Unfolding, Unedited

A mess I'm willing to share

Over the two weeks between Substack posts, I collect ideas. Mainly in the Notes app on my phone, scrawled at random times throughout my days when something strikes me.

When I sit down to write my piece, I pull up the notes I’ve collected. Most often, the ideas are disconnected from one another; each exists as its own island, less so connected to another and more so connected to the time and place when it arrived.

Some of the ideas I’m not ready to write and share about yet, perhaps because they’re too personal, or it’s just not the right time, or I’m not sure what I’d write about it beyond the snippet of the idea itself, encapsulated in time on my iPhone. And some of the ideas don’t seem to lead anywhere, like their only reason to be written was to escape my dancing mind. A fleeting observation that maybe hung around long enough for a swipe that opened my phone and a few tap-taps to get it down, just in case it could be something later.

I used to carry around a small notebook; it was something I’d heard other writers employed, hunting and gathering for precious bits of life that could be cooked into stories over a slow-burning fire and a dash of creative juice.

My favorite thing to do using this method of collection was to eavesdrop on nearby conversations and jot nuggets of real dialogue. Two people sitting together talking is never how we fabricate it for the page without listening to actual conversation.

I realized how often people do not answer each other directly. It’s not necessarily that either person is trying to be evasive; it’s just the natural flow of real dialogue. I might ask you how you slept last night, and you might comment on how the leaves cast a shadow on my face when they’re blowing in the wind.

We’re not a direct species, we humans. I think it’s why the question: What do you do for a living? is so boring. It prompts a person into a direct response, a concrete answer, or a phrase that is understandable to the asker, which will satisfy their societal-born need to know. However, as my Substack asserts, most of true life exists in a liminal space, somewhere between endings and new beginnings. Real life is never as simple (or dull) as a job title or elevator pitch.

It’s nuanced, layered, and, let’s be real— messy.

In efforts to draw back the curtain on my creative process, which admittedly I’m not sure anyone will care much about, I want to share the ideas I’ve collected over the past two weeks. Then, I’ll try to connect them all in a cohesive piece of writing.

We’ll see how this goes.

I was recently reminded of Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft concept, so the rebel in me is going to give you one of those. No revision. No second, third, fourth, fifth, tenthousandth look. Just a raw, hot-off-the-press piece of writing, a patchwork quilt draped across your lap should you choose to snuggle up with it.

The last thing I’ll say before I execute a little chaos theory magic is that I am a lover of the random, the weird, the spontaneous moments, images, sound bytes, and experiences that make up this life. My creative process is not tidy and certainly not linear, and it’s conveniently delivered to me in the same form: tangents, fragments, and the unexpected.

I would tell you not to judge, but I kind of want you to. Am I seeing the world similarly to how you see it? What do you notice that is different from what I do? What do you do with the ideas that grace your path? What is your experience from your own middle spaces?

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My ideas as written over the past two weeks in my phone:

Car jacked up on the side of the road with one wheel off

H.’s amazing memory(!!); reliability of memory as a writer

Andrea Gibson’s profound impact they had in their lifetime and beyond

Sometimes I feel like the lines between relationship and work blur

Cotton candy clouds

Moon…I can always find it

When I buried my braided hair in the woods

The friends who hold us through grief

The meditation retreat in Red Feather Lakes in January

Man in Mickey Mouse button-down reciting all the words to the pre-show before the Guardians of the Galaxy ride at California Adventure

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What I’m Learning About Forgiveness (Again)

At a meditation retreat in Red Feather Lakes this past January, I gave myself permission to stop overthinking.

Not just for the weekend, but for when I returned home, back to everyday life. I’d gone into the retreat carrying what I always carry: the too-muchness of my own mind. The lists and questions, the invisible obligations to make meaning out of every moment, to be a good student of my own life.

Mostly, I brought my obsessing over everything I could have done differently in my relationship with my former partner, which had ended 9 months prior. Beating myself up for all the mistakes I had made. I had become a car, left on the side of the road, missing a wheel and waiting for rescue. I wanted someone else to approach with enough concern to fix me, to tell me it was okay despite my obvious brokenness, but I’d had that kind of support for months from the trusted friends and family who held me, who saw me, who really knew me. They had offered permission to forgive myself, to move on, but still, I resisted.

During the few days of silence, when the only voice I could hear was my own, I started to understand something:

I am quick to forgive others, but I am relentless when it comes to myself.

Somewhere between the snow-draped pines and the long stretches of outward quiet, something softened. I stopped waiting. I stopped clutching so hard to the need for clarity. I ceased feeding the fire that I still tended, only to continue to hold my feet to the smoldering coals.

Instead, I let things pass through. I noticed them; I noticed the impulse to tinker with my thoughts, but instead of engaging with them, I sat on my cushion and drank hot tea, letting myself not know. And in that space, the world didn’t fall away; it started to hum louder.

I took a solo hike across the land a few times that weekend, and in my own solitude, I could hear the world waking up. When the snow started falling and swirling, I swear I could hear the flakes as they touched the ground. I became more aware of the shape of Ponderosa pines, the presence of the moon and how I could find it in both the daytime and night, the way the prayer flags flapped in the wintery wind.

I steeped myself in IFS (Internal Family Systems) practices, meeting with my parts and offering them reassurance. It’s okay to let go, I promised.

I filled my journal with intention; I imagined it was a year later and wrote a letter to myself about everything that had changed over the year, everything that I had done better, all that had improved. I wrote about how surrendered I felt, how I had metabolized the loss and been born anew.

I woke early on the last morning, and bundled at a peeling picnic table, under a stretch of cotton candy clouds, I wrote in my journal about forgiveness and the freedom I’d found.

And then I came home.

Somewhere buried in my offering of self-forgiveness was the illusion that I would not be making anymore mistakes that would spiral me back into the depths of my own shame. And somewhere buried in my claim to have surrendered was the fact that I still, and may always, battle with the unknown.

And I came crashing into both of these realities head-on.

Everyday life was not the retreat. There were no vegan meals waiting for me, no quiet room with a desk where I could watercolor each night instead of scrolling.

There was Wi-Fi. There were kids and clients and obligations and notifications. The simplicity I’d found in Red Feather Lakes dissolved into the thrum of normalcy. And without the structure of silence, I began to notice how quickly my old patterns crept back in. The self-judgment, the overthinking, the ache for control.

Recently, I spent time with an old friend I hadn’t seen in nearly fifteen years. As she told stories from our past, I realized how little of it I remembered. Either her memory was exceptional, or mine had gone to shit. I felt a flicker of shame, a fear that my own life was slipping through the cracks.

As a memoirist, I revere memory. I rely on it to shape truth on the page. And yet, memory is unreliable. It is fluid, slippery, shaped as much by feeling as by fact.

But maybe that’s the point.

Each of us experiences life through a singular lens. In relationship, there is no single truth. There is yours, and there is mine, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, there’s a meeting place in the middle. A shared fragment. A remembered line. Like the man in the Mickey Mouse button-down at California Adventure I saw a few days ago, reciting the entire Guardians of the Galaxy pre-show like it was scripture. That moment felt oddly holy.

It reminded me: we hold onto the things that hold us. Whether they make sense or not. Whether they serve us or not. Sometimes memory is devotion. Sometimes it’s survival. Sometimes it’s just what gets us through.

The evening before the one-year mark of my separation from my former partner, I was driving my older son to his theater rehearsal. We pulled up to a stoplight, and there she was. In the car ahead of us.

I don’t want to share the intimate emotional experience of neither my son nor I, but I will say that I lifted my hand to wave. And my former partner waved back.

The next day, on the year anniversary, I supported a client through the death of her grandmother. My client told me that she and her family were going to do a death ritual where they buried their braided hair with their grandmother’s into the Earth.

Later that day, as I was sharing with my therapist the events of the past 24 hours, which were woven with the past decade she was already privy to, I suddenly knew. I needed to go to the forest. I needed to bury my own hair. I needed to keep engaging with all of the rituals that allowed me to let go. This wasn’t a once and done thing that happened over a weekend in Red Feather Lakes.

Because healing isn’t a one-time act. It’s not a weekend in the mountains or a single journal entry under cotton candy clouds. It’s not a decision you make and never revisit. It’s a daily practice. A slow return.

A lifetime of making peace with what is, what was, and what might never be. A lifetime of self-forgiveness.

I went to the woods that day, plucked a few strands from my head, and buried them in the place where I used to walk with her. I cried over the memories, over the death of us, over my wrongdoings, then picked myself up off the ground and finished the hike.

My practice now is to keep writing. I keep collecting fragments in the Notes app on my phone. I let some ideas stay quiet. I pull others into the light. I sit in the in-between, in the middle place, and I make something from it. Not always tidy. Not always linear.

But the mess… it’s mine.

“The more we change, the more we must commit to loving the people we were before we changed.” - Andrea Gibson