Everything Fits

Storytime with Kate

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we were kind of given a step by step direction manual: school, marriage, house, kids, work, *shhh* (divorce), retirement, die.

yikes, it honestly sounds bleak when I just type it out like that.

Well, and yeah. It has actually always felt really bleak to me.

Since I was a kid I've felt like a fly on the wall to the hypocrisy of this supposedly incredible life trajectory.

Specifically the: marriage, house, kids, work, divorce part.

My parents got divorced when I was 17 - a man named Charlie Brown came to our family home on a Saturday morning and in a really polite way, told us our parents "have fallen out of love and are getting divorced but they love each other and they love you." I cannot even begin to describe what a cruel bullshit joke it all felt like.

As a little girl, it felt like everyone wanted to be dating someone, to fall in love with someone. We were fed messages about love and romance and relationships. My girlfriends would drop their friends the second a boy entered the chat and then come crawling back during the downs. There were so many rules around what it meant to be a good friend to a girl who suddenly got a boyfriend: be supportive and make him comfortable.

As I type all this out it just makes me mad.

Mad on behalf of all the friendships that got severed over some boy who we never should have been nice to in the first place because he wasn't nice to her.

And you've heard Ruby and me say this before: It Can Be Better.

For the first time in my life, I'm 34, I want to date someone. And I know why I feel like I want to now: I'm confident in my ability to not lose track of myself even if I'm in a relationship with someone else. I believe now that, because of me, an intimate, romantic, sexy, fulfilling relationship can exist without me compromising myself into oblivion or bending myself into unrecognizable shapes in order to *make it work.*

Because the facts are, I don't want to make it work.

I want to let it work.

The reason I'm telling you all this though is because I haven't felt (until recently) that "something's missing" when it comes to intimacy, romance, sexy, fulfilling.

There is so much intimacy in my life: my friends truly see me and they show me themselves too.

I can't even describe a more romantic time than when I get to get dressed up and go out for a cocktail with a friend and we share how much we appreciate each other.

The sex life that I've had both with myself and sexual partners over the years has been remarkable. Learning how to have sex with myself is an ongoing fun and comforting experience. It's helped me heal so much shame about sex, my body, and physical touch. It's also been a practice in consent. Because sometimes I'll think I want it and then my body actually doesn't... I listen.

Not everybody has the same kind of drive towards work that I do. I get that. But I love my job. I create my own work. And from a young age, I've known that my work will give me access to a life of fulfillment and purpose. I have a calling.

In my last long term relationship, I heard the most firm no from my body that I think I've ever heard when I was complaining about a shitty job at the time and he goes, "honey, not everybody loves their job. You just do it and then you have hobbies and other stuff that you love." That was not it for me.

Hard no.

Absolutely not.

I WOULD NOT spend 10 hours per day doing shit that I hated just to do something kinda fun on a weekend.

lol @ this: so instead I often spend 14 hours per day doing work that I'm obsessed with just to collapse into the bed and do it all over again the next day only to have to spend a full day asleep in the sun like a lizard on a day off.

An exercise that you'll find in the My Self Study Practice Guided Workbook and Journal is called the "Circle of Wants." Inside the circle you write qualities/feelings that you WANT in your life. Outside, you write the shit you don't want.

The first time I did this I had things like "husband, house, kids" inside the circle but that felt off. I even remember reflecting to the facilitator that none of that stuff felt like what I actually wanted but it felt like what I had been shown so it was all I knew how to dream about.

So I did it again, feeling into what I thought "husband, house, kids" felt like. Words like: creative, connected, safe, wanted, home, confident, authentic, nurture, and fulfilling came up.

And so I began to orient my *outcomes* (ie: husband, house, kids) around those qualities.

Me now:

I use my creativity to build businesses that make people feel connected, safe, wanted, and confident.

I live for my friendships that help me feel at home in myself, authentic, and connected. And I'm so glad that I didn't keep the idea of *husband* because that might have limited my exploration into my queerness.

My love for children and the part of me that is extremely nurturing, is what led me down this path of Self Study I think: this practice of "re-parenting" myself that I've been doing for a decade. I think that's a cool thing about becoming an adult. All those thing you needed growing up... you get to give that to yourself now. You get to tell yourself how proud you are, you get to encourage her to go for it. You get to buy her a little snow cone when she fails. You get to tell her the truth even when it's hard for her to hear and love her through the process of integrating that truth into her life.

So if you're somebody like me, who's unconventional, who feels like an outlier, who can't just fall in line no matter how much you want to... start noticing the ways that you've actually created fulfillment for yourself in your ways. Not the subscribed ways... you've done things differently and I'm so fucking glad you're here. It's people like us that move us into a new version of the world. We're showing people what's possible because we're just living.

You don't have to get it. You don't have to be able to explain it. You just have to keep listening to yourself.

You're doing great.

xoxo,

k