Embodiment – Page 2

Learning and relearning to trust our Self

May 27, 2019 By gwynn

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.  ~Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.  ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Within you is a fountain of wisdom. And you sell yourself short every time you allow some authority to define your limitations and cage your potential. Even if that authority lives in your head.  ~Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

Sometimes there are things we know. What our next steps are. Decisions that need to be made. Changes that need to happen. We know, deep down in our bones and being.

And yet. We don’t listen. Or we don’t want to listen.

Because the change feels to big. Because the process feels too painful. Because there is a part of us that doesn’t want the change, wants things to go back to the way they were.

Also because we were taught, from a very young age not to trust ourselves. Not to trust our own inner knowing.

So we look for ways out.

We look to signs from the Universe, the cards, the songs on the radio, the grocery store clerk. We ask everyone under the sun what they would do.

We talk ourselves in circles trying to find any way we can to not do the thing we know we need to do.

We do all this in an effort to avoid doing what we know we need to do.
We don’t listen to our own inner truth.
We seek answers outside of us when they are screaming at us from within.

We do this to avoid pain, discomfort, the unknown.
We do this out of fear.

We do this to try and escape the grief that is welling up inside of us.
Or the hurt.
Or the anger.
Or the frustration.
Or all of the above.

Regardless of the whats or whys, we don’t listen to our Self. We don’t listen to our Truth.

We stop our own metamorphosis.
We keep ourselves stuck.
We hide.
We put on fronts and masks.
We try to pretend everything is fine as it is.

But everything is not fine.

And if there is one thing that is constant and inevitable in our lives it is change.
Sometimes that means trying harder, trying different.
Sometimes that means letting go, surrendering, allowing.
It always means going outside our own comfort zones.
It means doing what we know we need to do.
Even if we don’t know what is on the other side.
Even if we are terrified of the process.
Even if it breaks our hearts that things need to be the way they need to be.

Trusting ourselves, trusting our own knowing, is no easy task. It is not something we learn to do, in fact it is something we were born with knowing and then it was taught out of us. We were conditioned to trust others over our own Self. We were told we don’t know what is best for us or our own lives. We were trained to seek answers outside of us and to never look within.

But here’s a thing: we were born knowing how to trust our Self. We were born with the knowledge of how to connect with our own innate wisdom. We were born listening to our own needs, wants and truths, and never, ever questioning them.

We were born with a blind faith in ourselves.

I don’t know that we can, or should, get back to that blind faith. I am a deep believer in curiosity, questioning, analyzing, and understanding. I believe we should always check in with ourselves and see if there are shadow pieces, hidden motivations, unconscious agitators, to what we see as our truth, as our knowing.

And all of that requires deeper looking within. Not outside. Within.

And a willingness to actually trust ourselves. And then to honor that trust and do what we know we need to do.

/../
This was originally written for my weekly newsletter in September 2018 and was edited and updated for publication here. To receive my most current essays you can subscribe here.

Learning to tolerate pleasure

May 9, 2019 By gwynn

A revolution is the solution.
Sex is not the enemy.
~Garbage, Sex is not the enemy

If you want to break through to the multi-orgasmic level, you have to be willing to kind of push through something that feels like discomfort the first few times.
~adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism

A couple weeks ago I wrote you about learning to tolerate enjoyable emotions as well as uncomfortable ones. Today I want to hone in on the feelings – emotions and sensations – of pleasure and how it does take work to learn to enjoy them.

A little over a week ago I wrote this on IG:

For the last couple years I’ve been unraveling, exploring, and reclaiming the idea, emotions, and sensations of pleasure. This started with my own personal therapy, coming into my body, learning to tolerate all the different feelings that swirl within and throughout me.
It hasn’t all been about sex, though that’s been a part of it most definitely. It’s also been about resting (and taking naps) when I not only need it, but also when I simply want it. It has been about reading and writing. It’s been about watching shows and movies I enjoy. It’s been about being in environments that are calming and soothing or if my mood wants it energizing. It’s been about being around people who feed me: emotionally, intellectually, physically. It’s been about allowing myself to experience, on a deep and visceral level, happiness.
There have actually been times that I have been so overwhelmed with happiness that I cried, sobbed. Learning to regulate “positive” emotions is just as intense as learning to regulate the generally less desirable ones. We can use the same tools, and it also takes practice either way.
We aren’t taught how to tolerate pleasure, let alone enjoy it, anymore than we are taught to tolerate grief, anxiety, or anger. It is something we need to choose to learn. And learning to tolerate pleasure is as uncomfortable initially as learning to tolerate grief or sadness.
When I started this journey of coming home to my body over a decade ago I never imagined I’d come to a place of enjoying some of the sensations and emotions this life as a human has to offer. I just wanted to be a better mom and not yell as much. Now, while I still continue my work in part so I can be the mom I never had for my kids, it is at least equally if not more true I am doing this now for me, so I can thrive in my life and truly enjoy it.
I share this all to say, it doesn’t matter why we enter into this work. And we never know where it will lead us. What is important, I believe, is simply that we enter into it.

Pleasure isn’t only about sex and sexuality. Pleasure is also about joy. Pleasure is also about love. Pleasure is also about contentment, happiness, satisfaction. Pleasure is about feeling good in our own skin, in our work, in our relationships, in the world and in our lives. Pleasure is about feeling alive.

Part of our cultural conditioning and socialization is the demonizing of pleasure or those who seek and enjoy pleasure. In Christianity the Seven Deadly Sins are almost entirely about pleasure; specifically::

sloth (resting, going slow, enjoying the moment)
greed (wanting to be satiated, satisfied)
lust (sexual pleasure)
gluttony (satiating oneself, taking in until we feel ful(filled))
pride (feeling good in your own skin, feeling good about your accomplishments)

The other two, wrath and envy, can also be about pleasure, in that they show up when we chronically deny ourselves pleasure.

For those of us with complex trauma, any type of body sensation – even ones that are “normally” pleasurable – can feel uncomfortable, even gross or “icky”. Living outside our bodies is a matter of survival, and so feeling any type of sensation or emotion, be it painful or pleasurable, can overwhelm our systems.

Just as we need to learn to tolerate uncomfortable sensations and emotions in order to recalibrate our nervous system and fight/flight response, we also need to learn how to tolerate and enjoy pleasurable sensations so we can not just survive, but also thrive in our lives.

Another aspect of all this is allowing ourselves to slow down and enjoy our lives. We live in a culture that is all about busy-ness, that does not celebrate the slowing down, the doing nothing. If we aren’t accomplishing something, if we aren’t producing something, we are taught we then have little to no value or worth.

Many of us also have a need to “prove” our value and worth, due to the abuse and or neglect we experienced as children. We do this by hyper-performing; being the best at All The Things, and if we aren’t The Best then the thing isn’t worth doing. We constantly strive for approval and validation from others, be they “superiors” or peers, and in this striving we also do not allow ourselves rest or enjoy who and where we are now.

So not only are we not able to enjoy pleasure because we are unable to tolerate sensations in our body, we also have a generations old narrative about how pleasure is bad and if we partake in pleasurable experiences then we are also bad.

As we come into our bodies we can also begin to unravel these narratives and do a bit of rewiring in our brains. It is true that I strongly believe in the importance of body-centered trauma work; and it is also true that in tandem we need to use cognitive and verbal ways to reinforce new messaging.

I often encourage my clients to argue with themselves. When they have a “negative” or harmful thought about themselves to fight back and remind themselves that no, that is not true and this helpful statement IS true. Then after a minute or two of the back and forth to move onto something else – be it a nervous system exercise to focus on or any other task to disrupt that thought that is causing us harm.

We can do this with any of the non-helpful narratives we have within our psyches, including those around pleasure. Yes, we need to also be learning how to tolerate the physicality of the emotions and sensations that go with these narratives; and we also need to grow some new neuropathways, and the only way to do that is through our actual thought process.

I am learning the importance of pleasure in my own life, for myself and for those who matter most to me. The importance of doing what feels good to us, be that the food we eat or the clothes we wear or the ways we move our bodies or explore our creativity or yes, experience our sexuality. It is a shift from just getting through each day to actually enjoying my days – perhaps not every single moment because life, but enjoying more and more moments nonetheless. It is the difference between surviving and thriving.

I highly recommend we all find our ways to thriving and including more pleasure in our lives, whatever that may look like for each of individually. It is a process, it takes time and practice and patience, and I so deeply believe it is worth it.

This was originally written for my weekly newsletter 5, May 2019. It has been edited for publication here.

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On Anger

April 22, 2019 By gwynn

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. ~Joe Klaas, Twelve Steps to Happiness

Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness. ~Viktor Frankl

In the Unleashed Woman Book Club call a couple years ago we got to talking about the idea of “going with the flow”. The conversation was inspired by a FB post by Toi Smith. Toi wrote ::

“silence is beautiful.

not speaking up is sexy.
going with the flow makes you tolerable.
doing everything without complaint makes you loveable.
making yourself always available is the expectation.

-love letter to women from patriarchy”

We talked about all the ways we have been trained and conditioned to go with the flow. To not speak up. Eventually this led to a conversation about anger.

A couples therapist recommended a book to my now ex-husband and I about anger when we were trying to find ways to save our marriage. It’s not really an anger management book per se, but it talks about all the ways anger is bad for us and how it “destroys our lives” (that’s a direct quote from the book).

I’m guessing you can imagine my response to this book. Wanting to throw it across the room was the most tame of my responses.

I did skim through it. There were some interesting, and perhaps in the right context, valuable exercises. But the premise that anger will ruin our lives had me rolling my eyes and wanting to burn the book.

In general my issues with the book, beyond this uninformed premise, are:

1. It does not come from a trauma-informed perspective
2. It does not come from a systems perspective
3. There is not discussion of the neuroscience or neurobiology of anger (it did talk about the physiological affects of anger)
4. Because it does not come from a systems perspective, it does not tie anger to social/political/institutional reasons for anger
5. There is zero discussion of epigenetics and how anger (or other unprocessed by our ancestors emotions) may be passed down
6. It did not offer any somatic-informed approaches (it only talked about the mind and thoughts)
7. It was written by three white middle aged men with PhDs who I am assuming are at least upper middle class in economic status and carry with them all the privilege that comes with this.

Again, admittedly I only skimmed the book, however the general sense I got was that anger is bad. And there was no science to back up their claim.

(That said, again, the exercises in the book, which are mindfulness based, could be helpful for people in processing some anger and in helping to control their (potentially harmful) actions that stem from anger. We can’t always throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if the baby is mostly made up of elitist and privileged bullshit).

I have become very weary of anyone who claims that anger is always a “bad” thing. Or that is it always destructive (and in these cases destruction = bad. My view is that often destruction = good, growth, change. But that may be another conversation for another day). That we should move past anger as quickly as possible. That anger will “destroy our relationships and our lives”.

Anger, as I have shared before, is an active emotion. It needs movement. It requires physical, emotional, and cognitive movement.

What this means, is that when we are in the height of anger, we do need to physically do something to help release it. This could be going for a walk or run, screaming into a pillow, punching a pillow/punching bag/mattress/cushion, doing jumping jacks/pushups, running up and down stairs, etc. Once enough adrenaline and cortisol (two chemicals that are produced by our bodies when we are stressed, which includes when we are angry) is burned off, we can then move into calming practices, like the nervous system soothing exercises I share with you each week. But those chemicals have to be burned off and begin to flush out of our systems first otherwise our nervous system will stay activated and we won’t be able to fully connect to our frontal lobe (where logic and empathy live).

It also means that when we are angry, not in a rage, more that we are simmering, that we can use this anger as a motivator for action and change.
It means it can be an encouragement to have those difficult conversations with our partner about how they have hurt us, or those difficult conversations with our boss about how we aren’t compensated fairly, or to make difficult decisions that will change the trajectory of our lives.

Sometimes there are other emotions beneath our anger. Sometimes there is sadness, grief, frustration, hurt, betrayal, or any other number of emotions. And it is important to be self-aware and to recognize when our anger is protecting us from some of those even more challenging emotions, particularly those of hurt, betrayal, and grief.

And it also is true that sometimes we are simply angry.

Angry because of any number of injustices that take place daily in the world and possibly even in our lives.

Our rage is valid.

Historically speaking and present day speaking.

When we take the opinion that anger is a “bad” or “negative” emotion or that it will “destroy our lives” then our tendency is to shut our anger down (or at least to try). To stuff it. To ignore it. To pretend we aren’t really angry at all.

Let me tell you something, that doesn’t work out so well in the end.

Remember how I said anger is an active emotion? It will come out, even if you (try to) stuff or shut it down. It will show up as:
• stomach/gastrointestinal and/or digestive issues
• depression
• anxiety
• chronic pain
• chronic illness
• mood swings
• irritability

It will manifest itself, in one way or another. And you can choose to try to ignore it, or you can meet it, shake its hand, and find ways to release, process, and be (positively) motivated by the anger.

Anger in and of itself is not bad.

Sometimes how we act when angry can be harmful to both ourselves and others. And finding ways to release, process and be motivated to healthy action is important. I am in no way condoning physical, emotional or psychological violence to ourselves or others using the excuse that we were angry.

We can all learn to find that space between “stimulus and response,” to expand it and find our ways to responding to and with our anger in appropriate ways.

And, because sometimes some people act inappropriately, or even in harmful ways, when angry, does not mean that anger itself is “bad” or will “destroy our lives.”

Anger can be our way of protesting the status quo. It can be our way of saying we will no longer go with the flow. We will no longer be compliant and complicit. We will use our voice and our intelligence and our resources to promote justice, to demand justice.

So, remember::
Our rage is valid. It is the culmination of generations of rage that has been suppressed and passed down. What we choose to do with this rage, well, that is up to each of us, individually and collectively.

/../
This essay was originally written for my newsletter in September 2017 and has been edited for publication here.

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Trust, needs, vulnerability, & Complex Trauma

April 11, 2019 By gwynn

What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful. ~Brene Brown

What happens when people open their hearts?
They get better. ~Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important. ~Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy. ~Frank Crane

I’ve been feeling a lot lately. Emotions and sensations swirling around in me, creating chaos, or perhaps expressing the chaos, within. They have been happy, joyful, pleasurable feelings on the one hand. And completely terrifying on the other.

Terrifying because they are new and different.
And.
Terrifying because I am actually feeling them.

And terrifying because I am beginning to be emotionally vulnerable with another person. I am learning what that actually looks and feels like. I am doing it in small steps and most certainly keeping much still to myself, and also with each little step of expressing my emotions to them, I am finding new, not harmful ways, of caring for myself and the overwhelming feelings of all the experiences I am having.

I’m trying on adulting.
Clearly stating boundaries.
Telling the person how I feel around them.
Not running and hiding or putting all my armor on with extra reinforcements.

It has not been easy. I have probably misstepped. I know I have gotten caught up in conversations in my own head that didn’t go well and lead me to tears (hello INFJ).

And still. I am doing things differently. Which is new and different and feels strange and yes, is terrifying in moments.

As humans we have very real needs of attachment and belonging. We actually need to feel loved, adored. We need to be respected in having our autonomy and our autonomy needs to be not only respected and accepted but also rejoiced and celebrated. We need to be physically safe, and also we need to feel emotionally and psychologically safe. We need to feel connected, understood by another, and to feel they feel connected to and understood by us.

Having these needs met, to even a minimal degree, allows us to survive as infants and children. They are absolutely necessary for survival. In some ways it doesn’t matter who meets these needs. Ideally it would be our primary caregivers, but it can be secondary, or even tertiary caregivers. And we only require these needs be met just enough for our actual survival.

That means as children we can be neglected, abused, disregarded most of the time, but as long as there are moments of feeling like a person, even our abusers, actually care for us, we will survive.

As adults, the needs are the same, but the requirement to have them met for our survival isn’t as dire. As adults having these needs met means the difference between simply surviving and beautifully thriving in our lives.

We all have these needs, and yet expressing them can be incredibly delicate and feel overwhelmingly vulnerable.

And vulnerability in our culture is considered a weakness.

And when we have had childhoods where there was abuse and or neglect, expressing our vulnerability could have literally meant our deaths.

So. What are we to do, as adults, with our wounding, our pain, our fear, our trauma, to have our needs actually met?

First I want to note that it is important that others meet our attachment needs, yes. That is part of thriving in our lives and being in a loving relationship. However, it is equally important that we know how to meet these needs for ourselves too. That we are able to build our resilience when those we love inevitably hurt us in some way.

I say inevitably because we are all human. We all cause unintentional harm. We all have our own “stuff” that we need to work through. And so, part of being open to a loving relationship where another meets many of our attachment needs also means that we are open to them sometimes hurting us. It also means that we will inevitably hurt them also. What matters here is how we come back into relationship through repair.

When we are able to process the traumas we have experienced as children and are able to come back into our bodies, we learn what it actually means to fully experience our emotions and their correlating bodily sensations. We begin to learn how to titrate so we don’t go into overwhelm. We learn how to hear our bodies long before they are screaming at us.

And.

We learn to trust ourselves. To have compassion for the people we’ve been and the person we are today. As we learn to trust ourselves, we can also begin to trust others.

Learning to trust another is yet another piece of our trauma processing. So many of us were abused and or neglected by our primary and or secondary caregivers, starting at such early ages. These experiences train us to distrust those we love and those who express that they love and or care for us. Part of our trauma processing is also allowing these old distrusting neural pathways to atrophy while we build new paths that allow for us to trust, and know who to trust in the first place.

It is important to note we need to be connected to the feelings – emotions and sensations – of our body to move into deeply trusting relationships. Being embodied means we can actually hear the appropriate alarms, and trust that they are correct and act accordingly when it comes to relationships. It also means that we can trust another when those alarms don’t go off.

And once we can trust another, then we can begin to be vulnerable with them.

Being vulnerable with another person is terrifying. We are opening ourselves up to being hurt by them. We are also opening ourselves up to being loved by them and see what it feels like to be truly respected and adored.

It’s not easy. We will have many missteps. We will dip our toes in and share something deeply vulnerable and then immediately pull our toes back out and maybe even take several steps back or run away and hide for a bit. With practice this sharing of ourselves, the more raw and vulnerable pieces, becomes easier, but perhaps never totally easy (I have no idea actually, I’m still in the dip my toes in and try not to run away and hide stage!).

And before we can share our feelings, we actually need to be able to feel them.

/…/

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To learn about my six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors go here. The next cohort begins April 15.

Wanting

April 8, 2019 By gwynn

I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.~Stanley Kubrick

The problem for a lot of people is that they don’t really know what they want. They have vague desire: to ‘do something creative’ or to earn more money or ‘to be free’, but they can’t really pin down what it is precisely that they want. So they drift from one thing to another, enjoying some moments and hating others, but never really finding fulfillment or success. (..)This is why it’s hard to lead a successful life ( whatever that means to you) when you don’t know what you want.~John C. Parkin, F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way

Over the last year plus I’ve been exploring the idea of want, and specifically what I want. What I want in my family life, in my friendships, in a lover and partner, for my work, for me and how I am in the world.

I’ve been trying to tease out what makes me feel good, what fulfills me, what satiates me, what satisfies me, what is pleasurable. What some would say makes me “happy.”

It’s been a challenge, to say the least. I know what I do NOT want. That is easy. The list can go on and on. But what I want? Actually want? I don’t know. Not consciously. At times it feels almost impossible to connect to.

We are taught in our puritanical patriarchal culture that wanting, particularly female wanting, is bad. Evil in fact.

Good Girls™ don’t want. And well, we all need to be Good Girls™, right?
Because Good Girls™ get husbands who protect them and provide for them and their children. (There was a little bit of vomit that came up in my mouth as I was typing that there.)

If we grew up in any sort of conservative, or even liberal, religious community (be that family or neighbors or both) we have an added layer of what wanting means:
It means the destruction of the Garden of Eden.
It means chaos unleashed on the world.
It means our personal damnation and the destruction of the world.

And so. We learn not to want. Or at least, to not really want. We learn to stuff our wants down. To ignore them. To pretend they don’t exist. Maybe we learn to vaguely want vague things like the quote above states. But to know, deeply and truly, what we want? Well that is not something most of us know how to connect to. Because we never learned how.

To acknowledge our wants, to connect to them, to know them deeply, is an act of rebellion, yes, and it is also an act of deep vulnerability.

Most of us can make a long list of all the things we don’t want. It is easy to wrinkle our noses at things and to know our Noes, in many ways. Knowing what we don’t want is a defensive act. It is an act of connecting to our knowing, yes, but at a more surface level. There typically isn’t a lot of vulnerability in saying No to something or someone. When we say no, we aren’t in a place of needing or desiring something within us to be fulfilled. In fact when we say no, we are saying we don’t need that thing or person to fulfill us.

To want however, is to notice the lack. To notice what is missing. To know what could fulfill us on any type of level. It also means, typically, that we need to either rely on another in someway to fulfill that want, or we need to do something different for ourselves, to change a way of being, to break a pattern or cycle, to fulfill that want.

What does it mean to connect to that want, that desire, that need for fulfillment? Well, in our culture, it means we are Selfish. And NOT Good Girls™. In fact, it means we are Bad Girls™.

And we all know what happens to Selfish Bad Girls, right?

Historically speaking they are ostracized. Or slaughtered. Or both. Bad Girls™ don’t receive safety, or protection, or security. They are shamed. Used as a cautionary tale. Callously pushed out of the inner circle and community.

I’ve thought about my own social and familial conditioning in regard to wanting. In regard to knowing what I want. In knowing that my wants can change. That I can think I want something, try it out, and then decide I don’t. I’ve thought about all the ways I’ve been told to want is to sin. That wanting is selfish. That I should be grateful for what I have.

Where I’m left is…
Curious.
Sad.
Frustrated.

In a space of…
Unearthing.
Unraveling.
Unlearning

I’m left in this space of connecting to the things I know I want. Some may be very surface level (like I want a roof over my head and food in my fridge). Some are a little deeper than that (like I want to feel good in my skin, to be resilient, to know deep my being that This Too Shall Pass).

Some of my wants, I’m finding, are deeply vulnerable. I want to feel wanted. I want to feel loved. I want to feel connected. I want to be told I’m amazing, smart, funny, beautiful. I want time with the people who matter most to me, and those who are becoming to matter most to me. I want physical contact, sexual and non. I want quiet space to be with myself, both in the company of others and in solitude. I want to feel joy. To feel complete within myself while also being deeply connected with others.

I find myself in this unraveling what it means to want and what it to feel, viscerally, the things I want.

I find myself seeing that wanting isn’t always straight forward. It isn’t always this or that. It is sometimes a both and of wanting polar opposites. It is sometimes needing to rely on others to have my wants fulfilled. It sometimes means looking deep within myself, at the hidden places, the forbidden places, and bringing them to light so I can see where the emptiness is and find ways to fill it, to fulfill it, to fulfill me.

It is not always easy. It is not always fun. It has been an adventure. To figure out what I want through trial and error, exploring this and that. Connecting to the wants that feel right, honoring them. And to knowing that this may be only what I want right now.

None of this makes me selfish. Or a Bad Girl™.

It makes me human, stumbling along her way, along side you, as we learn to unearth and unravel and unlearn.

Since I wrote the original of this essay, I have not only learned what my wants are, I’ve found them fulfilled in my life in the most unexpected ways. My own opening to possibilities, to understanding my own worth and deserving, to stop settling for less than because it’s easier. It has been an interesting and exciting journey, finding myself back to me, exploring my wants and seeing how some of them are actual needs. Finding connections with people I least expect, and learning how to express my wants in ways that are honest, but not demanding, vulnerable, while also knowing I am strong and resilient. It is a journey, and I’m still one it and may be for the rest of my life. And it’s a journey that is becoming more fun, more exciting, more filled with possibilities every day.

…

This was originally written for my weekly newsletter in July 2017 and has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent writing, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

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