I woke up this morning knowing I needed to meet myself. I grabbed my pen and my salmon salmon journal. Yes, it’s both salmon colored and has a salmon on it. Wanna guess what color ink my pen has? (lol a hyper-fixation if there ever was one.) That journal has been good to me. A space for the goods, the bads, and the in-betweens. While I knew my mind was about to let loose on the page, I didn’t know I was about to fully admit something to myself:
I don’t know what my interests are at the moment.
Let me back up. I’m back home in NYC and New York has a funny way of reminding me who I am. Unless I’ve been away. Then it tends to remind me of who I was. And every time I come back it asks the same question:
Who are you now?
Except this time, I didn’t have an answer. That sounds dramatic.. I mean, I know who I am. I know what I offer to the people in my life. I know the ways I show up. But when it came to something as simple as how I wanted to spend my time, I was blank and strangely.. it didn’t scare me. I mean listen, there was still that little sting at first, but I realized that sting was more habitual than real. In the past, uncertainty would send me into a tizzy. I’d convince myself I was lost, that I had somehow drifted too far away from myself, that I needed a new identity or a new self-concept to grab onto.
The spiral spirals and I let it. The spiral spirals and I watch it. The spiral spirals and I fall for it every time.
Or at least I used to.
This time, I caught it before it even started to bloom. There was no need to panic. I know who I am. I just needed to sort out what that looks like right now. So I started with a simple question: How do I actually want to spend my free time?
My first answer was, “definitely not at the fucking gym.” which made me laugh because… okay good. I’m still me LOL, BUT that answer actually revealed something important: movement has been a big part of my life AND at times it doesn’t feel like my time. It still felt like work even when it was enjoyable and that realization opened a door. I started running through my usual list of things I tend to do: classes, gatherings, events, the social things I normally say yes to and tbh, none of them felt right in this moment.
That’s when it hit me. I’ve been operating almost entirely from my masculine energy for a while now. Planning, producing, organizing, executing. Even the ways I move through my personal life have had that same structure and forward motion and suddenly my system was asking for something different: less doing and a lot more being. So I settled on the simplest thing I could think of: spending time alone. A self-date of sorts, but without the Julia Cameron worksheet attached.
What does it feel like to walk around without a destination? What does it feel like to sit somewhere and people watch these days? What does it feel like to exist with myself in this city again? What’s wild is that I didn’t realize how much I needed that shift until I allowed it.
The thing is when you’ve been in your masculine energy for a long time and doing things like pushing forward, solving things, holding structure and so on, it’s easy to forget that your feminine energy is where your curiosity lives. It’s where observation lives and where the quiet recalibration happens. The realization that hit me the hardest is that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop trying to produce anything at all.
This realization is actually what inspired the workshop I’m hosting at the end of the month called Balancing Act. We’re going to explore how masculine and feminine energies show up in real life .. in the way we move through work, relationships, decision making, and even moments like the one I had this morning. So if you’ve ever felt like you’re constantly pushing, or like you’ve lost your rhythm between structure and flow, this conversation might be for you. I’m so excited about it! Read more on what’s to come and reserve your spot <3