What I'd tell her
37 things
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A song I’m loving:
I was born on Mother’s Day in 1987, the same day I was left by my first mother. Each year, when May rolls around, the tenderness in my heart seems to widen like a sunrise. I remember what I’ve often pretended I didn’t miss. My eyes keep welling up unexpectedly lately: a beautiful song. awful news. gratitude for a friend. generosity from family. Layers of grit melt away and I find more access to the parts of me in need of care, of holding, of remembrance. I didn’t always understand this widening of tenderness, before I put the pieces together and recognized the truth of my own grief. Now, it widens and I say, “ah, yes. The grief is here. It makes so much sense that it’s here. How do I want to meet the grief this year?”
This year, the grief feels extra — maybe because of other personal losses I’ve experienced recently, or the grip of sadness I feel when I look around at the state of our world, or how my daughter isn’t a baby anymore, or the ever-softening heart I am getting to know more deeply. Maybe it’s the anticipation of big changes to come. Maybe it feels extra because I’m able to feel more. I’m not quite sure. What I know, though, is that when I explore how I want to meet the grief, the words offering and love keep arising. Offer love. Offer love. Offer love.
As I think about offering love, here are 37 things I want to remember this next year, my 37th, perhaps some you might need, too:
Your truest essence — the core of who you truly are — arrived with you on the day you were born and has never been eroded, erased, or damaged. It may feel hidden at times, but it is always there, in the very center of you, close enough to reach again at any time.
Despite what your brain tries to convince you of, there really is nowhere else but here. There really is no other time but now. Make of that what you will.
Waiting until you’re no longer afraid is often not an option unless you want to wait forever. Being afraid isn’t the same thing as not being ready to try.
It is acceptable to eat boxed Mac n’ Cheese as an adult.
You will learn things about the world that will shatter your ideas and beliefs. Let the shattering happen; let it rearrange you and widen your heart.
You might stray and return to your callings. The straying doesn’t mean your callings aren’t true; it might just mean they require different versions of you. Let yourself become different and let it bring newfound energy to what you love. Let yourself stray when you need to. Trust the straying.
Other people’s prescriptions for joy, success, connection, expression, anything at all, aren’t yours. You can trust what works for you. You can like what you like. You can move from your own center and let it guide you.
Being lost feels scary sometimes, but only from unfamiliar places can we truly let ourselves step into new ways of being. Lost is a doorway, a portal.
Portals and doorways are everywhere when you start looking for them.
Being misunderstood is deeply painful, but avoiding telling the truth in order to avoid being misunderstood is even harder. You can withstand the misunderstanding; you might not be able to withstand not telling the truth.
Think like a child more often. Tap into your child energy more often. Lose track of time more often. Play more often. Twirl around the living room more often.
Bless you for trying to control what isn’t controllable. You can always practice letting go. Surrender as a practice is forever available to you.
It is safe to soften. It is safe to soften. It is safe to soften.
Soft doesn’t always mean flimsy. Don’t belittle the power in softness.
Notice how you become more and more yourself the wider your heart opens. Notice how some of the fear of living with an open heart dissipates as you practice it. Notice how you feel the most you when you keep your heart available.
Keep things simple where you can. Life is complicated enough on its own to make an entirely new recipe every single day. Routine can be a lifesaver.
Listen to your longings and let them move you. They mean something.
Write poetry even if you don’t consider yourself a “poet”. Write what’s true, even if it is cliche or entirely non-unique. Write what grows in your heart. And when you feel like setting it free, share it.
Integrity, at times, has sacrifices. Your soul will stay intact the more you align with your own integrity than you do with the desperation to please.
Keep giving yourself permission to make mistakes without thinking it makes you a horrible person. You are human. Imperfect. Full of contradictions. Let your humanity exist out loud. Let it tether you to others.
Notice what you glean in the dark that you can’t find in the light.
Building friendship as an adult is so tender, so deeply vulnerable, and one of the most meaningful processes you’ll ever be in. Allow it. Seek it. Tend to it.
You don’t need to be embarrassed by your quirks. You don’t need to hide your silliness or your weirdness. Those things don’t discredit you.
There is love to be found in the crevices of yourself you’ve deemed not enough. There is love to be found in the corners you’d rather hide. There is love even there.
Your deepest wisdom must be earned… it cannot be bought, hurried toward, or merely performed. You’ll recognize it when it arises because it will feel so obvious.
Some of your wounds will never fully close. You’ll try and try until you remember there is another way, a way that doesn’t require you to banish the parts of you that still ache. You’ll learn to love your aches with the kind of reverence you thought you only deserved when they all faded.
Sensitivity is more than a gift; it is a source of knowledge, a guiding energy, a way of being you can harness as part of your medicine for this world.
Anger doesn’t always need to be soothed with calm. Sometimes, fully feeling what you’re really feeling, even if you’d rather feel differently, is part of alchemizing that feeling into something beyond itself.
Laughter might be more helpful than a self-help book a lot of the time.
You can weave new webs of connection in spite of the parts of you who think it’s easier to be alone. You can keep practicing the art of togetherness.
Don’t underestimate the power of a flower.
What you have to offer will never be for everyone. It will never please everyone. You will never please everyone. Your shoulders will soften a little bit more each time you remember this and continue moving from your heart regardless.
It isn’t too late. It isn’t too late. It isn’t too late.
Don’t cling too tightly to your certainty; you never know when change is brewing.
Your aliveness isn’t hinged on what you do. It is only hinged on your willingness to keep opening to it, again and again.
You are forever becoming. There is no landing place, no arrival. This will scare you sometimes, but learning to swim in the waters of the liminal is where you’ll come the most vibrantly alive.
Look up. Watch the clouds take on new shapes. Look down. Watch the buds blooming from what appears to be nothing. Remember the expanse within you. Remember the roots you’ve been nourishing. Some things are invisible yet so incredibly present.
Writing this felt like love. Thank you, as always, for being here.
△ This beautiful episode of Tension of Emergence with Prentis Hemphill
△ Speaking of Prentis, these grace-filled words and their upcoming book
△ What’s love got to do with it? A stunning dispatch from Shira Erlichman
△ The college students keep the score
△ The hidden-pregnancy experiment by Jia Tolentino
△ This scene from last month in Mendocino —
With care,
Lisa
PS. Parenting has been full-on lately... responding to comments has felt near impossible. But please know I read every single one, sometimes multiple times over, and am always so moved by your resonance and reflections. Thank you thank you thank you for reading and sharing what connected with you. It makes these letters feel like part of something outside of myself and that means everything. Hopefully I'll be back to responding soon. xx
Lisa, happy 37th birthday! I loved your list of 37 things. So many of them touched me deeply and resonated with my soul. "Yes, me, too," I could have said, now at 64, recognizing as you write "it's not too late..not too late...not too late". I wish I had had all your wise knowing at 37. I think I had a sense of it, but I wasn't ready to dig into what lay so deeply buried (which is why I held onto unhappiness in a marriage for much too long). But now that the knowing has come to the surface, it's not too late. Not for any of us, at any age.