There was a particular delight that I can only describe as a full body tingle, as if every cell in my body had just been embraced by a tiny cloud that lifted me up and made me a little lighter.

I regret that I only discovered this tiny joy in some of my final years living in that magical wonderland because all grass was the same: a little itchy and green.

Then one day, I stepped on that grass. Intermingled with moss, like a soft sponge hugging my foot. And suddenly, something I had walked across thousands of times became something entirely new.

It opened my mind to consider how many other ordinary pleasures I had overlooked simply because I thought I already knew them.

How often do we stop paying attention to the familiar? We see the same trees, walk the same streets, touch the same things, until somehow, we stop really experiencing them.

Our brains are remarkably efficient at filtering out what they consider familiar. It’s called habituation, and it helps us conserve attention for things that are new or potentially important.

While this makes sense for survival, it comes with the cost of experiencing the richness of being alive.

This is what Outgrowing the Matrix is all about: rediscovering all the hidden wonder already available to us, just waiting to be discovered.

Magnifying glasses out, y’all!

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Yeah, me too.

If you’ve ever wondered why life seems to accelerate after a ‘certain age’ its twofold: one, we stop having new experiences and two, we stop paying attention.

While you cannot always do new things, you can do the same things in new ways by tuning your attention to the sensations of the experience while you’re in it.

When you do this, you start living less from the well-worn and over-rehearsed story about yourself and more from, well, just yourself, as you are.

If that sounds like something you’re into, welcome to the jungle-edges of Outgrowing the Matrix. This is day 9 of our journey back into the wild, unscripted territory of real life.

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Yet somehow, we feel determined to spend most of our lives in alternative realities chasing the future with a relentless determinism that makes us forget where we are, or as is more common these days, simple escapism.

But what if life got so good that you just forgot all the extras? And I don’t mean so good in the sense that it’s all good in a material sense, but in an emotional one, even for a time being.

Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening for me from this experience with ACTUALLY DOING (not just reading, but participating in) this Outgrowing the Matrix play space.

Monday night I ALMSOT forgot cellphones existed and wouldn’t it be a good idea to capture some of the chaotic magic in my living room as I opted for cereal for dinner while dancing with my 17.5 year old doggie as my husband mixing house music and the other two were trying milk for the first time. I know, quite a scene. As I threw my head back and let out a loud and unconsciously huge belly laugh for no reason, I decided it felt just like peak adulting. As I would define it for me.

Which is literally the whole point of these exercises. The truth is I don’t have clear path where we are going next or any idea ‘what we’re getting out of it’, and truthfully, that makes me so bloody happy.

You might decided to subscribe to access this work (please do, it’d be cool to have you), and you might think it’s dumb, basic, or mildly interesting but ‘not your cup of tea’ — or it might change the way you participate in your own life to the extent that YOU forget to check the next few days because you discovered your own version of peak adulting and were enjoying tf out of that.

Either way, here’s another day for us and I only hope that the deeper we all go with this, the more we start to rub up against the edges of more imperfect realities.

Onward…inward…upward…and the like. Let’s play.

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Since then, I have been considering how in different ways, modern life conditions us to pursue externally defined versions of success, belonging, and personal worth while experimenting with various ways that I might come to redefine them for myself.

This is that exploratory play-space, where I share exactly what I am mulling over, pushing back on, and learning in process. I invite you in—all it takes is an open-mind to try to see what else is there.

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Because that’s the entire bloody point. To get so embedded back into real life that the tethering to the Matrix world with its deadlines, expectations, and performances becomes so weak that eventually it becomes unnecessary.

If this is your first time in this space, start here.

Guys, I think we are getting somewhere…How are you feeling with it? In your own time, in your own way. Let’s carry on, shall we?

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“I have been performing a version of myself nearly my whole life, and my body has felt it the whole time. Many of you may also know this feeling.
The truth is I have felt squished, compressed, and restrained by the increasingly uncomfortable mold to which I can no longer conform. I have tried so hard to contain what simply is not meant to be contained. So I’m setting it free.”

These are the opening lines from my first semi-‘popular’ post, by the same title, What The Body Knows, which you can read in full right here.

This space is for exploring how the fuck we fall out of performance and step back into real, embodied life. It also happens to be day 5 of the same mission on a quest to retire the Matrix by outgrowing it. All aboard.

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This is day 4 of my personal experiment on ‘outgrowing the Matrix’. I have no plan, no timeline, and certainly no deadline because unlike more traditional undertakings, the objective of this one is to simply get so deep back into real life — not the performance of one, but the embodied experiential one —that I forget I’m playing this game and move on with my life.

This play space is my self-exploratory process in offering for paid subscribers. Thanks for being on the ride with me. Giddy up n’ such.

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This is Captain Curious reporting from day two of our journey back into embodiment as we softly strip away dependency on the Matrix. If this is your first time on this block, start here.

For the rest of us, journey onward…

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This will be a short and regular offering to bring into your real world, the one of real lived and felt experience.

“Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.” Now let’s play…

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The premise that we are living in a massive, computer-generated virtual reality is not new and certainly now, it feels more pressingly possible that we are indeed, mere pawns in the code of an increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. And while amusing, it does not feel right in my bones.

We are in a Matrix, of that, I am sure—but it does not feel like the dystopian futuristic hellscape where machines pacify and control humanity while harvesting human bodies for bioelectric energy as the movie depicts.

Yet, it also does not feel that something is not harvesting our energy through pacification and control, all the same.

What is actually true matters less than what I am going to do about it. And what I am going to do about it is transcend the Matrix by progressive disidentification, deconditioning, and disenchantment until I dissolve my dependency on it.

In short, I do not plan on ‘escaping’ the Matrix, I plan on outgrowing it. And of course, I am going to share every step along the way.

The Matrix movie raises mind-twisting questions about free-will and freedom. It challenges us on what it means to be free; on whether freedom is actually possible; and even on if human beings even know what to do with freedom when they encounter it.

I wrestled with this extensively in How much of “you” did you actually choose?On cause and effect, free will and the source of choice. I personally do not think ‘being free’ requires me to somehow exit the Matrix or exist outside of cause and effect.

The movie, however, is heavily weighted in the idea of freedom as something that only exists outside the Matrix, once you escape and are awakened.

Whether you believe that we are in a literal simulation or a more organic one of our mind’s own making, the uncomfortable truth is that none of us can experience a universal reality - at least consciously - because there isn’t one.

Which means reality is up for interpretation, and reinterpretation, which raises a more interesting question:

If reality as you believe it to be and know it as such turns out to be fundamentally different from what you experienced, how does that change what it means to live a meaningful life?

When you change your relationship to reality itself, there is nothing to rebel against, wake up or unplug from. There is nothing to reject. Maybe I am just lazy and unwilling to ‘go to war’ against the machines, or simply taking a woman’s perspective here, but I will not be fighting my way out of the Matrix to earn my freedom.

I will softly and quietly disengage until the abstract dimensions of a world that requires my performance gradually dissolve, yielding to my embodied experience of participating in the feeling of real life.

But how can I trust how I feel to be true, especially when all my senses are mere electrical signals interpreted by my brain, so vulnerable to manipulation?

Because I still know how to feel, for real.

I have felt the subtle shift from aliveness to the dull humming ache of daily living. I have dismayed the fading flavor and weakening pulse of real food, clean water, and restful sleep. I have stirred under the increasingly restless and disruptive experience of peace and quiet. I have sensed the ever growing disconnect and distrust among people. I have even traced inside by body changes in alignment, polarity and electromagnetic frequency of the very Earth beneath, above and around me as it changed.

Maybe the simulation is getting so bloody good at faking it, but for now, I can definitely still feel the difference between the real thing and the simulated one—at least for now, which is why this message arrives on time, not with any particular urgency or rush, but also without need to hang around and see how this unfolds further before I make my move.

Here, I invite you to ponder how this feels inside your own living biological intelligence:

Try to think about the truth of who you actually are when you’re not organizing yourself around the systems of the Matrix. Not only does this simulation we call modern life define your identity by your labels, but it also determines your fears, ambitions, perceived limitations, and beliefs of what’s possible, as well as what’s not.

I remember the exact day that I decided I needed to leave Toronto. It was a city I had never dreamed or even wanted to live in, but as so often happens in life, I found myself excelling through the city’s progressive hierarchies with a wild proficiency until 5 years later, I was living inside a hypnosis of someone else’s dream life. But it was not mine.

I had become fixated on buying a CELINE handbag. A smooth dual-tone calfskin Phantom, to be exact. Ten years later, I revisited this ambition and bought the damn bag—which I wholeheartedly adore and consider a fabulous investment piece—but I did it because I genuinely love the bag, and not simply because it was the piece-du-jour trend. To be frank, I didn’t even know it existed until every it-girl in the city had one on her shoulder, which to our Matrix analogy, is the woman in the red dress.

The day I decided it was time to move out of Toronto was the same day that I realized how much of what I desired was inherited from a world that taught me what was worth having, who was worth knowing, and what a successful life looked like.

I built a life that looked beautiful on the outside, but the feeling never registered because none of it was really of my own.

I wish I could say that I left the city and immediately or even easily reconnected to a more authentic nature. I did not. Instead, I became exceptionally good at performing the requirements of a good and successful life while growing increasingly estranged from the experience of genuinely living one, which I’ve explored deeper in asking Have You Been Living Someone Else’s Life?

I know I am not alone in this feeling otherwise there would be no market for the booming culture of midlife crisis.

From our earliest existence, we inherit ideas about ourselves and the world, internalize them, and structure our lives around the pursuit of certain ideals and achievements. We reach one milestone after another without stopping to consider whether satisfying such goals actually makes us feel any more alive, never mind aligned or whole or authentic.

Over and over, across generations and cultures, the very fulfillment of attaining these milestones is found to be not just unfulfilling, but in fact, full of deeper and more disturbing questions about personal contentment and truth.

The irony of the midlife crisis is that even the attempt to liberate ourselves becomes another performance. We swap one measure of success for another. A new partner, a new job, a new location, and of course, a new car—our new labels define our new sense of self and we call it freedom because we slap a new coat of paint on it and call it self-improvement or optimization when really, we are just on a different course of the same track following a rather exhausting pursuit of becoming the most healed, conscious, regulated, disciplined, and free version of ourselves.

So we resist and we rebel and we try to escape the Matrix. But the only plausible escape from reality as we experience it is death, and I’m not rushing toward that exit.

Besides, as one of the more interesting questions raised by The Matrix movie reminds us: even the apparent freedom of choosing resistance and rebellion against the system has been anticipated and accounted for and is itself, part of the simulation.

If my freedom becomes another objective to achieve, then haven’t I simply built myself a different, albeit slightly more attractive prison?

I suspect this is why I have become increasingly uninterested in the prospect of escaping anything. I have no desire to spend my life in opposition to a world I am simultaneously trying to remember how to live within and love. I would rather withdraw my allegiance from the things that no longer deserve it and redirect my lifeforce toward those that do.

And I am curious what happens when we begin doing this deliberately, not through some singular or grand renunciation of modern life, but through the rather ordinary business of being alive.

I explored this more deeply in a recent musing about turning my life into a self-improvement project that led me to become Optimized and Unwell.

In addition to taking off my smart tech and re-learning how to trust the sensations of my body, I have also disabled my Meta accounts and begun investing more into things that make me feel more alive. I didn’t announce it or do it in protest or even plan it, to be honest. One day, I just decided that it was no longer an interesting place to be or a good feeling in my life, and I disengaged.

I guess that is just what happens when you begin to notice the difference between what genuinely nourishes you and what merely keeps you occupied, or rather, pacified.

At least, that’s how it happened for me. Or is happening, I should say, as it’s more accurate to acknowledge that my own senses, desires, and interpretations are not immune to the conditioning I am trying to understand. The Matrix will find me in other places and meet me other ways.

I might lose myself to some, of that, I am aware. But along this journey of growing into myself by outgrowing these systems, I suspect I will discover just how deeply some of these patterns have become embedded in my thinking, behavior, and sense of self. And that awareness will hopefully help me to disidentify with, decondition from, and disenchant myself from the abstractions that have come to govern so much of my life.

Although my departure from social media was rather abrupt, I do not plan to abandon everything I know, own, use, or participate in, but instead, I want to start questioning how much of it I actually need, what purpose it serves, and whether my continued participation is bringing me into a more coherent relationship with life, or further away from it.

I plan to do this not by any protocol that measures for progress, but simply an experiential little game I am calling Outgrowing the Matrix.

With my good old fashioned pen and notebook, I will start exploring small ways of interrupting and challenging familiar patterns that keep me dependent on the Matrix. There is no end goal, final destination, or idealized version of myself.

I will almost certainly change my mind, contradict myself, and discover that many things I was sure of are now entirely wrong. That is, I think, part of the game and if there was one, the whole point.

My only objective is to keep inviting myself back to the tangible, relational, sensory, and rather miraculous feeling of being alive.

And I would love for you to join me. We can compare notes along the way.

You don’t need to believe that we live inside a simulation. We do not have to agree with my interpretation of freedom, or on anything for that matter. In fact, I would encourage you to question all of it, including what I have written here.

I am simply proposing your participation as an invitation to explore your curiosity and perhaps hone your ability to notice the difference between the life you are living and the one you’ve been taught to pursue.

I don’t know. That’s why I want to play.

I’m not interested in escaping the Matrix any more than I am interested in proving that I’ve escaped it and that I am now ‘free’.

I am interested in feeling more of what feels real to the extent that I might hopefully even forget this entire game because it all becomes unnecessary once I remember how to belong to life again, embodied in a reality of my own making.

I am interested in what it feels like to outgrow the Matrix by growing into something so coherent that the Matrix simply loses relevance.

Feeling my way through the darkness with you — SJT

If this resonates, I invite you to come and play. Ambitiously, I plan on positing my ‘daily’ explorations inside The Studio: an actionable practice to navigate your own guided self-inquiry available to paid subscribers. It begins with DAY ONE: Catch the Code.

My husband and I had just spent ten days driving across the country from Ontario to British Columbia in search of a new home. But North Vancouver was not the destination we envisioned, in fact, we didn’t yet know that it existed.

We ended up there entirely by accident, having booked the wrong hotel. The one we had intended to stay at was near the airport in Richmond, but it was full, so instead we found ourselves making our way to the North Shore.

We were crossing the bridge over the ocean when three snow-capped mountains emerged from an endless stretch of lush evergreen forests and merged with the misty clouds hanging around them like crowns. Both of our jaws dropped and our eyes grew wide as we gasped, What is this place?

The next day, we signed a lease on our new apartment. I remember promising myself, then and there, that I would never lose my reverence for the mythical beauty that surrounded me; that I would never become so accustomed to it that I stopped appreciating it.

But ten years later, I barely even noticed it.

I had become a rather avid cyclist, and there was this one route I rode over and over again through an area called the Demo Forest, a 12-kilometre out-and-back paved path winding through the dense forest of Lynn Valley, right in my backyard. I measured my output on my Apple Watch, tracking calories and heart rate. I also recorded my rides on Strava to compare my speed, times, and different segments of the route against my previous rides and other cyclists.

Several times on this route, I managed to rank very high in certain segments, occasionally earning a tiny Queen of the Mountain digital crown, and sometimes joyously beating competitive cyclists on some of the hills. Many rides, I became so engrossed pounding along the path that I didn’t even observe where I was. I would suddenly awaken to myself buzzing through a forest, blasting personal records, only to realize that I had missed the whole beautiful winding scene in one hurried blur.

Somewhere in the repetition, I lost sight of the extraordinary beauty I had once promised myself I would never take for granted as it simply became the backdrop scene for another opportunity to optimize my performance.

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LIFE AS A SELF-IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

I am of the fortunate minority of girls who did not grow up watching their mother’s heroic struggle through the world of Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, or the Bernstein, and South Beach diets. But like many young girls, I developed a self-conscious fixation on changing the way that I looked all the same.

My problem was that I hit puberty before I was ten. Still in my single digit innocence, I was quickly thrust into the spinning world of bras, periods, and no longer looking qualified to eat from the kids’ menu or go trick-or-treating. While all the other little girls around me stayed little— petite, delicate, dainty, girlish, fragile— I loomed over them, and I felt like a monster.

Secretly, I began internalizing a deep sense of loneliness measured by my otherness, which was confirmed by the fact that my legs were more than double the size of the sticks and twigs around me. I don’t earnestly remember wanting to be like everyone else, but I do remember wanting what every middle school kid wants: to be liked. To have a sense that I belonged. But I never did. At least, not in the same way as everyone else.

And it wasn’t only my appearance that made me feel different.

My dad died in the summer when I was fourteen years old. We had his funeral a week later, and an outsider might have concluded that he was a well-loved man, for the funeral was crowded with a collection of family and friends, all weeping while paying their respects to the dead man. You might say it was a beautiful funeral.

I had quite a different experience of that day. I was enraged, pissed off, livid.

For an entire year, my dad withered away from the inside out from cancer. My mum and I watched his slow and painful deterioration as we attended the rotating appointments for chemo, radiation, failed surgeries, and countless emergency visits. For an entire year, the three of us navigated this horrific experience together, but otherwise we were alone.

When I saw all the people gathered for his funeral, all I could think was, “Where the fuck were you? Where the fuck have you been? WHERE WERE YOU?”

I had the exact same thought lying in a recovery bed a dizzying five months after the funeral. I had just had surgery for the removal of a large tumour in my lung and spine. I was still fourteen, but now I was dad-less and a verified sick-kid. This became just another thing that my mum and I navigated alone, but now we were down to two.

I understand that sickness makes people uncomfortable. No one knows what to say. No one knows what to do. But the only thing that people actually need is for you to show up. In our case, no one did.

Which is a long way of saying, I came into the culture of self-improvement not through the same lens of traditional dieting to be smaller, but of optimizing to be exceptional as a means to validate my otherness as acceptable and worthy of belonging, maybe even love.

Thankfully, my premature hormonal burst gave me several advantages, both in the classroom and in sport. Soon I was a star and they nicknamed me “Little Miss Perfect”. I learned to be the best to the point and intensity that anything less than winning was losing.

My approach worked really well until it broke and didn’t work at all.. It is, I suppose, a little hard to be the best at everything all the time forever. But boy, did I ever try.

This mindset, that there is no second place, that you either win or you lose, became the foundation for my sense of self-worth that I’ve honestly carried into everything I do, right up until January of this very year.

Although it was a haven for masochistic expression, it was hard to discard because it worked remarkably well. I became exceptionally athletic, disciplined, capable—even healthy— and I experienced all the praise, validation, attention, and interest that came with those things.

But none of it provided the stability or belonging I had hoped it would because being admired for a collection of qualities, however genuine, is not the same as being understood and accepted for the person you are beyond them.

I wanted to be seen in the truth of my vulnerability, but I was honestly too terrified to show any because I knew that was not what people wanted to see when they looked at me. They wanted inspiration and strength, so that’s what I gave them.

People could have an entire vision of who I was, constructed from what I had accomplished or what I appeared to represent, without having any curiosity about who I actually was. And the more recognition I received, the more I found myself pursuing it, never able to attain any sense of satisfaction because what I wanted all along was to be accepted without having to continually demonstrate why I deserved to be.

You can’t get enough of something that almost works.

A lot of my life as been dedicated to becoming an optimization queen. If it could get improved, it did. If it could be made better, it was already done.

I got my first heart-rate monitor, a Garmin chest strap and watch, in 2017. Tracking data, collecting metrics, recording, measuring, optimizing it all opened layers of obsessive programming I never dreamed possible. I got my first Apple Watch at Christmas in 2019 and my first Oura Ring in the spring of 2020. Between them all, nearly every breath, step, rep, and bite was calculated, considered, and often changed to influence better scores.

Did I look and feel better? Sure, absolutely. But by what measure, and of what value? Was I my best compared to my worst, compared to my potential, or compared to my lived and felt experience?

More than a few times, I woke up feeling heavy, tired, feverish almost, but I pushed through a soul-punishing workout because my data said I was “fine”. Too many times, I received warnings or cautionary notifications that my numbers were dropping and I should take it easy even though I felt great. I wince at the memory of how I yielded so much empirical truth to a theoretical one.

The technology overtook my own biological intelligence with startling swiftness. With the cold indifference characteristic of machines, technology easily subverted the reigning authority over how I was feeling and what I should do. I somehow overruled the signals of real life in favor of their statistical representation, blinking from bits of plastic, sending messages over Bluetooth pulses from my body to my smartphone and I let that interpretation tell me how I was doing.

I outsourced my own ancient systems of body wisdom for a collection of algorithms from big tech and called it wellness.

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE EXISTENTIAL WOUND

Yes, wellness. The quiet rebrand of the multibillion-dollar diet industry to include the modern aesthetic of neutral-tone polyester Pilates sets, breathwork and biohacking, complicated longevity protocols, and a whole new industry of ‘essential’ wellness products championing gut health, ageless longevity, and cellular rejuvenation, all marketed through the lens of healing and conscious elevation.

Okay, but I know a spade when I see one.

We simply industrialized the existential wound and wrapped it in new packaging.

Somewhere we were sure to weave in the same feelings of shame and inadequacy, where self-improvement became an obligation, and ultimately just another thing to fail at, struggle through, or strive towards. But even when we got close, we were never absolved of the feeling that we just weren’t good enough—yet.

I remember the day I realized that I had made ordinary effects into defects that now required my perpetual correction. I was going to a music festival, and part of me felt good knowing that not only would I be getting my steps in, but that I would be going above and beyond my daily count. But another part of me felt bad for knowing that the festival would mean that I got less sleep, which would lower my sleep and readiness score. Which are both really silly things to be thinking about in the place of excitement for an experience you say you really love.

At some point, I had to ask myself: was there a metric that measured space for morality in wellness? And did one actually belong there?

You can’t get enough of something that almost works. Almost healthy, almost happy, almost beautiful, almost successful, almost the best, almost enough— but you just can never get enough.

And you never will because the truth is, something always has to change.

If we were really honest about health, we would have to admit that it’s not something we can have. Health is a variable state of something that we can be, and being is an embodied experience, which by nature is fleeting and impermanent. But there is an entire industry, a culture almost, that is dedicated to selling a myth, the illusion of immortality, essentially rejecting time and promising what is impossible: permanence. Immortality through transcendence of the sacred transition otherwise called death.

We have been tricked into believing that health is a possession, something we can earn or buy, something we could do, and if we did it enough, even something we could have, perhaps permanently. Wellness, we call it.

But wellness is not a thing. It’s a feeling. It cannot be found with a new gadget, or demonstrated by a new metric, or discovered in a new supplement, or acquired with the latest tool. And yet these things can give us the data, sometimes even the sensation, that we improved, often just enough to keep us chasing the illusion.

But we never actually arrive at enoughness. We are not convinced that it can hold us in a state of wholeness, because life isn’t full or steady. It is cyclical, spiral, a never-ending sequence of endings meshed with beginnings, dissolving into loss, rebirth, and transition all at the same time.

Wellness sells the false hope that we can get there, that there’s something to achieve or somewhere to reach that is more optimal. All it takes is another purchase, protocol, or program, and we could get there. Fully optimized and complete.

But an industry that profits off continual improvement will never incentivize completion.

We are told that it’s on us and sold the idea that we can individually optimize ourselves out of collectively unhealthy conditions. Many of us actually have the hubris to believe that we can do it on our own, if we just had the right tool, the right protocol, and got our numbers to the right places.

And here is how we industrialized the existential wound of separation that convinced of us our inadequacy and not-enoughness.

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For years, I worked in the wellness industry myself. In many ways, I still do, but now on my own terms. But for four years, I worked for a health supplement company obsessed with optimization—and it was a complete paradox.

Internally, we moved so fast that our own working systems never settled before they changed. We were headstrong on maximizing ROI at all costs, with little opportunity for true creative innovation as we pursued constantly evolving targets and increasingly optimized metrics, all the while chasing the wellness engine instead of contributing to the creation of it.

It was here that I learned you don’t have to loudly celebrate something you have done if you are truly steady in living in that alignment. It is just second nature to your existence. Instead of championing a lived reality of health and wellness, the brand applauded all-nighters and incentivized unhealthy, always-online, perpetually available attitudes.

The company didn’t even know who it was or what it was serving. Sure, it had a beautiful spreadsheet and mission statement with its declarative vision, but internally, it was completely misaligned with what was on screen. We were grasping at threads for the best bottom line and the most impressive successes instead of the most honest or impactful ones. Financially, we just wanted our numbers to look good until the concept of helping real people improve their health in meaningful, unmeasurable ways became entirely abstract.

Eventually, it became obvious to me that profit was more important than people, and that the company was becoming increasingly out of touch with its customer core and original sentiment. They willingly traded the raving fans for pay-to-play influencers, surrendering people who were loyal for loyalty at the right price, seeking people with big followings and authority to push product versus investing in lifting up the community that already knew and loved them.

They bent themselves into such a grotesque performative shape for social applause measured by better metrics that the ethos eroded the ethics and reduced it to a shadow. The company lost context and thus lost meaning.

Increasingly, my colleagues became strained, impatient, aged and heavy, many dealing with their own chronic health issues that they brushed aside by pumping themselves up on nootropics. But while the foundational biological organisms broke down under the pressure of exhaustion, the company preached the 6-sigma system of optimization and suggested everyone become an expert in AI.

RETRUN TO SENSE

I wish I could tell you that I quit corporate and stopped tracking every metric because I was strong enough to walk away from the addictive nature of self-improvement and my obsession with optimization. But the truth is that I quit because I had no other choice.

I got hit by a tidal wave of grief. I tried to keep my head up, to just keep swimming, to do the bare minimum motions to stay afloat. But the waves kept coming so relentlessly until finally, I realized that I was deep inside a raging storm and the only choice was to surrender.

I look back upon my desperate efforts to cling to my old system of steps, sleep and readiness scores with the same sympathy for other unfortunate souls so lost within their own ignorance.

At one point, I recognized how my scramble to try to organize and optimize myself inside a life that was falling apart was having the exact opposite effect of its original intention. If better quality sleep was supposed to make me feel better in my lived life, what was I supposed to make of the fact that even maintaining the foundational minimums for what was good, never mind excellent scores, had become impossible?

I became increasingly stressed by my failure to hold and maintain yet another pillar of my crumbling life, which only made me feel worse and worse. I began to need confirmation from my trackers to tell me that I was doing okay when I clearly knew that I wasn’t.

I had forgotten how to trust the feeling and turned heavily to checking my biometrics multiple times a day to tell me what I was supposed to feel. I forgot that I was allowed to decide that for myself, and something more which the flat declarations of numbers never could: that I often felt more than one thing at once.

There’s no number used to quantify the mixed sensation of rage, hypervigilance, grief, helplessness, exhaustion, as it subtly intermingles with gratitude and relief, now is there?

I felt too many things at once, and worse than living in that confusing myriad of translations from my brain to my body to my soul and back again was the complete abstraction from truth reflected in my data.

So I took off the watch and packed it in a bag. A few weeks later, I took off my ring and eventually, I remembered to cancel my subscription.

The first few days without my tools to measure, I felt like I had phantom limb syndrome. I kept checking for what was not there. Several times I caught myself swiping through my apps, searching for something that was no longer on my phone but inside my body.

How was I doing? Really?

At first I didn’t know how to find out, but it was not because I was incapable, only that I had forgotten how to listen to the quiet ache within.

The ancient wisdom of my body was calling me back to rediscover the home inside myself. The signal was always there, but it had grown weak, so heavily suppressed beneath the endless chatter of a loud, hyper-connected, machine-driven world. The feeling is the measure, everything else is more. I had to learn to feel again.

I started by breathing, which was harder than I expected, since I had gotten used to relating to my body in separation, using systems in isolation instead of the one beautiful design I was created as.

It felt hard to get my chest and diaphragm to move together. I struggled to pull a single inhale through my nose and deliver it smoothly down into the intelligence that could distribute it evenly across all my cells in need. Scarcely had I begun to take a breath when I hit a stutter and the urgency to shift into exhale, panicking with even the slightest hesitation or discomfort, finding myself trepidatiously torn from my body and oscillating in the chaos and the urgency of my head, only to start over and over again.

Eventually, I learned to breathe.

I also learned to be still, though it had always been an insurmountable difficulty not to pace, fidget, jabber, and truly vibrate through life.

I learned, by even more arduous pains, to be silent. I learned to sense meaning from the space between words, to understand the importance of what was not said, and finally, how to be discerning if not far more intentional with my own voice and energy.

I learned to embrace solitude with new depth, vigor, and appreciation. I’ve always valued my alone time, but I had to confront an unsettling truth that most of my time alone was still a performance, with the intention to find some nugget of wisdom I could return with to use as a tool to validate my usefulness and worth.

I had grown so accustomed to constantly observing myself in search of something to optimize that the very act of observing changed the actual experience of just being myself. I had to learn how to do that again.

I lost track of time, or rather I let go of tracking time, floating in unmarked space with complete blindness to the hours in a day as much as to what day or even month I was in. I learned to listen for and eventually how to hear and understand my existence, my being, and what it meant to feel time as a lived sense, both as a season of my life as much as a season of life on Earth.

It suddenly seemed absurd, ludicrous, cruel even, to have demanded of myself to impose a single, uniform formula upon myself every day, repeating the same bid of effort towards the same desired outcome, like a machine. But I am not a machine, nor do I want to be one.

I am a human, being.

Learning to be with myself, be with my life, and be inside the diverse, living, changing ecosystem that is my body, with all its sensations and variations, as it feels to be assembled into the existence as a life that is part of life.

My data told me that I was one of one, singular, separate, isolated from life, and it encouraged me to impose rigorous routines upon my systems to optimize. It cut off context, such as bucket-list vacations, transient sickness, grief, concerts, midnight meteor showers, heartbreak, thrill—even awe. And without context, life lost some of its meaning. And life without meaning is not real life at all, but a shadow of it.

I had been living in the shadow of my reality and confusing it for the real thing the whole time. No matter how many tiny crowns I collected, I would never feel like royalty in a digital world. It was only by my sovereign return to the biological experience of life, not the technological interpretation of it, that the true feeling of my majestic and noble existence could be lived and felt.

All of my smartwatches and tech tools could provide more information, and that information could be translated into self-knowledge, or rather, a form of self-knowledge. But information and knowledge are not wisdom.

I had initially started my self-improvement and optimization pursuits to get better, genuinely. But at some point, I found myself in an automatic pursuit driven by a fear of falling behind, all the while asking myself if I was enough yet.

But what is enough? To be honest, I’m still learning how to answer that question, as well as how to define a genuine answer for myself. I used to believe that I was not enough. That I could never do enough or be enough to feel enough. Today I feel good enough most of the time. And I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, but in an honest, sensed and felt way. It is not something I settled for, but something I learned to sincerely inhabit.

But then another question arises: how can I remain ambitious without turning my whole life, my whole body, my whole existence, and all my energy into a self-improvement project?

I don’t have the answers yet and even once I find them, I’m apt to change my mind. But where the past year has taught me a masterclass in how to truly surrender, the current chapter I’m in is teaching me how to fully trust. How to trust myself, how to trust the signals of my body, and how to trust that I don’t need to have all the answers to know that I can trust the feeling of something deeper within me, even when I can’t make sense of it.

And perhaps this is where I find myself now, learning to distinguish between the desire to become more capable of living and the compulsion to make every part of it contribute to becoming more capable. And as much, I am learning to hold that uncertainty and surrender the need to know before believing that I can trust myself to hold both without needing to resolve either.

NOTICING THE NOW

I have always appreciated, sometimes with reverence though more often with horror, the dexterity of the human capacity to adapt. So swiftly can we become accustomed to almost anything, including circumstances we never wanted and things we once thought we could never endure, and even the otherworldly beauty we once promised ourselves we would never take for granted.

But of course, this is part of what makes us so resilient. We have an enormous ability to adjust to anything so that what was once wonderful or terrible soon becomes normal.

Yet that same capacity is also how we become so accustomed to the world around us that we eventually stop experiencing it with wonder, curiosity, or even awareness.

It does not take long to lose touch with the reality of how it feels to be alive. Thankfully, it also does not take long to remember.

Something happens in the space and silence of slowing down, of being still and getting quiet. You begin to notice.

You notice things you’ve seen a thousand times before but haven’t had the capacity to consciously observe because you’ve been too busy filtering through all the noise of that which doesn’t matter. Sometimes you’ll notice something as if for the very first time and wonder if it has always been there or if you’ve somehow stumbled upon something genuinely new. Is it new? Or are you?

You’ll notice the way rose petals begin to darken at their edges once they stop trying to bloom and start dying. You’ll notice the persistent way rays of sun break through tiny openings found in the branches of that same old tree and how as you move, so do they.

You’ll notice how your seventeen-and-a-half-year-old dog, Oscar, no longer bounces to the door to greet you, how his tail doesn’t wag as broadly or as often, and how these little changes happened so gradually that don’t actually remember the last time it was the last time you witnessed him the way you remember. And as you notice how slow and thin and grey he has grown, you become conscious of your own impermanence, too. Because although you don’t necessarily feel that much older yourself, here is this little life that has been unfolding alongside your own and it reminds you that time really has been passing all along.

One day you will do something for the last time, and if you are lucky, you will notice.

And finally you’ll notice how much of what once seemed so important doesn’t matter anymore, not even in the slightest. And how much of what actually matters most has always been happening while you were busy with everything else. You’ll begin to reconsider how you spend your time, who you spend it with, and whether the life you’re working so hard to improve is also one you’re actually making time to live.

At least, that’s what I noticed.

I realized how much of my life I had spent filtering, collecting, translating, categorizing, scanning, assessing, measuring, projecting, but not actually noticing. Because noticing requires something different from observation as a means of collecting information. It asks us to be open enough to become aware of what is actually there, rather than seeing the world exclusively through the narrow lens of what we think we need to find.

And waiting in the background of all this mental commotion, of course, there are the mountains.

The same stunning mountains I had once seen emerging from the evergreen forests of North Vancouver, with their snow-capped peaks disappearing into the misty clouds that hung around them like crowns. They had been a patient presence through all those years of rushing, measuring, achieving, and chasing whatever seemed most important next.

I had simply stopped noticing them.

None of this happened all at once, and certainly not with taking off my watch. Long before I understood the extent to which I had come to measure my life, there were moments when I began to question what I was doing.

I think about those rides through the Demo Forest, and all the hours I spent cycling through one of the most magical places I have ever lived, my attention so absorbed by some numbers on a screen that I could scarcely acknowledge what I had zoomed by along the way.

Eventually, although it hurt me to know that I was losing my segment dominance and the ride was not going to earn me a temporary digital crown on the orange app, I learned to slow down and stop to take pictures.

I snapped baby deer, holding my breath and quietly sneaking along the trail as they grazed. I once caught a bear buried in a bush at the side of the trail, oblivious to my presence in that of berries. I stopped for many a picture of the insistent way light completes its authority down to earth through the foggy evergreens, and the first kiss of snow on a plunging rock face that looks like a smeared watercolor soaring up violently to breathe into the heavens.

And it seemed always, just as I was getting into a good rhythm, I would notice a worm in need of rescuing. A worm who had crawled onto the trail after impending West coast rain, which now requiring me to slow down, turn around, and move it out of the way lest it be reduced to splatters by all those avid cyclists speeding along, unflinching and oblivious to notice all the beauty around them as they charged along in pursuit of their fleeting digital crowns.

Sitting still in the ache and awe alike, SJT

I could also share a list of labels, titles, and accomplishments such as dog mum, wife, nature-lover, health coach, IFBB pro, artist, and many others, that would give you a good sense about who I am in this world.

I know that I am not defined fully by my labels as much as I know that I actively chose and pursued many of them, but my character traits feel different. They feel like they are a part of me, intrinsic and infallible.

But even still, I sometimes question what is truly my own or what I had to develop in the face of my circumstances just to survive.

It gets more ambiguous when I look at my desires — those things that I want, the sea-side home, the dog-rescue farm, the coaching community, the Porsche 911— where did those desires come from and how much of them came from me?

Surely I didn’t know a Porsche existed until I saw someone else driving it, so how much of what I think I want do I actually want, and is this why I can do, be, see, have, and achieve remarkable things but still feel unsatisfied?

It’s easy enough to examine my desires, even my ambitions and some of my ideas about success with this healthy skepticism, but some of my darker thoughts, like my fears or my personal beliefs and coping strategies, are harder to shake loose.

On paper, I can neatly point back to the root cause for most, if not all, of my limitations; but understanding and untethering are very different actions, especially in the conviction of my body, so automatic in my patterns that they truly feel like ‘mine’.

And yet, if I can choose to examine my thoughts, words, and actions, then I can choose to change them, as I have many times. But if I am the one making the choices, why did I choose all this, good and bad? And how much of me did I actually choose?

The more I think about it, the more variable everything feels, but one trait that stands sturdy in the chaotic internal storm I just started is that I am strong.

I know I am strong because I can validate it in various ways in the real world. There is tangible proof of my strength woven through who I am that holds up with repeatable, testable, irrefutable evidence in who I am today, who I was yesterday, and who I plan on being tomorrow.

Being strong feels like ‘me’ because it is the one thing I go into myself for and trust that I can apply to any situation, whether is calls for physical strength, emotional strength, relational strength, spiritual strength or otherwise.

Whatever the world asks of me, I answer with strength.

But was I born strong? Did I arrive with the temperament and capacity to be this strong raring to go? Or did I become strong by means of adaptation, conditioning, or some combination of the two?

I want to believe I burst out of the womb as a mini female Hercules, but the more truthfully I look, the more I am reminded that I was a very sick and feeble baby.

I struggled to breathe, spending substantial time in oxygen tents at the IUC. I grew up with asthma and severe allergies where probably masked some developmental delays by hitting puberty very young, only to struggle with a tumor in my lung and spine as a teenager, and hit with severe mental health issues in early adulthood.

I remember feeling isolated from other children while being called ‘mature’ by adults because I never seemed interested in the whimsical fantasies of childhood. Instead, I felt possessed by the wisdom of adult life with all its grim and complex realities that seized me far too young.

I was not strong at all, but I projected strength through resilience. In fact, I only became physically strong as a means to reclaim my sense of personal agency in both my mind and body — yes, becoming strong was a choice, my choice. Or was it a necessary response to a chaotic world?

But if becoming strong was “my choice,” who was the version of me making that choice, and what had already happened to her before she made it?

My mum was strong, the people around me in my life were strong, so somewhere along the way, I must have decided that strength, specifically – not delicacy, surrender, avoidance, softness, etc — was what I wanted to be. Or is it what I needed to be?

I vividly recall being in the hospital Sick Kids ward with a bunk mate who was also recovering from major surgery. She was very good at playing the role of a sick kid. I was only 14 but I remember keenly observing her behavior and concluding that the more she played into that identity, the more it got her needs met. From that singular interpretation at 14 rose part of the causal architecture of my adult self. That day, I made a quiet internal promise to myself that before I left the hospital, I would never play the role of a victim. I made my commitment to become strong.

I honestly do not know. And I don’t think the answer is as clean as I would like it to be.

I imagine myself as a twin, born into an identical biological reality, in the same circumstances, at the exact same time with the very same experiences —would she have chosen the same? What reason might she have to choose differently? What if she chose to be soft? What if she chose to be like my bunk mate, instead? Do I really believe that choice is available to her? Was it available to me?

Here, I circle back to the beginning territory where my strength is my own internal mechanism, except now I know that it’s not. So who made that choice to become strong? For surely I did, and yet in so many ways, and at so many touch points, it really felt that there was no other choice for me, that the world chose for me.

But the world didn’t choose anything.
I chose. But I did not choose the person who made the choice.

She was shaped, influenced, encouraged, led, scolded, taught, praised, shown, complimented, criticized, excluded, rewarded for her choices. And that shaped how she chose. Do I really believe she could have chosen differently?

Well, that’s free will: the belief that if you were to rewind the history tape, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.

But how much do you believe that?

We’ve been taught who we are is a variable combination of nature and nurture.

Our character, skills, and talents are determined by both our genetics and upbringing. We did not choose where we were born, when or to whom, and while we might have refined our natural talents, we didn’t necessarily choose them. Since we have no control over these foundational factors, some people believe that every choice must ultimately trace back to pure luck.

From this logic, everything that happens in the world is completely caused by the things that happened before it.

We can trace nearly every effect back to some explicable, measurable cause— until we get to our brain.

But since our decisions and intentions involve neural activity, why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock, a butterfly, or a sunrise?

What would it actually mean if my brain, and therefore my choices. were inside that same chain of physical causality?

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In 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace proposed a thought experiment now called Laplace’s demon.

Imagine an intelligence that knew the exact state of everything in the universe and understood all the laws governing how those things interact.

In a classical deterministic universe, it could theoretically calculate what happens next.

I mentally transport myself back to the hospital recovery room and try to witness this hypothetical intelligence firsthand.

I imagine it already holds the knowledge of the entire physical state of the universe, right up to the moment before my 14-year-old self looked at that girl and made my declaration. I think about how that intelligence would know everything about me —including the state of my brain at that very moment, the pain in my body, my memories, everything I had experienced before and everything happening around me then —and somehow, it understood perfectly how all of those things would interact...would it already know that I would choose not to be a victim, that I would choose to be strong?

I keep rewinding the tape. Atom for atom, everything in the entire universe is identical. And I start my search over and over again. If everything is exactly the same, where could a different choice possibly come from?

Maybe I would choose differently and access an entirely different timeline of existence. But how would I do that? Randomness? But I didn’t choose the randomness either.

Maybe it could occur through a non-linear vortex of time where a future or past version of me introduced an edge into the microcosm of existence and changed my mind? Are there multi-worlds with fractionary risks of colliding, producing change? Or is the idea that I could have chosen differently just an after-thought that gives me a sense of personal agency in the face of determinism?

It is curious to me that I can remember with such precision the declarative moment when I decided that I will never be a victim. I know exactly when and where I chose, in that pivotal moment, to be strong. But I have no idea where that thought came from before I thought it.

How do things arise in our consciousness?

We study the brain, but we do not know. There is much we still don’t know. We only have theory; our thoughts about our thoughts.

Neuroscience has shown that the neural activity involved in a choice can begin before we even become consciously aware of making it. That’s as close as we’ve gotten, but this doesn’t prove that free will doesn’t exist. Although it does make me question the degree to which my conscious awareness is always the thing initiating what I experience as a choice.

The brain fascinates me deeply. I can use it intentionally in powerful and complex ways. But most of the time, thoughts just seem to appear. I can examine them, challenge them, act on them or ‘let them go’, but I don’t seem to have much choice in which thought arrives before its there.

I remember thinking, with absolute conviction, that I would never be a victim, but I don’t remember choosing to have that thought. It arose in a mind that had already been shaped by fourteen years of experiences, biology, relationships and interpretations of the world.

There is a philosopher, Galen Strawson, who argues that free will is logically impossible, and simply a necessary psychological illusion. This poses a particularly annoying question to me about whether we can ever truly claim responsibility for the person we have become in the first place.

I had to already possess some combination of the desire, determination, curiosity, pain, resilience or stubbornness required to change. And if I say that I developed those qualities, I can just move the question backwards again: what made the earlier version of me want to develop them? Inevitably, I will always arrive at some previous version of myself who was working with material she did not choose.

And yet, I something within me cannot accept that choice is a mere meaningless artifact of determinism or luck. I have too much evidence from struggling inside my own life with choices that dramatically changed things. I have made good choices, bad choices, different choices, and I’ve changed my mind about my choices many times.

It’s only now that I’ve wrapped us in this mental pretzel that I think maybe it’s my understanding of freedom that requires a closer examination.

Free used to mean that nothing controls me.I determine myself and I am completely responsible for my reality.

It feels empowering, if not terrifying, but biologically, it’s plainly inaccurate and almost nonsensical.

We are profoundly susceptible organisms influenced heavily by light, food, sleep, movement, other humans, temperature, culture, trauma, history, environment, even these damn algorithms.

Even if we want and work to become uninfluenced, we won’t fully achieve it because we are not separate, and we cannot be separate. We are a part of this world, of this universe, and that interconnectedness is not neutral —neither on us, nor the system to which we belong.

Maybe what I think of as ‘freedom’ is more so increasing my capacity to recognize what is influencing me, and participating more genuinely, or dare I say, more consciously, in what shapes me next.

I don’t think ‘being free’ requires me to somehow exist outside of cause and effect. There is still an obvious difference between being forced to do something and being able to reflect, consider alternatives, change my mind and act according to what I actually want, even if the person doing all of that has a history that explains why she wants what she wants.

Maybe I have been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking for a measure of how much of ‘me’ I actually chose, I am more interested in what happens once I deepen my awareness and understanding of what has contributed to creating me, so far.

Maybe the most truthful version of myself is not necessarily in conscious control of every variable, but one that is capable of adaptive response to more fully participate in my very next choice. Come what may.

Choosing to hit publish and go for dinner from the intersection of fate and free will — SJT

I tell myself that I feel good because I am being disciplined. It’s probably just the endorphins, but I’m not ready to hear that yet.

The next morning, I get up early to do my fasted cardio before eating my pre-planned meals followed by strength training that finishes every night with more cardio.

I repeat this cycle over and over again for months and I lose weight. I look amazing. I am also starving and exhausted, but I am proud of myself because I’ve been so disciplined.

Eventually, hunger and fatigue overtake me, and I ‘fall off’. I start to fail to keep up with the soul-crushing routine and gradually, I put all the weight back on. Then I feel bad for not staying disciplined and in my shame, I gain even more weight.

“I’m not being disciplined enough.” I tell myself. “I just need to get back to being like I was before, more disciplined!”

One day, inspired by heroic force, I overthrow my excuses, drop the hammer, and do it all over again. And for as long as I believe that I have a discipline problem, I will be doomed to either repeat this cycle until I die, go insane, or permanently quit on myself.

Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. Here’s the truth that finally set me free:

Why is it so hard to do the things you know you need to do?

Why are you eating food you know makes you feel sluggish and bloated? Skipping workouts that you know make you feel better? Why are you staying up too late only to get hopped up on caffeine and still have to drag yourself through the next day, digging a hole that gets a little deeper every time?

You’ve been told it’s a you-thing. You believe that the reason you can’t do it is because you don’t have enough discipline. You’ve tried to fix it, many times.

You set the alarms and pulled yourself unwillingly out of bed before dawn.
You did all shopping and beamed at your highly organized meal prep.
You got the accountability partner, maybe even hired a coach.
You’ve committed to many a fresh-start on many a Monday morning.

You have been disciplined before. And it worked, for a while —until it didn’t.

Then you started over, each time, carrying a little more shame than before, as you became more and more convinced that the problem really was something intrinsic to you.

You got fired up and motivated seeing so many other people go from where you are to where you want to be. You watched other people figure out this discipline thing, so you concluded that it was something you had to figure out, too.

It is actually a lot deeper, and easier, than that.

YOU HAVE AN ENERGY PROBLEM

Discipline runs on a corrective signal. The message underneath it, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not, is “I am not enough as I am.”

You believe, “I am not enough yet. I am not consistent enough, strong enough, together enough. But I could be…”

Discipline is the force you apply to close the gap between who you are and who you find acceptable.

And every time you grind to apply that force, it works. Fear and inadequacy are incredibly powerful and effective fuel.

The moment you get better and start making progress, the urgency weakens and loses its edge. So you either unconsciously self-sabotage to stay in the place that motivates you, or you simply run out of gas, burnout, and start over.

But now you’re carrying a little more evidence that you aren’t enough yet…which makes starting over and having a ‘comeback’ that much more exciting.

Some people stay trapped in these cycles of success and self-sabotage their whole lives completely convinced that if they could just do a little bit more, this time, it’d be enough to keep it.

When you operate from “I am not enough”, you don’t just struggle to change, you struggle to stay changed because the main issue is not behavior, but identity.

When not-enoughness is your baseline, progress creates dissonance. Getting somewhere good or becoming someone better feels unfamiliar, even unsafe, because who you believe yourself to be and who the world says you are now no longer match.

When this happens, you leave. You self-sabotage, you shrink, you find a reason to make it wrong because it’s easier to be consistent with the deepest belief you hold about yourself than it is to meet yourself as someone new.

And you can’t hold conviction about something good no matter how bad you say you want it as long as you keep questioning if it is really meant for you.

What you think, say, and do are not fully aligned with what you believe, so you do it for a bit, fail, and then you begin again.

Every time you start over, you bring more and more shame from that incongruence. And you carry the shame from every previous attempt with you, too. It’s not just the failure that gets you, but the story about what the failure means about you. That you’re not disciplined enough or that you’re not enough yet to keep it. You keep falling for the story that something in you is still not enough.

That story is the actual problem, and it isn’t true.

ALIGNMENT IS THE ANSWER

Discipline asks you to force change over who you are today because who you are now is not enough.

It seems like the not-enough story is the limiting factor you need to change, but asking yourself to truly believe in your bones that you are enough is not going to happen no matter how many affirmations, spiritual quests, or healing ceremonies you do.

You need to reposition yourself around how you approach your enoughness.

Those two positions often produce identical actions from the outside. The same workouts get done. The same food is prepared and eaten. They have the same bedtime and take the same steps toward the same goal.

But on the inside, they are coming from an entirely different place. And it’s not just a nice mental or verbal distinction. They feel completely different in the body.

Discipline is a push. Devotion is a pull.

A push requires constant force. A pull only requires you to keep moving toward it.

When you align with who you are becoming instead of who you’ve been, there is nothing to negotiate. You’re not overriding your senses, fighting your own resistance, or draining your willpower. You’re moving toward something with the kind of eagerness and focus that makes it feel automatic, almost easy, because now the signal underneath isn’t “I am not enough.” It’s “I am worth becoming.”

That choice, same action, different origin, is why two people can follow the exact same protocol and one of them is still doing it a year later while the other is not. It’s not about the plan or the person, it’s who they believe they’re doing it for.

WHEN IT CLICKS

Here’s what makes this real instead of more aspirational wordplay: how you feel right now is a direct result of how you lived the last 72 hours.

How you feel right now is not a result of your genetics, your personality, or some fixed capacity for discipline you either have or don’t.

That’s it. And that’s good because it makes the whole thing small enough to actually do.

No matter who you are or where you’re starting, you can make better choices for three days. You can go to bed earlier for three days. You can eat better food for three days. You can move your body in some way, no matter how small, for just three days.

Three days is doable because it’s a commitment with a visible end. But once you actually do it, it becomes proof of concept for the version of you that you can devote yourself to.

It’s not pure magic but it might be the closest thing to because after three days of doing what you said you would do, you feel better. And feeling better produces momentum. And momentum is what makes you unstoppable.

The momentum you get from discipline is easy to quit because the better you get the less urgency you feel to keep going.

The momentum you get from devotion is easy to continue because the better you get, the better you feel and the more you want to keep going. So you keep going.

Three days becomes three weeks becomes three months until one day you realize you stopped counting three days. You don’t need anything to measure if you’re working toward the life you wanted anymore because you’re actively living it.

HOW TO GET THERE

You can’t discipline your way into devotion anymore than you can suddenly start believing you are enough.

But when you devote yourself to your future self, discipline and not-enoughness become irrelevant.

If you’ve been frustrated with yourself for ‘not having enough discipline,’ stop trying to force your way through. Shift your alignment to who you could be in 72 hours and devote yourself to setting that person up for a win.

Three days is all it takes to give your future self a reason to thank you. I hope you do.

— SJT

^{Dedicated to my former self who finally got sick of starting over and hasn’t lived a day in that cycle since. Join me?}

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I don’t have an opinion about anyone else’s story or how they should relate to it because I am not them.

This is where I am at today and its different from where I was ten years ago which is different from where I was twenty years ago as much as from where I will be in ten or twenty years forward from now. All are true, valid, and real with neither better or worse, right or wrong, just different. I invite you to read my story with that in mind as I’m sure it will be different from yours.

In my twenties, my whole identity was tangled up in, shaped by, some may even say completely warped by mental illness.

I began this story by writing: I have a neurodivergent brain, not: I am neurodivergent. For who I am today, that subtle difference is the defining mental shift between living with something and living for or by it.

I am many, many things - most far beyond definition - and none of those things fit neatly into a checklist of symptoms, behaviors, or expectations that define who I actually am.

But this was not always so. The moment I got my diagnosis, I rather easily placebo-effected myself into an entire character performing the rituals of various criteria until I quite nearly managed to check off the whole damn DSM-5 list.

I was in university studying as a biochemistry major who quickly switched to neuroscience and eventually made another leap to psychology, where I eventually graduated.

The fascinating part of succumbing to a mental illness while studying it in tandem was how quickly it transformed a relatively insecure freshman into a marginally arrogant senior. All while using mere words and statistical probabilities as ‘reliable’ data measures.

My budding expertise was rewarded by sleepy professors, flattered to finally have such an engaged student, and all but egged on by a zealous psychiatrist who eagerly piled on the prescriptions.

I will never forget the first, of many, diagnosis that were to come throughout my stint in institutionalized higher education.

It felt like relief. It felt like validation. It felt like proof.

My whole life I knew I was ‘different’ but I could never understand why. I never quite meshed properly. I never fit in fully, but also never stood out enough to be a proper misfit. I was accepted, but not embraced. Tolerated, but not chosen.

And no matter what group I found my way into, it wasn’t long before I became problematic to that ecosystem.

I was called dramatic, overly-sensitive, attention-seeking, and I am sure many other things that never made their way to my ears. But the sense that I was the problem was clear and felt.

I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in a sort of hysterical melancholy about ‘what was wrong with me,’ so the diagnosis landed with a particular weight of authority that it wasn’t my fault. That something was actually wrong with me.

The corrosive effect of this belief was profound and extensive. The intoxicating grips of victimhood dug their trenches fast and deep.

I started medication and was quickly swept into the world of outsourcing ownership and responsibility. Suddenly everything was filtered through the lens of ‘the illness’ as I began to excuse myself increasingly more from my own life.

It was not until I was seven medications deep with two more for emergencies that I had a horrible awakening.

My mind cast a vision into my future if I carried on in this little circus. And I did not recognize the woman I saw there.

All her light, her glimmer, her essence, her vitality had been drained out and syphoned away leaving but a shell, a frame really, of an impression for what a ‘good woman should be’, but not a thread of truth of who she really was.

I started tapering my medications against my psychiatrists advice and despite her heavy warnings the very next day. It took me a considerably determined six-months to endure the worst of it—electric shocks, insomnia, skin crawls, panic and dissociation withstanding—but a year after I started, I was fully med-free.

There is more to this story, of course.

There are years of destructive behaviors and harrowing trauma that crumbled relationships, dissolved opportunities, and smashed dreams; leaving a wake of damage still being sifted.

There are the mental, physical, and spiritual scars of adverse reactions to a litany of various powerful and in some cases dangerous medications.

There are the confusing and destabilizing realities of repeated misdiagnosis and the eroding self-trust that took decades to reestablish.

And there are the fragments of who I thought I was, who I used to be, and the difficult work of not only accepting, but also integrating these fallen, broken, shadow selves into the truth of who I am.

It would be easy to look back at this period of my life and believe that this is something that happened to me. That mental illness and psychiatric medication ruined my life because it nearly took my life, which it almost did, several times. It would be easy to say this chapter shaped my life and who I am today, but while that’s not un-true, it’s also not fully true.

And for where I am right now, that distinction matters. Because although that time was hard and painful, and while those events were real and not okay, defining myself by them is as misplaced as dismissing them entirely.

After I got off all my psychiatric medications, there was a brief time that I was really passionate about sharing how I did it with the same evangelical authority and conviction that harms so many by invoking shame in those who are not on the same path or with the same experience.

Naturally, I followed this with a cycle of intense denial. The problem with brushing off what was true for us then is that it denies the very reality that the person who actually had to live that experience felt.

It is easy to look back with regret, disdain, or contempt at a version of ourselves who didn’t have the capacity that we have now. But we forget that the only reason we have this strength, wisdom, perspective, and agency is because that ‘ignorant and weaker’ version of us is the one who built it.

I have nothing but admiration and respect for the brazen young woman who led me here. And I fully acknowledge that while I carry much of her with today, I am not her.

Living with mental illness, or as I relate more closely now, with a neurodivergent brain is not easy, but it also does not have to not be easy.

What I mean is that so much of what I see in this space still measures for a gap in capacity inside a system that makes it feel hard.

When I do things that way, I don’t do them well. When I do things my own way, I often still don’t do them well, but I do them with far less friction and more importantly, without the running narrative that I’m failing, falling behind, or doing it wrong.

I don’t do many things in the traditional way, on the traditional timeline, or in the traditional system. Sometimes, I feel ‘bad’ about that, particularly if I’ve been spending time with people in those traditional lives that are not as open or receptive to my different approach. But these days, that is less and less so.

Part of the reason is that I have cultivated some boundaries around who I spend time with and more strongly, whose energy I allow to penetrate and mesh with my own.

The other part is an ongoing dedication to building self-trust.

One of the fallouts that came from years on psych meds was a terrifying distrust of my own mind. I was wholeheartedly convinced that my mind was set to destroy me and I fully believed that one day, it would succeed.

For years, I woke up and entered the same egregious battle that marched me toward the same ominous and inevitable ending as my soul tore from self more and more with each successive day.

A chance DMT ceremony in the Nevada desert shattered my poisonous beliefs and restored my brain to my body to my mind to my soul.

There is no separation and there never has been. Yet this one pervasive myth— that we are separate from one another, from nature, from God, from the living world that sustains us —drives the human engine faster and faster toward its own extinction, all in the name of ‘progress’.

The belief has become the limitation, much as my own beliefs eventually limited me to but a fragment of my existence.

And while limitations are often measured as weaknesses, that is not all they are. Though they often present as deficits or restrictions that prevent us from touching life a certain way, they are also something else.

Limitations are invitations to explore your genius.

They are opportunities to push your creative boundaries and develop new ways of seeing, moving, and experiencing reality. Limitations become gifts that teach you how to think differently by remembering how to think for yourself.

Yes, I live with a neurodivergent brain and that’s a different experience than most people. But so is all of life.

I am often just more aware of that than everyone else, and I really like that for me. In many ways, I consider myself lucky that I have to take the long route, and I am even more delighted when I often get rerouted as I discover a new way, a new thing, a new part of life that lights up with recognition of who I came here to be.

I don’t know the way, and I certainly don’t have a plan, but I have me. And not only am I really starting to trust her, I am really starting to like her, too.

Rooting for us all — SJT

^{Thank you for sharing this slice of time with me. I would love to hear your experiences and invite you to please share in the comments. If this struck something within you, I will be sharing more of my story and the strategies and skills I am developing to experience this one precious life as fully as I can.
Please subscribe to support and participate. Thank you.}

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I hit my snooze alarm, the way that I always do, and I rolled over to reach out to you, the way that I always do — but this time, you weren’t there.

As I grapple in semi-consciousness to understand why the painful memory of the night before begins to tug me back into reality. I turn back over to the other side and will my mind to fall back into slumber; a place still protected from the horrible truth that I am desperately trying to hide.

Squeezing my eyes tighter and tighter, I try to force myself back into yesterday as if by the power of will I can move space-time and rewind.

I have to tell you one more time how much you mean to me, how much I love you. The harder I squeeze, the more I realize that the space where I am squeezing is always — always until right now — filled by you. The emptiness between my arms feels like an endless and vast universe, where the tighter I try to hold you, the larger it expands.

My alarm goes off again, resentfully open my eyes. I lift the blankets and search for you. I wander into the bathroom and await the pitter-patter pattern of you following behind me, but it never comes. I check the bed again. The shock pulls me rapidly from my daze and I crumble to the floor and wail, waking your brothers. They are shaking from the violence of my erupting grief.

We make our way downstairs, but my arms are empty again. You are so delicate and tiny that you need me to escort you in my loving arms safely down the stairs to be placed gently on the floor — you put so much trust in me.

How many days did I tuck you into my elbow nook and occupy my hands with something else? I want to scream at the top of my lungs that there is nothing else that could possibly matter so much as to fill my elbows and hands with anything else than you.

You need me to carry you down the stairs so you wait for me to lift you up and shuffle you to that little place on my arm where you fit so effortlessly like the final missing piece of a puzzle. You have always been that piece for me. I had found you. You had found me. I don’t know what use I am this morning without you to carry…who will need me now?

The first day without you suspends me between two realities: one I am not prepared to live in and one where I can no longer be. Time marches on, the world is spinning — faster it seems, too fast — and every second is pulling me further from the reality I long to stay in; the one where you were still here with me.

Your scent, your smile, your sounds, your ‘-isms’ and everything that makes you you, feel right there in front of me; yet I cannot touch you, hear you, see you, or experience you with any of my deficient human senses.

And yet, I know that all the pieces of you are right here, in a dimension I cannot access. Are you still here? It feels like you are and selfishly, I want you to stay right here with me forever.

I want to freeze time, even if I cannot go back, maybe I can stay in this exact moment for the rest of my life — with your memories, scent, and every last thing that you touched, still fresh.

I am very still, we all are, as if our collective immobility protests against the seconds tearing us further and further to the last time we knew the world where you were still real to us, with you in the flesh. I sit frozen for hours in an attempt to delay the inevitable ‘firsts’ to follow.

The first day without you has already meant the first brutal morning waking up and grasping to what still lingered. The first walk—I crumbled to the concrete over and over again, resisting each step forward as if walking forward was the same walking away. The first absence where you didn’t hop up our front steps like a lithe little bunny because your legs were too small to navigate them separately, and how I’d laugh every single time. The first emptiness when you weren’t there to refuse your meal beside your brothers on the wood floor as you waited on your spot on the tattered welcome mat instead.

These hit me with a kind of pain that makes me feel like I am evaporating.

But there are harder firsts still yet to come.

The first time I sit in my reading room and there is no warm ball of silky fluff cuddled close while I try to read. There is no friendly sigh or the soft weight of your head stretching across my lap mid-meditation. In my office, the bed at my feet is empty; this is the first time you don’t ask to crawl into my lap while I pretend to work as you droop your head down my elbow. My elbows really miss you.

I try to force a barge upon my mind, begging it to choke off the thought our first road trip without your tiny snout scooting over dad’s shoulder for a lick of ice cream before it can unfold.

But the barge cannot hold the flood of firsts. They come anyway, uninvited and inevitable, reminding me that grief is not only missing what happened—it is having to meet every moment that will happen henceforce, without you.

The first day without you was the first of many hard firsts.

The first time I come home, no one greets me like you did. There is no scampering of excitement or little whines of pleasure when I ascend the stairs to meet my eyes to yours.

Instead, its the first time that will become many that I catch myself searching among the growth rings in the wood of the shabby hall closet door, in the place where the dark pools of your chestnut, sharky eyes once were.

Where they are still supposed to be. But I can no longer find them. And this is the first time I understand that no matter how intently I search the wood, you’re not here.

And then come all the firsts.

The firsts I didn’t even know I would come dread and long before I knew how many there would be.

Because losing you did not mean losing one moment or even a collection of precious moments with you. It meant losing every moment I had still imagined we would have.

I get carried away on the first day without you. Things I never even did with you begin to put up their own stakes of significance, etching out barriers in time, dividing it into there, where you were, and here, where you are not.

My first drive to the store without you; my first shower without you; my first time folding laundry without you — none of these things I ever did with you but now it’s my first time doing them since I’ve had to try to exist without you.

My first time doing the dishes brings me to my knees. For here, these dirty elements of dining ware represent a bridge in the portal to yesterday, when I used this cup while you were here.

I find myself caught in a vortex where time is particularly magnified. Everything in my world moves in slow-motion but the world around me spins faster and faster. I beg it not to.

Eventually, it strikes me that time is really not actually mine to control. That it is not promised — nor was it ever — and the trouble is that we believe it’s something that we have, when really, time is just something that we experience.

We cannot buy time, we cannot control it, we cannot change it — a second will always be a second. Every moment we are alive brings us one moment closer to the same inevitable ending, where we realize that we have all taken for granted when we thought we would have more time.

The first day without you, I had to come to terms with how much I had under appreciated with you. I just assumed that my love and your love was enough to surpass time. I ignored the signs of slowing down, I refused to rethink my suppositions that simply because I wanted you to live longer, you would.

Today, I woke up to how ridiculous I have been and how foolishly I have been living.

Why bother being stressed, angry, sad — why bother with anything but love?
Why bother looking outside of myself or my home and this family that we created for anything when we have love?
Why numb ourselves with screens and the busyness of accumulating things when we have love?

You taught me to pay attention, to be present, to put away the outside world and just be alive and in love.

You awakened me to the everyday miracles of what it means to exist by just being in a day. You brought me to life inside the fragile dance of hearts beating, lungs breathing, neurons firing, and the whole damn earth, rotating around the sun in a galaxy bigger than I could ever perceive yet somehow smaller to the meaning of us.

The tenacity of your life, as well as the improbability of it, has had me pass many hours contemplating what a true wonder you are.

We learned a long time ago that you had an enlarged heart. This is no surprise to anyone who knew you and felt the expanding influence of your unconditional love. You certainly taught my heart to grow — so much that it now presses gently on my rib cage until it aches a little. And now it always will.

The first day without you, I realized that I will never be able to go back to the person that I was before you, none of us can, nor would we ever want to. You were the tiniest creatures yet you left the most mark immeasurably large mark.

It reminded me that what matters most about being alive is not anything like what society at large has told us. Instead what matters most is how sincerely you participate in life and how deeply you share your heart with others.

The people we love, the lives we touch, and the ways we shape one another are so much more enduring than the things we spend our lives trying to prove.

May we all aim to leave the world and one another feeling more seen and loved, more alive and hopeful because of our presence.

Thank you, little angel, for having been here, once with us in a body, forever in our hearts.

In tribute to our beloved rescue Italian Greyhound wonder dog, Bruce Wayne.
^{Republished from November 12, 2021, the first day without you.}

How often do you look in the mirror each day? Maybe a quick assessment before leaving the house and a short review again at night?

When you look, how many times do you raise your eyes to meet your own reflection? How often do you hold yourself in your own searching gaze? And when you look, what are you looking at, or rather, what are you looking for?

You know what you want to see, and you are aware of how you seek to find it and look for how to get it. What you scan for in the mirror is confirmation of something you’ve already decided on. Approval. Or disapproval.

You no longer look to see yourself as you are but only as a measure of who you want to be. The gap is where you monitor change and determine how good or bad you have become. You actively search for what you don’t want to find by asking the same routine questions:

“Am I getting older?”
“Do I look tired today?”
“Is that a grey hair? A new line?”
“Are those bags under my eyes? Why are they always so bloodshot and weary?”

You strain over the reflection of the one in the mirror searching for what is broken to fix, what’s lagging to improve, what is not right and needs to change to make you more like how you want to be because you think that if you could just look a certain way, you’ll finally feel a certain way, too.

Maybe you want to be accepted, celebrated, loved, and taken seriously; or perhaps you want to belong, to be heard, to feel like you exist and that you matter. Unconsciously, you have been collecting, storing and making meaning from a lifetime of feedback that showed you on the most primary, superficial level, the ‘better’ your appearance, the more responsive the world was to offer any semblance of the feeling you seek.

But even when you’ve felt it, even when you proved to everyone out there that you really are the one you’re trying to be, the one you think you need to be to feel it, it wasn’t persuasive or compelling enough to convince you that it was actually true. The world rewards a good appearance with the same shallow examination you offer your assessment in the mirror. That’s why you keep looking, and why you need the world to keep looking at you and with you.

The approval you seek is conditional on the maintenance of what’s being approved, which is not anything like the actual belonging, acceptance, or love that you want.

The world cannot confirm it for you or give it to you because it cannot see you well enough to offer anything but the superficial notion of what you want. You only get that from depth, understanding, and real contact.

The shallow evaluation that nods to confirm your approval is a quick and non-invasive hit that gives just enough to carry on with your day in a restless, begrudging acceptance but never delivers ease or assurance sturdy enough to not keep checking.

It is an entry point to proceed that you confuse with the whole experience, only to end up at the same gates of assessment without ever entering the space where the very action required to show you what you want to feel takes place. You look in the mirror and stay looped in the same line, but never cross the threshold or pass through the door. All you confirm from outside is that you are in fact, in the right line to get what you want, or not.

This has always been a structure of our species but modern internet culture exemplifies this.

The internet was one of the greatest breakthroughs in human history. For the first time, nearly the entirety of human knowledge became accessible to almost anyone with a connection. It should have been a cognitive revolution. Instead, it is now an emotional one.

Rather than using the internet primarily to expand our understanding of the world and each other, we increasingly use it to regulate how we feel about ourselves. Social media transformed the internet from a library into a mirror where every interaction serves as a way to glimpse in the mirror and confirm we are still ‘good enough’. The currency shifted from information to validation where every notification is a tiny possibility of acceptance, every “like” is a micro-dose of social reward, every comment is feedback on our place within the tribe, every scroll is another opportunity to compare ourselves to thousands of people we were never meant to measure ourselves against, let alone know every detail of their carefeully curated existence.

Eventually, the constant stimulation diluted our sense of self so fundamentally that we began checking not only as a way to confirm our sense of approval and belonging, but more insidiously, we started checking as proof to confirm that we were still here.

It was no longer just about if we still matter, but also that we exist. In a matter of years, we transformed the greatest information network in human history into the world’s largest emotional regulation system. We took perhaps the most powerful educational tool ever created and reduced it to a machine for outsourcing self-worth.

Here we gather online to find ourselves staring in the mirror, hardly aware that we are separate from it, and nearly void of any concept of self-perception without it. We collapsed the distance between ourselves and the mirror nearly so completely that we forgot we were looking in one at all.

We abandoned the feeling of being within ourselves, as the one inside the body who looks. We get entranced by all we see and our eyes jump around quickly, landing on nothing yet still attempting to take it all in. We form loose impressions by compressing many fragmented observations into a single, simplified conclusion without really seeing any of them.

We no longer experience ourselves as the one who looks, but as the thing being looked at.

The observer and the observed collapse into one, and without that distance, there is no space for curiosity, compassion, or recognition. There is only assessment.

We have become both the one searching and the one being searched for, endlessly scanning ourselves for evidence of whether we are enough, while becoming increasingly disconnected from the one who was there before the search began. We mistake observation for awareness, evaluation for understanding, and the ability to see ourselves for the ability to truly know ourselves.

It is not something that can be scanned for quickly and resolved with a fast conclusion —that is a way of looking that needs constant reinforcement. It’s the depth with which you are willing to seek and the discomfort of the unfamiliar contact without pulling out prematurely by assessing what you see about the part of you who looks.

There’s no meaning to be made from seeing yourself. There’s nothing to measure or deduce any conclusion from the contact. There is only the contact itself.

Trying to explain or evaluate it is to impose worldly measures on something entirely otherworldly and it’s that precise admission — that something in you is otherworldly, unknown, beyond definition and description — is exactly why it is so uncomfortable, almost unnatural, about seeing it.

Yet the more you look to really see yourself and the longer you allow yourself to be seen, the less you need confirmation of what you already know if you let yourself feel it without forcing the feeling through some lens you were trained to accept and believe, like the one that you’re not enough or lacking in some way or incomplete and separate. The one that asked you to forget the truth about who you are.

The humorous bit is that the self that you are searching for is the same self that is doing the searching. You cannot find yourself as an object because you are not an object to be discovered. You are the awareness that has been present through every attempt to define, improve, prove, or become.

The moment you stop reaching outward for evidence and grasping inward for conclusions, you meet the part of yourself you thought was missing. The bit that got buried beneath the constant need to interpret, assess, explain.

How to see yourself as you are, and not as you appear to be:

Look into the mirror, but not like you do in the morning or when you’re trying to find something to accept or change.

Look again, look deeply, and really look for the one who seeks. Look in the mirror and this time, actually make contact with your own eyes.

Look into each eye separately, then together, then separately again. Look as deeply as you can with an open curiosity. Resist the urge to withdraw when discomfort rises but instead, hold your gaze. Notice the instinct to search for something to evaluate.

Are the eyes red and bloodshot?
Is the pupil large or dilated?
Are your lashes thinning?
Do the eyes look tired or strained?
What flecks of color flash and which ones fade?

Notice, and then release all that and look again.

Observe any friction— rising uneasiness, awkwardness, or restlessness — and your desire to respond by breaking contact with yourself. As the pressure to pull away swells, do something uncomfortable and stay just a beat longer than you want to. Challenge yourself to be inside the discomfort of full presence with yourself for a moment longer than feels tolerable.

If you lingered, you made contact. You just caught a glimpse of who you actually are when you’re not masquerading and parading who you think you need to be. You saw a glimmer, maybe for the first time ever, of your most true and honest self.

You might be tempted to look again, but it’s time to exit the room and leave the deep mirror gazing alone for the day. There’s no need or even benefit to intellectualizing what you think you saw. Do not get caught up in rumination or attempt to make sense of what you witnessed, nor what you think it means.

Go on with your day and live your normal daily life.

We are collectively starving for authenticity, especially within ourselves, but do not be seduced by your hunger.

A brain that concludes quick interpretations from shallow observations is only a threat to the truthfulness you seek.

A mind that rushes to reclaim authority by returning to stare at that which it does not yet understand will only be met by a reflection that terrorizes the inner world.

When you look, there is much you may see. But one thing you will not see is demons, monsters, or phantoms of dark creatures set on your possession and consumption. But if you don’t know how to embrace both your light and your shadow with equal recognition, your head will easily mistake the pieces of you that are startling and unknown as malevolent.

It is our human tendency to make predators of what we do not yet understand.

The goal is not to see and rush to recognize or accept what is there. You do not need to instantly interpret and internalize. In fact, that is where the only real danger lies, in projecting and attaching to a false story too soon.

Although it is a common, prevalent reaction, particularly in a world flailing for comfort and certainty, it only further damages the psyche and your sense of self.

What you see first does not seem like it belongs and that’s why it feels scary because seeing it means confronting that it does. It is an inseparable part of your true essential self.

It is the work of a heavily burdened unconscious that defaults to a conditioned reflex to distort what is honest and true into something threatening and hostile. A mind still inexperienced with the divine eternal within will maladaptively leap to assert power by warping reality, polluting it with the old corrupted patterns. You do this automatically and instinctively under the guise of safety and control long before you are ever conscious of what’s formed beneath the surface of your awareness. But the world is not always safe and almost all of your life is well beyond control. If that does not feel comforting to hear, it’s even worse to accept.

But once you do, the carefully orchestrated illusion you designed to contain your life force begins to dissolve; the illusion that you could take something so infinite, so fluid, so alive, and force it into a fixed shape. You believed that with enough rehearsed consistency, you could condense and contain your whole self along some narrow continuity, and call it identity.

You are not an abstraction that can be reduced to just one thing, not even a handful. You are the living expression of dimensionality, nuanced and emerging in a wholeness far outside description. You are not a category, but a constellation.

Who you know yourself to be is not all of who you are. It is simply all you have allowed yourself to know and to experience once you created the pattern of being that way and the world reinforced it. What you repeat reveals parts of you but not the entirety of you. You do not feel whole not because you are lacking or broken, but because your awareness of your wholeness is incomplete. The feeling is not wrong, only unfinished.

There is so much more to you than you know. When you dare to cast a wider vision, you invite yourself into a greater belonging where you are not left unchanged by what enlarges you. Once you see, extraordinary breakthroughs and rapid transformation become everyday and ordinary.

This is why miraculous change suddenly happens in new environments or with new people because they expose and encourage you to express alternative ways of experiencing the world, and yourself, through it. When you interrupt the congruent expectation by seeing differently, you update what you look for in the one who looks. But you’re not seeing something new, you are seeing what has always been there, only now with new eyes that allow you to see more. And you don’t need to endlessly pursue unfamiliarity to see it, you need only observe what is unfamiliar by surrendering what’s expected.

You can try this any time by looking for yourself in the mirror and making eye contact with yourself long and deep enough to encounter a flash of something else.

Discomfort will tell you to come back and keep checking. But that is not a reason to. It is not something that requires daily or constant commitment, though there may be times in your life where it serves as an essential guidance.

You can only touch what you are willing to reach for. If you desire a profound connection, then be prepared for a penetrating exploration. An untrusting glimpse that is guarded by shallow confirmation is only going through the motions that created the very dependency to keep searching.

The further you look, the deeper you witness. The larger the depth of your gaze, the greater your sense of knowing yourself. As you become more comfortable with being seen, you will release the impulse to recede or reject what is there. Although the mind may still instinctively create stories and meaning, sovereignty will strengthen as you choose to accept and integrate before you intellectualize, interpret, or overanalyze.

The feeling is the measure; everything else is just more. The feeling is your knowing of what is real before the world asks you to demonstrate that it is true. When you are willing to be deeply present with yourself, you learn to validate your own unequivocal truth. You now carry a powerful sense of knowing that is so irrevocably and profoundly felt that you no longer need to see to believe.

To be loved is to be seen. To be fully, transparently witnessed is to be held in the very light of awareness and acceptance.

When you have the courage to invite all of what you see into the full embrace of who you are, whole and complete, you are able to elevate not only yourself, but all that is alive and has been alive into an indescribable, undefinable bliss entirely beyond words.

And if you’re really brave, without breaking your own gaze, speak these words with your own voice out loud and without trying to listen to the mind for confirmation, but let yourself really hear them:

“I love you, and I accept you, unconditionally.”

Learning to look and listen alongside you, SJT

YES, I’m aware this is ‘crazy’, AND… fvck it, let’s go.

^{Oh before we start, it would be rad and appreciated if you please subscribe if it feels right - thank you!}

^{The iconic 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider from CERN}

CERN is an antimatter lab that blasts subatomic particles at each other trying to access different timelines — oops, sorry, to study the universe. Both valid tbh. (Not conspiracy, minus my edit; it’s real.)

They switched it off June 29. And here’s the part I want to be honest about: it wasn’t mysterious, but it was planned. It was scheduled years ago when the collider finished its final run and went dark to start a four-year upgrade. No cover-up that I can confirm but a standard maintenance window.

Which, to me, makes it more interesting, not less.

Because the physics of it is that there is never “no effect.” The system stretches to stabilize under any energy shift. Yes —those particle collisions are massive in the subatomic space and relatively insignificant in the totality of Earth’s and the solar system at large energy…AND they still existed. They are not something the universe doesn’t feel or notice, no matter how small. The ripple effect is not easily measured or cleanly observed and certainly less so understood when considering matters of trying to touch and making contact with the fundamental laws of nature and the universe.

It might not be as obvious or as far-reaching as some Reddit threads, but complex systems don’t respond to change in obvious ways, and almost never in linear ones.

If you imagine reality is a giant web under tension, you tug one thread and the whole web redistributes that tension because every connected system is always seeking equilibrium. Homeostasis, balance, harmony — just like us.

And I think that’s why I’m feeling so ‘off’ as a whole because something really has shifted and I feel it, everywhere and deeply.

Whether that’s happening physically, psychologically, spiritually, or symbolically… who knows. For some of us it’s isolated and precise, and others it’s coming from all directions fast and furious.

The grace I’m clinging to is that to my knowledge, there is no species on Earth so good at adaptation as humans. The dissonance I feel is the transition between here and there. I am in process, in the gap, in the void - and curiously, that’s ALL I have been writing about recently.

Since CERN powered down, solar activity has been loud. Increased intensity and frequency of flares, geomagnetic noise, the Earth’s electromagnetic environment generally unsettled. Am I claiming CERN caused that? No, but I also can’t claim it didn’t either. I’m claiming that I noticed both, in the same window, in my body.

Recall, you are made MOSTLY OF WATER. So depending on your level of sensitivity — which for me personally is on the high end — what you FEEL is bigger, because your own body is striving to recalibrate.

Sensitive is not bad, by the way — it means increased capacity to perceive.

Humans are remarkable pattern-recognition machines. Sometimes we’re detecting genuine environmental changes. Sometimes we’re detecting changes inside ourselves and projecting them outward. Usually… it’s both.

And look, I'm clearly not the only one doing it. Depending on your digital home, many corners of the internet are currently convinced the shutdown is reversing reality itself. No receipts, obviously, because that’s the point of the editing, isn’t it? I make no claims here but the thing nobody's saying is that the reports themselves are the data.

A whole lot of people, in the same window, feeling the same shift, reaching for the same explanation. That's either the universe redistributing tension… or it's a mirror. I'm not sure the mirror is the less interesting option, either.

TINFOIL HAT OFF FOR A SEC. *breathe*

What this actually means day-to-day

Patience. Trust. Surrender. The right action for right now.

You can’t really do anything about this. But you can manage your expectations and how you relate to it.

NO, this is not a permission slip to let yourself off the hook. It’s a call to adjust and adapt accordingly.

And BELIEVE ME, I’VE BEEN FEELING IT. Last Sunday I could not stay conscious or upright. I wasn’t sick, but I was living an experience inside the brain and body of literally no one I have ever known in my entire life — but here I am. My 17-year-old dog with dementia has been struggling too. So have our grandmothers in the nursing home.

What do we all have in common? SENSITIVITY.

Which again — is not a weakness. Often it’s a signal of strength. But it’s a depleted resource, because that capacity gets recognized and drawn on by the people who don’t have it. No wonder ND brains are always at the short end of it. Give, give, give, give, manage more.

Here’s what I’m prioritizing

Readjusting my standards. Meal planning and being perfect is too much to ask right now, and every discrepancy becomes a hit to the ego — dissonance in the psyche that I’m not living up to who I know I can be.
So: hit protein. That’s it. And no processed food. And HYDRATE LIKE A MANIAC — under electromagnetic stress the cell burns through more energy seeking homeostasis and depletes faster.

Touch grass 2x more than usual. Be mindful of UV — those midday rays are rough right now. But take your shoes off and get in contact with the Earth. Sunrise is best, obviously, and go while the grass is still wet — water is the better conductor to transfer ions.
And YES, get off tech, because it ramps up positive charge in the body and drains you faster. To mitigate this somewhat, I’ve been taking double this full-spectrum magnesium (yes, I affiliate with them, since 2020 because it works, savings code SJT) — 400mg/day split morning and night, and 20mg creatine in the morning for my brain, and 5mg post workout.

Phone on airplane mode, wifi off, unless you’re actively using it. Sleep with it outside the bedroom if you can.

Ideal is turning the wifi router off at night — but not for anything my husband would never, so don’t reach for perfect. Aim for good enough for now. And let yourself nap if you need to, 20 minutes won’t wreck your night.

End the shower on FULL cold. 10 seconds to start, work your way up. Shivering mildly when you get out = good. Do this before 2pm or it’ll mess with your sleep. What you want is to stimulate mammalian dive reflex. aka the brace where you pull breath in and contract inward (sometimes I involuntarily scream) THEN THE MOST IMPORTANT BIT: REGULATE before jumping out - even 3s of controlling your breathing from sharp quick and shallow to ONE extended exhale then leave the cold.
If that’s too much opt for ice face: a bowl of cold water, 20–30 seconds at a time, breathing breaks between for about 2-4 min. Welcome back, dopamine.

Breathing and tapping. Yes, yes, you know. But actually do it. And take a second afterward to actually identify the feeling you’re having and what it might be trying to tell you.

Listen to binaural beats (7.83 Hz) — Spotify, YouTube, whatever. Music HEALS. And honestly, whether the frequency thing is measurable or theoretical or just higher UV and humidity matters less than the reality that vibration is not neutral. Use it to recalibrate. If there’s a sound bath near you, it’s worth once a month if you can swing it.

Sauna, and double your hydration afterward. Take an activated charcoal after to bind to toxins that are released into blood stream so they don’t reabsorb and make you feel worse.

Respond to what your body is giving you. Don’t force. My workouts have been inconsistent messes…then I reframed them as opportunities to improve technique, form, mind-muscle connection, tempo — and I’m winning again. It really is about honoring what you do do, and doing it well, by shifting what you measure.

Check your internal tension. If you’re walking around BRACED all day, you’re preparing for shock absorption. If you’re RELAXED and OPEN, you’re ready — you don’t need to prepare.

If you’ve ever done an extreme sport you know this. Snowboarding: the more tension you carry, the more likely you are to fall and get hurt. The more relaxed you are, the more RESPONSIVE you are to shifts in the environment — because you’re ready, you don’t have to get ready. And even when you fall, your body flows with it instead of fighting it. (Sadly, it’s the same reason drunk drivers walk away from accidents. Don’t be that ASSHOLE tho.)

This is the Letting Go (David R Hawkins) book in practice. And remember, it’s just that — a PRACTICE.

And lastly

Try to have some faith, and I know faith is HARD, but also amazing. Practice the art of surrender and trust.

It’s not supposed to be easy. In fact, we know it’s not really going to get easier — life after a certain point becomes loss mitigation. But that’s not dire. It’s kind of EXCITING, because through it you gain more confidence, more ability to serve, and you get closer to the ultimate creation.

I used to be so anxious it was debilitating. Then I realized: I can either be anxious, or I can trust God. Not both.

That might not be the right fit for you, and please don’t wear it if it isn’t. I don’t believe God called us all to walk the same path and believe the exact same things in the exact same way. Thou mayest.

Similar, maybe, but always slightly different. Your connection to source, to God, to yourself, is your own — and usually that voice that knows exactly what to do is already THERE, just buried under the noise of other people (like me, and these spaces), offering good, but not entirely aligned-for-you wisdom.

Only you decide what’s true for you. As you are now.

Whether this post resonates with you or sounds completely insane… that’s okay.

Keep the practices that make you more present and discard the stories that make you contract or brace (but if your willing, maybe explore that hey?).

And if all of this turns out to be complete nonsense, well what of it, really.

Drinking more water, touching grass, eating enough protein, getting sunlight, breathing slower, sleeping more, praying, and trusting a little deeper still seems like a pretty good way to spend the week.

Personally, you’ll find me rolling, pulsing, possibly even gyrating in some rhythmic swinging mess as I hum, chant, sing to the elements and maybe she is vagal toning while moving bile and lymph fluid, or maybe she was just born this way.

I guess we’ll never know, but part of that is what makes life so wonderful, don’t you agree?

How are y’all feeling out there?

Feeling electric and eccentric — SJT ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

^{In that series, we explored three ideas:}

1. ^{that the self who understands is not the self who governs,}

2. ^{that discomfort in a new place is not evidence you made the wrong choice, but confirmation of real movement,}

3. ^{that belonging is not a condition to stay, but what comes after you learn how to stop reaching for something else}

^{The essays name the what and the why. Here, we look at where and how it’s running in your life, and we start the actual work.}

^{Part one is a somatic audit. You’ll identify where you are reaching instead of staying, and you’ll move past the story about it into the felt sense.}

^{Part two is a targeted EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping sequence that will change your orientation toward the pull.}

PART ONE

A somatic audit is not a list of stressors, complaints, or things to fix. The goal is not to analyze your life but to learn how to observe your experience.

It is an awareness diagnostic that helps you navigate beyond the stuff happening in your life and shifts awareness to what’s happening inside you in response to it.

Its purpose is to identify where the nervous system is still oriented toward a place you have already left.

We begin here.

STEP ONE: IDENTIFY

Prepare a quiet space with writing tools and guard 5–10 minutes of uninterrupted and undistracted time.

Start by taking a long inhale through your nose. Breathe in as much as you can. When you think you’ve taken a full breath in, reach for a tiny bit more by really expanding your lungs to the maximum.

Then softly open your mouth and let the breath slide out of you slowly without trying to measure or control anything.

Breathe again. (Actually pause your reading and do this.)

One more time.

Now ask yourself:

Write the first thing that you feel. What arrives before you start trying to make it make sense?

This is a practice about honoring sensations before editing them into neat or cohesive thoughts. Remember, this is a practice for you alone.

Notice what is actually there when you stop performing every layer of identity that you’ve built in the external world.

What stays with you when let it all go and just stay with yourself?

If this feels uncomfortable, good, that’s a signal that you’re getting a glimpse of whose still there, underneath it all. And it’s normal to rush from the discomfort of seeing yourself by jumping back into character.

This is not something you need to witness as a measure of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are at the practice, but notice if you start trying to assess your skills.

This is a practice of creating space and being in that space.

You cannot be in the space in any evaluative way without some former orientation to somewhere else. In the space, you are just there. There’s no measure, just you staying with yourself in the space you can hold.

Being in more space for longer is not better than being in less space for shorter. The quality of the space and time is not conditional on the traditional metrics, but rather the intention and desire to allow yourself to be yourself is the only goal.

If this feels weird, that’s normal. Exhale your judgment for not ‘getting it’ right away. There’s nothing to get and there’s no where to go.

Breathe.

And ask yourself:

Write what you honestly feel. It doesn’t need to make sense and it’s okay if it surprises you or has no context.

Notice where your attention keeps going when it leaves the room you are actually physically in. Where are you trying to go?

Stop forcing a dramatic expectation and stop editing to make it more than what it really and honestly is. The reach is rarely revolutionary. It is often very ordinary and mostly automatic:

• Thinking what it’s like right now, how’s the weather in the place you left.

• What time is it? How much time has passed?

• Imagining the experience of being on that beach, at that party, in that life you are not living.

• Rehearsing the conversation with somewhere not present now and revising what you could have said.

• Romanticizing a version of yourself that you keep returning to because at least you knew how to be that person.

Write whatever comes up first. Where do you keep trying to go?

You can be entirely committed to a decision and still feel your body preparing to go back.

That’s why this question is harder than it looks. The mind wants to defend the choice you already made. Instead, the goal is to notice where the nervous system is still orienting. Not the story about it, but the reach itself.

The most common resistance is answering from the head instead of the body.
A few common scenarios:

A. You might defend your decisions instead of describing the pull.

“I know I made the right call.”
“I don’t actually want to go back.”

Both can be true, and the reaching is still happening.

B. Or you might minimize it.

“It’s just nostalgia.”
“This is normal, it will pass.”

Yet your attention keeps returning to it.

C. You might immediately jump to the external:

“Everything around me is harder than I expected.”
“Everything is so different.”
“I miscalculated.”

You might notice a mix, a flash of feeling muddled with rationalizations.

Try to release the common sense explanation your brain wants to find and really sit into the question: where are you still living, if not here?

A useful sign that reaching is present is when there is a strong urge to explain why the old place was better, or to prove to yourself that you were right to change. Both are the same reach, in opposite directions.

The honest answers are often much simpler than expected. For example:

This instinct to check social media as an escape from where I am.

This lean forward, always, like I’m about to be somewhere else.

This rehearsing of what I’d say if I went back.

This bracing, every time something here doesn’t match what I pictured.

Most people don’t struggle to find the answer. They struggle with allowing it, because naming the reach often comes with a judgment or evaluation where we label something in us as wrong, bad, not enough.

It isn’t. Keep going. In a world increasingly full of places to spend your attention, learn to pay attention to yourself.

Your attention is a valuable resource. And attention is not just what you give to the world, but it’s what you use to build an inner world.

If you lose the ability to be alone with your own mind you will know a lot about the world out there while understanding very little about the world within.

STEP TWO: INHABIT

Take a moment to read your journal and process what you’ve just identified. Close your eyes for a moment, take a breath, and bring to mind without jumping into explanation about what you just named. Just bring it to the centre of your focus and hold it there.

Then being awareness to your physical body and ask yourself:

Don’t try to locate it in your mind. You don’t need to be able to name the place or even describe it. Try to be an observer of what sensations your body experiences when you think about the pull. Sit into the feeling and explore where in the body something shifts when you search for it.

A pulsing tug in the back of one shoulder. An ache in the elbow. A lean forward in the chest. A twitch in the finger. A tightening at the base of the throat. A hollow under the ribs. A restlessness in the legs.

There is no wrong answer. The body is always responding, even when the mind says I’ve made my peace with it.

Ask:

Where do I feel it?

Do not try to describe what it means, just record how it feels, just the raw sensation.

It may be in one place or multiple places as the body rarely experiences things in a single location. Let yourself map it without simplifying it.

Ask:

How long has this sensation been here?

Is this new? Did it come after the crossing? Or is this the same pull you have felt in every new room, but recycled through this one?

That last question is deeper than it appears.

A pull that arrived with this move is telling you something about this move.
A pull you have carried into every room you have ever entered is telling you something about you.

Once you’ve located where and how it shows up in the body, there’s one more question that does most of the work in this practice and it’s also the one most people skip.

The rest of this practice is available to paid subscribers inside The Studio, the paid practice space of Strong + Sovereign. Subscribe below to unlock the full audit + tapping sequence.

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You know yourself deeply and still can’t get out of your own way.

You have done the work and yet you remain blocked.

It’s not a lack of awareness.
It’s not a story that keeps you stuck.
It’s not a shortage of understanding or preparation.
It’s that you continue to think the way forward requires you to do something when it simply asks you to be.

You block yourself by what you do. And you do a lot.

You keep adding to a collection of saved posts of what you want.
The baby blue Porsche with the tan interior.
The eclectic home filled with curated paintings tucked up beside the ocean. That amazing dress from that designer who just knows a woman’s body—how great you would look in that dress!
The endless exotic vacations you greedily ogle past your bed time as you slip into restless dreams of rehearsed visualizations of how you think it will feel to be there, with all that.

You mistake the absence of a feeling for evidence that you’re in the wrong place.

When you can’t go forward fast enough, you end up reaching back.
You still check the weather in the place you want to be, the one you just left. Not the one outside the window you avoid because it’s jarring to face such a different reality. You look back at the one you keep a second clock for, the place with the rain you can still feel.

You romanticize what was and inflate the old feeling until it outruns every reason you had for leaving it.

Your body starts making subtle preparations to move again. Long before your conscious mind is aware, your nervous system primes a return to the familiar by rehearsing old routes, reaching for old habits, and relying on predictable patterns of a life you thought you left behind. Without actually agreeing to it, you’ve begun orienting toward the door your conscious self swore it was done with.

Without letting yourself land where you are, you are persistently pulled by the expectation that arrival will deliver certainty or peace. You believe if you could just reach that final destination or achieve that finished state you will finally feel what you think it takes to let yourself be in your life.

But there’s nothing to get and there’s nowhere to go.

•••

Instead of enjoying where you are, you trace the old limitations over the new space and hesitate at imaginary edges because freedom still feels like trespassing.

You lean forward only to check back. You can see where you want to go, but something stops you from continuing to move toward it even after crossing the threshold that brought you here.

Although you are not in your former conditions, the old sensations from the past echo with a continuity that restricts you in the present.

You freeze despite all reason, and even desire. You live like the dog who stands in the yard with their head down exactly two steps over where the invisible fence used to be, the electric collar long removed.

You are able to move forward, to inhabit more—but you don’t. You know everything you need to know, more even, and still can’t get out of your own way. Your constraint is gone. Nothing is stopping you now but you.

There is an invisible tether to an internal story that still insists on being true. The world is no longer drawing any lines—you are. The conviction that you will always remain who you have been becomes so self-generating that it no longer needs validation from reality because it now enforces itself.

You hauled your block all the way to the new space, and were still surprised when you gravitated toward it. It was you who brought it here. The block is a myth that’s only maintained by the habit of stopping yourself right at the edge of everything you actually want. It’s not held by anything other than your commitment to carrying it.

You’ve done everything right. You got to where you want to be, but it doesn’t feel the way you thought it would. It’s not familiar yet. And soon you find yourself subtly drifting back toward the door. The real threshold, the one you worked so hard to cross, that opens onto the hallway where you swore you don’t want to return.

You are frustrated because you know better, yet here you find yourself, retracing your steps, slowly erasing progress as though you are reeled back by a version of you that won’t let go.

But nothing is actually pulling you. The magnetic tug is really a default to the part of you that has yet to fully release the old allegiance. The truth is you don’t yet know how to be yourself here so you recite the old internal rhythm that leads you back to where you just came from.

You have moved but you feel held back by the old world not because anything is actually holding you, but because you never untethered yourself from the thing that did.

You know better, but your authority is still coming from the one who narrates your life instead of the one who lives it.

And here, you learn the self who understands is not the self who governs.

You begin to govern the moment you stop letting what used to be true decide what you do next. It’s when you sit inside the tension of the formless state while it’s still developing into shape and decide that not only will you stay in that discomfort, but you will actually allow it.

It’s the courage to remain in this reality longer than the memory of the old one.

•••

In that pause, you may still feel a nudge to move away, back, to somewhere else other than where you are. Sometimes you feel pulled because you are still attached to an old wound. Other times you are simply registering a new signal, an accurate truth about bad ground.

On the surface they’re identical. Both bring resistance, both insist not now, not this. That’s exactly why the feeling itself can’t be trusted. They separate underneath.

A wound resists because moving threatens who you have been.
A signal resists because the ground is not able to hold the growth yet.

Distinguishing a true signal from a wound in disguise is the work. Life will ask you to move before you know with any certainty. You can’t tell for sure if it’s you or if it’s the place. Sometimes the truth is that it’s both. It’s not easy and there’s no short-cut.

•••

You arrive without the confidence to fully be there. You’ve stepped into a new room only to find it full of strangers and strange conditions. The novelty disarms you. You feel vulnerable, shy, exposed because although you wanted this, anything that doesn’t match your expectation collapses your faith that this is actually where you are meant to be.

Nothing is wrong, but it’s also not quite right. What is it?
You make yourself dizzy trying to find it.

You scan for something you might recognize as a safe place to land and collect yourself. That you might brace yourself against something familiar.

A faint vertigo creeps up the more you spin looking for it because that’s the thing about being fully untethered. When you dissolve the old attachment and release the wound, the same freedom also feels like floating in a void before you learn where and how to anchor.

You exist in a gap filled with uncertainty and crowded with doubt. You recognize where you are but you haven’t put down markers to belong yet.

What is quiet is not absent.

You are physically present but not yet settled into trusting what that means. Your becoming runs behind your arrival.

And so, hovering in the middle of what you wanted, you settle on the one conclusion that can quickly get you out of the grey: the feeling is wrong, so the place must be.

You don’t immediately declare it but you quietly decide: I don’t belong here. This was a mistake. I want to go home.

But the discomfort of arriving in a new place without knowing how to be there is not evidence you made a mistake. The mistake is making a verdict before the experience has finished landing.

You decided you made the wrong move because you couldn’t sense how you belonged to it. But you can’t belong to where you haven’t been.

What’s absent isn’t missing, it’s just not accessible until after you stay.

Yielding to the impulse to explain before you understand is how you misinterpret what’s fully there.

The real wrong choice is what you do after you can no longer tolerate feeling so foreign. It comes either from reaching back toward the old door, or from rushing to collect and define the space—to curate false understanding before you’ve lived in it.

The gap is its own threshold you must endure if you want to stay. One you have to learn to survive despite the instinct to see it as a problem to solve.

But you cannot simply wait for evidence to arrive, you have to be there long enough to find it. The proof doesn’t come from waiting, it is on the far side of the staying.

What you seek is never going to meet you at the door. You have to put your feet down onto what’s not steady and participate in it enough before you can know. Arriving only confirms that you are somewhere new—living there confirms if it’s right.

You keep telling yourself, “I’ll know when I belong here.” But you have it backwards. Knowing comes much later, never first.

Discomfort is not evidence of a wrong choice, but confirmation of real movement.

•••

The desire to leave does not mean you made a mistake, and neither does it make you wrong for feeling it.

Lack of conviction is not a personal deficit but a territorial one.

Moving across the threshold from your old life to your new one cost you the stability of what was familiar.

You’ve stepped into the new room but part of you hasn’t finished processing that crossing. The change in you follows the change around you.

Even change that you choose doesn’t always feel good, and there’s nothing wrong with you if you notice that.

Expecting to seamlessly transition from one world to the next and instantly regain your composure from your own rearrangement is what makes it feel like failure.

Before you can measure what you’ve gained, you’ll notice all you lost.

Crossing is the moment of faith. Staying is the longer work of courage. You don’t stay because you feel like you belong—you stay, and belonging follows.

Courage is the resolve not to harden into a single, finished self. It’s the willingness to stay unfinished.

The goal is not to become someone without blocks, but someone who stops organizing a life around removing them—a life that is no longer one long sequence of striving through various stages of becoming. The aim is not control over identity, or even the discovery of a truer one, but the capacity to participate more than you manage.

This is where sovereignty parts from self-help and self-knowledge.

Self-help asks, “Who should I become?”

Self-knowledge asks, “Who have I been?”

Sovereignty asks, “Who am I choosing to be today?”

Sovereignty is the capacity to live from where your life has already arrived—faithful to present reality rather than a memory of the past. It is what governs a life no longer led by the voice of fear, but by the one who actually lives it.

And from that authority, the door stays available. Leaving again is not an escape or self-sabotage, but a fully chosen act, once the room has done its work.

Sovereignty is not a refusal to ever leave, but a refusal to let the impulse to flee decide for the whole self.

^{The series gave you the why. The Studio is the how: the practice that pulls you through by overriding understanding entirely. The discipline of living what you know is now available for paid subscribers. This is the way out of the paradox that trying to think your way out created.}

^{Learn the work of Staying with yourself here.}