Coming Home to Myself

I had to start at the end, to start at the next beginning. Writing the piece on Misogyny & the Cost of Not Disappearing broke something open, which ultimately led to me to realize that I’d been living inside an old identity that had died a long time ago.

Since coming back to Seattle, it’s taken several months to find a center to write from. I have to be honest with myself, moving to Montana was not the right choice, but that brief journey held several lessons that had to be learned.

Before I continue on what’s coming next, let me start with two things:

First, I’ll be putting up a gate on the posts for Mind, Meaning and Matter. All of my current subscribers will be moved to comp paid so you can continue to read my posted. The gate is the boundary on the deeper, rawer posts. I truly feel these need to be contained within a safe digital space for anyone who comes to read, as well as myself.

Second, what I write here is going to be evolutionary. I may do a series on something, or I may write a one-off deep dive, or curate resources for inspiration. It will center around the development of identity after the age of 40, that’s the only through line I can establish. Gender, race, and orientation are agnostic.

This morning, as I started this new journey into writing. I find myself thinking about who I was in high school

Becoming Who You Were Before the World Told You to be Something Different

When I was 16, I said I wanted to be a photographer and someone who worked with horses, and to write. I used to journal and read no less than three-four books per week. I’d take the bus to the horse stable where I got lessons in exchange for being a working student. It was what I wanted to become with all my heart, but I didn’t become it. Why? Because of the narratives that ran through my home and the family dynamics at play.

You see, my mother was a cold woman, and sometimes verbally abusive. She loved status, recognition and accomplishment, and what I had to offer didn’t translate, so I learned to translate myself. Good grades, that turned into a credible college education, that turned into jobs with titles she’d be proud to share.

But that brought something hard, trying to live up to the standards of a woman who could not find happiness in herself, because of her own unhealed trauma. I know now that you can never live up to the expectations of a broken person, but being her daughter, who wanted her love and approval, I would have done anything. So I abandoned my dreams to try to gain what she would ultimately never give me.

What Originally Held True Came Back, It Had Never Left

Here’s what I had to sit here, in a new town, with a whole new life plan, the realizations that writing and the horses never actually went anywhere, they were the through lines in everything I’ve done. I’ve always written — blogging, client work, creating the language for many businesses that weren’t mine. I’ve always photographed, for business and for Instagram (a rolling account of how I was seeing the world at the time). And horses have been in my life almost continuously, owned or ridden, throughout the entire course of it.

So it isn’t that I abandoned them, I abandoned the permission to call them mine. To own them as the personal piece, not the productive thing being leveraged for approval or a paycheck or a brand. The writing and horses are what fuel this next version of the newsletter, and it’s enough. And I have both – you’re reading this and Mystic and I work and rider four times per week.

The Identity That Sits Alongside Me, Not the One That Defines Me

For those of you who read this blog only, and don’t know me professionally, I work with data, behavior and most recently AI. I’ve been doing the data for a decade, the AI and behavior for about four years privately, and honestly it’s what fuels my brain in a completely different way than what fuels this newsletter. It’s the new obsession, and the antithesis of it is the analog and human element that exists here, which is exactly why both have to exist for me to be whole.

It’s the clean distinction I can make between the personal and professional now that has helped me identify the fact that for most of my life I couldn’t tell the difference between what I did and who I was. Because doing was how I earned love that was never going to come on those terms anyway. The work became the identity, and the identity became the cage.

Coming full circle isn’t about choosing the personal over the professional or pretending the data work doesn’t matter to me, because it does. It’s about letting the professional sit alongside me instead of standing in for me, and letting the writing and horses and photographs be mine without needing to monetize them into legitimacy.

That distinction is the whole point of what I’m building now, and the reason this newsletter is going behind a gate. The old identity collapsed because it couldn’t tell those two things apart, and everything I’m doing on this side of the collapse depends on keeping them separate.

Side note: If you want to follow my deeper, no bullshit exploration of AI, you can follow me on LinkedIn, or head over to Maca.la, which is my new professional site for all this work and advisory I’ve built on Ghost. It has a free tier.