it is the work
There was a time when I felt guilty about the practices my body needed to arrive for the day.
Conditioned by an education system built to support compliant and productive little workers, when I wasn’t pumping out the emails by 9:00 a.m., there was a sense that I should probably hide what I was actually doing. I felt this even when I didn’t go into a formal office, even when I worked for myself.
letting ourselves bend
In watching the storms today, I’m reminded that it is our ability to “not do” that reveals our strength. As the world swirls, we can bravely stand in the midst of all that turbulence and declare this act as simply enough. For marginalized bodies, this in itself is a political action. As Audre Lord reminds us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
success is
We can find the peace we seek when we see there is no there there. When we reach that pinnacle of achievement, when the accolades flood, the applause roars and the dollars pile, the whispers of doubt and fear do not cease. There is story after story after story of this. So, what then? We learn to be with these inconvenient feelings. We feel our sensitivity, entertain that we’re a failure, let our over-active mind tumble us toward every worst-case scenario, and then we breathe.