I Have Absolutely No Idea What I'm Doing
I left in search of a plan and, sure as heck, I still don't have one
Good morning, beautiful human,
It’s been a while, and oh, how I have missed you.
Although my silence may have implied otherwise, I thought of you every single day. You are my people — my community — the beautiful humans who chose to join Waffle as she walked me home to myself, and I do not take that honor lightly.
The past six or so months have held far more than I planned or even expected. I left this space and social media with a very clear intention: to find true quiet and then myself within it.
I wanted to strip away the layers that my experiences, my trauma, and this world had conditioned into my being. I kept saying to myself: I want to do it right, for once. And for the record, doing it right didn’t mean doing it successfully in the eyes of capitalism or society. It meant living with the intention of finding actual alignment within myself.
Waffle was gone, and I would be damned if I did not figure out how to honor her, this life, and the survival she so spectacularly gave me to the fullest possible degree.
My plan, of course, did not go as planned, as my plans never do :)
But the time away from social media, all phone notifications, and most outside expectations of any kind served me well. I found parts of myself that had long been hidden and patterns of existence that had held me captive within myself for far too long.
I won’t yet go into everything that time held: my daily walks with Tug, the many pies I ate, the grant I wrote to build a new project that will hopefully serve all of us, a new diagnosis, and hours and hours and hours of felling trees, raking brush, building terraces, and planting the first home and hillside of Waffle’s Wildflowers. Oh, and listening to Noah Kahan on repeat, of course.
But I will say that the time away brought immense clarity — just not the kind I had planned for.
My time away showed me that I had been living for other people — their expectations and their comfort — instead of living for myself and my own.
I do not shame this pattern of being. I don’t whatsoever, actually. It was entirely adaptive. My fawn response — my need to always put others first — was how I survived grade-school bullies, family dynamics, stigma, and, in the end, being fully institutionalized.
The fawn response saved me. And it no longer does. Now, it holds me captive within myself.
So, with this clarity, I reevaluated just about everything and started making some changes. I restructured my role at Harvard into a consulting contract and cut back immensely. I started writing comedy about my trauma instead of memoir, and loved it.
And then, having saved enough, I took a full break from work for two months. My first break from employment in twelve years. It was so needed.
I also realized that my never-ending quest to “find my purpose” was itself a reflection of my conditioning — a false belief that if I did not live perfectly and make everyone else comfortable and happy, I would be locked up once more.
What’s wild is that my body really believes this. It truly believes that any assertion of myself that causes discomfort in another person will mean the end of my freedom.
But the real truth is the opposite. It is the truth I have been called back to again and again since I was a fierce little fighter of a girl:
Only when I assert myself, just as Waffle asserted herself for me, will I truly be free.
Only when I am my full self out loud will I be doing it right.
I have learned and lived this truth over and over again. I fight and fight and fight for my right to exist, exactly as I am, and then my body protects my beating heart by abandoning my true self.
It has happened more times than I will ever be able to count or remember. I have been mocked, punished, silenced, institutionalized, medicated, fired, and worse for being me and each time, the message was clear: it is not safe to be me, and being me has dire, freedom-losing consequences.
When I really think about it, it’s actually kind of incredible that I keep getting back up. This world has beaten me down so many damn times.
And yet — always — I begin again.
I commit to being fully me once more.
That is the practice I am being called back to once more: being unabashedly me — being brave enough to put my full self out there.
But this time, I refuse to package myself into something easier to understand — or something I even understand, for that matter — as I do so.
I also refuse to prioritize everyone else’s nervous system over my own.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
This time, I’m simply beginning again as messy me.
This time, I’m coming back and actually living my full, zesty, uncomfortable, ever evolving truths.
And amazingly, therein lies what I was put on Earth to do in the first place: to be messy out loud with you and invite you to do the same.
Writing that sentence gives me full-body goosebumps because it actually feels right. It actually feels RIGHT! It is not like the nine other versions of this note I wrote, in which I tried to explain my chaos through poetic prose.
And don’t get me wrong — I love poetic prose when it flows through me. But I — me, myself, and Waffle beating inside my chest — I am not poetic prose.
I am a spectacular hurricane. A beautiful disaster.
I am messy me.
And yup, right now that self is smiling the biggest smile through her snot-covered — oh, the snot! — tear-stained face as she walks her dog through the woods and writes to you.
So, my beautiful peeps, here’s the deal: I don’t know what the future of this space will look like.
AND
The following truths are the founding beliefs upon which this space will be built:
There is no wrong way to be human, as long as you are honest and kind.
I don’t have the answers. Never have, and never will.
I love dogs and stories — mine, yours, and all those I have yet to encounter.
When I grow up, I want to be as incredible as my best girl: brave, fearless, bold, kind, sassy, silly, sweet, and always ready for an adventure.
Being brave means getting uncomfortable and I plan to do a lot more of that.
Life is best spent in the here and now — in the moments when we don’t even remember we have a phone because we are so embodied and present with our people, places, and pups that there is nowhere else we could even fathom being.
Life is better together — with you. And because I find you through my computer and my phone, how do I balance being here with you and being fully present in my life? I have no idea.
I want to leave this world a little kinder than it was when I arrived. I want to share what I’ve learned from living through pain and growing through discomfort so that other people do not have to hurt as much as I did — and often still do. I promised Waffle and Maura that I would do exactly that and I absolutely will not let them down. It also might take me a little time to grow back into that level of fighter. And I am okay with that.
I really — really, really, really — want to laugh with you. I want to share my extremely dark, sometimes earnest and heartfelt, often goofy, but always inappropriate sense of humor. I want to laugh at the fuckery, the chaos, and the brokenness of this world — and, above all, at myself. Oh, how I want to laugh at myself. I am not a sad story. I am a goddamn messy hilarious one.
The light gets in when we are brave enough to open the door and meet the world in its uncertainty.
Every single thing that hurt me — the learning disability, the bullying, the mental disorders, the rapes, the hallucinations, the hospitalizations, all of it — does not define me.
My resilience does.
And I survived because, after weeping it out, time and time again, I would begin again in defiance and say, “Oh, really, world? Is that all ya got?”
So today, as this note finds you, I begin again — unabashedly me — weeping because Waffle no longer walks beside me, unsure of what lies ahead, yet still brave enough to open the door in search of light without having a clue where I am going.
And I say:
Oh, really, world? Is that all ya got?
More soon.
I love you.
Kindly,
Kate
