Severance requires discernment and discernment requires stillness. This world we live in has convinced us that we need to always be moving moving moving like sharks who can’t breathe when they stop, but human beings are different. We breathe better when we stop. And when we connect our breath to our bodies, we can begin to discern what is right and real and true for us in any given moment. And when we can do that, we can begin to hear the things we’re being told from outside of us, and decide whether they are true or not.
I heard a story once about a corporation that had saturated the market in the western world for their razors, and decided they needed to expand to Japan. Unfortunately, there was a stumbling block: as a general rule, women in Japan don’t shave their legs. The marketing department had a solution, though, and it was twofold. First, convince women in Japan to hate their body hair. Second, convince them that our razors are the best thing they can buy to combat that self-loathing and make themselves feel better.
Growing up in the United States, I don’t remember being taught to hate my body hair by a corporation. I was taught to shave by the women elders in my family. I am certain they didn’t think of it as teaching me to hate parts of myself, but in their blind adherence to the idea that my body hair needed to go away in order for me to be “normal,” they were teaching me to tame myself, to change myself, to deny a part of my body that was something that was actually normal and natural and hide it or “fix” it to make myself more acceptable.
Discernment: what am I unwilling to pass down to my children?
Where can I be still and examine what I think I know? Where can I see which things have encouraged me to be smaller, quieter, more compliant? Where have I agreed to carve off pieces of myself, squash my ideas, close my lips in order to be more likeable? What are the things that I have done over and over again in my life in service to an ideal that was handed down to me that may not be something I actually believe?
I don’t have any anger at my mother or her mother or her mother for handing down these messages about assimilation and following the rules. They learned those things both from living in a culture where we are constantly told by advertisements and people in power (physicians, therapists, politicians) what is “normal,” and by watching what happened to women who didn’t conform. As mothers, if they were able to notice and acknowledge the relentless marketing and question it, they had to choose between protecting themselves and their children or fighting the system. It is one thing to do it for yourself, but when you have a child to protect, it becomes harder and harder to imagine what it might be like to be banished for nonconformity. There is no way to both stay and go. One can push at the edges of the dominant culture, but if the consequence for denying that culture or the importance of the rituals is not being accepted into the group anymore, that is often the difference between surviving and not surviving, at least if you're not a white man with some measure of power.
I work with so many parents of teens whose fear for their kids shows up as anger and punishment. Parents who punish their daughters for wearing certain clothes or makeup or try to talk them out of questioning their gender or sexuality. Parents who push their kids to hide who they actually are in some desperate bid to keep them safe. So many parents whose kids have come out to them have said some variation of “I wish he/she/they were straight! My child’s life is going to be so hard now!” to me and I get it. But why are we fighting our kids and working so hard to make them deny who they are when we know on some level that it is the arbitrary decision about what is “normal” and acceptable that is wrong? Because it feels like it threatens us, too. Because standing up against a faceless system feels impossible and it is often easier to pretend and tell ourselves that this is just the way it is.
The more I was still, the more I could begin to see how all of these systems were intertwined with each other – the ways capitalism told us what was normal because of colonialism and patriarchy and white supremacy. The more I saw, the quieter I got, and the more I could hear my own voice saying this was all wrong. It was time for severance.
ON SURVIVING
I have come to understand that what I once believed was thriving was actually surviving. Regardless of the material wealth I had, having acquiesced to the demands of a world that would never accept me for who I was as a whole, full person, I was not capable of thriving. Our culture is built on a foundation of rules that precludes thriving because thriving is messy, experimental, diverse, connected.
The world I grew up in – and was raising my children in – was created to support ideas of conformity, acquisition, independence, and competition. It says that if someone has found a way to accomplish something with a “good” result, that should become the standard, reproducible, not up for debate any longer. There is no need to continue to grow and develop – just keep reproducing that same thing to get the same end. The end goal – the accomplishment – is the point, rather than learning, creativity, deeper understanding. And if we come to understand that this “good” result is actually only good for a certain subset of people, and is likely harming others, we try to ignore it. Our culture abhors discomfort and unpredictability to the point where we have pathologized them. Leaning into both of those things was key to my ability to divorce myself from those old ideas, but it meant being willing to constantly remind myself that I wasn’t wrong for doing so, and staying curious about my old prejudices and assumptions. Because I was taught so well by patriarchy and white supremacy, it took effort for me to see things I had been taught to ignore. It still does.
Discomfort is not illness or disease. Irritability is defined as the capacity to respond to one’s surroundings. It is a tool. It is a sign that something is “off” but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to destroy the thing that is irritating us. Often, the remedy is simply to move ourselves away from it, but we have conflated “not right” with “wrong” and discomfort with illness. This is where discernment comes in. Asking ourselves the question, “is this something I need to solve by removing the external thing or can I simply shift something about myself and find some relief?” is important. Discomfort is information. It may be telling us that this particular place is not for us – it’s too hot or too small or just “off.” That is how I started to feel about living in Seattle.
Once we have moved away from the thing that we know isn’t for us, many of us assume that that means we will automatically be in the space of the thing that is for us. In some cases, that’s true – like when we move from the direct sun into the shade and immediately feel cooler. But in most cases, that is not true, and that is the trap of the binary. Because if we discover, instead, that we are in some new space that is confusing and still not quite right, we often reflexively decide to go back. Being in a big, unknown space is scarier than being back in that other place where something we can identify is jabbing us in the side. The devil you know and all that....
Both places cause us discomfort; it is just that one of them is more recognizable and we’d rather choose that. But I’ve learned that it is almost never a bad idea to sit in that big scary space and wait for a while and then go searching for the thing that will make me feel good and right. Moving away from the original thing that we know isn’t right for us simply requires us to keep asking, exploring. And it requires us to tolerate mistakes and messiness. And it often requires us to find support, people who can hold us and our fear while we wait. These are all things that white, western culture abhor – messes, mistakes, discomfort, fear, and support.
The old place tells us we can be still once we’ve acquiesced, that there is A Way and if we agree to it, we will have arrived (even if there is something always jabbing us in the side). The social contract we’ve agreed to is one that literally requires us to sit with something that is causing us pain so that the others around us can feel okay and the system itself can remain unchanged. The energy it requires of us to sit there, still and unchanging, carving off pieces of ourselves that question this way of being as they come up is real, and it robs us of the energy we would be able to use to create. If you are working hard to “belong,” hiding or denying parts of your own individual, untamed nature, the energy you’re expending is being wasted.
In the new place, we get to play, experiment, see what happens. There is no guarantee that we won’t find discomfort and pain there, too, but there is always the opportunity to keep asking, keep expanding into our fuller selves, expressing who we are in ways that aren’t bounded by some arbitrary rules. It is “fuck around and find out” in the most delicious way. Especially if you’ve found support. I was beginning to learn that being messy with people who embraced my need to explore was one of the greatest joys I’d ever experienced. The grace in that place of not knowing didn’t mitigate any growing pains, but it was far better than being in the old place where I was uncomfortable and given no grace at all, even by myself.
As I drove south from Seattle, I realized I was gradually pulling away from the idea I’d had in my head for the last several weeks that I could undo this at any time if I wanted to. It’s odd how hard it was to remember why I was doing this when I got scared and amazing how easy it would have been to just slip back into the (dis)comfort zone of staying in Seattle. I could rearrange the furniture after the kids left, be welcomed back at the food bank with open arms, try to shore up my few remaining close friendships there and double down on efforts to build a consulting practice in town.
It was like memory foam – quietly but unreservedly floating back up into its old shape. It would be cheaper to stay in Seattle and after all the work I did to get the house ready to sell, it was in perfect shape. I could just slightly renovate my life back in Seattle within the parameters of a place I knew intimately, stores and neighborhoods I was familiar with. But while the old ideas grew to fill in the space like memory foam, I imagined myself shrinking. Staying would make me small.
Staying didn’t get me closer to family or nature. It didn’t give me an opportunity to create an altogether new way of living, expanding my sense of who I am and what I can do. Staying felt safe, if uncomfortable. Leaving felt real, purposeful, like living, like choosing. Staying felt like only going to the beach at high tide so that I didn’t have to look at any of the things that showed up when the water had receded. Those things were still there – the tidepools with all of their teeming life and jagged edges and, often, dead creatures – but they were hidden beneath the water. Staying would mean I never got to see the whole picture.
The farther I got from Seattle the more I began to believe I was going to do this. I was choosing courage over comfort, just like Lauren and Moses did, just like Erin did when she went so far away for college. They did it in part because they knew they were going to be okay – they had a safe place to land if they needed it. It is so much easier to launch out and explore when we know that we will be welcomed by our beloveds whether we come back the triumphant explorer or a quivering mass. We are each other’s safe place to land, and while I wasn’t sure if I had a network of folks who could and would catch me if I fell, I was working on being my own safe place. I was learning to allow myself to be a quivering mass and not let it change how much I love myself.
That mantra became my lifeline, my infinite chorus. The pink sticky note on the dashboard of my rental van was the thing that steadied me, grounded me, calmed my heart rate a dozen times a day:
I am safe.
I am loved.
I have resources.
I deserve joy.
ON BEING LOST
When I was a kid and I lost something, I’d go on a tear. Turning over couch cushions, sliding furniture around to peer underneath, flinging open cupboard drawers and tossing shoes out of the closet behind me. Gathering information and clues can look like madness from the outside, but when you feel like you need to find something important, that you can’t do without it, there is a passion and a focus about it, even if it looks a little frightening to someone else.
When I left Seattle, many of the people in my life thought I was crazy. The ones who got it were the women, mostly women like me who had raised their kids and given their time and energy to their husbands for decades and lost themselves somewhere along the way. Those women were excited for me, jealous of me, standing in line to cheer me on.
I had done my best to be good, live up to standards, abide by the rules. As a kid, I endured the sting of punishment when I broke a rule I often didn’t even know existed. I learned by trial and error just how wide the spectrum of acceptable behavior was for me (which was, incidentally, different for the boys or for my brown-skinned sister). I had to find the edges because my very nature wouldn’t let me capitulate completely. Even as an adult, I classified myself as a “rebellious rule-follower.” I had carefully honed my ability to suss out just how much I could get away with as a white, suburban mother and wife of a tech executive. Could I swear? Could I talk about my political views in mixed company? Was it okay to disagree with a man at a dinner party?
But at some point, my nature pushed for severance. There was a trail of carved-off pieces of me littered behind me and it was time to try something different. I was surviving. I had assimilated. But I needed more – more oxygen, more space, more play, more light, more curiosity, creativity, connection, delight.
The best boss I ever had is responsible for helping me shift my view of the way I move through the world. When I was in my early 20s, I went to work for her at the Washington State Mental Health Division. It wasn’t my first taste of bureaucracy, but it was my first experience being on the inside and it made me more frustrated than ever. Seeing how these enormous systems centered themselves rather than bending to serve the people they were created to serve was infuriating and often brought me to tears as I sat at a conference table with my boss and a bunch of old white men who had the power (and the purse strings) to tell us what we could and couldn’t do.
By that time, I knew very well how to act in polite company, how to dress and speak professionally, but that part of me was constantly at war with the part of me that wanted to advocate for the kids and families who were desperately in need of mental health treatment. At my 90-day performance review, my boss called me in to her office and I sat nervously on the edge of my chair across the desk from her. She looked at me with a soft smile and kind eyes and used both hands to cover the pile of printed papers that comprised my formal review, but not before I saw something scrawled in her handwriting on a post-it note at the top. She laughed and said we’d get to the nitty gritty, but first she wanted to tell me that she had created a nickname for me: Queen of the Workaround.
I instantly felt shame. While the nickname sounded positive, I was flooded with memories of my mom and dad telling me to just follow the rules, already, asking me, “Why can’t you just do what you’re told? It’s not hard. You know what to do.” My whole life I had felt as if there was something wrong with me because there was some core, elemental piece of me that refused to capitulate in certain circumstances. Why couldn’t I just be ok with the way things were?
I must have hesitated long enough that Kathy felt like she needed to explain. “That’s a good thing, Kari. I love the way you go with me to these meetings and advocate for these kids and get shot down and told why it can’t work or we can’t pay for that, and you nod your head and then you get back here and figure out a way to make it work anyway. That’s what it takes to survive in this kind of work. I see myself in you.”
She was right. I was emulating her. She was the most badass, effective, no-nonsense person I had ever worked for. She was a master at navigating the bureaucracy, playing the game, and then thinking creatively about how to care for these families with the crumbs we were given. She was collaborative and innovative, and I wanted to be her. And here she was saying I was already like her in that way. Suddenly, something I’d been trying to hide my whole life – my rebellious rule-following tendencies, my willingness to MacGyver shit together to solve a problem – was an asset and something to be celebrated. That was nearly 30 years ago and it remains a huge turning point in my life. Her encouragement led me to embrace that part of myself and become an even more fierce advocate for my kids, Sean, the nonprofit organizations I worked with. It is the reason I was known as the “underground guerrilla food bank lady” during the pandemic lockdown. It has literally kept people alive despite the rules made by people in power that would have continued starving them.
Connecting to my body was key during this time of unlearning and severance. The way most of us grew up requires that we believe in the supremacy of our minds over our bodies and we cut ourselves off from the wisdom contained in our bones, our gut, our skin and our very cells. But it is important that, of all of the information processed by a human being in any given day, only 20% of it travels in the direction of our minds to our bodies. This is things like, “there’s a car coming, get out of the way!” The other 80% of the information we receive and process travels from our bodies to our brains. This is responsible for walking in to a room and 'knowing' the vibe is off, recognizing when someone is following you in the dark even if they aren't making a sound, getting goosebumps when we hear a beautiful poem or piece of music. This information tells our bodies we are connected to others all the time. So how could we ever think it was a good idea to divorce ourselves from our body wisdom?
It all comes down to control. Our culture reveres control, seeks it out, holds it up as paramount. But our bodies respond, often “irrationally,” to stimuli all the time and since we cannot control every single impulse or reflex or automatic response our bodies have, the patriarchy wants to ignore them. If we cannot reduce ourselves to a machine-like existence, we cannot hope to control ourselves. Who can control Spirit? If you can’t control it, pretend it’s not important.
We have become convinced that if we don’t understand something in a logical sense – cause-effect, predictability, reproducibility – it is dangerous. And women’s bodies are such a mystery to most men (and women) in power that they are more tightly controlled than men’s bodies. Women are messy – periods, childbirth, lactating – and the patriarchy hates a mess. But men suffer under this, too, by being encouraged to stifle certain emotions and only make decisions with their brains and sculpt their bodies with exercise. Bodies that don’t fit neatly into the binary of Man/Woman are seen as even more threatening, both because our culture loves a binary and because there is less clarity there.
It is no coincidence that women and transgender individuals are targeted by sexual predators more often than cis-het men are. Sexual assault isn’t about sensuality or desire, it’s about power and control. It is rooted in fear.
Reclaiming my whole, full, self meant re-establishing my connection to my body. Learning to listen for that "gut feeling” or honoring the hairs that rose on my arms when someone said something that hit me wrong. I’m not there entirely yet. I still have times when I am altogether unsure of what my body wants or needs or is saying, but at least I’m asking the question now. I have learned the importance of breath and movement. I have noticed that when I’m feeling overwhelmed with emotion, I often stop breathing in an attempt to stop feeling. Returning to my breath means I can slowly return to feeling, letting the emotion wash over me and through me so that I can begin to understand what I am experiencing in the entirety of my body.
My body helps me listen. It returns my focus. When I think I can find an answer in my head, I often get frustrated because I am looking for more information so that I can make the “Right” decision, but remembering that I can gather more information by leaning back, breathing deeply, feeling my heart rate and noticing whether my skin is puckering up in goosebumps or not, discerning how tight my jaw is and if my shoulders are hiked up toward my ears – that is golden. Returning to my Self creates an expansiveness and counteracts that feeling of urgency I get. It clarifies what is important to me like nothing else.
And part of this process means I’m taking better care of my body. I am giving it sunshine and rest, play and gentle movement. I am recognizing that waking with the sun in the spring and summer months feels happy and optimistic and sets the tone for my day better than any cup of coffee could. (Make no mistake – I still have that cup of coffee…) All those years of disdain for my body and the way it didn’t do the things I wanted it to – grew hair in places I didn’t want, made my cheeks flush when I was embarrassed, squeezed out tears in front of co-workers when I was angry – didn’t make it stop doing what it does. It only made it harder for me to hear it when it spoke to me. We can’t deny our body’s very nature, even if we try to ignore it. And when I started understanding what it means to be in cooperation, in harmony with my body, life got better.
The way we have been socialized to ignore or squash our body’s cues is like living our lives in Cliff Notes, from bullet points, not acknowledging or appreciating or understanding the complexity and nuances in every single thing. When we live by the “mind over matter” credo, when we let our minds set the pace and the agenda and we disregard and cut ourselves off from the wisdom and intelligence we could access, it’s like choosing to drive a car 55mph no matter what simply because that’s the speed limit, without checking to see if there is actually oil or gas in the car.
What happens when we let our bodies set the pace? What happens when we stop to pay attention to what they need in any given moment? In my case, the first thing that happened was a deep, profound confusion. Other than the obvious cues of needing to eat or pee, I wasn’t able to discern what my whole self needed in any given moment. But over time, I was able to decouple my immediate response of discomfort->indulgence (booze, chocolate, focusing on work, online shopping) and begin to notice that sometimes discomfort meant I was dehydrated or I needed a power nap or it was time to stretch and move my body. Many of us have created a small but powerful set of behaviors we indulge in at the first sign of any new information that we don’t welcome – irritation, confusion, a flare of emotion – and we automatically do those things without really tuning in to our body wisdom. I’m here to tell you that everything changes when you learn to tap into that other 80%. Everything.