Trusting the timing of your life
Tuscany retreat is *half full*! Writing workshop is *this* weekend!
Good morning everyone. For the first time since beginning this newsletter, I’ve been feeling a bit stuck (sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that I haven’t sent out one of my weekly public essays in over two weeks). Part of the reason is because I recently hit media saturation (again), which translated to the sense that my brain had hit max capacity and needed a break; another part of the reason is that it seems we have reached peak Substack, and I’m sitting with questions around what it will look like to continue to be part of this ecosystem that is growing faster than I can keep up with, or, if I’m honest, that I feel comfortable with.
I sincerely do not mean to be one of those “I was here before it was cool!” type people, and, it’s also true that it’s been wild how many “and here’s why I’m moving to Substack!” announcements I’ve seen from other creators in the past month alone. In the grand scheme, I think it’s WONDERFUL that collectively, we are beginning to move away from mega-corporation-run social media platforms, and how much more power this gives us to curate the media we’re consuming and the communities we’re opting into. In the small scheme, I want to bring value to your inbox, which I’m guessing is just as overwhelmed as mine, and so I’m wondering how to do that, and whether or not that means adjusting how I’ve been operating here so far.
All this to say, I’m noodling 🍜.
In other news: Our Tuscany retreat is officially half-full. If this is something you would like to do (particularly if you want your own room), now is the time!
Here’s a video about Carol, my partner in Italy who runs the tour (let your imagination swap in glasses of chinotto for the wine 😎).
Finally: Writing workshop is THIS Sunday!
That’s it for announcements. Keep reading for some sweet serendipity that happened last week <3
With love and care,
Dani
💥 Events 💥
VIRTUAL EVENT: May Writing Workshop is THIS Sunday, 5/21, from 10am-12pm PST. Workshops feature two writing prompts, and a (zero-obligation) option to read aloud and receive non-critical feedback. This workshop is appropriate for all levels. For more information and to register, click here.
HALF FULL ~ INTERNATIONAL EVENT: SELF MADE presents With Pleasure! —a seven-day alcohol-free retreat in Tuscany happening this October 7-14. I’ve partnered with Carol Sicbaldi, founder of Carol’s Moveable Feast, with the intention that you reclaim joy and pleasure, relish in your five senses, and soak in the richness of your surroundings. To learn more and make a deposit, click here.
❓Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
In 2008, I collected what in retrospect was a fairly modest sales commission but at the time was the most money I’d ever had in my bank account and left an awful phone sales job in San Francisco for the mountains of Thailand to follow the cliche of getting certified to teach English as a Second Language. I was a year out of undergrad with a degree I felt ambivalent about, innocently oblivious to the impact the looming Great Recession would ultimately have on my overall career trajectory, and, as was my tendency, was searching for the next thing to chase. The plan was to take the one month ESL teaching intensive, get certified, travel around for a time and then either come home, or continue on with a skill in my pocket that could keep me on the run. I stayed in Chiang Mai for almost a year, shoe-stringed around on that bonus and my near-negligible Thai teaching salary until I could no longer keep running, and had to phone home for a one-way ticket back to reality.
When you can’t sit and be with yourself, travel is an exquisite charade—I was seeing the world! Meeting extraordinary people along the way! Getting the type of life education I would never experience from sitting in a cubicle or in a traditional classroom! All of these things were absolutely true, as were their shadow sides: The constant onslaught of novel experiences while living in a foreign land was just the right cocktail to cover up my aimlessness and staggering lack of self-esteem, while fueling the type of Magical Thinking that had me believe that opportunities would always be available to me, not by dint of any of my own merit, but simply because I wanted them.
I came back to San Francisco in late spring 2009, nary a job offer in sight. Word of mouth pointed me in the direction of a receptionist position for an acoustical engineering firm downtown, and they hired me. Forty-thousand dollars/year, ninety minute lunch breaks, and full benefits to answer some phones, type things up on a typewriter (!), get surprisingly proficient at finishing the New York Times daily crossword, and play on the internet.
Many of my early-adulthood experiences are iterations of a similar theme: That is, not being able to sit, stay. I had zero concept of how much traction I’d already lost when it came to building a career amidst the economic crisis I’d returned to, 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 obviously waiting for me if I could just get something off the ground.
I picked up a copy of The Artist’s Way on the recommendation of a good friend and began making my way through the workbook. It’s been fourteen years, and though I don’t remember much from the workbook exercises, I’m still devoted to a (near) daily practice of Morning Pages. I often joke that if I go more than a few days without dumping the contents of my brain out onto an empty page, I get emotionally constipated: the rattle of anxiety shakes at a louder than normal frequency; I get more easily overwhelmed by the simple stuff of life; my tendency toward road rage increases; I feel ineffective and scattered which feeds right back into the aforementioned anxiety. Morning Pages restore something in me to a sense of equilibrium and I don’t really question it, it works, and it’s become something that I just do.
This translates to dozens upon dozens of notebooks in piles in my closet. Yes, I have a favorite kind (I like the bound versions, never the spiral ones) and also a favorite (refillable!) pen. If any of you are familiar with morning pages, you know that rarely does one revisit what’s inside, because 99% of the content is the banal, boring, mundane day-to-day of life. During the first few years of practice, I imagined that at some point I’d return, peruse the piles of pages as a way to craft a memoir. The truth is that I can hardly read a page or two before my eyes either glaze over from boredom, or roll so far back into my head I can see my own brainstem in response to the overwrought musings of my younger years spilled out in all their saccharine earnestness. The point of Morning Pages is the process, not the output, and though I thought this practice would feed into future writing, what it gave me instead is the habit of getting up before the sun every single day and being with my creative work, another thing I don’t question, because it’s become an essential part of how I move through life.
Anyway: a few weeks ago, my former housemates dropped off a box of stuff I’d forgotten when I moved out two years ago and in the box was a binder and inside the binder, in the front pocket, was a Morning Pages notebook from summer 2014. I flipped it open to the last few pages and read this:
That was almost ten years ago. Ten years—and the above is from a notebook five years into the practice. Prior pages are full of similar desires desires and musings, entertaining dozens of hare-brained ideas on my way to where I am now, almost one year into my first year of full self-employment, living into a reality that ten years ago felt like the most far off scenario imaginable.
The moment last week of rediscovering an old notebook that might have languished forever in a cardboard box in a dusty-ass garage, and opening it up to see spelled out two words that have become my north star—not just in business, but in every aspect of my life—well, um, yeah. My throat closes and my eyes well up just sitting here. And maybe the emotion is gratitude, because the memory of what life used to feel like—so many years spent barely holding my head over water—is still as close as a second skin. Or maybe tears come because it’s moving to see evidence that the other practice I’ve been inside (the practice I write about here all the time)—of orienting toward life as a trustworthy force; as a relationship I can attend to with care and attention; as an unfolding that I can receive rather than manage, allow to emerge rather than force—is an honest practice, and one I can rely on. Because despite how pretty it sounds to “trust your life,” it requires a daily rigor, a near constant redirect back to what’s right here. This is so much harder than it sounds, so yes, I’ll take the serendipitous stumble upons, the lanterns in the dark; I’ll look at the ugly scribbles in a near forgotten notebook as a trustworthy signpost on an otherwise confusing as hell path.
So it’s been a relief, stumbling upon these pages. A much needed reminder that so much more is at play than my thinking brain can understand at any individual moment in time. It helps me see that even if I can’t fully wrap my head around the longview—that even though I mostly spend my days obsessing over the nitty-gritty, daily grind, with varying degrees of success with that damn redirecting—that the longview is happening anyway. Despite myself. Despite all the ways I get in my own way, or forget who I am, or the game I’m playing.
What I’m noticing is that no matter how much I change my life, the feeling that I’m not getting to where I’m supposed to be going as fast I’m meant to get there hasn’t gone away. It’s dissipated considerably, thank god. But it’s still there. I still feel like I should be way further along than I am. I still can’t help but compare myself to my peers, to other writers, to other coaches, to people on The Internet. As I learn to trust my own pace, it’s these lanterns, these signposts, that remind me to do just that: to slow down, to bask, to reflect on all I’ve accomplished, to celebrate myself and my efforts. To be in my actual life, rather than an idea of my life. To express out into the world the unique expression that is mine alone to give. To rest in the knowing that despite how culture and capitalism might try to convince me otherwise, I’m right on time.
I turn 40 next year. Since I quit drinking almost six years ago, I’ve dreamed of dragging a wheelbarrow full of notebooks down to Ocean Beach, stacking the pages into a spiraling tower, setting fire to every last word. I long to let the past rest. I like the idea of burning away my first 40 years, clearing the underbrush and readying the inner landscape for another 40 years and more, if I’m lucky. I brush off the incredulous looks from friends who try to convince me not to do this. It’s a practice in non-attachment! I exclaim. Besides, no one will ever be allowed to read any of them, lest the die of boredom, and I don’t want that responsibility. After last week, I might be rethinking this promise. I have ten months to decide, ten months of sniffing out signposts, of keeping watch for confirmation that’s already on its way. Because until last week, it never occurred to me that the past might hold more than just utter cringe at worst, total melancholy at best. That it might hold lanterns I could have never in a million years expected, illuminating a way forward far brighter—and far more mysterious—than 2014 me could have ever dreamed.
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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