slowing down is not the side quest
This week felt like the first true glimpse of Spring.
Two weeks of April showers (April sleet in Boston) were displaced by the sun shining and the temperature set to climb to a whopping 65 degrees by the afternoon.
I drifted towards one of my favorite downtown coffee shops around 9 am, feeling the energy of the morning commute radiating off pedestrians in business casual and hurried cars stopping halfway into crosswalks.
My headphones half-muted the bustle as I tuned into one of my favorite podcasts, Soul Led Living with Nikki Novo. This episode was Messages About Your Content Strategy.
As always, Nikki had fresh takes that felt like she was speaking directly to me. One of the messages prompted the questioning
Who are you creating for? Who is your content speaking directly to? If the aim of the creation was to nurture a conversation and connection with someone you love and care for – how does this shift the energy with which you show up?
If I’m honest, content strategy and content marketing overwhelm me. The sea of advice on how to surf the algorithm by posting this hook that many times a day to hit those conversion targets is infinite. The copy-and-pasted templates, sales funnels, and endless optimization software feel impersonal. They feel tired. I feel tired.
Certainly content strategy can be extremely thoughtful and effective.
But it’s not the strategy itself that’s working, it’s the energy underneath the strategy.
When the energy underneath strategy or any action for that matter is pushing, taking, grasping, contorting— the result is repulsion not attraction.
——
I feel avoidant towards marketing anything I create. I write for myself but keep it in the dark and feel unsatisfied. When I do share on occasion it’s from this attitude of here you have it, now I’m dropping off the grid…
Not because I expect no notes but because I fear the feedback.
What I’ve been judging outwardly (content strategy) is a reflection of my judgement internally. It’s not that I’m afraid of what other people will think when I post, I fear what I’m thinking and judging in me and projecting that out onto other people.
I’ve been pedestalizing creating content as the road to an autonomous, fulfilling, and successful career. I’ve viewed social media as the only place worth sharing.
I’ve attached to the belief that creativity and sharing anything I create are inextricably linked to showing up on social platforms.
Yet, creating and sharing from this place doesn’t feel correct or sustainable, it feels icky.
There is this imposing energy of ‘should’ underneath my approach. I should be creating content and posting it.
Sharing and social media should be mutually inclusive.
To this end, I create and don’t share. I get on myself for not following through, for being avoidant, for not going all the way.
At the other end of the spectrum, when I don’t feel lit up by creating in the ways I know how to create, I tend to force ‘creativity’. I push and push myself to take action from this place of lack, only to feel drained and insecure in putting anything out there.
I can no longer ignore that this action feels like the opposite of creative. This doing for the sake of saying, see I’m not lazy, I’m doing something, I’m trying, it comes from this place of taking, the energy of not having.
People feel it, it’s contorted, it’s performative, it’s maybe more misaligned and costly than the avoidance of sharing altogether.
——
I want to work with my energy rather than against it.
As humans we crave quick fixes and one and done answers, known is safe. How do I show up, how do I stay consistent? How do I create and share in meaningful ways that uplift and impact people? How do I ensure I’ll succeed in order to feel safe?
The truth we don’t want to hear is that there is no one rule or action we can apply to get these answers and then zone out. Truth is kinetic, not stagnant, it evolves with us.
The answers lie in meeting ourselves each day, each moment. The answers lie in getting quiet and still and un-distracted to hear what this exact moment is asking of us.
This is a constant tending to, meeting the moment.
Our minds want us to believe we are safest when anticipating outcomes, but we are only ever where our feet are. To be exactly here is the only way to ensure the quality of where you’ll be in the next moment.
——
Yet pulling back from all the mind-making-sense-of, sitting in the space between, facing the uncertainty head on, it feels triggering and oh so confronting.
I’m so afraid of the empty space, afraid of the non-doing, afraid of what it means about me to sit and wait in the stillness for that lit-up feeling that cannot be faked.
We’re told constantly that we must self-motivate. We’re praised from a young age for our ambition. We’re valued for our propensity to get up and grind and put on the can-do attitude most job descriptions praise.
Ambition is not the villain, but the way we project that ambition outwards as performance, as a proclamation of look how busy I am, is only enabling us to escape from sitting with dissatisfaction and discomfort that burble beneath the surface.
For me this has looked like abusing all the well meaning advice to get out there, make it happen, maximum effort = maximum action. These words have been my permission to keep moving, keep doing, keep running from what there is to hear in the silence.
If I just keep doing I’ll feel better, I’ll get there quicker. I’ll finally feel enough.
——
The shift isn't yet perceptible in popular culture, but busy is no longer the badge of honor we’ve beheld it to be.
Lazy is a great American sin.
An indulgence, a shame, a malfunction in need of repair or intervention to strengthen willpower. What if we’re not designed to be motivated all the time? What if what we’ve been perceiving as lazy is actually an internal alert that what we’re pursuing isn’t quite aligned?
The 15 year old version of myself who learned to equate being productive to feeling better about herself, being productive to climbing out of a hole of non-existent self esteem could not fathom this.
The 19 year old version of myself who completely stifled her creative instincts to pursue a degree in biomedical sciences because that was the smart, good, approved of, and secure road could not fathom this.
The 23 year old version of myself who moved to Boston under the impression that the rigorous and restrictive lifestyle she’d created throughout adolescence to stay busy would copy-paste to post grad life. She who believed that the bustle of a real job would fulfill her and keep her distracted enough to continue evading feelings of deep self-distrust and abandonment could not fathom this.
What would I create for them? What do I want them to know?
From this daily devotion to dismantling perfectionism
From this time of shifting paradigms and shedding what no longer feels like truth
From this space of creating because I feel excited to write today instead of because I need something to point at and say look I produced something please don’t judge me I’m already judging myself…
I would tell these versions of me what I forget and practice reminding myself day after day, moment after moment : Slowing down is not the side quest.
Slowing down is the entire story. Slowing down is the plot we’ve lost sight of while overwhelmed with never ending ways to distract and avoid what life is laying out in front of us.
We fear the stillness, the space, the silence – because it's entirely unfamiliar to most of us modern-dwelling, media-accessing human beings.
Because in this void surfaces all the feelings and truths we fear that once we see and hear we will not be able to unsee or find our way through.
Slowing down requires trust and faith.
Not religious faith or even faith in a higher power, faith in yourself works too.
Faith that whatever is in front of you holds the exact unlock to your next right step. By attending to whatever this moment meets you with, you’ll alchemize it into priceless wisdom.
Faith that if it’s placed in your path you are capable of doing just that.
——
Meeting empty space and the wisdom it reconnects us to is a sacred practice of plugging back in.
To paraphrase a recent interview from speaker and writer Marianne Williamson:
You’re not the light, you’re the lamp. It doesn’t matter your shape or size or color, what matters is that the lamp is plugged in. When you prioritize plugging in you make yourself totally available, and you know- not with the mind but with that resonance to a deeper intelligence -that it is something in you but not of you that does the sharing, the creating, the action-ing.
Trusting comes from knowing yourself, in the quiet moments, in the still moments. To know ourselves is to get familiar with our inner voice, and that voice comes in whispers. These whispers are no match for all the noise that chooses us each day if we don’t choose to tune into their quiet guidance.
It’s up to us to carve out space to listen and plug back in to our inner wisdom.
——
To younger me stuck in self-suppressing and self-abandoning behaviors like restrictive eating, silencing my creative capabilities, compulsively working out or ‘working on myself’, and shaping myself to feel like I belong– start by slowing down.
It is only in slowing down that you will begin to see how disconnected you are from your body, your authentic self, your true needs and wants and gifts.
This isn’t to make you feel bad, or overwhelmed.
This isn’t to diagnose yourself with a dysregulated nervous system, though true, and excuse a pursuit of more answers from outside yourself about how to fix it.
When you slow down you see that you can meet yourself in any moment, this moment included.
You can start right now.
You can choose to try a different way of moving through the world by chipping away at the perfectionism that claims otherwise, bit by bit.
It won’t happen all at once and you can’t force it to.
Seeing the darkness does not make you bad. Feeling the weight of the feelings rather than running from and resisting them is not a way out but a way through.
Rushing is a way of resisting. Making yourself busy and taking action out of fear, to grasp a feeling of self-worth, is not honorable but distracted.
The hard work is not working harder, the hard work is slowing down to see the holes you’ve punctured in your own cup while pushing your attention outwards to get the validation, answers, or truth from outside of you.
The process of patching up must come from the inside out.
Self awareness is nothing without self compassion.
While no outcome in life is certain, true certainty lies in injecting the faith that this, right here, in front of me is unfolding perfectly for me to attend to and engage with.
What are you running towards when the truth of the present moment is all there is, and that truth is always right in front of you? Slow down.
Slow down to feel safe enough to get curious.
Slow down to feel safe enough to create again.
Slow down to feel safe to begin rebuilding the foundation of connection to yourself.
We can only meet other people to the depths at which we’ve met ourselves.
To connect with people, experiences, and the joy life wants us to feel on the spectrum of feeling it all– we must first connect with ourselves.
It’s in this connection that we see and share our purely imperfect humanness. We unlock a self acceptance that ripples outwards and uplifts, dissolving barriers and shame and shadows.
That’s the plot.
And it’s on each of us to slow down before we wake up to realize we missed out on our story we were the main character of all along.