty of IKEA and up until this last move I had a trunk I’d found streetside in the Richmond District nineteen years ago that I’d schlepped around this whole time; it just feels nice that for the first time in my adult life, I get to make other choices if I want).
Anyway: the coffee table.
It was an unwieldy box, just about my arm-span wide. I lifted one side: heavy. It didn’t slide so well so I rolled it bottom-over-top across the landing to the base of the stairs. I grabbed both sides, set my back, braced, and then I lifted that motherfucker up three flights, pausing at the second floor landing to breathe and pat myself on the back. I got it inside, opened the box, cleaned up the incredible amount of packaging material, and set my sights on putting it together, popping the top off a Lagunitas Hop Water and setting myself up for yet another wild Saturday night.
Then I freaked out when I saw that the instructions pamphlet was twelve pages long.
I am not the handiest person you’ve ever met (submitted for evidence: the pilot light saga). My confidence stops just past screwing in a dead lightbulb or replacing batteries in a device. And up until recently, there had always someone lurking about—either a boyfriend or someone I was dating or my dearly beloved ex-housemates—to whom I could easily outsource these types of tasks.
I live with myself now and no one is here to bail me out (aside from an overly hirsute creature with zero attention span nor opposable thumbs), so I pumped myself up, put on my new podcast obsession, and set to work.
And it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done (again!).
I’ve been on a storytelling kick lately, sharing the dumb stuff of my life as a way to tee-up the bigger focus of these here essays. This week, we’ve got a one-way ticket toward the Adaptation Station, and if you’re reading this, well, I’m sorry to say but you’re along for the ride.
Step! Right! Up!
*
I’ll start here: I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, I have zero answers, so please don’t look to me as a person who knows better than you. No one knows better than you.
That being said, what I do have is a whole helluva lot of time with myself to think (mostly, I’m thinking about myself and my own tiny little life. Occasionally, I see past my nose, and hence, we have these posts). As we move into year two of Life in Pandemia™, I’ve been thinking. Or, perhaps more accurately, feeling, because if I’ve learned anything (which I haven’t) it’s that my brain, full of all that persistent mind chatter, is what got me into most of the messes I’ve found myself in, and so maybe if the game I’m playing now is adaptation, then it’s possible that I should leave my brain out of the process completely.
If I let my brain conduct the train, then I get hijacked by the stress of uncertainty. I start to believe that the inner engine has the answer. I obsess over controlling the present (LOL) so I can predict the future (HA). I speed up, believing that the faster I can figure out X,Y and Z, the faster I’ll arrive at The Answer, a mythical place where I’m no longer stressed or despairing more often than not. This way of being is outdated, and I’m already so tired. I want to blow up the engine. I want to be free of constant inner urgency. If I know anything (which I don’t), it’s that the engine is all my old bullshit programming that I have to release if I’m going to be able to participate in and contribute to the great shift that is happening all around us. So I’m feeling my way forward. I’m in conversation with my microbiome, those plentiful messengers of gut feeling and intuition zaps. I’m turning to community. I’m calling out the voices of what one of my clients calls “the itty bitty shitty committee” that live in my head on the regular.
What the reality of the past weeks has shown me is that if I keep waiting for things to get better or go away, if I continue revving the engine, then I’ll stay in freakout mode. And that isn’t going to help me or anyone/anything.
Ok, so: how to I move with this? How do I adapt? How *do* I become the 2022 version of Winona from Heathers? Here’s what I’m personally working on/with:
Nervous system work. This first came on my radar in a more explicit way when I did a coaching program with Catherine Andrews last summer. As per usual, I read all the information and watched all the videos about how to get started but…didn’t actually start practicing any of it. All these un-ignorable gut checks as of late have me returning to this experiment. I am also taking Jane Clapp’s Foundations for Nervous System Support class, which I cannot recommend more highly.
I want to say that I don’t think it’s necessary to take classes or whatever to begin to tune into our nervous systems. Meditation is a way to do this. Naps, reading fiction, breathing! doing gut checks throughout the day, noticing when the engine is whirring and then pausing and asking: what do I need in this moment? What would be helpful? What might bring me back into my body?Death to all gurus. This goes back to what I said earlier about no one knowing better than we do what we need or what is right for us and our lives. For me, this is dismantling my tendency to seek external validation to make me feel ok with what I’m doing, or the decisions I’m making, or even who I am as a person. This is me reminding myself that I already have everything I need to move toward everything I most desire. Nobody else can grant me anything I don’t already possess.
This is very fucking hard.Shadow work. One of the things that has been driving me bonkers lately is the sanitized version of sobriety I see all over social media (even as I’m thrilled that it’s entered more of a mainstream conversation, particularly in the last five years since I quit drinking). Recovery is not a trend. The point of being in recovery is not to make our lives more polished or palatable to other people. It is to make peace with the messiness, to cozy up to our dark parts, to bring it out into the light with care and love and gentleness. This is a process not typically for public consumption. But if we’re going to do everything we’re here to do, we have to do all the work it takes to love ourselves for our freakishness, not eradicate it (my god! Please stay weird, OK? It’s what I love most about us).
Creativity. This is the way I stay in relationship to imagination, vision, and bringing vision to life. I’m spending as much time, or ideally more time, creating and visioning, or interacting with media that fuels my creativity, than watching the news, or bingeing Netflix, or scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, or—god help us all—Facebook. As adrienne maree brown says, everything currently in existence today started as part of someone’s imagination. I am committed to tending to my imagination as a generative force for change.
Community. This is my favorite.
All of this adaptation is stupid if it’s only for and with myself. I want us all to get to where we’re going together. I don’t want even one of us to be left behind. If this is true, if this is indeed a value I am living into, it means that those of us more resourced (hi) and with all! this! time! on our hands had better redistribute what we’ve got. I want to to be able to not only say that I value community, but also, I want to show all the receipts that demonstrate beyond the walls of my apartment that I am not perpetuating a system that I claim to be working to adapt away from.
Sorry if I sound a bit batshit today. You can blame this podcast, another obsession that, since I found out about it via Jocelyn K. Glei’s newsletter, has opened up my third eye and the soft spot on the top of my head, and couldn’t have come at a better time. I also want to say that none of this is from my brain. It’s what I’m tapping into for myself, but there are so many people out there speaking to these subjects in ways far more sophisticated than I. My website (!) is rolling out in the next few weeks (🤞🏽) and I’m going to include oh-so-many resources.
All right y’all. The world is furious and raging. Let’s 2022 Winona our way through, together.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️This Grand and Terrible Waking Up
⭐️A Most Awkward Dance. You’re Invited.
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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this post. thank you.
Love this Dani 💗