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There is nothing like spending time with family to push our buttons or open our hearts, am I right?
Seventy-eight percent of you, my readers, hail from the United States, where we just celebrated Thanksgiving. This tends to be family time, whether your current family is blood or chosen. This year, I’m tucked up with my mom and kids here in Upstate. Good food and conversation have prevailed. No complaints or ironic takes on family holidays will be offered. I’m grateful to be together.
At the same time, however, I feel hemmed in and subtly agitated. I’ve got an itch under my skin, like something inside of me is yearning to stretch out and take up a wider space but I’m not yet quite expansive enough to accommodate it. My heart, maybe, or my understanding. Have you ever had that feeling?
The something inside of me feels like it’s meant to spill out into every aspect of my life, requiring me to deepen and widen all at once. I can almost taste the something. Almost see it out of the corner of my eye. Almost grab ahold of it and find the words to describe it to you, but not quite.
Concentrated family time brings the agitation right up to the surface. Not because we are in conflict, but because I am so naked in their presence. My insides are practically outside at every moment. Any dissonance in myself, any pettiness, any inability to understand or empathize or connect is impossible to ignore or hide.
Whatever the something is will affect everything, but where I will first learn it, see it, test it, and probably fail at it? That will be with my family.
When my children were very small I learned that one impetus for tantrums is growth. When kids are approaching some sort of a developmental leap the frequency of their tantrums increases because they sense, looming on their internal horizon, what they will soon be able to do. They want to be able to do it but can’t quite yet. The pressure of impending capacity creates a constant, low-level frustration that increasingly erupts— around the thing they can’t yet quite do, but around all sorts of other things as well.
Part of learning to handle my kids’ tantrums with some equanimity involved understanding how hard they were working to learn things—skills, but also how to be human in relationship to other humans— and finding some compassion for their struggle.
I’m trying to find that same compassion for myself, faced with my own current agitation. I know once I level up, make the developmental leap that feels like it is looming, and the something inside me has enough space to operate, my integrity practice will have to assimilate it. And I know that some choices I make now won’t make sense from that perspective. I want to circumvent regret, to understand fully now what I can sense I will know then, but I can’t. That’s not how growth works.
It’s a privilege to grow older, growth being the operative term. If we’re lucky, we never stop growing. But it never gets more comfortable. Hopefully, at least, we’re less prone to tantrums.
How was your holiday?
Earlier this week, Amanda Hinton over at The Editing Spectrum published an interview with me as part of her Cave of the Heart series, all about creativity and my writing practice. It was a delight and honor to be invited to participate, and I hope you’ll check it out.
Amanda is doing really excellent work around editing/writing and neurodivergence. If any of that is up your alley, I’d strongly encourage you to subscribe to her newsletter.
XO,
Asha
This is so measured, so thoughtful and sane. Thank you!
"The something inside of me feels like it’s meant to spill out into every aspect of my life, requiring me to deepen and widen all at once. I can almost taste the something." I've been dipping into Wordsworth in the last day or two and your lines make me think of him challenging himself to put into words the youthful epiphanies that meant so much to him. Good luck with working it out!
Wise words and interesting observations, as usual; thank you. And thank you for asking: my kids and I haven't celebrated Thanksgiving for almost a decade now, but we'll gladly embrace any excuse for a fancy meal. Yesterday's feast included bison steak pie (a riff on Townsends' beef steak pie, which can be found on their YouTube channel), hazelnut chocolate tart, and lingonberry-based cocktails. Interesting conversation with them and no drama made it a lovely day.