You are growing to love me or growing to hate me.
This little nugget in your inbox.
I did not want to write today. Halloween is sneakily stressful as a parent. All of a sudden it’s the school parade and you definitely don’t have their costume.
What if I can’t do it?
What if I want scooped up—
not pumped up?
What if it hurts too bad?
What if I’m too tired?
What if being alone is too much?
What if it’s too scary out there?
What if people are mean?
I love an everyday thing. A little test of wills. A little way to force myself to remember that I am only energy. That my thoughts and my forward movement, my patterns and my processes, are the tiny dots of my life. They are connected. Every moment we are faced with decision. We create stimuli, others respond, we receive another energy, we respond.
People tell me all the time, “You are so strong!” “How are you doing it?”
It is such a weird thing. I mean, it is sweet—but when I break down sobbing, I am sure they’re like, whoa, I got myself in over my head here. It is all hard. I mean every day is so hard I think my knees could buckle. The emotional, physical, financial, and relational turmoil that forces its way through your body, mind, and soul during the divorce process threatens to rip you to pieces.
It threatens to rip me to pieces.
So I test my own will.
Am I so strong? Can I do it? I have to practice. I have practiced.
What do I know to be true?
I know that pain kept in will poison you.
So I dance, I write, I journal, I talk, I cry.
I know that if I don’t do something small, I will never do anything big.
So I make the call, set the appointment, plan the podcast, do ten push-ups.
I set my alarm and I drink the water and I wash my dish and…
The list seems to stretch before me. Into infinity. A scroll of to-dos, a scroll I will never finish in this life. There are two ways to look at such a scroll, but so far I haven’t met anyone who’s crossed off everything. Only people who resent the scroll and those who have turned their scrolls into bibles and worship the to-dos, the pain, the mundane.THIS IS NOT A BYPASS. This is not some sort of numb opting out. It feels like my soul recognizing life. It allows me to walk around out there and do what I can and let go of what I can’t.
I feel this as a sort of soul-holding—a way that the clouds part as I need a ray of sun. Or how they darken to remind me of suffering I should see. It is in birth and it is in death. It is in the flutter of love and the reckoning with it. It is forgetting to order the Halloween costume and a brother’s crafty-handed “I got you, sis.”
It is nestled inside “I’m sorry” and “I hate you; I can’t be around you.”
It rides on the waves of a sweet-scented hug and crushes you on a slick black night.
Our lives are utterly unexplainable and perfectly as they should be—all at once. I guess if I stay in that devastating unknowing, I will forever know where I am going. Mr. Wonka—such a gift.
Always, Felicia
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I come from women who survived by shrinking. I tried that too—made my life neat, made my voice polite, made my longing a private hobby. It didn’t hold.
I was raised by an alcoholic Lakota runaway and discipled by a cult that told me holiness was obedience. My body knew better. It kept humming: there is a wilder, kinder way.
These days I practice a daily liturgy of listening—intuitive, erotic, embarrassingly tender. I mother four bright beings and the girl inside me who wanted to be free. I teach self-worth as sacrament, boundaries as mercy, and desire as a compass you can trust. My God is love. My work is remembering. My offering is a rebel’s theology of transformation—usable, embodied, just dangerous enough to set you honest.
TODAY’S PRACTICE
Take one tiny extra step forward. You got this.
