I guess I never had a model of what it could look like, to feel a strong way and then to share it with another person and then to do all the dirty work of hashing it out, hearing both sides, enduring through the mess of sorting out how we get to the other side of mismatched expectations. Growing up I only learned that when emotions get too intense, people check out and then physically leave. I never really saw what it was like to stay in the disagreement until it was fully exorcised, like pulling a thorn from deep within a paw.

One of my dear friends drives herself all around New York City. It’s a wild way to live, to drive these streets yourself every day, to battle with the traffic and the bikers and the parking. But she’s done it for years.

At pickup, she drives to our kids’ school and parks a few blocks away. Her spot is across from a coffee shop on a one-way, one-lane street and has exactly zero city-approved parking spots. But half a dozen cars park there every day, half on the sidewalk and half hanging into the street, bothering absolutely no one and existing under the radar of the traffic cops.

Last week she was forced farther onto the sidewalk than usual when a huge garbage truck lumbered past. She hated being there – forcing pedestrians to squeeze past – but pickup only takes about fifteen minutes, she thought. She’d be gone soon enough.

So there she was, sitting in her car for the few minutes before the school doors opened, reading a book, when suddenly a large man appeared at her window. And he was furious. He was screaming bloody murder: “Get off his fucking sidewalk! Take your car and get the fuck out of here!”

My friend gestured to the six other cars parked around her, as if to say, What are you yelling at me? What about all these other cars? His rant continued, without pause: “Don’t you care about people with strollers who are trying to get by? You can’t park here! Move your fucking car!”

She rolled down her window to speak with him: “Sir, I park here every day, I’m going to the school to pick up my child. I’m leaving soon.” But the screaming continued. He began taking pictures of her license plate and car. An older woman walked by and caught her eye. “Don’t even talk to him,” she said, “you don’t need to defend yourself,” she said as she passed the car. This enraged the man further and he started yelling at the older woman too, telling her to mind her own business.

Eventually he walked up to the corner and rejoined the group of construction workers. Ah, my friend thought, so he’s working on the lot next door. She had no idea he was working nearby, he wasn’t wearing any construction gear at all.

Rattled and scared by the interaction, she decided to find a new parking spot. She pulled out and drove to the end of the block, where he was standing. But she was more than just scared, she was also pissed. Angry that this man had singled her out and shut down all her attempts to speak with civility. So as she drove past, she lowered her window again and gave it back. “You care about mothers and strollers so much? Well, you just screamed at a five months pregnant lady for the past 10 minutes, so how much do you really care about mothers!?” He didn’t back down, yelling at her once more as she drove to find a new spot.

She parked, settled her heart rate, and picked up her kiddo. But she’d had enough time to breathe and get regulated again, and so as they exited the school, she asked him, “Hey, you wanna go get a hot chocolate at the coffee shop?” Of course, kiddo was in.

So my pregnant friend, holding the hand of her five-year old, proudly marched back to the scene of the crime. And as she passed the man who had been screaming at her only fifteen minutes prior, she didn’t say a word. She just looked him in the eye as she passed with her child. He said nothing.

They got their drinks and came back the same way. Again, she looked this man in the eye as she approached. But this time, he spoke.

“Look,” he said.

“No, you look.” She said, “You need to understand something. I was sitting in my car not bothering anyone and you screamed at me over and over again.”

He tried to protest, saying that he just wanted to talk to her. That he had just cleared the sidewalks of snow so people could walk and besides, he didn’t really scream. But she called him on his nonsense. She spoke evenly and calmly.

“You didn’t speak to me. When I rolled my window down to speak, you screamed again. Look, I park here every day. I went to school here. I pick up my kid from the same school. I have no interest in making the sidewalks hard to get by on. I’m glad you shoveled for everyone but I didn’t know that. You never mentioned it, you just screamed.”

And then she told the truth of it all, “And you really scared me.”

And then. They talked. And they talked some more. He apologized. He explained that a lot of the parents at the school park there and they all ignore him when he speaks to them, that they treat him as if he isn’t even there at all. That’s them, she said. This is me. She told him that she’s part of the community. That she grew up in this community. That they should be able to just talk to each other.

And so they did. They introduced themselves. He met her son. Turns out, they have the same name.

And now when she parks in the same spot, and walks by the construction site, he blows her a kiss and says hello to her son, calling him by his name. It’s all water under the bridge.

When she told me this story, I was in awe of my beautiful friend. Of her willingness to stay inside the discomfort long enough for something real to happen between two people who had no particular reason to try. So much conflict is about trying to win, or trying to tear each other down and emerge victorious in some invisible, made-up fight. But she wasn’t trying to win. She wasn’t trying to tear him down. She just wanted to be heard, and she was willing to hear him too.

There’s something that becomes possible in conflict when it’s held that way, not as a fight to be won, but as two people sorting through a mess neither of them made alone.

This is how we find each other, I think, in the willingness to stay inside the hard moments, both with the stranger on the street and with the people already sitting at our table. Community, in both its grandest and most intimate forms, seems to get built this way. One repaired moment at a time, between two people who choose to stay.

xoxo, NdP

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I meditate most mornings, for about 10-15 minutes. I do fairly classical mindfulness meditation, in which I watch my breath and as thoughts arise I notice them, sometimes label them, and let them go while I return to focusing on my breath. Sometimes I do heartmath-type meditation in which I focus on imagining the breath to be originating from my heartspace. Again here, I am focused on breath and when distracting thoughts inevitably arise, I notice them, sometimes quickly and sometimes less quickly, and return my attention back to my breath.

I used to get down on myself for how often my thoughts wandered. I kept meditating with the hopes of achieving stilling and quieting of my mind. With the hopes that eventually, fewer of these pesky thoughts would be cropping up. But then a meditation teacher told me that the practice of meditation is actually not the practice of emptying one’s mind, it is the practice of returning. The work is getting distracted by a passing thought, realizing I have left my center, and then choosing to return back to the breath. It’s in the return. And without distracting thoughts, there could be no return.

Once he reframed the entire practice for me, I started to see how the practice of returning wasn’t just restricted to my meditation cushion. The practice of returning was woven into every interaction and every experience and every task of my day to day life. I was actually meditating each waking moment of the day.

You see, I have an idea of the best version of me. The me that is centered and grounded where I am. The me that is curious, gracious, and without judgement. The me that accepts what is, without trying to force a different way. Don’t get it wrong, she’s no dummy. She can assess a situation with clarity and discernment and make the next right choice (“there is a car speeding toward me, I will get out of the road”) but she does so without any attachment to judgement (“that driver is a maniac, he could hurt someone driving like that”). She feels what she feels without overwhelm. She knows what she knows (but holds knowledge loosely in an open palm). And she speaks and acts in alignment with that truth, and with kindness, and always with love. She is in awe of this life, she is deeply grateful for its abundance, and she has a damn good time living it. I think this is my best self.

And every day, I forget all about her.

I sit at my desk and get caught up calculating my finances and if and when we’ll ever have enough money to feel safe forever. Scarcity grips me and abundance is forgotten.

I make the breakfast and wash the dishes and pack the lunch and brush the teeth and squeeze into the subway and drop my daughter at school and look up after hours of being awake and realize I have been on autopilot the entire morning. Physically present but utterly absent.

I speak to a friend on the phone. I feel unheard and unseen by them and I’m sad and disappointed. But instead of letting myself feel any of that, I pack my day with errands and cleaning just to keep my mind too busy to feel any of it.

I stare at my phone. An hour of this one wild and precious life passes me by.

Every day, I drift away from my best self just like I drift away from my breath during meditation.

And I suppose I could shame myself for not being the version of myself that I know I can be (or should be, or want to be). I could see these drifts as a moral failing, an indication that I am not the person I should be and worse, that I’m weak and bad at the core. That’s certainly what the healing and wellness and fixit culture might have us believe.

But I’ve begun to see these moments as they are: just little moments of distraction. Just like our thoughts distract us during meditation, getting caught up in machinery of modern life (and all its anxieties, fears, and frustrations) can distract us from our true nature. And just like in meditation, the work has nothing to do with eliminating these experiences. We are not called to opt out of the world and begin a solitary life on a mountaintop, just like we are not called to maintain a mind devoid of all thoughts and feelings. No, the work is not opting out of life or silencing the thoughts. The work is all about living this life and having these thoughts, but then noticing and returning.

And so what a gift this life can be. We have, quite literally, thousands of opportunities every single day to get pulled from our true nature. The world keeps on worlding all around us: the errands, the doctor’s appointments, the job interviews, the caretaking, the taxes, the cleaning, the bills, the heartbreak, the sorrow. And every single experience of every single day is just another chance to notice if we’ve been pulled away from that beautiful, divine, true self of ours.

And if we have been pulled away, to do nothing else but notice it.

And then gently return.

XOXO, Nicole

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It flies from flower to flower collecting pollen and living its small, beautiful life. It doesn’t know that without its work, the flowers will die. And without the flowers, the insects will die, then the birds, then the small mammals, then the bigger ones. Then us.

It doesn’t go to status meetings. It doesn’t optimize its pollination strategies or measure its impact with KPIs. The bee doesn’t wake in the middle of the night and worry if it’s making enough honey or visiting the right flower.

It just… wakes up and does bee things.

The leadership and self-help industrial complex has told us that our purpose is something we need to find. That it’s somewhere out there hiding in the brush, waiting for us to discover through vision boards and personality tests and inner strength workshops.

So of course, if it’s something to figure out, we try to figure it out. We read books about finding our calling and we hire coaches (hi!) with the hopes that they’ll tell us who we are and what we’re meant to do with our lives. We create five-year plans and prepare our “why” statements before we attend networking events and job interviews. If we’re going to manifest our vision from the fabric of the universe, then we better first have a vision.

It’s true that you have to understand what kind of person you want to be in this world before you can actually go and be that person in the world. That’s not trivial. When you better understand why you do the things you do and why you make the choices you make, you can begin to stack your choices one on top of another so they point you toward the person that you want to become. You can check in with yourself and ask: is this choice aligned to how I want to move through the world? Is this moving me closer or farther away from who and how I want to be?

But.

You can do all that work and understand yourself deeply and you might still find yourself feeling perplexed about your grand, sweeping purpose, the one unifying reason for being that will finally make it all make sense.

But what if purpose isn’t some revelatory thing we’re building toward?

What if our purpose is already present inside everything we’re already doing, in every small and ordinary moment of every small and ordinary day?

Last Monday, I was picking up my daughter from school. She’d had a rough day. She hadn’t slept much the night before and she’d had an accident because she still refuses to use the bathroom at school and instead insists on holding it until her tiny four-year-old bladder simply can’t hold it anymore, and to top it off, she’d fallen during playground time and had a big nasty bruise on her chin.

She was quiet on the walk home. I asked her how her day was. She shrugged.

So instead of trying to fix it or make it better, I just held her hand and we walked quietly. When we got home, she gave me a big hug and told me she loved me. Then she ran off to color a masterpiece.

I wasn’t executing some brilliant parenting strategy or following any of the mission statements I’ve crafted in workshops. I was just tired too, and the quiet felt good and her tiny hand in mine felt good, too. It was just me doing the next small thing that the moment seemed to ask of me.

Maybe my years of self-work helped me recognize that in that moment, being present matters more than fixing. Getting more comfortable with myself probably helped me give a little space to the silence instead of filling it with forced cheer (or problem solving, my typical go-to). Knowing who I am now and who I’m endeavoring to be surely helps me show up better.

And I’ll never really know what, if anything, that walk meant to her. I won’t know what she absorbed from my willingness to just be with her in her hard moment without trying to make it better or different, or what she learned about how to hold space for someone else’s pain. I can’t see the neural pathways that get shaped by feeling safe or how those neural pathways might change how she moves through the world or treat other people. All of this will always be completely opaque to me.

I’ll never know my full impact. And neither will you. And that’s the point.

You’re like the bee.

Your specific way of moving through the world changes the world in ways that are invisible to you. You are creating ripples that extend from one person to another, to another, across the globe, setting off chain reactions that will continue unfolding long after you’ve forgotten the moment that started them, and long after you are gone.

Your purpose? What’s your purpose? My dear, your purpose is these thousands of tiny moments.

When you hold the subway door for the older lady struggling to carry her groceries home during the rush hour madness, you won’t know that she’s been feeling invisible for all day, but your eye contact and smile will remind her that she still exists.

You let that frustrated mom with a screaming toddler cut in front of you at the grocery store because (same, girl) you know what it’s like. But what you can’t see is that she’s been awake for three days straight because the screaming kid is actually a sick kid and now mom and kid are both hanging on by a fingernail. You don’t know that your kindness will make her cry in the parking lot because it’s the first time she got any help all week.

When you catch a spider in a cup and carry it outside instead of crushing it, you don’t know that it will go on to catch the mosquitoes that would have bitten the child playing in the yard. The same spider will spin a beautiful web and when it glistens with morning dew, it will fill the same unbitten child with awe.

You matter. You matter in concrete, life-altering ways that you will never know about.

Every single day, in every single interaction, you are co-creating reality with the people around you and shaping a future you’ll never witness in ways that are completely invisible to you.

And just like the bee, you don’t need to understand this for it to be true.

So yes, go ahead, do the work. Figure out who you are and excavate the old patterns that no longer serve you. Understand what’s important to you and seek to build a life that’s aligned with who you want to be and the legacy you want to leave behind. That work is real and it will help you show up better in a thousand tiny ways. But don’t for a second believe that you have to have it all figured out before you start living like you matter.

Because you do matter. Right now.

Your tiny actions each day are already rippling through the world and changing all of us, even the people you’ve never met and will never meet. The world is already forever changed just because you are here.

Bzzzzzzzzzz.

XOXO, NdP

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I’ve been married twice, and both times, these kinds of ideas pulled me to marriage, or at least, engagement. The first time, I wanted to get married because I was in love. And when two people are in love, especially when you’re in your late 20s in Virginia, marriage is the next step. I wanted to have kids “one day” too, and so marriage seemed logical. And so it was. We were married. We were happy for a long while. And then, as the weight of mental health challenges crept into our home, we began to grow apart. The love that compelled us to get married in the first place felt like it was dissipating between our fingers. And the harsh reality of a life deviating from the fairy tale we’d hoped for splashed cold water on that original magnetism we had felt. What was left was that kind of love one has for another person simply because they are human and deserve love and the chance to live their lives without pain. And so, eventually, the most loving thing we could do was to let the other be free.

The second time I got married, I did it for much the same reasons. We were in love. But this time we were both older. I had 15 years on the last version of me to make the decision, and my would-be husband had 20 years of dating experience to look back on before making this choice. We both found ourselves in love. And we both found ourselves, through comparison and through experience, realizing that we had found someone that we wanted to walk through life with, come what may. I was ready to try again.

I’m struck by how the things we optimize for when dating are so insignificant and utterly not the things we would optimize for once we find ourselves 10, 20, or 30 years into marriage. When we date, we look for good sex, great conversations, butterflies and tingly feelings. Fun and adventure. Someone who makes us feel special on our birthday. Someone who our friends like. Someone who will cook for us. Excitement. Thrill.

And so often, and especially when we marry young, we make these choices to spend a life together without really knowing what life may bring. Without having a full grasp on the fact that along with all the joy there will be frustration, and fear, and grief, and perhaps more surprising than the grief and despair, there will be patches of life that are seemingly endless with their tedium and everydayness.

I look at what I really want in a partner now, and it looks completely different than what I was looking for when I was first dating. I want someone who will stay up all night at our daughter’s bedside in the hospital so she never has a single moment of feeling alone. I want someone who will hug me in the hospital cafeteria, surrounded by dozens of people in the middle of the morning rush, and allow me to unleash my tears into his chest while he sheds his own into my shoulder. I want someone who will take on all the errands and all the school shuttling and all the tasks of just doing life for days at a time to let me go away and work on my own healing. I want someone who will go on his own adventures, to work on his own expansion, to bring a whole and centered energy to our lives. I want someone who will make school lunches while I make breakfast and make the bed while I unload the dishwasher. Not because I asked. Just because we both do the things that need to be done. I want someone who will close their laptop and sit with me when I’m pulling away. I want someone who will always make space for magic and awe, even when the world seems bleak and relentless. I want laughter.

And these are exactly the kind of things, incredibly, I now have.

But none of this stuff comes up while we’re dating, does it? How could it? These ideas aren’t exactly cute and sexy first date chat material. And even if they were, how could anyone know how they will live through the pain and everydayness of everyday life with a partner before they have lived through the pain and everydayness of everyday life with a partner.

Certainly, I learned a few things from my first marriage. I learned that someone’s relationship with their own pain tells you everything about how they’ll handle yours. I learned that shared values around money, family, and ambition are a helpful foundation, but that foundation can still crumble under pressure. I learned how deeply sovereign each of us truly is—our own beings with our own needs and our own path, and that we might be lucky enough to link arms with another traveler for a while, but it’s never forever.

And yet, despite all these important things that I learned, I realize that I could still never have predicted that my now husband would be the kind of partner that I needed in the hard and mundane because I simply didn’t know the breadth of the challenge to come. So few of us do, really. Perhaps those of us who were damned to brutality and grief as young children might have some inkling of what’s to come. But so many of us go in blind.

So what’s the advice to all the young people out there dating and swiping and DMing and trying to find someone to walk through this life with? I don’t know. I wish I had the answer. But I simply do not know how to pick the person who will show up in all the ways you need before you know exactly what it is that you will need.

I love to tell myself the story that I learned so much from my first marriage that I was able to pick exactly the right partner the next time around. But that really isn’t the truth. I did pick someone who was kind. And present. And curious. And who, even during his proposal, said to me, “I don’t know what life will bring. But I know I want you by my side as we figure it out.” I suppose that was my sign. His ability to say the thing out loud—we do not know what life will bring—that so many of us can’t even bear to acknowledge, and to not only say it, but to not be terrified by it. And maybe this perspective—knowing that we cannot predict nearly anything in life except to know that whatever comes will, at times, take our breath away—was the hint that I’d stumbled upon the right someone to link arms with during this leg of the journey. Maybe his willingness to name the uncertainty was what I needed to hear.

We marry for love and for the story and for safety. We marry to try to take a snapshot of this life as it is, right now, and to freeze it in place. If life can feel this good right now, we think, let us marry and have it feel this good forever. But then we discover, often to our chagrin, that marriage offers no certainty at all. It cannot make the world stop. It cannot freeze the moment in place.

For the lucky ones, a truer kind of marriage can emerge when the story collapses, after we’ve taken our snapshot and found that despite our best efforts, time continues to march on and the earth continues to revolve. It is then that love sometimes surprises us, showing up to us as the willingness to keep meeting each other in the unfolding unknown. To say yes, again and again, to whatever comes.

xoxo, ndp

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Eventually I left. I have since reorganized my entire life around curiosity and joy. I started coaching people through their own inherited and limiting beliefs. I went back to grad school for clinical psychology, something I had dreamed about for years. And I recently began writing a kid’s book, picking up on a passion for writing I hadn’t indulged since I was in fifth grade. I am doing work that really matters to me and brings me genuine delight.

I assumed that pursuing what gave me joy would help me finally kick this “achieve to be worthy” programming. I have done a ton of inner work to let go of those ideas. So after all that work on myself, I figured that if I also left the rat race, then surely I could finally just do what I wanted and be happy with my progress. Right? I did it! Hurray!

Nope.

Last week, drifting off to sleep after a full day of work I love, the familiar cold grip seized my chest. The voice was back.

You didn’t do enough today.

You didn’t study enough for next week’s exam.

You should have spent more time marketing your business.

You only wrote two pages today when you said you’d write five.

And when this kind of thing happens, it doesn’t unfold in the nice, neat way I’ve just written it, with each single thought proceeding in an orderly fashion. No. All of those thoughts happen everything-everywhere-all-at-once, all concurrent and all in a voice that I can’t actually hear but I can feel inside my chest:

youarebehindyouarenotdoingenoughyouarenotenoughyouareneverenough

The voice didn’t care that I’d left the corporate world and all its stresses and demands. It never missed a beat. It just found new ammunition because the voice was never about the work, really. It was about my fundamental worthiness to exist.

I sat there in bed with my heart racing and felt something close to despair. What the actual fuck. I’d reorganized my entire life. I’d closed my eyes and listened to my heart and tried to choose the path that felt most authentic to me and still the voice said: not enough.

How deep the programming goes

Oh, the cultural voices in our heads are so very strong. Capitalism needs us to believe that our existence requires constant justification. It needs us to believe that we are only really worthy (of a paycheck? of love? or existence?) if we crank out the deliverables and stay productive.

Rest has to be earned and our joy has to be justified. Our value has to be proven, over and over and over until we all die.

I thought leaving corporate might help solve the problem because I’d misdiagnosed the disease. I thought the toxicity was in the workplace. But I’d internalized the logic so deeply that the truth is, the toxicity was inside of me. The call was coming from inside the house.

It’s true that the corporate job didn’t create the voice, but it sure gave the voice a lot of great material to work with. And now? That voice just has new material: Am I writing enough to call myself a writer? Am I marketing enough to deserve clients?

The work I do every day now is different and so the metrics of “performance” have changed. But the underlying equation is identical: How much output justifies my existence today?

This programming started in early childhood, before we could question it. Our little selves figured out what made mama smile, what made daddy proud because that’s what kept us safe. From the beginning we learn that achievement earns attention and performance earns affection. School reinforces this for twelve more years. Our beauty and aliveness was diminished and captured into a single letter grade, we were told our mistakes were failures, and we learned that external validation matters much more than our inner knowing. After all, it doesn’t really matter if you believe in yourself if the admission board at the “right” school and the hiring manager at the “right” job don’t think you’re good enough, right? Right?

This voice has been speaking since before we had conscious memory.

The practice (not the solution)

I wish I could tell you I’ve figured this out and eliminated that little voice, but that would be a lie. The voice still shows up. The panic still grips my chest some nights and the laundry list of things I didn’t yet do still tries to pull me back from rest.

But I have been able to start managing her just a little differently these days. When the voice says “you didn’t do enough today,” I pause. I notice it and ask myself. Wait a minute. Whose voice is this, really?

It might be my grandmother’s obsession with titles as a proxy for acceptance in a country that wasn’t her own. It might be my grandfather’s work-to-the bone strategy to avoid the feelings of scarcity he survived as a child. And it might definitely be decades of capitalist cultural programming that equates human value with economic output.

And then I do something that feels both small and revolutionary: I rest anyway.

I don’t rest because I earned it through sufficient productivity or because it will make me more effective tomorrow.1 I don’t even rest because self-care helps me be more present with my family (even though it does). I rest because I’m a human being and human beings are meant to rest.2 Full stop. No justification required.

Some nights this works easily. The voice speaks, I recognize it for what it is, and I let my body drift into sleep. But other nights the voice wins and I lie awake re-living all the things I still have on my to-do list until exhaustion finally knocks me out around two.

I think this is just the messy middle, the space between recognizing the lie (which I now do) and being totally free from it (which I am not yet). But it’s my practice. What a beautiful gift that we have every single moment of every single day to practice (and fail, and try again) who we want to be in this world.

Here’s what I know to be true, even if it’s been buried underneath all the programming.

We are enough. I am enough. You are enough. Not because of what you do or what you achieve. You aren’t getting extra points for “working on yourself” and you aren’t better because you are trying your best.

You’re enough because you exist.

You’re allowed to rest. You’re allowed to create things that no one else will ever see. I don’t care if they are drawings or paintings or photos or essays or songs or ideas or sketches or furniture or little robots or a garden. You can create, just because you want to, never to sell anything or share it on the internet. You can spend a Tuesday afternoon watching the clouds float by. You’re allowed to exist without producing anything at all of material value.

The voice is quiet today but I know she’ll be back, next week or next month, probably when I’m drifting off to sleep, and I’ll have to choose again to recognize the voice and let myself rest anyway. That’s the practice. It’s a daily returning to something that the culture we’re steeped in wants me (and all of us) to forget.

But we can stop that voice if we pay attention to it. Notice when the voice says you haven’t done enough and then ask whose voice that really is. And then, just once, try to choose to rest (or play!) anyway.

You won’t always remember to question the voice, and it will keep trying to convince you of the lie of human worthiness. But the voice can never silence what has always been true underneath it all: you are worthy right now, simply because you exist.

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First let’s talk about clean pain. Imagine the sharp, reverberating pain when a hammer slams into your thumb instead of the nail. The pain is immediate and it carries with it instructions: Be more careful next time.

Then comes the dirty pain, which is the unnecessary commentary track that follows: “Be more careful next time... dummy. Ugh, I’m so clumsy. I can’t even hammer this nail right. What kind of idiot hits their own thumb?” While the initial pain was instructive, this secondary suffering teaches us nothing.

When a relationship ends, clean pain might look like the waves of grief that come and go over the months, like that feeling in your gut when you wake up the day after the breakup and realize they aren’t there, or the sadness that grabs you when you hear their favorite song. These moments hurt, but they also connect us to the truth that what breaks your heart reveals what matters to it. There would be no grief if there had been no love. Grief, after all, is just leftover love with nowhere to go.

But after the pure, clean pain comes the dirty: “They probably want someone more attractive, I should have been exercising more. I’ll never find anyone else. I’m unlovable.” This pain teaches us nothing, it only seeks to keep us trapped in a spiral of imagined inadequacies and self-punishment.

One type of pain moves us forward while the other holds us back.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a cerebrospinal fluid leak. The protective covering of my spinal cord (called the dura) had torn, and fluid was slowly draining from my spine throughout each day. Not good.

I’d wake up feeling fine, but by afternoon, debilitating headaches would build as my brain sagged in my skull, without enough fluid to keep it afloat. The only relief came from lying completely flat so gravity would stop pulling my brain downward. So there I was, pregnant, working full time, and trying to hide that I couldn’t function past 3pm.

The pain itself was clean. It was worthy of my attention. My body was giving me crucial information: “Hey you,” the pain said, ”Pay attention. We’ve got a crisis. But I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Lie flat. Get some rest. Now.”

But the thoughts and beliefs that came along with the pain made everything so much worse.

This is my fault. I must have done this to myself working out. I can’t afford to be in this much pain, I’ve got to keep going. I’m so stressed. I can’t be stressed. I especially can’t be stressed while I’m pregnant.

I’ll let you guess whether worrying about how stress would impact a baby made me more or less stressed.

I spent about two months in this dirty pain spiral. The physical agony was bad enough, but the cacophony of self-blame was far worse. Then I came across Martha Beck’s description of clean and dirty pain.

I was able to take some deep breaths and look at the pain as simply…pain. Not with the shame that I had caused it by working out. Not as stress that would harm the baby. Just…pain.

I started doing guided meditations specifically aimed to go toward and physical pain. At first, despite my best efforts (yes I know, “effort while meditating” is ironic, and worthy of a different post) I couldn’t go more than a few seconds without spiraling into self-blame. But I got better. Eventually, for brief moments, I could experience just the physical sensation without the mental tornado.

As I got better at separating the pain from the stories about the pain, I started making different choices. I stopped taking meetings after 3 PM. I acknowledged the pain and let myself feel it, but I worked to remember that my body wasn’t betraying me. I wasn’t at fault. Work would be there when I came back and being in pain didn’t have to be the same as being stressed.

I meditated with my pain. I meditated with my stress. And I was slowly able to turn down the volume on the more punishing thoughts.

Like any skill worth developing, distinguishing clean from dirty pain requires practice. And oh, how life has a way of providing plenty of opportunities.

My daughter had her own spinal surgery at 15 months old, totally unrelated to my leak. Instead of experiencing just the clean pain of fear and concern that naturally occurs when a loved one is having surgery, I layered on guilt that I “should have caught this earlier.”

So the thoughts were still there. They still are today. But I’ll be damned if I’m not finally getting better at catching the dirty and asking it to step back. I am finally getting faster.

She had a second surgery earlier this year (almost three years exactly from her first). And this time, while I still had a tremendous amount of clean pain around it – concern for her wellbeing, heartbreak at her physical pain, the exhaustion of being bedside for 48 hours without sleep – there wasn’t a speck of dirty pain to be found.

We just were. We lived through the surgery and the difficult recovery together. It hurt. I cried. My heart broke. But we kept taking every day one moment at a time. No anxious projecting into the future. No guilt and shame about past decisions. We lived there, in that present moment. As the days went on, she healed and we breathed a little easier.

Today she sprints around like a child who has never known spinal surgery.

Because the amazing thing that happens when you let the ferocity of true, clean pain move through you without being weighed down by dirty thoughts is that clean moves quickly. The pain subsides. When you let it flow through you it actually flows through you. It’s only the dirty of “what if, why, what have I done, this is my fault” that stays with us, haunting us for days or weeks or years after the original pain is long gone.

Next time pain arrives, ask yourself: Is this clean or dirty? Is this teaching me something true about the world?

Clean pain can be a compass. It can tell you that the job isn’t working or your body needs rest. When we grieve, it tells us that something precious has been lost. When we feel worry, it tells us that the situation requires attention and care.

The dirty does not point you anywhere productive, it only self-flagellates.

Learning to distinguish between these two types of pain doesn’t make either one disappear, but recognition itself changes how you might relate to the pain. When you can identify clean pain, you can listen to what it’s trying to teach you and when you can spot dirty pain, you can finally see it for what it is, just unhelpful and often untrue mental commentary, but certainly not the truth.

We can amplify our own agency simply by knowing which hurt is worth our attention and which are lies we can ignore. How freeing to realize that not every thought deserves our time. Pain is inevitable, but the stories we tell about it are optional.

XOXO, NdP

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How many times a day do we rush our children? Hurry up and eat. Hurry up and get dressed. Hurry up and get in the car. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.

But watch a small child when they're not being rushed. They move at the pace of being human.

They stop to watch an ant carry a crumb three times its size. It takes them nearly a minute to put on a single sock because they're too busy singing to their toes. You’re trying to get out the door, but instead you get asked, “Why is the moon still in the sky even though it’s daytime?” because right now, in this moment, that question matters more than anything else in their world, certainly more than arriving to school on time.

This pace of wonder is especially noticeable when children are very young. At four, my daughter is not an outlier. All of her little friends move through the world in exactly the same slow and curious way. At this age, they haven’t (yet) learned they need to fit in with their classmates. They haven't (yet) learned there's anything wrong with their own curiosity, their own likes and dislikes and joys. They haven't (yet) learned that they have to be a certain way to get all the cozy and safe feelings of being accepted and approved of by their peers, and to avoid all the pain of isolation if they don't like the right things or act the right way. They're untethered, free to pursue whatever captures their attention because they still trust their own instincts about what matters. They haven't (yet) learned the cultural ideas of "success" which inevitably mean more studying, more sports, more extracurriculars, more proof that this kid is worthy of a good school, a good job, and a good life.

At this age, they haven't (yet) become us: over-scheduled, under-rested, constantly filling every waking moment with more activity because we have to keep up.

Keep up with … what exactly?

I don’t rush my daughter because she needs to get somewhere. Does she really need to get to school at exactly 8:15am? Does she really need to get to art class 10 minutes early? No. But you better believe that I need to get back to my important appointment, my important meeting, my important life. I mean, I’ve got shit to do. And that’s the truth of why I rush her. It’s for my schedule. Not hers.

But when I take a beat and look at my important meetings and my important life I realize: I’ve been duped. And I think we’ve maybe all been duped.

We are living in an unprecedented moment in history. Technology is systematically removing the friction from our lives. We no longer spend the time calling one another (and being anchored to our landlines) to do so. We text. We no longer spend time driving to the store to pick up more toilet paper. We click “Buy” on Amazon. We no longer have to wait for our daily newspaper delivery to see what’s happening in the world. We have push notifications to alert us that Taylor Swift got engaged. If you define free time as the time left over after procuring food and shelter we should have more free time now than at any other time in our human history.

But instead of using that freed-up space to watch the leaves of a tree rustle and float away in the fall breeze, hustle culture has convinced us to fill every single moment with more. Of everything.

We’ve been told to rise and grind. We’ve been told that our worth can be measured in our title, our salary, our follower count, or how big our house is. And so we work. And then we work some more. And we keep up with the Jones’s. And it’s never enough.

Technology has eliminated the friction of everyday life. It feels good and efficient and like progress. But I’m not sure we should be trusted to live life without friction. Because without that friction to slow us down, we seem to be freefalling into an abyss of 24/7 availability and subsequent scheduling, where the only “free time” we ever experience is that one week of vacation you scheduled months ago and have been waiting for ever since.

Is that really a life?

Last week I was rushing my daughter to get ready for school when she stopped to watch the squirrels in our tiny Brooklyn apartment "backyard." We'd long ago planted tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, and herbs in our 5-by-5-foot space, and the cherry tomatoes finally started growing in late August.

But the squirrels keep stealing them.

We stood together watching them pull tiny red and yellow tomatoes off our plants and scamper away with their treasures. We called out to them, "Hey you! You tomato thief!" She laughed hysterically as they ignored our protests completely. She screamed, “Oh no another one! They’re teaming up!” We decided we'd have to buy our own tomatoes at the store after school since the squirrels had clearly claimed our mini garden as their personal buffet. We made plans to go to the market after pickup. We talked about serving our new tomatoes at dinner. We wondered if the squirrels would knock on our back door and try to steal the new tomatoes from our kitchen table.

We were late for school.

The littlest among us haven't learned lie that faster is better and that rest comes after the to-do list is done. They're still deeply connected to the natural rhythm of being human, and humane.

And it drives us absolutely crazy.

Because we've adapted to a world that has normalized rushing as the baseline. And these kids are holding up a mirror to everything we've lost.

If we stop rushing toward all the places where life is supposed to happen we just might realize what the kids have already figured out, that life is happening right here and right now.

XOXO, NdP

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A few Fridays ago, she came home from work. It had been a long week, filled with last minute demands from her boss. Her co-worker slash nemesis had embarrassed her in a meeting and on her commute home she found out the presentation she thought she had a week to prepare for just got moved to 9am, bright and early Monday morning. There goes the weekend.

When she walked in the door she was a bit more quiet than usual. She felt pretty beaten down and the couch seemed to call her name, “Come, sit, eat ice cream and binge watch something mindless.” She slumped into the couch and her partner sat next to her. How kind, she thought, he’s sitting here with me while I unwind. But after a few minutes, as she scrolled the binge options, he said, “Hey, so you seem really quiet. Are you mad at me?”

And it just keeps happening. When she makes plans to catch up with her girls midweek, he asks, “Did I do something? Is that why you’re leaving?” She laid down in bed last week with a headache, worried that it might bloom into a full-grown migraine, which is something she’s struggled with since her 20s. “Hey, did I hurt your feelings?” It even happened when she came home from playing soccer one Saturday morning. She was pissed because her old hamstring injury was acting up and she had played poorly all morning. Seemingly unable to see the bag of ice she was packing for her leg he said, “You seem so mad, was it something I said?”

In his mind, her every emotional state could be traced back to one variable – his own behavior.

The origins of “Is it something I said?”

Now look. Of course we want to be attuned to our partners, and in some ways, the behavior of checking “is this my fault” can be a healthy response if it doesn’t get too far. Noticing that your partner is having feelings and wondering how the two of you might have collectively created that state is a healthy way to engage with the world.

But for many of us, this pattern can rapidly eclipse simple attunement and morph into the more damaging pattern my friend’s boyfriend was demonstrating. If, as a kid, you grew up in with adults who weren’t safe to be around when they got angry, or who were totally absent and withdrawn when they were sad, then you it was highly adaptive for you to learn hypervigilance. When your love and care is highly dependent on the moods of others, your nervous system learns to scan constantly: Are they okay? Did I cause this? How do I fix it?

But this hypervigilance, once a necessary adaptation, can follow us into our adult relationships where it’s no longer needed for survival but continues influencing us like a puppeteer. What once protected us can now inadvertently harm both ourselves and those we love.

The lost art of betweenness

Your actions do matter. Of course they do. You can impact people and cause pain, or fear or sadness or (hopefully) joy and others can impact you in the same way. That is what it is to be in community with one another. Where, ideally, my feelings matter as much as your feelings, where my actions are executed with agency but also care, and your actions are executed with agency but also care. Where we balance what we want for ourselves and what our loved ones also want and need.

But there is a fine line. When we move from that place of community stasis and we anchor too far on either end of the spectrum – where we either consider only ourselves and never the other, or this version my friend experienced, where we still consider only ourselves, but as the sole reason for the experiences (good or bad) of all others – then we have lost real community.

We have lost the betweenness that comes in the space and experience between two people, who each have their own experiences and motivations. By replacing interconnection with dependence, we lose access to the beautiful complexity of true mutuality.

The paradox of selfless self-centeredness

This pattern creates a particular kind of suffering. It can feel like it’s all about the other person (Are they ok? I just want them to be ok!) but the irony of this “selfless” way of moving through the world is that it’s actually deeply self-centered.

This version of self-centeredness doesn’t harken vanity and narcissism in the way we usually think about when we hear this phrase. What I mean by self-centered here is the true meaning of the words: centering the self. Viewing the entire world through the lens of the self.

When we assume someone’s mood is about us, we’re not seeing the hundreds of other variables that shape a human life. We’re viewing the entire world through the lens of our impact or our responsibility.

It’s still making ourselves the center of the story, just in a self-blaming rather than self-aggrandizing way.

When we view the world through this filter of self we treat people like extensions of our own experience rather than recognizing them as complete beings with their own rich inner lives, wholly sovereign on their own.

Breaking free: from ego prison to ecosystem thinking

What my friend really needed when she came home that day was someone to say: “Tell me about your day. How can I support you?” Instead, because his “care” was really all about placating his own lack of self-assuredness, she instead spent her energies managing her partner’s anxiety. Her actual experience took the backseat so she could focus on reassuring him that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

She told me she’s started editing herself and trying to appear more upbeat than she feels just to avoid his inevitable inquiry. I guess another word for editing might be hiding.

But if we expand our capacity to see beyond the borders of our own experience, we can break this pattern and learn to hold two truths simultaneously: we matter AND we are not the only thing that matters.

Breaking this pattern means finding our way back to a healthy definition of community, where both people’s experiences matter equally. We can begin by recognizing when we’re making someone else’s experience about us, and then choosing curiosity over assumption.

Practical steps toward ecosystem consciousness

When you catch yourself wondering if you’re the cause of someone’s mood or reaction or behavior, try some of these inquiries:

What else could be influencing this situation that has nothing to do with me? Maybe they can’t stop thinking about the presentation they have tomorrow at work, or their ankle is bothering them from their run last night. Maybe their kid said something hurtful earlier that morning and it’s still on their mind. Try to come up with at least three ideas about why they are acting the way they are acting that have nothing to do with you (trust me, there are way more than three).

What would genuine curiosity about their experience look like right now? Instead of “Did I do something wrong?” try “You seem like you might be carrying something heavy today. Want to tell me about it?” or simply “How are you doing?” This is about understanding another’s experience from their perspective through curiosity and being open.

This doesn’t just work for romantic relationships, this works for all human relationships. It works for parents who wonder if their children’s struggles are because they are a shitty parent and friends wondering if their text message got left on read because they said something wrong. It works for co-workers wondering why their boss ignored them in the hallway and the business owner who wonders why her supplier is pissed off.

Maybe, just maybe, other people’s emotions and behaviors have nothing to do with you. Maybe, just maybe, they are living their own rich and independent lives.

The relief of not being responsible for everything

This work of transcending our ego-driven self helps us become better partners and friends and co-workers and parents, yes. But it also offers us rest. We get to put down the impossible burden of being responsible for everyone else’s emotional experience.

Best of all, when we start to get curious about others instead of assuming their emotions are about us, they’re actually more likely to share the truth with us. When someone feels seen rather than managed, they’re more inclined to open up about what’s really going on inside their head, and that gives us a genuine chance to support them in the way they actually need, ultimately making the relationship stronger, which is what we all endeavor for in the first place.

This approach still preserves our ability to find out if we did do something wrong. We can still repair when repair is needed. But we will discover the need for repair in a way that’s more whole, understanding our role within the full mosaic of reasons someone might be struggling.

You aren’t the main character in everyone else’s story, and thank God for that. Put down all those stories, let the world become lighter.

XOXO, NdP

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I just wanted a seat and a cup of coffee while I waited for my friend. Nothing too controversial, right? But the hostess smiled and shook her head. “Sorry hon, it’s policy. We can’t seat you until your full party arrives.”

Policy.

It wasn’t her policy, of course. She didn’t create that policy in between refilling the ketchup bottles or wiping down tables sticky with maple syrup. It must have come from someone upstream. The shift manager holed up in a back office? The owner who hadn’t stepped foot in this place for weeks? Whoever it was, I can guarantee you they hadn’t poured a cup of coffee or dealt with a cranky customer in years.

But this morning the hostess was enforcing this policy like it had come from God herself, even though the restaurant was practically empty and even though it made absolutely zero sense in that moment.

So instead I waited for my friend by the front door and in between the cold gusts of March breeze I watched her guard the nine empty tables. All that abundance! All that warmth and comfort, all artificially restricted by a silly rule written by someone who wasn’t even there.

It would be pretty self-affirming for me to sit in my little tower and pretend like this would never happen to me, that I am far too critical a thinker and far too empowered and agentic to follow someone else’s rules so blindly. But I do. All the time. And the rules I follow are far more insidious than this diner rule.

From childhood and over time, these inherited rules and limiting beliefs I carry were slowly added to my consciousness like salt added to water until I was swimming in the ocean, totally unaware that I had been adopting all these ideas that weren’t ever mine. The rules never introduce themselves formally, they never announce themselves with time stamps and attribution, but if you look underneath the surface, you can normally find the origin of each of these rules (or, I should say, lies).

“Don’t need too much”

(Acquired at age 5, from that relative who always raised her eyebrows when I reached for seconds at Thanksgiving dinner)

“I’m only worthwhile when I’m achieving”

(Acquired at age 10 from that teacher who only smiled when handing back A+ tests)

“I have to earn rest”

(Acquired all day every day, compliments of hustle culture)

When you’re little, your whole world revolves around keeping the big people happy. Little kids are, by design, fully dependent on their caretakers. They literally cannot feed and clothe and house themselves without the support of an adult and because their safety and survival is dependent on those around them, kids are highly attuned to their adults. It’s in their best (or only) interest to keep the adults around them happy, because happy adults translate to kids who are cared for and make it out of childhood alive. And so as a child, we pick up ALL the cues our adults are giving us, whether spoken or unspoken. The nervous systems of children are incredibly astute detectives.

If your mom took you to get ice cream and have special one-on-one time every time you got an A, little you clocked the message. Love comes through achievement. Got it. You rush into the door after school, throw your backpack on the ground and before you can even get a snack you get asked, “How was the math test?” but never “How was your day?” More data to teach your brain’s reward system that performance matters, but the actual experience and highs and lows of the day and how it all made you feel, not so much.

Your family didn’t hand you a manual titled “Here’s what success looks like, work hard, make tons of money and sacrifice yourself until there’s nothing left of you but a shell of the human you once were.” But we absorb that message anyway, through thousands of tiny moments that wire our nervous systems to believe worth is conditional. It’s a message they themselves couldn’t help but transmit, having been on the receiving end of the very same messages from their parents, and grandparents, and on and on. Hustle and provide. Presence is what happens after all the real work is done.

But we don’t stay small forever. We grow up and develop our own agency. We learn we can be critical of the things we learned as a child and offer our own assessment of what is true, for the world more broadly and specifically for our own experience. We remember what we learned before, but because of the incredible and enduring plasticity of our brains, we can always change and adapt our beliefs.

We can choose which voices in our heads we listen to.

And so why is it that at age 35 or 45 or 55, when childhood is definitively over and we are out on our own and making our own way in the world, when we are parents ourselves by now, do so many of us wake up each morning with a familiar churning in our bellies, doing the endless mental calculation: Have I been productive enough today? Did I earn my keep?

Those questions haunt us because other people don’t stop planting ideas and rules in our psyches once we leave childhood. Oh no. Once we leave childhood it’s just getting started.

The productivity industrial complex has colonized every square inch of our brains. We have breathed the air of hustle culture and swum in the waters of capitalism so long that the ideas have penetrated our whole being. Now they seem like our own ideas. We deny ourselves the midday nap because “successful people rise and grind.” Lunch gets eaten at our desks because “I have too much to do.” The laptop opens after the kids go to bed, just to answer a few more emails, because after all, “they’re expecting to hear from me.” You never know which opportunity will be THE ONE so we say yes, to everything, all the time, until our schedules are strangled and grasping for breath. Have a hobby? Let’s turn that passion into side hustle so we can “work on our personal brand” and have a few “passive income streams.”

We have been taught to measure our worth in metrics that were never designed to capture the value of a human: salary, social media followers, titles, clout, anything that looks like a flex on Linkedin.

And the bummer of it all? You can hustle and hustle and hustle, accumulate all the external markers of success the culture tells you to want, and no matter how many boxes you check, the gaping hole created inside of you by these external expectations will never be filled. You cannot outrun a system that benefits from your being trapped inside of it.

I watched the hostess that morning, enforcing a rule that served absolutely no one. I realized: she was me.

Just like that hostess, I’d memorized someone else’s rule book so well I didn’t even question it anymore. I enforced all these bullshit policies about “success,” to keep grinding and put everyone else first and rest later, later, later maybe later, even when they made no sense. And worst, I adhered to them tooth and nail even when they kept me from the kind of life that actually felt, well, alive.

The most fucked up thing was that this hostess, who I didn’t even know, was kinder to me than I am to myself. She was at least apologetic about enforcing the policy that wasn’t hers. Meanwhile I am ruthless with my own inherited beliefs. I would tell myself I was lazy and weak if I felt tired from working through the nights and weekends. She felt bad about making me wait while I tortured myself for silently wishing for a moment of rest. How could I rest when there were still dishes to be done and 401Ks to be earned?

We all act like hostesses in someone else’s diner, enforcing hustle culture policies that keep us away from the abundance that’s actually available. But we can stop enforcing rules we never wrote, and if we want to build lives that feel like freedom, we have to.

A few years ago I finally asked myself what I actually cared about, not what I thought I should care about to be “successful” in the eyes of a culture obsessed with productivity and profit. The answers were not at all surprising (uninterrupted time with my family, agency over my schedule, mental and physical health, space for rest and creative pursuits), they had just never had a voice before. Not surprising, the high paying job in corner office with its glass walls and 60-hour weeks was nowhere to be found.

Once I put voice to what really mattered to me, I could write my own policies instead of enforcing someone else’s. I stopped measuring success with the metrics of capitalism (salary, title, house size, followers) and I tried to find “metrics” that actually reflect what matters to me and makes me feel alive. Do I feel energized? Am I spending quality time with my loved ones? Is there alignment between my values and my choices? What’s the quality of my rest? The frequency of my joy?

You have the same power to write your own damn rules. Because here is what I am absolutely certain of: you are not the hostess of someone else’s diner.

XOXO, NdP

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“First we have June’s baby shower in the city, then we leave that night for Sam’s rehearsal dinner, and then of course the wedding. Wednesday after we get back from the wedding we are hosting baby Kyle’s birthday in the park, and I think Sarah will join because her birthday is the next week. So two birds, one stone. Then we have a day to pack up before we take the kids to the beach with Brian’s parents and sister and her new boyfriend. The whole family will be together for 10 days. Once we get home from the beach we have a day to prep for school. And then, finally, the kids will go back to school and I’ll go back to work and everything will calm down.”

She was, ostensibly, describing a series of celebrations. But the activities fell out of her mouth like lead, as if every event she described was putting another chain around her neck. The content was “parties and vacations” but the tone felt like “root canals and hard labor in the sun.”

There was such a deep sense of relief when she got to the part about “going back to school and getting back to work.” But I know her kids. These are kids who would rather run barefoot through the woods for hours than go back to school. Kids who want to jump into the ocean, eat ice cream for dinner, and skip bedtime showers for a week. Forever, if given the chance. These are not kids who are looking forward to going back to school.

And I found myself heartbroken for this friend.

To have all the joy squeezed from celebration and relationship such that all that remains is duty. What a devastating way to walk through life.

Because at the other end of these “tasks,” what was the thing worth waiting for? If we work our asses off all day for the money to go on vacation and spend time with our loved ones, and then when we finally get to the celebration-and–spending-time-together part we’re just trying to make it through those moments, what is even left at the end?

What are we trying to make it to? Collapsing into the couch at the end of the night to ignore Netflix while we scroll mindlessly on our phones? Or just collapsing into bed with the feeling of having survived, only to wake up the next day and start again?

Somehow the idea of a regimented schedule of school and work, two cages in their own right, had become more of a comfort to my friend than the possibly chaotic, possibly joyful but definitely unpredictable experience of just being.

That is not the life I want to live.

I don’t want to live a life that I’m patiently waiting to just get through. I want to live this life, the one right here. I want to live it with the people who are here, in front of me, right now and I want to experience the moments that are here, in front of me, right now.

I want to deal with my cranky, tummyachy kid in the morning because she was up way, way past her bedtime the night before, laughing hysterically with her cousins as they made (and ate, also way too late) some ridiculous sickly sweet dessert covered in whipped cream and sprinkles and chocolate chips at a sleepover.

I want to wake up bleary-eyed and exhausted at 3:30am and shower half-asleep because we need to catch a 6am flight to make it to my best friend’s kid’s graduation early enough to procure an obnoxious sign that we wave next to an even more obnoxious number of balloons that we just transported, sweaty, in an overheated Uber across town in traffic.

I want to be forced to introduce the concept of a full-body “tick check” to a filthy kid because we spent the afternoon wrestling with a tent and searching for kindling in the thick brush of a forest to build a fire to roast our dinner by hand, far, far away from the city.

These messy and inconvenient moments aer the ones that make a life feel more alive.

I have moments and days when I too am just struggling to make it through. But I watch these moments closely now, because they are an invasive species, like a vine that starts as an innocent sprout of green shoots but slowly and insidiously grows and begins to strangle everything it touches.

I’ve started paying attention to these moments as a warning. When I catch myself thinking, “Let me just get through this and then everything will be alright,” I know I’ve gotten way off track somehow. Maybe I’m spending too much of my time doing things that don’t fill me up. Maybe I’ve gotten too wrapped up thinking about tomorrow to remember how to be present with what is right here, right now.

Whatever the reason, these feelings of needing to survive the day (or week or month) have become a sign that I need to slow down and reframe how I’m engaging with life and ask myself:

What would I do if this moment really mattered?

Because it does. This moment, right here. This is your life. Not the vacation you’re planning. Not the weekend you’re waiting for. Not the promotion you’re working toward. This. So if this is life, how do we reclaim the joy that’s been strangled out of it? How do we shift from enduring our days to actually living them?

It can start, I think, with recognizing that language matters. A lot. More than we realize.

Neuroscience researchers love to put people into fMRI machines, give them tasks and watch their brains light up. One of those experiments asked folks to build a little tower of blocks while thinking one of two things about the task: either “I’m choosing to build this tower because it matters to me” or “I have to build this tower because someone asked me to.”

Using different language (in their thoughts, not even out loud) made completely different areas of the brain light up. When they had “I am choosing to” thoughts, it activated the regions associated with agency and intrinsic motivation. And when they had the “I have to” thoughts, none of those parts lit up. In other words, your brain physically processes “I get to” differently than “I have to” and that difference shows up in the neural circuits that govern how empowered you feel.

Just by using different words.

So I stole this idea from neuroscience and use it on myself all the time. Join me, won’t you? Try changing your language from “I have to” to “I get to” or “I am choosing to” and watch how that shifts your entire experience.

Instead of “I have to drive the kids to soccer practice,” try “I get to spend time with my kids.” Advanced move? “I get to spend time with people I love more than anything in the world.”

Instead of “I have to listen to my stepdad tell the same story 16 times,” try “I get to spend time with someone who doesn’t have many years left.” Advanced move? “I get to be a witness for someone sharing memories that bring him joy.”

Instead of “I have to call my mother,” try “I get to connect with someone who’s been loving me longer than anyone else.” Advanced move? “I get to be the highlight of someone’s day just by showing up.”

Changing the words we use to describe our reality actually creates new pathways in our brains. We’re rewiring our default view of the world such that we no longer experience life as something that happens to us but rather as something we’re actively participating in creating.

So here’s my prayer to the cosmos.

Let me not work my whole life to make enough money for someday, only to have someday come and be yet another thing for me to rush through. Let me be here now and let me not let the days slip away. Let me find the joy in the exhaustion, in the uncertainty, and in the beautiful mess of being human.

Let me not try to get somewhere else. I’m already here.

XOXO, NdP

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There is an entire industry built around the idea of fixing ourselves. From therapy to coaching (hi!), to self-help books and healing retreats, we’re always reaching for the next version of ourselves. The promise whispered everywhere is the same: if you just find the right teacher or insight, maybe one day you too can finally become the person you were meant to be!

I spent a long time splashing around in this water. Once I could see that I wasn’t living a life that felt very alive, I set out to fix that (always to fix, after all I’m oh, so Type A). I read all the books and listened to all the podcasts and worked my way through therapists, becoming an expert at optimizing my own potential.

And yet, the more I contemplated what needed fixing, the more things I found to "fix." It was like playing a video game where defeating the big boss just revealed an even bigger, uglier boss waiting behind it. But for some reason, I never got to the level with the final boss.

So was I evolving? Or was I just getting really, really good at finding problems?

There’s a moment when healing can stop being a path back to yourself and become another form of perfectionism. “Working on yourself" has a slippery way of becoming another way to earn your worth, or another project to complete.

After searching for that final boss for quite a while I came to realize that what we’ve been told just isn’t true. Healing is not about fixing something that's broken. It’s about remembering what's always been whole underneath. And the very premise that we need to be "healed" to be worthy of love and joy can become the very thing that keeps us trapped.

Your brain's problem-solving addiction

Let’s take a quick visit inside your skull to see what’s happening here…

Humans have this incredibly oversized prefrontal cortex compared to other mammals. Think of it as the get-shit-done headquarters of your brain. It's like a Swiss Army knife equipped for every conceivable task: planning, working memory, goal-setting, impulse control, abstract reasoning. It's basically our internal project manager and single-minded problem-solver rolled into one neurological powerhouse.

And it's really good at its job.

We've used these amazing brains to do amazing things. We eliminated smallpox from the face of the earth. We've more than doubled human lifespan over the past two centuries. We've harnessed wind and water for transportation, split atoms for energy, and connected every human on earth through the internet. Our problem-solving brains have literally reshaped the planet.

But this machine designed to identify and solve problems doesn't know when to turn off.

When we direct that same problem-solving-always-optimizing brain inward to consider ourselves, it does what it was literally wired to do. It scans for “areas of opportunity.” It identifies problems to fix and optimize.

Of course we think something's wrong with us. Our brains are designed to find what's wrong.

The cultural validation machine

If it were just our brains we were fighting, we might have a chance, but the deck is stacked against us.

Our culture has figured out how to exploit this wiring in our brain and then provide constant validation that our brain must be right about finding problems.

Your brain assesses that there's a problem with you, maybe you feels a little foggy or maybe some situation gives you anxiety, and then everywhere you look media and marketing are confirming this assessment. "You need this supplement for better focus!" "Try this program to heal your trauma!" "Use this method to optimize your morning routine!" "Join this retreat to unlock your highest self!"

Your problem-solving brain starts spinning. See? I was right to find problems! Look at all this evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with us that needs fixing.

We can become trapped in a feedback loop where our problem-finding brain gets constant cultural reinforcement that we are somehow wrong and need fixing. It's like being stuck in a hall of mirrors where every reflection shows you a distorted version of yourself that needs improvement.

Voila. The healing industry becomes a billion-dollar machine powered by our brain's natural tendency to find problems and then feeding our hungry little brains an endless stream of solutions.

You are not a project

But I believe that this is where our brains, and the systems exploiting them, get it completely wrong.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger spent his career arguing that human beings aren't "problems to be solved" but simply beings existing in the world. He proposed that our authenticity lies in being, not becoming and he saw our obsession with self-improvement as a fundamental distraction from the real work of learning to fully inhabit our own existence.

In his view, we'd turned ourselves into objects to be analyzed, when we're actually conscious beings experiencing the raw mystery of being alive. He felt we become so focused on becoming someone else that we'd forgotten how to simply be who we already are.

Assuming that growth has to mean that we are sculpting ourselves into something “better” is such a limiting view of what growth can and should be. Growth could, instead, be about learning to fully inhabit who we’ve always been, before the pain and before the hurt.

The living journey vs. the healing journey

When I work with folks now, I'm less interested in their "healing journey" and way more curious about their living journey.

Instead of asking "What needs to be fixed?" I ask: Who are you, really? Who do you want to be in this world? Can you remember who you were before the world (and your brain) told you to be something else? Let’s go be that person.

The clients who transform most dramatically are the ones who start living like they're already whole, right now.

They don’t stop doing the work, but they stop doing it to earn worthiness. Healing is no longer a prerequisite for joy. Humans are built to hold the complexity of the both/and: still healing and already whole, still unraveling old pain and already worthy of a beautiful life.

(And if that doesn’t feel true yet, if you’re still in the thick of it, unsure if wholeness is even real, that’s okay too. I already know you are whole, and one day you will too.)

Anxiety doesn’t have to be completely absent before they are willing to take risks. Instead, they welcome anxiety like an old friend and say, well, if you are here, come along for the ride then, but we will not stop living. Joy is no longer postponed, even amidst all the pain.

What a devious idea it is, that your have to put your entire existence on hold while your work to become worthy of it, as if life is a privilege you earn through enough self-improvement rather than a birthright you claim simply by showing up.

Yes. And.

None of this is to say that we should ignore genuinely harmful patterns or become complacent bystanders in our own lives. We all absolutely have patterns and behaviors we can learn to release our grip on because they no longer serve us or the people around us. We can and should keep evolving how we engage with the world. Growth and healing are integral parts of this beautiful existence. Agency is, too.

And, you are not a project to be completed. You are already whole and you have been since the moment you arrived on the scene.

So the next time you catch yourself reaching for another healing modality that promises to unlock the "real" you, pause for just a second, and consider this possibility: What if the thing that needs fixing isn’t you, but the story that said you were broken in the first place?

XOXO, NdP

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My friend is sitting across from me at the coffee shop, tears streaming down her face as she tells me about her marriage falling apart. Every instinct in my body is screaming at me to do something. Fix it. Solve it.

My entire body is practically vibrating with the need to make this stop. I could tell the story that I want it all to stop because I am so deeply empathetic and kind and I want to wash away my friend’s pain. And of course I do. But my response isn’t really about her at all, it’s about me. Her pain is activating something primal in me that says: Discomfort is the signal for danger and I have to make it go away and I have to control the situation. I have to fix this and fix it now.

But for once in my ever-loving ever-fixing life I actually don’t try to fix it. I just sit. I hold my coffee and hold her hand and breathe through the urge to rescue her from her own experience (or to rescue me from my own experience). The tears slow down. Her breathing deepens. She looks up at me and says, "Thank you for listening."

The most powerful people I know (and I mean spiritually-deep-grounded-to-the-core-unshakeable-expansive-gravitas kind of powerful people, not financially-powerful-on-paper-CEO-type powerful people) don't move fast when emotions get big. They make space for pausing. They notice when feelings crop up, but then somehow they are able to sit with feelings, even and especially the uncomfortable ones.

This is extremely difficult to do. And it sure as hell isn’t a “life hack” to "optimize" your “productivity.” But I’ve come to believe it’s the most important skill we can learn if we want to really experience this one, precious life we have.

How we learned to run

We've been sold the lie that discomfort is the enemy.

From the moment we're born, the entire world teaches us that feeling bad means something's gone wrong.

Crying baby? Quick, fix it. Are we on an airplane? In a store? Fix it even faster. Bounce, shush, offer seventeen different pacifiers, whatever it takes to restore the peace for others.

Whiny child? Quick, distract! Here's an iPad loaded with Cocomelon. Let's get you so overstimulated you forget you had feelings in the first place.

Sad teenager? Must be a phase to cure. Probably hormones. Definitely screen time. Have you tried going outside? Yoga? A hobby? Literally anything except sitting with the fact that being human is sometimes really fucking hard?

Struggling adult? Therapy. Meds. Life hacks. Supplements. Optimization. Rinse. Repeat. Anything but the radical idea that maybe you're struggling because life is genuinely difficult sometimes.

We've built an entire civilization around the premise that human beings should feel good all the time, and when we don't, it's a problem to be solved immediately.

So we do what any reasonable person would do when faced with emotional discomfort. We run.

Let me pour a glass of wine to take the edge off while I scroll through Instagram until my brain goes numb. I’ll pack the calendar so full there's no room to think, or God forbid, feel anything and then work myself to the bone so I have no space for any feelings other than exhaustion. Maybe I’ll buy a few things I don’t need and then end the week picking a fight I don’t mean.

Or, if we're more evolved about it, we get fancy with our running. I can meditate the feelings away, I can exercise until I drop and there’s always time to book another therapy session, because maybe this one will finally make the discomfort disappear.

The people who don’t flinch

The people who actually thrive , the ones who build meaningful relationships, who create art and communities and spaces that move people, the ones who lead with wisdom, have all figured out that life includes ALL the feelings, even the ones that don't photograph well for Instagram.

They are the ones who can sit with a crying friend without rushing to fix it. Anxiety visits them too, but they can hold it without immediately reaching for a distraction. Uncertainty does not cause panic. They can be bored without scrolling. Sadness is welcome and doesn’t mean they are broken.

Are these people naturally more evolved or emotionally gifted? When you meet them you might damn sure think they are. But they aren’t. They have just learned and practiced a skill that is accessible to every single one of us but that most of us are desperately afraid of: staying present with what is.

The flight attendant on my last multi-hour flight, who dealt with a passenger having a panic attack with such calm presence that half the plane didn't even notice what was happening, she is one of these people. The best plant medicine guides, who hold space for whatever needs to emerge during ceremonies, rage, grief, terror, joy, screams, laughter, shaking, tears, all without trying to speed up the process or make it prettier (and oh, it’s never pretty). They are these people. And thankfully and luckily, my daughter's preschool teacher is one of these people, a kind and patient woman who can stay calm when fifteen four-year-olds are having simultaneous breakdowns over snacks and the wrong color crayon.

These type of folks have developed the capacity to feel whatever arises without immediately grasping for something different, and my god is it beautiful.

The price of emotional avoidance

When we chronically avoid discomfort, we're also avoiding the full spectrum of human experience and inadvertently training our nervous systems to perceive all normal human emotions as threats to be avoided. We're shrinking our capacity for everything, including joy, love, creativity, and connection.

Here's what I mean:

The muscle that you build when you learn to sit with sadness and let it be, even when it feels uncomfortable and you just want it to end, is the same muscle you need to receive love without immediately deflecting it (even if that too makes you feel uncomfortable and like you just want it to end). If you can build the capacity to actually feel angry without suppressing it, even though your body is telling you that anger is a bad look, you might also build the capacity to create art without all self-criticism that comes when the same voice tries to edit you and make you more “palatable” to the world. This work builds intimacy, too. Those who can hold their own anxiety without looking for an escape can also hold space for all the mess of a partner without withdrawing.

When we run from discomfort, we're accidentally running from the good stuff too. We’re running from life itself.

The magic of the awkward guest

When I was in the midst of some pretty intense burnout a few years ago I was the one who was running. I had become so good at avoiding difficult emotions that I’d also lost access to all the most joyous emotions. I was living in this weird emotional flatland where everything felt muted and gray.

One day, in an attempt to regain access to the good feelings by getting a bit more comfortable with all the feelings I had been running from, my therapist invited me to start treating the tough emotions like guests at my table.

Instead of immediately trying to get rid of uncomfortable feelings, she asked me to get curious about them and ask them why they were here. Was it possible that these feelings were messengers carrying information about my life and my deepest needs?

I did not want to do this, but I am no quitter, so I tried anyway.

Incredibly, sadness told me that it was just my trying to honor what mattered to me. I was reminded that there can be no sadness if there was no love. Anxiety was an overprotective nervous system trying to get my attention and make sure I had done enough preparation. It was just trying to protect me. And I began to warm to the idea that maybe my anger was just energy telling me what I really cared about, sort of like an ethics barometer.

When I started getting curious about all these hard, uncomfortable feelings, something extraordinary happened. I thought for sure that focusing my attention on the emotions would give them more life. It seemed risky to give them a voice, because what if they just took over my entire existence and consumed me? It seems so counter-intuitive, but in actuality, the more space I gave the tough feelings, the smaller and more manageable they became. When I stopped fighting my feelings, they stopped fighting back.

The two-minute revolution

My therapist gave me some homework to practice building this muscle. She called it the "Two-Minute Sit." Here’s how it works.

The next time you feel that familiar discomfort rising, set a timer for two (just two!) minutes. Then sit. Don't fix. Don't distract. Don't even meditate it away.

Notice where you feel it in your body and notice what it feels like. Is it heavy? Tight? Moving? Does it have a color? What is its texture?

Try talking to it like you would a scared child: "Hey anxiety, I see you. You can hang out here with me. I'm not going anywhere." You can even try asking it what it wants to you to know.

When the timer goes off, you're free to do whatever you want. Scroll away or call your friend, whatever you need.

After you practice this a few times, you might find you don't need to immediately run anymore. Incredibly, discomfort begins to become just another physical sensation, like hunger or tiredness, and you start to realize that feelings are temporary visitors, coming and going like the tide.

This practice can help us begin to understand that what we feel and who we are are two very different things. You can feel anxiety without being anxious. You can hold anger without being consumed by it.

The unexpected freedom of feeling it all

Here's the icing on the proverbial feelings cake. The more willing you are to feel everything, the less overwhelming everything becomes.

Our fight-or-flight response activates when we perceive threat, so when we treat emotions as dangerous experiences to be avoided, we keep our nervous system in a constant state of hyper-vigilance. In contrast, when we treat emotions as temporary visitors rather than emergencies, our system relaxes and emotions (even the hard ones) start to pass through us like water. When you give your feelings permission to exist, they often transform on their own and move through much faster than we could ever imagine.

That kind of change ripples outward. We benefit ourselves from being able to feel the full spectrum of emotions, but so do those in our lives. When we aren’t afraid of our own emotions, there’s no reason to be afraid of anyone else’s. Difficult conversations no longer feel difficult when we can trust ourselves to handle whatever feelings might come up (from them OR from us), good or bad. Risks too, seem less risky when you have the confidence that yes, even if this goes off the rails later, you CAN feel disappointment without being destroyed by it.

At the end of it all, even the idea of “good” feelings and “bad” feelings is a false framework. Our feelings are just another kind of energy moving through us, and if we can give them their space, move they will.

XOXO, NdP

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Words like these move through move through so very many of my coaching sessions. My clients arrive looking for an escape, convinced that their discontent stems from their workplace, and they are searching for a fresh beginning somewhere “over there” where things will finally feel free.

They are me, just a short time ago.

The Slow Descent Into Panic

My slow unraveling started with a job that looked perfect on paper, like something I might have manifested during a particularly optimistic vision board session. I was working in the philanthropy group of a large corporation that I’d collaborated with for years, investing company money with nonprofit organizations that were changing the world. It was really the trifecta of professional satisfaction: good pay, good people, good mission. It was everything I’d ever wanted in a job.

After the initial buzzy honeymoon phase (“Is this really real life?”) wore off, things began to slowly unwind. It started with a background feeling of restlessness. The job wasn’t lighting me up the way it used to. As time wore on, I found myself just trying to make it through the day, to that sweet moment when I closed the laptop and walked away. There was real relief for me there, when I successfully made it through another one, but the reset of a night at home became less and less restorative. Gradually relief evolved into dread.

What began as normal (?) Sunday scaries, you know, the garden variety inability to enjoy Netflix on Sunday night due to the nauseating feeling of the impending workday, crept backward until I’d wake up Sunday morning tied in knots. I was physically there, but I’d puppet my way through the entire day. I missed out on every moment with my family because as the day went on, it would get harder and harder to breathe, like the very idea of another meeting was strangling me to death.

Then my body began staging a more dramatic rebellion. Between meetings, I’d find myself sitting on the bathroom floor, trying to catch my breath during what I now know were panic attacks. The first one happened after a meeting about an upcoming layoff that I would have to help orchestrate. I became way too well-acquainted with the tiles in my bathroom.

I ignored it all (obviously, ignoring my body used to be my superpower) and spent six months in this slow-motion freefall, telling myself elaborate stories about gratitude and perspective. This was the best job I’d ever had, wasn’t it? I was making good money, working with a team that needed me, contributing to meaningful causes. I should just suck it up and be grateful for what I had, right?

But eventually, when I could suck it up no longer, I realized something wasn’t right. And I knew why. The job must the problem, and I needed something new.

But as it turns out, I was completely wrong.

When My Body Forced a Reset

One morning I woke up and knew — I just knew — that if I had joined those Zoom calls, I would start crying and never stop.

“I guess today’s the day I quit,” I thought, before calling my boss. But she urged me to hold off on quitting, and instead take some time off. And thank god she did, because that space to rest and recover not only changed my entire outlook on the job, it changed my entire outlook on life.

I tried out the revolutionary idea of allowing myself to choose what I wanted to do instead of what I “needed” to do, just to give myself a taste of agency again. Mostly that turned out to be rest and long walks to settle my nervous system.

Those walks along the Brooklyn Promenade, looking out at the East River, quieted my brain and allowed me to think about what really mattered to me, probably for the first time in my adult working life. I journaled every day to process the ideas and thoughts that were flowing in, now that work wasn’t consuming all the mental space. Slowly, my nervous system went from fight-or-flight all the time back down to a more reasonable fight-or-flight only if we see a tiger.

After three months, I returned to work. I was scared shitless. I was certain that stepping back into that environment would immediately resurrect all the old feelings of dread and panic and undo all the good work I’d done to feel more myself. But I went back and realized that something fundamental had shifted during my time away. I was in this new place of nervous system regulation, and from there I looked around and realized: Holy shit. It’s not the job that’s causing me pain. It was never the job. It’s how I’m relating to the job.

Two Critical Discoveries

The first discovery emerged when I finally put pen to paper about what I actually cared about. Not what I thought I should care about based on cultural programming or family expectations, but what genuinely mattered to my soul: uninterrupted time with my husband and daughter, agency over my schedule, my physical and mental health, space for rest, creative pursuits that fed my spirit, and having enough financial security to keep my family safe (critical note: safe..not filthy rich).

I meditated on death and the end of life and what it would be like to be 90. I wrote down everything that would matter when I was nearing the end and I listed all the things I can’t take with me: promotions, titles, wealth, material possessions… being right.

When I’m about to take my last breath, will I wish I had worked more late nights, attended more meetings, or gotten a few more promotions? Will I feel pride to know I had been proven right in all the arguments of my life? That I was shown to be smarter than everyone else? Will I look back and think, “Gosh I was so good at my job. I’m so glad I spent all of my emotional energy on those presentations and sales calls.”

Fuck no.

But at the end, I might wish I had one more hour to spend reading bedtime stories to my daughter. Or one more hour to take an evening walk with my husband. Or another hour to hold the hand of a friend as they tell me about what’s hard for them. Or another hour to watch the sun rise or set or blaze at midday.

And so at age 45, I finally discovered what was really important to me.

The second discovery required dismantling the limiting beliefs that had kept me trapped in this crazy life chasing other people’s goals. Every time I heard “you should” or “you have to” in my head, I paused and asked: “Is that really true? Whose voice am I channeling right now? Do I actually need to hop on this 8 PM call, or can it wait until tomorrow morning? Do I really need to address that passive-aggressive comment my colleague made? Can I simply let it go and protect my energy?

I questioned nearly every thought I had and after a while I began to wonder if any thought in my head was really my own. Had they all been put there by someone else, like my parents or teachers or old bosses or exes or just like, the entire universe of patriarchal capitalist hustle culture at large?

What I discovered through this interrogation was unsettling but strangely liberating: most of my thoughts actually were not mine. The voice telling me I “should” work late was my dad’s obsession with titles and accolades and the belief that I “had to” fix every broken process was my mom’s people-pleasing pattern. Decades of capitalist hustle culture and their lies about what makes people valuable was the source of my constant pressure to achieve.

Once I saw that those voices weren’t really mine, I could make the space to hear my actual thoughts and real desires. Interestingly, they almost all came from my body, and not my mind, but that is a post for another day. But those wants helped me remember what I have always wanted out of this short, beautiful life, and those wants became my compass.

What Living This Way Actually Looks Like

With clarity on my real priorities, I could finally point my life in a direction of my own choosing. But it’s a funny thing when you haven’t really been listening to yourself for a few decades. You have to start small. So start small I did. I started with tiny choices like closing my laptop at reasonable hours and swallowing my fear and then choosing unavailability on weekends.

I knew that choosing myself would mean I would forgo promotions and miss out on “cool” projects, but for the first time in a long time I was also starting to taste what peace felt like, and it was worth more than any “attaboy” or bump in my bonus could ever be.

Here’s what this looked like in practice:

The first step involved the most mundane, non-spiritual, non-transcendent practice of all time: protecting my time and access to me. I started logging off at 5 PM and genuinely not checking emails or Slack after hours, setting up an auto-response that read “I’m logged off but will respond in the morning. Text me if urgent.” When requests came in for work to be completed ASAP, instead of automatically saying yes, I learned to respond with more specificity, “I’m not available now, but I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.” These tactical boundaries created time and space for my mind to breathe and process without the constant intrusion of other people’s priorities.

Starting with email boundaries felt so… small. But all these time management tactics were an absolute necessity. They were needed to create the space for transformation. How are you supposed to dig into the muck of learning to love and value yourself if your Slack keeps pinging? So I did the boring, small work of time management boundaries to make room for the larger transformation.

The good news is that it’s a positive feedback loop.

When you do this deeper work of self-acceptance, all those practical boundaries become easier to maintain because you finally believe that you’re deserving of working at a natural human pace. The philosophical shift has an incredible ripple effect. If you fundamentally believe you’re worthy of love and respect regardless of what you “achieve” in any given day, then you no longer feel compelled to fix everything that’s broken at work, and you don’t need to strive and overwork for a promotion to proxy your value in the world.

Knowing that you are worthy and valuable regardless of your “success” is the real unlock to freedom.

To start this work, every time you hear “you should” or “you have to” echoing in your mind, pause long enough to ask: “Is that really true? Whose voice is this, and do I actually agree with them?” Start questioning whether the stories driving your daily behavior are actually yours or just inherited programming from family, or school, or hustle culture.

The tactical protections creates the space you need to work on unlearning all the nonsense conditioning we’ve been fed about what makes human beings valuable. And getting to these fundamental shifts in belief is where the real work lives, and it’s much, much harder than setting email boundaries.

Staying true to yourself ain’t easy. The world will never ever stop telling us that our goals for rest and peace aren’t enough. The world will never ever stop telling us that we need more money and more “success.”.

But imagine if you could treat your own goals with as much love and reverence as you treat the (dare I say, arbitrary?) goals of your boss or your company (or your parents, or hustle culture). Then the job doesn’t matter. All that matters is living in alignment with what’s most important to you.

What Happened Next

I went back to that job and stayed there for another year and a half. It was the same job with the same boss on the same team doing the same work. But I had none of the restlessness and none of the dread.

And for the vast majority of my coaching clients do the same thing.

Eventually I did quit that job, but it was a year and a half later, and I wasn’t running away from anything. I was running toward my clinical psychology degree and starting my own business. I left from a place of alignment, not desperation. It feels different in your bones when you quit because you feel called somewhere else.

Yes, finding a job that fits you perfectly is a beautiful thing, and I’m not suggesting you should stay somewhere that fundamentally conflicts with your values or is toxic or treats you poorly.

Your job fades is just one small part of your amazing and expansive life, not the whole thing, so before you update that resume, ask yourself: what if the answer isn’t out there?

What if everything you’re looking for has been inside you this whole time, waiting patiently for you to remember who you really are beneath all the conditioning about who you should be?

XOXO, NdP

Every morning since then, she jumps out of bed and rushes to check if anything has sprouted. She presses her face against the glass like a little scientist. “Can we make them grow faster?” she asks as she peers intently at our very plant-less bowl of dirt.

This little girl is me. She has the same impatience I have, clearly handed down from mother to daughter. It’s more than genes though, strong as mine are, because it’s also the same impatience that oozes out of every nook and cranny of our culture.

“When will you finish that project? Can we accelerate the timeline and get it done by next month instead of next quarter?”

“When are you getting married? Your sister already had two kids by the time she was your age.”

“When will you get that promotion? Shouldn’t you be moving up faster?”

These well-meaning questions create a world that buzzes with a nervous energy that feels at best, frantic, and at worst, manic. Seemingly harmless questions about where we are and when the next milestone will come can leave us feeling totally inadequate, because the implication of course, is that if I have to ask you when the next thing will be done, wherever you currently are on your journey isn’t quite yet where you need to be. Good try, but keep going because you haven’t yet achieved anything worthy of my satisfaction, only my interrogation.

Amazon, as it turns out, does not deliver achievement on demand and our most meaningful experiences are not available for scheduling on Calendly. Yet we’ve internalized the idea that if we just work hard enough we can bend the universe to our will and force our dreams into existence. After all, what can’t be accomplished through sheer determination and the power of will?

Well, nature, for one.

The tallest living creature on earth, the redwood, begins as a tiny sprout emerging from the base of an ancient relative. These trees are more than content to wait for precisely the right moment to begin their hundred year journey. They wait for the right amount of space in the canopy and for the light to hit the ground just so, and only then, when they detect that the nutrients in the soil are ready to support life, will they sprout. Then, over the course of centuries (centuries!), the redwood becomes the tallest living being on our earth.

Rivers will always, eventually, on their own time and through their own meandering path, reach the ocean. A river will flow around whatever obstacle may appear in its path, be it rocks or roots. It simply finds the route of least resistance and gently presses onward, never stopping its forward motion. Through the lightest touch, sometimes just a trickle, a stream can somehow carve canyons through mountains. A river can reshape entire landscapes. The consistency and patience of a river can create what force and hurry never could.

There is a natural timing to nature, just as there is a natural timing to everything in the universe. This includes our own human lives. All of our career achievements and relationship milestones, all of our creative projects and personal healing and insights, all of it, all of it, has its own organic schedule, just like the redwoods and the river. If we let it, all will unfold exactly as it’s meant to when conditions are right.

Like I tell my daughter when she presses her face against the terrarium glass for the fifth time in a single morning, searching for signs of growth that are so frustratingly not there, if we water the seeds and keep them in the sun, when they are ready, they will sprout.

xoxo, NdP

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This question follows me to every dinner party since I left my 25-year corporate career to pursue graduate studies in psychology. The ink had barely dried on my application when the interrogations began. Sometimes it’s asked with genuine interest and a curious head-tilt. Other times, it’s delivered with the concern of someone watching a car crash in slow motion who is unsure whether to help or keep driving.

People seem puzzled when I say I don’t have my next move mapped out. They are perplexed that after two decades of strategic planning, I’ve chosen to follow something as unstructured as intellectual curiosity, something without a predetermined ROI.

But so many of history’s most innovative breakthroughs began without any practical goals. They started with someone simply following what fascinated them.

Steve Jobs, while building one of the most iconic tech companies we’ve ever know, revolutionized digital typography along the way, and all because he took a class in, of all things, calligraphy. He took the class because it was beautiful and fascinating, certainly not to help him build a business. That “impractical” pursuit became a cornerstone of Apple’s design philosophy and changed typography forever.

Lin-Manuel Miranda had a love of hip-hop for years before he discovered another passion: for history and musical theater. He is said to have picked up Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton on a whim while vacationing, but then was completely arrested by the story. That unexpected collision of passions gave us Hamilton and transformed both theater and how we engage with history.

What freedom can come from following your interests without knowing the destination! When we drop the predetermined end point, the path can open up. It can unfold more organically and allow for serendipity to shape its direction, or for unexpected connections to reveal an emergent goal we never could have imagined if we’d told the world what we expected of it at the beginning.

Now, whenever anyone shares their excitement about learning something new, I ask them what draws them to it, what fascinates them about it.

As for me, I'm studying psychology because I'm want to know why humans do the things we do and why we stay in patterns that don't serve us. I’m fascinated by how our earliest experiences shape our little brains (you can thank my daughter for really putting this consideration front and center). I also find myself quite relieved and hopeful as I learn about our infinite ability to change that wiring and thus to change how we think and how we act. I know this curiosity is guiding me toward something meaningful, even if I can't yet name what that will be.

Following curiosity or passion can feel less than serious in this ever-so-serious world of KPIS and ROI, but please never put down your curiosity. You never know which seemingly unrelated interests of yours might collide one day in the future to create something the world has been waiting for.

xoxo, NdP

xoxo, NdP