Photo by cottonbro studio
Happy Sunday, friends!
Here at Long Beach Island, likely due to a combination of excessive traveling(plane + multiple car trips) and schedule changes and being with old friends after a long time apart, I found myself shutting my computer in the face of “it all”.
It all being :
The need to appeal to the type of client I want to attract on LinkedIn as my freelancing career continues to grow through exhaustive engaging with other people’s content and producing content of my own
The need to appeal to readers on Substack by becoming more findable via my Notes activity
The undercurrent of urgency that seems to hum underneath everything we do now.
I really don’t mind engaging on LinkedIn or Notes or whatever platform will attract more like-minded people, but yesterday I went on a walk to the beach to escape the pressing feeling that I was already behind somehow, that I could never engage enough, and that I had to ramp up my inbound marketing efforts now or forever fall behind.
The beautiful illusion of certainty
As a writer, full-time, I struggle to find a balance between a healthy amount of self-marketing and feeling absolutely overwhelmed.
Yesterday, I leaned into that feeling of overwhelm as an invitation to slow down. To save energy for the days ahead. To untether myself from my work just a little bit more.
I think this is the question I’m living with these days, readers:
How can I wholeheartedly show up at work(whether that’s the creative side of things, like my newsletter and marketing, or for my clients and marketing my writing services) and continue to undo the binding between my identity and my work? Or, to put it another way, how can I trust that everything will be okay in a world where everything is obviously not okay?
There’s a great quote from a book I’m reading: “Between us and the world are the stories we tell”.
That’s hit home with me as I’ve been living this question. I tell a beautiful story about how I’m finally making this whole freelance thing work. I have the Roth IRA set up. I pay my 25% *highway robbery* self-employment tax. I pay my own phone bill. I can afford a few subscriptions here and there.
It’s a carefully spun story that could all fall apart at the drop of a hat. At one medical emergency or one huge, life-altering event. That’s the other point my book makes - that we enjoy telling ourselves stories about our lives, whether they’re conspiracy theories or narratives about our success, that give us a sense of certainty.
Certainty is such a lovely idea. But it is just an ideal - and one that’s heavily promoted in the world of LinkedIn, perhaps a reason I’ve grown weary this week of brainstorming content that promises or gives my followers the illusion that I know something, for certain.
Perhaps this is the question I’ll continue to invite: how can I find stillness in the midst of life’s predictable uncertainty? Where can I find ease in distress? Where and how can I invite joy no matter what?
In this one wild and precious life, may we all rest into an abiding feeling of okayness. Of peace. Of security.
Of course, I took some pictures of my beach walk for you. Of life growing in the most inhospitable environment, sand and brine and wind, and of the constancy of the ocean relentlessly beating against the shore.
What no one tells you about growing up
What is not so constant, I have found, is growing up. This has been thrown into stark relief over the course of this trip, and perhaps the real constant is the only one: that everything changes, and much too fast.
No one tells you that as you discover that you actually love your life as a suburban wife-to-be with a fairly stable career (fairly being the key word there), as you discover who you are and become more you, people don’t change with you.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes people have the capacity to open their hearts to this new you - the you that likes to spend a lot of time alone and has decided that devoting more energy to others than they’re willing to return is a behavior that will end with you.
Sometimes they’re confused or lost or can’t be with this new you, who has shed layers of needing to put on a facade or trying to impress others. Who are they without the you that was pretending to be the person they needed?
Growing up is joyful. It can also be, as my therapist pointed out, lonely. Knowing who you are and what makes you happy can be lonely because, ultimately, many people will be unable to understand you fully.
And it takes experience being with the wrong people to understand who belongs in your life to bear testament to you just as you are.
The story of the Selkie
There’s an ancient Celtic myth about creatures called Selkies. The short story is that these creatures were shapeshifters - they could shed their skins and come out of the water in human form but would put their skins back on and return to the water.
One day, long ago and right here, right now, a man fell in love with a Selkie. She loved him too, but she knew she couldn’t live as a full-time human with him. It saddened him so much that he stole her skin the next time she left the water to visit him, and wouldn’t return it.
Over years of marriage, they had a child, but the woman never grew any happier. She was constantly forlorn, and her human husband never understood why she couldn’t accept life with him and their baby.
One day, when her husband was out fishing, she did the only thing there was left to do: she stole her skin back and escaped. As her child grew, they were able to live with her, in the water, or out of the water with their father - no skin needed.
That’s my remembered version of the story of the Selkie, and it reminds me, just a little bit, of what it can feel like to grow up when others can’t fully meet the “new you”: as if you were a fish out of water, a part of your soul stranded until you might be able to reclaim it again.