Work, Purpose, Pandemic, Anger, and Community
Just a little hello during a 73 hour work week
This week is my first full week of work (and by full I mean 69 73 hours… 32 44 down, 37 29 to go!) since starting this space less than a month ago. I haven’t had much time at my keyboard (I wrote much of My Drunk Part on my phone during backstage at The Tonight Show) and I’ve been thinking about y’all constantly! I missed you yesterday! And there’s SO MUCH I want to talk to you about.
I have some more drafts that slot into the Mental Health Homebase that I need to finish: a piece on RAIN (a process used in Internal Family System therapy and in emotional regulation) and a straight up novel on relationships and attachment styles with a shallow dive into several of my past relationships - oh my.
PLUS now that this space exists and conversations have begun in and around it, other thoughts are constantly stampeding through my little brain and heart making a beeline for my fingers so they can start tippety tapping their way through the keyboard to get to you.
But I don’t want to write rushed pieces just because I miss you. Nor do I want to ignore couch Stephanie’s nudge to rest (which is why I came home from work and promptly took a nap yesterday after work) nor her nudge to cook for herself and eat a healthy dinner and pack lunch for work. Nudges I have rarely received before! I gotta jump to attention!
So it may be a few more days until I churn out a more full draft.
But!
There are five four five things on the top of my mind and heart today that I want to just skim now. Maybe we can think about some of them together.
Number One: WORK
This is its own piece. I know that because when I sat down to write this little “skim” of a paragraph, I wrote twenty. I’m not ready to put all of that into the world yet and keeping it short was supposed to be the point so here are the cliff notes for further marination…
The weight I previously attached to “work” sank me. Like many of us, I thought that my work was tied to my purpose on Earth. And if my job wasn’t fulfilling my true purpose, then I needed to change jobs. I battled this constantly. I had (have!) built a successful well-paid and pretty cool career. But I miss creative work and I wanted to help people and so I felt like I was failing.
Until recently. At the suggestion of my coach, during one of our many conversations about this, she said to me…
“A lot of creative people have trades. They are great at the work and they make money that funds their lives and also their creative endeavors. That’s totally normal. This is your trade.”
That slight reframe from “career” or “profession” to “trade” has changed my entire attitude towards work.
Mainly… I don’t hate it anymore.
Because I don’t need so much from it. It is not my life. It is not my purpose on Earth. It is not everything. It is the job I do, that I am good at, and that I mostly actually really enjoy. It is not my source of self worth, it is my source of income. It is not my purpose, it is my trade.
This shift has provided me with two outcomes that I am absolutely in love with:
I don’t get frustrated at work as much anymore. The stakes aren’t so impossibly high. I’m just a little plumber crushing the toilet game. Shit will happen, but I have a shower at home.
Somehow I have the energy to write my little words even during and after a day like today where an 8 hour day turned into 12. I used to find it impossible to write while freelancing and I thought it was the schedule, but I think I was exhausted from the mental gymnastics and soul sucking I was doing more than the actual tasks of my job.
Number Two: PURPOSE
It might sound a little “woo-woo”, but… what if our purpose is just to be on this Earth? To show up and live in the way that only we uniquely can. What is that’s the whole thing?
And/or perhaps living that way leads us authentically to our true purpose (but does me saying this mean I’m still just falling into the trap of purpose needing to be something more than just being?!?!)
Today, I went to work and did my trade. I rode in with a friend and talked about creative projects that we did outside of work and ideas for films. I worked hard and made authentic conversation with my coworkers. I brought my dog to work and he delighted the people around him at the shop. When I got irritable, I took a break and let Cooper run zoomies in the grass outside while I drank a glass of water to take care of myself. During lunch, I suggested we watch the short film a friend of ours made and sent him a picture of us watching it. I texted with some friends on my breaks. I threw toys for my dog. I smiled at some strangers. I waved at some friends.
And now I am here, writing this to you.
Only I could show up in the world in exactly the way I did today. It would have been different if I weren’t there. I crushed my purpose. Fuck! I bet you did too!
Number Three: PANDEMIC
Thinking about work and purpose also has me colliding into the pandemic and what my life would be like today without it. So much of it was awful. We lost so many beautiful people to disease and shitty politicians. And none of this negates any of that.
But three years out, I am looking at my life, and wondering how much longer I would have rat raced before I took a break and had to come face to face with myself and the life I was living versus the life I wanted. Is there a version where I just never would have? The pandemic taught so many of us things about ourselves. It gave us gifts of rest, solitude, confinement. It stripped the padding I had placed on all of the walls so all of the whispers I had been ignoring thundered. Could I have ignored those whispers forever? Would I have just kept adding padding? Who would I be? How hard would I be running?
Number Four: ANGER
A friend sent me this video (will link in comments) about anger today. I can’t wait to dive further into this study. Here are own thoughts on anger.
Anger IS motivating for me. It motivates me to prove people wrong out of spite. Sometimes in ways I’m proud of, sometimes in ways that are remarkably petty, and sometimes in ways that practically don’t matter at all.
But beyond the petty and prideful, anger has motivated some of my most awesome accomplishments. ExtendPUA.org was built on some of my deepest fury. I also knew I could poke at other people’s anger to make them take action.
I have worn anger as pin of pride, something I own, especially as a woman.
”If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” has resonated deeply with me for a very long time. A lack of anger sometimes comes off to me as dispassionate or even ignorant.
I found out as part of my mental health journey that in many ways anger has been a mask hiding deep sadness or embarrassment. It is far easier for me to be mad than to be heartbroken. I lost some of my anger when I allowed myself to be sad.
Anger is also one of my best indicators of what matters to me, what I’m willing to fight for, ESPECIALLY now that I know how to regulate myself. For me, emotional regulation has given me the tools not to “manage” anger, but to peel reactivity and nervous system dysregulation off of of my anger and then to separate frustration from rage. Regulation gives me command of my anger and the ability to DO something with it besides scream (or in addition to screaming). Emotional regulation isn’t removing emotions. No one’s trying to pretend we’re just not angry at anything anymore. That’s not called emotional regulation, that’s called lying.
I’ve noticed how many caveats I’ve felt like I needed as I was writing about anger. Anger is complicated! In breakups, anger is mixed up with heartbreak and embarrassment. In building ExtendPUA.org, it was mixed up with terror and also… heartbreak. Is anger always part of a complicated soup? Is it the main ingredient? Or are all of these other emotions the ingredients to a soup called anger?
Technically, some light research calls anger a core or basic emotion.
Number Five: COMMUNITY
A friend of mine shared slides from this post
in his Instagram story yesterday, after also sharing a really vulnerable and wonderful piece he wrote about his life. That piece was one of the main catalysts for my brain kicking around the life-without-the-pandemic wonderings of Number Four.
If you’re not able to see the post, here are two of my favorite quotations from it:
“I would hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life than gnaws in us all” - Richard Wright
“Don’t succumb to the sinister tradition of isolating yourself - as you witness and greive mass death - as you resist the tyrants of this world. They want you lonely. Who can be trusted to hold you? Stay close.” - @blackliturgies on Instagram
I have been hoarding my words for a long a time. I don’t know what I expected when I finally hurled them out, but the feeling I get every second I hear the faintest echo back is profound. It is spiritual. It is magic. It is the most deeply human experience I have ever known. The smallest whisper holds a megaphone to my heart. My body feels like it belongs in this world. I’ve found my church.
Thank you all for holding me. And sharing with me.
This space doesn’t have to be a one way mirror. I’d love to see you too if you want to be seen.
Either way, I’m so glad you’re here for this revolution of closeness.
Dang it, I don’t know how to write short posts. And now I’m making Hello Fresh enchiladas at 930pm, promising to give this a proofread and send tomorrow.
Work got crazy and I was so disappointed not to be able to proof and send. So NOW here I am at 10:10pm the next evening, pushing the hour I allowed myself to spend here tonight, but also pushing send (scheduled for morning). I love you all. Come play in the comments if you have thoughts.
The video on anger from @headonfirepod: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzT-7VarzQ0/?igshid=MTh5bnYyMXZyMW5qaw==
Read this first thing in the morning, in the dark, after greeting my cat. I loved reading every part of this. Can relate to many of these thoughts, and you word it so well. Love the little dog too . Thank you for sharing - with the pictures and your friend’s quotes.