More Story<3

What are you doing lately?

Lately, I’m an arborist, communication consultant, art programming designer, life coach, yoga studio assistant, friend, lover, daughter, cousin, artist, rabbit-keeper, and forever-student.

I spend my free time running around the woods barefoot, wading into the good water, reading, writing, telling stories, hosting, sleeping in new places, visiting my lover in Hawaii where I once worked, having important fights, sometimes allowing myself to flee, and practicing continual attentiveness to what I enjoy, care about, suffer about, and generally think, notice, and feel.

I spend minimal time attending events I don’t want to go to, talking to people when I am not really in the mood, digging through clutter I haven’t dealt with (this one was not easy for me…), working at 1/2 speed due to burn-out, dreading work, burying questions that I have, saying things I don’t mean to people for convenience, not saying things I do mean for the same reason, feeling ashamed of how much I think and care about my love life, worrying that I don’t exercise enough while simultaneously not exercising more, talking about things that suck more than once without also taking some action, letting anything inside me (food, medicine, or otherwise) that I don’t really feel great about, and making decisions in an unpleasant, fatiguing way (another big one for me!).

I pinky swear that’s finally, actually true.

I don’t think I particularly look like somebody who has their sh** ‘together,’ but I don’t have too much sh** I don’t like left in my life, and I have a lot of sh** that I love! I enjoy myself, and when suddenly I don’t (which does happen pretty frequently), I enjoy feeling open to changing everything over again and noticing how I can be there for myself to creatively make it better.

This is after years of serious ‘unending’ depression, mental stuck-ness, feeling like a waste, sincerely not believing that things could get ‘better-enough’ to be worth taking better care of myself, failures to protect myself, failures to give as much of myself to my curiosity as possible, experiments in self-healing, and the eventual experience of giving into letting things change and move as they do.

And just to be clear, among other things, I am still a sad girl, with all the sad girl cynicism and crude framings on hand. And I don’t wish I could discard those life-is-fuck-and-die lenses because a lot of sad things are true. They are.

For a long time, I didn’t think I could reconcile being so sad sometimes with doing… this… Who would want help from somebody who gets so sad? This was actually something I went and sought support for… and as I tried out conversations with different people about it, I realized that I actually did not want to work with anybody who seemed like they didn’t get sad… How could I trust that they could see what I was trying to wrap my head around if they never got so low, or blocked it out when they did, or couldn’t professionally own that part of themselves?

I love sad people. Sad people (including me) make me laugh. Sad people make me feel better, sometimes because they are so sad that I suddenly seem like a happy person. Sometimes because they ground me out. Sometimes because their smiles are so beautiful and unpredictable. Sometimes because life seems like a movie to me when someone starts to cry. Sometimes because they can move slowly and carefully when they’re comforting somebody, and take human suffering seriously when they are witnessing it. Sometimes because they can be such good listeners. The point is, I can be your certified sad-girl with an open mind AND your smiling sylph-optimist all at the same time, if that’s somebody you might be looking for. Welcome to the spaciousness.