* All names and identifying features have been altered to protect client confidentiality.

At the time, Sasha was a solopreneur who had just made her first virtual hire and was still struggling to delegate tasks.

“Tell me more,” I said.

“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and journaling,” she said, “and I need to stop playing small.”

Did you hear it?

It’s language that seems to permeate every rah-rah-BHAG-moonshot-you-deserve-this-vivid-vision self help book making the rounds.

I still have journals filled with aspirational visions of 7 bedroom lakehouses and a jewelry company and a hobby farm with ponies. And it turns out, I want none of it.

In fact, I could argue that I got really lucky on the lakehouse front because despite spending the better part of 2021 looking for a property to buy, we didn’t find something we liked, and as a result, had cash lying around for when I had my health crisis and needed a paid sabbatical.

Which brings me to the point of this article:

When I look back at my own life, I wanted to go to New School and study creative writing and live in NYC, I was sure I didn’t want kids, I wanted to win a Pulitzer (I’m not even eligible!), wanted to become a New York Times bestselling author, wished I had the discipline to be anorexic (true story and yeah, stupid, right?!), etc etc.

Many of the most magical, transformative things that have happened to me and genuinely changed my life were either things I actively didn’t want (kids) or things that had never even crossed my mind to want (a career in television, living in Singapore or moving to Montreal).

So when I’m working with a business owner who is walking that unlovely tightrope of I can’t continue like this and I can’t quit because I’m the breadwinner, I do not ask them what they want.

Because when a founder is teetering on the brink of burnout and they talk about wanting something that they’ve never had, they almost always reach for something that feels like the opposite of what they’ve got.

It’s an understandable but reactive way of thinking, which is the last place you want to make a life-altering decision from.

When I’m evaluating whether or not I can help someone, I don’t want aspiration, I want track record.

Lived experience.

Something real.

So I ask a different question entirely:

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“Tell me about a time in your life when you were really well.

“A time when you felt good in your body, in your mind, in your relationships, where you felt like you were thriving even if resources were tight.”

Most people have to think about it.

Sometimes they have to reach back into childhood.

But the way their body language changes is pretty telling. Shoulders come down, eyes soften and stare into the distance, breathing slows; their consciousness seems to drop back into their body.

Tell me the details, I say.

Because we want to dig past the outfits and the makeup each memory wears into the deepest, most somatic layer.

One founder I worked with talked about how she loved colouring for hours even though she “wasn’t an artist”. How she loved dressing up in outrageous outfits that made her feel transcendant - like the rules didn’t apply to her.

Another talked about how he loved travel and conversations with strangers at cafés and how it made him feel alive in a way that almost nothing else could.

Sasha talked about a gruelling kickboxing class she used to take - where she’d end the workout with minor cuts and bruises but feel like she owned the world.

Tell me more, I’ll prompt.

Because underneath the details they’ve just shared, I’m looking for the piece that is the catalyst; the smallest viable dose that triggered the feeling of aliveness.

Because blindly trying to recreate an experience that worked during a different era with a body that may have been capable of more is usually a formula for disappointment (or injury).

Colouring might represent the freedom to do something that has no “productive” value. An expression of abundance in a world pushing scarcity.

Travel is often about novelty and stepping outside one’s usual patterns in a way that wakes up whatever goes to sleep when we’re on autopilot.

Kickboxing might be about intensity and agency - about a visceral, physical experience of meeting a challenge and overcoming it.

Only the individual knows what a particular experience represents - so it’s important to stress-test assumptions and really dig for what the kernel of truth is (you’ll see below that I guessed wrong about Sasha’s kickboxing).

As I spoke to Sasha and we looked at real data from her lived experience (as opposed to wants she was told by culture to have), patterns began to emerge.

She wanted time for real connection - to herself, to her kids, to her spouse, to friends and extended family that she hadn’t seen in months or years because she was always working.

She wanted time - whitespace. Time to sit and read. She hadn’t read a physical book on paper in a long time. Listening at 2x speed on audio (which was her habit) made her feel frantic instead of informed.

She wanted coterie - a group of folks to hang out with regularly over a shared activity (it’s actually what kickboxing represented for her even more than the physical).

As someone who had run a 7-figure company and understood the unromantic costs of that growth, I asked if she was looking forward to the process of hiring, if she felt comfortable with the high overhead, if she wanted more managerial responsibilities, meetings?

“Ugh, no. That’s not my strength,” she said over and over.

“Why do you want a bigger firm then?” I asked.

“I thought it would give me more time,” she said, as she noticed what she actually wanted for the first time.

More. Time.

“So if you imagine more free time - 10-15 hours freed up per week - with a tiny team and similar revenue to what you have now, how does that feel in your body?” I asked.

She straightened in her chair, beaming. “I would like that!”. She seemed surprised at her own admission. “I think I would like that maybe even more. I just really want to work less and have time to live, you know?”

I did know.

I knew because I’d had to learn many of these lessons the hard way. I had paid for the growth with my health, my relationships, my faith in my work. By believing others about what I should want, I had “backwards engineered” myself into a life I didn’t actually care for.

Because, like Sasha, I thought I was supposed to want the outcome. The “7-figure business” or the “New York Times bestselling” label.

But you know what part of the process you have literally zero control over? The outcome.
Revenue is a lag indicator - which means it’s an effect, not a cause.

The cause? The process? The part you control?

Think about how you’d spend most of your waking hours.

If you want to be a NYTimes bestselling author, you’d better be dang freaking excited about writing a lot, learning to pitch your book to agents, learning to pitch to journals who publish excerpts, learning to build “author platform”. These are the things you control. If the bestseller list happens at all, it will usually be because you happened to be around when luck came calling.

If you want a larger firm, you have to picture daily meetings, learning to hire, learning to manage and figure out how to track someone’s performance and give helpful feedback, learning to fire someone, learning to delegate effectively, etc.

But Sasha didn’t want a larger firm, she wanted time. And time that when used in the specific ways I listed above, made her feel really well.

Which creates a totally different design and execution process from “build me a 7-figure firm”.

An anonymized screenshot from our Slack channel.

Because yes, he has spent more quality time with his friends, extended family, wife and kids this summer than he has in the last decade. And yes, the business has brought in more revenue during this period than ever before.

But instead of joyful, he seemed tired and distracted.

As we talked through the past week, he mentioned he wished he was delegating better. When I asked him to shut his eyes and drop out of his head and into his body to scan for what came up when he imagined said delegation, he stopped.

“I have a headache and my neck feels all jammed up. And I’m hungry because I’ve been up since 6am and haven’t had breakfast yet.”

There it was again. A pattern that kept cycling back (though we were now catching it earlier and more easily). His drive for “productivity” hijacking basic human functions like eating.

Because delegation wasn’t the biggest issue that day. It was actually not his biggest issue in general. Improving delegation was important, but it wasn’t his One Thing.

The “One Thing”

In his book The One Thing, Gary Keller, a successful real estate mogul, talks about the decision-making matrix he uses to help him stay focused on what actually matters any given day.

I love it and use it with all our clients because it’s simple, intuitive and easy to practice. When faced with a list of possible choices, you ask yourself:

What is the One Thing that will make everything else easier or irrelevant?

With a little practice, you learn to push your thinking upstream from the problem that’s tugging at your attention. What this often reveals is that the 7 competing “urgent” issues you’re facing might actually spring from a single source. And then you’d simply need to solve that ONE source rather than all 7 separately.

Let’s go back to my client:

He was unhappy with how many emails were piling up in his inbox. He felt unable to relax or focus until they were all moved to the specific folders in which they belonged. He longed to not have to do this sorting. He wanted to delegate it to a staff member but wasn’t sure if she was ready or even how to do it.

But really, he couldn’t focus because he was hungry.

If I had followed his lead and plunged head-first into delegation mechanics, we might have potentially compounded the problem by further delaying breakfast, having his energy crash mid-morning (thus shortening productive work time and making him feel panicky about workload). Based on history, that panic might have caused overthinking at bedtime, leading to insomnia which compounds next day fatigue and blood sugar dysfunction.

Instead, we stopped our meeting for 15 minutes while he got himself something nutritious.

Once he was fed, his energy returned, his headache diminished and he could think more clearly. Now we were ready for skill-building.

But the best part? That staffer had already gotten to work on his inbox without him having to do anything.

That’s right - because some of the delegation framework was already in play. And being hungry and dysregulated meant he had forgotten that and was about to step in and take on tasks that were already someone else’s.

Think about what this does: It sucks up his time and undermines the staffer who would now be confused about what is hers and what isn’t.

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This is how founders often stay stuck in overfunctioning.

They keep solving the wrong problem. And they run out of juice, forever puzzled about why all the soul-sucking hours don’t ever seem to move the needle.

What I’ve discovered in my work with founders is that before we can add in the cognitive load of “learning a new way of doing things”, a fairly common “One Thing” is often body-related.

But few talk about why so many smart, capable founders fall into this trap in the first place:

Founders operate this way because it works. And the system rewards you for it.

• You skip breakfast and “get more done by 10am than most people do in a day” (notice how that becomes a piece of your identity, now fused with your sense of self worth).

• You stay glued to your seat and hammer out 7 hours of “productive work”. Who needs hamstrings that can flex? Truthfully, hamstrings are beside the point if desk jockeying is your chosen sport.

• You can work on just 5 hours of sleep and why can’t your kid just understand that this email is urgent?!

• You can ignore your headache and so what if the “chill” part of Netflix and chill has been a little… icy… lately?

• You can use adrenaline to manufacture focus as long as there’s Ben and Jerry’s in the fridge.

And you do it because it works. Because the system rewards you for it with respect, praise, money and opportunity.

But it’s like using a credit card.

Borrowing is fine as long as you have enough to pay it back with. But most founders forget the repayment part and just keep merrily spending. Because their early experience of it was: it works.

One of the biggest obstacles to change is when our lived experience leads us to a faulty conclusion that feels right. In this case, it might look like: “You overworked and you got rewarded! Therefore overwork is necessary and a good idea.”

Changing our minds now feels like turning the Titanic.

Furthermore, our culture hates rest. It shames us for needing it.

So the incentives only ever reward overwork. They actively punish you for resting or needing to stop.

And by the time you notice there’s a problem, it no longer feels like a choice. Working this way is who you are. And so doing what would actually help makes you feel ironically less capable. So you resist it.

Which typically leads to more issues that make you even slower.

Now you’re always behind.

So what do you reach for? The tool that your own lived experience tells you works: more grinding! Expensive and sophisticated grinding. Grinding with accountability!

Which creates a near permanent state of dysregulation. Which means your radar is constantly jammed and your decision-making goes to… well handbasket territory.

Because when you feel like shit, whatever’s in front of you often starts looking like the cause: your inbox, your spouse, an employee who seems to be behind on deadline, or a client issue.

And then, ironically, you will drive yourself into the ground picking fights or doing tasks that should probably have been deleted or delegated in the first place.

Mind over matter is a dangerous game.

Because minds rely on the matter they’re made of to function well.

So, as I remind all my founders, ask yourself: What is the one thing that will make everything else easier or irrelevant?

And as your answering, check your main instrument - your body.

Hungry? Tired? In pain? Buzzed on caffeine?

Tend to your body first. It’s the most effective way to improve the quality of your decision-making.

Regulate first.

Make decisions after.

You can’t talk to your spouse, because, well you’re the breadwinner and the business is the thing that makes all the things possible, so the last thing you want to do is say something out loud and make it real.

And you’re not even sure if it’s real. I mean, what even is the problem?

Bills are paid, clients (at least most of them) are happy. Heck, you even have a pricey-ish vacation planned.

This is what you thought your life would look like when you first set out to build your business. And it’s weird to be living the dream and having it feel so unexpectedly awful.

You’re always tired.

You have trouble falling asleep and trouble waking up. Something always hurts. And no matter how much you spend on supplements or what diet plan you’re struggling to follow perfectly, you can’t help but feel this nagging sense of…

Distraction.

Like everything you’re doing is pointing you away from the thing you need to be looking at.

I need help, you sometimes think. I need to hire someone to take on some of this load.

But when you go to the job postings sites, you hesitate.

What exactly is the load?

The meetings? The emails? The marketing? The client stuff?

What is the thing you’d hand to this other person?

Is it the execution that’s heavy or the thinking about it?

Again that feeling of caution, a strong intuition that the thing you’re looking for isn’t the thing in front of you.

Meanwhile, there’s also this ticking time bomb feeling.

A feeling of being stretched too thin. It lurks in the skin around your eyes, the heaviness in your stomach, the constant low grade hum of no-more-no-more-no-more.

You try to shake yourself out of it by watching a YouTube video by a taut-muscled guy in a black T-shirt who is very sure he knows exactly what you need to do and spends the next 27 minutes of your time making an airtight case without

…asking a single question.

Backwards engineering.

Solution as absolution.

You wish you had his certainty. It’s been a long time since you’ve felt sure about anything.

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When he makes his pitch, you check out the testimonials on his website and you let yourself do a little fantasy math - if you could just make X dollars more, maybe you could just hire someone to take over, but wait, take over what?

Your stomach clenches and you shut your laptop with a snap, standing up so suddenly you feel a little dizzy. Something feels uncomfortably close.

That thing you’ve been avoiding.

You try to turn away, but too late, you catch a glimpse of the writing on the wall.

And it says the most terrifying thing of all:

Do you even want this?

No, you think. NO! No wait, not no to the question, no to considering the question. Now is not the time. Not while the kids still need private school and your retirement account is woefully underfunded and…

You march blindly towards the kitchen. Surely some Doritos or icecream or even salad will make you feel better. It must be your blood sugar making you think so crazy!

Then, unexpectedly, you grab your keys and head outside.

You find a park, even that tiny one on the corner that’s barely a park at all.

When you get there, you scan the ground for dog crap and nervously take off your shoes. You let your toes sink into the slightly damp grass. Your back hurts, so you sit down and lean against a tree.

You shut your eyes and try to ignore the panicky to-dos that float behind them. Your breath calms a little. You notice how tight your neck is, your chest, your belly. Even your hamstrings refuse to fully relax.

You sit there, just observing your breath like the meditation app says to do.

But the problem is that the breathing doesn’t calm your mind, it simply calms all the noise around it. And that question shimmers up to occupy the silence:

Do you even want this?

Because how can you know?

How can you know when you already have everything you previously wanted and it feels so complicated?

Do you even know what to want?

If wanting something, setting it as a goal and doing that backwards engineering thing has brought you to this point, might it not be risky doing the exact same thing in a different flavour?

This thought is unexpectedly terrifying.

Because if not this, then what?

If you don’t have a goal, then what?

What do you orient towards? How to proceed? How to stay afloat?

Your mind wants to shut down and run away from this thought. You can feel it tugging, triggering a craving for something sweet, something fat, something crunchy to distract you.

Because it is deeply confronting to want to quit the job you created. Deeply confronting to realize you designed the Mondays you dread. Deeply confronting to have turned a dream into some sort of prison.

Shame presses down upon your chest.

I see this a lot in my work.

In a previous life, I prided myself on having answers. On knowing exactly what to do to help the person exit the angst they were in. Heck I used to be a version of the guru bro.

But I’ve realized that when someone comes to you with a clear outcome that isn’t something they’ve experienced in the past (eg: “I want to build a 7-figure business”), they are likely trading the frying pan for the fire.

As if “bigger” is the cure for emptiness.

These days, I’ve realized that what of my founders actually want is much closer at hand. It’s often a simplification. A refocusing on pieces that matter. A turning towards strengths rather than blind growth.

And all that starts with staying just a little longer in that difficult space where all the things they’ve hidden from themselves break past the shame that held them back.

Does any of this feel familiar?

The way your kid’s shoulders slump when you turn away to check email on your phone.

The way your partner’s eyes slide away when you bring your laptop to bed.

The way you used to feel such harmony with you body but now have no idea what to eat or how to move or what treatment to try next.

You realize that what you want is complicated.

Because this is not one clear emotion: there’s pride at what you’ve accomplished, flow from the skills you’ve gained, love for the people you work with (at least most of them) and also exhaustion and frustration and a deep, unrelenting sense of numbness.

You realize you want some of it, maybe even most of it, but not like this.

Which then raises the question: If not like this, then how?

And that is the space that opens up.

And at first it doesn’t feel spacious at all - it feels more like a void. Like the sucking air outside an airplane when a door is opened mid-flight.

But it is space.

And the trick is to not get sucked in and ditch it all. It’s to learn to inhabit it long enough to separate the signal from the noise.

To figure out what you want to keep and what it’s time to let go of.

And that is where the work begins.

And the work is almost never what you expect. It is the work of staying with a difficult, scary question when you’ve historically been valued for having the answers. It’s the work of allowing yourself to not know when everyone and everything depends on you knowing. It’s the discipline of turning towards your suffering so you can listen to its advice before you try to fix it.

It’s terrifying and exhilarating and so, so worth it.

When you’re ready.

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A problematic book.

A book that revealed uncomfortable details about Gilbert’s deceased lover.

A book that brought up the question, what is okay to write about?

Because in the book, Gilbert supposedly has a vision where Rayya’s spirit appears to her and tells her to go full punk rock, baby!

Which apparently gave her permission annnnd also pissed a lot of Rayya’s living relatives off.

I found EG’s no-holds-barred honesty incredibly compelling. Her willingness to muddy her audience’s image of her as a nice person feels incredibly courageous.

But if Gilbert is only allowed to write what Rayya’s relatives would approve of, then what are memoirists ever allowed to touch?

What is fair game to reveal?

Who owns your experience of a shared thing?

Who gets to decide?

This became very real for me this week when I published this piece in The Gathering, a section of my Substack where I talk about my ongoing wins and struggles with building connection and community.

I originally included photos with the piece, but have since taken them down because I didn’t reach out to each participant ahead of time to ask for their consent.

I acknowledge that this was a mistake on my part.

Extra ironic because the piece itself discusses (in passing) the distance between intention and impact. My choice had a potential impact that deviated from my intentions.

Someone who read the piece and was at the party texted me requesting that I take down the group shot that they were in. They said that they would have opted out had they known I was going to use it for publication.

They were right. So I took it down.

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But I did something uncomfortable - I asked what their objection was.

I told them I had removed the photo, but asked whether they would explain their discomfort so I could understand them better.

I believe friction, handled carefully, creates closeness.

It was only later that I realized that no matter how collaboratively I had worded my request, it may still have felt more like an appeal to a verdict rather than an invitation to intimacy.

Anyway, here’s what happened next:

They explained that their expectations are that when they’re a guest in someone’s home, their interactions and any photos taken will not be used for content.

I noticed that this created a tightness in my chest - an objection.

Well, a partial objection.

Photos - especially photos on the internet - need explicit consent. I will definitely do this part differently at all future gatherings.

But stories?

Again, some lines are obvious: Trauma, medical information, romances, anything explicitly named as being in confidence.

But conversations?

Icebreakers that involve the entire group of 30 people?

Where is the line and who owns the line?

This is something memoirists have grappled with for centuries. In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott famously wrote “You own everything that happened to you.”

The internet then exaggerated that quote and added, “Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better,” but she didn’t actually write that. I know because I re-read the entire dang book to hunt for it!

Lamott’s advice feels cleanest when silence covers up harm. Of course you own your experience of abuse. Of course the person who caused the harm does not get to preserve their reputation by controlling your account of it.

But that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m writing about decent people whose lives have briefly intersected with mine. And so the advice, clean-sounding as it seems, doesn’t fully make sense.

In the chapter called Finding Your Voice, Lamott writes:

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak, unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words.

This seems obvious when dealing with abuse or trauma, but what happens when a writer shares her own interpretation of a shared event?

What happens when one voice (the writer’s) is raised above everyone else’s and thus becomes the prevailing “truth”?

What is won?

What is lost?

And who bears the cost?

Because in writing my essays about those gatherings, I’m something deeply inconvenient:

I’m making the implicit explicit.

I’m naming something.

Calling it out.

Forcing people to look at what I’m pointing to when they may have been hiding it from themselves.

This whole experience has crystallized something for me that I’ve grappled with for years: so much of social interaction requires plausible deniability.

So when I narrate, no matter how compassionately, I’m shutting a bunch of escape hatches that made people feel unexposed, even if they never consciously thought about them.

For example, people might have been thinking:
Maybe I was the only one who was bothered
Maybe the book is actually fine
Maybe the host didn’t notice
Maybe the group was cringing for some other reason

By telling my own version of the event, I closed many of those doors. Flattened complexity to my own interpretation.

And that’s uncomfortable, no matter how compassionately done.

And this brings up an even bigger question for me:

Will guests want to come to these parties knowing that I might write about them?

Even if I do nothing unethical - even if every word I write is legally defensible and thoughtful and kind - will my home remain a safe space where people feel welcome?

I feel torn between my commitment to honesty and realness and my desire to create that kind of haven.

I think my deepest fear here is that people will only want to be close to me if I agree to not see them too clearly. Or not bring up what I see - either in conversation or via my writing.

What I’m feeling for as I write these words is whether I have the courage to create the friction that sometimes leads to closeness and sometimes leads to rupture?

Can you belong without giving up these edges?

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If anticipation had a smell, it’s the strange, subtle mix of floral perfume and Doritos. Lounge music and the cool whoosh of the AC completed the sensory landscape.

The buzzer from downstairs sounded. My first guest had arrived.

I smoothed my white cotton tunic over my hips and took a deep breath, trying to create space for a familiar, bittersweet longing. That slight hollowness that sits right behind my breastbone, part hope, part fear.

Hope that I might feel the electricity that comes from genuinely connecting with another human, fear that the high will be fleeting, the cost higher than I want to pay.

I had prepared for the awkward phase that happens at the start of a party, when the first 2-3 people arrive and stand around awkwardly, wondering if they’ve made a mistake. What I hadn’t prepared for was 12 people arriving all at once and how loud my living room would get once all 30 were in it.

Because yes, 30 of my 33 invitees made it (I was expecting something like 22 would actually show up)! But following Nick Gray’s brilliant instructions to send out guest bios and reminders meant that a surprising number of people made it out on a Tuesday night.

Or maybe it wasn’t the reminders.

Maybe it was because many of us walk around with that hollowness inside our ribs. A craving for something nourishing but inherently dangerous; an itch that’s somehow tinged with shame.

Connection.

We had plenty of food.

Investing in two cases of whisky glasses had been a genius idea - no icky disposable plastic cups to weigh on my conscience or ruin a guest’s drinking experience.

Okay, next time I’d know not to cut the strawberries so small or add chopped mint to the drink dispenser (the tap clogged up with the very first pour and no amount of chopstick prodding would dislodge the stubborn fruit). We ended up having to use a ladle, but it made everyone laugh.

Adding fresh chopped garlic, a squirt of lime and olive oil to Costco hummus elevated it to something restaurant-sublime. Everyone wanted the recipe.

Having our daughter crew the nametags table and my son manage drinks allowed me to stay present and focused on curating introductions.

But boy, it got loud.

30 people trying to be heard, trying to connect, putting their shiniest selves on display… it was a lot. Even with the music barely audible, I had to yell to be heard.

When it was time for our last round of icebreakers, I got everyone to once again form a circle, snaking around the kitchen island.

And then it happened.

The unexpected.

The uncomfortable.

I followed Nick’s advice (from his book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party) and prompted folks to share something - a book, a podcast, a piece of media, a song, a show - something that had caught their attention and was noteworthy.

At first, it went as one would expect:

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One guest who owns a bookstore told the story of how a teen had wandered in and asked for “A book that will change the way I think.” How she pressed a copy of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael into his hands, even though he didn’t have enough to pay for it. How he came back months later with the money so he could buy it for his sister.

A mathematician who works for a hedge fund talked about how she’s a total nerd for vegetable fermentation and how it’s surprisingly easy to learn.

A dog-loving research scientist shared how she was deliberately getting off her phone and cultivating the habit of having face-to-face conversations with strangers.

A drama therapy professor talked about how she was healing her nervous system by intentionally experiencing moments of awe.

And then…

A guest shared that he believed every man - and possibly every woman - should read the book The Female Brain.

I felt my neck stiffen.

The room got suddenly still.

Oblivious, the guest went on at length about how women’s brains are different from men’s due to hormones and how we (women) go through distinct emotional phases in life at puberty, menopause, etc and this needs to be taken into account.

Many of the women smirked and made meaningful eye contact with each other. The men squirmed and looked down. The moment spun out, the cringe becoming palpable as more scientifically questionable (and upon examination, inaccurate) facts spewed forth.

As host, I should have stepped in smoothly, blown a note on my party harmonica and said something like, “Sorry to cut you off but we need to keep icebreakers moving.”

Instead I stood there, unwilling to risk shaming someone for doing something unguarded even if it was misinformed.

Torn between my loyalty to the collective experience and my care for this individual.

At some point, I did step in fumblingly and tried to be neutral in my reminder to everyone to keep it under 30 seconds.

The circle continued and icebreakers concluded and just in time for me to announce “It’s 9:05pm and Pat bet me I couldn’t end on time, so I’m kicking everyone out!”

The room emptied.

Eyes sparkled.

Conversations continued in the hallway.

My texts exploded with in-jokes and invitations to walks so we could get our 10,000 words in.

We’d had a moment.

Something real.

A little awkward. But real.

It broke through the small talk and put us in our feelings. For that I will remain grateful to that guest. He made it real. A gathering to remember.

It is this exact friction that I yearn for and fear in equal measure.

Relief from inanity of small talk, but terror of not knowing how to handle what is underneath.

I remain fond of that guest.

I texted him later.

I shared this link with him and some of the other criticisms I found of The Female Brain online. How subsequent science had thoroughly debunked the core premise of the book he had recommended. He said he was aware of the criticisms, but believed that the book had been written for a lay audience and therefore its approximate science was acceptable. At least that’s what I understood from what he said.

He talked about how much the book had helped him connect with his menopausal mother and how close they had become as a result. I was filled with tenderness when I heard that. No wonder he recommended the book.

Mixed emotions roiled in that space behind my sternum.

Through that guest’s eyes, the recommendation was a generous give, a revelation of his intention to be a better person. To have shamed him for his unrigorous research would have been to compound the sense of hurt and confusion that I imagine many men feel - men who expect to be judged by intention rather than impact.

I won’t pretend I don’t despair a little at how the incident showed me the gap between where too many men think they are versus where the rest of us need them to be.

Because for those of us who bear the impact and who aren’t insulated by intention, building community with those that refuse to engage in an examination of impact is… scary.

Unsafe.

Inherently fragile.

I wonder how the men in that room felt when they went home.

Did those that had female partners talk about it with them? Did they say not all men? Did they identify with the man who revealed his limits or with the women in the room who couldn’t look away?

Did my guests of every gender want to keep going to parties where things broke past small talk into something real? Or did they want to retreat back to the safety of known scripts?

My own answer was: Again.

I want to learn to inhabit the space that opens up when masks slip. When intention and impact are revealed. When discomfort floods my body.

Again.

When I want to look away but can’t.

Again.

When I feel the impulse to reach for the blunt instrument of shame, but instead choose to tie myself to the moment with spider silk, fragile and also stronger than most things.

Again.

Do you also feel a push-pull with “community”? I’d love to hear what you think! I read every single comment.

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He told me how he and his girlfriend were struggling with his gambling addiction. He talked about how he had saved up almost enough to go back to the rat-and-roach-infested hovel that he had been evicted from when he previously failed to pay the rent.

I asked him why he wanted to go back there. Why not find another place? And he talked about how he didn’t really have options. How he had to carefully husband his meagre resources to focus on harm reduction rather than growth. And how not having a place to sleep safely was the most catastrophic harm of all.

I left that conversation deeply disquieted. Not because he told me anything inherently shocking; I “knew” all the facts he shared. It’s just that before, I “knew” them from behind a screen or on a page. Now there was his human in front of me who didn’t smell good and who had snot in his beard but who was articulate and thoughtful and genuinely doing a great job with the circumstances he had.

So profoundly grateful to have a safe, comfortable place to call home.

Okay, that’s just the overstory. Here’s the truth…

The understory is that at the time, I was facing housing insecurity of a sort too. Our landlord was attempting to repossess our condo supposedly to house his daughter but really because he needed the cash and it was close to impossible to sell with us in it.

Given the shortage of rentable spaces in Montreal as well as the inflated rents, homelessness didn’t feel abstract to me any more. And meeting that man made it vivid in a way I couldn’t unsee.

And then there was fascism

As we put together the documents to challenge our landlord in court, I noticed in myself an uncharacteristic feeling of restlessness and emptiness. Watching YouTube videos and reading Substack articles about everything from ICE murders to the genocide in Gaza, from AI data centres and super El Ninos and the effect they would have on food security…

I couldn’t help but think that if I wasn’t spending most of my waking hours doing something to directly address the problem, I was doing the equivalent of putting up curtains on the second floor while the basement was on fire.

But what to do?!

I went for a walk with my swirling thoughts. I tried to get calm and hold space for them. I found a bench in a park and took off my shoes and planted my feet in grass. I let the anxiety crest without trying to talk it down. I let the shame and sadness of being human envelop me without resisting (okay, I admit I had to consciously relax through several rounds of resistance before I could really be with it).

And I tried to hold a question in my mind.

Because questions are doorways into other rooms, other states, other spaces for being.

The question: What is the ONE THING I could do that might solve (or at least address) all the things I cared about?

A word bubbled up:

Community.

A part of me flinched at this.

You see, I grew up in Mumbai, in a collectivist culture and and now live in Montreal in a more individualist culture. So I don’t have the same romanticized view of collectivism that I often encounter with those who haven’t experienced its stifling side - the push for conformity, the cost of questioning the status quo, the friction of competing unconscious agendas.

But the idea refused to budge.

Ideas from various books I read reached out to each other and held hands in my mind.

In On Tyranny, Tim Snyder talks about the importance of putting one’s body in spaces with other bodies. Of making connection physical, visceral - as a hedge against fascistic ideology. It’s harder to hate someone you’ve spent pleasurable time with when some disembodied figurehead tells you to.

In The Luck Factor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist who got curious and ran studies to determine whether lucky people behaved differently from unlucky ones talks about how contact with other humans is a huge part of “good luck”.

In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, one of the most paradigm-shifting and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read, professor Kenneth O Stanley talks about how learning to look for and use stepping stones leads to more innovation and faster progress than moonshots. In this context, I pictured various casual interactions as those stepping stones.

I thought back to every giant leap I ever made in my life.

How I thought I wanted to go to New School in NYC but instead ended up working as a technology writer in Singapore and how that led me being roommates with a guy who was the reason I moved to Canada.

Tell me: could you plan that?

How, when I moved to Canada, barely able to string two sentences together in French, and when the boyfriend and I broke up, it was volunteering and taking workshops that led to the friendship that led to the screen test that led to a career in television (and me meeting my husband)!

You can’t “backwards engineer” that.

You can’t run ads to your dream life.

You have to engage in the messy business of meeting people and putting your desires out there. And participating actively in helping others find their way.

So I thought, what might that look like as an action in my life as is it today?

I homeschool our youngest while working part-time. I am also writing a memoir-in-essays called The Exquisite Art Of Being Wrong. I am 85% recovered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but still struggle with chronic pain.

Time and energy must be husbanded carefully.

But of course, the stepping stone I needed was already on my bookshelf. Put there by a chance encounter with its author, Nick Gray, whom I had met briefly because we were in the same business coaching community.

Highly recommend reading this. You can finish it in an afternoon.

A simple process, tightly structured, designed to increase one’s surface area for serendipity.

And so I’ve started throwing 2 hour cocktail parties. And here on The Gathering, I’m sharing what I’m learning, what works and which longings remain unfulfilled and how I’m stepping-stoning my way towards a life and world I love.

I’m thrilled that you’ll be joining me.

For access to live discussions and the archives, consider upgrading to a paid membership. It might just be the stepping stone you need.

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My brain does this weird thing where, when I’m in contact with someone (or a kitten, an idea, a strange object, etc), it will feel for a name for it/them.

In fact, if we end up chatting on the street and you don’t introduce yourself to me quickly enough, my brain will assign you a name. I’ve only ever matched a person’s actual given name once. 🤷‍♀️

This is Frida, so named for her moustache and resemblance to the wonderful Frida Kahlo. But at home we call her Pink, Pinklet, Pinklestein, Bink, Binky, Sweet Meat, Splinky (and on and on). This impulse to name things? I don’t control it; it controls me.

Naming things is how I pay attention to them.

It forces a very specific kind of attunement. You must consider the shape of the thing, its essence, its texture, its energy, its purpose, its way of affecting the world around it, sounds, smells - the whole bit.

Back when I did a lot of marketing coaching, one of the things clients absolutely loved was how I guided them to name their programs or modules or methods.

And since I started writing my memoir-in-essays, I’ve started to think about how I came to name it what I did: The Exquisite Art of Being Wrong

I happen to think it’s a bomb title. As in, I would buy it (more on this filter as we go). And more than that, it encapsulates the core essence of the book perfectly - because it’s a book about meeting the space that opens up when all the “right” ways of doing things fail us.

When I first started spending time with The Work (this is how I think about the book itself - more than any past project, I noticed how clear it was about what it wants to be; how bossy in its voice).

1. The first thing I realized was that The Work itself is my ideal reader: This is new for me. I usually write to a younger version of myself or sometimes to a person I know in real life. To write to an idea - even more strangely the idea - is new and deliciously weird. But somehow, at least for this project at this point in time, it feels very natural to me.

What this means concretely is that I see my job as a writer as one of attunement. I come in with no expectation or idea where things are going. I currently have 5 essays done with a 6th in process and no idea what the total number is going to be.

Writing this way is what I imagine mindfulness practitioners do: you clear your mind and listen.

2. I practice “tuning” my body for resonance: To build my capacity for listening, I read daily - either craft or reference books (which help me improve skill or add subtext). For example, I’m currently reading The Heroine’s Journey because it’s giving me access to the layers I sensed underneath the words in my mother-daughter essay-in-progress, Between. Brenda Miller’s A Braided Heart is a fave in this category.

But I also read literature (of all genres) that moves me. That makes me feel like I want my reader to feel. Alive and enhanced and slightly undone. I think of this as tuning my instrument.

Because if I can train my body to respond to truth in other people’s writing, I’m much more likely to recognize it when it shows up in my own.

3. I practice naming things: This is that fun thing I do all day every day. When I see a teapot that’s shaped like an elephant, my kids and I will crack each other up coming up with names for it: Tealaphant, Pachypot, Trunkalicious.
   It’s play, which means it doesn’t have to be good; just fun! The more I practice this way, the more weird and unusual image and word combos seem to come to me. It’s a muscle, like anything else.
   

4. I read Sam Horn’s Pop on the john: I know, TMI. But this is advice I’ve been giving clients for literally 11 years. When you’re in a season of naming, I highly recommend you ditch your phone during throne time and spend 15 mins flipping through Pop. Horn is a maestro when it comes to language play and she makes it contagious. Honestly, if you simply did this 7 days in a row, I all but guarantee you’ll improve your naming capabilities substantially.
   

The Exquisite Art of Being Wrong isn’t my first stab at memoir. I started one (similar but less sure of itself) back in 2022. That book was called Mad, Sad and Ultimately Glad (which I also happen to love as a title). But that project stalled because I realized I’d written all the way to the present and was somehow still in the middle of the story.

This new project started off being called The Art of Failing. And that was good and I kinda liked it but I noticed I wasn’t in love.

When that happens I don’t force things. I don’t double down on the brainstorming or try to collapse uncertainty into a decision that doesn’t even need to me made yet.

Instead I let it unfold.

What happened was that my bookclub and I read Arundhati Roy (fucking brilliant) memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me and she has a chapter in it called “The Exquisite Art of Failure”.

You can guess what happened next.

Unfolding.

Remixing.

Boom.

The Exquisite Art of Being Wrong.

A friend gifted me an empty frame for my book cover and it got me noodling. This is what I’ve come up with so far. It’s not there yet, but it’s on its way. Just like its name.

It’s a book about uncertainty. About how crap I realized I was at knowing what to ask for. At predicting what would make me happy. At identifying the “right” way to do anything. About how instructive “wrongness” can be - how useful.

It’s a book filled with paradox.

About surrender and agency.

Truth and False Gods.

Love and letting go.

It hides razor blades in the softness of its folds and the writing of it has continued to undo me. To create more space, more depth, more appetite for truthfulness.

It’s exactly the book I came back from the dead to write. Because it is rewriting me.

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She lives in shop windows. I live in cotton boyshorts.

Also, she probably follows prompts.

I don’t.

I steal things instead.

Photo by Victor Candiani

For me, writing isn’t a monologue, it’s a conversation.

I need something to react to.

Something to take, turn, mess with.

A sentence.

A song.

A fragment.

If writing is an exhale, I need it to be preceded by an inhale.

So when my Creative Play instructor assigned us a simple task: Write something about yellow, I did what I always do.

I resisted.

Not because I had nothing to say.
But because there was nothing yellow under my skin.

I’m already deep in writing my memoir, The Exquisite Art of Being Wrong, and using precious writing time or headspace for something else felt like cheating on a lover.

Also, I couldn’t freaking think of what to write.

Which, in my experience, is usually a sign that I’m trying to start in the wrong place.

Because when it works - when it really works - writing never follows the rules. And a prompt feels too much like a rule.

So I’ve learned to lean into my resistance. To use it.

As a crowbar.

A portal

A parachute.

I’ve often joked that my ideas have ideas while I’m having them. Under deadline this can be a curse, but used right, it’s a doorway every single time.

All I need is a “mother idea”.
And she doesn’t even have to be related to what I think I’m trying to write.

The rest just… follows.

So below is the tiny story that came out of this process. After, I’ll share the exact cascade of ideas that led to it.

YELLOW

The rage came down softly.
Not a bomb. A parachute.

Doris felt it settle over her shoulders, cooling everything beneath it. Her pulse slowed. The crowd blurred.

He was late.
Again.

Five minutes, he always said.
Just five minutes.

Five minutes that became twenty.
Thirty.
An hour of congealed steak, apologetic waiters and her pretending everything was fine, no really.

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” he’d told her once, laughing lightly, as if she were a child. “You’re so sensitive. Maybe it’s your hormones.”

Maybe it was.

Or maybe, the quiet rage said now, it was something else.

She smoothed the yellow satin over her hips.
The dress caught the stadium lights - a small sun wrapped around her body.
Zumba, salads, weights. Paying off.
Commitment made visible.
Worth something, somewhere.

People were looking.
She could feel it.
The small, involuntary glances.
The look. The look back.

A beautiful woman, alone.

Tonight was her 40th birthday.

Tonight she had planned to stand beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder, and sing.
Her favourite song.
Make it their song, perhaps.

She checked her phone.

Nothing.

The screen stared back. Blank. Indifferent.
8:20.

Irritated, she stuffed it back into her red leather clutch.

A woman stood a few yards away in an oversized ochre sweater, a stack of yellow plastic bracelets sliding up and down her wrist. She held a sign, crooked hand-lettering that read:

LOOKING TO BUY A TICKET

Doris watched her. The hopeful tilt of her chin. Her dark bangs and funky green glasses. The way she rose slightly on her toes each time someone passed, unabashed in her enthusiasm.

Before her mind could intervene, her red leather pumps were already moving.

“I have a spare ticket,” she heard herself say.

The woman blinked. “How much?”

Doris smiled. It felt strange on her face. New.
“Utterly and completely free.”

For a second, the woman didn’t move. Then her whole body lit up.

“FOR REAL?! Oh my God, are you serious?!”

She laughed and clapped her hands together, bracelets clacking. Then she stepped forward and hugged Doris.

“Uh, sorry,” she said, not looking like she meant it at all. Her eyes sparkled. “I’m a hugger.”

Doris held out the ticket.

The woman took it with one hand and stuck out the other. “I’m Anne.”

“Doris.”

Anne looped her arm through Doris’s without asking. “I can’t believe this. I almost didn’t come. I had this whole… sensible phase.” She rolled her eyes. “Recently divorced. Trying to be responsible. And then I thought, screw it. It’s Coldplay.”

Screw it, thought Doris, something warm and electric unfurling behind her breastbone. It’s Coldplay.

At coat check, she glanced at her phone one last time.

Nothing.

Five minutes, he would say later.
Traffic.
A meeting.
You know how it is.

She powered it off. Tossed it into her purse.

“Ready?” Anne said, practically vibrating.

Doris nodded. “Let’s do this.”

Inside, the stadium pulsed, music throbbing through the concrete, through the soles of her shoes, up into her bones.

They found their seats. Sat. Stood again almost immediately, laughing.

Anne talked easily, in bursts - about her ex, about the tickets she hadn’t bought, about how Yellow had been her favourite song since she was sixteen.

Doris found herself answering.
Small things at first.
Then more.

Nothing important.
Everything important.

When the opening chords began, something in the air changed. A collective inhale.

Anne grabbed her arm. “This is it.”

They stood, bodies angled toward the stage, faces tipped up.

I drew a line
I drew a line for you

The song moved through Doris like a wave.

She felt it - suddenly, unmistakably - the space beside her.

Not empty.

Open.

Anne’s hand found hers, squeezed, then let go as she threw both arms into the air, singing, off-key and radiant.

Doris laughed. She didn’t remember deciding to. It rose out of her, unpracticed.

She lifted her own arms. Sang.

The words were different in her mouth now. Or maybe she was.

Oh what a thing to do

Anne was shouting something, pointing upward. “Look! Look!”

Doris followed her gaze.

The Jumbotron.

Two women bathed in light, flushed and bright, temples damp, eyes sparkling. They waved, ridiculous and gleeful, blew kisses.

There she was.

Not waiting.
Not watching the door.
Not calculating how long was too long.

Here.

Singing.

Alive.

Beside her, Anne whooped, spinning once in place, bracelets flashing.

Doris turned back to the stage.

This, she thought, surprised by her steadiness,
was what it felt like
to stop waiting.

Below is the cascade of random, unrelated ideas that form the skeleton of the story you just read:

• I started by listening to Coldplay’s Yellow.

• Which made me think of their kiss cam scandal.

• And that made me think about why people have affairs.

• And that made me think of an example from the book Hold Me Tight where a couple is in therapy because the man is habitually late to dates with his wife.

• And that made me think of Chelsea Fagan talking about how the real polyamory we all need is friendship, not more lovers.

And all of this got me thinking…

Maybe prompts aren’t meant to be followed.

Maybe they’re meant to be resisted, pressed against, twisted, misused.

Because it’s not obedience that creates anything interesting.

It’s engagement.

And engagement, even reluctant,
is enough to wake something up.

Okay, your turn:
What’s a mother idea that you’re kicking around right now? Have you ever written a piece from a random jumble of disconnected dots? How do you lean into resistance?

Process Porn is a reader-supported publication. If you’re a fellow creative obsessed with the underneath of things, you’ll love it here and I’d be thrilled to have you join the conversation in whatever way feels joyful to you.

Comment, drop a heart, share it with a fellow process junkie or best of all, send me the equivalent of a large coffee each month and gain access to the underbelly of my book about uncertainty.

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Being interviewed on stage by deep, sharp readers like Dua Lipa or Arundhati Roy.

Having someone press a battered, tear-and-coffee-stained copy of my book into my hands to autograph.

But today I want to share the fruition of a fantasy I didn’t even know to have:

Being interviewed by a wise old woman trapped in a young girl’s body.

Mother and daughter painting by Cree artist Betty Albert: Purchase a print on Etsy.

My daughter, Samara, has been the first reader of every essay I’ve written so far.

And before you watch the video she shot, you need to understand what it’s like to be read by her.

She’s only been reading fluently for about a year, but her tastes are wildly eclectic.
Everything from Super Chien to Enid Blyton to Jasmine Warga.

And when she reads, her whole body participates.

She sighs.
She giggles.
She holds her breath.

She smiles and frowns and looks worried at all the right places.

So when I’m reading one of my essays out loud and she starts to shuffle, when her gaze drifts, I know exactly where the work has lost its pulse.

She doesn’t analyze the writing.

She responds to it.

To the electricity.
To the music.

So to be interviewed by someone who knows me — and my work — this intimately felt like a kind of gift I didn’t know to ask for.

If you’re a writer, I hope you get to experience something like this at least once.

A reader who doesn’t perform intelligence…
but feels the work all the way through.

We didn’t plan this.

No mic.

No prep.

No idea what she would ask.

Which, in hindsight, feels exactly right.

And maybe this is part of what I’m learning about process.

Not systems.
Not routines (or “consistency”)
Not word counts.

But sensitivity.

The ability to feel when something is alive…
and when it isn’t.

A 9-year-old interviewed me about my writing.
She asked better questions than most adults.
Click the video above to watch the whole thing. My fave part is about 3/4 of the way through where she asks me about “freefall”.

Okay your turn:

If you could be interviewed about your work by someone who really feels it…
what would you want them to ask you?

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The public pieces are what I can articulate.

The paid ones are where I’m still figuring it out.

If you want to be inside that process, and make this work more possible, I’d be deeply grateful for your support.

You can share, comment or subscribe (free or paid, whatever feels most joyful)

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But first, tell me: what can you make from these ingredients?

2 cups of dinner prep

7 tbsp kid rage

1/2 cup sullen teenager

1 meeting with accountant

15 cups task updates

2 exhausted adults

That’s not even a salad.

We have an egalitarian partnership, Pat and I.

Both of us cook, clean and care for kids. We work together and have done since almost the beginning of our 21 year relationship.

So we have very little carpet to sweep our problems under.

And as a result, there’s little we haven’t already addressed.

But what to do about this inconvenient yearning for heat?

This wanting a return to aliveness?

How to stay loyal to the relationship

To each other and

Ourselves

Without becoming domesticated by it?

About that poem:

KISSING

Mouth open,

your teeth at the soft of my lip

not breaking skin

but promising.

An ask

A tell

A prayer.

Weight,

just enough to

breathe against.

To resist.

Melting,

breath contagious,

ribs unlocking

knees undone

Their argument forgotten.

Whispers

Moans

Your tongue unlocks time and

history twines around us,

now and forever

dissolving into

Always.

Now for the backstory:

A few weeks ago, something inside me woke up.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say something inside us woke up.

Us being my husband and me.

Together for more than 21 years.

Comfortable.

Safe.

But safety isn’t always safe.

Sometimes it’s stifling.

Sometimes it’s stagnation.

Both are the opposite of

heat.

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And my body, alive again after Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,

Alive again after flirting with the edge of not wanting to be,

My body is louder than ever.

She has needs.

She has wants.

She wants depth, vividness, intensity

She doesn’t just want nourishment

She wants a way to explore

hunger.

Recently the Museé des Beaux Arts in Montreal hosted an exhibition by Kent Monkman.

On impulse, I bought us tickets. We got the kids to babysit each other now that they were old enough.

We dressed up.

Pat even wore fancy black leather shoes.

The exhibition was filled with exquisitely realized figures. The detail, the scale, the textures, the light - breathtaking.

mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Welcoming the Newcomers, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist © Kent Monkman

There were penises everywhere.

And bearded ladies.

And disturbing scenes of imprisonment and

execution.

But my favourite exhibit?

Hot man in fancy shoes.

No, not this one.

This one.

I watched this man I thought I knew walk through those halls, laughing at the in-jokes Monkman and his team had built into each painting.

I watched his body respond to the inherent sexiness, the playfulness of the narrative underpinning the paintings.

And I felt my own body respond.

We stood in front of one that featured a group of indigenous children at a scaffolding, their eyes a silent indictment.

“I think it is us, the viewer, who are on trial,” Pat said to me, wrapping his arms around me. That hadn’t occurred to me until he pointed it out. And now that I saw it, I couldn’t look away.

I was so turned on.

In a stairway, I kissed him like I wrote about in the poem.

And we’ve been kissing that way ever since.

At the breakfast nook.

Between meetings at work.

In the bathroom when we’re supposed to be brushing our teeth.

Esther Perel, the renown sex therapist, has written extensively about how Eros requires the opposite of domesticity:

Domesticity wants safety and reassurance.

Eros demands… distance.

At least that’s Perel’s theory.

At least that’s the way I understood it.

It’s a theory that makes me uncomfortable.

Because it seems to throw us back into the arms of the patriarchy that dictates that in order to be turned on, we need to objectify our partners, at least a little. We need to pull away from them.

And that makes me think of the Gisèle Pelicot case, of the Epstein files, of most heterosexual porn or the eyewatering bullshit of romance novels featuring distant, emotionally unavailable billionaires.

I’m sorry.

I’m not turned on by distance.

Especially emotional distance.

The hottest sex I’ve had has always been enjoyed with a side of deep, safe presence.

But if not distance, then what?

As someone who brings a lot of intensity to pretty much everything, it’s a question I’ve had to grapple with my whole life.

• In friendships that have collapsed when I turn into coach or therapist.

• In romantic partnerships where my comfortable-moving-despite-uncertainty has led to power imbalances that require me to shrink.

• Even in parenting where I’ve offered too many suggestions when what was really needed was the one thing I couldn’t give: initiative.

If not distance, then what?

Let’s look to this line in the poem (which I wrote before I had consciously integrated the idea):

Weight,

just enough to

breathe against.

To resist.

“Weight” - this is where it lies.

For someone like me, someone who brings capability, resourcefulness and a kind of crazy “can-do” to most situations, it’s too easy for me to swallow the other.

To become the sole generator of movement

Of meaning.

And that

kills

heat.

It replaces passion with

resentment.

So what is the “weight”?

After that day at the museum, I have come to believe it is closer to “self possession” than distance.

Self possession is that quality of having a solid emotional centre.

It speaks to a cultivated belief in one’s own capability to navigate

Uncertainty

Difficulty

Distress

Growth.

This centre of gravity means that each partner is arriving whole, sovereign.

They can handle intensity without collapse or retaliatory aggression.

In fact, intensity in this context becomes an aphrodisiac.

Because intensity speaks of

aliveness.

At that museum, I saw a side of my partner that I hadn’t even known existed. Despite being together for 147 years (you have to count them in dog years since we work together), I never knew he had this deep interest in and knowledge of modern art.

Eroticism lies in the unexplored, unmapped territories within each partner.

I have come to believe it is where the “novelty” in long relationships can lie.

Which means each member has to actively cultivate these territories in themselves.

Trying new things.

Taking classes.

Introspecting.

Asking questions and holding space for unexpected or uncomfortable answers.

Finding joy in the incompetence of something unfamiliar.

Cultivating confidence, that most erotic

centre.

It is only under these conditions that a relationship can generate enough heat for history (to twine) around us,

now and forever

dissolving into

Always.

Gratuitous cat photo. You’re welcome.

“It’s amazing that you’re writing so fast,” my book coach said to me the other day.

I was shocked.

Fast?

But I’ve never put less pressure on myself.

I have so much spaciousness.

I touch the work every day, true, but have no “goals”. Heck, some days I don’t even write - I just read.

No word count to try and hit, no deadline, no external accountability. None of the things I thought I needed.

What propels me these days seems to be a deep connection to the memoir-in-essays I’m writing, working title The Exquisite Art of Being Wrong.

Each essay has its own voice, its own rhythm. Each essay has big opinions about what it wants to be and how it wants to feel and so my job has become to silence anything that gets in the way of the essays speaking to me.

To create space.

To listen.

But here on Substack? It’s different.

“My Substack feels like a dangling thread. It’s the thing that sometimes feels like a real thing and sometimes a distraction,” I said to my coach on Voxer.

“Are you thinking of leaving it?” she asked.

“No, I want to make it work. I am just having some trouble finding its rhythm. The essays (for The Exquisite Art of Being Wrong) have a rhythm that’s easier to follow or move to. Doesn’t mean it’s always smooth but it never feels like the conversation breaks,” I typed.

“Substack still feels like the signal is fading in and out.”

“Yeah, I feel similarly about Substack” she responded. “If there wasn’t such intense pressure to produce constantly on that platform, I’d put more “for my ESSAY essays” effort into it, but it’s a very different thing. I’m trying to think of it more as a blog space.”

The same week I read promotional emails from Tarzan Kay, who is probably my favourite creator in the email marketing space.

The offer?

A chance to join her community where you could finally achieve the holy grail: consistency.

In bold font, this line lodged itself like a fishhook in my mind:

“Consistency is more important than writing the best emails.”

Another line from the same email, Tarzan quoting CJ Chilvers:

“Consistency is an orders-of-magnitude-level differentiator… Consistency is how you maintain attention.”

It wasn’t even aggressive.

It was pragmatic.

Rational.

Data-adjacent.

And yet…

I look at the Substacks I pay for.

They run the gamut: Zeteo puts out near daily content, sometimes up to 3 emails in a 24 hour period. Granted they have a team and there’s a lot going on in the political space they cover.

But when I tune into how my body feels when I see yet another email pop into my inbox, I’d have to admit to overwhelm. I don’t read every single one.

Then there are the two creators whose emails I read faithfully.

And not just read, re-read.

Mary Roblyn and Ora Laio.

Both very different from each other - Mary writes these gorgeous, sometimes hilarious, meticulously crafted essays that open dusty boxes of treasure in my mind.

Ora writes raw, vulnerable reflections of her realizations as a practising psychic, tarot card reader and Silicon Valley executive. I return to them over and over when I’m hunting for answers but really need a better question.

Neither of them publishes on any sort of fixed schedule.

And I never miss a single one of their emails.

In fact after reading them over and over, I usually forward them to friends who I know will love them.

So is it consistency that drives success?

What even is success?

And this is where I find myself suspended between two truths.

Consistency builds platform.

Devotion builds depth.

The first feeds the machine.

The second feeds the work.

I don’t know yet whether it’s possible to worship at both altars without splitting myself in two.

So I’m wondering:

If a Substack arrived less predictably but more alive… would you still open it?

Would you rather receive signal… even if it comes in waves?

Because I suspect what I’m really trying to build isn’t a cadence.

It’s a conversation.

Her descriptions of herself at her writing desk in Bird by Bird, wrestling with resistance are absolutely hilarious, and I regularly re-read that book because she’s a damned fine writer.

But (sorry Anne), I can no longer relate.

Not because I always know what to write or always feel like writing.

Ironically, it’s because I stopped trying to be disciplined.

I know.

I’m as shocked as you are!

And now, looking back, I realized it wasn’t a single realization.

More a series of small epiphanies, layered over time.

I mention this so that you know to expect your own liberation (like most freedom movements) to proceed in sparks that often feel, in the moment, too small to matter.

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Once upon a time, writing was very…

pressureful.

I had to write The Great Canindian Novel.

Or a Poem That Would Change Your Life.

Or, more urgently still, an Email That Would Convert.

There was always a finish line.

A job.

A metric.

And wandering?

Verboten.

Writing without wandering is like licking a photograph of a cupcake instead of eating the real thing.

Like having sex while checking email.

Like drinking coffee when you’re really thirsty.

It gets the job done, but at what cost?

No wonder my desire got itchy feet.

Add in the craft books quietly nudging you toward “bestseller” energy, and suddenly you’re balancing your entire sense of purpose on a toothpick stuck in quicksand.

So I stopped.

Not stopped writing.

Stopped writing toward something.

I began writing because it helped me think.

Because it turned the Bad Things into “material”.

I wrote because it felt like breathing, like singing, like running on the beach with the wind in my hair.

I started writing for the most subversive, dangerous reason of all:

Because I liked it.

And something strange happened.

The pressure dissolved.

Without the capitalistic finish line, there was nothing to rebel against.

Turns out the real block wasn’t creating, it was measuring.

I decided to plant my flag somewhere more solid.

Cultivate land I already own…

Because I like it.

I ditched all the rules except the two I wrote about here. And the second rule is really just to make sure you don’t let your overachiever brain jackboot your joy.

Does this mean you’ll never struggle with not knowing what to write?

I doubt it.

Sometimes the urge to write shows up before the insight is ready to come out and play. For those times, try this.

Does this mean everything you write will be brilliant?

God, I hope not.

Half the fun is writing something you’re convinced is genius, only to return the next morning and discover it’s a flaming pile of doodie.

But even that is satisfying.

Because now you can see better.

Now you can cut.

Now you can shape.

And instead of shame, there’s this quiet thrill:

Oh.

I’m getting stronger.

Why does it have to be a war with our art?

What if it’s allowed to feel like making love?

Or brewing tea?

Or laughing so hard you forget what you were trying to prove?

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(on the floor, in the way)

Most are about writers.

Specifically: how writers work.

One of these books - Stephen King’s On Writing I have inhaled over and over since it came out in 2000.

I love that book. Truly.

His backstory.

His humour.

The writing instruction.

And yet, over time, in what I can only assume is a sign of personal growth, I have come to disagree with almost everything King tells me to do.

He has Opinions:

Write every single day.

Ideally for 3-4 hour chunks.

Don’t outline.

Adjectives should be treated like warts.

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Look, Stephen, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I have kids. I have to work to pay the bills. And I don’t have a wife whose primary task is (or was for a season) to protect my writing time.

Also, on the rare occasions I manage to carve out a marathon writing block, my muse usually kicks me in the crotch, spills my tea and runs off giggling.

I’m sure Cal Newport is judging me.

What has actually worked better for me is kinda… undramatic.

It’s writing in small sips.

All the time.

Any time.

A sentence (or two) while waiting in line at the grocery store.

Risking frostbite to type out a particularly juicy metaphor on a walk in -20 C weather.

Index cards tucked into the 5 books I’m reading simultaneously.

This method has converted my phone from enemy into ally.

I learned to write this way deep in the throes of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when my brain and body felt wrapped in cotton and then thrown in a blender.

That experience put me on the hunt for other writers who have bent process around their reality instead of the reverse.

One such writer, now my mentor, is Esmé Weijun Wang. She’s a NYTimes bestselling author and regular Substacker despite the almost unfathomable challenges of living with schizoaffective disorder and late stage Lyme disease.

Okay Stephen, let’s talk about pantsing…

In Writing Creativity and Soul, Sue Monk Kidd tells the story of losing a year and a half trying to write The Secret Life of Bees without an outline after a workshop leader warned that structure would kill her creative spirit.

But without structure Kidd felt lost.

Confused.

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Rather than declaring allegiance to either camp, Kidd did something radical: she stopped arguing with the rule and started paying attention to herself.

Sometimes knowing where the story is going helps.

Sometimes it strangles discovery.

Listen to Sue, Stephen!

Or actually, don’t. Just listen to the work and forget the rules.

I’m a natural pantser, like you Stephen, but when a project starts to sprawl or lose its pulse, a little structure feels like kindness, not betrayal.

One of my favourite workarounds comes from Michael A. Ronn, who outlines after he writes. He lets the work roam first, then maps where it’s already been.

Leave dogma to the dictators.

Okay, Stephen, I know your homies Strunk and White are pretty strict about adjectives.

Adjectives are like spice.

Too much and you muddy flavour, sure, but Stephen, a rich Goan curry is as delicious as sashimi.

Hemingway couldn’t have written The God Of Small Things. And no one wants to live in a world that doesn’t have Rahel and Estha and Baby Kochamma in it.

Recently I was talking to a friend who said, “People keep telling me I should write a book.”

And goshdangit, I love me a good “should”. Why wouldn’t I?

Should feels rational.

Responsible.

As close to a guarantee as you can get.

But shoulds make terrible houseguests.

They start with bouquets, eat all the chocolate and eventually leave with the silverware.

When I started writing to save my own life, I decided to go rogue.

To listen in a completely different way.

Not to a guru.

Not even to the writers I most admire (like you, Stephen).

Instead, I listen to the work.

To the project itself.

When I get stuck (which happens approx 17 times an hour), I walk away from my computer and pick up my trusty Lamy and try to describe the knot.

What’s bothering us?

What do you need me to see?

What do you need that I’m avoiding?

Sometimes the answer is research.

Sometimes a skill up.

Sometimes I realize I have like 3 different opening lines because the essay wants to be braided.

I’m currently stalled on an essay that wants me to do a rude amount of research (even though it’s memoir). Because it knows something I haven’t yet thought to ask .

Which is how I’ve realized that, for me at least, the work of “becoming a writer” has less to do with following rules and more to do with learning to listen.

Not to someone else (not even you, Stephen, though I adore you).

But to the work itself.

And inevitably, as many of us do, I found myself realizing I’d done everything "right” and had somehow still managed to bollocks it all up. In my case, I had to shut down a multimillion dollar coaching company, face my shame and angst about having given people advice that seemed to no longer work even for me, inhabit a body that was in chronic pain and had no energy (and no diagnosis) and watch every identity I had constructed for myself wither and die.

It’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It is also something I’m profoundly grateful I went through.

Being that catastrophically wrong about everything that was important shifted my orientation from answers to questions.

Which then led me to wu wei, the Taoist idea of effortless effort.

This led to me dramatically thinning my herd of sacred cows. I traded consistency and discipline for something that (for me at least) works astonishingly better.

It’s wu wei as writing practice. And it has only 1.5 rules:

Rule 1: Touch the work daily

This means I stay in conversation with the project I’m working on; these days that’s my memoir-in-essays The Exquisite Art Of Being Wrong.

It does NOT mean I “write every day” or hit any sort of arbitrary word count.

Some days I don’t write at all.
I read.

Rule 1.5: Do only what comes easily once you’re in contact

I had to create this rule to help with my deprogramming. I am still unlearning some of the “rules” I was taught in my 30+ years of writing and publishing; rules about how you need to force yourself to do what’s good for you.

Because I let the work dictate the pace, I have to surrender my expectations about what a particular session “should” look like.

Sometimes it’s re-reading what I’ve got so far and simply polishing, sometimes it’s reading someone else’s related work, sometimes it’s writing to the work itself in my journal - explaining why I feel stuck and asking for help (which somehow always comes).

It’s the living real life practice that this brilliant quote points to:

“The word “discipline” has been hijacked in our culture to erroneously mean making yourself do what you don’t want to do because it’s good for you. Discipline is actually knowing yourself really well, knowing what you really need to be your most alive, and settling for nothing less. Real discipline has a spirit more like self-advocacy than self-punishment.”

- Jason Gootman, Mayo Clinic

It’s a practice. Some days I’m better at it than others.

The Great Unknowing is where I think out loud about all of it — the writing, the work, the ongoing project of unlearning certainty.

As I was trying to decide what to do with my life, especially these days when it feels like the world is on fire, I sat with my despair.

I feel an urgent need to do something meaningful. To not waste my time and attention on curtains for the second floor while there’s a gas leak in the basement.

At first despair sobbed that there were too many problems. Too many separate things that needed fixing and fixing yesterday.

But as I held my despair and listened, she calmed down.

And together we realized that my old obsession - “what happens when certainty breaks?” may actually be the doorway to rebuilding in an uncertain world where so much feels out of control.

Which is why I undid all the fancy branding I had just spent months doing and went back to this Substack’s original title: The Great Unknowing.

Join me as I “un-know” things that I once took for granted. As I surface and examine assumptions. As I dismantle what used to feel safe and now feels like a cage. As I jump off the side of a sinking ship and onto a life raft that feels tiny and fragile and terrifying, and as I practice being a sailor instead of waiting for rescue.

You’ll find three things here:

The Unknowing: Personal, literary, often uncomfortable. The kind of essays and notes that make you feel less alone in your own contradictions.

The Gathering: Unfiltered observations as I navigate my own push-pull with community and attempt to build something I want to belong to.

The Founder Letters: A working diary about the risks and rewards of rebuilding ones assumptions and practice in business (drawn from my executive coaching and strategy consulting practice).

If you’re someone who has followed all the rules and suddenly found yourself lost at sea - if you’re willing to be curious instead of just terrified - you’re probably going to feel at home here.

Cats supervise.

If you’d like deeper access to some of my rawest, most unfiltered thinking, workshops on cultivating your own nourishing creative process and how to integrate whatever you’re learning about into your actual behaviour (without forcing), you’ll want to become a paid member.

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Me these days - decidedly less devastated

Going from 500% energy to 20% is hard enough - but not having a sense of what went wrong or what to change… to put it really simply, I lost my faith in process.

I no longer believed that putting in effort or time or even intention could lead reliably to a result. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome doesn’t follow the rules. In fact, trying and pushing dig you into a hole that can be hard to get out of. And there doesn’t seem to be much logic to it.

Also important to note: at that point, I didn’t yet have a name for what was wrong with me. In retrospect, this was also part of the problem.

After all, you can’t “come out” and announce an illness that’s devastating, but also kinda vague and without a clear name or label. I wouldn’t get my diagnosis until December 2022 (a full 3 years after my decline began).

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As I wrote in part 2 of the Sabbatical series, the lack of belief in process started to bleed into all areas of my life.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely without purpose, without drive. I had no idea what habits were healthy and which ones were harmful. For a Type A overachiever, this is basically like losing your entire identity. I had no idea who I was or what I even wanted. And I had no get up and go.

Dark thoughts began to crowd my mind at that point.

Also, I told no one. Not even Pat (my husband).

I journaled a ton and allowed myself to write whatever came to mind, including detailed ideas for how I would off myself. I planned it in such a way that my family wouldn’t be the ones to find me (I could spare them that trauma at least). And of course, I had a huge life insurance policy on me, so that would be my way of continuing to be a provider.

But as I explored the darkness, little rays of light kept permeating my pages.

Since I’d been so burned from being accomplishment-oriented, I couldn’t imagine having a big goal. Goals felt toxic to me at the time.

Instead, I found myself pondering a rather different question. I’ve written about it here.

If failure was guaranteed (and so accomplishment was taken off the table), what would be so fun and so fulfilling that you would be happy to wake up every day and die trying?

Something I could have full control over (so I didn’t need anyone else’s permission or participation).

Something that was pleasurable in the mere doing of it - so no outcome was necessary.

Something that I could see myself being fascinated with for the next 20, 30 even 50 years.

I encourage you to ponder this idea for yourself. When you take achievement and outcome off the table, it tends to kill 99.9% of your ideas. At least it did for me.

My answer?

I want to write.

And I want to learn to write books.

I’ve been fascinated with writing since I was 10. I’ve been doing it professionally (i.e. getting paid) since I was 12. It’s my oldest love.

For me, the sheer joy of being in flow and wrestling the perfect sentence onto the page is bliss. So often, I’ll read my work and think, “Dang! That’s amazing. I wish I could write like this!” Except I did! I wrote it but I have no sense of ownership of it. No sense of where it came from or that I could recreate it on command.

Writing is the ultimate alchemy for me - I put in time and attention and I get… delight! Words that somehow capture and name the roiling emotions inside me. Little word pictures that make me laugh or sigh or cry.

Pure delight.

So I vowed to become the sort of person who would write for the sheer pleasure of writing. I would write what pleases me. Books, poems, essays.

I began to write to give words to my pain. To find the little flecks of wisdom that were also buried in there.

I began to write to make sense of the profound absurdity I was experiencing.

I began to write… with delight.

And it saved my life.

Meet one of our new kittens - this is Frida

This year, I went back and took some of the most delight-inducing pieces and put them together into a mini journaling course which I’ll make available soon.

I think I’m going to call it Me-Search: A journaling journey to reclaim joy and delight after devastation.

Something like that.

Right now, I’m writing two books. Yeah, I know.

This isn’t an overachiever thing, I swear! It’s more that my main project is one a memoir tentatively named Mad, Sad and Ultimately Glad: How I found joy and purpose after chronic illness stole my identity.

But memoir is hard and I find myself sometimes struggling to figure out what order to put a series of events that feel overly connected to each other in my head. I’m working through it. But I do find that I get stalled often.

Since my goal is to give myself more of what I love (i.e. writing), I gave myself permission to start a “procrastination project”. You see, I have a list of 38 other books I also want to write. So I just picked one off that list and started writing.

It’s been flying off my fingers and is probably 3/4 done! In just under 10 days!

I’ll share little snippets of it with you if you like. I’d love to get some eyes on it to tell me if it makes sense outside my head.

In the meantime, I had a few questions for you:

Would you be interested in me sharing my creative process with you here on Substack? I formed a writers group and Scott Anthony, one of my writing buddies is also writing a book. Our goal is to have our drafts done by Sept 30.

What has been fascinating is how similar our creative journeys have been. From the first rush of momentum to the stalling, the wrestling with discipline vs flexibility, starting “side books” - all of which happened organically and that we shared with each other after the fact.

I’d love to share what I’m learning about writing joyfully and prolifically with you despite life’s challenges (kids, business, chronic fatigue, meal prep, etc).

Is this something you’d want to read about? Please tell me in the comments.

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I imagined wowing her with my literary talent and brilliant insight. I imagined that maybe we’d become friends and even exchange text numbers. And then, years later, when I became famous, she’d tell the story of how she had recognized my raw talent and how she felt so privileged to count me as a friend.

I know.

In reality, the “workshop” was more of a “talk” with 450 participants in attendance. EG spent all three days up on a stage, far from the unwashed masses, or in a private backstage area before being spirited off to her private cabin.

Needless to say, there have been no late night texting sessions that have led Elizabeth to insist her agent take me on. (Yet).

So while the experience was about as far from what I was expecting as the American medical system is from the true meaning of “healthcare”, I’m glad I went.

For two reasons.

I finally put my finger on what it is about EG that makes me adore the her way I do, especially given my background with the self help industrial complex.

She is the kind of leader I want to grow up to be:

She’s brilliant and an epic practitioner of her craft, but her core commitment seems to be to impress us with our own brilliance instead of hers.

What I mean by this is that instead of being prescriptive and telling us what to do, or speaking to us from up on some pedestal, she instead told us stories. Many (if not most) of these stories were about foolish things she had done or thought and how she came to a more enlightened perspective.

And she shared what the journey was like - both the external journey (who she met or what book she read or who she hired) as well as the internal journey (the fear, the doubt, the self loathing or the sheer mindfuckery of deep personal shifts).

At one point she shared how she had been on a panel with another famous female writer (whose name I neglected to write down, sorry!) and how the MC had asked them both how they dealt with the difficult people in their lives that they couldn’t get rid of.

Elizabeth was pondering how to answer the question when the other writer piped up and said, “There are no difficult people in my life that are impossible to get rid of. No one has a free pass to be in my life.”

EG delighted us my mirroring our own consternation with such a simple-and-powerful-but-seemingly-impossible maxim then shared with us how that evolved into a mantra that she now uses:

“I don’t want your magic.”

This allows her to acknowledge that we each have magic inside us but that there is no obligation for a recognition of said magic to turn into any sort of contract. And that no one- not your mother, not your daughter, not your spouse- gets carte blanche to stay in your life if they aren’t respectful of your needs.

Of course, Elizabeth doesn’t have a 7 year old who will display more creativity than JK Rowling when it comes to stretching bedtime, so liberally adjust grains of salt to taste, but the core premise had many of the predominantly female participants tearing up. We acknowledged that one of the ways we’re often dicks to ourselves is by letting others do the dirty to us.

I liked the mantra aspect of this. And the palm-out hand gesture that went with it. But the most exciting takeaway from the conference was how Elizabeth Gilbert takes notes.

Image from a hand-drawn workbook that I started to create as a companion to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. I gave it to her. Maybe one day she’ll want to make it real…

At one point, after her co-presenter finished speaking, she read us a poem that she had whipped up in the previous 15 minutes while he was talking!!

My mouth was actually hanging open and I might have drooled by the end.
And poetry and I often don’t get along.

Just as I was about to contract and retreat to the cave of unworthiness in my heart, EG asked, “Want me to show you how I did it? It’s super easy!”

Here are the steps as I remember them:

• Go over your notes with a highlighter (or underline in a different coloured pen). Just highlight all the notes that still have resonance hours or days later.

• Now pick 15 of the highlighted snippets and write them out.

• Now further distill them by discarding all but 10.

• Now all but 5.

• Use one of the discarded snippets as your title.

  Voila! You have a profound poem that sums up your core takeaways of just about any conference.

Here’s my poem…

Note: Parts of it may have zero resonance for you because you may not understand the story or concept the line represents. But it makes sense to me. And that’s the point of the exercise.

I’ve gone longer than the prescribed length but this fully captures my core takeaways from the materials.

Shroedinger’s Lion

I am powerless over the softness of kittens;

Powerless against delight, joy, smooches.

God is in the bathroom whispering as the world shouts

Break your banks, drop the charge, mind your language

How else would I know?

You don’t need an answer:

A better question, a different perspective, an awareness

I don’t know but I am willing to walk with you through this.

Well done earlier me, proceed from peace.

All you need is a next step

Take a sacred pause

What is in that bush? Shroedinger’s lion or

250 million birch seeds?

Magic is the thing that

wants to happen next.

This eye-catching map, drawn by Harold Fisk — a geologist and cartographer working for the US Army Corps of Engineers — traces the ever-shifting banks of the Mississippi River from southern Illinois to southern Louisiana. It’s the inspiration for the line “break your banks” in the poem above. Image borrowed from the Public Domain Review.

It’s fascinating because, as I mentioned, the workshop was nothing like I expected it to be. I think if I had known in advance that it was going to be as big as it was, I probably wouldn’t have gone.

So I’m really glad I didn’t know.

Because sometimes you have to go to find out. And what you discover when you’re there might be exactly what you need even if you never thought to want it.

This article is publicly available and I encourage you to share it with friends who might find delight in knowing how to take notes EG-style. Your support of my writing is deeply appreciated and never taken for granted. 🥰

I don’t mean to be alarmist, but it’s entirely possible that some random Tuesday, you could go from just a normal day of picking up kids from summer camp…

… to asking a total stranger to press down on your vulva while you lie on the side of the road (with said kids looking on).

I grew up riding my bike on the streets of Mumbai where there’s a picture of traffic next to the word “crazy” in the dictionary. Rickshaws, cows, backfiring Maruti Suzukis held together with spit, glue and a prayer - my nervous system was finely tuned to the beat and thrum of the streets. Stop, start, start, turn. The rhythm of chaos was coded in my DNA.

So you’d think riding the pristine bike paths of Montreal would be easy, right? 

It was. But something about that ease made me almost somnolent; wont to drift off in reverie and miss the stop signs that dotted the landscape. 

In fact on the Tuesday in question, a year ago now, I had my eyes half closed, inhaling the sillage of the lindens along de Maisonneuve. My 6 year old daughter, Boo, pedaled a few feet in front of me, laughing about some camp story she was shouting over her shoulder.

There was a gentle downhill, almost nothing. I felt my bike gathering momentum. In front of me, Boo suddenly slowed, still chatting. 

It all happened very fast - I braked. 

Too hard. 

Back wheel flew up and my body rocked forward.

I smashed my crotch against the crossbar and teetered there a few seconds before falling over on my side, helmeted head never touching the concrete. 

My purse, as shocked as I was, catapulted out of my front basket, vomiting wallet, keys, pens and assorted receipts into the street.

My daughter pedaled on, still chattering, streamers catching the breeze. 

Now both my kids - my 10 year old son, who was a strong cyclist and had been ahead of us the whole time and my daughter - disappeared into the distance. 

Embarrassed, I scrambled to pick up my things. My crotch throbbed dully and I remember thinking “that’s gonna be one nasty bruise.”

I narrowly avoided a car passing by and righted my bike. I felt drops. Cool drops on my face - it was starting to rain. 

Warm drops on my feet. 

I looked down. 

I was standing in a pool of blood. 

There was a sensation of warmth coursing down my Lululemon leggings and as my mind fumbled with the words “fuck” and “blood”, a male voice interrupted and asked, “Are you okay?”

I looked up into the piercing blue eyes of a middle aged man who had stopped his own bike behind mine. His teenage son was staring at my feet.

“My kids went on ahead. They didn’t see me,” I said. “Can you please find my kids?”

I looked down again at my legs. Blood was literally flowing down my inner thighs and pattering onto the asphalt. 

I pulled out my phone and paused. I had never called 911 before. Was I being overly dramatic? I mean, this is the sort of thing where you call 911, right?

Blood pulsed down my legs. The spot where I’d bumped myself throbbed but it was a quiet pain, nothing dramatic. I’d had papercuts that felt more dire.

The man helped me wheel my bicycle across the street while I texted my husband (we lived literally 5 minutes away) and called 911.

“I’ve sent for an ambulance, madam, but first you must stop the bleeding,” said the voice on my phone. 

“Can you take off your pants and find the wound?”

Um… no? 

Somehow, I didn’t think that being butt naked on the sidewalk trying to find where my crotch was bleeding from was a very good plan. Having my leggings on made me feel like things were somehow being held together.

“Put pressure on the wound,” the voice advised. “Press down and stop the bleeding.”

I lay down in the grass beside the sidewalk and attempted to put pressure on my bits. It was almost impossible. In order to get the correct angle to press down, I had to half sit up, which seemed to make the bleeding worse. 

I had no choice. I looked into the blue eyes of my Samaritan (whose name turned out to be Rob) and asked if he would please press down on my vulva. 

We both laughed. 

He pressed down. 

I felt safe. 

Pat (my husband) pulled up in our van. The kids were in the back. He leapt out and wrapped me in a foil blanket - the kind they use to swaddle endurance runners at the end of a long race. We keep these in our car because…Canada. 

The kids were crying. Rob went to the van to comfort them. After 10 minutes, my youngest asked for a snack. They were okay. 

While we waited for an ambulance, we were joined by another Samaritan. He was a new immigrant - a Palestinian from Israel. He had been a pharmacist back home, and he checked my vitals. I was okay. 

The ambulance arrived a full 90 minutes later and when the paramedic took my blood pressure, he asked if I was an athlete. I didn’t know what to say.

In the previous three years I had gone from running marathons and training for a 50K race to barely being able to walk 3 blocks. And no one could tell me why.

I had aged suddenly and inexplicably - gaining 25lbs over 6 months despite working with a sports nutritionist and a running coach, eating really clean, avoiding alcohol and training 6 days a week.

Everything hurt.

My right foot zinged with pain during the night, waking me from fitful sleep, despite never having been injured.

My endurance athlete mentality of “get it done no matter what” was exactly the wrong tool for this new predicament I was in. Trying to train through the symptoms I was facing was like performing eye surgery with a bag of hammers.

I very nearly broke myself.

A health coach I was working with invited me to wear a bracelet on my wrist to remind myself to NOT work out when I felt better. To bank the energy so my body could use it to heal.

So as I lay there with my Lulus around my knees, and as the paramedic probed my crotch trying to find the source of the bleeding, I didn’t know what to say. Was I an athlete? I used to believe that whatever you focused on, what you put your mind to, grows. I used to believe that if you put in the work, results would surely follow.

But now my skin had turned into a spacesuit that magnified gravity and I was walking underwater, trying to teach myself to like the pressure.

And I couldn’t mindset or plan or train my way out of whatever Upside Down I was trapped in. And I no longer knew what to believe in.

At the hospital, a nurse gave me a thick pad to put into my soaked underwear. She kept looking at me strangely as I smiled and joked. Later I would realize she thought I was miscarrying and couldn’t understand how I was so chipper.

Then I settled in for the 6 hour wait. I did what I never seemed to find time to do in my regular life: I binge watched Netflix. It was glorious.

Pat joined me and brought me a muffin. I hadn’t eaten since lunch. 

The only time I cried was when the ER doc cleaned my wounds. It turns out I had multiple cuts along my inner labia and one deep one internally. The glue stitches stung, but the doctor assured me they were a lot less painful than a needle would have been.

The athlete version of me would have gritted my teeth and not made a scene. But this new underwater version embraced the wisdom of releasing emotion and sensation to the moment so as to not carry it forward as trauma.

So I let myself cry and moan in an unseemly way.

And when it was over, it felt over.

As I waited for the pelvic MRI to make sure I had no internal bleeding, I felt more grateful than ever. As a Canadian, this entire incident would end up costing me the $150 fee for the ambulance and not a penny more. I didn’t have to choose between care or the mortgage.

In the weeks that followed I lay on my couch with no undies on and continued my Netflix extravaganza. My husband cooked us shakshuka and our kids slept over at a friend’s for 4 nights.

All that alone time made me feel deeply loved and supported. Not since before childbirth had I had so much free unstructured time to myself.

Given the unexpectedness and pelvic nature of my injuries, I expected I might feel traumatized by the event, but instead I look back at those weeks with fondness and deep gratitude. And I think it’s because of how many hands showed up to help. How safe I felt and how little I needed to focus on outside of healing

There are so many good people in this world. 

Hug someone you love or pay forward a kindness. 

The way I was treated made such a huge difference to my recovery. 

Kindness can really change someone’s experience. It may not blunt the physical pain, but it truly can change the emotional journey of healing.

Oh, by the way, the story has a happy ending - everything healed perfectly and it all works, good as new. So, um, Pat didn’t need to sign up for Tinder.

Any “holding on” to my previous identity that I was doing kinda released after the accident and I settled into sabbatical.

I’m telling you about the accident because it might have been a factor in how I approached “the unknowing” as I’ve come to call it.

Before the accident, I felt angsty and panicked. Partially because for the first time ever, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have desire. I wasn’t moving towards something. I was in freefall.

Afterwards, as I lay on my couch with no undies on, binge-watching Netflix shows that had been on my list for 4 years, I felt oddly peaceful.

Instead of trying to fix things, I found myself willing to just…

Be with them.

Be in the discomfort of not having a plan.

Be in the pain and shame.

Writing in my journal really really helped.

It was like pouring all the muddy water out of my mind out and letting it fill back up with clear raindrops.

I made a decision.

I would allow myself to not know.

But not in the way I usually did it - not in a “turning away and ignoring the problem” way. 

Not in a “distracting myself from it all” way.

I would not know… and still ask. And be okay with not receiving an answer.

It’s deeply, elementally vulnerable to ask, to pray, for clarity and not receive an answer day after day and still to return calmly to that metaphorical locked door and knock.

It was humbling.

And it was one of the most profound experiences of my life. 

If drama surfaced, I wrote it down and gave it a voice and kept returning to what I can only call relaxed awareness.

So if I felt shame, I would write that I felt shame and what I felt ashamed of. But instead of stopping there, I would allow myself to explore alternate explanations for what happened. I would allow myself to have compassion for myself because I did the best I could with what I had at the time. I would ask what I could do better and map out a different path for the future.

Really anchoring into your body and breath and being willing to examine what comes up without trying to change any of it is powerful medicine. 

And it takes practice.

I sucked at it when I first started. But I kept coming back willing to see all of it - the bad (the parts that terrified and shamed me) and the good (the parts that my drama llama wanted me to ignore or throw away).

After three years of being sick with a mysterious illness despite doing everything “right”, I finally gave myself permission to stop waiting to get better and find ways to enjoy my life in the present, as imperfect as it is.

And that was the most healing part of all.

This post is free to the public, so please feel free to share it with a friend who might find comfort in it.

If you haven’t read that yet, click here.

For the most part, business was growing effortlessly (or seemingly so) during all of 2020 and certainly the first half of 2021.

In fact, we couldn’t hire fast enough. Clients flooded in and I was loving doing lives in my Facebook group and getting immediate feedback on some of the newer concepts that I was developing.

So let’s get back to that Christmas party in December 2021.

I was on the Bean Protocol, which meant every single one of my meals had to be a trifecta of lean animal protein, beans cooked in almost no fat and some vegetable. I was eating this decidedly non-festive meal while everyone around me was throwing back wine and juice, scarfing desserts of every kind and eating cheese like cows were about to become extinct.

My then four-year-old daughter bounced up to me with sparkling eyes and asked if she could prettypleasemamahavesomemorechocolatecakepleeeease...

I opened my mouth to say that she’d had way too much sugar already. That she should eat more protein or veg if she was still hungry. And then I looked down at my own plate and my tired old chubby body and I looked around the room filled with laughing, happy people and thought, “I eat the healthiest of anyone in this room and yet I am the sickest. What the fuck do I even know about nutrition?”

I said yes, she could have cake. 

And I put my plate down. I’d lost my appetite.

There it was again - the Upside Down.

Where it felt like my reality had broken and I lived in this Bizarro backwards world where the harder I worked at something, the further away from my goal I got.

Doubt began to nibble at my thoughts.

Spring 2021, I was in the park when I met a woman who used to be a trainer at a gym. She was now doing outdoor workouts at the park and would I like to join in? She was beautiful - petite, in her 50s with great muscle tone and kind blue eyes.

I thought, let me try again. My optimism had taken a beating and was starved and thin, but still willing to have another go.

I struggled through the workout. It was hard. Unreasonably so. At the end, she had us do push ups. I couldn’t do even one. 

I used to be the pushup queen.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Keep doing it and it will get easier.”

I stared at her.

I wasn’t mad or even sad. I just hoped that she was grateful and that she noticed that she lived in the reality where statements like that were true. I remembered wistfully saying things like that myself to people who asked me how I did it back when I was fit. 

But I don’t live in that world any more. In my reality, what you focus on doesn’t grow.

It blows.

Up.

In your face.

My doubt intensified.

Now, when teammates brought me challenges they wanted my input on, I didn’t feel my usual confidence when I advised them.

I felt disconnected in meetings, my usually sharp mind feeling foggy and fuzzy. 

I bought too many things I didn’t need on Amazon. 

I found it hard to hold teammates accountable because I looked at my own effort-to-output ratio and didn’t know how to parse the numbers.

We tried hiring senior level executives to replace me in some of my roles, but we could never find the right person. We wasted months and thousands of dollars hiring and firing one candidate after the next.

The one place I still felt in my element was on our group calls. When I could hold space for someone else’s doubt and bring them this new level of compassion that I’d discovered in my own struggles. 

But I wondered if it was enough - after all, they weren’t coming to me for compassion, they were coming to me for advice.

But what did I really know?

I doubted everything.

Fast forward to late 2021.

Every obstacle started to feel like proof of my unknowing. My incompetence.

Instead of embracing challenge like I’d always done, I retreated and questioned. Most of all, I hesitated to push - anyone.

Not teammates.

Not clients.

Not myself.

I didn’t want to be part of the toxic pushing culture that had caused me so much suffering during this confusing, incomprehensible time.

So when a client told me that they were reaching out and making PATH posts and not getting any response, how could I know whether they inhabited “normal” reality, where steady work always bore fruit…

Or the Upside Down, where the harder you worked at something, the further away from your goal you got.

Tough love felt like trauma. And the last thing I wanted to do was compromise someone else’s long term wellbeing even if that got them short term financial results. And that was an “if”. 

A big one.

By this point, my team was beginning to wobble.

We’d always had amazing culture - people who really cared and went the extra mile. And I’d always gone the extra mile for them too.

Now, for the first time, I was seeing entitlement and greed and lack of engagement. 

I knew that at some level, it was my fault.

After all, I was no longer the vital, charismatic visionary leader they had all signed up to be led by. I was an old, tired doubt-addled bottleneck.

I fired someone who’d been with me a long time but with whom things had turned terribly ugly. In doing so, I not only lost an employee, I lost a friend.

I wondered how much of it was my fault. 

Or responsibility if you prefer that word.

When the fabric of your reality feels unraveled like this, these nuances matter less. 

By now, I had zero desire to grow or even maintain the business. 

We had been floundering for a couple of months - proof that we hadn’t systematized enough because too much of our company’s wellbeing hinged on my own - and now, I vacillated wildly between wanting to shut shop and quit and wanting to somehow pull a Hero’s Journey moment, slay the dragon and make everything okay.

More than anything, I was paralyzed by the shame of letting my team down. I felt so awful that they had placed their trust in me and I’d gone and fucked it all up. 

And I couldn’t even explain why.

Wasn’t I the Clarity Queen? Hadn’t getting to the root of things always been my superpower? But maybe it was like pushups - I’d had my moment in the sun and now I was trapped on the dark side of the moon.

Over and over I asked myself: How do you come to this point when you’ve built a business literally around your zone of genius? When you get to do what you love on the daily?

But there were aspects of personal development that I didn’t agree with any more. This idea of taking radical responsibility felt like a meme - black, white and toxic - leaving no room for the softer greys of real life.

I didn’t know what to say on our team meetings.

I didn’t hide the fact that we were in trouble, but part of me still believed we would figure it out.

One of my mentors, a man who runs 9 separate $100M companies, tried to help me figure out what I wanted to do. He couldn’t understand the level of doubt I kept bringing into the conversation. My unwillingness to fight and figure it out. He knew I’d built something real and he’d seen some of our client results, so he just couldn’t understand what my problem was.

Every time I’d get off a call with him, I’d be all fired up and ready to do whatever it took.

Then I’d actually do shit. And it wouldn’t work and I was so freaking exhausted all the freaking time. 

My brain felt like someone had wrapped it in fur and thrown it in a blender. 

End of first quarter 2022, I got on a phone call with an entrepreneur friend of mine. John brought me a different perspective. He once founded and ran 4 different companies simultaneously and lost them all. His once shiny life crumbling into debt and depression. He had to move his wife and child into a trailer and figure out how to start over.

The story has a happy ending - today John runs a successful $20M+ business. “Geeta,” he said gently. “You need to quit with enough in the can so you have seed money to start over. Don’t make the mistake I did and wait until you think it’s time.

“It’s usually time long before you’re willing to give up.”

My husband and business partner Pat backed him up. “You learned to be responsible with money and you built us a nest egg. Don’t waste it trying to save something you don’t fully believe in any more. Give yourself the gift of a sabbatical. Take some time and figure out what you really want without the pressure of fixing things.”

It was the permission I needed. 

And so I shut shop, let most of my team go and went on sabbatical.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. My heart broke over and over as I said goodbye. 

I stepped into the void of not knowing what I wanted - for the first time in my life, I literally had no idea what I even desired. The only thing I could ever write down during my Be More Possible journal Want Practice was, “I want a break.”

And so I took one. 

So, to everyone who’s sent loving messages wondering where I’ve been, this is my answer.

Have you ever wanted to go on sabbatical? Is there any aspect of my story that resonated with you? I’d love to hear from you!

In fact, Gabriel wrote, “What’s the REAL reason you went on sabbatical”?

(Yeah, I read all your messages even if I don’t always get back to you).

Well, gather round and settle down, because I have a strange story to tell you and this might take some time.

To set proper context for this strange story, we need to rewind a few years. 

Those of you who have been with me for a while might already know this, but I’ve always been a big fitness buff.

Those of you who were in my programs have probably watched me walk on my desk treadmill or do Zoom meetings at my bike desk.

This is in addition to training for endurance runs (lots (and lots) of half marathons and one full one).

In fact, in 2019 I was training for my first ultra marathon. I hired a running coach and was even working with a very highly recommended British nutritionist who specialized in endurance athletes.

I was trying to lose the last 6 lbs that seemed to be stuck stubbornly to my middle and that prevented me from fitting into my favourite pre-second-kid clothes.

But I am nothing if not a workhorse and I fully believed I would get there. I just had to keep chipping away as I had always done.

Because if you put in the work, the results are inevitable, right?

And that’s when I fell into the Upside Down.

Throughout the first 6 months of 2020, I trained 6 days a week and ate extremely clean and took all my prescribed supplements. 

And every single month, each time my period approached, I would gain a pound. Some months I gained two pounds. 

I told myself it was water weight. There’s no way I could be gaining with my clean lifestyle and workout habits (minimal processed sugar and zero alcohol).

And yet, each month, that new weight became the starting point and by the end of my cycle, sure enough, there was more.

My running progress first stalled and then started to decline. While all the other athletes following the MAF protocol (low intensity steady state – the gold standard for endurance athletes -especially those who wanted to cover ultra distances) would get faster over time, I got slower.

In other words, when I ran for an hour each day, I covered less distance as time went on. I wasn’t getting faster. I was slowing down. And I wasn’t enjoying the running much either.

A heavier body meant my muscles and joints were sore. I tried taking breaks and more rest days, but it felt like any rest I took made it that much harder to get back on the horse.

So I doubled down on the discipline. I must need to really pay attention to my strength workouts and watch form or increase weights lifted.

Injury.

My body didn’t want to hear it.

Six months in, I fired both my coach and nutritionist. Neither of them could explain what was happening to me – why I was gaining weight so steadily despite my clean eating, workouts and diligent tracking. Neither could explain why I was so freaking exhausted all the time. Why everything ached so much. Why I couldn’t seem to recover no matter how much I slowed down or rested.

I even took 3 months off. 

This may not seem like a big deal to most people. But you have to understand – I have worked out regularly since I was a pre-teen. I never needed accountability or motivation because I had enough hours clocked that I knew on an embodied level that any resistance was a thin membrane and I’d feel great once I got into it.

Except now that resistance was a brick wall. And there was no other side. I only ever felt tired, not exhilarated like I’d always felt after exercise.

In October 2020, I hired a kettlebell coach to work with me for 30 mins, four days a week. He is amazing. Highly skilled, extremely technical and very patient. I put in the work (I always do).

My neck and shoulders started to ache. Again, an ache that never seemed to go away or be relieved by stretching or rest or anything else that had previously always worked for me.

I came to my workouts by sheer force of will – I NEVER looked forward to them the way I had in the past – I felt a deep ambivalence at best and proper loathing on bad days.

Instead of feeling good at the end of a workout, I felt… relieved. 

Relieved it was over and happy to lie on the floor and rest.

These weren’t even intense. It was a joke. The workouts that wiped me out were the kind of things I used to do on my rest day for shits and giggles.

I didn’t lose a pound either (in case you were wondering). I did gain some minor definition and I did sometimes enjoy the feeling of swinging a kettlebell (it hurt less than running). But I didn’t seem to have the juice to sustain even a 30 minute workout.

I was 40.

I felt like I was 80.

In Jan 2021, I woke one morning with shoulder pain so bad that I couldn’t use my right arm at all; I couldn’t even straighten it. I had to strap it, bent, to my torso and get help to use the bathroom.

Over the counter medication did nothing for the pain.

Eventually it eased after 4-5 days of NSAIDs and muscle relaxants and then slowly tapered to that now familiar neck and shoulder ache that I’ve lived with since 2020.

I stopped structured workouts.

I tried walking instead.

I mean walking’s gentle right? Even 80 year olds can walk?

My left hip flared up and had me in so much pain even sitting was hard. 

Anything that felt even remotely like “pushing” (something that had always gotten me results in the past) now created pain that radiated all the way from crown to heel. As if the muscles and ligaments of my my posterior chain had shrunk and were too tight for my frame.

So I iced and rested and tried again. And again. And again.

I’m not a quitter.

Exercise is good for you, right?

What the fuck was happening to me?

I saw osteopaths and physiotherapists and muscle testing “alternative” practitioners. A psychic, a shaman. I left no stone unturned.

No one thought there was anything particularly wrong with me. 

I felt like I was going crazy.

In case you’re wondering about my stress levels and all that good stuff in the background, it was the usual. 2020 had been an incredibly bountiful year for us – we were an online company after all and the whole world suddenly wanted in on the party.

There were the usual stresses of hiring under pressure, but nothing crazy. Client love poured in. Business felt like the one thing that WAS working in my life.

So yes, being an entrepreneur has its stresses and being the frontwoman of a company comes with pressure, but overall I felt like I was operating in my zone of genius.

But you know what they say, if you don’t have your health, the rest matters less.

These were the years of compulsive googling.

If I could just ask the right question, I reasoned, someone out there will have an answer. A solution. A treatment that actually works and makes sense.

I’d experienced this years earlier when I had a copper IUD that gave me debilitating cystic acne and no one – not doctors or naturopaths – ever connected the excess copper with my condition. Every time I told them it was non-hormonal, they would check the box and move on.

It was through relentless googling that I found a random forum in some corner of the internet that had scads of women telling my story.

I had the IUD removed and took zinc supplements to counter the copper excess. Within 2 months my acne was gone. 

Shared stories are powerful medicine.

By now I had invested well over $25K in trying to be fit and vital. Every expert was convinced that their way was the way and that I just had to stick with it long enough to see results. Every expert contradicted the other experts.

I had already experimented with various eating styles including 6 months of strict keto, intermittent fasting, Atkins, the Bean Protocol. 

Each restricted something else. Each warned how noncompliance would wreck my microbiome or cause inflammation, etc.

I remember my friend Brad and I chatting about alter egos after reading Todd Herman’s book about them. I didn’t like the idea of the necessary fracturing of self that I perceived as a requirement for an alter ego – I wanted to be all of me in all circumstances.

Brad said, “Imagine you knock your head and have total amnesia. You don’t remember anything about yourself or your life. None of your memories or beliefs, who would you be?”

It was meant to have me thinking deeply about my limiting beliefs and habitual patterns, but you know what my mind immediately jumped to? “What the fuck would I eat? What would happen to me if I didn’t remember all my food rules?”

I realized I was in trouble.

At 41 I was too old for another eating disorder. I’d done my time with anorexia and bulimia in college and while I didn’t feel certain about much any more, I was sure I didn’t want to spiral into that dark place again.

I loved my body.

Not the way it looked or felt, perhaps, but the changes I was trying to make didn’t come from self loathing. They came from trying to do right by this wicked magic machine I was riding.

This incredible body that had always been so vital and strong and resilient. That had moved countries and adapted to extreme climates. That had birthed and nursed two beautiful babies. That had put up with so many of my whims.

The image that came to mind was of me (the Self) sitting beside my body as if it were a sick child, suffering and in pain. I felt helpless; my usually almost psychic intuition gummed up by the voices of all the experts who I had turned to for translation because I didn’t understand what my body was trying to tell me.

No eating disorder for me, thanks. So I hired an intuitive eating coach. She was fabulous. She helped me surrender (mostly) the conflicting food rules.

While I couldn’t lose any weight (I was by now 20lbs over my pre-pregnancy weight), I at least stopped gaining. And I was able to eat whatever I wanted. Even sweet, buttery almond croissants. 

My mind very much wanted to believe that you can eat all things as long as you listened to your body and that food rules weren’t necessary. The problem was I still felt like crap and my body ached and refused to let me move the way I enjoyed.

Eventually, I returned to the Bean Protocol that had me eating loads of soluble fibre (in the form of, you guessed it, beans), cutting out caffeine including decaf and all herbal drinks of any kind, fragrance, cinnamon and saturated fat. And you had to separate your bean meals from “fat snacks” (nuts) so the fibre could bind with excess hormone and toxins. 

Things began to unravel for the business at a Christmas party in December 2021.

I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Until then,

xoxo
G

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