Finding a Soft Place to Land

A Return to Wholeness

A photograph from a series of self-portraits I did earlier this month.

I’ve started diving into parts work both at the suggestion of my therapist and within a professional training for future career paths I want to explore.¹ Parts work invites us to get to know the parts of ourselves and our minds that have been exiled, that scare us, that protect us. To foster an intimacy with these parts is to understand what purpose they’re trying to serve, even the ones that are manifesting in ways we might deem harmful. We can feel distant from the parts of us that manifest in ways we don’t like, creating a sense of fracturing or a like mental family feud. In reading No Bad Parts, rather than the western script of psychiatrically-labeled individuals as broken and needing to be fixed - there’s this narrative of inherent goodness and wholeness. It reminds me of the Christianity of my youth, if it didn’t go all damnation on me. It's the softness I’ve been craving.

Maybe it’s my 30s, or the trauma of the ongoing pandemic, or me finally hitting some sort of magical hard limit, but I’ve found that I can’t really mask who I am anymore. It’s been a year+ of messy, bumbling humanness, being left with myself, completely bare, perhaps for the first time. Been a bit of an adjustment. I’ve found that the seemingly-mandated constant striving towards healing has left me exhausted to the marrow. It’s not that I don’t want to be a better person. I’d just rather let humans be human, and thrive in the absolute humanness of fucking things up sometimes. Of taking time off to lose your shit. To just be.

I think a pain many of us share is being put on a pedestal and told to perform, to dare not fail, for the very real fear of being devalued and forgotten. That used to be my ultimate fear - a mix of abandonment trauma, social rejection, and a lingering feeling that there’s something very much wrong with me that everyone else notices. But as I’ve gone through the terrible fucking slingshot of being valued and devalued again and again, I’ve learned that 1) Yes I do in fact hate that shit, 2) I can choose a different path for myself, and 3) I can embody what I wish to see in the world. What would the world look like if we offered each other humanity instead? Like actual messy humanity. If we individually and collectively built up our tolerance for holding space for the messy shit. If we gave each other a soft place to land when things go wrong?

Early Autumn Glimmers:

#69 Fixing ourselves before we begin from Recovering by Holly Whitaker - 100% an inspiration seed for this piece

Is This Desire? (entire album, thanks) by PJ Harvey

My newfound love of glitter on my eyelids and cheekbones²

A late-morning black coffee and brown sugar donut streetside at my favorite cafe, while a cool breeze kindly threatens rain

Baking focaccia at sunrise

Looking for a soft place to land

1. Loading… loading… hopefully something I can have a coherent narrative around soon.

2. I find it very frustrating that my local Sephora stocks basically 0 glitter in store. Shopping small is better anyways. Taking suggestions for glitter (both face and body), especially biodegradable!