Greetings from the wrestling match, friends! I must confess that I’ve been here at the ring for a little while, more than a fortnight. In fact, I was right here when last I popped in on you, but I wasn’t ready to admit it quite yet. I’m a very reluctant wrestler, you see. Singlets aren’t a good look for me, and I make a lousy fan, too. I’m most definitely no stan, no mark, not even a smark (sorry, Trump). Truth be told, I identify much more closely with the term “gentle forest creature.” I also resonate with “Hobbit,” save for the furry feet part.

My nervous system, as a matter of fact, consistently reveals itself to be most at ease when I’m away from the fray, wandering aimlessly through the woods in a rather worshipful way. Which reminds me that I wanted to share a little poetic morsel1 with you, written by the preeminent bard of all forest creatures, the late, great Mary Oliver. It’s worth the detour, friends. Trust me:

But despite my nature and my reluctance to part with Nature-nature, every now and then, I find myself heading for the nearest underworld arena to submit to the wrestling mat. It’s an utterly irresistible pull. Well, that’s not quite right, though. It’s more of a pull disguised as a push.

It begins as subtle sense of pressure building somewhere deep within — a sort of rumbling restlessness. Slowly, and much to my chagrin, I note that the predictably engaging, consistently interesting things in my life turn tedious. The previously pleasant becomes the perplexingly perturbing. Soon, nearly everything feels dreadfully scratchy.

As is the way with most humans, I don’t eagerly embrace this shift. Oh no, I do not. Instead, my first impulse is to do something I would never, ever advise anyone else do. I smother my own knowing in what amounts to a miasma of minimization:

Yet the pressure continues to build. And build. And build. Until finally, there’s a full-on needle scratch that puts an abrupt end to the soundtrack of self-gaslighting.

Now, you might be wondering if this isn’t just garden-variety burnout, especially because I’ve mentioned burnout more than once here. Or maybe you’re wondering whether I might not just be depressed. After all, there are plenty of good reasons one might be depressed right now, what with the world being a giant hazmat site and all.

I’ve wondered similar things, friends. Particularly because — like many of us — in November 2024, I flew like a bat out of hell into a relentlessly stiff headwind of existential dread. Then, with all the energy and time I didn’t have to spare, I went gangbusters trying to actively resist fascist takeover. And that particular combination of conditions is, by nearly all objective standards, the substrate in which depression and burnout thrive.

But I’ve got a decent amount of lived experience with both burnout and depression, and this…this is something different. It feels qualitatively distinct. It feels driven more by a desire for wholeness and expansion, less by desperation or despair. It feels like there’s a…a thing, or maybe things I’m meant to be doing that I’m not yet doing. And meanwhile, the existential game clock continues its merciless countdown. The whole phenomenon feels like what I’ve heard termed “divine discontent” or “sacred restlessness.”

To be sure, burnout and/or depression have sometimes been precipitating factors in my taking the first faltering steps of a personal hero’s journey. Indeed, they’ve often fluttered in like the metaphorical canary in the coalmine, heralding an imminent eruption. But not always have these states led to a major remodeling. Sometimes they’ve simply cued me to make smaller structural improvements of some sort. Like setting much-needed boundaries with myself or others.

As much as I initially resist these periods of restlessness, I’ve come to regard them as sacred seasons that I’m in no position to control. I can’t turn back winter, spring, summer, or fall, and I can’t stop these seasons from running their course, either. Instead, I try my best now to adapt to the weather and trust the cosmic choreography, which has an uncanny way of understanding my soul’s needs better than I do.

I’ve also come to see myself as the caterpillar that’s outgrown its skin. When restlessness strikes, it disrupts my momentum of stagnancy. It tells me to stop compulsively stuffing myself full of the familiar and step into the darkness of the cocoon, where I can dissolve, regroup and reimagine. I never know what I’m going to be like on the other side of the whole thing. Sometimes I haven’t even been sure there would be an “other side,” and I most certainly haven’t ever imagined I’d sprout wings. Yet every time I’ve gone through this process, I’ve “flown” in a way I couldn’t before. And every time, I’ve emerged with a deeper sense of both authenticity and belonging.

I shan’t subject you to my entire wrestling record here, yet I do feel a nudge to share a few examples of what seasons of restlessness have looked like for me. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration was also my first real encounter with divine discontent. I was 31 at the time, a Mrs. to a Mr. and a mother to a toddler. I drove a minivan, lived in suburbia and knew no queer folx. I was living a textbook cis-heteronormative life. And then I felt it: the rumble. At first it was subtle enough, buried as it was in the down-deep distance. But then it erupted into a firestorm of hail, lightning, locusts, the whole nine. Next thing I knew, I was coming out as queer and just about everything on my landscapes — inner and outer — had changed.

Fast forward 15 years, when I came out as trans, and it was nearly the same scenario. In between those comings-out, I got sober and that, too, was a process of dissolution and reconstitution that involved a rather hefty amount of sacred restlessness. You get the idea.

True to previous experiences, I’m not entirely sure what this current season of restlessness will bring, either. But I do feel sure that I’m meant to confront some as-yet unexplored part of my shadow, at a depth I’ve not yet plumbed. I also feel sure that whatever I’m seeking is also seeking me. And that whatever the underworld presents to me will be the next just-right thing and ultimately worth whatever sacrifice it demands.

And that, friends, leads me to make a little announcement. I’m planning some time away from Substack to undertake the journey to the center of my proverbial earth. My preliminary plan is to cocoon for the month of June. If I’m in your Substack feed, you may see an occasional “postcard” from me in you notes, but I shan’t be dropping any longer form posts here for the next several weeks (and if you’re a paid subscriber, please know that I’m turning off paid subscriptions until I return).

Until then, I leave you with all my best wishes. May your shadow give you just the right dose of your own divine discontent to help you find the vibrancy of your deepest longing.

keitharon.com

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Yep, I’m ready. If all goes according to plan, I’ll nimbly intercept each and every slippery Mother’s Day maneuver like a nunchuck-wielding, gender-bending ninja. Then, I’ll do what I must to keep it from penetrating and permeating my psyche. I’ve solemnly sworn to self that I shan’t allow this phantasm of a “holiday” to wring me out a single time more like some soft cloth used to wipe clean the apple cheeks of mother’s little cherubs.

I’ve learned my lesson about this the hard way, of course. For years on end, I watched myself slide helplessly into the bog of guilt, compare-and-despair, and over-compensation. These are the raw materials that fuel the commercial engine, not to mention the widespread (albeit largely invisible) angst of that dreaded 24-hour descent into the umbilical underworld commonly known as Mother’s Day.

For me — I’m guessing for many of us — this day has hit like a one-two punch. First, I never felt quite like I was paying adequate homage to my own long-suffering mother. Then, I never felt anywhere near worthy of the mother title, much less the celebration of myself as “queen for a day.”

When it came to honoring my own mother, I struggled to find the right Mother’s Day greeting, because card shops were peddling only the most pedestalizing praise. The syrupy sweetness of the available options left me feeling covered with the sticky residue of fakery.

While I loved my mom, I felt a great deal of ambivalence about our relationship. I deeply appreciated some of the ways she showed up for me in her maternal role and deeply resented others. And the truth is that there were many ways in which I really had to mother myself. I wasn’t looking for a card that would indict her, but I also wasn’t looking to deify her.

And as to my identity after having birthed my own kid? Well, that was bound tight by the same vine choking off my suppressed trans identity. It was also the same vine locking me into the facade of a cis-hetero-normative life I had styled after my mother’s, which she had styled after her own mother’s and on and on back through the matrilineage.

I came out as queer a little over two years into my motherhood tenure. And although it was years after that before I legally transitioned, my gender dysphoria was — had always been — there. And so had the need to figure out how to reconcile it with my role as my child’s birth mother. What should my child call me? How should I refer to myself? What should I do about Mother’s Day?

Over the years, there’s also been the complication of holding space for others’ confusion when they’ve confronted the conundrum of me vis a vis the mother/father “holidays.” Some who knew pre-transition me continued to wish me a happy Mother’s Day. Others, perhaps trying to show allyship, said nothing on Mother’s Day but wished me a happy Father’s Day. Some just ignored the whole thing. Rarely did anyone ask what might feel best for me…and none of it felt like a fit. *I* felt like I wasn’t a fit. The cognitive dissonance was profoundly painful.

Whew. Let’s set my story to the side for now and bottom line the Mother’s Day conundrum more broadly:

If we pause to really think about this, there are quite a load of reasons that the one-size-fits all celebration of Mother’s Day sets so many of us up for exclusion, feelings of inadequacy and, more often than we acknowledge, heart-ache. Here’s a short list, straight from my own think tank:

Not all who birth babies are female;

Not everyone who has a body that’s capable of birthing chooses to, and some who would choose to have bodies that can’t;

Some who have birthed children have lost those children for reasons beyond their control;

Some who have birthed children have not done so out of choice, and some have suffered great trauma in doing so;

Not all who birth children are nurturing to those children — some may be indifferent, abusive, neglectful, or all of these;

Many have nurtured and supported children in a way that culture considers “maternal,” yet have not birthed children of their own; and

We’re not all in agreement that birthing children is “the highest calling.”

What’s that you say? What about the fact that Mother’s Day, which in modern times began as a feminist anti-war effort, has been co-opted by consumer capitalism? Yeah, I know friends. There *is* that, too. The more I examine this for myself, the more I see how powerful the manipulation of the marketplace truly is. Its success rate in getting us to abandon our values is nothing if not stunning.

In fact, Mother’s Day really strikes me as a commercial dream come true. It sticks a red-hot poker right into the tender heart of all of our earliest attachment wounds, then promises a variety of performative antidotes we need only apply for a single day each year. A bargain, on the whole, no? Drop a bunch of cash on flowers, brunch and cards one little day a year and you’re good to go for another 364! It’s like an oil change, but prettier.

So what am I saying here, friends? I guess what I’m saying is that when we’re not conscious of our “why” (in this case, why we might be choosing to celebrate a commercial holiday that fills some of us with dread), it’s easy to lose the plot of who we are and what we value. And from there, it’s easy to find ourselves fastened into a seat in the first-class victim section, on auto-pilot, pushing through some gale-force resentment.

But I like to end on some good news when I can. And the good news as I see it here is that we don’t have to buckle ourselves into anything, just because that’s how we’ve always done it. We can check in with ourselves about how it’s all feeling, and about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We can course-correct when it feels misaligned and stay the course when it feels aligned. Simple, but not easy. The choice is ours.

Whatever, and however you choose to spend your day this Sunday (and all the days after that), I’m wishing you alignment, friends. First and foremost with yourself. Because all that unfurls from there will be clean, true, and worthy of celebrating.

www.keitharon.com

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*“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.” - Aldo Leopold

How’s your thaw going, friends? Hmmm. Maybe your flavor of climate crisis this winter renders that question ridiculous. Maybe, for all intents and purposes, you’ve leap-frogged right over winter and are sweating your way through…

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But if I’m really being honest, there’s another reason. I, like many — maybe like some of you — continue to struggle with feelings of guilt and overwhelm. I regularly doubt I’m doing nearly enough to help stem the escalation of our collective desperation. And I feel what I can only describe as guilt about my white privilege as I see ICE brutally snatching up people based on their less white skin. But while guilt can occasionally be a productive emotion, more often than not, it’s really…not. More often, it’s quicksand that keeps us stuck where we stand, frozen in place.

Well friends, here we are, sweating our way through the dog days of summer. I dare say that seems a bit of an understatement. It’s feeling much more like the fire-breathing dragon days of climate crisis in many parts of North America. Can you even believe that the dog days of summer are not so named because they leave panting pooches powerless to do anything but laze about, snoozing and drooling? Nope. They are so named because this time of year happens to be when Sirius (aka “the Dog Star”) rises at dawn. And the ancients believed that Sirius + sun = HOT.

All these years, and I had absolutely no idea! My late revelation is made all the more stunning by the fact that climate deniers haven’t yet plucked this low hanging fruit. Sirius seems the obvious scapegoat, the perfect justification for the furnace that is this week, don’t you think? Climate crisis, climate schmisis…it’s just Sirius!

I will confess here that *I* have been lazing around, panting and drooling from this heat. And as I’ve lazed, far-flung trains of thought chuffed down the tracks straight at me. I haven’t flinched, dodged, nor otherwise evaded them. Oh no, I have not. I have instead cavalierly climbed aboard, even when the marquis has stated plainly that we’d be passing through dodgy territory and picking up thoughts covered in the soot of guilt and self-blame.

It all began with thoughts of my grandfather, who would have celebrated his 130th birthday on July 9th. I know, friends. It’s hard to believe that a baby-faced chap such as myself had grandparents born in the 19th century. Yet it’s true. And this particular grandfather served as an army medic in WWI . He survived unspeakable horrors, trauma and eventually the entire war that over 16 million did not. I imagine he must have been riddled with incredible survivor guilt.

After the war, he immigrated to the United States in search of a better life, leaving all his near and dear ones behind in Europe (except his sweetheart, who followed him here to become my grandmother). No doubt that heaped on more survivor guilt, as well as some separation guilt.

And before any of that ever happened, religion supplied a steady stream of guilt for both my grandparents. I know this because I was raised in the same religion, which is grounded in that old bugaboo known as original sin. You know, the idea that, thanks to Adam and Eve’s indiscretions, we’re bad to the bone from the get-go and deserve eternal damnation just for getting ourselves born. In fact, the way I learned it, we’re so irretrievably sinful that God had no other choice but to sacrifice his only kid to save our sorry souls. Talk about survivor’s guilt.

Long story short, I suddenly found myself really, really taking in the probability that guilt galore informed my grandparents’ daily existence. Their daily existence never struck me as particularly footloose nor fancy-free, come to think of it. Much more like doom and gloom. Workaholism, isolation and suspicion of outsiders. Needless to say, this was the worldview inherited by my dad, then by me. And with that realization, the connections clicked between deeply-seated generational guilt and some of my own deeply entrenched limiting beliefs.

Then came the bigger revelation: guilt, along with its bosom buddies remorse and shame, might just be the the biggest silent drivers of so much of what most people choose to do or not do.

A little investigation seemed to prove my hypothesis. It also revealed that guilt seems to come in at least as many flavors as Oreos. And the roots of guilt are incredibly complex and deep. That said, I shan’t bore you with a long treatise on the subject (you’re welcome). There’s plenty of research out there, written by people far more qualified than I, should you be inspired to learn more. In the meantime, I offer you a kiddie cone bite. Here goes:

First off, not all guilt is problematic (that holds true for all our emotions, btw). Guilt can sometimes keep us true to our core values. But it shifts from adaptive to malignant when entangled with shame. Hold on though. Aren’t guilt and shame like peanut butter and jelly? Bert and Ernie? Laverne and Shirley? They often are. To keep them straight, let’s turn to shame expert June Tangney’s basic distinction between the two:

Shame makes us feel bad about ourselves, and guilt makes us feel bad about a specific behavior.

Out in the ethers of the guiltiverse, there seem to be different life forms. Broadly speaking, there’s a more global guilt, like what we might feel about contributing to climate crisis or systemic oppression, and interpersonal guilt, which comes from a belief that we’ve directly harmed another individual. This kind of guilt, when shame-free, activates natural empathy for *most* of us, but clearly not all of us.

Interpersonal guilt indeed seems to be where things tend to get most shame-y. Particularly when it comes from a place of excessive, unrealistic, or irrational worry about others. Clinical and evolutionary psychologist Lynn O’Connor, who’s done extensive research on survivor’s guilt, altruism and empathy, notes three sticky kinds of interpersonal guilt that mushroom out of maladaptive beliefs:

1. Survivor guilt. While this is often associated with literal, physical survival of a tragedy (like my grandfather surviving WWI), it’s often much more subtle and insidious than we realize. Underlying survivor guilt is a belief that by pursuing goals and attaining success or happiness, we’re abandoning them or causing them to suffer shame or humiliation. This is an invisible but high hurdle to clear in attempting any sort of personal growth.

2. Separation guilt. This comes from a belief that if we separate from or even differ from our loved ones, our religion, or any sort of social group, we causes them harm. This kind of guilt often leads us to mask our authentic self and keep us stuck in kinship groups or systems that don’t align with our truest sense of ourselves.

3. Omnipotent responsibility guilt. This one’s kind of the classic caretaker guilt. We have an exaggerated sense of responsibility and concern for the well-being of others, so we sacrifice our own well-being in service of theirs (of course some of us have small children or other dependents and really are quite literally responsible for their well-being). Fear of letting others down, or even disappointing them, becomes our kryptonite.

Again, each of these forms of guilt springs from quite a tangle. Some of the origin points have been highly correlated by Dr. O'Connor and colleagues to certain religious beliefs, high levels of empathy and altruism, and cultural orientations.

But regardless of exact origin, problematic forms of interpersonal guilt tend to lead us to the same grim places: shame, depression, anxiety, addiction, low self-esteem, somatic complaints, and oodles of other conditions that our western medical model would call pathological. Most importantly, they often hold us back from living our best lives.

So that’s a quick aerial view of the tip of the iceberg, friends. There’s always so much more beneath the water line. But no need to go Titanic here. Let’s turn to solutions for a moment instead.

A first step might be to run the mucky waters of our thought stream through the strainer of consciousness. Guilt-induced limiting beliefs tend to lurk in the the realm of the subconscious (below that proverbial waterline), so it’s no small feat to dredge them up, then run them through the strainer. In fact, it generally requires slowing down and paying attention in a culture that prioritizes speed and efficiency. It’s in the slow and silent spaces that we’re able to see and hear what we’re telling ourselves about ourselves, about others, and about circumstances. And it’s only in the quiet that we can truly notice where guilt and/or shame come up related to those messages.

I’ll tell you, friends. When I’ve taken a few beats to interview myself about a particular area of life, say money, work, family, or friendship, then recorded my answers in some way, the results have been fairly revolutionary. There’s nothing like seeing or hearing your own beliefs fed back to you to make them really sink in. That space between the ears can be one heck of a hall of mirrors where the wackiest things seem true.

For context, I’ll share just one of my logical fallacies. It’s an amalgam of religious dogma, parental modeling and internalized capitalism. The basic gist is that there’s some sort of cosmic accounting ledger that demands that gains be offset by losses, because to receive without giving is BAD. The thoughts go something like this:

If I get that promotion at work, something else might be taken away. So maybe I don’t want to go for that promotion after all, because I don’t want to see what the other shoe looks like when it drops, as drop it inevitably will.

The good news is that once we’ve pinned down a guilt-spawned limiting belief, we have the opportunity to deconstruct it. But first, we need to acknowledge and accept that it’s probably been there for donkey’s years. We also need to show ourselves a good enough level of empathy for how hard it’s been to live under that kind of internal duress. We might even need to feel some grief about it. And all that can take a while, as processes often do.

In the shorter run, there are some practical things we can pull out to soften the edges of our guilt. The Buddhist practice of compassionate breathing in suffering and breathing out relief and healing (aka Tonglen), can help. So can reframing our success. Instead of seeing our success as an abandonment of others, we might focus on the ways in which it resources us to either give back or pay forward with care. We might even play with the idea that claiming our authenticity isn’t a disloyalty, but a way of honoring those who didn’t have the option of living authentically. Breaking generational cycles is honorable work.

Okay, friends. Thus concludes this exploration of the sticky grief wicket. Speaking of helping, I hope this little exploration been helpful in some way for you. If not, please do NOT feel guilty about it (kidding/not kidding). Stay cool in temperature, warm in heart.

keitharon.com

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But I shan’t (although if you were to argue that I just did, you wouldn’t be wrong), because enabling arbitrary authority, particularly ancient arbitrary authority, just isn’t a great …

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I hate to tell you, friends, but the holidays aren’t yet over, and the earworms have made a resurgence. It’s as though they heard me congratulating myself on making it through that multi-round slugfest I had with Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town and decided I needed to be knocked down a peg or two.

The most recent earworm onslaught happened just a couple days ago. There I was, ambling along peacefully enough on my daily constitutional, casually cogitating about this and that, when whammo! In popped Rudolph with his nose so bright, reporting for Christmas Eve duty.

It didn’t matter one jot to Rudolph that it wasn’t foggy, or that there was plenty of light. He was seemingly unphased about my not being Santa and my obvious lack of sleigh and adjacent cargo. No, he was on a mission and clear in his conviction. He would guide me through the night, and that was that.

Let’s be clear, though. I didn’t go willingly, and suffering was involved. Rudolph tenaciously tried my last nerve from the very start of tune time. But after the first 10 rounds or so, I lost my resolve and gave up the fight. It was obvious that I was more likely to find a polar bear in a snowstorm than I was to locate Rudolph’s off switch.

I’ll level with you though, friends. This was no act of sabotage on Rudolph’s part. I may not have invited the intrusion per se, but I had certainly opened the door to it. Just before he showed up, I had, in fact, been contemplating one of my favorite and most frequent thoughts: the difference between fitting in and belonging.

And it was at this point that Rudolph emerged. As you may recall, Rudolph was, by all accounts, the most famous reindeer of all. Why? Because he didn’t fit in with the other reindeer!

I probably don’t have to remind you, but Rudolph was the only reindeer — in all of recorded reindeer history — born with a schnoz like a fire engine’s beacon. This was an anomaly that caused him no end of ridicule and humiliation by his reindeer peers, mind you. They regarded it with great suspicion and perhaps a little envy. In an ideal world, these youngsters might have asked a few friendly questions. Or gotten some sensitivity training from the adult reindeer. Or maybe even experimented with glowing up their own look. But instead? Instead, they took the low road. They laughed and called poor Rudolph names and refused to let him join in any reindeer games.

And what does Rudolph do with this? It’s not good, friends. Under the duress of intense bullying, and with a dearth of allies (not even his parents have his back), Rudolph hangs his head in shame and sets off on a forced march of self-imposed exile. Into a raging blizzard, no less. Before long, he joins forces with Hermey, an elf who had been similarly ridiculed and ostracized in Santa’s workshop, apparently because of his decidedly un-elfin preferences. After a close brush with the Abominable Snowmonster, the two of them narrowly escape on an ice flow and find themselves castaways on the island of misfit toys.

Perhaps Rudolph’s story could have ended right there. After all, he and Hermey finally fit in among the other misfits. But fitting in wasn’t the denouement of this drama, friends. Of course it was not! No proper hero’s journey would settle for merely fitting in amongst a colony of exiles on a remote island (no, Gilligan’s Island was not a proper hero’s journey, friends).

<On the off chance that you don’t know where this is going, consider this your official spoiler alert.>

Long story short, owing to some very clever cosmic choreography, a thick fog settles in on Christmas eve, threatening to cancel Christmas. Santa, perched precariously on the brink of despair, has a stroke of genius and remembers Rudolph’s incandescent nose. And voilà! Rudolph’s liability is transformed into a superpower!

Rudolph graciously lets bygones be bygones and accepts Santa’s “invitation” (he was basically voluntold) to lead the reindeer team through dangerously low visibility with the brilliance of his nose beam. He then deftly proceeds to save children the world over (as we’ve previously established, only the ones who haven’t cried or pouted, of course) from waking up without any presents on Christmas morning. In the process, he redeems his parents’ reputations, manages to get the girl (remember Clarice?), and at long last (but not least), finds belonging among the other reindeer.

I loved this story as a child. As an adult, I see approximately 87 problematic ingredients baked into this holiday treat. I shan’t list them all (click here if you want a variety of opinions on the matter), but instead leave you with what I see as the 7 most toxic of the bunch:

1. ableism

2. bullying

3. emotional abuse

4. toxic masculinity

5. implicit homophobia

6. glorification of consumerism

7. productivity and punctuality at any and all cost

Notwithstanding all the foregoing, which to be fair, was culturally de rigueur for the 1960s (not an excuse, but more like an inconvenient truth), Rudolph’s story does a pretty decent job of illustrating the basic difference between fitting in and belonging. And that basic difference, as I extrapolate it, goes something like this:

Fitting in typically demands some degree of self-abandonment. Belonging, on the other hand, requires self-acceptance.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

What does it mean to “fit in?” What, or who, are we fitting in with? The short answer seems to be that we’re trying to live up (or down) to the normative social standards and mores of the culture at large, as well as the subcultures of our communities. We figure out what’s considered valuable and desirable, and then we try to do, or be, or get those things. Or we try to mask the ways in which we struggle to be, do, or have those things.

When we’re “fitting in,” we’re focused on external validation. This requires that we really stay on our toes, because we’re aiming at a moving target. Even the most firmly rooted humans find things changing around them over time. People come and go. Things evolve and devolve. Keeping up with the Joneses is an endurance event, friends.

Now belonging is different sort of a thing altogether. It’s a terra firma sort of feeling that no matter what we do or don’t do, and no matter what we have or don’t have, we are categorically legitimate and unconditionally accepted. Unlike fitting in, belonging affords us a safe internal space where we can rest securely, regardless of external opinions or expectations.

In fact, I’m of a mind that belonging is most securely anchored at the level of the self. That’s not to say we can only live happily in isolation on our own little island of misfit toys. No, no. We humans are social animals, and isolation (not to be confused with restorative solitude) can be more of a prison than a sanctuary. At the same time, it’s true that I’m the only person I’ll be in ongoing relationship with from my first breath til my last. And if I belong with myself, fitting in is no longer a priority for me.

I say this out of personal experience, friends. As a queer and trans person, I’ve had many Rudolphian experiences with not fitting in. I don’t mean merely feeling like I didn’t fit in, I mean I literally don’t fit in to the cis-hetero normative standards of our current culture. For a long time, this had me swimming up a steady stream of anguish. Swimming up any stream isn’t easy, but especially not when you’re spending so much energy self-flagellating, self-gaslighting, and flat-out self-abandoning. Like Rudolph, I eventually wound up taking the route of self-exile.

It was in the deep freeze of self-exile where I eventually found a sense of self-belonging. That’s also where I discovered that while I often don’t fit in, I always belong. My birth was an invitation to life that my soul accepted, and so I belong, regardless of what society might tell me.

I think the real punchline of Rudolph’s story is that the places where we don’t fit in are the places where we are most powerful. They’re the wellspring of our essential authenticity. And when we deny them in an effort to fit in, we disempower ourselves and deprive the world of the unique gifts we have to offer.

Alright, friends. That’s it for 2024. Wishing you a safe and earworm-free New Year. And, of course, a sturdy sense of self-belonging.

www.keitharon.com

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Seriously, ‘tis feeling a lot like burnout. At this time of year, there are stacks and stacks of things to attend and attend to, many of which seem genuinely worthy of time and attention. But the problem is that they’re all happening all at once (does anyone else out there find this as insane as I do?). And as an introverted sensory sponge having a human experience, I require an above-average amount of hermetic recharge and wringing-out space.

When I don’t get the requisite level of respite, I start drowning in the runoff from the sponge of my fiber. I also begin obsessively fantasizing about chucking my phone, computer and all things digital as I head for the hills with nary a glance back. Admittedly, this is likely not the best plan in the long term. Taking a break from as many things as I can without blowing up my life seems a little more reasonable. So it’s been decided. A break I shall take.

But before I do, I’ll also acknowledge that just about two years ago, I found myself perched on a similarly precarious precipice of burnout. And as I peered over the edge, the following post pulled me back towards safety. So as tempting as it is for my inner critic to head down the road of ranting about my delicate constitution, I’m not going there. Instead, I’m staying put and reminding myself of that thing known as the spiral of healing, then leaning into gratitude for the resonance of my own words. Words that I clearly channeled from a source far wiser than my inner critic.

Good day, friends. Or good morning, good evening, or good dead of night. It’s been hard to tell just what time it is lately because we’ve been doused in monochrome gray here for donkey’s years. Seriously. I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the sun here in well over a week. Maybe two. And who cares what day of the week or time it is when it all feels like a long, dark night of the soul. Incidentally, I happen to be writing this on Groundhog Day (#apropos).

I know I’ve said plenty in previous posts about the value of reframing narratives and choosing one’s thoughts. True. True, true. But, I also believe there is cathartic value to be found in a bit of complaining, so long as one feels the feelings adjacent to the complaint. And besides it being the dead of winter in the Northeast, there are approximately an imperial fuckton (this is an actual measurement, I swear, and so does Urban Dictionary) of other reasons things are feeling sludgy these days.

Since you’re asking (play along, friends…play along), I’ll mention a select few such things that I’ve been noticing. For starters, we’re up to almost 120 days of war in Palestine (and who knows how many now of genocide and apartheid). Then there’s the deluge of disbelief and grief coming up as American presidential politics devolve into a 2020 election rematch (did I mention that today is Groundhog Day?). Last, but very much not least, there’s the steady dismantling of trans rights ripping through state legislatures nation-wide.

I could go on, but I shan’t. However, let us not minimize nor dismiss things on the personal level that serve to punctuate the collective claptrap. For me this week, it’s been the receipt of two separate jury summons from two separate courts; the discovery of mouse poop in my car console, and the maniacal masochistic effort of attempting to build my own web site, which feels every bit as easeful as trying to furnish my entire home with build-it-yourself furniture, using instructions in Swedish when I am most definitely not a polyglot.

Every now and then, the collective and the personal collide in my nervous system. This produces a fairly spectacular nebula, what with smoke and springs and sparks flying furiously from my body, sizzling and glowing radioactively. Picture a mini Big Bang and you’ve got it.

Fear not, friend. Once the smoke clears, I always find my way through the haze. And I always manage to locate the surrender seat as it beckons me to come and set a spell. I stagger my way over to it, plunk my weary bones down and perhaps have a bit of a cry (did you know crying releases cortisol and adrenalin from our systems? This is directly related to why I spent all that time last week going on about the genius of our bodies).

Post-crash forensic reports almost always conclude that the cause of my crash can be traced to over-exertion. My over-exertion. My having tried really, really hard to either make something happen or make something not happen.

It all starts when some part of me resists some part of reality (Let me not beat around the bush. What I’m really resisting is a feeling about some part of reality). Under the incredible pressure of my resistance, do reality and my feelings about it back off? No. No, they do not. They persist. Moreover, they gain momentum. And reality and I, we continue this game of chicken, all the while accelerating and escalating until eventually, exertion exhaustion sounds the buzzer and declares game over. It is at this point that reality goes back to its very important business of gloating.

Whew. These cycles of habitual over-exertion, followed by exhaustion, then a period of puddling are serious business. Running roughshod through life on the high-octane fuel blend of adrenalin and cortisol can land one in a state of Adrenal Fatigue, which blood tests don’t usually pick up on until it becomes life-threatening. No, thank you, and fingers crossed.

Lucky for me, I’ve caught on to the folly of this efforting business. Not just from my own mishaps, but from sources far wiser than I (there are, it turns out, many such sources).

A couple years ago, I started studying qigong and tai chi. Interestingly, the decision to do so was made whilst visiting the aforementioned surrender seat. Pretty much the moment I first walked through the door of the tai chi studio, I could feel my nervous system settle. And immediately pearls of ancient Taoist wisdom started spilling from my teacher’s mask (it was the middle of the pandemic, friends). One such pearl was a principle known humbly as “the 70% rule.”

This utterly nondescript idea states, unequivocally, that if you want to achieve 100% output, you must not utilize more than 70% of your maximum effort. What???!!!

Yes, friends. It runs counter to how most of us in the western world conduct ourselves. We’ve been conditioned to muscle our way through our days, believing that gain comes through pain and strain, feeling the burn and blahbety blahbety blue blue. We have drunk the Kool-Aid and self-flagellated and brutalized ourselves with such ideas. Oh, how we have. But take heart. Together we can let those winged monkeys fly.

It’s pure simple-but-not-easy genius that’s been going strong for millennia. When we exert more than 70% of our maximum effort, it results in physiological strain. Our bodies tense, our adrenalin flows, and our nervous systems resist. We begin to feel anxious because our nervous systems start wondering just how much suffering and strain it’s going to take to get this thing done. And now we have the additional task of overcoming our mounting internal resistance, which further drains our energy.

Conversely, when we utilize 70% or less of our overall capacity, we move (or think, or problem solve) easily and naturally and yet still generate 100% of our available energy. Magical, no?

Now, clearly I forget to apply this rule, try as I might. But I keep it within close grasp, because it’s like an EpiPen for my nervous system. And unlike so many rules I’ve encountered along the way, it’s patient and forgiving. It doesn’t punish or penalize or shame you when you break it. It waits and it whispers soothingly. Try softer. Easy does it. No pain, no pain.

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