Dear friends of TC,
I feel like I have a lot to be grateful for today, so lot of thank you’s are in order.
Firstly, I want to thank everyone who read/shared/engaged with the last post that I sent out back in October. I was really moved to hear from so many of you and it served as powerful reminder for me to keep going, that the personal is truly universal and the deeper I go within it somehow connects me even deeper to others and the world around me. I am also honoured to say that the post was selected by Substack readers to be a read of the week :) - so thank you again so much for that.
I ended that piece wondering if the sense of darkness that had been shrouding my vision was actually the darkness that comes with being back in the womb. And I am very glad to say that the last few months have really ended up being something like that. A shedding of the parts of myself or the beliefs I carried that were no longer serving me, a process of dying and grieving followed by the excitement brought on by a sense of rebirth. A big breakdown followed by a big breakthrough. Learning to sit in the discomfort of so much change at has ultimately allowed me to zoom out graciously to learn to see my life from a different perspective. All my greatest fears about this move have dissipated and on the other side of that surrender, I’ve been able to start to make peace with all the uncertainty that the future holds.
Yet at the same time, I can see some things very clearly. This moment has allowed me to start to connect the dots between all the things I have experienced and done across my life and the things I am called to do that at times have felt super random. I can now see how they have all been the crumbs on my path to my true purpose. I’ve been out here diving so deep, losing myself to find myself all over again but this time in a way that feels like I’m finally coming home to myself, a sacred remembering and a reunion of sorts. I am starting to be able to see my gifts and they are helping me remember who I am and what it is I am here to do. I don’t exactly know what shape these realisations will end up taking, that feels like the beauty of it, but this remaking of myself feels fundamental to moving forwards in my life. I am starting to know what I truly want to embody and how I can be of service to the world around me and that kind of clarity feels super grounding. Being away from London has given me a chance to take everything out of my life and decide what I want and who I want in it. Though funnily enough, I’m learning that it’s not actually really so much about where I live. That the external surroundings may speed up what’s happening, but the journey inwards is what it's really about, that liberation really comes from the inside.
So, on that note, I am proud to share that this week marks the one-year anniversary of this newsletter’s existence! Reflecting back, this space has been a great teacher to me in unexpected ways. When I started it, I had the abstract idea that its purpose was to be about ‘tenderness’, a virtue I still feel is one of the tools to hold close for our collective survival and even though I had great intentions for it, it was also supposed to be a kind of productivity accountability exercise for myself. I wanted to write more and I saw it as a way of getting myself to commit to a weekly deadline. But now even just typing that sentence out makes me laugh and shake my head at myself because therein lay the big lesson for me.
Yes, sure I want to write more. But I want every word I write to carry truth, depth and meaning. Despite how we’ve been socialised under capitalism, more doesn’t necessarily equate to better and since I am grateful to have another income stream that currently doesn’t depend on writing (even though Iongterm I am hoping that I will be making a living that feels more aligned with who I am becoming) meaning I have the great privilege of being able to write what I want when I want. Yes, discipline and commitment are important but there are so many ways of embracing those qualities. I have deeply committed to myself and others and been more disciplined than I ever have in numerous ways but it’s just been offline and behind closed doors. Yes, tenderness is important but how can I write about it if I don’t even know how to practise it towards myself? I spent months carry heavy guilt and shame over my lack of ‘productivity’, at my so-called laziness that it took me months to understand that something much deeper was happening under the surface.
I had gotten it all wrong. This newsletter wasn't about churning anything out fast, it was here to teach me the importance of slowness, the magic of deep pondering and the soft power of the pause. Over time I realised that for me to write as truthfully as possible I had to go deep within myself to explore and that just doesn’t happen on a timely neatly-packed schedule. I’ve been slowly learning to forgive myself for this so-called lack that I was basing too much of my day-to-day sense of self-worth on to start to see it instead as a blessing, as the thing that makes me, me. And so over these 12 months it’s ended up becoming a site of deep self-reckoning, reflection and transformation.
I’ve grown up sharing myself and connecting with the world through the internet. But over the years the addictiveness, algorithmic oppression, and hyper-surveillance engineered into the platforms we use have left me with a sense of great unease, mistrust and caution. This place has become a site of refuge on the internet to reclaim what I once loved and through it, I am learning to love again. So thank you so very much to all of you who have been reading these words over the last year. It feels good to know that we are out here learning together. Thank you for all the personal notes, emails and messages. And an extra big thank you to those of you who have been generously paying me for this spontaneous newsletter. I am still learning to see myself as someone who deserves to get paid to do this work so I’m truly grateful to have your support.
We have so much to reckon with. Our generation has so much to undo and make sense of so we can build the world anew. But we are bombarded with so much information on a daily basis that we become deprived of the space, both physical and mental, necessary to grow and change. That’s what this newsletter has gifted me. Reminders to take a deep breath and reflect, so I can then take my learnings back out into the world and try to be as intentional as possible with everything I say and do. There is a huge shift in consciousness happening everywhere as we wake up to the lies instilled in us by patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism that we have been socialised to believe in. We are being called into service of a new world and each and every single one of us has our own unique part to play. The pause helps us to try to understand what that role is.
In this era of immediacy, reactivity and being able to be contacted anywhere at any time in too many formats, the pause has become priceless. A lot of us learned that back in 2020 but since then have been forced to forget and now we are often left to feel that it’s become a luxury that we feel we can no longer afford. But the pause is vital to our survival as much as our joy and can be cultivated in the smallest of ways. It might look like taking a breath, a day, a week to gather your thoughts and feelings before responding to a message. Asking for more time to reflect in the heat of an argument. A weekend off social media. A walk in the park without listening to anything but the wind and the trees. From micro to macro, start small and witness the expansion for yourself. For there is always more room where they told us there wasn’t any to be found.
The pause shows me what a true blessing it is to have a roof over my head, with food in my belly and to feel the warmth. I look outside everywhere to see that in our broken society these things are not promised. The pause tells me that I am enough. That I already have more than enough and some to share. The pause tells us not to forget that it is possible for everyone to have this. That it is the vision for the world we need to carry forward.
My wish for all this holiday season is that you too can somehow manage to find a moment for slowness, a moment for pause.
Let’s all take a deep inhale/exhale together right here and now.
We are alive and we are amazing.
End-of-year blessings to all.
See you on the other side.
In awe and gratitude,
Naomi
See you on the other side, thank you for this one today. It felt lovely to be able to read you 💘
This was a beautiful read, thank you. Pause and reflection are both so necessary for growth and change, and I entirely agree that in a society where we are very much ‘on’ and contactable and awake, we never seem to get those moments to take stock. Totally here for carving out those moments yourself and prioritising what’s important to you.