Love Letters from Flora: THE LIFE YOU WANT WILL COST YOU YOUR IDENTITY - Death and becoming who you want to be | 26
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I am finding this process of writing more and more captivating. When I remind myself why I am doing this, it is easy - the goddess creates. This is a process of creation. The resonance of the weekly creation becomes more and more startling. When I began, in February, I set out to do this for one full year. 52 weeks of creation. Once a month, around my ovulation, cause magical energy, am I right?, I record four to five episodes for the show. Before the recording day, I sit down and take note of what wants to be expressed through me. Initially, I had AI create a concept for me, one headline for each quater, and then rough outlines of the stories to be told. The further I move along in this journey of creation, the more freedom I reclaim. The experiences of my life are stories worth telling. They show patterns and societal reflections. Readers, viewers find themselves reflected in what I share. And this glimpse of a thought just flashed into my awareness, how many folks worldwide access those platforms? And, does it matter? I desire to create, I desire to write, and so here I am, doing exactly that.
Back to the point - I record multiple episodes in one go, and then weekly write, edit and publish one episode to read and watch for you. Multiple times this has happened, when the time has come for a specific publication, it feels absurdly accurate for the current happenings in my life.
Let me introduce you to identity, death, grief, rebirth, reinvention. This feels particularly on point as I have left the west coast of Canada, which has become home over the course of seven years, to explore the east and potentially, probably create a home in Montréal, QC, Canada. And for that, I have to die. Whilst my head is spinning from looking at way too many rental annonces, I am letting that die for a moment, to write. While my MacBook is dying, too, one quarter of the screen is, well, dead.
Help me find a home (asap, min. 3 1/2, peaceful, tub, top floor, balcony, beautifully furnished, 1 year). And a MacBook (M1 min.). Thank you. Stay tuned!
THE STORY
I am fully aware of the privilege I get to live. It is my choice to leave and arrive, to shape shift, change, evolve, and leave and arrive, over and over again. Maybe your choices are different. Maybe you chose the career, the family, the mortgage, the house, the marriage, the kids, the cars, the boats. I salute you. I sometimes envy you for what I perceive as straight forward choices. You are easily recognizable. Your identity makes way more sense than mine. You can easily be identified: Boss. Owner. Father. Leader. Athlete. Winner. Strong one. Good girl. Rescuer. Builder. Achiever. It's easy to recognize you, to bond with you. Identity makes us recognizable in the world. Again, I envy that. I changed forms so many times, even I am having a hard time following myself at times, let alone my parents, or friends from university. "You are doing what now? Didn't you just move to Morocco to be a diplomate?" "Sure, that was (let me reverse engineer my life).... 13 years ago." "Oh, right...."
So, you can say many things about me. One thing you cannot say about me: not living her life to the fullest. I might not be recognizable. And this might challenge you - what happens when the version of you that everyone recognizes is no longer true? What happens when you outgrew it, outperformed it, got bored of it? Tell me if that's right, are you stuck? This identity, is it armour, too? Does it protect you? Is it a castle, and you get to be king? Did this identity offer you the safety of belonging, status, fame, success, love, normality, profanity? Did it become a golden cage? I had many opportunities for golden ages, aaaaaah, cages, in this life, so far. I turned all of them down. Career in corporate law. No, thank you. Career in diplomacy. No, thank you. Expat wife life in Morocco. No, thank you. Digital nomad. Maybe. Is that still a thing? Hippie. No, thank you. Yoga teacher. Hmmmm..... You see, many versions of me had to die in order to become who I am right now. And I am still fairly young, but I dare to say this. I have been many. I am many. I am becoming many. I will be many. But, once again, not for the faint of heart. The life you want requires the death of the person(a/ae) you learned to be. The ones that belong, are loved and successful. And yes, you have this one, precious life, in this shape and form. Might as well give it your all, hm? And I want to acknowledge, that maybe some choices along the way, children, partners, investments, are now all part of the equation. And I challenge you, it is figureoutable. You owe your life, to yourself, to them to the word. Only you can know, in the depths of your heart and soul and boner..... bones, I meant bones, who you get to be. And who needs to die. Behold, though, one thing I learned, the nervous system does not particularly enjoy funerals.
So, all those women I've been. You met some of them. Good girl. Country girl. Naughty girl. Wanting to drop out of high school girl. Good girlfriend. Excellent grades in university girl. PARTY GIRL. Associate in corporate law. Diplomatic world. Negotiations. Conferences. Deals. Dancing. Drinking. Drugs. Signings. Closings. Running. Traditions. Kinda.
Then the pendulum swing. It somehow just happened, over a few years. I went from weekends at the country cabin, city trips, Michelin star meals and designer bags to backpacking, hostels, crotch drop pants and no make up, ever. The label I might have identified most was hippie. This peaked in rejecting wealth and the world I came from. Along the way, I picked up some more identities. Vegan. Spiritual. Yoga teacher. Nomad. Ditched some. Minimalist. Broke. Projector. Victim. Reclaimed others. Skier. Mountain woman. Activist. Teacher. Coach. Leader. And some always sticked. Writer. Athlete. Vibrant. Nature. Loving. Warm. Almost like a very loved record. With some of them, I spun many circles, until they wore out. The identities Flora has worn, inhabited, loved and eventually outgrown. How many are the things I do, and how many are the things I am? There is huge privilege in being able to say: this is no longer true. From the outside, it might look like I am always seeking, running. This might have been true in the past. I am always curious. I am an explorer. For sure. I don't settle. When I have a sense that there is more, I go for it. I want it. I want more. I want the most.
Living life this way is full of grief, too. Growing pains. Leaving relationships, built over years. Familiarity, comfort, environments. Belonging. Followers. Places and people I took time to get to know. And then this knowing, that there is more. Sometimes it can be found on the inside. And sometimes it needs to be followed on the outside, across continents and oceans and timezones. The people around you learned how to love and understand one version of you. Or maybe many. I hope many. Change, evolution is a natural part of being human. For some people in your life, loving many versions of you can be hard. Transformation asks them to meet someone new. Especially long term relationships, and I don't mean that solemnly in a romantic way, but also think of family, work, friends, clients - can you love me when you no longer recognize me?
THE PATTERN
We as humans like easeful, we like familiarity, predictability. Is that also truth? Definitely not. Identity (starting with basic identifying gender, race - does it mess with you when someone has altered their body? Does it mess with you when a femme woman kisses a femme woman?) is a nervous-system strategy. It protects belonging. Predictability. Familiarity. You look at someone and you assume you know who they are, what they like, how they speak. Consciously or not. I do that too, all the time. One identity I am really trying to clean up right now, maybe not so much in public: financially illiterate. On that subject, I had an exquisite conversation with a dear friend a couple of weeks ago. She uses the metaphor of a highway. The road you have driven a thousand times. Multiple lanes. Rather straight. Smooth surface. Maybe your highway is chasing unavailable people. Jerking off to porn. Working at 5:30 every morning. Being indispensable. Being dominant. Being the rescuer. Being the looser. Being the victim. Being the person who is always right, who always wins. It might not feel good. But it feels known. You do this on auto pilot, blind folded. Even though you think you want to change, this is the way you've been going your entire life, and maybe your parents and their parents have gone down the same highways. Chances are pretty high.
Then there is the country roads. Unknown, dimly lit, if at all. Slower. Uncertain. Maybe there is a roadblock. Maybe you have to turn around. Maybe you have to find a different way. Maybe hardly anyones has taken this road before you. It's scary and uncomfortable. Yet, you never know. You might discover completely new perspectives. New views. New people.
The nervous system chooses the highway because it recognizes it. It's easy. It might hurt and not serve who you want to be now, who you want to become, but at least it's known. Doing things differently requires a conscious choice, hitting the breaks, turning around that wheel, taking the exit, and going down that road you have no navigation for, yet. It's scary, it might feel like death. And exactly that is required for real transformation: death. Familiarity has this annoying habit of masquerading as safety. New ways feel unsafe. They make you hold your breath, break sweats and tears, make your knees shake, your voice crack. And that might last for a while. What if familiarity has been masquerading as safety? And what if you make it to the other side? Nobody will ever know unless you try.
THE INVITATION
We spent decades becoming somebody. Our lives invested in looking, feeling, being perceived as achieved, successful, capable, respected. All the time, energy and money that went into becoming a leader, a provider, an owner. Man who knows what to do. People turn to you for advise, opinion, help, support. You are an innovator, a way shower, a change maker, a game changer. That identity worked spectacularly. Until it didn’t.
Once again, the outside is polished, shiny, perfect, from the shoes to the tips of your hair and nails (as if you'd care, but, between us, you do). You made it. Perhaps you made it all by yourself. A self-made man, celebrated a million times. And again, between us, any chips in the lacquer? Maybe internally only, something crumbling, shaking, trembling. Held together by the sheer power of your, yes, exactly, identity management. The very identity responsible for creating his success may now be constraining his intimacy, sexuality, relationships, creativity and next chapter. Are you even alive? Are you even living? Or are you so concerned with this identity? Following fifty-step-programs, bio-hacks, cold plunge protocols, optimizing, always?
Let's get you naked, my friend. Let's strip away the strategies for becoming a more optimized version of the same man. He needs somewhere safe enough to discover who he is without performing the identity that made him successful. Yes, I am telling you what you need. Your identity is telling others what they need. Your turn. You built lots. Your success is awesome. It is time to bring the body into the equation. Let his body discover that he can loosen his grip on an old identity without losing himself.
You read about breath here. Many times. Once again. Can you exhale without knowing who you’ll be on the next inhale?
SOCIETAL REFLECTION
"What do you do?" is one of the classic questions. For the longest time I had no idea how to respond. To be honest, I still don't really know. I am aware that most people's most burning curiosity is what I do for work. Really? I mean, yes, I do love my work. I am proud of my work. I identify with my work. And yet, what do I do? I'm alive. That's enough. Society likes recognizable people. We reward fixed identities. It makes it easy to relate. Oh, you're a parent, too. Or a founder, physician, author, lawyer, CEO, expert. Immedietely we are we rewarded with something we can relate to, or avert to. Identities make humans legible, easy, easier to contain. We look at someone, we see them in scrubs, a suit, a safety west, and our brain places them in a corner. We hear them speak, we see their skin colour, their breasts, and make stories. We hear someone always speak up eloquently, or be mostly quiet. Identifying is part of our our ways of being, staying safe.
We ask children what they want to be. Who ever says happy? Content? Authentic? Fully expressed? Me? Alive? It turns into the doing part of things once again, so early. Adults introduce themselves through what they do. And then, I've you've been doing the same thing for years, decades, generations, it gets harder and harder to pivot, to change, to exit. Success solidifies the identity further. This is who you are. Period. You are what you do. What happens if you hate your life every morning you wake up? Drowning the identity crises in drinks, or buying a new boat or changing partners? It is simply who you are expected to be. Everyone knows you as partner, doctor, professor. What happens if you change your mind? What will they think of you buying this property in California growing organic citrus? Or biking across Cambodia? Or taking your partner on a one month Tantra immersion into the jungles of Bali? You'll be the talk of town (or not. People have their own lives, you know?). Changing your mind might be seen as failure. And we talked about that before, failure might mean death (in a good way, as we learned). But still, death. Letting identities die. Many think leaving is quitting. You didn't try hard enough to make it work. There are things to be said about staying, for sure. Only you can know, in the heart of your hearts, when it is what. When is it time for expansion, growth, substantial change, reinvention. That is not instability. It is choosing yourself, and through that the ones around you and after you.
And perhaps one of the great privileges of living this incredible life you have built for yourself is being allowed to say: That was me. It was real. And it isn’t me anymore.
EMBODIED INQUIRY
Begin with the exhale. Some stretches, some sways, movements of hips, shoulders, jaw. Let the identity loosen before asking the mind to explain it. As always, notice sensations in the body. Let yourself be the animal you are. No need to fix, no need to change. This is a transmission, not advice. Take what lands, leave the rest.
Which version of myself am I still protecting? Notice where that identity lives in the body. Chest? Jaw? Belly? Shoulders?
Who would I be without this identity? Stay before the answer. Feel the emptiness.
What part of me is ready to die so something truer can live?
Exhale. Flare your lips. Shake it off.
Let something go.