Sofia

Endurance 101 (Pt. 4)

In parts 1 – 3 we discussed a few key concepts:

Endurance is basically your body’s ability to delay fatigue.
Fatigue is the result of your body no longer efficiently producing energy (ATP).
Good endurance/conditioning is the result of multiple metabolic systems in the body being well-trained & developed (and thus being able to efficiently produce ATP for longer and thus delaying fatigue… see how it all comes together)
We touched on the AEROBIC system, which supports you in long-duration/low intensities.
We touched on the ANAEROBIC system, which supports you in short-duration/high intensities.
We discussed the fact that while they work together, the optimal way to train each of them looks a bit different (intentional long/easy work, intentional short/hard work, 80/20 split easy/hard)
Finally (in part 3) we discussed the profound importance of having a well-developed aerobic system AKA aerobic base. Basically, sprints and metcons without intentional & separate aerobic capacity training will only take you so far.

Now that we’re caught up on some basic concepts, I want to talk about an often-overlooked aspect of conditioning/endurance: TECHNIQUE.

Whatever you do – run, bike, swim, fight, dance, hike – how efficient you are with the mechanics/movements is a crucial aspect of your durability within the activity. Your nervous system has an incredible ability to adapt very specifically to the movement patterns you repeat in order to expend less energy while still getting the job done.

Take running, for example. Even a slight variation like the surface you’re on (road, treadmill, trail) is taken into consideration by the body as it figures out the “path of least resistance” (path of least calories expended to run). This explains why many people who predominantly run on the road find themselves getting fatigued sooner when they hit the trails – even when the trails are flat. Your body doesn’t have the same hours of experience there and therefore hasn’t built trail-specific efficiency!

This is one reason why you can’t become a better runner just by jump-roping, for example. Even though you could technically train the same necessary systems, build a monster gas tank, and *systemically* develop phenomenal conditioning, it will leave you lacking the movement efficiency it takes to be an all-star runner. In short, you gotta run to run fast, bike to bike fast, hike to hike fast, and so on.

That being said, there is absolutely a place for non-specific training (like hopping on the stationary bike for a long aerobic session, even if your goals are running-focused). That’s a topic for another time.

If you’ve worked in Wildland Fire, how many guys can you think of who were slow on the crew PT runs but would absolutely destroy everyone on the hikes? This is what I’m talking about. Years spent walking up and down steep slopes created movement efficiency/specific conditioning (patterns repeated over and over again). It’s a nervous system thing.

For example, if you’re specifically trying to improve your endurance swimming, *most* of your weekly volume should be spent swimming. HOWEVER, the amount of specific training you should be doing is going to depend on a few things:

Your training experience/history… for example, if you want to be a great runner, but you haven’t been consistently running, it would be a good idea to mix up your modalities first as you build more general conditioning and slowly work up your capacity to handle higher volumes of running. The more conditioned you become, the more specific training you can handle and also the more specific training you might require in order to progress.
On the other side of that, if you’re an advanced runner and your capacity for weekly training volume is now very high, it would be a wise choice to spend some time in non-specific modalities, like doing a longer steady state session on the stationary bike or elliptical in order to mitigate the local fatigue & impact you’d get from yet another run.
How taxing is the thing you’re training for? For example, if you’re training to hike faster up a mountain with a ton of weight on your back, I wouldn’t recommend going for a 60lb hike every day. This will accumulate unnecessary fatigue and limit your ability to train your aerobic system exclusively as well as just limit how much volume you can do per week (you need a good amount of volume to improve your aerobic capacity). Spend some time running, bodyweight hiking, and even swimming or biking as you start to increase your weekly volume.
How measurable is the thing you’re training for? For example, if your goal is to improve your conditioning during rounds of sparring in Jiu Jitsu, it might be very difficult to measure things like perceived exertion or metrics of improvement week to week – which I think is very important if you’re following a conditioning program. So, it might benefit you to utilize more general modalities – like running, elliptical, swimming, biking, jump-rope, etc. and get your *specific* conditioning done on the mats!

I hope this was helpful. If you haven’t checked out parts 1, 2, and 3 – you can find them in the category “Endurance 101” right below the Title of this post. Thanks so much for reading 😊 See you in Part 5!

You’re Going to Lose Motivation

… In case no one’s already told you, or you haven’t already. It’s inevitable. Ask anyone who’s ever pursued anything at all – whether they succeeded or not – at some point (usually much sooner than they’d have preferred), they lost motivation. They woke up one day and before even getting out of bed, had thoughts like “what’s the point”, “you’re bound to fail”, “this is too hard”, “I can’t”.

And at that point, every single person who has ever tried doing anything, has made a decision. Either turn the volume DOWN on those thoughts & keep it moving or turn the volume UP and let them take the wheel.

When you turn the volume DOWN, you are recognizing these emotions as your mind’s natural preference for a comfortable hell over an uncomfortable paradise. You’re allowing yourself to have & acknowledging them, but then you are separating them from your reality. Awareness + separation + action = freedom. In other words, you feel like shit and do it anyway. With time & consistency, the feeling like shit will be less and less frequent. Action can exist in the face of fear (which is all any negativity ever is – it ALL boils down to fear).

When you turn the volume UP on these thoughts, you take yourself out of the driver’s seat. Before you know it, these thoughts are tying you up and throwing you in the trunk as they drive to no man’s land. And guess what? The pain and the fear are there either way… but now you’re no longer in control. You’re no longer taking any kind of action & you’re not growing. There is the pain of stagnation & the pain of growth. They can hurt equally as bad, but the outcomes are very different. The choice is yours.

So, a few things that I want you to chew on if you want the strength to turn that volume DOWN.

Define what perfection looks like to you. Define your relationship to “perfect”. Is it something you’re “striving” for (while truly knowing it’s always out of reach), or is it something you genuinely expect of yourself? If it’s the latter, it’s time to let that go. Perfect is the enemy of good. This idea of perfect will never serve you, consistently make you feel like a failure, and is the reason you keep quitting and starting over with things that, had you just kept taking small imperfect action, you would be SO far along in by now.

Define what good enough looks like, and please get VERY real with yourself. What are some things you actually have evidence of accomplishing most days on a normal week that move you in the right direction? Define your good enough action items — the things that don’t necessarily make you feel like a rockstar, but rather just a normal human doing their best — and respect them. They’re unglamorous and trivial and that’s exactly why they are so important… because they are the things you will actually do.

Now, picture what it looks like to do the bare-minimum. Visualize the weeks where you’re drowning and the best thing you did for your goals was eat enough & wake up on time. Accept that those weeks will happen and promise yourself you will not let them convince you to give up entirely. This is the long game.

Time passes anyway. Pain comes to us anyway. You can choose how you spend said time & you can choose the type of pain you’ll welcome as it pertains to certain goals. Will it be the pain of no change, the pain of coulda-shoulda-woulda (“what if I’d just taken small, consistent action? What if I didn’t give up?”), or will it be the pain of elbowing your way back into the driver’s seat each day, even if it’s just to drive a few blocks closer to your destination?

Endurance 101 (Pt. 3)

Last week we touched on the importance of developing a strong aerobic base if you wish to improve your conditioning. This looks like a lot of long, easy-ish hours in your modality of choice (bike, swim, run, hike, whatever) at a pace you could hold a conversation at.

These adaptations takes a long time to develop (several months, even years) so you’ve gotta have patience, show up, and trust the process.

On the other hand, the changes you’ll see from higher intensity training often happen much faster than those from low intensity training. You’ll see rapid improvement if you started out with relatively poor conditioning, so it may be tempting to just stick with your sprints… But in the long run, this will stop you short of your potential.

So what’s the deal with HIIT training?

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a term that has been somewhat bastardized by the fitness industry in an attempt to sell you yet another shortcut (in this case, to better conditioning) — accomplish more with less time!

Effective high intensity training typically consists of short periods of VERY hard work followed by periods of complete rest or low intensity “recovery”. Most group classes labeled as “HIIT” often have folks rushing between exercises operating at a moderate intensity with minimal rest.

This is not to say you can’t improve your cardiovascular health at orange theory! You absolutely can, and sometimes people simply need to get moving and the energy + social aspect of these spaces is really helpful.

BUT — if you are serious about improving your performance, it will only take you so far.

True high intensity training is crucial — I am not poo-pooing it — but it’s not going to replace your long, easy hours. It’s meant to be layered on top. There are no short cuts (I know, bummer).

Oftentimes people assume that because they felt that pesky fatigue start to kick in at higher intensities (super steep inclines, the last leg of a race, etc) that they should improve the system in charge of high intensity. However, it’s not that simple.

It’s all connected.

If your aerobic system (“gas tank”) is well-trained, you’ll simply be able to do more (faster, longer, happier).

And!!! You’ll be able to RECOVER better from your workouts. A strong aerobic system will allow you to recover quicker from high intensity training as well as higher volumes of lower intensity. You’ll even notice an improvement in your recovery BETWEEN SETS in the weight room.

So, if you want the ability to handle more training & THUS move past your current limits, you have to make sure your aerobic system is in good shape. Try to move past these limits without the ability to recover from more training, and, well… good luck. You’ll be humbled or hurt or both.

Endurance 101 (Part 2)

First, let’s recap Pt. 1 real quick:

ATP fuels muscles & gets eaten up in the process
Metabolism is the process of ATP being re-produced
The body has options when it comes to which pathway/system it will take to produce ATP (we discussed aerobic & anaerobic)
The faster ATP gets recycled, the more work you can do / sec
So, more ATP = more power = more speed

Endurance is the ability to sustain quick production of ATP (speed), mostly through the aerobic pathway, for a long time (harder better faster stronger). This is what people mean when they say conditioning is a “metabolic quality”. Metabolism isn’t just about how much food we can eat.

So, we already covered the two main systems at work. The anaerobic system & the aerobic system. Which system is putting in more work depends on intensity (we know anaerobic is better for high intensity & aerobic has a limit), genetics, training history (whatever you do more of you tend to be better at).

During these processes, there are a few different byproducts produced in the body. I won’t get into the weeds here, but just know that these byproducts can disrupt homeostasis & cause fatigue if they aren’t dealt with efficiently in the body. People with higher aerobic capacities have cells that do a great job dealing with said byproducts (thus keeping the body in its happy place) at higher outputs (they can go pretty fast without a lot of fatigue – and even faster if they’re okay with more fatigue).

So, bottom line – if you don’t have a high aerobic capacity, you might be able to go fast but you won’t get far! And even during shorter events, you’re probably not going as fast as you could if you’d done the work to maximize both systems. For this reason, a common practice is to spend a good amount of time building up an “aerobic base” before incorporating much high-intensity work. Beyond this, you’ll see many athletes roughly adhering to the 80/20 rule (80% low intensity aerobic work, 20% high intensity).

This is all great news – there’s a way! But aerobic capacity takes time to build. Long duration, lots of volume, gradual increases. You’ve got to be patient, diligent, and trust the process. Remember, by training aerobic capacity, you’re teaching your body to recycle ATP via the aerobic pathway. A great way to do this is by repeatedly depleting your glycogen stores (which takes a while, hence the long sessions @ lower intensities). This is why effective endurance training has a lot of “easy” volume. You can build your capacity without the fatigue of lots of high intensity work & thus recover adequately.

If you really want great conditioning, you must maximize your aerobic fitness. You must clock the long, tedious hours to change your body. A lot is happening beneath the surface on a cellular and structural level, just be patient.

If you just read to here, I love you. Hang in there, we’ll get into programming in the real world very soon. 😊

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR PART 3: What about HIIT?

00:00:03

Once a week for the past 2 months, I’ve done an interval workout consisting of 4 rounds of 4-minute sprints at an RPE 8 (gross) & 4-minute recovery. It doesn’t sound like much, but I do some serious mental gymnastics to lace up for it every time. If you’ve ran the 800m in track & field, it’s got the same awful flavor – short enough to feel like a sprint, but long enough to put you in the when-will-it-end-pain-cave. It’s mentally brutal, as your mind is just constantly calculating how long you can keep the pace for.

I usually do this workout on the treadmill because once I set the speed, I don’t have the option to slow down without intentionally pushing a button. It holds me accountable. And yet, I’ve still found a small way to back down: I’ve observed myself several times ending the sprint with 2 or 3 seconds left on the 4-minute timer.

Now physiologically speaking, does this make a huge difference? No. Sprinting for 237 seconds instead of 240 seconds is not going to make or break my fitness – and holy shit I just wanted it to end can you blame me – but it’s bigger than that.

The last time I did this, the image of 00:00:03 on my timer was burnt into my mind. I had a zoom-out moment and the familiar voice of my wiser self said “So…that’s who we’re deciding to be now?”

*shame*

There’s a quote most everyone is familiar with: “How you do anything is how you do everything”. I don’t fully agree with that.There are absolutely times to half-ass things. We all have a limited capacity for effort (sorry, it’s true).

HOWEVER, when I cut corners in areas of my life that I say are priorities (training is a huge one for me), I’m putting marbles in a metaphorical jar that says: A. it’s not as important as I say it is, and B. I’m the kind of person who just wants to skate by.

These seemingly trivial instances of shaving a few seconds here, cutting a corner there (especially within pursuits you’ve identified as “important”) erode at your concept of self. Trust, confidence, & integrity are both built and destroyed by small decisions over time. Your identity (and self-esteem) rests on repeated proof that you are who you say you are.

I do not want to be the kind of person who stops sprinting with a few seconds still left on the clock. I feel most fulfilled (and best about myself) when I show up to my supposed values with presence, immersion, & devotion. I don’t want to half-ass them. I don’t even want to 3/4 ass them.

If I’ve identified something as a priority/value, it’s because I know in my core that it will move the needle in the right direction. I know it contributes to the woman I want to be and the life I want to lead this go around. I am NOT here to f*ck around with EITHER of those things.

You will reap what you sow – even if the crop doesn’t ultimately look like what you thought it would. Respect your values. If something is truly important to you, dig your heels in and give it a proper effort from start to finish. Take responsibility for your outcomes and run like prey ‘til the timer’s up.

ENDURANCE 101 (Pt. 1)

Endurance is your ability to run, hike, bike, fight, you name it – for an extended period of time. It’s the maximum pace/speed you can sustain for the duration of said activity before you get tired and have to slow down (fatigue). Endurance is limited by fatigue. So, the goal of endurance training is (you guessed it): fatigue resistance (delaying the inevitable).

What causes fatigue?

Your body’s inability to meet energy demands (either you don’t have enough reserves or your body isn’t efficiently using what it already has)
Certain metabolites accumulating or diminishing
Reduced motor nerve signal

Your brain is the ultimate regulator of your endurance/fatigue (brain always gets final say). No matter what causes the fatigue, your brain will respond by telling your body to slow down. So, endurance is not just about pushing through the pain. It’s about making sure fatigue doesn’t hit you for as long as possible, (thus preventing your brain from slowing your body down).

SO, good conditioning/endurance training raises the limit of how much you can do before that fatigue signal has the brain shut everything down.

What are you training when you train for endurance?

As you might have guessed, your <3 heart <3 is doing most of the work to send oxygen out to the body. The more efficient your heart is at delivering oxygen, the more conditioned you’ll be (probably). The good news: the heart is a super teachable muscle. You can actually train it to pump out more oxygen with each heartbeat (& thus improve delivery to your muscles & thus delay fatigue).

The next piece of the puzzle is how well your muscles utilize that oxygen once they get it. This is dependent on the muscles’ “aerobic” qualities (also very trainable). During any exercise, your brain controls which muscle fibers are being activated and for how long.

Most activities favor a certain type of muscle fiber, and you can train these fibers depending on the adaptation you want (strength, speed, power, endurance, etc). For example, long steady-state training improves the aerobic (oxygen using) qualities of your slow twitch muscle fibers. Short bursts of high intensity train the anaerobic qualities of mostly fast-twitch muscle fibers.

So, good conditioning/endurance training doesn’t target just one system, but rather multiple systems working together. You have to train each system appropriately in order for your body to become fatigue resistant as a whole and reach your true potential as an athlete. The primary systems I’m talking about are the aerobic system & anaerobic system. They are connected. If you only focus your time/energy on one, you’ll eventually hit a plateau and come up with some bullshit narrative that you’re “not built for endurance”.

Moving on! <3

People who have great endurance/conditioning (these terms used interchangeably):

Can take up and use a lot of oxygen during exercise (Vo2 max)
Are very efficient in their movements (technique that doesn’t take unnecessary energy AND efficient metabolic processes…they’re efficient inside & out!)
Can produce and sustain a good amount of energy/output (key word: sustain (lactate threshold))

One last thing for part 1. Stay with me!

Let’s talk briefly about ATP. ATP is a molecule inside every single cell that holds energy. Think of it like your body’s currency (the more intense an activity the more (ATP) expensive it is. So, the faster your body can pump out & recycle ATP, the faster you’ll be able to go for anything beyond like 5 seconds. So, we want our body to be churning out (and properly utilizing) ATP out like a MF so you can go faster longer.

The body takes two main routes to fuel activity (supply ATP):

Anaerobic glycolysis – great for high intensity because this pathway can supply more ATP immediately.
Aerobic – produces much more ATP, but it’s a slower-process & therefore better for long-duration stuff.

IN SUMMARY: improving endurance/conditioning is about training the different metabolic processes & systems (how your body produces energy to get ‘er done), not about redlining as long as you can every workout*.

*Should you redline as hard as you can sometimes? Hell yeah! But it’s probably less than you think.

🙂

That’s all for right now! Stay tuned for PT. 2 where we’ll cover the science a bit more and also start the discussion of what this stuff actually looks like when applied in real life!

Thanks for being here!

Tell Better Stories

I want you to take a second and think of your biggest, juiciest, furthest-out-there dream. If you have more than one, even better. Don’t be shy. Take a second and just sit with that dream of yours that’s so grandiose it’s almost too embarrassing to say out loud.

I’ll break the ice and share mine:

I want to build an impactful coaching business that absolutely changes peoples’ lives. I want to fill the gaps I see in the space & set a new standard.
I want to work remotely on my own business & travel full time.
I want to speak perfect Spanish, and then learn a 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th language.
I want to get my black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
I want to write. I want to write articles and blogs and poems and stories – but mostly I want to write a big fat book that people besides my mom (love you mom) will read & get enormous value from.

I’d be lying if I didn’t cringe a little at the thought of expressing my dreams out loud without following up with some self-deprecating joke or caveat …like maybe I should at least make a facial expression to let you know I’m not that serious? That I don’t actually believe I could do any of that (hehe-lol-a-girl-can-dream)

Nope. As tempting as it is, I refuse.

Because I am serious and I do believe I can do all of that, actually.

And as terrifying as it is to type out my dreams & allow them to be seen by others – and as outlandish as they seem to me right now – I know they need to be even bigger. I know I’m still putting a lid on my ambition and that it’s all a byproduct of stories I tell myself.

The quality of your life is largely dictated by the stories you tell yourself (about yourself) – and so many of us have shitty stories.

“Nothing I do matters”

“I’m too young/too old to start ____”

“I don’t have the right education so I can’t _____”

“I have bad genetics”

“I’m terrible with money”

“I’m too busy/don’t have time”

“I’ve waited too long/It’s too late”

“I’m not smart/talented/qualified/sexy enough”

“I’ll always be a follower, not a leader”

“That industry is already so saturated”

“People will judge me”

“If I fail, I’ll never recover”

“I’m embarrassed to be seen trying”

Most of us are the loudest voice for why we can’t have or be what we dream of. We are the strongest forces against ourselves.

BUT WHYYYYYYYY?

Your brain is trying to keep you safe & prevent future pain. If you’ve already labeled yourself, decided your limits, and declared (repeatedly) that you’ll never amount to anything, maybe it won’t hurt so bad if that turns out to be the case. If it doesn’t, cool! But if it does, at least you already saw it coming.

Suffering can often be measured by the gap between your expectations and reality. It feels safe to set the bar low and know you’ll never fall short. But you know what they say: shoot for the moon & land among the stars. I know it’s corny, but I don’t really care. The truth is allowed to be corny.

We often develop ideas about ourselves at a young age and just continue searching for evidence to back them up for the rest of our lives.

The first step to changing your ideas about yourself: Air them out. Talk about them, write them down, connect with people who struggle with the same ones. Just become aware. Here’s one of my favorite truths: Shame shrivels up and dies in the light.

Next, assess how accurate these beliefs are. Where is your evidence even coming from? Maybe there are past experiences you can recall. For example, for a long time I clung to the story that I have a hard time connecting with other women. When I started to really unearth that, I could pinpoint an experience from PRE-SCHOOL where I tried befriending two girls on the playground, and they shut me down so fast my little head spun. It was traumatizing, so I began crafting a narrative to protect myself in the future.

Perhaps the beliefs are simply coming from a fear of the unknown/fear of failure. Think about that for a second: Why should we be afraid to be seen trying? Why is it embarrassing to admit you have aspirations?

Picture these beliefs like little devils on your shoulder. They’re popping in and out all day telling you you’re not good enough, life is bleak, stop dreaming that’s cringe-worthy, blah blah blah. You need to put an angel on your other shoulder to go to bat for you & shut that shit down. This means developing new beliefs and collecting new evidence in favor of yourself.

Here’s a very generalized example of what that looks like:

Old story: “I’m not good enough for _____”

New story: “I have the traits necessary to excel at whatever I do” or “I always rise to the occasion”.

Create a list of all your shoulder devil’s tired, boring stories and right next to each one come up with its angelic replacement. Then, start finding evidence to support your new narrative.

Can you come up with ANY evidence that you are (or have ever been) the kind of person who rises to the occasion? I don’t care how small or trivial it is. When did you feel unqualified or unprepared & still managed to get it done? You have to acquire a basis for beliefs that serve you. And guess what? The beliefs that serve you will all boil down to things like I’m capable. I’m worthy. I’ve got this. I trust myself.

You can also find evidence outside of yourself. Get inspired by others. The internet is amazing and you can probably find someone who faced the exact same obstacles as you and still found a way through. For example, “I can’t do X because I have $5 in my account”. Okay, cool. In about 2 minutes I could probably pull up the story of someone who had $4 and still made it happen for themselves.

Let yourself want more in this life. It’s not embarrassing.

I want you to envision your dreams as entities separate from yourself. They’re like these … little guys (if you can’t show up for yourself, maybe you’ll be motivated to show up for some little guys). Anyway, here we have these little guys who are BEGGING you to get over yourself & bring them into being. They exist in another dimension right now (alive & well but not quite here), and they’re saying “LET US IN (to this dimension)! WE’RE RIGHT HERE ON THE OTHER SIDE WE JUST NEED YOUR HELP CROSSING OVER!!!”

These little guys (your dreams) have been calling to you for so long because they are meant for you. If you let them die, they’ll haunt you for the rest of your life. They’re not concrete destinations. There is absolutely no guarantee you will achieve anything specific, but they are signals pointing you in certain directions & they deserve respect. I truly believe it is your duty as a human being to heed the signals, to be patient and diligent, and to tell yourself better stories.

After all, the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right.

🙂

Protected: 02/19/23

For 25: Things I’ll Need to Hear (Notes to Self)

Your most difficult relationships are your most powerful catalysts for growth. They’re like search dogs, sniffing out your pain and exposing it to the light, where it then has the opportunity to reach for a rescuing hand or crawl back beneath the rubble to wait for the next dog that comes to dig it out again.
You can be heartbroken from the right decision.
You don’t have to finish a book you don’t love. My GOD there are so many books out there that will absolutely crack your soul open. Don’t grit your teeth through the end of something that feels like 8^th grade required reading.
This quote by Terence McKenna: “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is how magic is done; by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”
Get your check-ups. All of them. As frequently as you’re supposed to.
Pay attention to your body and use your observations as future guidance. For example, you feel like shit when you have more than 2 drinks. You feel great when you eat spinach and nuts. You feel like shit when you skip meals and rest days. You fall asleep easily when you saw the sun set that evening.
Life is beautiful and you have time. This will still be true a decade from now, a decade from then, and so on.
Community is not an accident. Where there is community there is always a concerted effort to create the space for it. Recognize who creates the space for your communities – who hosts gatherings, who plans the events that you slightly dread until you get there, who has spent years cultivating a place which brings people together and uplifts them? Thank those people.
Keep making the list of beautiful moments. On your shitty days, you will cherish that list as proof of the other side.
You are usually more afraid of the fear that you believe will accompany a thing than of the thing itself. Death, for example.
Most of what you’re chasing is feelings. You want a title so you’ll feel valued by others, you want more money so you’ll feel safe, you want to move out of the country so you’ll feel child-like wonder. How can you get a slow drip of those feelings so you aren’t constantly seeking to escape yourself and your life?
Action is the antidote to anxiety. You will feel significantly lighter after taking the first step, and even more amazed by the momentum it builds. So just write for 10 minutes. Run to the end of the block and back. Put one shirt in the drawer. Read one paragraph. Just take the first, tiniest action possible and then re-assess.
It is a very beautiful and sacred thing to be a young woman growing up and discovering herself. Respect this period of your life and let go of this urgency to arrive somewhere.
Let yourself be mothered by many different people. Sometimes those people will be younger than you. Still, let them.
Love is not a calculated exchange, it’s the highest spiritual virtue. Give it generously without considering the tit-for-tat, the 2-way street, the mutual back-scratch. Give it without exception and entitlement and you will reap the rewards. Love is not a finite resource. The more of the real stuff you give, the more you have. But the thing about this rule is that it only applies to the real stuff. Give pretend-love (the kind that keeps score, that expects the perfect response, that anticipates a big fancy Instagram-worthy dividend), you’ll only wind up exhausted.
Some things are just sad and wrong and unanswerable. They don’t need to be anything else.
If something is torturing you, speak it out loud (even if just to yourself).
Many things are better slowed down: sex, meals, showers, drinking alcohol, frying eggs, growing up, etc.
Life is an enormous, interconnected, forever-in-flux web of an experience operating completely on its own. In the brief moments of truly believing that, I feel I’ve finally been granted permission to feel peace. To experience the web in all its fucked-up glory is to respect the flux.
What you do for work doesn’t always need to be “compelling”. It’s okay if it’s never compelling. How you make money is not the most interesting thing about you.
Actually, you don’t know that you and that one person probably wouldn’t become close friends. Actually, you don’t really know anything. Don’t put people into boxes.
If the idea of not doing something at all is worse than the idea of doing something terribly, that is something you absolutely must do (even if you’re the worst to ever do it)
The truth is always risky. Just because someone doesn’t receive your honesty warmly doesn’t mean you can’t be honest with them. It also doesn’t mean they will feel that way forever. Sometimes people just need time to circle back to what was said with a little less emotionally charge.
However often you’re calling your brother, call him more.
However often you’re going to the ocean, go more.

This Was Supposed To Be About Something Else

“Happy New Year. I’m feeling compelled to tell you this and unfortunately don’t have the courage to do it over the phone.

I’m sorry for how cold I am when I come visit. I’m sorry for every cruel word I’ve ever said to you. I’m sorry for how many times I have completely broken your heart.

I’m sorry that for twenty-something years I’ve withheld the love that you want so badly from me. That withholding is making me ugly.

I’m sorry for being so angry with you over circumstances that were probably crushing you even more than they were crushing me.

I’m sorry I have such an aversion to certain things you devote yourself to. I need you to know I have my own relationship to those things and it’s a story separate from yours and mine.

I’m sorry for rebelling against nearly every dogma you raised me to believe. I promise there are a few of them I decided to keep, and they are the guiding principles of my life.

I’m sorry your life has been so hard. I’m sorry you don’t feel like you can tell me everything.

I’m sorry our relationship has been so hard. I’m sorry you don’t feel like you can tell me everything.

I’m sorry for all the hours you’ve cried until your head split because you just wish it wasn’t like this. I have clocked those same hours and we are carrying the load together.

I’m sorry for the times I’ve said whatever was needed to make you feel as small as possible. . Every time I do it, it kills me too.

All of the above are manifestations of all the big and small ways that I am still hurting.

Sadly this may come as a shock to you, but

I want you to know that when I’m alone at night, or driving down the road, or a Rod Stewart song comes on, that I get pulled under some kind of current in which I cry and cry and cry because I love you so much.

I want you to know that I am in awe of you – that just half of what I’ve seen you endure in my short life (which is a fraction of your story) would probably chew me up and spit me out, grind me into a paste.

I want you to know that you did a good job.

I want you to know that sometimes, despite everything, I’d kill to be in your arms. That in my most terrified, hopeless, crumbling moments I have wanted you more than anything else.

I want you to know that sometimes I see a mother and a child playing at the park and I become choked up with a loosening and tightening sensation all at once.

I want you to know that my own encounters with “God” have so-often centered you.

I want (need) you to know that I love you more than anything, that embedded in the core of my being is something beating like a second heart solely for you.

I want you to know that I am starting to understand this: love is an infinite resource and it’s our job to alchemize it into something that can be felt. This message is my first attempt.”