Dear reader,
The close of September 2024 finds me marveling at the fact that I listen to brown noise in the morning & before bed. I am trying to be on my phone less and succeeding — some days, only in the trying.
I’ve decided to be okay with that. I think it is in the trying.
Block quotes in this post come from ‘Serotonin’ by Angie McMahon.
This summer has been the stage for the kind of inner work I didn’t think I would ever do. I don’t know that I considered myself worthy of accepting that the struggle — real as it is — sometimes just has to be that. Sometimes, the intensity of the pain is a signal of the intensity of the healing that comes after. Sometimes, the healing is really painful too. Leaning into honesty with myself has been the biggest, most painful stretch I have done (so far), but as a result, I am more flexible than I have ever been. As it happens, being more lenient with my humanity has extending hope to every part of myself: who would have thought?
October is approaching again. Last October, I moved to Virginia (?!?!?!) and staved off the whisper in my gut that something wasn’t right, that I was operating off bad information. I felt it, and I didn’t trust myself enough to listen. Two Octobers ago, my meds started working and the dominoes of disaster began to fall, signaling the beginning of the end of my Brooklyn baby dream. Honestly, it was quite nightmarish. The things that followed (deep friendship betrayal that I brushed off, my resultant brush with homelessness, the racist roommate that followed… a spiral of disasters, truly) pushed me all the way to the edge of 25, and then the portal closed. Or rather, the compassion entered.
And things were changing like I hoped they would
Changing like I hoped they would change
And then my clothes got too small for my emotions
Too small, I had to change
There have been remarkable changes in my life over the last three months. Since my last letter, I have gone analog. Three small notebooks for each month of the summer and no pressure to fill them. Just leaving the door open for myself; making sure the part of me who wants to write but doesn’t feel like she can knows that she’s welcome whenever she’s ready. I’ve been holding myself like a child because I am myself as a child.
I’ve been thinking about hard/big/overwhelming feelings — and even regular-degular actions or behaviors that send me spiraling — as an investigative opportunity. I guess all the frontal lobe chat is real then: my brain finished baking and suddenly, I was realizing that things made even more sense than they had the last time I thought they made sense. Thirteen years of therapy and doing my best to beat compassion into my brain, and thirteen years later, a capital R Realization: if bullying myself like I have been was what I needed to do to feel better, surely it would have worked by now. Thirteen years of swimming around the soup of my brain with a big frown on my face, passing by trauma monuments built in different states, murmuring about how I needed to fix it. How much of a problem it was, how they needed to be torn down, how annoying it was that they are still standing after all these years. All this swimming and scowling and yelling! And on a day in July that had been a long time coming, I realized — not suddenly, but still all at once — that it didn’t work. I couldn’t convince myself to heal and get over all of the things because I was annoyed that I hadn’t. I couldn’t be mean spirited about it. I am not mean spirited by nature. I couldn’t meet myself in a way I didn’t recognize.
So I called a meeting. I call it the boardroom. Let me explain: a big feeling comes up. It’s most often abandonment and/or a deep distrust of myself and others. I notice, and I make an announcement over the intercom in my brain: “Shalom who is yelling about their hurt, please come to the boardroom.” I’ve accepted a few things at this point: (1) Every version of me that I have ever been, still exists. (2) Each version holds their own experiences, and based on each experience, longs for some kind of care they didn’t receive in the moment. Finally, (3): Of all the Shaloms that have ever existed, I am the adult in the room. I know all of them, and all of their experiences, because I lived them. And as the adult in the room, it is on me to make sure each of them has what they need.
Someone makes their way to the boardroom, and I am ready to meet whoever does. Sometimes, she’s 12 and reeling from being misgendered in front of her whole class because her hair is short, and she doesn’t have the language or understanding to call what she’s feeling dysphoria. She just wants to disappear. Sometimes she’s 22 and trying really hard not to care about the fact that someone who asked her on a date after a month of a casual relationship (which she preferred to maintain, but she preferred the validation way more) ghosts her on the way to the date. She never heard from him after his “I’m getting on the train” text. She never knows (and will never know) what happened. It bothers her; it pains her so deeply, but she lives in New York City. There are shows to play and electronic music to sweat to. She still cares.
Whether the person who shows up is me as a child or me from three months ago, the other person at the table is me now. I look at whoever is hurting and I say, what’s going on? A lot of the time, she doesn’t want to talk to me. It makes sense: most other times we’ve met, I’ve been mean or dismissive. This summer I started wondering about the effectiveness of my methods. There’s no version of me that takes being yelled at well. Not one. There’s no edition of myself that appreciates being berated. If addressing the issue means addressing the Shalom who Has The Issue, why would yelling at her work? It won’t, it didn’t, it hasn’t. What has worked is radical compassion. And man, does it work.
Been chasing, tracking that old feeling
To find my sistine chapel ceiling
First, I'm gonna kneel before it, then forget I cared about it I'll keep moving through the cycle, I just take a while
I kneel before the pained, hurting version of myself. I kneel and apologize for not being nice to her. I ask her what she needs, really. Sometimes she doesn’t know, so the next best question is, “What would make you feel even the tiniest bit better?”
As I’ve established for myself previously, it is immensely easier to feel less shitty than it is to feel good. Feeling good can be a burden, honestly: it can turn into guilt, shapeshift into arrogance, set the scene for being taken advantage of. Feeling less shitty always seems to be a net positive for me: all I do is get to feel a bit less shitty.
So I listen. The compassion practice has brought me to a place where no matter what she says, it is just allowed to be what she has to say. There doesn’t need to be a judgement cast on it: she’s dealing with plenty of judgement, and so am I. I listen and as the adult in the room, I take care of her. The 11-year-old wants popcorn and to go to bed without brushing her teeth. She just doesn’t want to feel like she’s the worst person in the world because of it. The 21-year-old wants reassurance that she isn’t disgusting to look at, because her boyfriend isn’t attracted to her. I give her the reassurance and remind her that she doesn’t need it from a man. Especially not one who had her doing his laundry and community college homework. We laugh. The 24-year-old wants to know that she didn’t make a mistake by staying alive. I take her to go see the ocean and we stare down the moon. We agree that the moment is not a mistake, that she made the right choice.
It takes a few months of rinsing and repeating before I don’t have to use the intercom anymore. Recently, the past selves come into the boardroom. Sometimes the knock and say, “Hey, can we talk?” and other times they storm in and flip the table. They still need to talk. I stay in the room. I want to hear them.
If you can believe it, until last week I didn’t realize that I had Trust Issues. Obviously I do, obviously I should! But I didn’t realize it in a way that could be useful to me, until I felt trust and didn’t recognize it. I was very scared and I cried a lot. The lunar eclipse in Pisces held me tight and whispered, "what if you could do it scared?” I started listening to an affirmations playlist some mornings, and one day I heard, “I choose love over fear”. I stared at myself and felt like I got hit by a wave of consequence. Here I was understanding that right then, I could make a choice. I could choose love over fear like I had been trying to for the last couple of years. I thought I was doing it! I’ve learned though, that part of getting it right — whatever that means for you — is being okay with getting it really, really wrong.
I journaled about my realization that I stop writing when I feel there’s too much to confront. I don’t want to write it down; I don’t want to make it real. I was confused by this because I didn’t know about this behavior. I thought I wrote about things when there was too much to confront.
I guess I’m saying that I embraced my inner ogre. The layers exist and there are always more of them. Infinite onion! I have been trying to choose love over fear most of my life, but I don’t think I’ve been in a position where I trust myself to do that before. None of the past Shaloms are practiced in it.
But I am the adult in the room. I love all of those girls, those past Shaloms, so much. I want them to trust me, so I build trust in myself. I keep my promises to myself. They learn from the follow through that they can trust me, too.
Devastate me, baby!
writes some of my favorite letters. The print above sums up my offering from the summer. I trust I’ll know what to do. Every version of me has lived through and handled what they once considered unhandleable and sometimes unlivable. I trust that I will continue to. A couple days ago I was on the phone with my dear friend Sydney, and I was telling her that I was scared. But I realized that I wasn’t, so I corrected myself. She said, “You feel the trust.” I was scared because I didn’t recognize the feeling, but I felt it. I cried for 30 minutes afterwards. She was right.It's just something I am trying
Have to change it up a while
Might be futile, I don't mind them
I think it is in the trying
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
I live in Baltimore! Here are some notes app selections from this summer:
That’s the letter. Thanks for being here - hello new readers! Here’s an end of summer playlist if you like. I hope you are all cozying up the the part of yourself that needs the most love. Apple Music here.
Love always,
shalom