Self Awareness

Safeness & settling into the in-between

December 23, 2019 By gwynn

The In-Between somehow makes you feel grimy, like all those sights and sounds and sensations and smells have stuck to you, like you’ve been rolling around in a preschool art class’s trash can. ~Michael Reaves, Mallory Reaves, The Silver Dream

The In-Between place, what I have often referred to as The Goo, can be a very messy, very uncomfortable place. It a place of unknowns. A place that is familiar in some ways and yet filled with the unfamiliar.

For those of us with unprocessed trauma living within us, unknowns can be uncomfortable to say the least and at times downright terrifying. I know in the past I have been a planner. Well, I still am a planner, but to much less of a degree. In the past I would have plans A through ZZZ, thinking through all the possible scenarios and back up plans for each scenario or possible derailment to the previous plan. It was exhausting, and yet it gave me a sense of (not real) safeness. It gave me a sense of (not real) control. It gave me space to breathe and not completely freak out if plan A, B, C, or DDD, didn’t work out.

I understand why I was the way I was. The chaos of my childhood left me in desperate need of stability, consistency, and knowing what the hell was going to happen next in every moment. I wasn’t one for “surprises” and when plans had to suddenly, unexpectedly change, it would send me into a fight/flight/freeze meltdown.

I don’t react quite so strongly anymore to changes. I still have my feelings and depending on what the change is sometimes my complex trauma stuff comes up. But I don’t need a million fall back plans anymore and I can actually sit in the in-between spaces of not really knowing what will be happening in the next days, months, or years with relative comfort. Or when there’s not relative comfort I can tolerate the discomfort without freaking the eff out.

I didn’t get to this place by chance. It has taken a lot of hard work, intention, and a ton of self-compassion.

Being able to sit in a space of discomfort is no simple task. It requires us to be able to be present – in our bodies, in the moment, in our environment, with the people around us. When we have complex trauma coursing through us, all of these things are almost impossible.

Almost.

We can do it.

And.

It takes practice, commitment, self-compassion, and time. These shifts don’t happen over night. It can take months for small shifts to happen. It can take years for bigger shifts.

And it can happen. We can do it.

Learning to regulate ourselves, to calm our nervous systems, takes time and energy. Most of us didn’t learn life-long helpful ways to self-regulate. When we were children we did what we needed to do to survive – both physically and psychologically. That generally meant for most of us leaving our bodies, leaving the present, living in our heads. As we grew older we may have found ourselves constantly stuck in the past or future or both, but rarely if ever in the here and now. Being in our bodies, being present to our physical sensations was too overwhelming and activating.

This is not our fault. We each did the best we could with what we had.

And this disconnection from our bodies, from the present moment, from our whole Self, can also leave us feeling empty, lonely, and disconnected. Our relationships, with ourselves and others, don’t go overly deep. We have our walls and armor that prevents others from getting too close.

This works for us until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t work for us anymore we are left not knowing what to do or how to shift things or wondering if we even are capable of shifting things, of being in the world differently.

We can. Again, it takes work, intention, compassion, and time. It takes all of these in combination. Not one part alone will allow things to shift. All the time in the world won’t process our trauma or teach us to self regulate if we aren’t doing the work, if we don’t have the intention to do different, if we don’t cultivate some self-compassion. Because we will mess up, we will fall back on old patterns and cycles; on old ways of being that served us so well for some many years (until they didn’t anymore).

And.

With work, intention, compassion, and time we will fall back on those old ways of being less and less. We will find our ways to self-regulation. We will learn where we end and others begin (a.k.a. boundaries). We will find our ways to center and ground. We will begin to understand we are not alone (a.k.a. internal and external resources).

All things come to an end. All things shift and evolve. Whether we want them to or not. How we respond to the shifting and evolving is ultimately up to us. We certainly have the choice to remain in our activated states, to remain hyper-alert, to resist and avoid to our heart’s content.

We can also choose to the do the hard work. To make the commitment to find some peace for ourselves. To learn to self-regulate. To come home into our bodies and the present. To accept the shifts and changes and evolutions as they come and do our own work within and outside of them to continue our own shifting and evolving.

It’s not easy. Often it’s not fun. Often it is messy. And as I have said many times before and will likely say many more times again, I believe it is deeply worth it.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on July 22, 2018. It has been edited and revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

Feeling our feelings

December 16, 2019 By gwynn

We try so hard to hide everything we’re really feeling from those who probably need to know our true feelings the most. People try to bottle up their emotions, as if it’s somehow wrong to have natural reactions to life. ~Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday

To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a ‘hot mess’ or having ‘too many issues’ are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world. ~Anthon St. Maarten

For those of us living with trauma, we have spent a majority of our lives dissociated. Meaning, we didn’t really feel our feelings (until perhaps we had no choice and couldn’t ignore or stuff down anymore). We weren’t aware of our bodies. We lived in our heads and outside of ourselves.

And when we did feel our feelings, we never, ever, under any circumstances shared them or expressed them (except maybe anger). Those of us living with complex trauma learned early on not to express our emotions, or at least we never learned how to express them in any sort of constructive or helpful way.

So when we start to come to this work of coming into our bodies and processing the traumas that live within us, we all have so much to learn and unlearn.

It is a painstakingly slow process that generally involves many almost imperceptible baby steps mixed with a lot of falling back into old patterns and cycles and finding our ways back out again.

I can say that it does get… less challenging… in time. With practice, with patience, with self compassion.

Learning to sit in our uncomfortable feelings (and really for those of us who dissociate, all our emotions are uncomfortable, all body sensations can feel like too much) is not easy or fun. And once we have learned how to tolerate our own feelings, well, now we get to actually feel those feelings and let me tell you I wouldn’t exactly call that fun either.

So if this embodiment stuff isn’t easy and isn’t fun and has us sitting in our uncomfortable stuff, what the heck is the point to it??

I actually used to ask myself this question at least once a week. I’m not even kidding.

I have many answers for myself (and for you!). Ultimately, for me, it is all about relationships, and having real, deep, meaningful ones; with myself, with those I’m intimate with, both sexually and not, with my children, with my friends and family.

If we not attuned to our feelings (emotions and bodily sensations), then it is very unlikely we are present in the moment, in our environment, or with the person we are interacting with. If we are unable to be present with another person, then we are unable to connect with them on a more than a superficial level. If we are only connecting with folks on a superficial level we feel lonely and isolated and we are also unable to tune into what is happening with the other person on a deeper level.

If we can’t tolerate to feel our own feelings then how can we tolerate to feel another’s? And isn’t part of being in deep and meaningful relationship being able to hold space and be supportive of and to those who matter most to us?

That’s part one of my answer.

Part two of my answer has to do with our reactions and actions, which also impact our relationships. If we aren’t noticing our little “tells” that we are at the very early states of feeling overwhelmed, flooded, or triggered, then we are unable to do anything to soothe ourselves in those early moments. If we are unable to soothe ourselves in those early moments, then those feelings build and build. They may build over weeks, but still with every interaction that activates our sympathetic nervous system that we are unable to reset our system from, then the next trigger feels more intense. This build up continues until we explode in one way or another.

That explosion can look like yelling and screaming and “losing our shit.” Generally speaking when this happens we aren’t our best selves and have a tendency to lash out and cause harm to the other person (be that actual physical harm, or emotional or psychological harm may depend on any number of factors).

That explosion can also look like illness. Chronic infections, chronic pain, autoimmune issues, chronic colds or flus.

That explosion can look like self harm, which includes over spending for “retail therapy,” over eating foods that ultimately don’t make us feel good, using drugs or alcohol to numb, and of course what we usually think of as self harm: cutting, binging and purging, suicide attempts, etc.

That explosion can also look like self isolation coupled with extreme amounts of shame and shoulding on ourselves (which can then lead to self harm or illness or “losing our shit”).

That explosion can look like any combination of the above.

None of these explosions are ultimately helpful for us or for our relationships.

As a species, we humans need each other. We were never meant to live in isolation or do this thing called Life alone, without any support or help. We are meant to live in community and in relationship. We are meant to have deep and meaningful relationships where we are accepted by each other (even our uncomfortable feelings), supported by each other, held by each other, and lovingly pushed by each other.

Trauma, and specifically being dissociated, prevents us from being in community and in relationships.

And so.

Becoming embodied helps us relearn what to experience being fully human.

Being fully human has some very messy and uncomfortable parts to it, as well as some amazing and joyous parts, and everything in-between.

So, my short answer to my question above of why I do this whole embodiment thing, and why I support others in their own journeys to embodiment, is so I can be in deep and meaningful relationships with others and with myself and so I can experience all that living as a human has to offer.

It is a conscious choice. It is made multiple times a day. It is not a one and done.

I am so much more embodied and present in my environment, relationships, and Self than I have been at any other point in my life. Even so, I still fall into those old no longer needed survival skills of dissociation and isolation. Even so sometimes my feelings sneak up on me when I’m not paying attention. Even so I cause harm in my relationships, even though that is the last thing I ever want to do.

And. I am also able to express my emotions to others, often without exploding. My relationships have grown deeper and more meaningful. Those closest to me see more of me than they have before. I am able to get past defensive anger and get to some of the deeper emotions that are bringing up my armor relatively quickly. I am able to laugh more freely and also cry more freely. I understand myself so much more.

I am able to receive love. To be seen. To see that others accept and adore me as I am.

And I have developed a deep compassion for myself and others that wasn’t there five years ago.

This work is not easy. It is not generally speaking fun.

And even so, I believe it is so deeply worth it.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weeklyish newsletter on April 15, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To read my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

We need each other

November 25, 2019 By gwynn

The world of intimate bonds is the world of emotions—a field of reactions and hidden desires for safety and acceptance that we all long for. All of us. ~Joseph Schaub, Divorce (or not): A guide

One of the things that trauma does is encourage us to isolate. It encourages us to be away from our family, friends, intimate partners, and communities. How this looks for each of us is different. It may look like us actually appearing to be a hermit and not interacting with people or it may look like we are incredibly social, with many friends and connections, yet all of those relationships are only surface level and we never reveal (much of) who we truly are, our fears, our wants, our needs.

Both scenarios (and a million in-between) are isolation. When we do not allow ourselves to deeply connect with others, that is one way our trauma shows up. Our not allowing this deep connection is a signal for our desperate need for a sense of safeness and acceptance, our need for love and a sense of belonging.

When we have unprocessed trauma living within us, it means our ability to have a sense of safeness — with others or with ourselves — is stilted. For many of us living with trauma, the traumatic events we experienced were perpetrated by people we trusted, people we possibly literally depended on for our actual literal survival. These types of betrayals, especially when perpetrated over and over throughout our childhoods teach us that we can’t rely on another, that the world isn’t safe, that those who claim to love you will only cause harm.

We internalize these lessons and they form the development of our neural pathways that then inform us as adults, once we are far from the harm, how to be in relationship with others.

David Richo, in his book How To Be An Adult in Relationships, talks about the “5 A’s” that make up our emotional needs as humans. These are: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

We all need someone to pay attention to us in a way that builds us up.

We all need to feel accepted, just as we are, in all our messy and complicated human glory.

We all need to feel appreciated for our contributions to our families, our friendships, our communities, our world.

We all need affection, be that loving words or begin physically held.

We all need allowing, to be allowed to shift and change and grow, allowed to be complex, complicated, and even contradictory.

All humans have these needs. For those us who did not have most or any of these needs met as children, we have that much more of a desperation to have these needs met as an adult.

But even though we have this requirement to have these basic human needs met, we don’t trust that anyone will ever meet them.

Trauma is a complex and contradictory thing in and of itself. As a survival mechanism we isolate and yet isolation can literally kill us. Without the love and support of our community (be that chosen family, blood relatives, competent trauma informed professionals or hopefully a bit of all of the above), we slowly or sometimes quickly will bring about physical disease, intense loneliness and hopelessness, and sometimes a depression so deep there feels like there is no way out.

But our early life experiences have formed the ideas that we cannot trust other humans to have our basic human emotional needs met. And it takes a great act of courage and strength to reach out and ask for help. And frankly, some days we don’t have that courage or strength.

So how do we shift this? How do we find the resources to move through and past the fears of betrayal? How do we develop our own sense of safeness and trust?

It takes work. Patience. Time. Intention. Mostly, it takes work.

I deeply believe that we need to do the work of calming our nervous systems, connecting deeply to our boundaries and reclaiming our bodies as our own, finding our ways to our own center and ground. And then we need to continue this work through deep embodiment and trauma processing work.

Then slowly that sense of safeness, and our ability to trust others and ourselves, will grow.

We are not meant to do this processing and healing work in isolation. In fact, we actually cannot successfully do it in isolation. We need others, we need to do this work in relationship. This is the point of therapy, to help a person heal in a safe relationship so they then can take what they learn (and the ways they have shifted) out into the world and apply it to their other relationships.

Of course, therapy is not for everyone and frankly not all therapists (sadly) are competent.

However, that does not change the reality that we need to do this work of healing, of developing our sense of safeness, of cultivating trust, within relationships.

It does not make us weak to need other people, it makes us human. It does not mean we have a character flaw when we yearn for deep connections with others, it makes us human. It does not make us “less than” or “too much” to ask another for support, it makes us human.

Where this is tricky perhaps, is that we can’t rely on any singular person to fill all our emotional (or any other kind of) needs. No one person will ever be able to do that. We need a community of people and we need to be able to rely on ourselves in way that is helpful for us and not harmful.

Stephanie Bennett-Henry wrote :
No one is going to love you exactly like you imagine. No on is ever going to read your mind and take every star from the sky at the perfect time and hand it to you. No one is going to show up at your door on a horse, with a shoe you lost. Do you understand?
That’s why you have to love yourself enough, so that any other love just adds more candles to the cake you’ve already iced.

Our work in processing our trauma is loving ourselves, it is the cake and the icing of our making. But we don’t need to, and I would argue can’t, do this work alone. We build ourselves up as we build our relationships, our relationships grow as we do, we learn to trust others as we learn to trust ourselves.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum, honestly. The point being however, we need both. Both our own willingness to do the work, and people to support us and or guide us in this work.

It is true that no one person is ever going to meet all our emotional needs. Knowing this is part of our own maturation process. However, we can have a community of people, even a relatively small community of a handful of folks, who together can help us get our needs met.

That’s how we are supposed to be. In community. Serving each other and ourselves.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly newsletter on June 10, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.

On being an adult in relationship

June 17, 2019 By gwynn

Our work, then, is not to abolish our connection to the past but to take it into account without being at its mercy. The question is how much the past interferes with our chances at healthy relating and living in accord with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. ~David Richo, How To Be An Adult In Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

David Richo states in How To Be An Adult In Relationships, that in order to be an adult, we need to be self-aware and mindful in our actions.

In other words, self-awareness is vital on it’s own, but until it is coupled with mindful and intentional action (or inaction), we still aren’t fully acting in our frontal lobe, or “adult” brain.

Those of us who experienced chronic trauma in childhood have a lot to be angry about. We have a lot to be sad about. We have a lot to rage and scream and wail about. I don’t believe anyone would deny that. The atrocities that were done to too many of us as children are horrifying and all of it is held in our body and mind memory.

The trauma doesn’t want to stay trapped within us however, it wants to get out. This is great news if we are in therapy and doing a combination of talk and somatic therapies to help move that trauma on out of our systems and being. It’s not so great news if we aren’t and so we try to stuff it down and eventually it bubbles up and out and we spew it all over an unsuspecting passer-by.

That passer-by could be our children, our intimate partner(s), our friends, other family members. It could even be ourselves.

It is understandable that we have so much hurt and torment living within us. I makes sense that it all needs to get out. It is not okay for us to lash out at others.

Even when they cause us harm.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Even when a person causes us harm, it is not acceptable for us to lash out and cause them harm.

The whole “two wrongs doesn’t make a right” thing.

Here’s a thing, though. For most of us, I don’t think our “eruptions” or “lashing out” are intentional. I know for me it mostly certainly isn’t mindful. It comes from a primal place within that only cares about our survival. And so when we are already wounded, like any animal, if we get poked or prodded we go into fight/flight/freeze because we see any hurt as an attack and we need to protect and defend ourselves.

Rollo May wrote: “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.“

The work of self-awareness is to be able to grow that capacity to pause and allow space for us to mindfully choose the response we want to to actually have.

This is not to say there isn’t a part of us that wants our response to be screaming at the top of our lungs and stomping our feet.

It is to say however, that we need to take the moment to consider the longer term impacts of us screaming and stomping our feet. And if the longer term impacts actually cause us and other (more) harm, then perhaps we could consider a different response.

Shifting from a space of automatic, mindless, response to one where there has been space created between being activated and actually responding, is no simple task. We cannot undo the habit of a lifetime of automatic, mindless responding simply because we decide we want to do so.

It takes time.

AND.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, learning to regulate our systems: calm our sympathetic nervous system, activate our parasympathetic nervous system, move the stored up cortisol out of our system.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, connecting to our boundaries and coming into our bodies. Learning to truly understand, on a very visceral level, where we end and another begins, physically, psychically, emotionally.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, finding our ways to ground and our own center, being able to find our way to not only be in but stay in, the present moment, despite any and all the discomfort we may be feeling.

And after all of that, it takes practice, a LOT of practice, to break the patterns and cycles that we have become so accustomed to. To actually not engage in an argument even though we may be being provoked, to walk away, to calm ourselves in the moment, to bite our tongues, to actually feel empathy for the person causing harm.

None of this comes easy. Or at least, none of it has come easy to me.

Changing life long, if not generations old, patterns and cycles takes effort. It requires compassion. And we will all screw it up along the way, slipping back into old ways of being because that is what is known.

And.

It can be done. With practice.

What is interesting about changing these patterns and cycles is that as we begin to do so on our end, the person(s) on the other side may try to up their game. When this happens it can be so tempting to engage. Believe me, I know! And, it is all the more important for us to continue practicing our own work, to continue growing that “pause”, to continue our own work of breaking harmful patterns and cycles.

Eventually those who try to engage us will change too. Either they will simply go out of our lives because they aren’t getting the emotional charge from us anymore, or they too will begin to create space, to cultivate and grown that pause, to break their own patterns and cycles.

We can’t do any of that for them though. We can only do our own work. Even in those moments when, right then, we really just want to scream and stomp, and perhaps, especially in those moments.

In rebellious solidarity, always.

/../

This essay was originally written in May 2018 for my weekly newsletter and has been updated and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

The difference between being triggered and feeling our feelings

May 20, 2019 By gwynn

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget. ~Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

I’ve written about how I view healing compared to processing trauma. It is an important differentiation to make, I believe, and the quote above pretty much sums it up for me.

The reality is that the traumatic events we have each experienced did happen. And they did change us. Molecularly, yes. And more importantly, fundamentally those events in so many ways inform who we have been, who we are currently, and will continue to inform the people we continue to evolve into.

The events happened. There is no changing that. The conscious memories we do have, we will not forget. They are imprinted now in our explicit memory.

And.

The body remembers too. That remembering shows up as anxiety and or depression. It shows up as a low tolerance for sudden and loud sounds. It shows up, for me, in my own yelly-ness.

However, the implicit memory of the body is something that can actually be reset. While the mind will remember forever the things that it does (barring any dementia in the future), the body can release the memories of trauma that lives within it.

This is true for all of us.

This resetting is not done quickly. It usually involves a lot of discomfort and moving out of our own norms and ways of doing and being. Often times things may feel like they are getting worse before they get better. And sometimes we reach a point of wishing we’d never started down this journey of processing the trauma that lives in our bodies and being.

Life can be challenging, even hard. Often there are discussions out in the greater world, as well as in our private lives, that are uncomfortable and even triggering. Add to this the fact that sometimes our anxiety ramps itself up without any obvious cause and well, our daily lives can be challenging at best.

There are times where we forget all we know about how to self-regulate and self-soothe. There are times that we need someone else to help us reset. There are times of lots of tears and actually feeling some pretty intense feelings.

Which is to say, that while we may have processed a lot of the trauma that lives within us, there is (always?) still more work to do. And also, life happens to all of us and sometimes we just have bad days or weeks or months.

And.

While it is true there are times that we can’t access all the things we know about self-soothing and self-regulating, with practice there will be more times that we are able to access at least some of what we know and utilize the tools we have worked so hard to ingrain in our mind and body.

Here’s an important thing to note however: there is a difference between calming our nervous systems and not feeling our feelings.

Stuffing our feelings, not allowing them to be expressed in some way, is not the same as calming, soothing, or resetting our systems.

While it is true that we may be able to calm our anxiety and bring ourselves back from our amygdala, it is also true that we are also able to cry and feel sadness.

We can both feel sad and have our nervous system regulated at the same time, is what I’m trying to say.

Sometimes I think we are sold a bill of goods on what it means to process our trauma, or to heal our brain stems, or to reset our nervous systems. Doing these things does not mean we will not feel intense sadness. It does not mean we will only ever be happy shiny people.

Having a healthy nervous system does not stop us from feeling grief. Or fear.

What it does is allow us to feel those emotions, and the sensations that go with those emotions, and still remain present in our bodies and in the present moment.

In fact, I would argue, that having a healthy nervous system, one that is not in a constant activated state of fight/flight/freeze, may mean we actually feel those emotions more intensely. Because we stay with them in the now. Because we literally are able to feel them in our bodies. Because we are no longer stuffing them down or disassociating from what is happening within us.

I believe this is an important thing to note:

At times, having a healthy nervous system may actually mean we feel worse.

BUT.

That feeling worse, is momentary. It isn’t a constant state. It will pass.

AND.

That sense of feeling “worse” is actually part of the resetting. It is part of learning to actually feel the emotions and sensations that we have been ignoring for so long. It is part of learning that we can feel our feelings and not be flooded or overwhelmed by them, even if they feel overwhelming in the moment.

When we first start to do the work of trauma processing and coming home to our bodies, everything is new. Even the slightest sensations or emotions can feel intense. Not overwhelming, but intense. It is the newness of it all that can feel a bit “too much” even though in actuality our systems are not being activated or flooded in a trauma sense.

We can feel intense emotions and sensations and not be overwhelmed back into an activated state.

Feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body is not the same as being triggered into a trauma state.

Over the last few years there have been more and more times where I have felt all those emotions and sensations. It is not fun. I have cried a lot of tears. AND I was not in a fight/flight/freeze state. It is true at some points I was not verbal, and often being in our emotions is a non-verbal state and so we find other ways to express ourselves (crying, art, cleaning, movement, etc). It is true that when our nervous systems are activated that we can become more flooded when we feel our emotions and sensations.

It is true that being non-verbal is also part of having activated nervous systems and being in a fight/flight/freeze state. It is true that a sense of overwhelm is part of having the trauma living within us triggered and activated.

And.

It is also true that with time and processing, we learn the difference between feeling our feelings and becoming or being flooded or overwhelmed or triggered.

We learn to tolerate uncomfortable sensations and emotions without going into a fight/flight/freeze state. We learn that feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body isn’t dangerous or life threatening.We learn to hold ourselves and allow ourselves to be held.

It takes work and time. In many ways it has taken me years and in others mere months to be where I am now. To be able to feel intense sadness without becoming lost in a forever downward spiral. To be able to feel both the intensely uncomfortable and intensely pleasurable sensations of my body without going into a trauma triggered state.

I now have a sense of freedom and safeness within myself that I had not had for most of my life. And it is amazing, even when feeling some of these emotions and sensations isn’t always pleasant.

This sense of freedom is something I want for everyone. The journey to this place is not easy; it is filled with challenges and discomfort. It is also filled with rewards and peace. And I believe it is all worth it.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly newsletter in January 2018 and has been edited for publication here. To receive my most current essays you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

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