I Turned 40.

I turned 40 this month. Forty very full years.

Feels like I’ve spent every single one of them trying to figure out what all of this even means. What I mean. Which ideas and feelings belong to me, which ones were handed to me. Forced on me, even. And which ones I built in response to what happened. What I believe because I believe it. What I believe because somebody told me to. What I learned to believe because at some point it helped me survive.

The last few years have shaped an ever-expanding interest in what it means to be here for my own life. Not just alive, but here. Where, with, and who I truly am. These reflections have asked me to witness the uncomfortable distance between the person I now recognize as Myself and the person I have sometimes been every day.

Most of these years have belonged to a person I'd imagine becoming if I could just get everything together. The version of me that would be more orderly, more contained, more easily explained. She would have handled her finances, cleaned her house, resolved her emotional dramas, organized systems, become appropriately disciplined and done all the things that would make the rest of her expression feel well-earned. She succeeds and because she succeeds she has earned the right to speak, create, be. She was a version of me that I tried painstakingly to sell to Myself and I dedicated many years to honoring her.

But I became very resistant to her. Still am. I couldn't stand the thought of who I would have to be to get it all together before getting to be the me I’m expressing and growing into now. I was working so hard to be only half-ass living and it’s because this version of me just wasn’t me. I sucked at being her and I realized I was never going to get good at it. I spent a lot of energy pretending to be one way while the actual circumstances of my life were saying “baby, be so fucking for real right now”.

The truth is that so many experiences have tugged at my wellness. From about 25 to 35, I experienced the complete dissolution of so much of the foundation and belief systems I had organized my entire life around. Religion, American patriotism, lifelong patterns of codependency and self-abandonment, male-centeredness, plans for a highly decorated and respectable life of service. It all eroded into a sour, resentful ooze I no longer had reliable systems, beliefs or practices to address. Separated from the structure of military life, I was confronted with the depth of my unwellness and ultimately shell-shocked by how much of what I had come to believe was true about the world didn't even damn exist. At least not in the world I was left to navigate now. And underneath years of performance and achievement, I began to understand the impact of an unknown number of years of masking stacked on top of extremely cruel and negative self-talk. At my core, I didn't truly love or believe in myself that much at all.

All the same, there were very real circumstances in my life that needed to change, and many of them were urgent. But the condition of my inner life was itself the largest of the circumstances I had to account for. I was wearing myself thin trying to act my way out of problems while feeling increasingly worthless. Frantically taking more action from that place wasn't improving my earning potential or my mental wellbeing any faster. Truthfully, I was becoming less and less interested in actually being here.

In this, the work I've done around my self-worth couldn't be something I would get to once everything else was handled. Once things were perfect. I needed it while things were as bad as they were. Not instead of taking action, and not because the material circumstances of my life could be resolved by thinking differently about myself. I needed to change the relationship I was having with myself while I lived through it all. I had already spent years learning what I could accomplish through performance and force. I did not want to build the next version of my life from the same hollow premises about myself and the world. Nor did I have the energy or resources to.

I still crave order. I need systems and structure. I need several things contained in spreadsheets to become reality. There are things to repair, address, clean, pay, organize, maintain, complete and change. But the new systems and order I build now have to account for a person I believe is already worthy of care, pleasure, support, expression and resources. I could not keep organizing my life around the idea that becoming sufficiently disciplined, productive, organized or financially secure would finally make me worthy of living it.

A question I return to: how much of my actual life am I willing to spend waiting to become eligible to live it?

Naming that depression, anxiety, and trauma had shaped so much of my constructed identity freed me in a weird way. And it dropped me on my ass, too. I felt listless, ungrounded, shocked, and ashamed at the state of my life away from the sheen of the alleged perfection that was to come if I ever could just get it together. Who was I for real separate from this phony clone? From maybe the shakiest place in my life, I did decide that I would give nothing and no one more say over who I am than who I decide to be. But it meant practicing a new way of being with myself that I didn’t have a reliable map for.

While I didn’t emerge from this decision knowing exactly what to do, I have through trial, error, and serious consideration cobbled together the living practices I found the most resonance with in this era of life. As someone slightly more freed from the idea that the way I lived my life needed external approval, my overarching practice became a personal exploration of individual and collective ways of being with the purpose of seeing what actually works for Me.

Years of casual to somewhat intense study of the brain, philosophy, religion, global revolutionary politics, collectivism, beauty, art, and preservation have ushered me into building a relationship with Myself rooted in trust, safety, and willingness to be lovingly curious about who I am and to apply the same loving curiosity to the world around me. My life and learning what it means to live well, fulfilled, and connected in it has become like a new religion, one where I get to experience my own re-joining with Myself..

In this exploration, I discovered how fractured the realest essence of me had become from the person I had found myself performing every day. What was I really thinking? What was I really feeling? What was I really doing? How was I being with myself, with other people, with my environment? What did I really believe?

My conversations with Myself have become the most important conversations of my life. Having some of those conversations in the witness of others, through coaching, has been one of the most important rituals of this phase of my life. I ask and am asked many powerful questions. What I practice is discerning what in each conversation is beneficial to me as a person who is very good at making meaning. I am highly sensitive. I notice a lot. I feel a lot. I can perceive something small and build an entire world of meaning around it before lunch.

The gauntlet of being alive on this planet taught me to pay attention, scan, interpret, anticipate, and try to figure out what everything meant and what I needed to prepare for. There have been environments where that sensitivity and vigilance made me very successful. Helped me feel some sense of safety. It would also leave me routinely disoriented, angry, confused and hopeless. Ultimately I recognized that giving everything I could perceive an enormous story was wearing on my energy and my mental health.

So I've made new practices with new intentions. I can notice something without deciding it is a message. I can feel something without immediately building a story around why I feel it. I can sense something without assigning it a role in my life. I can let some things simply be things.

That doesn’t mean I am finished making meaning. Quite the opposite. Meaning matters enormously to me. What has changed is my relationship to the practice. I don’t have to give everything I can perceive a huge story. I get to be more deliberate about where I put that energy. I get to decide what I want to engage, what deserves my attention, what I want to create meaning around and what I want to make larger through my participation in it.

In this way, I am so grateful to channel more of myself toward the spaces, experiences, relationships, capacities and world that my experiences have most called me to want to see. I want to sense it all, be in it and feel it. This is what I’ve decided to use my sensitivity for.

This practice has asked me to create a different sense of safety for myself. Not the safety I once tried to create by noticing enough, anticipating enough or correctly interpreting everything around me. Enough safety to tell myself the truth without immediately turning what I discover into an indictment of who I am. Enough safety to notice what I need, admit what hurts, examine what happened and what I made it mean, and decide whether that meaning is useful to the life I am actually trying to create.

The years have made me a full believer of the notion that we are here and responsible for curating our own lives. And if I am to build systems, relationships, work, practices and environments that actually support my life, they need to take the real me into account. Not the imaginary woman who would be easier to organize around. Me. My actual nervous system. My actual body. My actual desires, limitations, gifts, patterns and responsibilities. My appetite for beauty and pleasure and people and art and meaning. The things I need help with. The things I am extraordinarily good at. The conditions under which I expand and the conditions under which I disappear.

From this knowing, I practice allowing myself to imagine. What does the version of myself I recognize as expanded think? What does she believe? How does she feel? How does she behave with herself and other people? What kind of environment does she create and maintain? What does she believe is possible?

I believe we have to allow ourselves to think about that. You have to allow yourself to imagine and vision yourself into being.

Lately, I'm always casting a big spell. And there is something vulnerable, and occasionally a little ridiculous, about being witnessed hoping for and building toward things that do not exist yet while there is still so much visible disorder in your life. I do know I look a lil bit crazy right now (and, darling...I am and you would be too lol). But part of what I have come to understand is that my approach to resolving the problems in my life could not possibly look like the one someone else would dream up for me. Considering it would just be another way of building a life around an imaginary woman and the yearning for the approval of others.

Because I am not writing this from the other side of everything. I am 40, but I am not financially secure, perfectly regulated, beautifully organized, sitting in a polished house with every system humming and telling you how I figured it all out. Absolutely not.

It is from this place of apparent and obvious disorder that I am building my life.

And part of building from here has meant becoming much more honest about what I need. You would never know it sometimes, but the person who is able to show up for everybody else can need a lot of help. I need a lot of help. Financial, structural, systems, processes, resources, energy. I am still learning and practicing how to name those things clearly enough to even receive support. But they are real. I accept that they are real. And I am doing my best to live well with that truth.

Shame used to make that much harder. It kept me quiet, but more than that, it made me feel like I needed to wait until I had resolved something before I could speak from it. Solve the problem first. Understand the relationship. Repair the finances. Develop the practice. Survive the thing. Extract the lesson. Then come back later and tell everybody what happened once I knew how it turned out.

I understand the appeal. I'm not interested in doing that for my whole life. Not at all.

There are things I can say truthfully from the middle without pretending I know how they end. That doesn't mean every thought needs an audience, every wound needs content made from it, or every experience belongs to me alone to tell. Some of my stories are also other people's stories. Some things belong only to me. Privacy matters and all that.

But I am living now. Learning now. Changing now. Building now. I just refuse to let shame, yours or mine, about my unwellness prevent me from sharing the truth of it all so that I have a chance of receiving the support I need. And I refuse to let it convince me that because I need help, I have nothing useful to give. I have plenty. 

I can need help and be helpful. I can be in the middle of financial repair and be an excellent project manager (And am!). I can still be improving the systems I use to support myself and have a sharp eye for the systems, structures, language and details that could make someone else's work better (And do!). I can be healing and hold space for someone else's healing. Asé. There is no contradiction there that I feel pulled to resolve anymore.

Accepting those contradictions in myself has changed some of what I expect from other people too.

This world has been the strangest school. Some of what it has given me has become art. Some has become wisdom, fear, pleasure, wounds, jokes, characters, practices that changed my life, and things I am still trying to understand. Some became things I can now sit beside another person and help them examine in themselves.

People are complicated in much the same way. Limited. Beautiful. Disappointing. Generous. Selfish. Capable of extraordinary care in one direction and astonishing inadequacy in another.

Sometimes I feel like having anything close to what I could call a happy life has meant making peace with the ways that we can be sometimes. I don't mean tolerating everything, and I don't mean nothing bothers me because I have reached some enlightened state of acceptance. I mean seeing what is there. Really seeing it. Then getting a good sense of how I feel about it, what it makes me want to do, where it makes me want to be, and moving in accordance with that instead of making the point of my life going to war with the way that people are.

People can love you and still not have what you need. People can want to be close to you without possessing the capacity for the kind of closeness you thought they were offering. People can mean well and hurt you. You can mean well and hurt people. Sometimes someone's best is not enough for you. Sometimes your best will not be enough for someone else. Sometimes a person simply does not have the capacity you imagined they did.

This has been true for me too.

There are people I love who I am terrible at keeping in touch with. There are people who probably do not know how often I think about them, and relationships that have changed shape without changing what they meant to me. There have been times when my mental health limited my capacity to return love in the ways I wish I had. There have been times when I was doing my best and my best still left something undone. I regret that this is true, but it is my real experience.

I can wish I had done something differently without deciding I was secretly capable of being somebody else at the time. I can acknowledge the limits of my capacity without pretending those limits had no consequences.

The way I remain connected is changing too. I don't have the capacity or energy to maintain relationships, social media, work, creativity and my actual interior life the way I once did, or perhaps the way other people expect connection to look. On the other side of unmasking and awareness of my own attention deficits, I am increasingly protective of the attention required to make the things I care about, tend the environments I want to change, love the people immediately in front of me and actually inhabit my own life.

But when I think of people, my people, I endeavor to send love, regardless of what the story has been. And I send so much light. I really, really do. Because I need it, too. I have always needed it, too.

I am thinking deeply about capacity these days. I suspect I will be thinking and writing about it for quite some time. For now, what matters is recognizing that none of us gets to be everything. Including me. Maybe especially me, because I know firsthand how easy it is to look capable from the outside while internally falling apart. 

Accepting that none of us gets to be everything has also made me less interested in the project of being perfectly good. This is different from not caring about goodness. I, personally, am planning to do a LOT of good. I care deeply about what I contribute to the lives of other people, about my impact, about what I create and whether the world is better because I participated in it.

But I am increasingly less interested in proving to myself that I am a good person than I am in knowing what I can count on myself for.

I know that regardless of the circumstance, regardless of how I am perceived, I'm here to do God's work. I love. I serve. I care. But as Myself. So I'll do it as a whore. As a saint. I'll do it as whatever anyone says I am. I'll do it as lover. I'll do it imperfectly. Caring is something I can count on myself for. Not goodness as a permanent identity I earn and defend, but something I trust myself to return to and act from.

That trust matters more to me than purity. I can be mischievous. I have appetites. I am irreverent. I can be selfish (and I thank the good heavens for this). I can be difficult. I don't need every interesting edge of my person sanded away so that I can present a clean moral object for public approval.

At 40, I am honing the art of being as good as I can and as bad as I want to be.

And underneath the mischief, I know what I want all of this to point toward. In my experience, I fundamentally believe that the whole point is to be helping ourselves, curating meaningful lives, and helping one another create the world we want to live in.

And I mean really create.

Dreaming matters. Imagination matters enormously to me. They allow us to conceive of realities we haven't experienced yet. But I believe that at some point, we have to be able to communicate what we see and participate in making it real.

The truth is that the more and more I speak on what I want to see, the closer and closer I get to it. Not because saying something aloud magically produces it. I am actively witnessing what clearer communication of my desires, ideas and intentions does in my own life. I can better recognize what moves toward them. Other people can recognize something familiar in what I am building. Sometimes that recognition happens because the world they are building is similar to one I am building too.

Truthfully, I don't need everyone to agree with me about the world we should create. I am not trying to convince everybody to want what I want. I just want us to be able to find one another.

My aspiration at this point is to send a clearer and clearer signal for the type of world I believe we can create together. I want the people building toward similar worlds to be able to recognize me, and I want to become better at recognizing them.

I believe recognition creates the possibility of collaboration. We can bring together knowledge, resources, access, skills, relationships, energy, perspective, care and whatever else each of us has. We can be honest about what we don't have. We can grow capacity alongside one another for realities that none of us had the capacity to create alone.

For some time now, I have been deliberately reorganizing my life around these ideas. Some of that has meant leaving structures that no longer fit. Some has meant taking things I have always known about myself more seriously. And some has meant building without having every resource, answer or piece of infrastructure I need yet.

Last year I left federal employment after spending my entire adult working life inside of that type of environment. I didn't leave with every detail of the next version figured out. I am still figuring some of it out now. What I have created instead is a life with more alignment between the ways I desire to serve, work, create, care, organize, think and contribute.

Currently, I'm a Project Management Consultant and contractor for a few amazing organizations here in New Orleans. I still love making sense of moving pieces. I love organizing people, information and resources around something we are trying to accomplish. I like seeing what is missing and helping build the structure that makes the work possible. I especially love that I get to be of service to organizations whose missions and visions align with the world I'd most like to be a part of creating, and I thank them for their trust in me. I am so grateful to be using my energy towards advancing environmental resilience and growing affirming learning spaces in a city I love so deeply.

askMAMA is my life coaching practice and one of the places where much of what I have integrated from living, studying and examining my own life has become useful in service to the collective. It has grown from my own study and practices, years of listening closely, asking questions and helping others hear themselves, and the formal training that led to my certification as a life coach. Holding space for one another is something I take very seriously. There is so much power in being witnessed, and I am deeply interested in what becomes possible when we have room to examine what we think, feel, believe, and do while remaining the authority on our own lives. My highest gratitude to my clients, past and present, for allowing me to witness them and to support their becoming.

I am also deeply grateful for the coaches I've had the opportunity to train alongside, including Veronica Hotton, Tasha Thomas and Becca Rich. There is something particularly valuable about learning how to hold space for other people while being held, questioned, witnessed and challenged by people practicing alongside you. They have been part of my own becoming as a coach and as a person, and I am grateful our paths crossed in this particular season of our lives. I love you dearly, coven. 

LegsforeverXO turned five this year. It is my performance and embodiment practice, where I channel my body, sexuality, movement, imagination, characters and creative direction into what I have come to believe about embodied living and movement, personal care, art, collaboration and worldbuilding. It is also where my local creative consulting, project management and event curation live, with LegsforeverXO and its projects managed through Offcultured. Making art and creating the conditions for art to happen make perfect sense together to me. My future projects and side quests all keep this seed in mind. I recently penned my Showgirl Wish List for what I'm exploring next, and I mean everything on it.

Beyond New Orleans, I am also collaborating with my friend Becca through Enriched Projects. Together, we're working to reshape the language and landscape of creative project management by building practices rooted in compassion, empathy, an understanding of the larger systems we are all working within and affected by with an honest accounting of our humanity and actual capacities. Imagine two empathetic Virgo project managers looking at your creative project, book, business, etc., and drafting a plan for what to do next. This is what we’ve teamed up on and are making available to the real people who need it.

There are more possibilities I am building too. Some are becoming clear enough to name. Some require collaborators I haven't met yet, money I don't have yet, skills I will learn, help I will ask for, and capacities I am continuing to develop. All the more reason to keep imagining and speaking on them. My time engaging with people and ideas continues to show me what I need to learn, what capacity I need to build, and who I need to connect with.

And all this building isn't professional or artistic. After nearly ten years in New Orleans, it is time for a light remodel at our home. I am bringing my physical environment into closer alignment with the life Nova, Rosceaux and I are actually living and the one I am creating. More beauty. More function. More ease. More room for the things we actually do.

I am creating conditions that support my best self in continuing to express, growing more confident in that expression, receiving support and building greater capacity for the life I am actually living. I'm so delighted to be receiving support from the lovely Kenya Foy, my friend and a psychic medium who provides energetic attunements to people and spaces. While humble about it, she also has a mean eye for interior spaces and has written professionally in this area for years. Over the next year, we will transform my home and the energy in it, and I'm excited to write about it here the entire way.

My financial practices are also still coming into form. There are obligations I am addressing and systems I am creating around how I earn, manage, receive and steward resources. I want abundance. I want wealth. I want the resources and capacity to support the life and work I am creating. I don't experience those desires as being in conflict with the financial repair happening now. Increasingly, the practices that support one are the practices that support the other.

And there are people whose friendship and collaboration have become part of the texture of this life in ways that don't fit neatly beneath a job, practice or project. Over the last year, I have had the pleasure of working and collaborating with Ashley Starling (also A Society Experience), Alexx, Kenya Foy, Claire Lawrence and Jada E. (Miss.Sidecar504) on projects and events, while also being able to speak candidly with them about creativity, the things I am building and the real contents of my life. I am deeply grateful for people who can hold space for both the ideas and the person having them, and who let me do the same in return. I thank you and I love you.

There is so much in motion. I don't know exactly how all of it goes and I don't feel the need to. I understand what I am pointing toward and what my desire for these things comes from. I don't know what this swirl of things looks like from the outside, but I'm so grateful to be settled and resolved about the mix of energies in my life and how I am carrying them. I make a lot of sense to me, and I can't think of anything more valuable to me right now. My work, my art, my coaching practice, the environments I create, the relationships I cultivate, the resources I build and the ways I care for myself and others are not competing versions of my life.

They are my life.

And I am here for it.

That feels important to say plainly after everything it has taken for me to be able to say it truthfully.

I have spent so much of my life trying to understand what things mean. I am still interested in that. I probably always will be. But I am much more deliberate now about what I give my attention to, what I participate in making larger, and what I use my energy to create.

There is so much I want to experience. So much I want to make. So much I want to give and receive. There are people I haven't met yet who I will love. Ideas I haven't encountered that will change what I understand. Places I haven't been. Art I haven't made. Questions I haven't thought to ask. There are capacities I will grow into and things I cannot currently imagine from where I am standing.

I don't need to know all of it from here.

Forty years has given me plenty of evidence that being alive will continue to surprise me. I have no reason to believe I am finished changing my mind, discovering things about myself, being changed by other people, making a mess, finding something beautiful, getting something wrong, creating something I couldn't have imagined before I had the capacity to create it, or becoming more of whoever the hell I am.

There is so much life left to participate in. So much I care about. So much shifting for us collectively in real time. So much I intend to use myself for.

That is plenty to create from.

And whatever comes next, I am so happy to be fully here for it.