Happy Sunday!

Mindy and I have been engaged in a lively conversation about this project because we want to double down on what’s working for us and those of you engaged. We’re very appreciative of what this project has brought into our life: a chance to collaborate, an opportunity to better know the mind of the other, and the lovely experience of so many of you reaching out to share with us what’s resonated or resulted from engaging with our thoughts.

This week, Mindy reflects on how her relationship with writing and self-reflection has shifted this past year, a practice she started as a child living alone and a practice that took on a rather anxious tone after getting married.

As we look at continuing this project, we’ve decided that the more blog-style, free-form ideas will decrease to make space for Mindy and me to collaborate on topics we will seek to flesh out individually and together over about a month. Likely, this will look like a longer issue in one week and a brief issue on the alternating weeks where we share the stuff we’re engaged with that’s helping us think into ideas.

This feels like a natural evolution and was something we thought about doing when we started this project, but we needed to build some momentum. Probably, we need to work through the process we went through to be better situated to collaborate. We also needed to learn more about how we think and process.

It feels good to have stuck with this project, even though we struggled a bit the past few months. My career as an entrepreneur keeps reminding me that all projects require awkward phases filled with no knowing and that we learn by doing. It has also shown me that the awkwardness isn’t always apparent from the outside, so it’s best to stick with it, trusting that the process of delivering something will improve as long as the results are appreciated.

We’re very appreciative of how encouraging and kind you’ve all been throughout this past year. 

—David/Gonzo

My relationship with writing has changed since summer. I was reflecting earlier today on this and trying to figure out how to capture it in words. Here’s my attempt. 

Something that has been reiterated to me over and over the past few years is the power of waking up to our unconscious patterns. Most people really do live most of their lives in a sort of autopilot, reactionary trance. So many of our reaction patterns are formed when we are young, and we go through life like a pinball; being battered and bumped and boinged by the flippers, bumpers and poppers that show up in life. Our reactions seem normal to us because they come naturally, and it’s difficult to imagine a different way of being. And a part of us is invested in keeping us running that way. Especially if we were raised in a household that utilized shame for behavior control. We don’t want to have to look at our motivations or fears or desires because there is a chance they might reveal that we are bad. 

Growing up, I was the youngest by 6 years. This meant by the time I was an adolescent, I was the only child at home. My parents were not available emotionally, so my go-to strategy for handling my emotional life was to process it alone, often via writing. I filled up pages and pages of journals. This was my normal, so I didn’t think much of it at the time, and had no real awareness of the patterns it was creating in me.  Only over the past year or so have I woken up to the realization that my childhood patterns made it really difficult for me to engage with David verbally to try and discuss issues or solve problems. I simply had so little practice doing so. And worse than that, growing up I had a lot of experiences of negative emotional discussions, in which I was yelled at, not listened to, told to stop crying, etc. My body remembered all of that, even if I wasn’t aware of the effects on a conscious level. And over our twenty years of marriage, David had understandably been frustrated with the way I would so often shut down during these discussions. Due to his own childhood modelling, he wasn’t any more aware of his negative patterns than I was, so he’d see me withdraw and shut down and he’d panic and push harder for engagement. So we created a lot of additional trauma that piled on the old stuff. 

As David and I have both tackled working through a lot of our own shit the past few years, we have tried various hybrid methods where we talk and write to each other as needed. Last fall I became aware of a pattern that showed up while we were working through a particularly thorny issue. I noticed as I was writing, both stuff in my journal and stuff to him, that my “solutions” to the problem were very much dependent on me and me only. I saw that it came from a place of feeling like I was really the only one who I had to rely on, and that I couldn’t really ask anyone else for help. I realized how much of my writing (both to myself and to him) was an effort to build a case to justify my feelings and actions, because I needed his validation and acceptance in order to feel good. If only he understood where I was coming from, then he’d be on board with my ideas or would see that my way of acting/feeling made sense. 

Fast forward to this last summer, and I woke up to the realization that there was a part of me that felt sure with the right information and diligent effort I could “fix” myself, then I’d be a joy to live with and I’d feel happy the vast majority of the time. I do still believe that the right information can change your life, but I finally saw how much this belief that I needed “fixing” was costing me. When triggers would show up and I’d have a hard time, I felt like all my efforts had been for nothing. I used the tools I’d learned to beat myself up because it didn’t seem to matter how much I learned – I still sucked, I still messed up, I still felt shitty. I saw that I viewed my feelings as problems to be solved. One way I liked to try and solve them was by convincing David not to do things that brought up feelings I didn’t like. Another way was to avoid getting too close to some of the feelings. Melancholy and sadness I especially preferred to give a wide berth. I woke up to the realization that most of the time emotions don’t need to be solved. The analogy of emotions as weather works really well here for me. It’s raining today, and I don’t need to solve the rain. It’s going to rain for a while, and then it will stop. But I can burn through a lot of energy and exhaust myself fighting, resenting, or shaming myself for the rain. Seems dumb though. I was happy to find that writing poems, or rather thinking of poems, some of which end up getting written, was a really powerful way to attend to my emotions without solving them. I could engage my mind in the task of searching for words and phrases that captured as much as possible the essence of what I was feeling. This effort gave my mind something constructive to do, rather than its old habit of shaming me or trying to “solve” my feelings. And poems seemed to help my heart feel cared for and seen. I didn’t feel the same compulsion to write paragraphs and paragraphs trying to justify my feelings or make a case, either to myself or to David. 

The final relevant insight I’ve woken up to that has affected my relationship with writing is this: I’ve realized just how incredibly varied everyone is. (In particular, studying the enneagram has been helpful to better understand core motivations and fears of different people.) I am so grateful for the useful tools and information that have shown up in my life, often at what seemed like the exact perfect time. I used to think that they could benefit everyone, and I felt a sort of missionary zeal to share them. Now I have to be honest and confess that it seems pretty random, the stuff we bump into that ends up being helpful. Or maybe it just looks random from this vantage point–I’m open to cosmic alignments and all that. I only have so much energy and bandwidth, like we all do, and I just don’t know if writing long form essays about stuff really appeals to me right now. I don’t feel like I’m going to convince anyone of anything, and I don’t know if I have it in me to spend a couple hours working on something that doesn’t feel rich & juicy to me while I’m creating it. Especially compared with the way I’ve felt over the past few months when a poem comes to me–it feels alive and fleeting and magical. What I find I really love about poetry is that it seems to leave so much room for interpretation. It’s almost like just catching a whiff of a smell, maybe it connects with something inside of you, maybe not. But when it does, it can be so rich and powerful. 

This newsletter project has been a really lovely thing to work on with David, so I think I’d like to figure out what it could look like in a way that feels fun and interesting to work on. I also trust that it’s fine for it to morph and evolve–there are no rules! 

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After writing this out, David and I took some time to discuss what we’d like to work on for the next year with regard to this newsletter. I’m excited about the things we are going to try. Thanks for joining us on this journey. 

-Mindy

NEAT!

Stuff we think is neat enough to share! (David⚡️ & Mindy✨)

• Visions by Tample was on repeat for me this week. 🎶✨

• I’ve been listening to The Expectation Effect and its full of fascinating studies and research on just how powerful our minds are—let’s use them for our own good! 📚✨

PARTING

WORDS

PIC

That’s all for this week! If you’re into this, share this newsletter with all your friends. Connecting with new subscribers is magical! 🧚🏻‍♀️

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.