Satisfaction is the goal
"The way we get there is how we'll be when we get there."
Friends, as I’ve sure you’ve heard, it’s straight up RAINING in California. Has been for weeks now. Monday we had some of the for-realest weather I ever recall experiencing in my twenty years of living in San Francisco—thunder, lighting, hella rain, motherfucking HAIL. This is absolutely wrecking havoc on our extraordinarily parched lands, including flooding, mudslides, and downed trees; and then of course there’s all the power outages effecting hundreds of thousands of people; not to mention the impact on our unhoused population; not to mention that seventeen people have died. I’d like to have a conversation with California about spending more time in the “messy middle,” but since the arrival of climate change she seems to traffic only in extremes.
It’s also true that the reservoirs are filling back up, and in some cases, overflowing. The Sierra snowpack, which in many ways governs the health of our state, because a healthy snowpack means there will be plenty of water to go around, is at 226% of it’s typical average for this time of year. So, though I wish these rains weren’t so destructive, I’m also thanking every last god for some relief from the omnipresent mindfuck of living under the tension of extreme drought.
The coyotes are still playing. Many of the fallen trees were already near the end of their natural life cycles. All the hills are in their deep-greening. We still have a few storm systems on the way, but I’m relaxing in the exhale as much as possible, Tater and I looking out the window from our cozy, third floor vantage point, all of us in mandatory hibernation a little longer.
I hope, wherever you are, that you are safe and cozy, and that your January is off to the most exquisitely slowest start.
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I have wanted to start my own business since 2009, which was the year I returned to San Francisco after living for a year in Chiang Mai, Thailand. In 2009, I was two years out of undergrad, and arrived home to an economic recession in full bloom. I had zero concept of how much traction I’d already lost when it came to building a career, naive as only a 25-year-old can be to the realities of basic adulting, my dumb little buzzed head (that was the first time I buzzed my head) full of stars about how easy it would be to bring one of my idiotic ideas to fruition, fantasizing about all the fame and fortune that was just waiting for me if I could just get something off the ground.
I sometimes joke that were I to write a memoir, the title would be “Late Bloomer.” Here are some of the ideas I entertained:
🙄 Sewing tchotchkes to sell at the Ferry Building (I have never sewed anything in my life).
🙄 Starting a food truck (this one makes me laugh) - I had a vision of making pressed Cuban sandwiches and pastelitos.
🙄 Becoming a full-time yoga teacher (no one tells you when you take a $3,000+ yoga training that hardly anyone “makes it”, and if you *do,* it more often than not entails burning yourself out, not to mention that literally everyone in San Francisco is a yoga teacher, which is to say, we have what you might call a saturated market).
🙄 Candlemaker (???)
🙄 Screenprinter (????? I can hardly change a lightbulb for Pete’s sake).
All of this to say, it took me a while to get myself together. Here’s a list of jobs I’ve had:
🤔 Retail at a secondhand shop
🤔 Receptionist, and then manager, at a day spa in Pacific Heights
🤔 Massage therapist for about thirty seconds
🤔 Sales at a cultural exchange company, selling study abroad programs to high schoolers
🤔 ESL teacher
🤔 Receptionist at an acoustical engineering firm
🤔 Receptionist, and then manager, at a clinical skincare studio
🤔 Yoga teacher (lord did I try)
🤔 Manager of multiple yoga studios
🤔 Executive assistant
🤔 Program manager in the psychology department at CIIS
🤔 Selling and cleaning jewelry
🤔 Operations for a writing school
🤔 Operations for a consulting company
🤔 Teaching fellowship at USF
🤔 Program Lead and Coach at Tempest
🤘🏾SELF MADE
Near the beginning of my tenure at Tempest, when I realized that what I thought would be my dream job was behind the scenes more of a nightmare, I decided to once again turn my focus to entrepreneurship. I signed up for a three-month business coaching program with Catherine Andrews, who had launched a pilot program called “Secretly Ambitious.” There were three other woman in the program (one of who I’m still close with and who built my gorgeous website and who I work with to this day for marketing support), and on our very first group call Catherine said something that in and of itself was worth the entire cost of the course:
"The way we get there is how we'll be when we get there."
The reason I’m spelling all of the above out in so much detail is because one of the biggest themes in my 1:1 work with people is the belief that they should be somewhere other than exactly where they are. They “should” be further along in their career than where they are. They “should” be in a relationship by now. Their recovery practice “should” feel easier than it does. This is not unlike how I felt cleaning jewelry at a friend’s shop for a full year after I got out of grad school with yes, a fancy art-degree, but also, hella debt, looking around at all my peers having, like, their second babies and buying, um, actual homes and jet-fucking-setting all over for fancy-ass jobs as I huddled in a poorly-lit bathroom, hunched over a tiny sink, cleaning the tarnish off sterling silver necklaces I could never have afforded.
Quitting drinking already had me newly connected to the preciousness of time, and the desire to not waste even a moment more. So when I turned my attention to building a business, one might say that my foot might have been pressed pretty firmly down on the proverbial gas pedal. I understood, however vaguely, that I didn’t want to perpetuate the same bullshit I experienced in the corporate sector (you know: overwhelm, burnout, a constant sense of inner-urgency, the prioritization of bottom line/profit over honoring people’s basic humanity couched in gross jargon that tried to convince us that the company gave a shit about our well-being), and it’s also true that those patterns didn’t go away just because I became aware of them. I had quit drinking! The last thing I wanted to do was keep living in a way that had me feeling stressed and grasping and future tripping toward some mythical arrival that would have me missing out on the present moment, which is to say, missing out on my actual fucking life.
I’ve experienced many “aha’s” on the path, and hearing Catherine speak those above words has been one of the brightest lightbulbs yet. I continue to feel it shining over my head, casting its warm glow over my own life and my client work.
🤘🏾
"The way we get there is how we'll be when we get there" is another way of making the process the goal.
The only way I know how to do this is to commit, unwaveringly, to daily practice. A daily practice is one of the ways to make the mundane-nitty-gritty-everydayness of existence the most exquisitely beautiful experience I can possible muster, given that life will be life-y no matter how sober I am or how fancy my job is or how many stamps are in my passport or how lofty my ceilings are.
I did not work so hard to quit drinking to spend the rest of my life at the mercy of a capitalist engine that if I’m not careful would steal the most important resource I have, which is of course, TIME. I do not want to wait until one-day-some-day to arrive at the thing that most of us are striving for, which is a sense of satisfaction. I want to be satisfied every goddamn day. Satisfaction will forever be unattainable if I move through my life operating from the belief that it’s only when I have that thing/person/job/house/etc that I’ll be happy. My job (my practice) is what has me connect to a sense satisfaction every single day, so that I can begin to recognize it when it shows up outside of this 5am-7am-overly-elaborate-hella-extra-nondrinking-sober-ish woman’s magic morning time. Knowing what satisfaction feels like has me move more steadily toward choices that nourish me rather than feed the engine, because practicing satisfaction also has me more readily recognize satisfaction’s opposite, which, let’s just say, is where I lived for a very long time.
Do I know what satisfaction feels like? Where do I feel it in my body? How do I know that what I’m experiencing is satisfaction?
It would be rad if we could all take a sabbatical for however long it took to shift our relationship to the urgency spiral, and to discover how to live in a way that feels satisfying more often than not. I know that isn’t reality for most of us. Besides—I want to work! I love working. I just don’t want to feel like I’m waiting for <gestures vaguely>for my life to start.
This *is* it. This moment is my whole life. This is everything. Nothing else exists beyond this. So, how do I move toward good? What practices do I commit to that will keep me grounded, connected, and present to joy as I continue down a path that takes as long as it takes, and is frustrating, painstaking, and kind of dumb and annoying a lot of the time?
These are not rhetorical questions. How do we learn to love what’s right here? How do we learn to love who is right here (you know who the who is, right?)?
Like I said—kind of dumb and annoying. But also: Mystical and magical and full of serendipity, joy and devotion; accompanied by good pals and tasty snacks; and plenty of rest.
But don’t take any of this from me. Go practice.
SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, Integral coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
So wonderful, Dani - just what I need to hear. Thank You!
Love your words Dani