a quickie hello and what's to come

love and revelation is afoot

traces all around

It’s 5 days into 2024 and I am the same and I am new. Glimmers all around have led me to novel thought processes, expansive reframes, and reminders I am exactly where I need to be. This all happens because of the art of subtle whim trusting and presence, which all happens alongside my usual neurosis. I said here my intention this year is to be less intentional, which of course doesn’t mean I don’t have intentions, it just means I’m practicing not attaching to them. I don’t need anything to “workout” the way I intend. Instead, I’m allowing life to co-create something with me, or maybe it’s the other way around—life is allowing me to.

This is the year of the incidental: of less intention—less calculation, of abandoning maps that do not serve the terrain, of fucking around and finding out [for myself], of being me—which I realize is only ever who I could be, and am.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be unpacking in a semi-strung together series of what it means to be authentic (and how I think it’s yet another trap we set), karma, conviction and uncertainty, delusion and truth, and my updated (and limited) understanding of god/gob/spirit. Stay tuned and please read them in order, as they will layer like a cake for a most delicious mouthfull.

Meanwhile…

One day I want to write a “how to be your authentic self¹” book, but after the title page it will be entirely blank. Once the person gets over their anger of investing in absolutely nothing, they’ll notice, perhaps, the pages are for them to fill out. If they don’t throw it out, they might learn this is how “being authentic” happens. On its pages they will collect advice from other people, obviously, that’s what we’re constantly doing. But even the gathering of selected advice and compiling it by hand will be its own form of agency. Maybe a few chapters in the person will begin leaving their own notes, their own thoughts and reflections of their reality tests. Maybe by the end of it they’ll have developed so much of themselves, they could sell their own how to _, and it will be as cheap as the rest of those books because it won’t actually be for anyone but themselves. One day I’ll realize this has been the work of my life. It is the work of each of our lives.

As I write this I’m home in Colorado. Yesterday I was driving around in my mom’s car listening to a podcast, which offered me sobering advice on “how to be free”.² Which was honestly so good. At the end I debated putting on another podcast from her,

notes on shapeshifting

, but instead felt the urge to hear my own voice speak to me. What is freedom truly other than relying on one’s own inner council? I went to my recorded notes app and listened to a series of voice notes from the last 5 years.

In one of them, my favorite one, I left a message to myself, both present and future, from the bathtub on my last night in my Long Island City apartment I shared with my ex. I expressed how I needed to record that moment because I never wanted to forget it, which somehow I had. My dreamy, steamy sadness and awe sent me the most poetic of messages. Who knew back then I would need this message so dearly now? I’m not sure, I guess I did. The potency of a younger me recording her experience of pain and trust brought me to laughter and tears. I couldn’t believe it was me—the conviction in her voice, the strength and resolve arising from the uncertainty of it all. The paradox of being unsure and certain at once. I needed this reminder.

It’s a shame I lived for so long so untrusting of myself. But the even bigger shame is that I have this idea in my noggin that that was actually ever the case. In that message from me to me, there was nothing but self-trust, self-determination, and love, which has always been there and will always will be so long as I am breathing air.

My only advice to anyone who wants it, is to leave voice notes to yourself, present and future, and do it often. Replay them when you feel the strange and important urge. Listen to yourself. You know everything that’s going on with you, and if you don’t “know” it, you certainly feel it. When it comes to you, your voice is supreme and most lovely.

That’s all. XO

1. I’ll be kicking off this new string of essay’s with the breakdown of authenticity, how it sends us after our own tail so often and how it’s always available to us exactly where we are.

2. Okay fine, sometimes “how to _ “ advice from another being is actually so spot on.