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Hello again. It’s been a while…

I hope this letter finds you well. When I stopped writing my newsletter two years ago it wasn’t a choice precisely, it was mostly an exhaustion.

The truth is that writing a newsletter is not an insignificant amount of work. The truth is also that I never really put a lot of attention on how to make this habit of writing to you sustainable, and so my energy for the task slowly dried up. 

And then of course the pandemic hit and life changed and for the past couple of years it has felt like there has only been distraction after distraction, crisis after crisis, and a lot of things fell through the cracks.

But it’s a new year and even though I don’t believe in resolutions, I do believe in reflection and recalibration. I believe in leaning into the things that whisper to us in the quiet moments when no one else is there to hear them, and lately this newsletter has been calling to me.

Exactly what it has been whispering is not entirely clear. I do not know why I feel called back to the page to write to you again now after so many years of silence. When I stopped writing I thought perhaps that I would never write again, and yet here I am. 

What I do know is that this newsletter has in many ways always been a place that I have returned to in order to know my own heart, and space for reflection is something that has been missing in my life for a while now.

So here I am again, writing to know my own heart and hoping that maybe somehow these words will help you to know your heart, too.

The truth is that the last few years have been hard. I am certain this is true for all of us, each in our own unique ways. For me the past two years have been a time of paradox: life has been great and terrible in equal measure.

I have loved working from home, skipping my commute, and have developed new exercise habits that have made me stronger in both body and mind. I learned that when I am not forced into an office environment every day, my body remembers how to sleep. In many ways I feel better than I have in years.

At the same time, my anxiety hasn’t disappeared – it’s just been transmuted. I sleep better at night but during my waking hours I feel worse. My meditation practice has fallen by the wayside since the pandemic started and it shows. Now instead of lurching awake before my alarm clock every morning, I’m restlessly picking up my phone throughout the day and opening six different tabs to check for updates on six different websites. 

In my experience this is how anxiety goes. You gently unwind its grasping fingers from one bad habit and it reaches out and grabs onto something else to replace it. But having danced this dance with anxiety for many years now, I can tell you that the strength of its grip is weakening.

Every time I unwind another anxious pattern it gets a little easier. I get a little better at learning how to let go and move forward. My anxiety settles down a little bit more.

The way I see it, the goal isn’t eradication. I’m not sure that that would even be possible. I think of it more like a meditation – the goal isn’t to cease the anxious habits or thoughts, it’s just to notice them sooner and sooner and to intercede with them more and more skillfully.

My recalibration for 2022 is to do just that. To intercede with these new patterns and hopefully, as a result of that, to have more time to spend on writing and meditation and the things that will actually make me feel better – instead of spending hours anxiously refreshing the latest headlines.

How about you? How are you doing? 

Do you also have pandemic patterns that you are ready to let go of?

I would love to hear from you, so please feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Much love,
Jessica

Notes on caring for yourself in a lockdown

Today in Boston everything feels different. The city is slowly drawing to a close. Schools are closing. Colleges are sending (or have already sent) students home for the rest of the semester as campuses empty out. The grocery stores are bare of eggs and milk and anything canned or frozen. 

Today in Boston everything feels normal. No one I know is sick. Our case totals of COVID-19 are growing, but so far the numbers remain small. Access to testing is still very limited so there may be many more cases that we do not know about, but for now the official totals are reassuring. The state of Massachusetts has not yet recorded its first death from COVID-19, which is also reassuring.

Today I am settling in for the long haul. I have been instructed to work from home as much as possible in the coming weeks and have no plans to return to the office for the foreseeable future. Very happily my job can be performed remotely and I have adequate paid sick leave and good health insurance so I am already so much luckier than so many here in Boston and around the world.

Today in Boston everything is okay, and yet I know that very soon it probably won’t be. An epidemic is a slow moving crisis that seems okay a while and then suddenly isn’t. Here in Boston we’re still waiting for that tipping point to arrive and until it does we won’t have a good idea how bad things are going to get. Right now the disease is spreading slowly and silently and in the absence of mass testing there’s really no way to know how far it has spread until people are gravely ill.

Today I’m finding myself restless. Perhaps today you are feeling restless, too. Perhaps your restlessness is an attempt to quell a thinly veiled sense of worry or panic. Perhaps mine is, too.

All of my routines have been upended. I won’t be going to ballet classes again for the foreseeable future. I won’t be going to restaurants or to the movies. I have had to choose which doctor’s appointments to keep and which to jettison as I try to balance the importance of keeping myself healthy in other ways with the risk of contracting COVID-19 and possibly spreading it to others.

Social distancing doesn’t require total isolation but it does mean far fewer contacts with people. I’m trimming my social circle back to just a couple of the most important people. Everyone else will be transitioned to digital-only interactions. Many of my loved ones are already remote, so we will be talking on the phone more often and caring for each other from a distance. 

Today I am grateful to live with a roommate who is also one of my dearest friends, rather than a quasi-stranger from Craigslist who I only vaguely tolerate. Living with a good friend feels like a blessing always, but especially in light of the weeks of close quarters that likely lie ahead of us.

I’m also grateful that modern technology makes it possible to connect with the people who matter to me remotely, so that we do not have to gather in person to feel a part of a community in quite the same way as was true before cell phones and the internet made it so much easier to be together from afar.

In just a few short days COVID-19 has changed life from normal to different. Today we are struggling to patch together new routines. We are trying to learn how to stay emotionally and physically healthy when we are trapped indoors in ways that we are not accustomed to. 

I too am struggling with these things and so I don’t pretend to have answers for you. The only thing I know is that it is okay to find this transition disorienting and to struggle to find a new equilibrium. It’s okay to feel restless and anxious and scared for our loved ones who are most at risk and sad for the trips that were cancelled and the activities that we have had to give up.

My plans for the coming weeks involve:

  • Enjoying as many remote interactions with people as I can.
  • Doubling down on my at home yoga practice, as well as adding other forms of at-home fitness to my daily routine. It’s really important for my wellbeing that I don’t just sit on the couch all day.
  • Deep cleaning the apartment, doing some mending, and otherwise getting to all the nagging chores that I always mean to do but never have time for.
  • Writing more — especially working more on my memoir, which I’ve been working my way through re-reading in preparation for beginning work on the second draft.
  • Reading more — I have a huge backlog of books on my kindle that are waiting for me so I’m excited to put a dent in my list.

If you’re looking for books to read while you’re in lockdown, here are some books I’ve read and loved in the past year: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, The Bear & The Nightingale by Katherine Arden, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi.

Plus a few of the books I’m looking forward to reading while I’m stuck at home: The Yellow House by Sarah Broom, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

There are also some things I will be doing less of:

  • I’m limiting how much time I spend reading the news. I want to read enough to stay informed, but not enough to induce panic. I will also be limiting myself to just a few reputable sources: one source for local news and one or two national papers.
  • I’m limiting social media (especially Facebook). I won’t be pulling off of social media altogether because some of it is good for me. I get updates from loved ones in my extended network on social media and my women’s memoir writing circle has a group there which is lovely and nourishing. But also: I will be temporarily muting anyone who shares too many articles about coronavirus or otherwise fills my news feed with fear. 

Most of all, I’ll be trying to shape my life in a way that allows me to remain healthy and sane and well-rested so that I can do my part to keep everyone safe by staying home and continuing to do good work and checking in on my loved ones.

I share this list not because I think that these ideas will be exactly right for anyone else, but because we should all be making plans for a lockdown now. And while most of us have thought to stock up on toilet paper, food, disinfecting wipes, cold medicine, and any prescription medications, we have perhaps not thought about how we will need to reshape our routines in order to keep ourselves sane and healthy through the worst of the outbreak. 

But this is important work, too — much more important than refreshing the news one more time to see what the latest infection counts are.

In addition to taking care of myself, I am also going to be looking for ways to donate financial resources to those who will be most affected by the coronavirus. As businesses close there are going to be many in Massachusetts and around the world who won’t be able to make rent payments or afford groceries. The economic fallout of the shutdown is going to be devastating for so many. As someone who is lucky enough to have financial resources and to be earning a paycheck during the outbreak, I’m looking for ways to give back some of my surplus. If you know of or hear about organizations doing much needed relief work during the outbreak, please hit reply and send suggestions my way!

Wherever you are reading this, I hope that you are well and that you are safe and that you have food and shelter and health insurance and paid sick leave and all of the things that human beings deserve. And if you do not have those things and are frightened or scared then my heart goes out to you. If there’s any way that I can help, please hit reply and let me know. We all need each other more than ever right now — even as we remain socially distant and physically far apart.

Much love,
Jessica

You’re allowed to be a work in progress

As I sit here on the first day of 2020, amongst the hubbub of an internet that seems to be overflowing with people announcing their goals for the coming year, I find myself wanting to offer a counter-argument. 

Maybe January 1st is not the time to tear down and disavow everything you do not like about yourself. Maybe January 1st is not the time to cast those rejected pieces aside like so much garbage in the hopes that the dump truck will come to haul them away for good.

Maybe that approach was never going to work out the way you wanted it to. Maybe the cast off pieces of yourself were always going to come crawling back just about the time your resolutions started to slip and old habits began to creep back again.

Maybe it’s okay to be a work in progress. 

Maybe you are allowed to be just as messy and imperfect today as you were yesterday. Maybe the only thing that’s changed is that today you are just a little bit braver, just a little bit more prepared to admit to your flaws and to love yourself anyways.

Maybe the only intention you need for the new year is to become every day just a bit more of yourself. Just a little bit braver, just a little bit wiser, just a little bit more willing to speak the words you are afraid to say, and to disagree with the people whose opinions of you matter the most.

Maybe these are the only things you have ever really needed. And maybe casting off the parts of yourself that you could not be proud of only ever served to make you feel more dreadful about yourself, maybe it never helped to dislike those parts of you at all.

In 2019 I did a lot of things I’m proud of:

  • I finished the first draft of my memoir-in-progress. Finally. After literal years of failing.
  • I read 38 books after several years of really not reading much of substance or quality.
  • I walked 96 miles from start to finish of the West Highland Way in Scotland with a great friend.
  • My sister got married and I managed to pull off being her maid of honor despite being far outside of my comfort zone.
  • I nourished connections with old friends and new ones.
  • I navigated difficult conversations and found that sometimes relationships come out stronger on the other side.

The thing about 2019 was that I didn’t set out to do any of these things. Indeed, in 2019, as far as I remember I abdicated goals and intentions entirely because they seemed way of torturing myself for not yet being the person I knew that I could be (and therefore thought I should be), rather than being a healthy and productive way of motivating myself to make beneficial changes.

Because the first thing I know is that when it comes to making changes is this: it’s okay to not be ready yet. 

There’s a particularly uncomfortable place that we linger in — a liminal space between the moment when we understand that more is possible for us, and some future moment when we are finally brave enough to step through the doorway and to try on that new way of being out in the world where other people might see and hear and judge us.

There is a sacred pause in the process of becoming.

It is a pause that cannot be skipped or avoided. It must be lived fully because only by leaning into the discomfort of becoming will we ever find our way to the other side.

But also: how you navigate this liminal space matters more than anything else. 

Learning to love yourself in the space between knowing who you could be and actually having become that person, will always work better than trying to excise the parts of you that you do not like.

In the end there’s nothing special about the beginning of a new year (or a new decade). 

Which is why in 2020 I’m not planning to make any big changes. Instead, I’m planning to keep leaning into courage as much as I am able to — and to love myself as much as I can in the moments when my courage fails me and I fall short of being as brave as I hoped to be. 

There are of course, more tangible things I would like to do as well: to revise my memoir, to perhaps begin blogging again, to continue to focus on the health of the relationships in my life that matter most to me, and to make sure that life is as rich and fulfilling as possible.

But in the end what I will accomplish in 2020 is less important to me than the choices I will make. Will I choose to act in accordance with my deepest values? Will I be brave enough to use my voice? Will I allow myself to be truly seen by the people who matter to me the most?

What about you — what choices will you make in 2020?

Reclaiming my relationship with myself

It has been many months since I have written. There are so many reasons for my long silence that it seems foolish to try and catalog them all. Some of them are health-related: my health reached a new low late last summer which was good in some ways and bad in others. On the good side, I got some useful diagnosis and treatments. On the downside, it has been nearly a year and I’m still not really well.

There are a lot of things about being ill that aren’t particularly glamorous. These days my list of non-negotiable self-care is long and my well-being deteriorates easily if I let things slip. But in general I’m actually doing okay. If the previous paragraphs made things seem a little bit dire, the truth is that it doesn’t really feel that way right now.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about today: no matter how grim the circumstances are, there are some fundamentals which will always make being in those circumstances easier to bear — possibly the most important of which is our relationships to ourselves.

This is why I’ve also been radically reinventing my relationship with myself.

Because I truly believe our relationships with ourselves are fundamental to our happiness and well-being — and most of my life I’ve been in a really bad one.

I have been unkind.
I have been judgmental.
I have shamed and berated and bullied myself.

I have done all these things in the name of motivating myself to be better: to do more, to be braver, to earn other people’s approval.

But the truth is that none of these things have happened (except maybe the last one). If I have done more it has only been out of terror. My self-bullying has only ever made me more scared and never once made me braver. And whatever approval I might have earned from others has always been at the cost of my approval of myself.

And I know these things now, but that knowledge has been hard-won. Rewriting the rules of how I relate to myself has been the scariest and the best thing that I have ever done.

It’s a problem I’ve been working on for a while and I’ve written about it before (see here and here and here).

But I really don’t think it’s overstating things to claim that the quality of your relationship to yourself is the one thing that really matters. All the problems we worry about, all of the times we question our worthiness — it really comes down to this: if we learn to love ourselves enough, none of those things matter.

We learn that we can have problems and make mistakes and still be worthy of love and belonging — and it is this knowledge that makes all of it okay.

Self-compassion is strong enough to carry us through even our worst difficulties.

Self-forgiveness enables us to face our wrongs, make amends where we can, and live with the parts that can never be made right.

And these two things together allow us to find our courage in the face of our fear. 

Because to dare is to take a risk and to risk is to be willing to fail. And in order to survive our failures and keep on trying we need compassion for our fear, forgiveness for our errors, and to love ourselves for being brave enough to have tried in the first place.

But what I’ve been learning more recently as my health has been improving and creating more energy for me to work with in my life — self-compassion, forgiveness, and love are essential, but there’s one last piece that I’d been missing: self-trust.

This is what I think it boils down to: Do you trust yourself to keep the commitments you make when no one else is watching?

I am terrible at this. I will kill myself trying to keep the commitments I make to other people — but the promises I make to myself I break thoughtlessly, as easily as breathing.

But I have underestimated the cost of breaking the promises I make to myself.

I underestimated the cost of not sitting down to write on all the days I wanted to, but didn’t.

I underestimated the cost of choosing what was easy over what was important.

I underestimated the cost of using my health as an excuse to avoid the things that mattered — when the truth was that I avoided those things because they scared me.

That cost was my trust in myself.

My trust that I would make what mattered to me a priority, that I wouldn’t let other people’s needs or preferences walk all over mine, that I would show up for the activities and events that really mattered to me even if doing that was terrifying. My trust that I would be on my side even when no one else was.

So I’ve entered a new phase of my self-relationship rehabilitation program.

Over the past few years I’ve become really good at what I now have come to see as “phase one” of rehabilitating my relationship with myself: I have become really good at noticing what is true for me, offering myself compassion in the face of difficulty, and forgiving myself my humanity, my mistakes, and my imperfections.

I believe that these skills are the essential foundation without which trust can never be built.

And now in phase two I’m building that trust — I’m learning to keep my promises to myself.

To not shelve the projects that I care the most about just because they also scare me.

To not put off the activities that really matter unless the reasons are truly beyond my control.

To show up for my dreams and my passions, even if that means I show up imperfectly.

Today I showed up for myself by showing up for my writing. By taking myself out of my apartment and sitting down at the library to write this blog post (because I knew if I stayed home, I wouldn’t).

I made the commitment and I kept it even though yesterday that meant going to the library in the rain, and today it meant going in boiling heat.

I kept the promise even though my to-do list for this weekend is already a mile long and the floors in our apartment haven’t been cleaned in roughly a thousand years and I feel bad about that.

But I showed up anyways. Because right now my writing is the next-most-important thing after the non-negotiable self-care that keeps my life running. Because keeping my commitment to my writing is keeping my commitment to myself, and that matters to me more than anything.

It matters because how I feel about myself improves every time I keep a commitment, and deteriorates every time I had the opportunity to keep a commitment and didn’t.

And I really do believe that how we feel about ourselves is everything.

I shan’t promise that this commitment to my writing means that I will be showing up on the blog here more often — my real priority right now is working on my memoir which I have finally returned to after literal years of neglect (and which I am determined to finally finish). But my hope is to be here more often, for whatever that might be worth.

I hope that all is well with each of you.

Much love,
Jessica

P.S. For a deeper dive on what trust really is, and how to cultivate it (with others and yourself), I highly recommend Brene Brown’s SuperSoul Sessions talk, The Anatomy of Trust.

In search of quiet

It’s a snow day here in Boston, which seems like the perfect time to write to you about quiet because a snow day always brings the most delicious hush to the city. People stay huddled up inside their homes and the silence is interrupted only by the howling of the winds and the thunderous scraping of the plows as they drive by…

The general bustle and lack of quiet is hands down my least favorite thing about living in the city. Those of you who are highly sensitive like me will probably understand my dismay at how difficult it is to shut out the world around you in the city (no amount of headphones or ear plugs is really sufficient in my experience).

But despite these challenges, my life seems likely to be tied to the city for a number of years still, and so I’ve been thinking about ways in which I can consciously create more quiet for myself in the city.

And if you don’t live in a city, or are not highly sensitive and are starting to wonder if this post is for you — here’s the thing. I believe that most of the time our circumstances are not entirely ideal.

Life doesn’t provide us with exactly all of the things we need in order to thrive.

I think it’s easy to look around at our lives and think, “If I just had an on-demand supply of peace and quiet, then life would be perfect…” (or whatever it is that you’re longing for).

But life is a complex optimization problem. Yes, I could move somewhere quieter — but then I might need to own a car and I really, really enjoy not needing to drive or find parking in Boston. Yes, I could move out of the city altogether — but then I might have to change my job and I like my job quite a bit these days and I don’t really want to give that up either.

So life is a series of compromises, which means that the best way forward lies in learning to make the best of a less-than-ideal situation — and learning to do this effectively means learning to harness your ability to look for creative solutions to the situations that trouble you.

For example, one of the paradoxical ways in which I am bringing more quiet into my life is by listening to more music.

On its surface this seems like a pure contradiction — but since I’m stuck hearing noise either way, one of the things I can do is I can try to take control of what noises I’m hearing. Using noise that has a neutral or positive effect on my mood to cover over less-pleasant noises (like the cars driving by outside or a coworker’s loud conversation), is actually really helpful.

And because my emotions are less jangly and aggravated when I’m not being disturbed by other people, I feel more quiet and grounded inside myself. By adding more of a specific kind of noise to my life I can actually increase the number of hours I experience a kind of quiet.

Trying to live the very best version of your life means looking for ways in which you can better all the parts that aren’t working for you until you’re doing everything in your power to maximize your happiness.

The truth that took me years to learn is that we have a shocking amount of control over how we experience our circumstances. By making small changes that move the needle just a little bit in the right direction we can dramatically improve our day-to-day experience.

I know this for sure because I used to be pretty unhappy with my circumstances, even just a few years ago. I really disliked living in the city and yearned for the small-town lifestyle I grew up with. I was dissatisfied with my job and I spent a long time seriously considering changing careers.

And then something magical happened.

I graduated from my life coach training program and I changed exactly nothing about my life (literally not a single detail), but I radically changed my beliefs and how I show up in the world.

I reclaimed a lot of my agency and discovered that I liked my circumstances quite a lot once I’d removed all the layers of suffering I’d layered in on top of the reality of how things were.

So you may not always be able to control your circumstances (I cannot magically call in a snow storm to bring me some peace and quiet whenever I need it…), but how you feel about the circumstances you find yourself in is surprisingly malleable.

Sometimes all it takes is a few small shifts in how you approach your life in order to make a really big difference in how you feel.

Because the truth as I know it, is that I am happiest when I am able to exercise my agency, my creativity, and my power to satisfy my needs and create the life I yearn for right here, right now.

My wish is that you might come to learn and wield this power, too.

So my question for you today is what do you need? What are you longing for? And how might you be able to create even the tiniest scrap of that thing in your life right here, right now? 

Much love,
Jessica

P.S. If there’s something you’re longing to create in your life but you’re struggling to actually do it, I’d like to invite you to consider the option of private coaching with me. While the concepts that lead us to freedom are in some sense universal, the barriers are often very individual and working privately with a coach can be the most effective way to overcome your unique barriers and see real results. If this interests you, click here to schedule a free conversation with me and learn more about what I offer my private clients.