10 things I've been telling myself

Short & sweet reminders

If you can picture it, I’m writing this newsletter on the couch, Alfie’s head is resting on my shoulder, he’s snoring, and there may be drool accumulating but I can’t turn my head or else he’ll wake up and leave.

I’d take a photo and show you, but I don’t have my phone near me, and getting it would also spark the risk of him leaving.

The things we do for love.

Alfie is my dog, by the way, in case you’re new here. I just re-read that intro if you were to assume it was a man, and it has a whole new visual.

Here are some things I’ve been reminding myself lately. Things I forget, and then remind myself of again, whether it’s as a mantra in my mind or sitting down with a journal and spelling it out for myself. I hope at least one of them strikes a chord:

10 things

1. Just this. Let’s kick it off with the shortest and most annoyingly simple one. When my mind has been riddled with fears, to-do’s and emails I responded to in my head but forgot to actually send — just this. Can I come back to what is happening right now, in front of me? Using these words as an anchor return to has been a daily ritual.

2. Focus on what’s working out for you. I notice an immediate and sharp change in my state of being when I overly-consume, even just for a few minutes, what other people are doing, eating, seeing, breathing. I feel wildly sensitive to it. I said this in last week’s newsletter: we’re not supposed to be seeing everyone’s lives. Our brains are not able to take it all in. And actually, neuroscience backs this up. It’s a process called automatic goal contagion: your brain mirrors and copies the goals of the people that you’re seeing and watching: that person you follow from high school, influencers, strangers on the internet. Your brain takes their goal, adopts it as your own, and then anticipates the dopamine you’d get when you achieve that goal. But you won’t, you can’t, live ten million lives in one day, so the dopamine doesn’t happen and you feel behind or disappointed in yourself. When that feeling arises, we can notice it without shaming ourselves for it. What is working out for you? What’s happening in your life that’s exciting right now? What do you want for your future self?

3. It’s just an emotion, not a permanent place. Why is it so hard to remember that emotions are inherently fleeting? When we’re in pain, we get stuck to it and think it’ll last forever. When we’re happy, we cling to it and want it to last forever, and are disappointed when it doesn’t. In feelings of stuckness, overwhelm, anxiety, reminding myself that it’s already on its way out, is what allows it to move through me more quickly.

4. Fuck! It’s fun to say and I think I read it somewhere that it releases endorphins? I don’t know, regardless. Fuck!!!!

5. Quiet gets us closer to clarity. I’m apparently about to launch into the intense part of birthing my book, and it turns out there are a trillion ways to launch a book in the world. No one could possibly do them all. Similar to #2 on this list, it can be easy to get pulled into what others are doing and think, should I be doing that, too? But I wrote a book about the fawn response — the protective need to shrink ourselves, be perfect, liked, wanted, approved of, and the constant need to impress and prove and to never believe that you are doing enough. For me, writing the book itself was the deepest act of healing the fawn response. In order to actually turn in a final manuscript, I had to move through the discomfort of not knowing how it’d be perceived. Wondering, will they be mad at me? Letting messier parts of me be seen, and showing myself that I can be uncomfortable and safe at the same time. The fawn response disconnects us from ourselves. It forces us to abandon ourselves. Accessing quiet while in the fawn response is hard to do, because quiet exists within us. So, in marketing the book, I could easily fawn, look outward instead of inward, disconnect from that quiet, do what others are doing, try to do it perfectly, morph myself into what I think should be doing, but then aren’t I just going against all the healing that the book provided me? While being in launch-mode, I want to stay connected to myself. And I don’t really know what that looks like yet. I just want to name it, and bring you into my process. I believe that when we’re attuned to the quiet place within each of us, we can finally be still enough to access the clarity that we’ve been craving.

1. Someone will care. A constant voice that I battle up against is the voice that says no one cares. Even as I’m typing this newsletter, this voice is trying to pull me away from the keyboard, trying to make me delete what I’m writing. Nothing you say matters. What I say to soothe that voice, I don’t need everyone to care. True impact is having one person care. I like to believe that if an idea is visiting you, in whatever form, it’s because you’ve been chosen for it, because someone would benefit from hearing, seeing or witnessing it. One person caring is enough.

2. Slow down to speed up. It’s incredible how convincing urgency is. When we’re already feeling overwhelmed, urgency will chime in with the most useless contribution of hurry! Time is running out! Whether you’re trying to think of a creative idea, trying to make a decision, trying to move through an emotion, slow down. Ground yourself from your feet, up. Shift your energy away from trying to “figure out” the problem in your mind, and instead grounding your body so the solution can make itself clear to you. And in that clarity, can you let me know why I forget this 5+ times a week?

3. Notice the drama. The drama that the mind conjures about. Endless. It’s wild to witness the places our thoughts take us to, which then stirs up challenging emotions, and nothing in our external reality even changed! The mind just got caught up in stories, we got wrapped up in them, and it spoiled our mood. Notice the drama like you’re reading a script. Step away from it.

4. I can simply put the thought down. As a follow-up to #8, the most liberating practice is remembering that we can simply put the thought down. Put the story down. Put the scenario down. We’re not saying to the thought, see you never, but rather, see you in a bit. We’re not ignoring it, pushing it away, shaming ourselves for getting pulled, once again, into the story. We’re just saying, in this moment I am going to set you down, but I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be with you shortly.

5. It feeling hard doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong. This maybe deserves its own newsletter. When I started writing ARE YOU MAD AT ME?, impostor syndrome swarmed in, as it does, and I was truly convinced that the writers and authors I looked up to the most must have cranked out a final draft of their books in one sitting. I was sure of it! I thought that it feeling challenging must have meant that I wasn’t built for it, that others were “good,” and I didn’t make the cut for that category. But really, whenever we’re doing something new, that voice just pops up because it’s just scared. Doing something new and unfamiliar feels scary to the body, which will naturally bring up resistance, and that resistance probably just means you’re stepping into a reality that’s different than the one you’re in.

That pretty much sums up my mental chatter — thank you for receiving it. It feels so good to be back into my weekly newsletter routine!

1-10, which of these reminders resonated with you? Each of them could truly be their own newsletter, so let me know which one landed the most.

Wishing you ease and clarity, in whatever you’re currently navigating.

Me un-fawning:

Until next time,

♡ Meg