Towards a life outside the rules: A note of encouragement for a tough day

Dear you,

I know you're feeling today like you want to burn it all down. Like nothing's working, like it's all so hard, and you just want a clean slate. There is so much to clean up, whether it's the house, the kids' emotions/schedules/homework/etc, your relationships, the income-generating work, your business, your money, the garden, the world in general. There's so so much. And yet your time gets consumed by the conveyor belt of daily activities that keep our lives running. It feels like there is no time to even figure out how to turn enough attention to the problems to figure out the simple tasks, the low-hanging fruit to address them that could be added into that conveyor belt of to-dos.

I know it feels pretty terrible. Today, the tears feel especially near (watch out world, any little thing might be the trigger to invite those tears out today!). But here's the thing I want you to remember: you are a brilliant, caring, committed person building a body of work (even if it's still in thought phase, not tangible yet) who is in survival mode during a challenging era. Of course you're prioritizing your kids' needs right now - this is your very top value. Of course you're continuing the work you're totally burned out on - this represents a form of safety during a really uncertain time in your own life and in the world in general. Of course you're building relationships via small moments in passing, rather than reaching out to plan activities together - this is what you have fuel/capacity for right now. None of this means that you're failing. You're actually doing an incredible job of being a human in a world that offers less and less support with more and more ambient, ongoing unknowns.

And of course you're yearning for something else - you have lived experience and awareness of your power to create and build positive things that can address what's messed up in the world. But what if the intensity of that yearning for something else is not about the pain of the stuckness of this moment, but actually reflects your deep inner certainty in your power, your potential energy... (which, when it becomes kinetic energy, watch out world)! Your brilliant body already knows that power is there, and it wants to let it out in a concentrated, purposeful form (not this dissipated form distributed towards the conveyor belt needs), it just doesn't have a clear path for how to do that yet.

So I wonder... What if this period of not creating anything tangible is not a "rest" or "latent" phase, but a reorganization phase? You have the core skills, talents, and agency to do amazing things. But you also have deep awareness that operating within our current capitalist/patriarchal/achievement-oriented/hustle culture systems is JUST NOT WORKING for you (or for many, many others). What if the components of your inner power machine need to be disassembled and put back together in novel ways, in ways that work for humans. Right now, you're in the "tinker with the pieces" phase, and there's a lot that's not working as you re-build. That's okay, that's the way it's supposed to go. Assemble, test, disassemble, try again. Did you even realize all of this is happening simultaneously while you're also managing the daily to-dos rolling off the conveyor belt?

From this perspective, you're doing an incredible job. You're challenging paradigms while also living the very real struggles that come from breaking down the systems we've grown up in. You're exhausted and worn-out, and that makes complete sense. You are doing big, no, HUGE things. Keep going. Keep tinkering in the small moments (and recognize that you're doing it already, you don't need to add anything other than trust in your instincts). That moment when your inner power generator and creative machine come together is going to feel like flying. You're already headed there.

With love,

Me