On work addiction and waking up into a cloud of anxiety & internalized capitalism...

hi loves....

here I am writing at 9:34am on a semi cloudy morning. Palm trees through the window. Still can't believe I live here. What is my life? A glorious, quietly triumphant one.

I want to write today about work addiction. About the tiny incessant call of my dopamine receptors, bound to a systemic drip of productivity as happiness, as self-worth.

I woke up after not enough hours of sleep, and as has been happening lately, a small sleepy peek at the morning light turned into a jolt of adrenaline as an anxious thought ran through my whole body. I don't remember what it was; it doesn't actually matter. What matters is that it woke me up, the damn monkey mind.

Awake now, I watched with envy the slow rise and fall of A's sheet-welted body beside me in the soft light. The cat snoozed, a tortoiseshell crossaint, in her adorable resting spot between our two pillows. And my mind continued to whir. I checked the time - hours before my alarm was supposed to go off. I worried over an unresolved conflict between two friends, rekindled by them both inadvertently showing up at a virtual workshop we did. I lay in the rumpled blankets and wondered about the possibility of naturally falling asleep again. I'm awake, my mind insisted. I'm dead tired, murmured my body.

Then a gem flashed through my mind, and momentarily erased my worries.

Remember the workbook on "working softer" that you're creating? It whispered, gleaming. When it was clear it had my attention, it dropped some shiny wordplay into my consciousness. "A break in the moment is worth two in the mind."

"That's good," I replied. "I should write that down."

Suddenly, I didn't feel tired anymore. Even though I resisted immediately writing it down (thank you, years of healing my tendency to just start working while still in bed), I mulled over the quote in my mind and thought about a few other things I needed to do for the workbook. My mind briefly wandered back to the anxiety-provoking friend situation, but then I went back to thinking about the workbook. A moment later, I grabbed my phone and typed the quote into my note app, so I wouldn't forget it.

Before I knew it, I was flashing through possible launch strategies, thinking about the sales podcast I wanted to listen to, and mentally re-arranging layouts for the workbook pages in Canva. In a last ditch effort to get myself back into a more restful state, I opened the #SelfCare app on my phone and drew a virtual tarot card:

The Devil: Materialism, Addiction, Ignorance.

"Don't give in to temptation."

I frowned. Tapped it again (because sometimes the AI gave different - better - messages the second time). 

"Don't give way to impulse."

My breath caught as my brain finally registered the word "addiction". In an instant, I remembered my body, lying on the bed. And I asked her - how are you doing?

Exhausted, she said. 

What do you need?

I need to rest!!!

Oh.

I clicked off the phone and I lay back, feeling gravity gently pull my back against the mattress and the crumpled sheets. I thought about how conditioned I am to subconsciously equate any hint of productivity with excitement, how it conveniently masks my other emotions, how it makes me forget my body and my need to rest. 

And I also thought: it's not my fault. I'm doing my best to heal. This is not about me; this is about capitalism, and the way it gets into our heads, latches onto our unresolved stuff.

I wish I could tell you that I went back to sleep, but whatever weird thing is going on with my body and morning anxiety patterns lately prevented that. But instead, I listened to my body, moved out onto the couch so I wouldn't disturb A with my restlessness, petted my other adorable sleeping cat curled up on said couch, did a bit of soothing breathwork, and gently reflected on the insidiousness of internalized capitalism, which led me to journaling this piece.

...

and of course that same dopamine drip is saying:

PUBLISH THIS TO PATREON AND MAKE MONEY HONEYYY

BE THE NEXT BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WORK SOFTER

GET EVERYONE TO SEE HOW WISE YOU ARE SO THEY'LL FINALLY NOTICE AND APPRECIATE YOU

.... oy.

No, I'm gonna post it to the kitten blog... and then maybe do some more breathwork.

I love you, my love.

You are good.

I know that it feels good to write, and have big ideas, and potentially be able to share it with others in a way that feels reciprocal.

You get to have that. And also, you don't have to get love that way. You are already loved. I love you. You're safe.

We can do this our way, capitalism be damned.

And I'm giving that part of you that didn't get your needs for love and safety met as a kid, as a teenager especially, who thought she had to work to get those things, a huge hug. Rest now. You get to be loved even as you rest.

<3 T

The In Between Time

Hello loves.

Writing from the strange in between time in which I find myself, where my semester is over but not totally over and I'm getting better after being really sick but not totally better and my nervous system is calming after being really activated a lot recently but not totally calm.

I'm also going to get my period any day now, and I'm feeling the flux of hormones in my body, the extra sensitivity and irritation and difficulty sleeping and mood swings and deep sadness and anger processing through me. I'm thinking about how in tune fenix is with the rhythms of their bleeding cycle and how much permission they give themself to be with what they know they need in different parts of their cycle...I don't feel as much awareness around my cycle, except in the week leading up to it, when it announces itself with sore breasts and sore pelvic bowl and extra irritation and migraines and mood swings and trouble sleeping. And sometimes, like this time, with getting really sick.

I had been going non stop for a while, though trying to pace myself, motivated both by self-care and love and by fear of getting really sick if I overdid it. It was going alright, but then the workshop that was supposed to happen in March and had to be rescheduled (for obvious reasons) snuck up and jumped on me. Workshops in my program are intensive all-day things that happen on two consecutive Saturdays, and this one had been rescheduled for the last two Saturdays in the semester.

So my careful rationing of energy, fitting everything I needed to do into the time I had available with enough time around it for me to take care of myself, fell through the floor. I started trying to readjust things and postpone things that could be postponed to make room for it, but in the end there was no getting around the enormous drain on my energy.

The workshop itself was actually really wonderful, it was on Facilitation and Dialogue, and run by my adviser, a very cool person. It was his class that Tessa and I sat in on when we came to visit the school in 2018, and that was the main reason I felt really good and excited about actually enrolling (because the weird tour and everything else was so unimpressive lol). But I hadn't actually had a class with him until this, so I was excited about it. It was really lovely...he always makes time for everyone to free write while listening to beautiful music, and he uses storytelling to teach, and he arranged the structure of the day really well, trying to take into consideration that a workshop via zoom is a different kind of thing (he didn't actually have us be on zoom from 9-5 for instance, just from 9-2:30, which was really helpful).

But in between the two Saturdays, I ended up having to spend hours and hours prepping for the final assignment in my Media and Conflict class, which honestly I had been struggling with and dreading all semester. It was about monitoring and analyzing mass media, and everyone had picked topics at the beginning of the semester to monitor. I had, unfortunately, picked the primaries, because I wanted a topic I really cared about, and at the time I very much thought things would go differently. And because our professor wanted us to do this with partners, one of my class mates signed on as well.

Even when things with the primaries weren't total shit, though, I was having trouble engaging with the three news sources we were supposed to be monitoring - CNN, NBC/MSNBC, and Fox. Ugh. I honestly hate all of them with a passion, and find looking at them physically toxic. So I hadn't really been keeping up with them all semester, and my partner hadn't really either, what with all the disruption, and also because we hadn't really narrowed down our specific focus until the very end.

We decided to focus on the media's treatment of Bernie before and after he dropped out / before and after coronavirus. So I ended up going on each of the three media sights and searching Bernie Sanders and going through months of articles, copying and pasting the ones that seemed relevant.

God, it was exhausting, disheartening, depressing, anger-inducing...and I did this for hours and hours over several days...I hate mass media so much, wow. I mean, it was certainly interesting to see the extreme machinations of the corporate media glamour machine, but it was also really hard on my subtle bodies.

And then I had class and then I had another workshop and then my partner and I met to try to get somewhere with all of this and she had started putting together a power point but hadn't been able to narrow down which articles we should focus on so we ended up spending the whole time figuring that out, and drawing some preliminary conclusions. I was trying not to feel frustrated with her, because she's super super busy in her last semester of grad school and trying to help her sister keep her restaurant afloat, I honestly have no idea how she's doing all of that. But at this point I did kind of feel like I had done a lot more work on this project than she had. And we only had one more day before we had to present it.

Aaaaand....the next day, the day before our presentation, when we were going to try to finish analyzing all these articles and putting it all together and everything, I woke up so sick I could barely move. I could barely open my eyes or get out of bed. And I still tried to start doing the work. But after awhile I had to recognize that there was no way I could do all of that and probably no way I could even show up to class to present.

My partner and my professor were very understanding, at least in their texts/emails. At the time I didn't even feel conflicted about it at all, because it was so clear that I really had no choice in the matter. I took it very easy that day and the next day I slept through almost the whole time that I would have been in class.

I realized at some point that what was going on was this virus thing that I've been dealing with off and on for a year. It starts with a rash, and then I feel a little extra tired, and then it hits me like a freight train. And I think it almost always gets me right around that week before my period. And it definitely gets triggered by stress, so the stress of the end of the semester and the workshop and not sleeping enough and really, the stress of those fucking news articles...the grief and pain of what the fucking mass media did to Bernie's campaign, the lengths they went to to stop him and then to turn around and flat out deny that they were trying to stop him...the gaslighting, the baldfaced corruption hiding behind layers and layers of intricately recursive glamour...god, it was evil, and it was awful to go through that in depth tour of it. It made me so, so physically sick, and I'm still dealing with the ways that it effected me.

And I'm also dealing with my feelings about having to miss that last class, the last class of the semester, and feeling guilty about my partner having to present half-prepared by herself, and feeling like I have no closure, and still not being sure if we're going to have to redo the presentation and send in a recording of it...which I really, really don't want to do, because this fucking assignment made me sick to my soul. But another part of me really wanted to do it, wanted to fucking officially analyze how shitty and screwed up the media is in their treatment of Bernie. But I don't think I actually can do it. It hurts too much.

But this whole thing is also bringing up all this stuff about having to miss so many things in my life because of being sick, and all of the misunderstanding I've gotten about it, and I have all of this fear come up that my partner hates me now and thinks I really let her down...and then I feel angry because I did so much hard work on this assignment that it actually made me sick....and part of me feels like my contribution is meaningless now because I couldn't do the final part...but I don't think any of that is really true. My partners texts to me were really understanding and she thanked me for doing so much work on the articles. This whole situation just brings SO MUCH SHIT UP from so many different angles, so many different times in my life...

And now I have one final assignment from that class before I can be done with it (unless we have to redo out presentation, which I really hope not), and that's to write a one to two page paper just reflecting on the class and my experience and what I got out of it. He changed that from having to write out a more in depth analysis of our mass media project, which I am grateful for, because again - I don't think I can touch that subject anymore. But even this reflection paper was feeling really hard, because I had all of this stuff in the way, all of these intense feelings about how this final assignment went and how I got so sick at the very end of it, and couldn't even finish out the class with everyone. I wanted to be there at that final class, get to discuss and debrief the semester with everyone, get to say goodbye. Now it feels so strange for it to just have ended....no more waking up at eight AM and rolling out of bed and onto zoom....haha. But I'll miss it, as strange as that was.

Talking it out with Tessa really helped though, and writing it out here. It's been a really overwhelming couple of weeks. It's been a weird fucking semester. I started it out feeling so crappy, and I was having such a hard time for the first half of it, because I just felt so physically awful and I didn't feel like I could get my momentum going and I couldn't keep up with the mountains of reading and was struggling emotionally with feeling like I could do any of it. Then the pandemic hit and campus shut down and sent everybody reeling, but weirdly that actually really helped me, because suddenly I had permission to be struggling, there was so much understanding, because everybody was now struggling. That was actually really healing for me. And I no longer needed to actually get myself out of the house and drive myself to school and struggle to find parking and walk up a giant hill to get to class, I just had to get on zoom. And partially with the help of these things, and partially because of the natural cycling of things in my body and in my being, I started to feel way better than I had in quite a while.

And I spent most of the second half of the semester feeling really good, navigating lockdown really well, feeling really close to Tessa, feeling really hopeful and happy about school. Before these last couple weeks that really overloaded me, I had been feeling consistently better than I have probably since I was a child. And that's really amazing. I'm trying to remind myself of that, and remind myself that it will come back, even as these last few days have been really hard, since I got sick and am going up and down a lot as I heal. But even with that, I'm healing faster than ever from one of these virus episodes. And a lot of the physical pain and discomfort I've been having I think is really related to all of the deep emotions I'm processing...

I want to feel good. I want to dance. I want to be in my body. I want to play music, I want to sing, I want to create tools and spaces of healing for people. When I'm not feeling good I have so much stuff come up, from all of the years that all of those things felt so out of reach. But I know they're actually closer than ever. I know I'm getting ready to actually move into my power and my flow.

I miss you, Isabella. I loved your last post, by the way. I haven't been able to comment because things have been so crazy and I've been finding it hard to communicate. But I loved it, and I read it at a time when I really needed to hear about the things you were talking about <3 <3 <3 and the story that you shared about the belly and the head and the heart was sooooo nourishing and real and good and part of what I'm going through too.

I'm reminding myself that it's okay not to feel good. It's okay for things to feel hard. It's okay not to know how things are going to turn out. It's okay to slow down and rest. It's okay to just breathe and enjoy the moment. It's okay to feel weird and sad. And things are healing at a deep level within me. It's been a weird semester, but I have done a lot of amazing things with it, and there are more amazing things to come. It feels weird to feel so hopeful and positive in the middle of global crisis, but in some ways it's the global crisis itself that's making me feel so hopeful and positive. I've lived so long in a constant state of personal disruption, to have that disruption mirrored on a global scale gives me hope that things are cracking open, that things are getting ready to change in big ways, that there will actually be room for change and possibility for change in places where there wasn't before. For sure, nothing will be the same after this. And I'm glad.

Love you both so much.

<3 <3 <3

Alia

Bee-ing, simmering old coals, learning from lizards.

Things I want to say about being a busy bee, resting, letting things be. There's an infinite Google doodle game live today for Earth Day, and it's fun, but also kind of exhausting. You guide a bee to pollinate many, many flowers, and it's hard to keep up. After awhile, you're led to a mandala where you get an educational fact about bees, and {most importantly} you can rest.

I am so tired, even though I've been getting enough sleep. My body is weary from processing so many old stories. And though I know I am pollinating future flowers by gathering the data now, it feels disheartening because all week I have been struggling to feel able to do external things, to feel like I can make progress. It's also hard to make words come out, because I want to write about the process. I did write a whole post yesterday about working softer for the Rain Blooming blog. Currently feeling frustrated because it feels like I am externalizing pieces here and there, but they're not coming together yet into a whole.

Pulling wool feeling out of my ears with the gadget that sucks pressure out of headaches. Power tool buzzing outside. Am I in Seattle? /sarcasm

It is hard to feel like this because it's how I felt so many days living in the Northwest, struggling to be okay even though I couldn't think or do anything. Alia says to be with myself, to try to feel into inner tugs, and know that even working softly I may need to overcome a bit of inertia, but it's okay if I'm following the inner pulls towards what wants to happen.

There are things I want to say - about living through a pandemic and revisiting everything I have learned from chronic illness about making it through, day by day. My mao tells me that the world is getting ready to want the things we have to offer, that we're creating. And to trust that things are happening at the right pace, even when it doesn't feel like it.

But I want to cry with frustration, being inside this numb blank woolly feeling, while knowing with this sort of awareness external to my agency that there is so much that I want to do but it won't go. I'm pushing again. Let me try to talk to the numbness, feel into it. What are you? What do you need?

It tells me that it's trying to process the intensity of everything that has happened to me, that it needs me to be very patient and very slow, that it has things to teach me.

I cradle the hurting place in me that screams at me to go faster. I tell it that I know it hurts, I know this feeling state doesn't make a lot of sense, that the incongruence of thought and ability right now is super painful. I tell it that it's doing so well, and that I'm proud of how it breathes and tries to be okay with what is, to undo the conditioning that tests its limits.

Under the surface, I can feel grief. And I gently disarm the inner critic who has learned to resist grief, to apply labels of "too much" and "this again?". I invite the grief to arise as much as it needs to. It's tricky, trying to feel into this grief - it's like a shy animal that retreats. Like the lizard we found in our apartment this morning. It ran outside and hid in the shadows of the balcony. When we tried to grab it, to take it back down to ground level, it retreated into a rain-hole and I saw it from the other side of the balcony wall, poking its head out of the rain gutter, its little tongue darting out. That's how my grief feels. Maybe this lizard is coming to teach me, today. Maybe it's teaching me about lying fallow, about befriending the place in me that feels skittish, hermit-like. Actually, the tarot card I drew today was the Hermit. Well then.

Trying not to judge my writing, the stream of consciousness. Sometimes I feel so non-cosmic in what and how I process my day to day, compared with the two of you - especially you, Isabella. I have been struggling to feel like I can meet you in the esoteric web you're aware of weaving with maos, and I've been feeling guilty about not replying yet to your post.

But I think I need to find a way to honor the fact that I have unwittingly been in retreat this past week, inside the dome of symptom flares and intensive trauma healing. These threads go back so far, they pull at ways in which my being shut down when I was 7, 9, 12, I don't know. All I know is that I am trying to consciously be with, for the first time in many years, these subtle gradients of pain and depression and fog living.

(I guess this is my version of working through the dark place right now, the way it's manifested concretely in this life for me.)

Puttering around. Writing and planning bits here and there. Making little foods. Just finished eating some stir-fried kale and celery with Momspice and a few smoked oysters over rice. Already feeling hollow again inside. I've been so hungry all the time, and it's not really just for food. There's so much I'm craving, have been craving for so long. I'm missing my home, my roots, having a conversation with Jess about trying to trace back our indigeneity. Breathing with all this complexity. Sitting in the 80 degree heat that is San Diego heading towards summer. A deeply quiet, hot day, simmering things inside like a wood stove or maybe a dragon.

<3 Tessa

Altcorp Starts Now

How do we tie together everything we’re doing? Core Philosophy and Working Softer and Rituals of Remembrance (just made that name up, I think it’s awesome :D). Restorying the Root is also part of this, so let’s think about that too. And anti-capitalist marketing strategies, however we end up weaving those in.

What connects all these?

The first thing that comes to my mind is: they are all reaching for paradigm shifts, for Another Way. That’s a concept I’ve long felt a connection to, because my name in latin means Another, and Alia Via means Another Way.

I’m feeling like this might be the direction we want to go, or at least an umbrella concept we can use to tie everything together. Another World Is Possible, that kind of thing...and how can we each contribute to building that new world, in our own individual and collective ways? Through knowing our Core Philosophies, our core services that we can offer as individuals, and bringing those gifts together in community Rituals of Remembrance (remembering who we are, what our gifts are, why they matter), while making sure to dismantle practices of systemic oppression through Working Softer, Restorying the Root, and Reaching for Connection as a marketing strategy. Ummmm yes!

And SCT ties into this through the Rituals of Remembrance, we bring SCT principles to life through ritual, and use rituals that are themselves SCT experiences to co-create SCT stories we can put out into the world...and we weave trauma literacy and trauma healing into everything we do.

What do you two think about all that? I’m really seeing that all of our work is connected, and Tessa I think that one of the things we’re running into in not feeling clear about our Core Philosophy work is that it’s actually much bigger than just that, it’s connected to this WHOLE THING, which we’ve known but I think haven’t fully embraced in a concrete, running-our-business sort of way.

And Isabella, our work with you, and Tessa and your work with Restorying the Root, is absolutely an essential part of this. You are our business partner too! In your own way, in a way that feels good and resonant. We all need each other to do this.

And Tessa, I’m realizing as I write this that our whole business up until this point has been us dipping our toes into externalization, and trying to find ways to convince ourselves that we can actually put our real work out into the world. And now I think it’s time. It’s time to recognize that what we’re creating here, right now, with THIS business that we’re running, is….Altcorp. It’s the really, truly the beginning of Altcorp, which means that in order to actually do it, we need to recognize that and lean into it fully. It’s not just Core Philosophy. It’s not just anti-capitalist marketing. It’s not just Working Softer and Restorying the Root. All of these things are ONE THING: and that thing is our business. We need to look up from the details and see the whole picture.

I know it feels a little overwhelming to think of it that way, which is why we’ve needed to warm up to it sort of piece-meal and one thing at a time. But I think we’re not only ready, the world is becoming ready. The world needs ALL of us, everything that we have to give, and they need us to start putting it together into a coherent externalized vision right now. And we can do it. We have that capacity. We have everything we need. And it will actually really HELP us to see this all as a whole, and to brand it under the umbrella of Finding Another Way.

And we can start laying our our vision, all the different parts of it and what they entail, and we can use THAT to start scheduling our time and finding ways to use it wisely. Because we’ll be excited about that. We’ll know why it’s important. We’ll know that everything we’re doing is DIRECTLY connected to our larger vision for changing the world. The time is now.

And we will lay the foundations of Altcorp, and we will start by producing bite-sized, experiential pieces of our vision that can make us money now and be the foundation of our business. OUR REAL BUSINESS, the one we have always been working up to. That’s what it’s always been. That's what it is now.

Alright yes! Let’s get ready to rumble!!!

And Isabella, I think we need your input as we sketch out this Altcorp roadmap and look at how all these different pieces come together. And I would LOVE to have all three of us brainstorm and explore and talk about how we could start weaving in regularly scheduled time to work on externalizing these things that most matter to us.

This blog is actually an important piece of it, I think. We need to be tuned into to each other’s needs and feelings and wants and day-to-day lives. Then we can start seeing how we can build supportive structures around manifesting our dreams.

And trauma work is a HUGE part of it - all three of us need to understand and communicate with each other about our specific trauma patterns around work, productivity, doing, money, etc...and we need to learn to recognize the ways that our trauma patterns trigger each other and find ways to gently work with them. Working Softer is so much about all that, so I would offer that maybe, in a regularly scheduled situation, we should start from a Work Softer place, exploring and working on that, and using that as our foundation for figuring out how to do everything else. And Restorying the Root, too - I’m realizing that these two things are actually much more foundational for our entire vision than how we’ve been treating them. The Root is the literal foundation! Of course we have to start there!

Mmmmmmm yessss this is gonna be so good

Also, I think that is the three of us were all on board with some kind of regular working together schedule, founded on a deep place of honoring our needs and nourishing us, it could feel really joyful and pleasurable to connect and work in this way, and that would be us putting into practice Work Softer principles and reaping the awesome benefits - which would give us more and more to work with in helping other people.

This is it, y’all! Let’s rise to the occasion, root into the soil of our beings, and GET TO WORK in the nicest most wonderful sustainable nourishing way we can possibly imagine <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Love from maos and Alia! Lolll

Productivity demons & running away from death...

I posted this on FB just now, but wanted to expand on it here... a dear newish friend & brilliant astrologer wrote this post reflecting on the pandemic through an astrological lens, which is super worth reading. But I was drawn to this part in particular:

“My fear is that so far, we have been taking the old normal and streaming it on Zoom— our work, our yoga class, our dance parties. Aquarius is such a tech-head in part because it has trouble staying present for uncomfortable feelings. That could also be why we’re on the internet so much. What if, instead, we felt our discomfort and loss of control? Felt our fear of loved ones dying? Felt the pain of feeling unworthy when we’re not productive? Learning to rest is one of the most important skills we need to break away from capitalism.”

I have indeed been trying to sit with the fear in me of being unworthy when I am unproductive, which feels like such an old friend/enemy at this point. It’s been eight years since my being was snapped out of its workaholic patterns by burnout / illness / spiritual crisis, more violently than most. And I’ve spent much of that time fighting against myself, learning to rest, resisting rest, resisting the resistance, coming into stillness, listening to the terror of stillness in me that comes from trauma... indeed it’s near-impossible to summarize the murky tender inner weavings of that period of darkness. I guess I'll probably write more about this, it feels like it wants to be written about, but I am also still nursing the rawness of it, especially right now.

Because this time of quarantine and indeed weeks leading up to quarantine has been one of revisiting these things, of tending nuances that I’m finally deep and slow enough to notice and thrash with anew. And in many ways, it's sucked. It feels like incredulity: have I not learned these lessons enough? How am I STILL fighting this part of myself? But it's that higher turn of the spiral - I must admit I am seeing it more clearly than before, and that I am becoming more deft at being in the midst of that horrible discomfort.

Years ago, when I was temporarily staying in the cottage, I sat on the dusty blue couch in late afternoon Seattle half-light, feeling the intense need to "do things" running crazily in my solar plexus, and at long last I let myself collapse. I literally collapsed onto the arm of the couch, my body draped like a limp rag. I gave into my exhaustion, the exhaustion of constantly running inwardly and fighting myself and the fog and the fatigue and I thought of it as letting myself die. I really did. Because to stop - truly stop, not only outwardly but inwardly - felt like death. It felt like death would catch up with me if I stopped, and with effort, I let it. I let the feeling of dying run right over me. And I felt the Christ in that moment. I felt him with me. I still remember that.

I feel a lot of tenderness, and grief, about these things - they feel like whirlpools, or puddles, collective gatherings of energy like water. What I said in my public post is that I want to believe that I have much to share and teach about the healing of productivity demons, about the disastrous measures of worth and accomplishment we are taught to enact within the vastness of our beingnesses. And there is a fear in me that I can't do it, that I won't be able to, because I am *still* riding these waves and there are still days like today when I feel and struggle with the frantic beating of wings inside myself, the strangling that feels like death catching up and threatening to incinerate my very being.

But I want to believe.

And I know this fear is part of it. That some of it is still this desire to run from death by doing, by becoming a great teacher, by having a Work Softer business, by proving to this haunted part that I am still good enough.

It's about evolution, not perfection. About the process, about the learning within the struggle, the teaching in the healing.

And hope. Hope that this healing is possible for me. That I can come out the other side. And also recognizing that it's not up to just me to make these shifts, they are embedded in our collective systems and so holding hope for that shift within our collective systems, for the patterns that sustain and mold our lives. I want to believe that this is a time when that healing becomes more possible. But we have to have the courage to listen. To not run, or if we run, to notice that running, and ask why, gently, tenderly, inexorably...

It occurs to me, as I type the post title, that it's what aomaoms are experts at - maneuvering and running away from death. Orchestrating whole marathons away from death. It's what The Farthest Shore is about, and FMA, and so many stories. So it occurs to me that as I find and work with the trauma-terrors in me, that I am also touching on some of the root tendrils that evil tugs on. Good times. No wonder it feels like shit sometimes. *Feels slightly more compassionate towards myself*, haha.

<3 Tessa