I wrote this to myself today:
“Progress can be known without needing to be proven”
Lately, I’ve realized that my tolerance for stress has been higher than I thought possible. Two international trips in four months, managing and growing my business, reorienting my identity, my life (the ways I thought things would turn out versus how they are), sleeping less, and working long days into the night have become a testament to all the progress I’ve made, how I can show up in the world now thanks to the work I’ve done for my mental and emotional health.
I’m not fragile in the ways I used to be, when my heart and head were so sensitive. I’m proud of my sturdiness, in total opposition to how I used to be, when I wore frailty like a childhood security blanket. Where life seemed sharp, exhausting, and overstimulating before, it offers brightness and vibrance now, inviting me into it. My capacity to function confirms the distance I’ve traveled.
I wonder when I will tire of this pace, yet all I feel now is a hunger for more.
And …
I notice the fleeting thoughts between the joyful ones:
“You can handle this much. Why can’t you handle more?”
“Finally, now you’re worthy.”
“Now, you’re good enough.”
I am aware of my habits.
My habit of pushing harder and harder. My habit of assigning value to striving. My habit of associating suffering with growth. My habit of finding symbolism where there is none.
The inversion of these habits is the belief that slowness is valueless, a habit of becoming uncomfortable in stillness. To fear I lack worth beyond production and believe I cannot be affirmed in the wholeness of my being exactly as I am.
I notice myself becoming enamored with my ability to persevere.
Now I wonder what will happen when (not if, because I am in a season and all seasons pass) my energy falters, and my capacity shrinks again.
Will I remember that what I do has and will never dictate the value of who I am?
In my last essay, I wrote about love. Now I recognize why it was so easy to write then.
It is easy to love myself at my best—loving myself in my shining comes naturally.
I wonder how I might remember to love myself at my worst.
How do I remember to love my weaknesses, shortcomings, failures, and inadequacies in equal measure to my thriving?
What praise can I speak in those moments when my tongue is so familiar with a language that disproportionately celebrates doing over being?
I have more questions than answers; here are some of them.
How can I detach my “self” from success?
I take success personally, as if I don’t live in a world of coincidence, chaos, and co-creation … as if I have so much control. What would it be like to experiment with receiving, staying still to see what comes in when I stop chasing? So much of my worth gets tangled in what I assume my direct action creates.
What if all this—success and failure—is wildly more subjective and random, the energetic exchanges becoming equal in ways I can’t imagine?
What if my “self” has much less to do with success than I convince myself it does?
How can I reorganize my measuring?
What if I reassigned value to my ways of being?
How could ten hours of rest, reading, writing, and softness be valuable to me in the same way I’ve learned that performance is?
Why is this so difficult for me to do? Why does it still feel indulgent and luxurious to reorient what I value?
And then there are the false equivalencies, that rest deserved is predicated on effort extended, an imagined scale I’m constantly checking in with to ensure I dole out softness and restoration in lesser measure to effort, as though I can only earn rest.
What would it look like to throw out the whole fucking scale?
What if I stopped trying to reframe rest as productive?
I remember hearing about an article (or watching a show?) where Europeans found Americans very strange in our commitment to drinking water, how we make something simple so utterly competitive, the peculiar way we gamify daily ounces, as though it makes us superior. (Google “american european water debate” to see what I’m talking about.)
These things like water, self-care, and rest are commodified—“clean living” as a performative aesthetic—transforming the practices and products of gentleness: candles, yoga, baths, athleisure wear, exercise, and meditation into means for a more productive end, as though these things are only worth doing if they make you more, more, more: I rest now so I can be better tomorrow.
(Side note: this is not a commentary on anyone who supports or promotes rest and self-care. I’m speaking from my commodification of care, which I see as an undercurrent of our collective and my individual contradiction. I don’t have any answers, so I can’t claim where the errors lie, nor do I wish to.)
I sense that this equation keeps me in the same paradigm. If my permission to rest is predicated on increasing my performance, slowing down now to speed up later, aren’t I still playing the same game?
A game that is unloving, a game that is finite, a game in which I do not celebrate myself in my being and only in my achieving.
Can I honestly practice love if even my resting is a performance, an optimization, where pleasure is earned, and softness requires pain first?
Can my desire to show up more in the world coexist with my willingness to care for myself independently of that desire?
How do I separate the two?
Do I need to?
These are the questions I’ve been asking myself.
I know I can only find them in practice—practice that, I’m realizing, feels scarier than I was aware of, keeping myself busy and buzzing in the last few months as I have.
What are your questions? What are your answers?
I would love your ruminations and ideas, your reflections, and thoughts on these questions.
Share about your relationship to rest and performance, care and creation.
How do you disentangle yourself from the external measures of the world?
Do you believe it’s possible to separate loving yourself from optimizing yourself?
Do you think it’s worth it to try?
Let me know. 🩵