forget about being inspiring

it's a trap

Warning: your crashout is approaching,

and don’t take my word for it.

Well, how do you feel? Are you gritting your teeth at night? Do you feel the empties at 3 - 4 pm? Do you say yes, of course, all the time? Do you tilt your head when you speak? Do you rise above the disrespect? Do you apologise a lot?

Do you clench your jaw? Are your shoulders bunched up and closer to your ears than necessary? Are you the one whose mistakes are always lessons, whose pain is always growth, and who says, “It’s fine”, or “Really, what can you do?”

That iteration of you has a shelf life. Why? Life crashes and burns. YOU crash and burn (and when you do, it’s magic). Your persona, your surest veneer, got too heavy, or something. I’m watching them enough of them collapse in public to know how this goes. I think this is what it is, guys - the standard was impossible from the start. I’m not talking about anyone in particular (or maybe I am 👀),

but if you are paying any attention to popular internet discourse right now, you may be seeing this play out in very public ways among advice-giving influencers, dating coaches, and controversial thought leaders. I have noticed in my (ahem) extensive YouTube research that usually, the louder and prouder a performance of all-knowingness, the shakier the foundation.

Here is what I know about having a story worth telling: you have to bump your head a few times first. It’s part of it. The bumping leaves a mark/scratch/graze or damn, a fracture, and it is, at times, debilitating/destabilising/fucking humiliating. Ain’t the kind you can explain away or reframe into quick content, either. It’s the kind that has to sit there being a mistake for a while before it becomes anything else. I have been there too,

and it’s a doozy, and I guess continues to be,

but guess what? The people who have never been allowed to bump their heads because the optics were wrong lose a lot, too. They have polished acts and thin material. You can feel it when you read/see/listen to them. All loud and bloodless. All never-ending scroll.

If you are doing daring and important work (and here we can include the giant work of being), your realness will sometimes come up against somebody else’s. That collision is not a problem to solve, nor evidence that you are too much or not enough, it’s just what happens with real blood, real tissue, real insides, guts and all. Those who can’t handle it were never really with you anyway.

Forget about being inspiring. Are you alive? Are you moving through the world? Are you getting up in the morning? Are you awake and sensitive to change? Do you ask questions? Do you listen? Do you open up your arms? Being inspiring is, then, a naturally occurring phenomenon once you tell yourself the truth,

and act in truth, so start there. You don’t have to craft a ‘perfect you.’ Rigidity is killing so many of us. There is so much more longevity in being yourself with the bumped head and the unresolved things and the sorry, I don’t have a clue yet, and the sentences that don’t always land¹. I want to say something, too, about the people we look up to, the ones who seem to have just gone for it without waiting. A lot of them are no better than you at whatever their thing is. They are not more talented, not more prepared, no more deserving, but they went for it. The gap between them and the people who are still waiting is not ability. You have to decide.

I’ve been talking a lot about granting yourself permission, but I must! I go on and on about it because that decision is not equally available to everyone. Still, you have to grab it. If you come from systems that taught you your ambition was presumptuous, waiting feels like the responsible thing, waiting until you reckon you’re qualified enough, until you’ve done enough work to justify taking up the space. Then, one day, the waiting has become your life.

Ooof. A lot of us carry the weight of the waiting as a personal failing, as evidence of something lacking in us, when it was never personal at all, only installed by systems, by families, by LIFE! Naming it as systemic helps because you can begin to identify something that was happening to you before you knew it. Then you can act. Hopefully.

So. Now That You Know, forget about being inspiring. Be here instead. Bumped head and all. Unresolved and bloody all. Still figuring it out and going for it before you’re ready, which is the only time that makes sense. The crashout that’s coming belongs to the old you.

I am in the middle of a personal glow-up that really needed to come.