no filter

When I write I often write it’s often from a place of

1. needing to get something out of me, out of my head, catharsis

and 2. needing to reframe something in an optimistic way that elevates and informs and helps others

The latter is a pure and delightful intention but I think sometimes it holds me back.

I am an inherently enthusiastic person, I gravitate towards seeing the bright side, but sometimes that deters me from feeling the depths of the shit first, if at all.

I always want to tie things up nicely, with a neat little bow, in a picture perfect package. But life isn’t about knowing all the answers.

We’ll never have all the answers, we’ll never have certainty at all for that matter, our brains just like to convince us otherwise to feel safe and secure and in control.

I’ve written before about perfectionism holding me back from ever publishing this blog, but perfectionism often still prevents me from sitting down to write.

It whispers in my ear ‘I have nothing to say’ or rather ‘I have nothing of value to say’.

It tells me that no one wants to hear me ramble on about the inter-workings of my intuition and the multitudes of my un-worked-through experiences. It repeats ‘I haven’t had enough life experience to share stories that will entertain, inform, guide’.

Maybe I’m not here to guide right now.

Maybe I’m here to make you feel less alone, to provide comfort or a laugh at the messy nature of my mind I decided to make a space for online. Maybe I’m hear to shine a light on the reality that rejoicing in aesthetic pictures and aesthetic social media content is certainly no marker of how aesthetic your insides are.

When I sit down and write without a filter, without trying to weave a story arc, without even thinking about publishing it— that’s when I’m at my best. That’s when my writing feels the most authentically me, the most cathartic.

But the stories on loop remain relentless: no one will see this as real writing experience, no one cares that you can brain dump and post it on the internet, your grammar is terrible, this isn’t getting you anywhere…

Oh how the mind likes to race to figure out where this (insert any obstacle, situation, feeling of resistance) is going to get me.

Oh how the brain runs to figure out the future when the truth will always be that its predictions are as limited by its past frame of reference as they are limiting to its vision of the future.

Operating beyond the instruction manual of the mind is where I feel the most alive. That’s not to say I don’t see the value of using my brain it of course has its time and place, but my intuition, a lost art silenced by incessant thinking, has been drowned out for far too long. I’m on a journey to hear it again, to tap back into that voice that is so much deeper and so much more me than the chatter of my mind.

I had a thought on the train yesterday, after I’d been out on a long walk and settled my mind not by filling it with another podcast episode but by listening to frequency music that relaxed me enough to receive some insight.

There will never be ‘too much’ content, nor too many creators because how something is expressed through the unique lens and consciousness of any individual at any given time will be received differently by each person who hears it, on different days in different moods at different chapters of their story.

I think back to some of the content I consumed years ago that resonated so deeply with me and simply doesn’t land anymore. I think of past versions of me stuck in low self worth and self deprecation and old narratives that would not have been able to digest the content I consume now.

I’m sure the future versions of me, or even the version of me tomorrow will receive ideas differently and extract something else from their messages based on a whole funnel of factors and conditioning some I am conscious of and some that are impacting me deep beneath the surface.

I love to get existential, I love to dive deep into the spiritual, the woo, the ‘doing the work’ to expand and evolve and experience —but too much of anything, even a good thing, misses its potential to move people when it comes from a place of force or hidden agendas.

I want to lift people up and create content and speak from a place that brings people closer to themselves but that doesn’t always mean saying the comfortable thing, that doesn’t entail having all the answers, that often means communicating the things people might not want to hear. Not just for the sake of sharing but for insatiable need to get the ideas out of me when I feel them bubbling up inside. I know I am someone who can say it from a place of compassion.

Sharing doesn’t equate to teaching, that’s something I’ve struggled with wrapping my head around for a while now.

I can still share in ways that resonate and bring value to people that don’t involve instructing or speaking from a place of i’ve been through it and here are the tangible steps of what I’d do now that I’m on the other side.

I’m still in the trenches.

I might change my perspective, opinion or how I show up tomorrow, and that’s okay, that’s important actually, because at the end of the day my intention is always to get back to feeling like me and that is a fluid process. Stagnation and resignation to one way of thinking or one way of being don’t fit there.

So maybe its not about me not sharing because I have nothing to teach, that’s an excuse and a limitation I’ve allowed myself to live in that’s only prevented me from putting myself out there. Maybe it’s about talking and letting it land with whoever it needs to land with.

I don’t believe I’d feel so called to write and speak and share if it wasn’t meant to resonate with someone. Just one person.

I know I want to help people and I know I’m on the road to building a consistent thing that will.

I just don’t know what that looks like yet and I am learning to be okay with that.

Maybe it means I just need to keep writing until I realize writing isn’t the thing, and not feel so broken up or bogged down by that conclusion.

But even in that I’ll gain more clarity towards what is the thing then I will sitting around wondering what would happen if I just got over all the limiting stories, writing through it and letting it land with whoever reads it.

We’ll always have aforementioned reason for writing #1 Catharsis is clarity, maybe that is enough.

Enough is enough only when I decide so. Only when I accept not every thing gets wrapped up with a bow on it, we keep growing, we keep evolving, our work and our worth and our way of doing and being does with us.

Any other way would be so boring.