In San Diego, 13K played the theme song like it owed them money, and on Saturdays they’d pass out these little folded cards, no bigger than a business card, with the lyrics printed tiny inside. I kept mine in my pocket like a hall pass to another life. Tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen. Pour myself a cup of ambition. I didn’t know yet what ambition was, exactly, but I knew what it felt like to need some.

What I did know, at twelve, in my particular house, with my particular stepfather, was that I needed to see three women tie a man to a chair and haul him out a window on a pulley. I needed to watch them poison his coffee, kidnap him, blackmail him, and rearrange his entire company while he dangled from the ceiling on a garage-door opener rigged like a chandelier. Mr. Hart deserved every second of it: sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot, and I could have described his kind without ever having met the word “misogynist.” I’d already met his kind. He lived in my house too, and his name was Darrel. I would have handed Dolly my entire allowance to walk through our front door and turn him, as she promised in her confrontation, from a rooster to a hen with one shot.

So my mother drove Julie and me to Parkway Plaza, dropped us at the curb, and I got out of that car vibrating. And Julie, who was fourteen and pretty and cool and a far better liar than I would ever be, looked at the marquee and said, “let’s not go.”

What?

“I’ve seen the trailer enough times,” she said. “We can say we saw it.”

I want to tell you I fought her on it. I didn’t. I was twelve and desperate to be the kind of person who didn’t need permission to skip a movie, and Julie had that kind of ease already installed in her, so I followed her past the box office and into two hours of mall.

And here I have to pause and honor what that actually was, because I had never done the mall before, not like that, not without a parent three steps ahead of me steering by the shoulder. This was my virgin voyage. My debut strut. Two kids cut loose in the fluorescent wilderness of a shopping mall in 1980, no destination, no money to speak of, just the food court smell of Orange Julius and cinnamon and the distant electronic bleating of an arcade we weren’t allowed near, and a payphone bank we walked past like it was a shrine to the world of teenagers we hadn’t been let into yet. It was thrilling. Julie was looking at boys. I was on the verge of looking at boys myself, in a way I had no vocabulary for yet and no intention of admitting to, so instead I looked at the directory map, the window displays, the ceiling, anything that wasn’t a boy’s face, with the specific, studied intensity of someone who has already learned to look sideways. We didn’t buy anything. I don’t remember a single store. What I remember is the walking, and the specific quality of a lie you’re constructing in real time with someone who’s better at it than you: the way you start rehearsing your lines under the fluorescent lights before you’ve even needed them yet.

Photo courtesy of Bruno Makori ©

My mother picked us up and asked how it was. Julie said it was good, and told her enough of the plot, with enough conviction, that neither of us had to say another word. It was the first outright lie I ever told. Not the last, but the first, and I remember it more clearly than I remember most of the truths from that year.

I did eventually see 9 to 5. In a theater, just not that theater, not that day. Then on VHS, and later on a DVD I kept long after I no longer owned anything that could play it, because some objects are ballast and you don’t get rid of ballast just because it’s stopped being useful. I have seen 9 to 5 more times than any movie except The Color Purple (which is a different essay for a different day). I didn’t know at twelve that I was watching a woman who’d grown up dirt poor in a one-room cabin in the Smokies decide, on principle, that the men who ran things could be lassoed, strung up, and taken down a peg, literally, on camera, with a length of rope. I just needed it to be true. I needed Violet and Judy and Doralee to win, because I needed proof, at twelve, in that house, that winning against a man like that was a thing that had ever once happened to anybody. I’ve needed that proof again since then. A time or two. Or twenty. Hell, I’ve stopped counting. I’m sure you have too.

It would be a few more years before I got free of my own Mr. Hart. But Dolly got there first, on a movie screen at a mall I lied about visiting, with a song already memorized off a card I kept folded in my pocket. She never met me. She turned nobody in my house from a rooster to a hen. And she still did the thing I needed a grown woman to do that year, which was refuse to be small in front of a man who wanted her to be. Atta girl.

Thank you for the ambition, Dolly. Some of us poured ourselves a cup and never put it down.

Brush teeth. Drink a glass of water. Prep the coffee. Fall to the floor and stretch, move through the yoga. Read from the daily readers. Meditate. Press start on the coffee maker. Put away last night’s dishes.

Then what?

Then I figure it out. That’s always been the answer, even before there was a question to put it to. The figuring-it-out is old. Older than any of the strategies I’ve built on top of it since. By the time I reach the coffee maker I’ve already done six things right and I’m scanning ahead for what I might get wrong next.

My hands are cramped by the time I notice them. I look down mid-routine and my knuckles are white around nothing, around whatever the next task is before I’ve even picked it up. That’s the trouble with the grip: it doesn’t need an object anymore. It just clenches.

I have spent most of my life certain that if I unspool the tangle carefully enough, I will find the one thread that explains it, work the knot correctly, and finally get to stop working it. So this morning, hands aching, I pull the thread.

First knot, close to the surface: I want the next thing to already be here, so badly that I miss the thing already here. This morning, I got accepted into a well-being fair for the second time, and I filled out the questionnaire immediately, before anyone could change their mind, mine included, as if the opportunity might spoil if left on the counter too long. By this evening I’ll be walking through a venue to see if it suits workshops I haven’t scheduled yet, for people I haven’t met yet. I move so fast toward what’s next that the present slips by unnoticed. I only knew I’d brushed my teeth this morning because of the mint still sitting on my tongue, evidence after the fact of a thing I apparently did. Even that’s already fading, and I’m three steps further into the day before the taste is gone, checking what’s next. I want the future stapled down so I can stop holding it up myself. That wanting has a name and the name is not ambition. The name is scarcity, dressed for work, hellbent on running.

Second knot, except it isn’t quite second. It’s tied to the first, a double knot, tricky and tightly wound: a voice older than the figuring-it-out, older than I can date, that says I am in trouble if I get the order of the day wrong. The figuring-it-out grew to manage this one. Loosen one and the other pulls tighter. I’m not late for something. Not behind on something. In trouble. That checklist every morning, the coffee pot and the yoga mat and the dishes, isn’t really about coffee pots and dishes. I live alone. I answer to no one’s calendar but my own. And still, some mornings, I move through my own list like I’m being watched by a judge with a clipboard. This morning I caught it and said it out loud: you are not in trouble. I wrote it on a sticky note and put it on my front door, so I’d have to walk past the reminder every time I left the house believing otherwise. I don’t know whose voice that is. I’m not sure I need to know, but it feels like many. I only need to keep noticing it isn’t mine.

Third knot, and this one makes me laugh at myself: item four on the list is yoga, item six is meditate, and I move through both like tasks to clear rather than practices to sink into, poses to finish and a mind to empty, on schedule, as if the entire point of either weren’t to slow down. Even that has an agenda. I sit down to let go and I bring a plan for how empty my mind should get and by when. How preposterous, to grip the very practices built to teach me to unclench. Even surrender, it turns out, is something I have tried to manage.

And yet. My empty mind appreciates the emptiness, even for just a spell. Most mornings, once I stop bringing a plan to it, the sitting does exactly what it’s for anyway. Clarity shows up. Direction shows up. It brings me back into my own body, into today, into whatever this actual morning is instead of the one I scheduled. I don’t want to make the practice sound like a failure. It isn’t. It keeps working even when I try to run it like everything else on the list, which might be the real lesson here, not the joke.

The last knot is the oldest one, and I know exactly how old. I was eight. We had a dog named Buck who loved my sister’s bedroom and my sister’s bed and wanted, every night, to sleep curled against her. I wanted him to want me instead. So I’d carry him into my room, into my own bed, and hold him as tight as my arms could manage. He wriggled. He always wriggled. And the second my arms loosened, even a little, he ran straight to her door. My whole body felt the sadness. Not a child’s sadness, filed away as something a child feels and grows out of. Mine. I needed him for safety. I needed him for proof that something would choose to stay if I held on hard enough. I am not eight anymore. I still reach for that proof.

Photo courtesy of Jayme Roderick © 2026

So here is the string, pulled all the way back: wanting a future to arrive early, a voice insisting I’m in trouble that’s older than my own strategies for managing it, a meditation practice I tried to grip, a dog who ran to someone else’s bed anyway. Four knots, one hand. No wonder it aches. Perhaps this finally explains the coffee.

And then the string runs out. A frayed end not unlike the other.

Some part of me is certain there’s an answer waiting at the end of it. A tidy last knot with my name on it, the one that finally explains the whole tangle and lets me set it down for good. And another part of me, just as loud, dreads finding it, because an answer is just one more thing to hold onto, one more outcome to manage and protect. I want the certainty and I’m afraid of it in the same breath, which is its own small comedy: even my hope for resolution is a form of control, and so is my bracing against getting one.

But there isn’t one. Not yet, not today. The string just stops, and where it stops looks exactly like where it started: two open hands, nothing in them, waiting to find out what they’ll do next.

There’s a term in crochet, I’ve learned: frogging. To undo your stitches on purpose, all the way back, and start again. Not a mistake to mourn. A reset.

Maybe that’s not an ending. Maybe the other end of the string was never a beginning waiting to be found. Maybe it’s a frog: pull it all the way out, on purpose, and see what my hands do next. I don’t know yet if they’ll stay open. I look down at them as I write this. The knuckles are a little less white than they were an hour ago. I don’t know what that means. I’m trying to let that be enough.

Photo courtesy of Jayme Roderick © 2026

Mia and I are fellow coaches, writers, storytellers. We get together for all the reasons, but mostly for mutual admiration: to look each other in the eye and tell our truths since the last time we met, to say out loud what we intend to manifest in the world for ourselves and for others. Sometimes we get to the places where people have failed us, which has a way of showing us our own deep humanity. That part I resent, if I’m honest. Some stubborn piece of me still yearns to be superhuman. Alas.

Yesterday we met at Fable to write. We didn’t write. We talked, the way we usually end up doing, and somewhere in it she started talking Enneagram, which is her native language. Mia is something close to a genius with all nine types, the kind of fluency where she doesn’t have to look anything up, she just knows a person’s number the way you’d know a friend’s face. She sees my twoness plainly. Twos are helpers, motivated to serve, built to be useful to the people around them. No wonder I became a coach. She showed me her own number too, at first, a One, a perfectionist, holding a glass exactly half full and asking herself whether it read as half empty or half full, gauging herself the way a One gauges everything. But it was the Two demonstration that undid me.

She filled two glasses and set them side by side. “This is a Two,” she said, and started pouring, back and forth, glass to glass to glass, water slopping over the rims and onto the table. We were laughing through most of it. “This is what an unhealed Two does,” she said, still pouring, still laughing, still slopping water everywhere. Gives itself away. Feeds everyone else and runs its own level low. I know that pour. I have been that pour, in my caretaking, my people-pleasing, my need to fix, my unsolicited advice. She let the water settle unevenly after that, one glass higher, one lower, and asked if I could be with that. Not equal. Not identical. Just enough, whatever that measure happened to be on a given day.

Somewhere in the pouring I noticed I preferred it when her glass came out fuller than mine. I want other people to have more, to experience more, and some part of me has decided that’s a lesson that only balances out over time, if it ever fully does. I’m still learning that one. What I didn’t mind, oddly, was the water everywhere, on the table, on our hands. It looked less like a mess to me than like abundance, everyone getting watered, everyone getting full. That’s the metaphor I took from it, anyway, whether or not it’s the one she intended. I thought that was the lesson. It wasn’t, and I didn’t see the rest of it coming, which is exactly why it landed the way it did.

She picked up one glass, poured water into it, and slid it toward me. For a second the light caught it and threw a thin prism across the table between us. Then she took the other glass and moved it off to her left, out of the exchange entirely, out of the whole equation. My chest contracted and expanded at the same time, some strange double motion I don’t have better words for. My mouth may have opened. I’m honestly not sure. I was somewhere inside my own astonishment at how seamlessly she’d turned the whole demonstration on me. Underneath it I heard something like an echo, simple, almost embarrassingly plain: can I stand alone. It moved through me like an avalanche starting somewhere I couldn’t see the top of.

Sitting across from Mia, I said it out loud for the first time: I write now because I know I’m writing for myself.

“That’s huge,” she said.

I started to cry.

For most of my life I wrote because somewhere at the end of the manuscript there was a Pulitzer waiting, or the idea of one, which was really just a way of making the whole enterprise so enormous I never had to start. Later the reason changed but the shape didn’t: I wrote because I believed my story could help someone else find their way from shame to grace. That’s a better reason than a prize. It’s also still a glass being poured toward someone else.

It is huge, because I still want to give everything I have, to Mia, to my clients, to my partner. That instinct hasn’t gone anywhere and I don’t think it’s supposed to. What’s shifted is what I’ve learned to ask underneath the giving.

I still do this with my partner, if I’m honest. The believing I have to perform to earn love hasn’t fully let go of him. It pisses me off, and it saddens me, because it doesn’t serve either of us. When I’m caught in it I don’t feel real love, I feel the performance of giving it. What he receives is earnest, generous, genuinely loving. Right behind it, close enough to touch, is my own need to be loved, and my own reflex to push that need away the moment it shows itself. I do both at once. It exhausts me.

That same underneath-question shows up with my family too, though not evenly, and not all at once. With my mother I’ve learned to hold a boundary, to love her without giving myself away to the point of depletion. That’s new. With my father and his wife, two different people with two different holds on me, I’ve had to learn something similar in a different key: showing up because I love them, without performing my way into being loved back. I have power-washed my father’s stucco walls, dug holes for his planters, climbed into air ducts to fix what needed fixing, and every bit of it came from love. None of that has stopped. What’s changed is the question underneath it.

None of this evolves all at once, and I don’t think it’s supposed to. I can be years down the road with my mother and only just wading in with my father’s wife, still ankle deep with my partner in a place I thought I’d already cleared. Evolution comes in layers, like droplets, some landing inside the glass and some landing outside it, on the table, on my hands, and I don’t always get to choose which side of the rim they fall on. That’s the practice: the writing for myself, the learning not to perform, with my mother, with my father, with his wife, with my partner. Each one its own droplet, its own timing, none of them obligated to arrive together.

I’ve been meditating for over a decade, which turns out to have been its own long apprenticeship in exactly this: filling my own glass. Not rescuing myself in some dramatic, once-and-for-all way, but the smaller, steadier version. Getting myself to the grocery store. Getting through a hard morning without waiting for someone else to walk in and hand me permission to be okay. I used to wonder who was going to rescue me. I don’t wonder that anymore. I’ve become the person I needed when I was a child, and I keep becoming her, again and again, in ways too small to notice until you add them up.

The confirmation came the next morning, when I shuffled my tarot deck and pulled a single card. Self. Not planned, not chosen, just turned over. It felt like something larger than the two of us at that table, showing me the same lesson twice in two different languages. Attempt to see the you inside the you, the card said, and I thought of the light catching that glass between us, splitting for a second into something more than plain water. That’s the self, maybe. Not one clear thing but a prism, the one container that lets every fractured, particular part of a person catch the light and throw its own color into the room.

I’m not finished with this. I’m still sloshing more than I’d like to admit, still learning where my own rim is. But I know this much now: I get to be my own glass, catching whatever light comes my way, and throwing it back out as mine.

The difference wasn’t a secret ingredient. It was everything the card couldn’t hold: the smell that told her when to pull it thirty seconds early, the feel of a batter that was wrong before it looked wrong. When someone finally asked her why, she said the recipe was what she could write down. The rest was four thousand cakes.

I don’t know if that story is true. I don’t think it matters. Presence works the same way hers did. Mine came from someplace less sweet than a kitchen.

I got good at it by sitting with my own grief once a week for over a decade, in a therapist’s office. I got good at it in church basements on the nights in between. I got good at it by watching my mother be harmed, and by being harmed myself, and by the years and years it took to come out the other side with resilience instead of a wound that never closed. I got good at it by walking out. I got good at it by showing up.

I got good at it by witnessing my own body, in shutdown, denial, bypass, recognition, shaking, dancing, all of it, until I could read someone else’s. I got good at it by not flinching from someone else’s rage, because I’d already learned, slowly, not to flinch from my own. I got good at it by not rushing someone’s silence, because I know what happens when you rush your own: you get performance instead of the real thing. What I learned in someone else’s tears was permission to finally allow my own, after years of being told they weren’t manly, weren’t appropriate, weren’t mine to have.

Every one of those hours taught me something too small to name on its own. A pause held half a second longer than felt safe. A question offered instead of the advice I wanted to give. The exact moment to stop performing empathy and just have it.

None of that shows up on a card. It wouldn’t help you if it did. It’s not transferable that way. It has to be lived into.

The people with her card in their hands weren’t failing either. They were trying to live an experience that wasn’t theirs, and couldn’t be, not the first time through. I know that road. I have tried to be someone else. I have coached people who wanted badly to be someone other than who they actually are, and I have never once seen it work. The only gift that does work is smaller than that: be exactly who you are right now. Then tomorrow, be whoever that turns into. Meet each version with gratitude and curiosity instead of a grudge.

I call myself an Integration Coach because that’s the most honest name I have for what actually happens in the room. Not a method I can hand you whole. A way of being with a person, built one repetition at a time, most of them invisible even to me while they were happening.

I don’t have her recipe. I have thousands of hours nobody saw, and I’m still adding to them. I don’t know if she’s real. I know I am. That comes from sifting it myself, stirring it myself, baking it myself.

I’m not going to decode it. I don’t do that with my own dreams, and I don’t let my clients do it either. Dreams don’t translate. They grab your friends, your old jobs, your childhood nicknames, and shuffle them into something that resists being solved like a crossword. The second you start assigning tidy meaning, you’ve stopped listening and started narrating.

Nothing looked quite right, which is how dreams go. The halls were the halls I knew, and also weren’t. An old colleague strolled through a bullpen like she owned it, and I watched from behind glass, half in and half out of my own old job. Later, an exit interview happened somewhere I couldn’t have named awake, the questions landing like an interrogation. I both belonged there and didn’t. Familiar, and not. Same place, different planet. You know this feeling if you’ve had a dream like it. No explaining it. You just recognize it, the way you recognize a face before you remember the name.

What’s actually worth sitting with is not what the dream meant but what it did.

Jung’s take on dreams was simple: they balance us out. Not flattery, not confirmation of the story we’ve been telling ourselves. A nudge toward whatever we’ve been dodging. I’d spent a year building a clean growth story. Maybe my psyche’s job that night was to hand me the messy version instead. An interrogation dressed as an interview. Old coworkers still sprinting toward the same fires, sure of themselves in a way that looked, from where I stood, a little like sleepwalking.

There’s a body version of this too. Sleeping brains run a kind of maintenance on our big feelings overnight, replaying what mattered and quietly taking the edge off it. Maybe that’s why a threshold like a year can crack a dream this wide open without me ever circling the date. The body keeps its own calendar. It knew before my coffee did.

So maybe the honest thing to say is this: I didn’t learn anything new. I was shown something I already knew, in a voice I don’t usually let myself hear.

Two friends answer a question at the same second, same words: Ed Catmull needs me. Something in me laughed, the inside joke of it, the hierarchy dressed up as corporate speak, the kind of line that used to mean you’d made it. And under the laugh: that’s the answer, and it’s not interesting to me anymore. I used to want to be needed by the room. Now I want the room with the uncertain answer. That’s not a plot point. That’s a year of self-congratulation getting quietly corrected. The dream wasn’t handing me a trophy. It was handing me the parts of the story I’d been too busy building a business to actually feel.

And then, the flower.

Cut to: The building falls away behind me, glass and archives shrinking, until I’m eye-level with a single goldenrod growing in the dirt off a busy sidewalk. Shoes and cuffs rushing past. Horns, exhaust. The flower, turned toward the sun anyway.

I feel all of it at once. Gratitude for the Pixar that doesn’t exist for me anymore, and grief that visits anyway, because you don’t stop loving a place just because you outgrew it. A bigger gratitude for the purposeful year since. Pride, really. And under all of it, the question that never fully leaves: what the hell am I doing, making, building here? The exit interview happened. It’s done. The dream didn’t answer that question. It gave me permission to keep asking it while I let go of what’s behind me and trust what’s ahead.

Here’s what is feeling useful, resonant. Not my dream. Not my growth. The question underneath both: what are you still walking the halls of, even after you’ve already left? Where have you convinced yourself you’ve integrated something, when part of you is still doing the leaving, over and over, while you sleep?

You don’t need an answer today. Next time you wake up with an image that makes no sense, don’t reach for what it means. Ask what it’s correcting. What got too loud, too certain, too self-important in your waking life, and needed a flower off the sidewalk to set it straight.

Rooted and free aren’t opposites. Neither are relief and grief. Some things get to be true at the same time. Rooted, grieving, and still turning toward the sun.

Later, in musical theater, I found out what my body could actually do. In The Unsinkable Molly Brown, I jumped off a bar into the Russian splits. There is no other way to say this: in that moment, I was flying. Not metaphorically. Not approximately. The ground was there and then it wasn’t, and for the duration of that leap I belonged entirely to the air. A barrel roll, when you’re inside it, feels like a biplane doing lazy circles above a field, the horizon tilting, the world rearranging itself around you, gravity briefly demoted to a suggestion.

I have been thinking about this because a colleague I deeply respect — a professional dancer from girlhood, someone who gave her body to this art form long before I ever walked into my first class — wrote recently about what the studio really teaches. Not how to defy gravity, she says, but how to fall well. How to shift your weight into the inevitable. Build for recovery, not control. It is wise. It is earned in the way that only a lifetime in the body can earn it.

And. I want to talk about the feathers.

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Get to know you.

There’s nothing better or more important or urgent. Get to know you. Meditate. Exercise. Walk. Write and journal. Get to know your mind, body, heart, spirit and soul. Don’t wait. You have ignored it long enough.

Your complaints come from a place of dissatisfaction with you. No one else. Your judgment follows. Your resentment follows. Your expectation follows. And you point outwards and wonder why nothing is different. It’s you.

You don’t like you. You certainly don’t love you. You speak harshly to you. You are cruel to you. The one person who holds you up, gets you up in the morning, brushes your teeth, clothes you — the same person you should be loving through your day — you hate.

Stop it. It’s a trap. It’s a spiral down. It’s reinforces shame. No wonder you don’t want to get up in the morning. No wonder you don’t look at yourself in the mirror. No wonder you mutter under your breath all that’s wrong with you and the world. No wonder the noise from inside the house is so loud and mean. No wonder you need a break. No wonder you want a vacation.

The only trouble is, you think you need a break from you. A vacation from you. But there you are.

Take a break with you.

Take a vacation with you.

Give yourself a break. Give yourself a vacation. Like yourself. Look yourself in the mirror and say something kind. Act as if. Fake it till you believe it. A scrap of it.

Then love yourself.

Take yourself on a walk. Take yourself somewhere you like to go. Take yourself on a date. Say sweet things to yourself. You look nice. That’s a great thing to order off the menu, I like that too. May I have a bite? Will you share it with me? Here, take a bite, it’s delicious. You’re great to spend time with. You’re beautiful. Thank you for spending time with me. Thank you for showing me a bit of who you are. You are funny. You are smart. You are kind. You are excellent.

If this makes you squirm, you’re welcome. It it makes you feel bad, that’s a clue. Start now.

I know this because I have lived on the wrong side of it for most of my life.

I am in recovery. This is my fourth time through the twelve steps, which means I have made amends before, done the work before, stood in front of the people I have harmed and told the truth before. And every time, somewhere in the middle of my list, I have found the same name missing.

My own.

The last name on my amends list is always the hardest one to write down. Not because the wrongs are unclear. Not because I don’t know what I owe. But because the person I have harmed most consistently, most creatively, and with the most efficient cruelty is myself.

I’ve been on the list every time, and there’s more. There’s always more. And so I keep adding my own name to the list.

I sat down and I wrote myself a full amends. Not a gesture. Not a paragraph of self-compassion I could check off and move past. A real one. The kind I would write to anyone else I had wronged across decades. I write with specificity, with honesty, with the willingness to name what I actually did rather than what I wished I had done.

What I found when I wrote it surprised me. Not the content; I knew the content. I knew I had been brutal to myself. I knew I had carried shame that was never mine to carry, shame handed to me by people who were working out their own unfinished pain on a child who had no way yet to hand it back. I knew I had kept myself small and called it humility. I knew I had started things and hidden from finishing them, had stood on stages and walked offstage immediately into the audit of everything I’d done wrong, had looked at a life that was genuinely full and called it not enough.

I knew all of that. What surprised me was how much it mattered to say it formally. To treat myself as someone worth the full ceremony of an amends. To not rush past it into the action plan, the next right thing, the forward motion that recovery sometimes uses as a way of never having to fully arrive in the present moment of one’s own pain.

Making amends to myself didn’t mean letting myself off the hook. It meant telling the truth. About what I did. About what was done to me. About what I picked up that was never mine and carried anyway. And then, and this is the hard part, putting it down.

Recovery books tell us that working step nine brings us self-respect, compassion, empathy, and growth in self-forgiveness. Growth in self-forgiveness. Not instant forgiveness. Not forgiveness delivered from the outside like a verdict. Growth. Which means it’s a practice. Which means it requires the same willingness, the same rigor, the same unflinching honesty we bring to every other name on the list.

Which means we have to put our own name on the list.

Here is what I have come to believe, four times around and still learning: self-amends is not the last thing we do in this work. It is not the bow we tie on the package at the end. It is the thing that makes everything else possible. It is the difference between a life lived in ongoing secret war with oneself and a life lived imperfectly, uncertainly, sometimes badly, but from a place of basic self-regard. Basic willingness to show up for yourself the way you have learned, slowly and with great difficulty, to show up for others.

You are on the list.

You have always been on the list.

The question is whether you are willing to write yourself the letter you would write anyone else you had wronged this deeply and this long.

I think you are. I think that’s why you’re reading this.

Write the letter.

I had been horizontal for approximately four minutes when it happened. The plum galette, made from plums brought to me by a friend I have known since we were teenagers, a costumer at a local theater who arrived at my door the day before with a box full and that particular theatrical flair that never really leaves people, was doing its work in the oven. I was doing my alleged work on the couch. I had also been thinking about getting outside for a walk. And returning some messages. And the fact that my heart was beating unusually fast. And the Tony Awards, which were still hours away and about which I had been quietly, completely, unapologetically excited all week. I have meditated every day for eleven years. I know how to be still. I teach people how to be still. And yet there I was: horizontal in body, entirely airborne in mind, performing rest for an audience of no one.

Then the smoke alarm joined the production.

I fanned around the little mechanism until it hushed, closed the door to the room, returned to the couch, and made peace with the fact that some days the body simply refuses the script. My heart had its own ideas. The oven and smoke alarm had its own ideas. And across the country, the Tonys were several hours away. I gave up on stillness and gave in to the feeling, which had been asking for that all along.

This is a story about that kind of feeling. About where it comes from, what it means, and what it might have to do with you.

I was twelve when my childhood best friend Brendan’s mother, Susan, took us to see Cheaper by the Dozen at the local high school. The whole family was creative in that easy, unselfconscious way some families are: Brendan played the flute, his older brother Todd the guitar, Susan herself sang. That night, Stacy and Todd were both in the play, and I sat in the front row next to Brendan and watched people I actually knew, people who rode bikes on the same streets I did, become, completely and convincingly, someone else entirely.

I was transfixed. And here is the strange part, the part I have never quite known what to do with: what transfixed me was not the acting, or the costumes, or even the dancing — and I was a queer boy on the verge of knowing certain things about himself, so you would think the dancing might have done it. It was the staircase.

It rose from the stage with the confidence of something permanent. It looked load-bearing. It looked, frankly, like it had a mortgage. But what stopped me cold was the moment when all twelve children, plus the parents, stood on it at once, and it held. It didn’t tremble. It didn’t collapse. It simply held the weight of everyone on it, as though it had been built for exactly that purpose, as though it had always been there and always would be.

What a strange thing for a child to notice, well at this this one. But I think what I was encountering, without having words for it yet, was the profound human capacity to make something convincingly real from nothing: to build a world so solid that a twelve-year-old in the front row forgets, entirely and willingly, that it will all be gone in just a matter of weeks.

Which it was. Dismantled the moment the run ended, returned to lumber and nails and empty air. The whole world of that play existed completely, and then didn’t.

I have thought about that staircase for forty years.

A few months after that night, I was on a stage myself. And I loved it with the particular love that feels less like preference and more like recognition: oh, this is where I belong. I pursued it for years: musical theater, straight plays, dance, song, the full triple-threat devotion that the form demands. I eventually found my way into the professional theater world, working for a Broadway director, briefly inside the world I had loved from the front row. I met people I would watch on my screen last night: Kelly O’Hara, before she was Kelly O’Hara (Dracula at the Broadhurst Theatre that was seen by very few before it too was imagined, created, and dismantled all in the name of love of the craft) in the way she is now, and others whose names would become familiar to anyone who follows theater. I know what that world costs and what it gives. I know the particular electricity of building something that will only exist for a while.

And then, gradually, I drifted from it. Not dramatically, not all at once: more the way you drift from something when life accelerates and the distance grows quietly, one compromise at a time, until one day you realize it has been years. My creativity went into a long hibernation. The musical I had begun writing simply waited, patient as lumber, for me to return.

A few days ago, I returned. The characters are alive. The story feels necessary. And I understand now that the distance was not wasted: every year of it became material.

There is a theory at the heart of musical theater that I want to offer here, because it explains something true not just about the form but about being human. We speak until feeling exceeds what speaking can hold. Then we must sing. And when singing can no longer contain what we carry, we must dance. It is an architecture of escalating expression: a crescendo toward full embodiment, and then a resolve, the feeling fully spent, finding its rest at last. Musical theater does not ask us to be more emotional than we are. It builds a form large enough to hold what we already feel.

I understood this in my body before I understood it as a concept. My heart was doing it that Sunday afternoon, hammering away at something too large for a quiet room, reaching for its larger instrument. The smoke alarm, in its way, was singing.

What I have taken longer to understand is why imagination saved me as specifically as it did.

I was a child who could not hold onto things. I did not collect, did not plan, did not let myself want anything too much. The home I grew up in was chaotic in ways that produced a particular interior effect: I could not trust permanence. Everything felt subject to sudden disappearance. So I kept one hand on the exit, always, and let very little fully in.

Except in imagination. Except in theater.

Because in imagination, impermanence is not a threat; it is the entire point. You build the staircase knowing it will come down. You rehearse for months for a night that happens once. The Tony Awards: dreamed, designed, choreographed, lit, and made extraordinary for a single broadcast, one night, and then it becomes memory, becomes legend, becomes the thing that ignites something in a child watching from a living room somewhere who thinks: I want to be part of that.

Imagination taught me that impermanence is not the enemy of meaning. It may be the very condition of it. Something is built. It becomes real. It gets into the hands and minds of others and grows beyond what any one person imagined. Magic moves from imagination to the page to the stage to the world, and the world is changed by it, even after the staircase comes down.

Write what you know, we are told, and this is reasonable as far as it goes. But I think there is somewhere further. Be what you know. And further still: become what you are called toward. Keep envisioning. Keep evolving. Let the force of your accumulated life–the grief, the wonder, the staircase you never forgot, the heart that refuses to be still on a Sunday afternoon–be not just the subject of what you make but its actual substance. This is what integration means to me: we do not leave behind what we have survived. We bring it forward, transformed, into whatever we are building next.

Coaching feels like this to me. At its best, it follows the same architecture I fell in love with at eleven: helping someone move from speaking to singing to dancing, from the careful and contracted version of themselves toward something more fully expressed, more alive, more completely in the room. A crescendo toward full embodiment. That is what my clients are reaching for, whether they would name it that way or not: the place where what they carry finally has a form large enough to hold it, where they are no longer managing their feeling but moving with it, through it, into something they could not have imagined from where they began.

Creativity is not a talent reserved for people who call themselves artists. It is the willingness to look at what is not yet there and begin anyway. To suspend disbelief long enough to build the staircase, knowing it will come down, knowing that what matters is not its permanence but what happens on it while it stands.

We are all, at any given moment, somewhere on a staircase of our own making. Some of us are just finding the first step. Some are mid-climb, the top not yet visible. Some are standing in the empty space where a staircase used to be, wondering if they have it in them to build another.

You do. Begin there. Be where you are, with what you have, and let the next step show itself. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, the whole thing.

The galette came out beautifully, by the way. The smoke alarm was wrong about everything. And I took a few minutes to offer myself a soothing bath before the Tony Awards.

He still tells that story, more than fifty years later.

For a long time, I looked back at that five-year-old with something uncomfortably close to embarrassment. The commercial wasn’t about us, after all. I had misunderstood. And somewhere along the way I confused that innocence with not being smart, and quietly stopped loving that part of myself — the one who ran full speed down a hallway just to share something beautiful with someone they adored.

I’m trying to be more gentle now. That child wasn’t naive. They were whole.

This past weekend, my nephew graduated from Sonoma State University with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science — a remarkable achievement on its own, and more remarkable still when you know that he is on the spectrum, and that this degree, this field, this path, was entirely and deliberately his own. The whole family came. And when I say the whole family, I mean it in the way that phrase carries weight for some of us — not just logistically, but emotionally.

My father and his wife drove up from San Diego. My mother, whom I had not seen in five years — not by accident, but by necessity, and with whom I reconciled just six months ago — would be there. My sister and her husband. My niece, their partner, their six-year-old son. And my partner Patrick who is new to my life and therefore new to all of theirs.

In the weeks leading up to the graduation, my nervous system had opinions about all of this.

The stories came, as they often do. Old ones, mostly. The kind that were written in childhood and have been running quietly in the background ever since, convincing us that the past is a reliable forecast of the future. I know these stories well enough by now to recognize them — the trepidation, the hypervigilance, the careful planning that is really just anxiety wearing the costume of competence.

A few days before we left, I sat with a colleague and friend who practices Internal Family Systems therapy, and I let all the parts that were showing up have their say. The part that worries about food — I am gluten-free, and I carry an old, young hunger that has nothing to do with gluten. The part that knows how to lose itself in a room full of family, that slips into caretaking or appeasing or making itself smaller so that everyone else can be more comfortable. The part that is still, in some recess of itself, eight or nine or ten years old and not entirely sure it knows how to ask for what it needs.

What came to me in that session was an image: a June bug. Iridescent, green and purple, with an exoskeleton that is not armor so much as simply its own strong Self — something that knows it can protect itself, that has wings if it needs them. I held my younger parts the way you’d hold a child who has just come out of the water, wrapping them in a towel, sitting with them in the warmth, and handing them a snack. Telling them: we live in abundance now. We live in safety and care and freedom. You don’t have to manage this. I’ve got us.

I packed enough food to survive a minor catastrophe anyway, because healing is not linear and the body remembers what the mind is still learning. I established a safe word with my partner — something we could use if the day became too much. We chose jellyfish, inspired by a news clip he shared with me a couple days prior. I told my sister and my niece, and we all laughed, which was itself a kind of medicine.

The day before the commencement, Patrick wrote me a card. He said he hoped I knew how deeply he admired the strength I carry — my resilience, my courage to keep showing up with an open heart, the compassion I give freely to others. He meant every word. I could feel that.

I am still learning to receive it. Not because I doubt him, but because the parts of me that were formed before I knew how to protect myself are slower to update than the rest. They hear words like resilience and courage and quietly wonder if the person saying them has mistaken me for someone else. That is the work — not acquiring new qualities, but recognizing the ones that were always there, even when they were forged in difficulty rather than ease.

What I am learning, slowly, is that being seen clearly by someone who loves you is not a verdict to be suspicious of. It is simply the present moment telling the truth.

Sonoma State sits in Rohnert Park, which is not, it must be said, a culinary destination. The strip of chain restaurants near our hotel suggested an evening of cheerful mediocrity. But Heather, the concierge at my father and his wife’s hotel, pointed us toward Art’s Place, and Art’s Place was packed on a Saturday night with local families doing exactly what we were doing: celebrating something, feeding each other, taking up space together in the way that people do when they are glad to be in the same room. The food was delicious. My father and his wife were across the table. Patrick was beside me. It was, unexpectedly and simply, a lovely night.

The commencement the next morning was everything a commencement should be — moving and a little long and full of that specific collective energy that happens when hundreds of people are all proud of the same thing at the same time. Afterward, we gathered in my mother’s backyard. The sun came out. My sister sliced and handed out chocolate cake, and the overdose of sugar was magnificent. We took a family photo on the front lawn, everyone close, and the world did not end. The jellyfish was never summoned.

The stories from my past tried to haunt me, as they often do. And I found, as I keep finding, that they were just stories. Not nothing — stories shaped by real things, real losses, real years — but not prophecy either. I didn’t have to take on anyone else’s weight. I didn’t lose myself. I stayed, mostly, inside my own skin, which is not a small thing for those of us who learned early that our own skin was not always the safest place to be.

I have kept a daily gratitude practice for over a decade, and a meditation practice alongside it. They did not eliminate the fear before that weekend. But they gave me somewhere to put it, and a way to watch it without becoming it entirely. The research on gratitude is, at this point, substantial — it rewires the brain over time, builds resilience, improves sleep, deepens presence. But the science is almost beside the point. The point is simpler: when we look for what is good, we find more of it. When we name it, it becomes more real.

The last thing I do each night is write at least ten things I’m grateful for in a journal beside my bed.

A person whose patience steadied me.
A quality of afternoon light.
Love moving quietly through an ordinary moment.
My home.
My city.
A good night’s rest, anticipated.

The list has grown easier and longer over the years. What I’ve noticed is that the practice doesn’t just record a good life. It gradually builds one. You begin to move through your days looking for what belongs on the list.

Across the country right now, people are graduating. From universities and community colleges, from trade programs and high schools and the kinds of informal apprenticeships that never come with a ceremony but deserve one. Families are gathering. Old dynamics are being navigated. Safe words are being chosen, or should be. Someone is packing too much food just in case. Someone is reconciling with a person they haven’t seen in years and finding that the room they feared has more light in it than they remembered.

My nephew crossed a stage and received a diploma and became, officially, the next version of himself. The rest of us stood and clapped and felt the particular pride of watching someone you love step forward into their own life.

And somewhere in my memory, a five-year-old is still running down a hall, certain that the radio is talking about them and their father, certain that this moment — right now, this one — belongs to both of them.

They weren’t wrong.

***

What is the story you’ve been carrying that the present moment keeps trying to disprove? And what would it mean to let this season — whatever you are graduating from, or into — be the evidence that you made it through?

My mother and I have a complicated history. I grew up mostly in my father’s house. He raised my sister and me after my mother left when I was three, and I spent weekends in hers, a house that was not always safe, where I witnessed things a child shouldn’t witness and experienced things I wouldn’t find words for until decades later. My mother was consumed by her own chaos in those years. That doesn’t change what happened to me in her house. Both things are true.

I loved her anyway, the way children love, without conditions, without much choice. I was enmeshed with her. Codependent. And when I finally tried to tell her, as an adult, what had happened to me as a child under her roof, she could not give me the one thing I asked for. What she denied, repressed, and defended, then offended. So in June 2020, I walked out of her life.

The years away were not empty. They were full of therapy, recovery, the long patient labor of learning to love myself without anyone’s permission. I was becoming, slowly and with great effort, the person I had always wanted to be.

But there is a particular kind of grief that comes with estrangement. It doesn’t resolve. You can be at peace with your decision and still feel the ache of it on ordinary days — a Sunday in October, a birthday that passes without a phone call, a moment when something happens and you reach, instinctively, for the person you haven’t spoken to in years. I grieved my mother while I was still living. And in the grieving, somewhere, I began to find the edges of something that might be forgiveness.

***

Last October 2025, I wrote a letter after I had read Pema Chödrön’s The Places That Scare You about the Bodhisattva path. (I’m hardly a bodhisattva.) I wrote the letter to my mother, not with the intention of sending it to her, but rather writing it for me. Writing it for my own clarity, my own recovery. Writing it to just see if I could actually write a letter of forgiveness to her. For the harms she caused.

In the same month, while I was down in my hometown, I read it aloud at the dinner table in front of my father, his wife, and a family friend. My father cried and I teared up. My father’s wife told me it was a powerful letter. The family friend just said, wow, that was a lot, and had a look of anguish on her face. As I finished reading, I heard the “a lot-ness”.

I regretted reading that letter in front of my father, I could see the helplessness in his tears all these years later. All he’s ever wanted to do was protect me — he just didn’t know what had happened, because it happened in a different house. Watching him cry was its own kind of grief.

Not two weeks later, my sister called me. After five years of not seeing my mother, she said that my mother’s partner of three and a half years had died suddenly of an aneurysm. And I said, do I need to see Mom? And my sister said, that would be wonderful.

So I drove the hour and a half north from San Francisco, and I surprised my mother. I knocked on the door, and she was elated to see me.

I had no intention of delivering the letter. I needed to see: did I really mean what I wrote? Or was I still full of resentment, just quieter about it now?

I showed up. I sat with my mother. And I just listened to her in her grief. She wanted to know how I’ve been, where I’ve been, and who I am now. And I learned, in sitting with her, that my mother now has dementia.

Before I left, almost six years ago now, she had mentioned off and on that her mind was slipping, that her memory was going. We both chalked it up to old age, normal forgetfulness. Although it’s true that her mother (my grandmother) died at 101 of Lewy body dementia, so it was quite possible my mother would develop it too. It was early, but I saw the signs. My sister and her family had been telling me about the signs over the previous six to twelve months. I wasn’t completely blindsided, but I was a little surprised to see just how much the dementia had taken hold.

To watch someone you love, someone with whom you have such complicated history, someone you have spent years learning to forgive, to watch them lose the thread of themselves in real time is its own specific sorrow. She would say something and then, a few minutes later, say it again, unaware. She would look at me with such love and then, briefly, such confusion, and then love again.

Nonetheless, I sat with my mother and watched her cry. She hates crying. Somehow I got the crying gene in the family, and she mostly hated that too. But she cried, and I listened to her, and she was so elated to see me; and she was really afraid I was going to leave again. I told her I would not.

I had come to test the letter. I meant it.

What follows is the letter I wrote for myself last October. I share it here, for the first time publicly, exactly as I wrote it.

Dear Mom,

When I first began this letter, it was your 83rd birthday, and I wrote, “I hope it’s a good one for you. In fact, I wish you all goodness every day.” I still wish that for you every day, birthdays or otherwise.

For the past decade, I have done my own work–therapy, recovery, and a world of soul-searching for clarity, answers, and a cleansing of the deepest sorrows in me. Through all of this, I have been looking for forgiveness.

Let me remind you: I was physically, sexually, and emotionally abused in your home from the age of four until fourteen. This is the same home you and I fled on numerous occasions from your violent husband at the time.

I remember the last words you said to me, “I did not know.” Now you know. I forgive you for not knowing.

I asked for six words: “I’m sorry I did not protect you.” I forgive you for not apologizing even after learning what happened to me as a child. I forgive you for refusing to acknowledge, hear, or believe my words. I forgive you for not protecting me.

I tried to come out to you at 12, and you did not hear, see, comfort or support me. I forgive you.

I came out at 18 and, again, you did not hear, see, comfort, support, or accept me for who I was. You said, “I’d rather you were blind because then it wouldn’t be my fault.” I forgive you.

I also forgive myself. Not for being abused or for being queer; I have nothing to apologize for there. I have, however, forgiven myself for believing that I did not deserve to be protected. I deserved to be protected. I have forgiven myself for not seeing myself and loving myself just as I am: queer, emotionally available and sensitive, gentle, beautiful just as I am.

I release both of us from the burden of carrying the words I have longed to hear from you (”I’m sorry I did not protect you.”)

I let go of the things I blamed you for. I will not carry them with me in my heart, mind, body, spirit, and soul anymore.

In the past five years, since our last conversation, I have become the person I have longed to be. I feel free. I know myself on a deeper level than I ever have. I have loved myself through my sorrow, anger, resentments, disappointment and grief. I love myself deeply and thoroughly. Self love has been my own best answer to my challenges. Hey, I’m ok.

I no longer need to look to other people or things for my validation. I find value in myself just as I am now, a perfectly flawed, delightfully beautiful human.

I release you. I let you go. I do not plan to see you right now or any time soon.

It may not be what you want. It is what I need.

I forgive you.

May you be free from suffering and the roots of suffering.

In peace. Jayme

That was October. By November I had driven north and was sitting at her kitchen table, then right next to her on the sofa, and she was holding my hand as she liked to do.

For the past six months, my sister and I have been working with a lawyer to get power of attorney, working to get my mother situated so that we know her finances, her medical condition, and how to take care of her all the way to the end. Which we have no idea when that is. It could be years from now. Decades. Although who really knows?

My mother is back in my life, and I now have boundaries around her. I can take care of my mother and I can take care of myself. Both things are true. Both things are possible. I’m still a little astonished by that.

One of the last times I went up to see her, she kept asking if I would forgive her. And I kept telling her, Mom, your children love you and forgive you. But she’d keep forgetting. So I grabbed a coffee filter from the cupboard and wrote with a Sharpie pen: Your children love you and forgive you. I taped it to the cupboard, right next to the word aneurysm, which was its own reminder to my mother of how her partner had passed away, because she kept forgetting.

Two pieces of paper on a cupboard. Two things she needed to know.

I hope she reads the coffee filter tomorrow. I hope she reads it on Mother’s Day and every other day she needs to be reminded. I hope it meets her in whatever moment she’s in, wherever her mind is, and gives her some peace.

Because I mean it. I really do. Not because she earned it in the way I once needed her to earn it. Not because she ever said the six words I asked for. But because I finally understood that forgiveness is not a gift you give to someone else. It is a weight you put down. It is a door you open in yourself and walk through, alone, into air that is cleaner than anything you’ve breathed in years.

It is for her. It is also for me. In the end, I’m not sure those are different things.

We all have varied relationships with our mothers.

Some of us never knew them at all. Some of us knew them too well, in all the wrong ways. Some of us had mothers who were extraordinary — steady, loving, present — and some of us spent our childhoods trying to figure out how to survive the mothers we were given. Most of us, I suspect, hold something more complicated than either of those extremes: love and damage braided together so tightly you can’t always tell where one ends and the other begins.

Wherever you are in that, whatever you’re still carrying, you are not alone in it. Not in the anger. Not in the grief. Not in the exhaustion of loving someone who hurt you, or in the strange guilt of having walked away from someone you still loved.

Forgiveness is not a requirement. It is not a performance. It doesn’t mean what was done to you was acceptable, or that you owe anyone your presence, or that the story has a tidy ending. I am telling you mine and it does not have a tidy ending. My mother is losing her memory. The six words I asked didn’t come as prescribed, but she did say I’m sorry five consecutive times in a row just a few months ago. The words are getting harder for her to find, but she finds them.

It took me the right amount of time. Not too long — the right amount. Yours will take however long it takes.

What I can offer you is this: the moment I stopped waiting for my mother to free me and decided to free myself was the moment the ground under my feet became solid again. Self-love — unglamorous, daily, imperfect self-love — turned out to be the answer I had been looking for in all the wrong places.

So if you are ready: forgive. Not for them. For you.

And if you are not ready: that’s alright. Just keep going. Keep doing the work. Keep being honest about what you carry.

The coffee filter will be waiting.

Let me back up.

On the first day of the conference, I was supposed to give a workshop. I had planned it. Created it. Made the deck, practiced it, rehearsed it, gathered feedback, practiced it again. I moved through the full emotional spectrum — nervous, anxious, excited, confident — and then it didn’t happen. The why of it isn’t really the point. What matters is this: I flew across the country; caught a train and a car. I showed up completely ready to offer something I had poured myself into. And then I didn’t get to.

Historically — and I know this about myself — I might have cried. I might have spiraled. I might have collapsed into shame, into the old familiar loop of What’s wrong with me? while simultaneously pointing fingers, looking for someone to blame, making myself both the victim and the prosecutor. I know that version of me. They’ve shown up before.

They didn’t show up this time.

What I did instead was take a walk. I sought support. I called my partner. I called my sponsor. I called colleagues and fellow coaches. And I said something I haven’t always known how to say: Here’s what I don’t need. I don’t need your pity. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me. What I need is for you to remind me that I’m still capable. That I’m still worthy. That I’m still a good coach.

And they did. And I received it.

That moment — the asking, the receiving, the staying present with myself instead of abandoning myself — was its own kind of workshop.

Additionally, I’ve been sitting with a TED Talk by Debbie Millman, the brilliant host of Design Matters, called “You Got What You Wanted. Now What?” In it, she asks how long the feeling of pride and joy from accomplishment actually lasts. An answer: eleven minutes. The pride arrives, and almost as quickly, it dissolves. She calls this the creative condition — the fleeting nature of fulfillment — and suggests that the real answer is simply to keep making things. Heed the calling. Continue.

I found it resonant. I also found it incomplete.

Because here is my experience: the pride and joy of creating that workshop — building it, imagining and reimagining it, writing and editing it, rehearsing it, receiving feedback, rehearsing it again — has lingered for nearly a week. Not eleven minutes. Days. And consider what I’m holding that joy against: I never got to give the workshop. I made the journey across the country, paid the cost of it in money and time and vulnerability, and the moment I prepared for didn’t come. By any conventional measure, that’s a loss. Shame was nearby, waiting. It knew my name and my history.

And still, the joy persisted. The pride lingered.

So I have to ask: what if the eleven minutes isn’t a condition we’re sentenced to? What if it’s a habit we haven’t yet questioned?

Millman quotes David Lee Roth, who described reaching the peak of accomplishment as feeling “cold, alone, and with only one place to go” — implying the only direction from the top is down. I understand the feeling he’s describing. I’ve felt the cold of a summit that somehow wasn’t enough.

But my answer to that moment isn’t down. It’s inward.

What I found at the peak — or rather, in the place where the peak was supposed to be — was presence. Not performance. Not arrival. Presence. I had to check in somatically, emotionally, honestly. What’s actually happening inside me right now? And what I found, when I really looked, was that the part most affected by this turn of events was my ego. My ego had been ready to step into the room and be the one with the wisdom, the one at the front, the one who impacts people. But ego and worth are not the same thing, and I had to feel that distinction rather than just know it intellectually.

Here’s what I think happened: somewhere in the months of creating that workshop, the process itself became the thing. I had, perhaps without realizing it, already found meaning in the making — in the imagination of it, the crafting, the refinement, the practice. The workshop day was meant to be a culmination. But the joy was never only stored there. It was distributed across every step of getting there.

Maybe that’s why it didn’t evaporate when the moment didn’t come.

Maybe I already knew, somewhere deep, that the process was sacred.

Here’s what I want to say clearly, because I don’t think it gets said enough: What if we are allowed to remember? What if we gave ourselves genuine permission to praise ourselves — not in a fleeting, embarrassed, quickly-swallowed way, but with actual savoring? The conference didn’t go as planned, and yet I came home having learned something about my own resilience that I couldn’t have taught myself. I got to watch other people shine. I got to sit in rooms I wouldn’t have entered if I’d been busy performing. I got to be a student rather than a teacher, and there was nourishment in that I had forgotten.

When people said, I’m sorry I missed your workshop, I got to tell the truth: It didn’t happen. So you didn’t miss anything. That simplicity felt like freedom. I didn’t have to perform loss. I didn’t have to insist they’d missed something incredible. I got to just be honest.

Debbie Millman says the fleeting feeling of accomplishment isn’t a flaw — it’s part of the creative condition. I respect that framing. But I don’t fully accept it. I think we have more choice here than that. I think we can choose to savor. To accept and acknowledge. To let the pride of a thing linger past the moment of its completion — or even past the moment of its not-completion. Joy need not be fleeting. That framing, however poetic, still hands our inner life over to automaticity. It still suggests we are passengers in our own experience.

I’d like to propose something else: presence wins. Every time.

Not the compulsion toward attainment. Not the ego-driven hunger for the crescendo, the climax, the applause. But the slow, deliberate, relishing of all the moments that comprise a life — the drafts, the rehearsals, the phone calls, the walks, the workshops that didn’t happen and taught you everything anyway.

In recovery, we say that hardships are a pathway to peace. I believe that. I’ve said it many times. But believing something and living it are different things. On the first day of that conference, I got to live it. And I came home not diminished, but full.

My partner said it simply: You’ve created it. It’s in the world. It’s just waiting for the right moment to be shared.

Maybe that’s a week from now. Maybe it’s a year. Maybe the universe is still making room for it. What I know is that the workshop didn’t disappear when the day didn’t go as planned. It lives in me, ready. And in the space where I expected loss, I found something I hadn’t planned for: proof that I can meet the unexpected with steadiness, reach for connection instead of shame, and come out the other side not just intact, but genuinely grateful.

I call that being, not doing.

I call it presence.

And I think it might be the most important workshop I’ll ever lead.

Photos from my walk. All kinds of things grew in the forest that day.
(Photo courtesy of yours truly.)

But I also noticed how easily longing can tip into self-pity, how quickly absence can start to feel like deprivation, and deprivation like a story about being without. It made sense that I went there. It simply didn’t need to stay there.

In the middle of that mood, I looked around me. Spread on the hearth in front of the fireplace were the bags I had painted and collaged, the eggs I had decorated, the gifts I had wrapped by hand. Most of what was inside the packages was simple—little food items, nothing extravagant. Yet the care I had poured into them was anything but small. I had cut out paper eggs and turned them into tiny baskets on the bags. On the backs, I had watercolored sweet animals. I painted tulips, cut out flowers, layered collage upon collage. I wrapped nearly a dozen gifts. I wrote cards, signed them, decorated them with stickers and pen, with the delight and freedom of an nine-year-old child. Ribbon matched paper. Colors played with one another. Even the mesh I found felt joyful in my hands.

And as I took it all in, something softened. I realized I had spent hours cutting, pasting, choosing colors, wandering aisles, following whim and curiosity. I hadn’t rushed. I hadn’t judged. I had simply played. Somewhere along the way, without noticing, I had become a sweet child again, absorbed in making something just because it felt good to do so.

I stepped back and saw the display I had created. It was beautiful.

If Patrick hadn’t gotten sick, I would have carried all of this to his home. I would have sat across from him and watched him open each gift, hoping he loved them, letting him gush, receiving his gratitude. That would have been lovely. But I might have missed this quieter, more unexpected moment: the chance to see myself. To pause long enough to recognize the artistry, the imagination, the playfulness, the devotion to beauty that had been flowing through me all along.

The fun, I realized, had never been in the contents of the bags. The fun was in the doing. The choosing of colors. The cutting and gluing. The painting of imperfect tulips. The layering of grass cutouts to define a tiny scene. The willingness to create something I had never seen before. It was in the hours of attention, in the delight of making, in the way my hands followed curiosity without asking permission. It was in the quiet permission to be small and joyful and unselfconscious.

Nothing was perfect. The tulips leaned slightly. The edges weren’t precise. The collage was a little wild. And yet it felt unmistakably like me. Not polished, not performed, but alive. I began to notice something I had overlooked for a long time: I am creative. Not in some grand or formal way, but in this gentle, instinctive way. In cutting paper. In matching ribbon. In imagining tiny scenes. In wanting things to feel beautiful.

I realized that I had done all of this not only for Patrick, but also for myself. I had created a display simply to stand before it and feel joy. I had made something that made me happy. For too long, I had denied or minimized this part of me, the part that delights in making, arranging, decorating, imagining. Yet here it was, undeniable and alive. And in touching it, I felt something else too: the sweetness of a child who never stopped wanting to create, only needed permission to begin again.

Patrick’s presence was still part of this. His absence, in fact, made the awareness possible. My desire to bring him joy set the creativity in motion. My love for him inspired the care, the attention, the play. Even sharing photos with him allowed me to feel witnessed and supported. He is the beneficiary of these gifts, yes, but he is also the spark that helped illuminate something in me. His being in my life invites me into generosity, into beauty, into expression.

Standing in front of the display, I felt something shift. The narrative of lack softened into one of abundance. I saw not what was missing, but what was here: my imagination, my effort, my love made visible. I saw that creativity itself is companionship. That making something beautiful can be a form of holding my own hand. That inspiration flows in both directions, and that love, even when physically absent, can still create.

I thought I was preparing gifts for someone else. Instead, I found myself.
Yes, he is the beneficiary of all of these gifts.
But so am I.

Because I want to be as brash, forceful, and confident as they are. I want to say things like this is how it works and here’s the answer without flinching. But I’m not like them. And I never have been.

Try as I might, the shoe keeps me bound.
My story keeps me small.

There is a part of me that is afraid of arrogance—afraid of being too loud, too bossy, too much. That fear has a history. Once, there was a ferocious part of me that didn’t actually know very much, but knew how to bare its teeth. Loudness was armor. Judgment was protection. Power was something you seized before it could be taken from you.

That part kept me alive.
It was never meant to lead.

So now, when I imagine standing in confidence—saying here’s how this goes or let me explain this—my body tightens. Those sentences feel dangerous. Like crossing a line I was never meant to cross.

And yet: what if I do know?
What if I really do?

This is where my resistance to cultural authority lives. Not because certainty is wrong, but because certainty without permeability feels dead. Fixed. Final. The world doesn’t work that way. Knowledge evolves. Wisdom breathes.

The figures who unsettle me most are not villains; they are mirrors. They reflect back a kind of authority I was taught to fear—authority that sounds like the voices of my past. Voices that spoke at me. Voices that confused dominance with truth.

Still, beneath my irritation is longing.

I want to speak without apology.
I want to place ideas into the world and let them land where they land.
I want to stop shrinking in advance of disagreement.

Here is what I know about myself: I do not want to convince people intellectually. I want them to recognize something in their bodies. I want to speak from lived experience, from study, from intuition, from neuroscience and soul—without pretending I have arrived at the final word.

I want to say, This is what I see, and leave the door open.

What I no longer want is to disappear.

This is the real cost of staying small. I have mistaken humility for self-erasure. I have bound myself so tightly in the name of goodness that I have prevented my own growth. Like foot binding—wrapped until expansion becomes impossible, until movement itself is painful.

I see myself forced into a box far too small for my body. I am six feet tall, and I have learned to crouch. To compress. To apologize for the space I take up.

This is not virtue.
This is captivity.

What I am actually seeking is not confidence—it is internal authorization. Permission that does not come from consensus. Authority that does not require domination—authority that is embodied, integrated, and alive.

My nervous system learned early that certainty was dangerous. That when someone spoke with confidence, someone got hurt—or I became someone I despised. So I collapsed authority and cruelty into the same shape. I confused arrogance with harm.

But authority is not tyranny.
It can be presence.

The king does not shout.
The mystic does not persuade.
The wayfinder does not beg to be followed.

They stand. They speak. They trust what moves through them.

This is the initiation I am in now: learning to hold conviction without foreclosure. To say this is what I know today without needing it to be eternal. To remain permeable without shrinking. Solid without rigidity.

And here is where admiration becomes something else.

I met Brené Brown several years ago when I worked at Pixar. She came to speak at an internal summit, and she was exactly what you’d expect—riveting, bright, energetic, wise. My boss and I talked afterward about following her to the moon, about working with her or for her one day. I have been a longtime fan.

While reading Adam Grant’s Think Again, I had a question. I found his email address, wrote to him—and he responded within minutes. With generosity. With clarity. With information I technically could have found on my own, but didn’t have to. The knowledge was right there, just beneath the surface, made available in an instant.

I want that too.

I haven’t met Simon Sinek yet. (I’ve heard his hands make people nervous.) When I do meet him, I want to thank him—for who he is, and for what he offers so many.

Because this is the truth I couldn’t admit at first:
I respect and love the people who unsettle me for the same reason they unsettle me—because I want to be like them.

But apprenticeship is not meant to end in imitation.

As Leonardo da Vinci said, poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. Not out of contempt, but out of completion. To carry forward what was awakened—and take it somewhere new.

I am not here to replicate anyone else’s voice.
I am here to speak in my own.

I am no longer asking whether I am allowed to take up space—I am taking it, and whoever needs this will find me here.

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