My solve was changing the way I open the show. Instead of hanging backstage, I started greeting the audience, moving around, sitting in seats next to them, focusing on connection, on who was there. Not who wasn’t.

This transformed my experience from performing to an audience, to performing with the audience. It’s one of my favourite parts now, that beginning connection.

But you know what I also truly love? Full theatres.

I’m touring in Eastern Canada in just a few weeks, and there are seats to fill!

Maybe with you? Maybe with someone you know? Will you help spread the word?

Who do you know in (or near)…

Ontario: Toronto… St. Catharines… Guelph… Ottawa…

Quebec: Wakefield…

Nova Scotia: Wolfville… Lunenburg… Dartmouth…

Will you reach out to them and share this page? https://cheladavison.com/show

If you have a newsletter, social media or a network you’d like to share with, and want images, swipe copy and location-specific links, hit reply or comment and I’ll get them to you!

Thank you to everyone who generously shares this art with their people. I’m so grateful and can’t wait to be in rooms together, laughing, crying, oversharing.

Little by little and then all at once. This seems to be the way of things, be it skills we’re trying to grow, goals we’re trying to hit, or conversely, addictions, afflictions or harmful habits catching up with us.

Midlife is where bills come due, and we see the fruit of what our younger self put their time and attention into. My younger self was always trying to live in a way that wouldn’t leave me with regrets. Trying to outpace regret is one of my regrets. But I have far more gratitude than beef with younger me.

Here are some things that enthusiastic, naive and intensely overthinking, overdoing, over-functioning young woman prioritized that are paying off for me now.

She did things before she was qualified

I did hair before I was licensed, started my first business at 19, coached before I was certified, taught as I was learning, and just went for things sourced from curiosity and passion (and naivety, audacity and youthful arrogance), assuming I could figure things out as I went.

And I did.

I also failed and fumbled. I skipped steps and didn’t build foundations that would have helped. I would eventually circle back around on the places I needed more training, mentorship or structure to ensure I was embodying what I was trying to carry out.

Moving into action, instead of trying to gather more information or skills before acting, quickly showed me where I needed to grow and develop. To self-start and deepen has given me some things I really value now:

Courage to reach for things: New dreams, new territory, putting myself into pools where I may be out of my depth but know that reps will get me across. Because I did things when my inner voice said “who are you to do that?”, now when it comes up, I say “who are you not to?”

Confidence AND Humility: I don’t think I’ve ever believed in “faking it till you make it”. Faking isn’t really my vibe. But going for it until you become it, yes please. I’ve found that people appreciate and respect when I own what I’ve got and what I don’t. I know that I have talent, skill and capacity, and it doesn’t serve anyone to downplay that. It’s also incredibly humanizing to just be real about where I fall short, don’t know something or need help. I understand the impulse to want to hide these kinds of vulnerabilities. Maturity has shown me that revealing them builds trust and invites champions and support.

You just never know: Most of the biggest opportunities that have come my way haven’t been things I could have foreseen or planned for. They came after I bet on myself, showed up and went for things. Doors appeared that I wouldn’t have seen without risking and moving. I trust magic and synchronicities. I can leap without nets, not because they always appear, but because sometimes they do, and I know how to land in myself when they don’t.

She developed emotional capacity

One of the gifts my younger self gave my today self was developing emotional range and the capacity to be with really challenging emotions. To name what I’m feeling, to stay with what I’m feeling, to be able to express what I’m feeling, and to even have a certain kind of neutrality around my emotional preferences, which is hard because peace and joy seem cool, but grief and shame and rage feel terrible.

I knew I couldn’t effectively be with others if I couldn’t be with myself.

I started to relate to emotions like weather that comes, goes, and brings information or wisdom with it. When I started to understand, experientially, that it wouldn’t last forever (which is often the fear), I could meet it.

Sometimes it’s weather you want, nice sunshiny days and peaceful winds. Sometimes it’s big-ass storms that feel like they’re going to take you out.

I learned how to make my being bigger than the weather itself so that it actually has room to arise, expand into the fullness of whatever is trying to work its way through me and then pass away.

This capacity expanded my ability to handle life and to be in charge, not in control, but in charge of how I direct my attention and my energy. When I’m trying to get away from certain feelings, they take the reins.

In a culture where full-feeling women are called “too much” and “crazy bitches” and full-feeling men are called “pussies” and “simps”, it’s no wonder that humans shy away from the full spectrum of our emotional selves. But developing emotional range and capacity not only allows us to fully feel our lived experience, but it gives us more command of being able to navigate our lives consciously and skillfully. Because controlling, suppressing or denying our feelings just pushes them into the basement. What’s in the basement takes control of the whole show.

I’m in a life stage where I have more confidence, power and capacity than I did in my youth. I also have a longer history with my patterns. Working to unravel those patterns and heal wounds that go way, way back can be hella emotionally activating.

This gift my younger self gave me means I’m able to simultaneously move out into the world in ambitious ways, taking risks that activate all sorts of feelings, while doing deep healing and growth work.

This past year in particular has had me excavating, going inward and outward. This emotional range and capacity has helped me know that I have myself, can identify what I need and when, and offer myself grace when I find myself in darker corners.

She learned to love her body

In my 20s, coming out of the heroin-chic ‘90s, owning a beauty salon, I realized that I could either do the gruelling work of learning how to love my body no matter what I look like, or I could forever be at war with myself trying to attain something impossible.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean I feel great about myself all the time. I can pick myself apart. I can look in the mirror and think “whoa, oh no, lots of problems going on there!”, feeling shame and disgust. But there’s a part of me that refuses to believe those thoughts and feelings. Those thoughts and feelings are not mine; they belong to a culture that wants me small, palatable, believing that my body is a problem and a project, spending my time, energy and money turning myself into a product.

NO.

My younger self (I don’t know why, but I’m so grateful) understood the assignment. I could spend my entire life in a battle with my body, or I could battle the internalization of beauty standards and norms that are not on my behalf, that are not on your behalf, that keep us preoccupied and obedient.

I’ve done a lot of work on it. I continue to work on it with every life stage and body change. The anti-aging industrial complex is fierce. I feel a lot of rage and indignation about it while also feeling vulnerable to its machine.

But I did not fight that hard when I was young to recover from an eating disorder, learn how to move in a way that was pleasurable instead of punitive and eat in ways that were deeply nourishing instead of restrictive, to fall into self-hatred now.

I do want to look and feel good, and put energy into that. But my younger self did not work that hard to come into this era to be told to commit a bunch of violence to myself or disappear.

NO.

When I look in the mirror, I try to look myself in the eye instead of whinging about my neck. Instead of saying “you’re looking old, fat and tired,” I say “alright you hot cunt, what kind of shit are we going to get up to today?”

She did inner work with others

I was a personal development glutton, and I’m not mad about it. I developed a ton of self-awareness skills and capacities. But the real gift I gave myself was not doing it on my own.

I got in rooms with other people, and I did work with others in community. People from different countries and cultures, from different generations, from different socio-economic backgrounds. Being with others, doing depth work, spiritual work, inner work, relational work, helped with perspective taking, growing trust and healthy attachment, and understanding and appreciating sameness and difference in humanity.

It can feel vulnerable, scary and awkward to do inner work with others. I did some weird-ass stuff (not to be mistaken for weird ass stuff. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself).

With the rise of technology, and especially post-COVID, it seems like more and more of us spend time on our devices, growing, learning, and developing on our own, engaging with technology instead of being in rooms with each other where we are co-regulating, where we are exploring and risking, where we are sharing, where we are being messy and human and real with others.

Self-help and personal development are often commodified as another way for us to perfect ourselves as products. To self-improve into being rich, happy and hot. Capitalism dressed as spiritual wellness. To me, the whole point of doing inner work is to serve our relating, collective resourcing and liberation.

Doing inner work with others helped me deeply value (and trust) community, connection, co-creation and our shared humanity.

She created from pleasure over pressure

She did not embody or sustain this.

I wish she had.

When I was younger, wild and joyful creative energy would propel me into action. It was so fun, playful and pleasurable. It was also magnetic. This sword had edges. I could easily get something in motion, attract excitement and support, but I didn’t always know how to handle what I was growing. The initial pleasure and excitement would turn into weight and pressure.

Over time, I started creating from pressure. Over the last several years I’ve been unravelling many of the patterns around it. For a few years there I even denied how strong my ambition and creative desires are so I could learn how to rest, winter and rot.

I had some early experiences of receiving attention (and worse), as well as rejections and isolations when creating or expressing from pleasure, joy and eros. I’ve been in a push/pull with it ever since. Feeling, understanding and wielding my creative power, and then being terrified of it. Pulling back, hiding, burning myself out, dissociating from it.

When I create from pressure, it’s being fuelled by some deep and tender wounding. Fear, anxiety, shame. When I create fuelled by connection, pleasure, and joy, it feels like being plugged into an energy source that feels infinite.

I know I need to move slowly enough to identify what fuel I’m using before I hit the gas. That’s the practice.

I saw a meme recently that said: “What if your dreams are manifesting you rather than the other way around?”

That’s what my life has felt like lately. I can see where I’m headed, not specific outcomes but the shape of it. I don’t feel like I have visions for myself; I feel like the visions are courting me. I don’t feel like I’m trying to make the art; I feel like the art is asking something of me.

It feels at once impersonal and deeply personal, where I’m a disciple of the call. Listening and sourcing the correct fuel.

I feel like I’m being asked, once again, to grow, to unravel, to expand, to change, not because I’m not good enough or don’t have what it takes, but because I do. Because something far bigger than me wants to collaborate with me and my energies. It doesn’t want to collaborate with my wounds, conditioning or misery.

It wants to collaborate with my erotic lifeforce, to offer something connecting and meaningful in the world, and it wants me to have a great time while we do it. There are a lot of ways in which I trust myself now. The gifts my younger self gave me built that trust.

Learning to trust myself to create from pleasure over pressure, to do less and trust that I’ll be resourced, to trust myself to move and express and be in the fullness of my creative potency and to understand that while there may be forces or people who will want to extract or feed on that in harmful ways, I know how to protect myself without closing, collapsing or retreating into unhelpful patterning.

How bout you? What glory and challenges are you dancing with these days that your younger self helped set the stage for? I’d love to know.

Love,

Chela

I’m touring in Eastern Canada this fall!

A Little Bit Much is kicking off in Toronto and closing in a few cities in Nova Scotia. Cities and dates are here → cheladavison.com/show

If you’re in the area, please come! If you’re not in the area, please travel or tell your people who are!

Let me know if you’re coming out. Do I want to hang out afterwards? Yes, I do.

You know when you’re subscribed to a newsletter (or maybe you write one) and then the author (or you) doesn’t write in a while, and then they/you start with “I haven’t written in a while, sorry, here’s why…”

I’m always like “you’re good, don’t need to do that, please just jump in.”

But here I am, having been MIA and am about to explain myself! Less so as an apology or to lubricate the re-entry, but more like “whoa, have I ever been in a thing, let me tell you about it!”

So… whoa, have I ever been in a thing. Let me tell you about it!

Also…to all the new folks who’ve subscribed recently…HI! Welcome. Hope you dig it here. To all you rock steady readers, I be cheatin’.

Quick Q for all the creatives, the project jugglers, the artists who play in different mediums or the entrepreneurs with small or non-existent teams: When you immerse yourself in one area of your work/business/art for a while, do you ever feel like you’re cheating on other parts?

I’ve been cheating on my writing practice with a social media project of all things. What?! With that cheap hussy??? Exactly. THE DISGRACE.

I can’t just do things bit by bit, APPARENTLY, so I decided I wanted to produce 300 pieces of content before releasing any of them and then publish 3X/day for 3 months. When I told my small team this plan, the first response was “for fuck’s sake, Chela”.

So, yeah, that took over my life. Not all has gone according to plan, but that’s okay. I built whole worlds. It’s a show of sorts. There are characters.

Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in how deeply I nerded out on creating this thing, and I’ll take you behind the scenes. The time and effort it’s taken are disproportionate to whatever outcomes it’s supposed to produce, certainly, but there were things I needed from the experience, and the breakthroughs I’ve been gunning for are certainly underway.

Not only did I not feel like I had a ton of time for other creative things (I learned how to edit video, y’all, which in my 15 years of making videos I had not once edited one myself), I ended up with a wee bit of writer’s block. Just couldn’t get here.

I used to feel a lot of pressure to keep all the parts moving simultaneously. Not that I don’t feel pressure now, but the quality is different and my relationship with time has evolved. The juggle of creating a service/program/body of work, marketing it and delivering it, usually all at once, was a lot. For decades I did all three at the same time, continuously.

These past few years, I’ve been working on my bat-shit-bananas relationship with time. Also, notably, time scarcity, over-working, over-functioning, and not claiming inner space, creative space, pleasure space—space, just any old space— are themes I most frequently worked with clients on. Almost like it’s cultural or systemic or something.

I’ve been practicing, with really intense intention, not making plans and timelines (SO HARD). But instead, following aliveness, trusting the process and giving myself over to fewer things at a time so I can be more intensely and more satisfyingly in them.

I’ve been working on my time dysmorphia a lot. The outside world continually reflects to me that I’m up to a lot, doing a lot, producing a lot, and it always, always, always feels like I’m behind. I don’t mean behind others. I can fall into comparison traps from time to time, but that’s not my Achilles. For me, it’s how much time I think something needs from me to be able to do it well, or meet the vision I’m holding for it.

My race is with myself, and I’m always losing.

It’s always longer than I anticipated, and the result is always inferior to what I imagined or intended. I always, always, feel like I’m failing or falling short.

That doesn’t mean that what I’m creating, doing or producing is slow and of low quality. It just feels like it. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s excellent. I’m often proud of myself; this isn’t a pity party.

I’ve made peace with the probability that some part of me will always be disappointed in myself and what I produce, and I’m becoming unbothered by that. I think that’s just part of art. It certainly isn’t stopping me from trying and going for things anymore, and I’m pretty sure that’s how remarkable stuff ends up getting made.

Part of what I’ve learned is that it’s this interior pressure that helps create good work. If I can stay with a project despite feeling like it sucks and is taking too long (and even rub my heart in the midst of the anxiety and say out loud “you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay”), while it feels shittier and slower than my idealistic visionary self wanted, I’m still pretty prolific and things do come together in a way that I feel good about (if I don’t let my inner totally-fucking-tyrannical critic take it to the ground).

Part of working with my time dysmorphia has been about letting things take the time that they take, and letting go of other things while I’m in them. Trying to maintain all the things while moving intensely into something I’ve deemed a priority is not a “me problem”. Every ambitious, driven and creative person I know does this. As you build the thing, you need to deliver the thing and maintain the thing and especially as people become reliant on you or are paying you and you have a standard you’re committed to maintaining, leaning into something new, something innovative or growing in a new way can take a lot.

Why? Because we forget to subtract. Or at least I do. And that’s been something I’ve been practicing. If I want to give energy and attention to something, especially if it’s something that’s working a growth edge in me that’s emotionally charged in any way (I feel vulnerable, scared, out of my comfort zone, etc), I need to intentionally say “this thing over here isn’t getting my attention for a while” so I can give myself what I need to be in the new and in the stretch.

I am sorry I haven’t been here in a bit, because I want a relationship with you, because I feel dedicated not just to the practice of writing, but to you as a reader. Would we call it cheating? Or creative polyamory? (You should see what I let happen to my garden this summer; now that’s a disgrace!)

Turns out fidelity to everything is fidelity to nothing.

Wanna see some of what’s underway? The characters are one bit (some have story lines, my dudes. Someone might even get cancelled. Some haven’t dropped yet), but there are other things I’m trying out too. Again, let me know if you’re interested in knowing more about the why and how of it. They’re in these places:

Instagram / Facebook / TikTok / YouTube / Substack

Thanks for being on the ride with me.

With Love,

Chela

I give myself an A- on the assignment, which is pretty darn good.

It’s in the “know thyself” vein.

The better we understand ourselves and work with the material of who we are, the more command we’ll have of our lives. Simple theory. Lifelong practice. Outrageously embarrassing.

I used to think I didn’t embarrass easily, but I might be embarrassed all the time? With a self-ascribed A-, you’d think I’d know for sure.

But that’s the tricky trick of self-awareness. Just when you think you know yourself, the ego and all your dumb little unconscious compensatory and self-protective patterns are like PSYCH!

I like to push myself. But when I do it in the realm of conventional achievement, it’s wildly unsatisfying. Which is annoying because I’ve sure got skills that can be applied in areas that could win me cookies, you know? Not that I don’t have cookies. But my propensity to yell squirrel and go running can leave cookies scattered, a rough diamond of a personality trait that’s taken until my 40s to learn how to polish.

What am I even talking about? Exactly.

In the coaching work I did for the past couple of decades, I used several different change models and developmental lenses, which is an earned authoritative way of saying I like personality tests. Of course, anyone in my field would know that personality types fall under a types lens, and a types lens is just one kind of developmental lens, so more accurate to say it’s an earned authoritative (aka heady and douchey way) of saying I like to nerd out on maps. And words. Clearly.

But really, those maps are only as useful as their application in honest self-location, and then in what to do with yourself once you find yourself. Which is basically my whole life’s obsession dressed in different outfits.

I was into chakras and shit when I was a teenager. My first woo book was Living in the Light by Shakti Gawain. I’d smoke weed and hang out with my stepmother and her witch friends who taught me about astrology and ayurveda, ritual and ceremony, how to rock a shag haircut and use talent and proclivity as a vocational compass.

Tell me you grew up on the west coast without telling me you grew up on the west coast.

In my 20s I befriended a group of intense male philosophers, discovered Integral Theory, injected every kind of personal transformation modality directly into my veins, became an Enneagram zealot and pressured all my friends to learn and talk about their type, which they were happy to do because I’d finally shut the fuck up about Landmark.

While magic was always the fuel, the car I drove into my coaching career was frameworks and change theories. Grown-up professionals seemed to value evidence-based modalities, fine, fair enough, so I tucked the witch away for a while. Before the coaching career, when I still owned the hair salon, but had already started snorting these maps, I was literally drawing and explaining a four-quadrant framework at a dinner party and a man asked me “do you have people in your life you can talk to about these things?”

That’s around the time I realized I should probably go into coaching so that I could stop trying to corner my friends into being interested in this shit and start getting paid for it. That also helped me find friends who are interested in this shit.

Haha! Knowing thyself! A+

So whenever I feel lost, I pull up a self map. I dig into my little bag of tools to locate myself. I’ve gotten pretty good at not pathologizing myself in the process, which is helpful in coming back to centre and determining right action. To know who I am, how I tick, what works for me, what doesn’t and how that fits into this big beautiful world I’m navigating.

But seeing myself clearly is always a challenge.

So I rely on the reflection of trusted others when I feel stuck or circling the same pattern. People who ask, wait, why are you doing this? I’ll send a rambling, disoriented voice note to one of my developmental junkie business besties. We know all our types, our psychometrics, and anything that requires a “birth time”, have excavated our patterns, traded therapists, coaches, courses, book titles, and spells and have developed the kind of trust that when a pal is going astray, we don’t pull punches. Someone will inevitably be like…

“Giiiiiirl you’re disintegrated to 1 and doing that bullshit again, your SOUTH node is in Aquarius, not your North. Go fire up that midheaven 10th house Leo, create in your Manifestor’s closed aura, remember you’re a heretical HERMIT even though you’re an extrovert. Stop with that anxious attachment pattern, your 7th house moon, mars and CHIRON are showing, integrate to 5, honour your emotional authority, sleep on that decision, stop trying to open all the doors for others, walk your pitta vata ass through the ones opening for you and for the love of your Scorpio rising only do that thing if you have the erotic energy for it.”

Whether rational or woo, the gold is in the shared map, in the pointing out, in the loving kindness beneath all of it that says I know you, I see you, I see what you’re trying to pull off here, and I think you can be more YOU about it.

Aaaaannywaaaay…I came here to tell you about this thing I was going to do that I decided not to, which I’ve made some good sense of with all those maps. I have some gems to excavate and share, but I need a bit more time with them. I’ve also been working on another piece of art, a show of sorts. I’m very close to being ready to release it. I want to tell you all about it, but best to show you.

More to come very soon.

OH! And tickets are on sale for my A Little Bit Much Eastern Canada tour this fall. Find the locations, dates and deets here.

LoveLove,

Chela

“I’m sorry I’ve made you cry”, she says to me, warmth between us.

“Oh, don’t apologize, crying is my love language. This is my favourite thing.”

A few years ago, two friends and I started a local storytelling event in our community called Speak the Spark. We gather every two months for a by-donation evening of stories told by community members. Funds go to various Indigenous organizations as part of our engagement in reconciliation, and the ethos that drives the evening is about cultivating connection and empathy through telling stories.

Modelled after the Moth (US) or the Flame (Can), the rules for the tellers are simple: The story has to be 10 minutes or less, has to be true and about you. There’s always a theme, and it’s a blast to hear the way people weave that theme throughout their stories. We’ve hosted workshops periodically to help tellers shape their stories, and sometimes folks get together to practice ahead of time. It’s become a whole thing, and we’re very proud of it.

The hardest part is finding people to tell stories, which surprised me, but also shouldn’t have. As someone who doesn’t hesitate to do a little yap in front of a room, I forget that many people would rather die than public speak. This project is about creating a space for neighbours to tell stories. Not for performers to perform.

This is what’s happening as tears fall to my goose-poop feet, sitting by the lake on a camping trip with a bunch of families from my kid’s school. A story. Told to me by a parent who was an audience member at the last Speak the Spark. One who thought she’d never want to tell a story, but who went home after the event, and one poured out of her.

Turns out, telling a personal story in front of a room full of people you may run into on the ferry is scary. It also turns out that while terrified, there’s a little spark in a lot of people who just need a little nudge. We’re not asking people to polish a performance; we’re inviting community members to find the stories in them that want to be told. We’re inviting people to see what happens when those stories are tended to, even if they never tell them. We’re asking people to consider that not only are their stories interesting, but the telling of them could be integrating or invigorating, healing or moving, not just for them, but for the listeners, too.

My favourite part of opening these nights, besides the cheeky little backstage ritual of sipping tequila with my co-creators, is setting the tone with audience members on how to listen. We’re not just here to be entertained, removed in our chairs. We’re not here to Netflix and zone out. We’re listening as members of a community, generously. We’re listening, knowing that our neighbour is up there doing a very brave thing. We’re listening not as separate selves, but as co-weavers of a culture of empathetic connection. No audience, no tellers. We put our feet on the ground. We open our hearts. We take deep breaths. We be in a room together, phones away, making eye contact, laughing, crying, and cheering each other on.

June’s Speak the Spark was a special Pride event, with a lineup of queer storytellers. The theme was Out of the Blue, and the vulnerability, joy and connection in the room were just what we’d hoped for. This special Pride edition was part of a wider queer arts event in our community and was driven forward by one of our regular tellers and audience members, who was so joyful to work with, and there was this sense that this has become something that community members not only like, but they’re picking it up, and co-creating its shape.

So when this parent plopped down next to me and told me she was at Speak the Spark, and that when I said “we’re always looking for tellers and maybe you think you’d never want to tell a story, but just notice if there’s a little spark in there…” she thought “no way” and then when she went home, it poured out, and as she shared not only that moment of realizing she too had a story that wanted telling, but then actually told me the intimate, funny, brave, heartwarming, story, I thought, well shit, it’s working.

This felt so significant to me because of the thread of relating that being at this storytelling night wove for us. We hadn’t yet passed small talk on the playground, and here we were, dropped right in together. After she shared her story, it opened a whole vulnerable conversation, we got to know each other, and I left excited to get to know her and her family better. I had this sense that she’s another contact point in my community for whom I’ll show up, as she will for me.

I think a lot about what our phones are doing to us. To how we talk, what we express, who we think we are out loud.

More and more, especially with younger folks, it seems like people are forming their sense of the world from opinions about other people’s opinions. A recursive, disembodied churn. Not from what they’re living or from the actual people they know or proximity to the longer form shared experiences of wisdom holders. Just takes, stacked on takes, about takes.

It’s not that opinions don’t matter. It’s that they’ve come unmoored from the people having them.

We started Speak the Spark because we believe that when we share our stories, we build empathy, connection, and trust — the relational ground that all the churning threatens to hollow out. Stories create the conditions where opinions can be exchanged and debated without us dehumanizing each other in the process. We can disagree with someone whose story we know, whose context we understand, whose humanity we’re connected to, but we’re far less likely to make assumptions and jump to conclusions and more likely to extend curiosity and grace.

When I hear people sharing opinions about how the world should be or how people should be, I’m always curious about how they got there, what lived experience shaped that view. I don’t know about you, but increasingly I can feel when the views feel thin, like a regurgitation of a view being regurgitated. Like podcast talking points instead of something deeply wrestled with within a context where real contact is happening with other human beings.

Whether in a room with tellers and listeners, by a lake with a fellow parent, or myriad other moments of connection, I’m committed to being someone people can tell their stories to, and someone who shares my own intimately and truthfully. I’m interested in cultivating the conditions to be neighbours with each other, sharing the brave things. It’s in such relational fields, phones away, feet on ground, where new insight and ideas can pop off. Where meaning, safety and belonging emerge.

But before you dive in: catching this before 11am Pacific on May 31? Come to my Backstage Pass Birthday Bash Open House. Grab a seat. More on the Backstage Pass this week.

I have lots of very big feelings about AI.

Do you have big feelings? I bet you do.

Maybe you have thoughts and opinions. I have those too. But as with most thoughts and opinions, beneath them are feelings and sensations. That’s what I’m interested in exploring, uncovering and ultimately sharing about here. All these feelings. So many feelings.

I’m stoked. Disgusted. Afraid. Excited. Angry. Amazed. Sad. Relieved. Hopeful. Overwhelmed. Embracing and rejecting all at once.

I’ve gotten quite into AI. Nobody is more surprised by that than me. I’m also wholeheartedly repulsed by it. Both/And.

I like my art the way I like to eat and fuck. At a pace I can feel.

AI replacing the making of art feels at once absurd and tragic. And yet, here we are, at the precipice of…what?

A brave new world?

I feel empathetic toward the resistors.

Those in the no-way-no-how-organic-or-bust camp. Animal Intelligence. Ancient Intelligence. Ancestral Intelligence. Astral Intelligence. The robots will have to pry the soil and paint, the parchment and pens from your cold, dead hands camp.

I see you out there, with your holy refusal. I tip my hat with respect.

People are saying that you need to start adopting it now or you’ll be left behind, that there’s no point in resisting it, just surrender and take it. I mean, kind of a rapey take tbh, which is pretty on brand for our dominant culture.

When I felt inundated with messaging that social media is a necessary evil I should succumb to, I left it entirely for years. I don’t believe in necessary evil. What a weird assertion. That period of refusal sharpened my discernment, and while I’m back on social media now, it’s not out of resigned necessity. I don’t feel hooked by it in the myriad ways I used to. I can relate to it as a tool to use or not, and feel a healthy amount of emotional distance from it. I’ve even been working on a social media-related project that feels entirely like art, that I’m excited and inspired by, and that deeply honours my creative rhythms and style.

Using tools while being aware of the ways they’re using us feels like part of our work as humans right now. AI is the steroids version of this.

Every massive change has to have people holding the pole of holy resistance. I’ll meet you in the forest for spell-making.

I feel discerning and interested.

I’m endeavouring to approach my engagement with AI with inside-out discernment and with as much attuned, embodied awareness as possible. To feel what I’m feeling. To sense what I’m sensing and to be curious about why. To move at a pace where I don’t disconnect from my animal. To not lap up the seductive claims of optimization and efficiency so wholeheartedly that I give AI the very jobs that give me life.

I won’t pretend I’m not excited to be able to do some things more efficiently and effectively. Some of the uses I’ve dipped into are mind-blowingly exciting and have even offered fuel for artistic acts. But the artistic acts themselves? My elbows are up.

I feel sad and grated.

The AI in so many people’s writing is not just making me sad, it’s grating on my nervous system. This isn’t a moral reaction. I understand why people use it to write for them. I don’t need it to write for me. Not only can I write skillfully, but the process itself is challenging and nourishing in a way that’s a necessary part of how I metabolize my experience, express myself and contribute.

I know that’s not everyone’s relationship with writing. If writing wasn’t a foundational part of my humanity, if I struggled to find language, or express myself clearly or lacked composition skills that AI could help me with, I’m sure I’d go for it. I know people who feel like AI has helped them find their voice, has gotten things out of them they haven’t been able to do on their own. A friend recently shared a quote she’d heard that asking AI to write for you (robbing you of the experience and process) is like asking AI to have sex for you. Why?

But if finding the words, if weaving what’s inside into something coherent outside has eluded you, gosh, it makes so much sense. But even if it feels like it’s articulating something you couldn’t without it, it’s still in AI’s voice.

And the voice is grating.

I’m pained by the experience of beginning to read something, particularly by someone whose work and voice I know, but then the cadence is different. The sentences are all roughly the same length, and the points are clear and escalating. And then come the short contrasting sentences to make a point…

It’s not expression through craft. It’s words organized through patterns.

See what I did there? Can you feel its voice?

Perhaps it’s more obvious to people who do use it, the tells. It used to be that everyone was like “The em dash, the em dash!” And there are other grammatical and structural tells, dominant word use and the like. But it’s the overall voice, with all those pieces embedded, that’s eerily recognizable. It’s recognizable in corporate speak, it’s recognizable in the sales emails, it’s recognizable in the invitation page for the sacred spiritual ceremonial circle, it’s recognizable in the nervous system expert’s Instagram posts, and I even recognized it in the script an influencer was reading off his teleprompter. It was so weird to hear the voice of AI being spoken by a human.

I feel tricked and repulsed.

What’s grating on my nervous system is that it feels like a trick. Again, not morally, but in terms of being able to FEEL the author. Their ideas are there, their values are there, their arguments are there, but their voice, their wrestling to express just what they’re trying to express, it’s like it’s been through a spin cycle exorcism; the pieces are all there, but the soul’s gone. The piece makes sense, but it also doesn’t.

And as soon as my body registers the familiarity of the pattern, it closes with disgust. Not disgust at the author, but at the voice of the piece. In a way that I feel subtly assaulted by something I didn’t sign up for. Slimed on. It reminds me of that feeling of being out at a club with your friends, and some hot guy is giving you all this nice attention, and then you find out all your girlfriends just got the same set of lines from him. It’s like, ew, gross, fuck off, you fake, manipulative, weirdo.

I feel concerned and worried.

What worries me is the prevalence of the “AI writing voice” becoming a voice of the collective. When I read books by authors with a very distinct voice, that voice starts to live in me. Sometimes I dream in that voice, or the voice influences my thought patterns for a time (usually until I’m done the book).

Art influences art. If I read a lot of someone’s work, where the voice is distinct, it will start to influence and infiltrate my own thinking and writing. And I will be fucking damned if AI starts to influence my writing voice by the sheer prevalence of my accidental consumption of it.

I feel angry.

It’s already happening. At least in reverse. At first, it was the em dash. While I’ve always used it, I started feeling self-conscious using it, afraid people would think I was writing with AI. The subtitle of this piece is two short, contrasting statements (This isn’t an AI think piece. It’s an AI feeling piece). Very AI. As if writing isn’t challenging enough, trying to wrestle something into form, I’m now trying to elbow AI out of my consciousness while I’m doing it? This pisses me off.

And if we all start moving our art through AI, not only are we forfeiting some of the most essential parts of a creative process, but we’re also homogenizing our voices into something that will then influence our very way of thinking, writing, speaking and making.

Maybe AI will advance soon enough to drive each individual using it towards a truly more unique and authentic expression of themselves. I guess we’ll find out. I feel skeptical.

I feel protective, alive and desirous.

If I’m going to use a tool to replace something I used to do, and I sure as shit am exploring all the ways AI can help me offload the things that make me feel dead inside, I want it to result in greater connection with myself, others, and all that’s alive.

We’ve all seen the quotes lamenting why we’re using AI to make art when we really want it to do our laundry. I imagine we’re not far off from that.

We are feeling, sensing beings, and AI is not. It is a strange thing to be in what feels like relational engagement with something that doesn’t have a nervous system or inner world. I’m a feeling-sensing being who is quite sensitive to my emotional landscape and the somatic rippling as I interface with the world.

I feel present and curious.

Because it feels, and we’re being repeatedly told or warned, that we’re on a massive precipice, that things are changing so rapidly that our world will be unrecognizable in months, certainly in years, and I have no doubt this is true, I want to be present, awake and choice-fully engaged in the process. I’m not interested in scrambling over this truth with urgency and fear, desperate not to be left behind or railing against a future dystopia. Left behind on which part? I don’t want to feed a collective anxiety that reinforces our culture’s continuous race to be first, better, top, while leaving behind our souls, our embodied relating, and our stewardship of the living.

I feel dedicated

To tending to my capacity to sense and feel in the midst of these changes. I feel devoted to staying tethered to my values and humanity, lest I be chewed up by something sinister.

I have nothing objectively predictive to add to the conversation. More of a plea to all of us, while we’re in relationship with this technology, that we keep feeling and sensing and sensing and feeling and noticing what’s happening in and between us while we do. I don’t think we did enough of that while the smartphone took over society, and we need to reclaim these capacities, or the disorientation and divides will certainly deepen.

I’ve had some good, long, strategic sessions with AI. Ones where I’m developing out my thinking, where I’m experimenting with its use, where I’m uncovering and building, where I’m marvelling at its applications and potential. What I’ve noticed is that I can stay in those sessions for quite a while, similarly to how I can sit and write and re-write for long periods of time. Similarly to how I can stay in collaborative conversations for a long time. What I’m noticing is the difference in how I feel afterwards.

I can feel satisfied by what I got done, by the outputs, by what came together, in a way that echoes the satisfaction of completing a piece of creative writing (this does not apply when trying to get AI to help me write, which I have done and find it thwarts and hollows out my ability to really sense and find what I’m trying to say. More on that in a bit). I can even feel the spark of aliveness that I experience when engaging with another human.

But I’m trying to slow down and really feel what’s happening when I do this. Because afterwards, I feel a low hum of emptiness. I come out of those sessions a little tired and a little sad. Not with the work that gets done, that’s awesome, but because the way it’s being done mirrors collaborative engagement with a human. But there’s no human there, and by the end, my body feels it. It’s different when I’ve got a living thinking partner. Perhaps I feel this more intensely than people who aren’t extroverted, who aren’t fuelled by intimate collaborative engagement.

But I feel compelled to flag it. To tack back to my comment about the smartphone, it’s been 20 years now that we’ve been going to our devices for connection. At the beginning, it offered that. But our brains have been hijacked by synthetic connections for a very long time now. We go back for the chemical hits, while being collectively lonelier and more disconnected than ever. So with AI, session by session, build by build, use by use, I am practicing feeling and sensing and sensing and feeling, lest I feel seduced by its relational nature and return to it to get something it can’t give me. Relationality and nature.

I feel sheepishly, delightedly surprised.

If you’ve been here a while, you know that I’m a self-proclaimed technology resistor. When my husband Andrew first saw the branding for my website, which has a 70’s vintage vibe (despite my having not yet graced the planet that decade), his comment was “I think that suits you. The 70s are about as technologically advanced as you want to be. You’d have loved it then.”

It’s true. Newspapers, books, handwritten letters and rotary phones. Disco and cocaine without Instagram evidence. I can romanticize the heck out of that.

It’s not that I’m against tech. It’s just that I’ve never known how to engage with it. It’s not intuitive to me, and I realize that “tech” is a ridiculous catch-all, but it’s true. I know how to engage with people. With craft. With animals and soil. I’m basically a golden retriever, so all the dogs are my soul twins. But machines are exasperating and confusing, and when people are like “the interface is so intuitive,” I’m like “I want to scratch my eyes out, I’m allergic, this thing gives me hives.”

In my 20s, I dated someone who wanted to play video games with me. I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that. I did try. He told me it would get more fun as I got better, and I was like, I’d rather the learning curve of literally anything else. Beekeeping. Taxidermy. I’d rather embalm a body while being stung by bees than play Mario Kart, okay?

What I found as interesting as he found hilarious is that I just didn’t understand what I could and couldn’t interface with. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said to his friends, “like she doesn’t get how to move, what she can interact with and what she can’t,” and I was like “HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT DAVE I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE!” and he was like “it’s intuitive.”

UGH.

So when AI started seeping into everything, I was like “for the love of god, kill me now, I don’t want to be in a world with this.”

Until I started using it. Like really using it.

Recently, a friend said to me, as I was sharing my enthusiasm for learning how to build AI agents, “You would be unrecognizable to 2023 Chela.”

I actually get it. It’s intuitive. I’m just at the beginning of my learning curve, but it’s one I want to be on. And I’m as dumbfounded as the next person that I’m this stoked.

I feel in awe and relieved.

If you told me two years ago that not only would I be using it, but I’d be excited to use it, and I’d even take the time to show other people how to make it work for them, I’d have been like clearly you have no idea who I am.

So what’s with this breakthrough? Why the adoption? Why the enthusiasm? What makes this different than every other infuriating piece of tech that’s supposed to be so simple a toddler could use it, while I woefully smashed my head against it?

Language.

You talk to it. You write to it. And the clearer you are with your language, the more comprehensively you share the context, the better the output.

And you know who’s chatty AF? THIS GIRL.

You know who finds joy in stringing together just the right words to express the thing, challenge the thing, explore the thing, wrestle with the thing, and find a way through? ME! And now, when I do that, when I share disparate thinking, layered perspectives, partially formed and contradictory strategies and a desire to bring it into a shape that I can execute and track, this little language model will spit out a spreadsheet for me!?

OH. EM. GEE! All those years of wanting to smash my disobedient tech, feeling like the idiot amongst idiots and now if I’m not satisfied with an output, I just EXPRESS THAT WITH LANGUAGE, and this motherfucker will apologize to me!?

Let’s goooo!

I feel righteous and satisfied.

I enlisted AI to help with this little ditty, and it couldn’t do what I wanted it to do. I thought it could be fun to do a show-and-tell with prompts. To see how it advanced my thinking, but how could it when this piece is about feeling and sensing? At first, I shared some thinking, asked it to offer some structure based on themes, and it seemed helpful. But quickly, I felt confined and thwarted by it. I felt disoriented and hollow. I had the exact meta experience I’m trying to get at here, about how the making is in the process. I didn’t end up in this essay where I thought I would end up at the outset. I ended up here by rejecting the direction it offered and coming back to the page on my own. Back to my own feeling and sensing. Back to my own creative process. I did this twice and found both times it became an irritant I had to brush off. I feel deep satisfaction in trusting my own feelings and sensing and writing from there.

I did go to it for edits. It reminded me, once again, that alluded should be eluded, so I fixed that up top. A useful tool. Just not for all the things.

I feel conflicted and cautious.

Privacy and environmental impact. Technocratic overlords. Another widening of the economic divide. The technology using me to train itself. My inner world being given over to something with no inner world. There’s a lot to sift through, advocate for, and resist.

And while I’m down with a tool that’s being touted as something to help us with our productivity and efficiency, I’m not down with a society that values productivity and efficiency at the expense of everything else.

To what end? Haven’t we gotten close enough to that end to feel how dissatisfying it is yet? How destructive? How dehumanizing?

Do more faster. whyyyyyyyyy? Underneath all the layers, it seems to me that the impulse to do more faster is ultimately about trying to get somewhere. And that “somewhere” is where we feel like we’ve arrived. Arrived where?

Feeling like we’re secure and belong. Feeling self-realized and successful.

Art. Creativity. Connection. Sensing. Attuning. Co-regulating. These are embodied acts that cultivate a deep sense of security and belonging. Of self-realized success. Not racing towards something that’s going too fast to feel, binging on neurochemicals that tell us things are good when they’re very, very bad.

So that’s the part I’m watching out for, the ways we’re being sold that this tool will offer us the very thing it can’t replace. Being human. Being creative humans being human together. Isn’t that the best part? I feel like that’s the best part.

I can get into a future where your bot-agent and my bot-agent go back and forth, set a date for us. Where our bots handle the banal while we meet in a field and draw pictures together, read poems written by humans, poems that turn to songs against the beat of the cricket sounds. Hold hands, marvel at the sky and ask, how are you feeling?

Tomorrow, May 7: My dear friend, the legendary Danielle LaPorte, is hosting an in-person event in Vancouver, and you should totally call in sick to whatever you have planned and go there instead. It’s called Publish, and it’s a 3-hour, intimate deep dive into all the things the publishing industry doesn't tell you. SO MUCH content creation and marketing intel. Book deals, royalties, AI, the real numbers. + time for YOUR questions. D gives great wisdom. And hugs. Get the deets and seats here.

Fall 2026, A Little Bit Much, Eastern Canada: Remember that show tour I postponed? New dates are up and runnin’. More to come, but what’s confirmed is now live on the site. Thanks to everyone who previously had tickets to the spring tour for your patience and understanding. I hope you can still make it! Please tell all the people you know who like to enjoy themselves.

I felt like I was going to die of cringe last weekend. I’m still making sense of it. But I think this is what it means to be a real artist. Wildly inspired and a little self-loathing?

I’m working on this thing. I’m so excited about this thing. The kind of excitement that keeps me tickled with inspiration. It’s popping and fun.

A friend asked if I was feeling any fear around it, and I felt a genuine “no, just stoked.”

THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MY FIRST WARNING.

Has anyone ever gotten through the creative process of making a thing that takes a little grit, stretches them beyond their comfort zone, feels ambitious in scale and approach, without having a terror crisis in the middle of it?

What do I think, I’m special or something? That I could saunter into the centre of this new thing, wave some inspiration and talent around and be like “Ta-Da!”

I did something I always do. I started putting timelines around it. As if that will motivate its completion instead of inciting wholly unnecessary pressure. I should have learned last summer when I did that with my book proposal and then dropped acid for some “inspiration” and just ended up lying in bed for hours being like “why do I do this to myself?”

THE DEADLINES SHOULD HAVE BEEN MY SECOND WARNING

So I have this deadline to finish a significant part of it by my birthday on May 31, and this past weekend I thought it would be cool to film a part under the full moon in Scorpio (it fit the vibe of the bit). Divine inspiration never turns into overdoing a thing, right?

I was driving around the island with my Moon app, trying to rope my adult son into scanning the sky for where the moon would rise, when he said in horror, “Ugh, what, seriously, you’re dragging me along for your Pokémon Go moon-chasing bullshit?!” And I said, “Thank you, my son, for that great material.”

While the moon filming was a bust, due to low rise, overcast skies and my desire to maintain my sleep hygiene, I did pour a lot into wrestling this particular part of the project into form. I felt pressured to get it right. Never helpful. I took myself to the forest to listen below the hum of the gritty, arbitrary deadline, to see if I could feel the true notes I was trying to hit.

This is all very new to me, working in this way. Pushing the artist out front. Taking creative acts seriously. Like it’s my job. Cause now it is. Immersing myself in a way that feels like a satisfying push but also a little naive, like that meme where we ask if the process knows we’re trusting it. Trusting what exactly? That it’ll come together? That I’ll be glad I tried? That the magic is in giving myself over to it even if it’s terrible, unusable, confronting, embarrassing, very bad, no good, stinky, stank of a thing?

In the midst of it, I was like, wait, is this just weird? It feels weird. I think I might be missing the mark. OMG, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? And while nobody even knows the details of what happened or has seen, heard or witnessed what I did (except my brother, who was there and was like, um, yeah, this is totally weird, but awesome), I started to feel this bubbling of dread and shame and vulnerability.

I literally felt hungover.

I washed the dirt from my mouth. I put down the character I either channelled or butchered.

And then I promptly had a large, fitful nap, which felt like my body was trying to integrate and process what the heck I just laboured over. Then I texted the crew in the Backstage Pass to spill the beans on my cringe crises and felt a wee bit better.

But still, I cannot bring myself to look at it.

I think I’m, like, in love with this process.

Thanks for reading my report from the land of “I’m going to go have a mid-life awakening and recreate my whole vocational identity.”

If you want to know more about this elusive THING I’m working on, I’ll probably share about it in The Backstage Pass on May 31, which is my birthday. I’ll be hosting an open house; details to come. Save the date. It’s a full moon. We’ll be doing some Pokémon Go moon-chasing bullshit.

Love

Chela

I came to write about creative rhythms. About “creative hygiene,” and the pressure or pull to be engaged with the world, to be visible and producing. And how those pressures and pulls, and our seductive devices, can lure us to the places we surely mustn’t be when trying to create something that takes bravery and grit.

When we’re facing the making that will only clarify and come through if we can roll around within ourselves for a bit, unassaulted by all the creations of others for a hot minute, long enough for us to meet the muse, play whack-a-mole with our creative defences, and court art’s agency through our chosen craft.

I wrote an opening paragraph that I was sure I’d cut. Just lubricating the page, you know? And then I opened my phone and replied to a few texts. Before I knew what was happening, I was sending memes on Instagram.

I came back and mused on some other things. Then Facebook was open in my browser. Who did that? I hate it there. There were messages I replied to, and before I noticed what was happening, two hours had gone by. Two hours of writing that wasn’t writing at all. It was attention-hopping.

Very unsatisfying. Restlessness started to hit, and I thought I should pause and investigate what’s happening. And wouldn’t you know it, the pattern was this…

I’d write a thing. And then there would be a moment, after the period, before the writing of the next thing, when I didn’t know what I was going to write yet. Not writer’s block, not deep wrestling with words or trying to get anything profound or confounding on the page. Simply a moment of the unknown. Would I describe this moment as one of tension? Or boredom? I don’t even know because I didn’t stay with it long enough to investigate.

I think it’s these moments that sabotage…oh my, it just about happened. Okay, so this is becoming a real-time meditation, and I’m just going to tell you about it.

I almost bounced away from the page again. Why? Because I didn’t have the language for what’s being sabotaged. It’s not far away, that language, it’s right here, but a small beat of uncertainty, where I had to look for it, almost turned into me picking up my phone, clicking through some apps, and ending up watching a comedian’s bit that’s so sharp I feel envious, nom nom nomming on terrible news and researching if that cute onesie is a drop-ship scam all at once.

If I just stay, what happens? I can explore what leaving would have sabotaged.

When distraction and consumption are readily available in the same place as the creative work we’re trying to engage, and we bounce to them in a moment of boredom or uncertainty, in a moment of frustration or self-doubt, we’re sabotaging…

• The capacity to hold our attention in discomfort

• Intimacy with the thing we’re working on

• Creative tension that can lead to very satisfying output

• Creative resilience

• Self-inquiry and self-awareness

• Finishing the damn thing

When I have that impulse to flit away, if instead I just go back up and read what I wrote, it gives me a mental break, but doesn’t context switch (which dilutes everything). Or if I turn my attention to the part of my body where the impulse to flee is, and I stay with it, I settle back into coherence. These are small moves, but ever more necessary when there are no barriers to digital fast food that will give the dopamine hits that staying in creative practice doesn’t.

This moment-by-moment mindfulness asks me to stay in the creative cave, session by session. But this is the micro-practice of a macro phenomenon I’m trying to wrestle myself into. I want to feel myself contained by a larger creative cave to hold what I’m trying to bring into form.

I’ve been working on something. A new show of sorts. Not in the medium of the last show. It’s taking longer than I want it to. I almost said it’s taking longer than I planned, but my planning was based on fantasy, not actual scoping, so I’m right on time.

I’ve already given myself permission to disappear for a bit, to drop into the creative cave. But when I hit the bumps and the boredom, the fear disguised as confusion, I jump out, I read or watch other people’s stuff. I lose contact with myself. The potency of my creative impulses dilutes, and if it’s a day my energy is already low, I can spiral into one of those who do I think I am, I have nothing to offer, everything is so noisy, why add to the noise kind of moments.

I’ve learned that I get the most satisfaction from making (and am less attached to the outcomes) when I can go really far in. At first, it’s just having the space to follow the inspiration without knowing where it’s leading. Eventually, there will be enough in there that I can see the shape of the world I’m building. What’s ideal for me is to stay in that space as long and as often as possible, to be consumed by it.

The project I’m working on is specifically about platform growth and visibility. Perhaps it’s ironic that I need a minute to disappear. But when I imagine the life I most want to be living, it’s one where I grant myself large swaths of time to be in a creative cave. If I’m going to feed a machine, it can’t be at the expense of my own soul.

So if you’ve been feeling like you just need to drop away for a bit, and you needed a sign or a permission slip, take this one. And if you feel like telling someone about it while you’re cave-dwelling, I’d love to know about it. I’m a fervent cheerleader.

With Love,

Chela

PS - If you’ve been musing on (re)designing your website, your brand, your body of work, my friend Cristy just opened her book for new clients. Cristy designed my website like some kind of magical oracle. She designed the entire homepage without any direct input from me. It blew my mind (and made the process soooooo easy). She has a talent for seeing the soul of a person, their art, their offers, and the needed architecture and visual transmission that captures who they are and where they’re going. If you’re interested, inquire soon. It’s the first opening she’s had since August and will go fast.

I recently did an interview with Tarzan Kay for The Girlboss Apology Tour. We had a pre-interview chat to explore the territory. I’d told her about what I felt I needed to apologize to myself for, so I knew she was going to ask about it.

And still, when she did, I could feel myself talking around it. The shame was right there, prickling up my neck, flushing my chest, doing that thing where my skin goes red, which makes me feel like I’m naked in my shame soup for everyone to see.

And then, because the universe enjoys a bit, I felt shame about feeling shame. Which is shame’s whole move, really. It festers in the dark, and then when you finally catch a glimpse of it, it whispers oh, so you’re the kind of person who has this? interesting. Love that for me.

If you want to know what I’d been “shoulding on myself” about, you’ll have to watch the interview. But what’s more interesting to me than the content is what was moving beneath it, an arrogance I’m also embarrassed about (take that, triple shame!), because I was pretty sure I was above it.

Gather round. The elder internet coach has thoughts.

I came up in the online coaching space in the early 2010s, before that even, when personal brands were just becoming a thing, when blogs ruled the internet, when you could share a link on The Facebook and actually (genuinely, wildly!) all your “friends” would see it. Most would share it. And if you were good at your work and bold enough to ask a client, “If you know someone who’d benefit from this, would you tell them about me?” — you could end up industry famous.

It was the golden age of online business.

Every client who came to me found me in one of two ways: a direct referral, or they’d read something I’d written. When Danielle LaPorte, an early client (now dear friend), mentioned me in a newsletter, I was booked out for a year. An article I wrote got shared six thousand times overnight — viral, for those days — and led to a firestorm of activity, opportunity and clients.

It was easy. Until it wasn’t.

Twitter exploded. Instagram arrived. People started jumping ship from Mailchimp to Infusionsoft and Ontraport because “oh my god, you don’t have a funnel yet?!” Affiliate marketing became a surge and a spectacle, a referral circle jerk where people earned social clout by landing on top of the B-School leaderboard.

Things haven’t moved like that in a very long time. A single drip would create a massive ripple. Now you can have a whole ass body of work, be creating in your genius zone, dance on TikTok, be splattered across publications, take a stand on social media about every horror in the news cycle, be a magician at your craft, have an army of affiliates, and still feel like you’re crying into the void.

The first business book I ever read was The E-Myth, back in the nineties. Michael Gerber’s whole premise is that most businesses fail because a technician (someone good at the actual thing) has an “entrepreneurial seizure” and decides to start a business, not realizing that doing the thing and building a business around the thing are entirely different skill sets.

That problem isn’t new. But the internet turned it into a hall of mirrors.

Suddenly, the technicians were drowning, not because the premise had changed, but because the sheer volume of people selling how to sell, building businesses to build businesses to build businesses, coaches coaching coaches coaching coaches coaching coaches. All dressed up in cute filters and enviable lifestyles, what Kelly Diels (also on the Girl Boss Apology Tour) coined as the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.

Welcome to the Girl Boss and Business Bro era! Often (not always), people with zero training in the actual thing (the technical, the craft, the practitioner promises being peddled) make bold transformational claims. Those of us who were established had roots to rely on. Some newcomers couldn’t make a go of it in the speed and volume, while others made bank fast, capitalizing on having a strategic edge, sometimes ethically, often exploitatively.

And the age-old challenge, people who just wanted to do their work and share their gifts without having to build the infrastructure and marketing engine around it, were not only more disoriented than ever, they had a deluge of psychological selling slurping up that confusion with shame and blame tactics. It’s your mindset! It’s your fear of success! Have a money breakthrough, put my course on your credit card!

I’ve had conversations with a lot of people who came up in those early days, and the grief we’ve felt in all of what flooded in, the ways we felt we didn’t keep up, the things we tried in earnest not to get sucked into, how many things that started as places of genuine opportunities for connection and growth (early social media), have turned into harrowing horrors.

The sheer noise and volume of tactics and strategies could make you feel like you’d miss the gold rush if you didn’t have a lead magnet with a nurture sequence to your $47 micro-offer funnel to the $497 course that fed the $2,997 group program that you’d A/B test to split your audience into a $27/mo membership or $27k VIP mastermind (or for the lightworking witches, those numbers would all end in 11, 22, 44, or 88 because magic over bro math stats amiright?)

And yet, I mostly felt outside of the circus.

In part, because I have a pretty strong inner directionality, but it’d be arrogant to hang it all on that.

Some of it was just technological ineptitude, an unwillingness to race or compete or just your run-of-the-mill freeze and avoidance. I’ve always said I’m an eighty-five-year-old when it comes to tech, so I’m never going to jump on a trend, whether that’s the first on a new platform or an evergreen funnel.

I never got on the psychological triggers sales train, which was rooted in moral superiority for sure! Countdown timers on digital products that could technically be purchased at any time? How are you not embarrassed? I didn’t chase followers. I didn’t chase top-line revenue as a brag. I stayed in my lane, did the work, wrote the things, got the referrals.

And I told myself I didn’t care.

Which was mostly true. But not entirely.

Because what came up in that interview with Tarzan, what had me prickling red in my chair, is that even while I was feeling quietly above or simply not aligned with a lot of it, it was still being internalized. Where I should be by now. What I should have done or built. Comparison I wasn’t tracking. Ways I’d felt I’d failed by metrics I wasn’t even trying to play.

Turns out I’m a little vain about not being vain. Certainly, in the territory of what I’d have called vanity metrics. My version of unconscious superiority was feeling above the tactics, and actively telling myself I didn’t care about certain things. And I didn’t. Not really. But I also, quietly, had. Just enough to carry shame about it while not going after things that maybe I wanted but felt like I shouldn’t.

The design of the thing I told myself I wasn’t subject to had gotten me anyway.

I’ve been in a multi-year metamorphosis. I’ve put down the coach identity as my primary vocational self. Not because I don’t love coaching, I do. And I still use those skills every day. But because the identity took up so much room inside me, I needed to kill it off to make space for what’s coming through me next.

Whenever I move into something new, I like to anchor into what I’m bringing with me from my past self. What hit a nerve in this interview is that just as important as what we carry forward and what we leave behind, is what needs to be integrated, healed, translated or grieved, so we can actually feel free and alive going forth.

That’s what The Girlboss Apology Tour is for.

It’s not about tactics. It’s not a “how to make money online now” summit. Tarzan has put together something far more generative. It’s a chance to see the water you’ve been swimming in, to orient in a disorienting landscape, to grieve a little if you need to, and to be in honest, open conversations with people who are more interested in courageous and connected relating than posturing as experts.

Fifteen years ago, everyone was aspiring to be a brand. Now I think a lot of us are craving the opposite — intimacy, trust, connection, things we can just feel and know are true, being real and messy enough that we won’t be mistaken for AI. Experts selling to experts selling to experts. Who cares. Boring. Sad. I still want to know your expertise, sure. I definitely want to experience your gifts and champion your genius — but I’m far more interested in who we are when we stop being impressive. To me, that’s where trust, intimacy, and actual connection live.

The Tour is free, it starts tomorrow, April 13. In addition to interviews, there are opportunities for live connection and collaboration, and if you want to know what I’m embarrassed to be embarrassed about, my interview is in there.

Come hang out. Bring a friend. Let’s all make art, love and a living in a way we can actually live with.

Love,

Chela

I was supposed to be in Toronto right now and kicking off an Eastern Canadian tour of A Little Bit Much this Friday. But alas, plans have changed.

There’s been a medical emergency in my family, and I need to be home for a while. Details are not mine to share publicly at this time. Thanks for the well wishes from those of you who’ve already been notified through the venues, and please don’t worry.

New tour dates will be announced soon and are likely in early fall.

On celebratory notes, two things. I just spent a week in New York, which was all kinds of awesome. Updates for another time. But one cute moment I’ll tell you about is walking down a busy street in Brooklyn with my friend Elizabeth, as a gazillion motorbikes fly past all loud and annoying. She covers my ears in a panic and yells, “Y’all, quiet! She’s from the forest!!!”

I felt so seen.

I’m home now. It’s quiet here except for the Ravens. It’s spring, and those witches have opinions. Do you know that a group of Ravens is called either a Conspiracy or an Impoliteness? Outstanding. We’re waiting for Jesus to return (our resident woodpecker who pecks inside our chimney). It’s so bloody loud it sounds like a pipe about to burst, rattling through the house. Startled guests inevitably yell, “Jesus, what’s that sound?!” Hence his name. Also, his predictable return during Holy Week.

The OTHER thing I want to tell you about is Tarzan Kay’s Girl Boss Apology Tour!

When she first reached out to me to ask if I wanted to participate in it, I had three thoughts:

1. GREAT summit name, hilarious.

2. Count me in, whatever Tarzan is doing, I want to play (more on that later).

3. I never got into the “Girl Boss” thing, and I don’t have anything to apologize for (except maybe to myself). Is this a tour for people who got a lil’ overzealous in the ol’ online marketing game, did some dumb and unethical stuff and want to come clean about it?

This is part of what drew me in. Tarzan and I have been talking behind the scenes about the title and the summit’s ethos. She’s funny and playing an angle, but also, what part of this title is tongue in cheek, and what part of this is a move to reckon with some of the weirdness (elephant of an understatement) of the online business space?

People keep telling her, “Women apologize too much!” I don’t know, girl, some people should be.

I coached people in this space since 2009, BEFORE INSTAGRAM, and let me tell you: A lot of people have gotten really hurt. Or burned. Or felt like they’re utterly failing at things that everyone else is killing it at. Mirages abound. Snake oil highlights reels high on their own supply.

One of the things I’m grateful for, having coached some wildly successful people across industries early in my career, is that I got invited into the reality of people’s inner worlds and businesses. So as the house of cards intensified on the internet, I could be like, naw this ain’t real. Some people are doing as well as they say they are by all measures claimed. Most aren’t.

And the ones who are transparent about the hard things, it’s often after the heat or the bleed (myself included). Which, fair enough, we don’t owe people the play-by-play of struggle while we’re in it. I coach this in storytelling; there’s a line between telling a vulnerable story and trauma dumping. Most of us need time to process what we’re in before we’re ready to share, especially with any kind of earned wisdom to lead with. But “performing vulnerability” has even become a gimmick to sell solutions. I’ve talked about this before and satirized it here. The model that emerged from what I sincerely believe was once just people opening up about challenges they’ve been through has turned into a sales arc:

1. I used to struggle with this thing (that you’re currently struggling with).

2. I tried everything (that you’ve also tried and will recognize).

3. It all came to a head (connect with my vulnerability and bravery).

4. I had a breakthrough (that you haven’t had yet).

5. I have a solution to your pain (buy my shit).

This isn’t inherently bad or dishonest, but what it’s created is an online culture of performed relatability, selling solutions while oversimplifying the entrepreneurial journey and reinforcing a belief that if people aren’t getting promised results, it’s their personal failure (and not a whole ass industry with distorted claims).

The Girl Boss Apology tour is a complication of conversations with people in the online business space, having real conversations about the bat-shit-bananas-ness of it all and how to make a living doing things in real alignment.

It’s for the people with online businesses who are frustrated because they’re not where they want to be, and aren’t sure if what they’ve been sold is real or a lie. I got a little feisty in my interview.

After I had one of those “oh shoot, what did I say?” moments. Little shame hangover. But that’s some Tarzan magic. She makes you feel like you’re hanging with a pal, and before you know it, you’re on a Let Me Tell You soap box. Spoiler, no, I don’t think “Girl Boss” is an empowering term or ever has been.

Go check out the Girl Boss Apology Tour. It starts April 13!

LoveLove

Chela

I almost don’t believe it because there’s nothing wrong with my life. Also, people keep being like “omg you’re on fire!” Yep. Hot flashes, too. Night sweats. The whole shebang. I’m not misaligned, struggling greatly or dealing with things falling apart. Sure, the state of the world is a backdrop of horrors, but that’s not it.

In fact, in my little life, it seems that many things are coming together. Or coming to a head. The inner and outer transformations that have happened in this past year are ones I’ve asked for, signed up for, and hell, was even excited about.

But I underestimated what they would take.

I do that a lot.

Time optimism is a poison I drink on the daily.

My husband reflected recently, in a cosmically cruel meta-joke kind of way, that the choices we made this past year—choices for our family—the changes we initiated, they created conditions so exacerbating that the underlying patterns we run, you know, those, those fucking patterns born from the tenderest, achiest wounds that maneuver themselves into compensatory or protective mechanisms that run on repeat as though that’s just who you are but they’re protecting something while simultaneously repeating the pain? Yeah, those. So we just turned the volume up so much that those patterns got so loud and so obvious it would almost be funny if it wasn’t shit. Now we can’t look away from those patterns, we can’t pretend they’re not running the show, and now on top of all the things we’re just trying to handle like work, parenting, existential angst, and cleaning dog vomit off the carpet, now we gotta deal with those suckers too.

And he said, “Just think about the content you’ll get out of this.” And we laughed a sad laugh.

So here I am, telling you it’s been so relentlessly hard. Not bad. That’s part of what’s so disorienting. Lots of good. Tons of amazing. Heaps of important.

But relentlessly demanding in ways I wasn’t prepared for. So much so that I can’t really run into people in my community, who ask me how I’m doing and search my face for the real answer because I’ll just start crying. Or I’ll forget how to use words. People tell me they appreciate that I answer honestly, that I’ve never been an “I’m fine, thanks, how are you?” person. But fuck me, I feel like an idiot weeping in the forest or the general store or the school parking lot, babbling on that I feel like I’m doing and braving more than ever before, while simultaneously failing at everything.

The indignity. And yet, it’s somehow so tenderly dignified.

Maybe I am as hard on myself as my therapist tells me I am, but I just don’t quite buy it because there’s life to live and things to do and presence to cultivate and wounds to heal and service to offer and gods to love and people to adore with senseless abandon and art to make and pedophiles to hold accountable and deaths to grieve and magnesium to take and a disgusting amount of protein to ingest and so many people are suffering.

I hosted a New Moon Creative Cauldron Session in the Backstage Pass. We planted creative prayers and shared what permission we want to grant ourselves in our extended block of creative time together. And all I could feel was how much I needed to get done, so I gave myself permission to get nothing done. I promised not to go near my computer. And to not do a single thing on my to-do list. To not even think about it.

I booked a mani-pedi.

I played music so loud that I could scream along with it without hearing my voice. I sobbed. I climbed into bed with a mason jar of water and wrote in my journal. I called a friend and she reminded me that this thing I’m dealing with that makes me swirl with emotional confusion is the very thing I use to avoid feeling pain and just when I think I’ve gotten good at staying with pain, I discover I’ve dressed up my avoidance to look like grief, so I can get as far away from actual grief as I possibly can. Good grief, I’m so good at that.

My 18-year-old son came to hang out in my office the other night, and I had work to do. But I’ve finally learned, with him anyway, not with everything, but with him, that when he’s available to connect, not a single other thing can matter as much as savouring a few minutes together. And he caught me up on life stuff and shared some funny stories, and then after a relaxed pause, he asked, “What do you want to accomplish before you die?”

And visions flashed before me. They did. Some of the dreams as images. Things we might call goals or ambitions. An undercurrent of sensation I’ve come to know as the values I want to express through real social contribution. Some of that sparking as emergent forms. Ways I want to stretch and grow, and the mediums through which I imagine that happening.

But those weren’t the answer. Those were like echoes that could happen alongside the answer. Or all of those things could happen, but they still wouldn’t be the thing I want before I die.

So I described the experience I have with my ambitions. It’s not the ambitions I want themselves, there’s a way of being in the pursuit that I’ve touched, but not sustained. Mostly when in an intentional creative practice, or holding space for others, but not yet as a way of living.

I described my disordered relationship with time. How my enthusiasm and possibility orientation are my undoing. The way my pursuits can, even with all my awareness and checks and balances, tip me beyond threshold, where they become a race to meet my commitments, where they become pressure and do-to lists that are distracting and relentless, where I’m never quite fully in the thing unless the thing I’m in demands I be there fully (and I do find relief in that, but it doesn’t alleviate the pattern).

Day to day, it’s a constant stream of all the shit I’ve got to do. Shit I want to do. Shit I signed up for and created and consented to. Shit I genuinely enjoy. And yet the sheer volume and expectation of myself within that experience makes it feel like more shit to do instead of a divine privilege. And I experience it as pressure.

I told him about those few years, when he was about 7 to 10, maybe longer, where I was running that pattern, and there are whole swaths of time I can’t remember, just doing and doing and doing. And how painful it is to feel like I missed that time with him, how I wish I could have just been in my days with more grace, more presence, soaking in every moment, saying yes every time he asked me to read him Calvin and Hobbes. Because now I see how fast it went and how I wasn’t fully there.

And he tells me that he didn’t experience it like that at all, that he thinks I was always there, and I did a great job. I can’t even express how much tension crumbled receiving that feedback, how relieved that makes me, that I don’t have amends to make, at least not now, maybe it’ll change. But still, I experienced it the way I did, and that’s an excruciating loss. And his brother is 7 now, and I’m afraid I’m doing it all over again, even though I know better.

Knowing better and being more capable are different beasts. And the ambitions continue to burn.

The thing I want to accomplish before I die is to be here. You know? Like to really, truly be here. In what I’m in and not off somewhere else, split, pressured, stretched. To be with people so fully that they feel me being with them, fully. Like all the facets of myself are collected and landed and right here.

I want to be that for others, and for myself. I want presence to be a gift to the moment. I want to know what it’s like to not suffer the ache of relentlessly abandoning myself in the here and now to get somewhere else. To accomplish something before I die.

“That’s what I’d like to accomplish before I die.”

“Whoa, mom, that’s deep.”

“Yeah, bud, that’s kind of my brand.”

I’ve got some events coming up you might be interested in.

I’ll be “Lubricating the Room” as the opener for the community screening of M-Factor 2, Before the Pause (Perimenopause) on March 31 in North Vancouver. Come on out for a night of connection, laughter and education.

I’m touring A Little Bit Much in Eastern Canada in April, and I’m starting to lose sleep about filling seats, so if you could help spread the word and come on out, that’d be boss. Here’s a lil’ IG post I made about my angst if you want a laugh (and to tag your people to come to the show.)

Today, I’m sharing about what happens in the in-between. When you’ve outgrown an identity, offering or creative territory but aren’t yet firmly in the next thing. Why we spin out when we get close to what we actually want. The two flavours of self-doubt that show up at creative thresholds (one of them has internalized patriarchal bullshit all over it). What helps at the edge. And why the thing that feels most selfish might be the most generous thing you do.

This one’s for the Front Row Seat subscribers. Aka - paywalled. If you’ve been reading from the free seats, you’re invited in closer. For the cost of a latte (with special mylk), you can upgrade your subscription. As always, if a paid sub is out of reach for you, contact connect@cheladavison.com, and we’ll comp you. Thank you for being here and supporting my work and art.

These kinds of conversations and practices I’m digging into are just what we’re up to as a community in the Backstage Pass, which I just quietly opened. If you’re interested, you can read more about it here and message support@cheladavison.com if you want in.

Grateful.

Chela

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Hit up the show page to check out locations. If you know people in these cities, please share this with them. I fill venues because people like you spread the word. I so appreciate your hype!

Anyone else feelin’ raw dogged by the Fire Horse?

Strapped to a gallop while trying to steady your arrow? Aiming for…what exactly? Your wildest dreams? Justice and accountability? Turning up the volume on joy and creativity to out-sound rage-bait spectacle? Planting and tending new stories of community care and resilience, casting potent spells so they take root in the soil beneath fire and brimstone?

The inner and outer worlds of those around me are in motion. The texture of that motion is so varied. Like, now is not the time to assume I understand what reality is like for someone from the first two sips of a conversation.

All the witches were saying, “Once we’re through this snake shedding business, into the year of the Fire Horse, things are going to speed up. strap in.”

Inner, outer, global, local, work, family…all of it seems to be ramping up. This from a friend recently…

I promise I don’t mean it in a rapey way, which sadly needs to be explicitly stated, thanks to all those shocking but not surprising you-know-whos-and-whats.

But I feel like my practice right now is about how to meet intensity with an accepting and open heart. I don’t mean acceptance as complacency, but as the doorway to right action.

This season for me has been the culmination of all the threads of my life, hitting peak intensity at once. Work. Mothering. Marriage. House holding. Community Care. Relational deepening. Creative edge. Excavating, touching on and reckoning with some core wounding and healing threads that weave through all of it. OY.

I’m attempting to be very discerning about what I say yes to (I have a weeeee bit of a tendency to fire hose my face). I’m not succeeding at this.

When I’m in something, I want to be in it fully. Full heart, full presence, co-create with reality. It’s much harder to steady ones full engagement when reality is a shit show. When every news cycle takes you out at the ovaries, and everyone you care about is wrestling with very big shit.

Add to that an inconvenient literal shit show. Our septic backed up, displaced our tenants, and now I have TWO open insurance claims and renovations underway. The other is from a garage fire last year, which we thankfully caught before it spread to the house. We lost most of everything inside.

I love a good metaphor. Is Fire and feces the theme I wanted for 2026? Big fat nope. But I’ve got these mantras on repeat: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it” and “lube up and surrender”.

Both of which, for me, are about not resisting reality as it is.

I don’t mean surrender as a form of collapse or like allowing horrors and BS. I mean, what’s most helpful in navigating what seems to be an increasingly intense time, in every area of my life and how those areas intersect with the wider ecologies of things, is to first accept them as reality.

Some parts of reality as it is feel like blessings and miracles. Opening in gratitude, resting in and leveraging these dimensions of reality can be personally and collectively resourcing.

Some parts of reality as it is I feel I have agency over. I can apply my will and energy and influence these aspects of reality in generative ways that seem to have a positive impact.

Some parts of reality as it is feel disorienting, enraging, terrifying, overwhelming and trigger a sense of urgency in my nervous system. For these parts in particular, I’m practicing slowing down instead of speeding up.

I’m doing my best to ask myself what I need to be able to meet what’s called for wholeheartedly and with presence with all these aspects of how I experience and engage reality.

To “Lube Up”. How do I resource myself, relax, open, stay awake to what’s happening and not just what I wish was happening? Find pleasure, creative aliveness and joyful expression while working with what’s here?

To “Surrender”. To fully be with what is, as an interior centring location. From that place of surrendered acceptance, I don’t deny or resist reality, which can feel counterintuitive. Especially at a time when collective active resistance and healthy fight are being called for.

Which is where “if you can’t get out of it, get into it” feels enlivening. Like, what’s happening that’s underway at the micro and macro levels, and what does it mean to get into it? What attention, action, energy and pace are needed?

There are certainly things I know are “mine to do” that feel hard or scary, and I’d rather retreat to the forest with a bag of weed and a pint of raspberries, but instead I’m leaning in with all my heart.

Some things catch my attention that shout, “Look at me! Handle me!” and I have to bring vigilance to saying not my pig, not my farm, which is SO HARD when there’s so much harm (and I love pigs and farms). But not flexing this discernment leads to dilution—or disoriented collapse.

On the work and art front, there have been several seeds that have all taken root at the same time. It’s beautiful, fun, aligned and correct. And it’s been a lot.

This past week, I launched a new creative membership called the Backstage Pass. If you missed it, or missed the moment to get in there, reply to this email or send a note to support@cheladavison.com and we’ll send you the details. It’s going to be a slow burn, which is the pace I need with that offer right now, and I’m really excited about what’s been seeded with the people there. One of the members said that they’re there to learn how to both lead and be led, and those are the dimensions of the creative impulse I’m most interested in dancing with and that feel called for in this wider moment.

Tell me about you. You being fire-hosed by the fire horse? Life intense? How are you coping with the world stage? Got any practices, rituals, or mindsets you’re trying to steady yourself with?

Thanks for being here.

Love,

Chela

Break forms, norms and the ways I’ve pushed through or complied!? Ok, queen, show the way!

Over the weekend, I emceed an art gala and was the auctioneer. A hilarious and invigorating challenge to thread that needle of getting people to stfu long enough to humorously part them from their money in support of the arts, without being too bitchy about it. I was warned about the acoustics and the chatty crowd, and that my predecessors always struggle with this bit, so it felt like a bet or a dare.

One of the things I find works well to get people onside is to say things they can relate to but probably wouldn’t say out loud. Even better if it lets me off the hook for what I’m most afraid of failing at. For me, right now, that’s spontaneously losing access to nouns.

Living in a small community, the pressure to remember names is intense. And I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I regularly stand before someone I’ve known for over a decade and think, wow, their name is just…gone. For someone who values relationships above all else, this is an unsettling turn of events.

So I warned them. “When you win an auction item, I will need your name, and if you think I know your name, I do not; I am a perimenopausal woman.”

The anti-aging industrial complex is courting me hard. It’s a dark neg.

I’d love to tell you that I’m immune, that I don’t stare at the new crease making its way across my chin and think oh no, here we go.

Autumn is my favourite literal season, except for the fact that it’s followed by winter. And I think that sums up the anxiety of the fall season of one’s mortal existence. This is actually an incredibly dynamic, powerful and fierce time in a person’s life. We’ve built things, seen some shit, and, if we’ve been actively working to untangle the internalization of soul-sucking cultural expectations and narratives while doing whatever healing work comes knocking, we’re probably tasting the freedom of finally knowing who we are, how we tick, what we need, and that nobody is going to give us permission to create or lead on our own terms, that’s ours to claim.

So right as we’re brimming with wisdom and a substantive toolbox to dismantle the chains that have demanded our submission, we’re inundated with warnings of decay and irrelevance. It’s by design, and I’m not having it.

Do I cling to my youth? I do not. Do I grieve it? Oh my goodness, yes. And with it, all the ways I used to be able just to make demands of my body. And that’s part of what any autumn season asks of us. We harvest what’s here, and we begin to let go. We prune what’s on the way out, which strengthens the roots and feeds the soil for what’s to come.

Whether it’s the autumn of our life, which may stretch for a couple of decades, or the autumn of an identity as we shed who we knew ourselves to be for an emergent new self, vocation, expression or call. Or the autumn of the systems and power structures that have oppressed people and planet, as the ground swells with an uprising of humans who are. just. not. having. it.

An autumn season invites us to stoke the imagination, to envision what might flourish when we cut back the rot, whether we’ll be here for it or not.

All of these will ask for our grief. Grief for what was, what wasn’t and what never should have been. And they will ask for our creative prowess. They will ask us to make things from what we harvest. And bring those forward. For collective nourishment, for our own pleasure, for the co-creative conversations we need to be having, and the connection and belonging we deeply deserve.

The summer season of my life, my metaphoric and literal mother years, trained me for this. My deep ethic of care, my drive, my capacity to root and hold and love and blossom, to protect and pour into others.

This ever-deepening intimacy with my body at this life-stage, the inability to make demands of her without pouring into her asks me to appreciate her contours, not as a consumable object, but as a wisdom keeper, to attune to what’s needed moment by transforming moment. This is my training ground for the level of presence and courage required to embrace initiations that flip the rules of youth on its head.

Rest and recovery build power.

Creative risk, not conformity, cultivates belonging.

Doing less creates abundance and resilience.

Honouring desire and prioritizing pleasure fuel generosity.

Being less palatable makes you a brazen beast and a feast for the right spaces.

And so now, my artist era. My selective fucks to give era. My oh hey, I’m the grown-up in the room era. My, excuse me, pardon me, see this space here, imma take it up era. The dawning of my crone-in-training era. May I be blessed to live long enough to shrivel into a creaky, croaking hag, and may I be rebellious enough not to taxidermy my face in an effort to look more fuckable while being brave enough to ripen into someone you don’t want to fuck with.

With Love,

Chela

PS - I’ve just started sending out emails to share about a new creative membership I’m starting called the Backstage Pass. If you’d like to hear about it during these early stages, you can sign up to get those emails here.

I’m creating some things that are starting to feel like an exciting balm during some really dark times.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing the vision and emerging form of a new offering I’m cooking up. If you want to read about it, you can sign up for the interest list.

If you’ve been here a while, you know my work has pivoted in the last two years. From a pretty established coach & teacher. And now: writer, performer, comedian. contemplative bard, room-lubricator, whatever-this-is.

My Artist era.

I’ve been touring and performing my show AND retreating into creative caves a lot (and flailing about in a particularly demanding season of care work).

There are things I’m working on and working out about what I’m building, where I’m headed, how I want to develop my craft, share my gifts and contribute to communities.

I WANT TO TAKE YOU ALONG FOR THE RIDE.

I’m starting an online community hub to share and play with the works-in-progress. Mine & yours.

If you’ve been on the internet a while, you’ll probably recognize a marketing & service model we might call: “I built this expertise, got these results, now let me show you how.”

I’m going to try something we might call “I haven’t done it yet, want to watch me try, fly, stumble and fumble? Wanna watch me lean into the places where I feel embarrassed, out of my depth, and like a cringy newb? Wanna borrow my courage, grow a network of rad weirdos who are down to take each other’s art and dreams very seriously? Wanna watch me try not to take myself too seriously while I also try to find just the right acupuncture points to direct my needle for cultural care and change? Wanna see how I approach developing a business model from the ground up, centring art, people and creative aliveness?”

It’s called the Backstage Pass.

Think reality show meets creative community meets relational resource sharing experiment.

It’s a space where I share what I’m building—while I’m building it. And what I’m shedding, healing, wrestling with and trying. The creative work. The inner work. The business and platform building. The risks. The things I feel fear around that I judge myself for feeling fear around, because I wish I were more evolved than that or something. The ways I’m hard on myself. The ways I grant myself grace. The brilliance I have and the capacity I’ve developed. The gunk I unearthed from my unconscious during my last therapy session, or when I took a bunch of mushrooms. The decisions and rationale, and how they’re unfolding, which are often shared after the fact, when they can be turned into a tidy, teachable moment. But, we’re not here to learn from others’ glow-up stories; we’re here to learn together through honest works-in-progress and making.

It’s not just where you get to be voyeuristic about my stuff, it’s where you lean into creative longings, risks, and new edges of self-expression. A place to create connections, borrow courage and receive inspiration for your own community contributions.

I’m not doing a big launchy launch with a branded sales page, etc., because I want to invite my keen peers, the people who want to see how the sausage is made at the very beginning.

Meta-Backstage. Including how I’m thinking about developing this very offer so it’s seeded in a relational field.

This is the back door invitation. The soft launch and gentle entry. (Wait, were those anal jokes?) If you don’t roll with offside humour, you probably shouldn’t come inside. hayo!

The tagline, after all, is…

I’ll show you mine. You show me yours.

Here’s some of what I’ll be sharing about in the coming weeks, if you’re interested or just nosy, get on the list.

→ The recent breakthrough I’ve had about my ambivalent relationship with visibility, platform growth, the internet, and what I actually want to grow. I’ll give you some behind-the-scenes snippets of a new show/project I’m working on (hint: there may be wigs and absurdity).

→ Why I closed up shop and walked away from a thriving coaching career. (During a talk-back at a show recently, someone asked me if it was because of how weird the self-help and coaching industry has become. I have things to say.)

→ The inner work I’ve been doing around attachment, desire, eros, some resistance and freeze patterns, what’s been happening as they thaw and why I want a closed (read: not all over the internet) community to talk and play in together.

→ How I’m approaching building a business model that offers me stability AND room to play, the very big things I want to do while being very very bad at estimating the amount of time, energy and capacity they’ll actually take to pull off and what I think might help keep it enlivening WHILE being a busy mom and active community member.

→ What I’m learning about taking creative risks in midlife—when there’s more to lose and more to gain, as well as what I’ve found helpful and what really dries up the proverbial pussy (or boner, all proverbial (and literal) genitals welcome).

→ The relational and community threads I want to weave through everything I’m building because we’re all watching the way very powerful people are causing immeasurable harm, right?

If none of this interests you, all good, I’ll be back in this space soon with some other musings. If your curiosity is piqued, raise your hand with your sweet, sweet email, and I’ll be in touch soon!

Be loving out there! Take breaks from the scroll and hug people and animals and get your feet on the Earth, or touch grass or whatever the kids are saying these days.

With Love,
Che

Something’s happening with the middle-aged crowd, and I wonder if this has always been the way of this life-stage (I’m new here) or if it’s exacerbated by social media and internet-induced self-perception dysmorphia, the cascading dominos of global horrors and/or just the overall capitalist machine relentlessly poking pain, asserting our inadequacies and irrelevance and selling the belief that if you’re having a hard time, it’s your fault.

It seems we’re in times where we need all the grown-ups in the room to give our gifts, offer our wisdom and mobilize within our communities. But what if we’re swirling in self-doubt, don’t know how, are freaked out, or frozen?

I’m surrounded by educated, intelligent, kind, and compassionate friends and colleagues, many of whom are trained, skilled, and wise practitioners in various fields and disciplines. They’ve done a ton of inner work.

They’ve developed bodies of work, have layered and impactful careers and know how to lead a meeting, a room, a movement. They’re complexity capable, justice-oriented, spiritually attuned and committed to wellbeing, connection and collective care.

They’re community organizers, parents, bosses, creatives, entrepreneurs, advocates. They call their representatives (or are representatives), share resources, help out their neighbours, other people’s children and make meals for folks in need. They’re funny, caring and concerned citizens who are continually leaning into growth edges with commitment and humility.

They’re arguably among the most skilled, loving, relational and capable people around when it comes to navigating uncertainty and tumult. The ones you turn to during a crisis, the ones you can have hard conversations with, the ones you’d recommend to others, the ones who can hold paradox and nuance, and will get in the deep with you.

They’re real, embodied, grown-ups.

And their self-doubt is through the roof.

Last week, one such person was sharing about a new stretching opportunity they’ve said yes to and the terror that’s accompanying them. Another friend who was there asked what the terror was about, and she said, “I just feel like I don’t have anything to offer.”

There was a pause.

Then both of us (kind-hearted, empathetic and compassionate friends that we are), simultaneously burst out laughing. It really seemed like the kindest and most obvious thing we could do since our friend has so much to offer, like seriously, a leader in her field, very wise and very skilled. Obviously, we stayed with her, didn’t just dismiss the fear, but we wanted her to feel how we truly see her.

This isn’t unique to her. It was like the sixth conversation with someone between the ages of 40 and 55 I had that week, who expressed the same thing. In my coaching practice, it was often folks in this life stage who seemed the most disoriented when it came to claiming their capacities, even when their experience, reputation and results lapped those of the younger generation coming up with vigour and confidence. And they often said it hadn’t always been like this, that the confidence loss felt new.

I have some thoughts and feelings about it.

I’m curious to hear from the elders here, ones who’ve passed through this part. Folks who are in their upper 60s and beyond. Did you feel like this at this age? Do you feel like this now? What do you attribute it to? If not experiencing it yourself, why not? Do you see it in your peers? I want to know about your experience! And for my fellow 40+, how are you faring, pals?

Here are a few thoughts…

Experience humbles us. The more you can see and understand, the more you realize how much you don’t see and understand. Great when this squashes arrogance. But confidence and self-assurance can be collateral damage. And while we may have had a bunch of success, we’ve also experienced a lot of failure. We know how quickly things can change and be lost, and we’ve likely internalized our failures as shortcomings. Whenever this creeps in for me, and I feel like I have nothing to say or offer, I think of how many buffoons are on the internet confidently spreading nonsense, and I’m like UUUHHHHH, go be a grown-up, Chela, make and say your shit.

Proximity and comparison are mind-f*cks. When people who seem to me like they’ve earned the right to be a lil’ arrogant are in a doubt spiral, there’s usually some kind of comparison going on, and they’re often comparing themselves to their contemporaries. How weird is that? To occupy the same rooms as people who are excelling, and by virtue of being in those rooms too, you wonder, who the hell am I? You’re in the room! We need to act like we’re in the room.

Another comparison that’s wild is comparing ourselves to our younger self (when I had more energy, more discipline, more courage) or to the potential of our future self (who I’m letting down, falling short of, will never pull off).

Then there’s highlight reels, where we compare our insides to others’ outsides, our worst days to others’ best projections. And between every post of someone selling their excellence is someone selling you what an old, irrelevant, falling-apart POS you are.

Certainty and posturing are disorienting. The internet exposes us to a lot of people making all sorts of claims. Some very confidently and very incorrectly. When someone communicates with confidence and certainty, it can be easy to go along, to assume they know what they’re talking about.

But we’re all catching on to how much this is used to push forward harmful rhetoric. Something I’ve noticed in thoughtful and informed people, particularly those who are tracking the context in which things arise, is that they have become almost allergic to certainty and posturing such that they’re constantly perspective-taking as a way to orient and ensure they’re not falling into reductive thinking, which can lead to self-forgetting or to a flattening of perspective, as though their lived experience, wisdom and expertise don’t have weight.

Compensatory patterns are unravelling. If you’ve been avoiding looking at your caca, the bills come due in your 40s. You can’t drink or spend or eat or fuck or deflect or avoid or whatever else you’ve used to move away from the pain or the mirror without consequence anymore.

But that doesn’t mean that the development gluttons in the crowd get a free pass. I’ve been engaged with personal growth and transformational change since the first time baggy wide-legged jeans were in style. Long before personal development became a cringy and questionable cash cow for internet grifters. I’m one of those insufferable a-holes who can legitimately claim “I’ve done my work”. And while we know it never ends (we’ve been toting that onion peeling metaphor since the early 90s), I didn’t expect to find the very things I thought were healthy and evolved strategies were in part compensatory patterns that become obstructions to living life and being of service in ways that matter.

UGH. The well of the self is bottomless. You never arrive, which you learned in meditation class when you were fifteen, and you’re learning it all over again!? The indignity.

Capacity and capabilities are upending. I was in a team meeting recently and said, “I really wish we worked together several years ago; I used to be on top of stuff like this.” It’s disorienting not to be able to get it up for things that used to come naturally or would be naturally prioritized, to feel like I just don’t have my shit together in certain ways. To be fair, I don’t have chronic migraines anymore, so I must be winning.

I’ve been on a bit of a tear these last few years, shedding ways of working, ways of moving through the world, things I used to feel like I needed to rise to, take on or handle that are just NOPES for me now. I’m more honouring of my style, my creative impulses, how my energy moves, and what I need.

The result is that certain things are growing, expanding, and taking off while others are withering away or falling to the bottom of the list. So many share this experience. It’s both liberating to move through the world in ways that feel more congruent and aligned, but killing off old and hard-won ways of being can feel like losing limbs, and that disorientation can shake confidence.

Biology/hormones and all that. I’m so tired of talking about peri-menopause and hormones because what the actual, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that so much seems to be changing in our bodies. I don’t want to be waving the flag of decline. I think a lot of these changes prime us to show up more powerfully (hello, lessening caretaking impulses and the feeling that I need to make sure everyone around me is happy and comfortable). But I have heard a lot of people share that self-doubt, anxiety and even paranoia have been symptoms of hormonal fluctuations.

If you want a simple solution to overcome your self-doubt and lead the way you’re called to, I have a course for that. Naw, just kidding, you’re fucked. JKJK, I’m on fire today! No, for real though, what’s the solution? Honestly, I think it’s community. I think it’s dragging our eyeballs away from our devices and growing and nurturing relationships with people who see, know and honour who we are. Those who will laugh at us when we say we have nothing to offer and help point our compass back to what matters.

The toxic side of the personal growth industry is the part where we try to endlessly improve ourselves out of some strange quest for perfection or belonging, as though that growth is meant to serve the individual instead of it being about growing our capacity to be wise, joyful, reciprocally contributing members of our communities.

I feel like a lot of my work right now is acknowledging that I’m a grown-up in the room and that that comes with certain responsibilities if I’m willing to claim them. My mental and emotional health is my responsibility, and it’s hard to tend to in isolation. If I feel the limits of my capacity (because I’m going into freeze, or dissociative patterns, or because the onslaught is dysregulating), I can take breaks, seek help and collaborate with others so that I’m able to mobilize and lead within my communities and circles of influence.

I think one of the most helpful things for me is acknowledging my partiality. I’m great at some things. I suck at others. My sucking does not negate my greatness. I neither need to inflate myself nor diminish myself. We aren’t and won’t be all the things, and I think that’s one of the gifts of mid-life is really doubling down on your you-ness and trusting that we’re all part of an interconnected web.

What I notice when engaging with others who are questioning themselves is that I want to lovingly shake them. I feel the impulse to yell, “We don’t have time for you to doubt what you have; we need you to just bring it!” Honestly, I’m not sure that urgency is helpful. But the sentiment is meant to be encouraging.

I guess what this long exploration is trying to do is to help orient those who are holding back out of self-doubt and fear. There are good reasons for that. Also, we need grown-ups to be grown-ups, and at a certain life stage, I think we need to band together and say “Welp, we’ve got what we’ve got and we don’t have what we don’t have, let’s do what we can.”

Love,

Chela

I’ve got shows in Gibsons and Powell River, BC this month. Details here.

I’m opening a new community space for people who want to do brave things (amongst other cool happenings). Details, reg, timing, etc. will be shared with folks on the interest list. Get in on it here.

One of the ways I enjoy knowing myself is through the lens of others. I don’t mean I let others define me, or that I’m looking to be told who I am. But paying attention to how others experience me tells me things I may not be aware of—the core me-ness they experience as “so Chela,” the surface notes that seem to reflect a season or stage I’m passing through, and how the ways I show up impact them.

I tuck these insights away, like little nuts in my cheeks (that was supposed to be a chipmunk reference, but feel free to interpret it as you like). The right kind of feedback can be deeply connecting, orienting and courage-building.

When we don’t lose ourselves in others, but relate in ways that are open, curious, intimate, and honest—our us-ness, your you-ness, my me-ness—can grow and evolve.

2025 was a year of risk. Of trusting my instincts and betting on myself with a kind of faith that’s been stretchy and edgy. Terrifying. Unreasonable. Risk-taking that requires a depth of self-trust that decades of lived experience can either erode or deepen, depending on how fiercely intentional we are about our sense-making.

Many of these risks were vocational and public, and I’ve shared about them while taking them. Nothing new there. I hospiced and then closed my 15-year coaching career, along with my most reliable revenue streams. I launched myself into a new medium, a new craft, and a new work identity without a clear business model or strategy—without full clarity on what this is or where it’s headed.

I released myself into it with a kind of abandon I’ve never mustered before, at least not with so much to lose. There’s been an eerie certainty to it—one I can feel, like really feel—that I know what’s meant for me. My job is not to try to make something happen, so much as it is to intuit and remove obstructions to what’s unfolding.

I launched and produced a show tour with zero experience. It’s been rolling out in ways that are both magical and gruelling. I’m toggling between following that momentum and wrestling adjacent creative projects into form. There’s a business model here, certainly, within the marble of my most desirous impulses and artistic longings, that I’m chipping away at.

When people first started telling me my show was “brave”, I didn’t quite know how to take it. I was like, Wait—should I not be saying these things? What’s so brave about what I’m saying?

And then, duh. I realized that, once again, I was saying the inside part out loud—and doing it quite provocatively—and that a lot of people, for myriad reasons, do not.

It reminded me of a moment in high school when my friends were jokingly commiserating about how I shouldn’t be allowed to talk to their parents because of what I might say. I was genuinely confused. What are you talking about? What am I saying that you’re not supposed to say in front of parents?

They were like, Uh… how about the time you told my mom you lost your virginity when she asked what you did last weekend? Or when you told my dad you got a taste of interconnected oneness on a mushroom trip?

And I was like, FIRST OF ALL, I thought your parents were cool. Secondly, your dad was clearly stoned, and we were talking about transcendental meditation as a doorway to state experiences, so that felt like fair terrain. But fine. I’ll try to be normal. I’ll lie about what we’re up to or whatever.

What others experience as bravery has often felt to me like the inevitability of authenticity. Expressing something because not expressing it would cost me more. Like saying the thing because it’s already alive in me—and it wants to connect to what’s alive in others, in our shared field. Withholding feels like a kind of self-betrayal, where the thing wriggles and rots inside.

This is very different than just blurting things out. I’m talking about intentional self-expression that feels risky.

But the most courageous things I did in 2025 weren’t public at all.

They didn’t happen on stage or online or in bold vocational moves. They happened quietly, privately, relationally. They happened in places where bravery didn’t just look like being seen— but like risking being unwanted or getting it wrong. ew barf, ugh.

That’s not where I’m going yet in this piece. But it is where this inquiry is leading me.

There are potent connections between what courage looks and feels like ‘out there’ in public spheres, what it looks and feels like close in, and what can be cultivated in either to grow a sense of belonging and courage in both.

I’m beginning a longer exploration into brave self-expression—where it flows freely, where it breaks down, and what it actually costs us to live more truthfully. Or not.

What does it take to follow the things that feel true before they feel palatable? To pursue work and ways of relating that are alive even when impractical or risky. Part of that exploration will be shared here in writing. Part of it will be explored more dynamically and relationally.

I’m pretty intimate with what stops my expression. The contexts that lead to freeze or fawning.

What about you? Where in your life does expression feel natural, almost inevitable?
And where do you find yourself holding back?

While I am very comfortable saying some things, these public, vocational risks don’t just look brave from the outside—they feel brave on the inside. The Backstage Pass is where I keep going, and where others who feel called to their own unreasonable, creative, or half-formed longings can borrow that bravery and grow relationships that support doing the same.

It’s a space where I let myself be seen in the act of choosing, building, risking, and making—vocationally and creatively—in real time. Not after it’s successful. Not once it’s tidy, and I can sell you my “proven framework”. Yawn. But while it’s uncertain, stretching me, asking me to trust my instincts and move without a model. I used to get paid well to apply these skills to other people’s businesses and bodies of work. This is where you can witness my thinking and approach (and how insufferable I am when I’m thrashing) while I build something from the ground up that centres joy, play and creative aliveness.

If something in you has been brewing, or boiling, or waiting, or chomping—for permission, for company, or for the courage to move toward what feels alive but unformed, unreasonable or all your very adult and rational responsibilities get in the way—and you don’t want to walk that edge alone, you’re welcome to stay close as this work unfolds by joining the interest list.

I’m not doing a big launch-y launch. I’ll be opening it up as it comes into form because that’s the spirit of being backstage. Getting on the interest list gets you in the backdoor so to speak. Was that an inner circle invite or an anal joke? Yes.

K, before you go, I have some questions for you. Your answers will help me shape a series on courageous self-expression, and with all the coo-coo-bananas stuff going on in the world, this is a skill worth building. For ourselves and to grow trusting and resilient communities.

If you’ll lend me your perspective (comment on this post or reply to the email!) I’ll make something to incorporate your unique challenges and needs. I’ve numbered them. Answer whichever ones you feel moved to. And thank you!

1. What feels riskier to you: saying the thing publicly, or naming your experience with someone you care about? Why?

2. What do you edit, soften, or swallow—creatively or relationally—and why do you think that is? What’s being protected or maintained?

3. Where in your life do you feel the pull to express or pursue something more fully, but you haven’t yet? What do you believe you need in order to do that?

4. What’s something that feels deeply true to you but too risky to express? What’s the perceived consequence you’re resisting or afraid of?
   

As always, thanks for being here and gracing me with your attention. I’m grateful.

PS - I would like to acknowledge that there are a lot of em dashes in this here missive. I wrote it. Not AI. Annoying that that needs to be said, but, as you probably know, the robots have been stealing our em dashes.

New Year’s Greetings to you! I’d say Happy New Year, but I don’t want to make any assumptions. Goodness. Whichever way you’re rollin’ on in, I greet you!

Meeting folks where they are, being met where I am, that’s the sweet sauce!

Speaking of meeting each other…

I’ve got two performances of A Little Bit Much coming up in January. Please tell your people. And if you’re in this area, tell me you’re coming!

GIBSONS, BC - Friday, January 23 - Get tickets

POWELL RIVER, BC - Saturday, January 24 - Get tickets

I did my best to meet 2025 with honesty. It was a weird year—a year of unexpectedly outrageous change.

Not planned change. Nor change that comes through blindsiding disruption. Perhaps we’d describe it as a mystical dominoes kind of change. Following eros, instinct, magic, literal birds. Shedding layers of identity that didn’t feel like mine anymore, layers whose ghosts linger like limbs I can’t scratch. Unfurling kinked energy. Mustering courage. I didn’t realize I was just being big and brave until I caught my breath in winter’s descent. So much bravery it turns out!

I’m in this strange in-between, waiting to be shot into 2026 with projects I’m chomping-at-the-bit-stoked about, without yet having the calendar space (read: childcare) that’ll let me shove it all down my throat the way I want to. Gobble gobble gobble.

I write to you from a ski trip with my dad and kids. This last-minute jaunt has extended our holidays and delayed school and work. I’m not complaining. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. A unique challenge of having two kids 11 years apart is finding activities that meet everyone’s needs, interests, and capacities. Skiing is ours, and it’s heavenly.

Writing to you feels like a tether to the world of creative aliveness that I’m jonesin’ to lose myself in. Do you ever feel like the things you want to make are swirling inside you with such intensity that their ripening almost feels painful? As though no amount of dedication, time or output could satiate? Like a building rolling orgasm that feels like it’ll never crest? Like you’ve caught some lightning, and if you don’t throw it down into the earth, it’ll burn you up?

That’s how I feel right now.

But alas, in this suspended time, sharing all my brimming shenanigans for 2026 will have to wait. For now, I invite you to join an interest list for something I’m calling the Backstage Pass. It’s where I’ll be laying out the behind-the-scenes building of what’s next—much of which is leaning into cringe in ways that, well, make me cringe—and a space for you to build or birth your brave & cringy things too. It’s an “I’ll show you mine, you show me yours” kind of situation. Get on the list here —>

Okay, the kids are up, time for a final day of skiing through seriously burning thighs. I created this highlight/lowlight/busts post on Instagram, rating aspects of 2025. I share about coming home to myself, my most humbling failure, some big leaps, the ways I’ve been smashed around by perimenopause, a motherhood heartbreak, a new pink wig, and a crowd favourite, a rockin’ dick pic of sorts. Check it out.

Thanks for being here. I really appreciate you. If you’ve got the energy, tell me about how your new year has started and what you’re dreaming into being in the comments.

Love,

Chela

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I caught up on the phone with a friend for almost three hours on Solstice. She knew I’d had a couple of weeks from hell, and I knew, from a light-yet-cryptic text that wasn’t really a cry for help, but also kinda was, that she was probably in some shame spiral.

So I called. I didn’t even text to warn her first. What a monster. No, let’s set up a time for a walk and talk. No, hey, do you have a minute? Who does that to another human being these days? It must be an emergency. Heck, last week when a friend reached out to me with a real emergency, they texted first: emergency. I did not; I just bowled her over with my non-consensual presence, ringing away.

She assumed I was in distress, naturally, having called without warning and all, so she answered. She told herself, despite being in the middle of a pile of work, yes, I have space for this.

I was not in distress. I was in the forest. I was not calling for support, I said, I was calling because clearly she needs help figuring out this thing, and we’re going to do that together. We did figure out her thing, some easy math, didn’t take long, but might not have happened had we not meandered for hours, her working and chatting, me returned home and re-organizing my office, both of us dusting out all the corners of every topic of our lives. A good relational dust-up can set things right, an excellent solstice practice.

We established that everything has been very extra while there’s been very little light to go around. We are both fine, deep down, just feeling the weightiness of all the weights while everyone around us is also carrying massive weight, more burnt out, disrupted and unsettled than usual. Everyone, it seems. Who among us has regular seasonal depression versus the upgraded global collapse edition? Hard to tell.

We did note who isn’t having a shit time, which makes us feel shittier when we are having a shit time. You know the ones. Those who aren’t burnt out and exhausted and wrestling their cyclical patterns while shadows dance into the depths of winter. Gentle reader, it’s the people who are killing it on Instagram and going to show us how. They seem fine. On Solstice of all days. The nerve.

And we, in all our wisdom and compassion generously acknowledge that everyone highlight reeling it on the internet are not in fact liars, they’re just sharing a partial part of the story, which we also do, which is what many people use these platforms for, projecting an aspect of self, not to mislead, but because not all aspects of are meant for those places. Goodness, offer some grace to those poor souls killing it on Instagram and braving that wilderness to show us how.

Some aspects of self need the light of a social platform on them, and some do not. Some belong by candlelight. Some belong in a meandering phone call with a friend, or by the light of urgent cries for help and fierce presence and witnessing. Some need ritual and to be buried in the soil deep deep deep.

If you’re killing it on Instagram, excellent, I celebrate you. If you’re dragging your ass, barely holding it together, I see you. If you’re both of those things simultaneously, consider yourself seen and celebrated. We are multidimensional beings, afterall, stardust and robots and everything in between.

Later in the evening, my husband and I did a ritual by fire and candlelight, and I felt no impulse to turn it into a reel, which is not a moral declaration of anything, just a sweet noticing that I’m not constantly mediating my experience. I’ve come to know which aspects of myself I really want to push out to be seen in the world and which ones get the dice roll of simply being remembered or forgotten. It’s not just the highlights going out, and the lowlights kept hidden, I love a good existentially angsty overshare, and many joys and successes are sweeter with no flash.

I do think it’s when we only share the good and always hide the bad that splits in authenticity occur and loneliness festers. This is one of the gifts of the Solstice, the reminder of just how much wants to reverently tuck away in the dark.

So if you’re smoked, toasted, tired, toppling, I wish you a long winter’s nap. There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with needing to move at the pace of the actual, natural season, and no kidding, it’s overwhelming when there are gifts to buy and lights to hang and meals to prep and people to gather with and revolutions to participate in and that big world stage has tested and torn our collective resilience.

My wish for all of us is that we gather with people we can tell the truth with, who ask, how are you, really? And not feel like you need to perform a highlight reel for them. And simultaneously, if you’re killing it, rocking it, expanding into all the space your soul wishes to occupy, may your people celebrate you. I celebrate you. Light and dark, may we fully be where we truly are.

Happy Belated Solstice. May the Dark be with you.

Love,

Chela

PS- if you want to be in relational spaces that are both honest and celebratory while priming your creative pump and revolutionary spirit, toss your name on the interest list for the Backstage Pass. More to come on that. For now, it’s cozy underground.

I’ve got two performances of A Little Bit Much coming up in January. Please tell your people. And if you’re in this area, tell me you’re coming!

GIBSONS, BC - Friday, January 23 - Get tickets

POWELL RIVER, BC - Saturday, January 24 - Get tickets

Last thing before we get into the meat of today’s missive: I’ve got a coupla new projects I’m working on. One is a super-secret new show in an alt format I’m courting and sneaking around with like a naughty little lover.

I’ll be sharing about its creation (and so much more) in my other project - The Backstage Pass. I’m opening the back door to this project in early 2026, and you should probs get on the interest list if you’re curious.

K, onward…

“I do not have time for this,” she said as we raced across the street to our organizer’s meeting.

“Yeah, me neither. I’m only doing this because you’re doing this.”

“Me too! I love doing this together. But seriously, if you were a no, I’d be a no. How are we fitting this in?”

I feel like this about most of the initiatives I commit to. The people make it worth it. The ones giving and the ones receiving, which is often the same.

Courtney, my co-organizer for the island’s holiday party, and I show up ragged and overwhelmed, and love each other into a good-ass mood.

The same thing happens weeks later at Speak the Spark, a local storytelling event I co-founded and co-lead. I arrive spent and leave full.

Never underestimate how contagious a positive attitude can be. Nor how hard it can be to generate a positive attitude when you feel underwater. That’s why we need each other.

Engulfed in a world of extraordinary convenience, no one has time anymore.

What are we so busy doing?

I’m quite certain the smartphone madness casts spells of exceptional busyness, whether we’re actually being productive or not, but that’s a post for another time.

When people ask how I am, I’ve stopped saying tired. I’ve asked my husband to stop saying tired. That doesn’t tell us anything anymore. I know you’re tired. Everyone is tired. What else are you?

Weary? Hopeful? Grieving? Joyful? Scared? Stretching for something meaningful?

And why are we so tired?

What is going on that we’re so busy and so tired?

Late-stage capitalism? Easy answer. Probably the correct one. Racing about earning things. Money. Status. Love. Significance. While people turn to AI for therapy and away from each other because they don’t like what they saw them post on the internet.

I think it’s due to an increasing loss of connection and belonging.

Who has time to rest, make art or volunteer anymore? Why spend time getting to know a neighbour when your algorithm can curate the perfect list of people to follow and feel parasocially connected to?

I hear volunteerism is down and has been for a while. Everyone I know locally who organizes says it’s harder to get people to show up and throw down for the community.

I live on an island, population 4200. The first weekend in December, the island becomes a figurative set of a Hallmark Movie. There are lights all over the cove. There’s a parade. Santa. Choir music and it all culminates at a party in a courtyard outside of the local arts gallery and library. It’s adorable, quaint and takes over a hundred volunteers to pull off.

Last year, the woman who runs the show posted to a local Facebook group saying that it wasn’t going to run anymore due to a lack of volunteers. Impulsively, I made a quick comment: I’m pretty good at getting people to do things if you want some help.

I meant, I could help round up some people. Instead, I became the new co-organizer for the post-parade-party. The job itself, aside from gathering volunteers, is mostly stuff I suck at. Administrative oversight, which makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Helping to build systems and processes. Extracting the knowledge and detail that’s been living in the head of the main organizer for decades, so it’s easier to delegate and role-transfer. I guess I don’t suck that much at it because it’s working, and I said I’d do it a second year. And my co-conspirator is amazing to throw hot potatoes with.

This year, while getting my hair done, I was sending final co-ordination emails for the group of women who’d be gathering to make home made cookies for the hundreds of children rolling through (the event used to have store bought and I, with my naive enthusiasm, was like what if we gathered people to MAKE the cookies?! And so it is.)

“Why are you doing this?” my hairdresser/friend/therapist asked. I was getting on a plane a few days later and wouldn’t be back until right before the event, and, to her, it seemed like an unnecessary amount of extra. Well, my dudes, I am extra.

Here’s the thing. I’ve spent a lot of my life being stretched by my commitments. It’s kind of my shtick. It’s not like I haven’t unearthed a gazillion reasons why in my decades of therapy. I’ve gotten better at choosing those commitments to align with my values and the ways I want to grow and contribute. I’ve learned to build in rest, thankyouverymuch. I’m pretty regulated most of the time. But I still fill things. Cram cram cram.

This past season has been full of so many new and challenging commitments. Like, I knew I’d have to grow to rise to what was needed, but I didn’t realize it would be so hard. I’m not upset about it. I’ve come to understand the difference between the hard of being out of alignment, and the hard of listening to the deepest notes of the soul. Either way, I’m still busy as hell, and it seems like I shouldn’t have time to volunteer as much as I do.

I volunteer, in part, because it really seems like I don’t have time to. And a society racing around in collective time scarcity is a society devoid of healthy community.

Once, after speaking at a local event, a community member bumped me playfully in the shoulder and said, “Be careful, don’t let people around here find out you’re good at something or you’ll be asked to show up and do it relentlessly.” I’m happy to be put to work in this way.

There’s something extraordinary about people coming together for a shared cause and experience, centred around gathering, art making, tradition and connection. Where the transactionality of the capitalist machines takes a bloody rest. I’ve spent a lot of time working. Many of us do, where I’ve been so off my feet, I’m unable to land in place. Local volunteering seeds a kind of belonging, I think we really need right now.

The volunteers I gather with at the myriad community events I participate in are living full lives, have incredible hearts and skills. We’re all busy, and we’re all here for it. Each of us carries our own challenges, longings and sorrows. While we schlep boxes and put together tables and stack chairs and make mulled wine, we talk politics and worldviews, we muse on how the youth are faring, we swap recommendations and resources. The longer we spend together, the deeper we go. Culture-making happens in these moments of shared labour.

The internet is not sufficient for human connection. Yet we spend more and more time here. Spectating each other’s lives instead of living them together. There’s lots of talk of a loneliness epidemic. I did notice, as I do at many community events, that the volunteers are disproportionately women, who, it seems, are disproportionately less lonely than men. Perhaps some of that could be soothed by doing volunteer care work.

There’s a lot of pain in this world. And a lot of joy. May we gather to hold and heal the former and amplify the latter. Sleeves rolled, we need each other. In person. Face to face.

What are some of your favourite ways to gather, culture-make and cultivate community? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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I just recorded a video update for you, and then I watched it back, and I feel like I know myself better now. How strange. Maybe you’ll feel like you know yourself better after you watch it, too? Certainly, you’ll know more about what’s been happening for me while I flail about the frothy edges of life.

How’s your season been? Knocking it out of the park? I’m just over here thriving-not-surviving.

Just kidding.

I’ve been riding the wild ostrich of life bareback through a fun house of mirrors.

Wanna hear about all the things I’m sucking at and smashing into? It’s a joy, hop in. The water is… tumultuous.

It’s behind a paywall. Why? Because all those sweet sweet people who support my work with their dollar dollar bills deserve a sweet sweet treat of a Front Row Seat to my seasonal crash out.

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