Watch above, read below, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
First: Shadow work, anyone?
Fun fact: I co-created a shadow-play group game called HEAT!
The game’s tagline is “Become Unfuckwithable. Play HEAT.”
You will indeed become evermore unfuckwithable if you play HEAT.
We’re hosting free public games on Zoom next Friday, Nov 1, at 1 p.m. EST, and next Sunday, Nov 3, at 3 p.m. EST. Come thru even just for a few minutes.
All info here!
And now, on to the essay!
At some point, we have to do something terrible.
Keep the baby. Or have an abortion.
Keep the consistent pay & benefits. Or quit the job.
Stay in the relationship or break up. Or stay in the relationship or break up the fucking family. Even the dog. The cats, too. Jesus.
These situations can be all the harder when the conditions aren’t awful: when you have the resources, when you’re not being beaten, cheated on, abused. When you just want…more. Or less.
And there are so many of these terrible things, these terrible decisions, the ones with no way that the eggs and everyone’s hearts don’t break.
What do we do when we have to do something terrible?
The kind of thing where, either way, we’re fucked, we’re bad people, we never thought we could do x-y-z? The kind of thing where, either they’ll hate us or we’ll hate ourselves, we’ll break them or we’ll slowly die inside, everyone is counting on us or we save ourselves?
First, we can know: we are not the first, and we will not be the last, to do a Terrible Thing.
Our pain, our agony, it is real. But it is not original to us.
We can marvel that goddamn, other people have felt this way? Others have walked around Target for purple dish detergent, others have murmured mechanical bullshit small talk with coworkers, others have asked after the kiddo’s homework, presenting as Normal&Okay, all as the Terrible Thing looms?
We can look at our fellow Target shopper in her schleppy sweatshirt, we can look at our coworker who won’t shut the fuck up, and we can wonder: is it possible that this person is in functioning agony, too?
And we can know, because it is happening to us, that yes, it is possible.
We can know, deeply, our humanity.
We can know we are not alone.
This is a good start.
But: what to do? What to fucking do?
We’re agonizing.
And we can’t pull the trigger.
We can’t bring ourselves to do the thing. We might not even be able to bring ourselves to know what to do.
Here’s what to do.
Notice you’re breathing.
What the fuck does that have to do with anything, Leslie? I know I’m breathing! I need solutions, bitch! Not some soft-ass breathing nonsense!
And yet.
Some softness is exactly what is needed now. Softness, precisely when there’s no time for it, no room, no possibility of it solving anything.
And softness happens only now.
And what is happening now?
Our breath.
But I have to do this thing now!
As Byron Katie says: Is it true?
Do you have to act in this right-right-right now? Like, are you signing paperwork here in the Target checkout line? Or are you putting the purple dish detergent and your other items on the moving conveyor belt like the ordinary asshole that you are, that we all are?
What you do have to do in this right now is breathe.
Like—you really actually have to fuckin’ breathe right now or you’ll be dead and then you’ll really have a problem on your hands.
So, try it out.
Notice you’re breathing.
Notice how your breath is coming into your body. Its speed. Its contours. Its texture.
Notice your resistance to slowing down.
Because you are slowing down.
Noticing you’re breathing is like a speed bump: it slows your ass down.
Now we have softness and slowness going for us.
And now, the thing will happen: we will feel.
We will feel our pain.
We’ve been in pain, yes, for sure. But we’ve been so busy doing something about it that we haven’t really let ourselves feel it.
Makes sense. What’s the point of feeling it, after all, because it feels terrible?
And yet. If we will feel our pain without doing something to it—going into thinking mode, trying to figure out what to do, panicking—if we will sit in the car in the Target parking lot and notice we’re breathing as the pain swells, if we will let that pain rise up, let it swell like a great watering blister, or let it mushroom like a giant pink marshmallow that fills the car, the parking lot, the neighborhood, the city, the galaxy…
If we will let our hearts for real-for real break, if we’ll just give up, even a little bit, or even for a little bit…
Then we can speak the truth.
We can say, “Holy fuck, I’m in enormous fucking pain.”
We can nod at this truth—this now-felt truth. (The nodding actually helps.)
There is something miraculous about this, our capacity, our body’s capacity, to be with our horror.
If we will stop to notice this miracle, if we will let ourselves be moved by our beingwithness:
Then we will have made way for the Big Guns, the main-stage strippers: Compassion! Sweetness!
And finally, finally, the thing we need even more than the Terrible Thing being over and done with, the thing that is most needed right now, can come through: we can be sweet, we can be compassionate, with ourselves. Toward ourselves.
And finally, armed with these mighty tools, we can offer ourselves the magical elixir we’ve been withholding: our gentleness.
We can do what we absolutely must in the midst of our fucked up swirling morass of absolute mess and messiness.
We can be nice to ourselves.
This self-niceness carries the profound consequence of space.
Being nice to ourselves at our messiest, it creates space.
And ohhhh is this space Good News. Like, it really might be the best news ever.
For this space is Space. Like, the big deal Space.
For this space, which becomes available with our self-niceness, our self-compassion, it returns us to the flow of life.
And our return restores our capacity to remember: yes, other people have been here. I’m not alone in my suffering.
And from there, we have capacity to remember, we can feel, that life does indeed love us, and will take care of us, wouldn’t dream of not taking care of us.
We can know that we don’t yet know what to do, or we can’t pull the trigger if we do know, because it isn’t time to know what to do. It isn’t time to pull any triggers.
We can know that when it is time, we will be ready.
We can know that if we are not yet ready, it is not yet time.
Perhaps best of all, we can know that the very best thing we can do right now is to chill the fuck out and drive the fuck home.
Just go home.
And as we humbly pull out of the Target parking lot, the sky darkening as it does this time of day, we can feel life, the very power of the multiverse, beside us in the passenger seat, loving us so hard, so fierce, stroking our arm, our cheek, telling us, I’m here, darling. I’m here.
Thanks so much for reading! Here’s your post-essay chaser.
Feel like more?
Check out my new essay called “What to do when you don’t know what to do” on my OnlyFam writer’s substack.
And don’t forget to check out HEAT.
Thank you again!
Share this post