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October 7 - October 18, 2025
Every day I spiral around the same questions: Why am I like this? How do I figure out what I want? How do I know what to do? Why can’t I be happy? Am I doing this right? Each morning, I’ve somehow forgotten all the freaking answers.
I am a great mystery to me. Understanding why I do the things I do is important to me because the things I do affect the people I love. So I don’t want to live on autopilot. I want to choose carefully which patterns to pass on. I want to break cycles. I want to live with freedom and agency and intentionality. This means I have to look under my own hood and tinker with and examine my programming. Responsible adulthood is being both the engine and the mechanic. I’m the mystery and the detective. Tricky.
I became more attuned to others’ emotions than my own. In my family, there was one person whose emotional fluctuations dictated everyone’s experience. This dynamic teaches a child to be highly attuned and vigilant to others’ emotions to keep the peace.
I did that my entire life and only recently learned that it’s an actual thing. It’s called emotional monitoring, and it involves living your life as a fixer in hyperactive awareness of everyone else’s experience. You’re so busy keeping everyone comfortable that you completely lose any boundary between everybody else’s experience of a situation and your own. And because of that, you actually do not have your own experience. Their experience is your experience.
I internalized that the way to prove to the world and to myself that I am okay is by performing, accomplishing, and excelling. But I don’t want to have to excel to be okay anymore. I want to be a fully human person. I don’t want to have to perform to receive love and acceptance, and I don’t want the people I love to have to perform to receive my love and acceptance.
I’m the responsible one. I got good grades and believed that if I was perfect enough, my family’s problems would go away. I’m high performing and competent. Because I expect a lot from myself and others, I find it difficult to embrace imperfection in myself and others. I’m self-critical and never satisfied with my effort. Now, my healing work is to be less controlling and more patient, especially in stressful moments.
my healing work is to set clear boundaries and tune in to my own desires.
I no longer want to be a hero. No one can love a hero, because heroes aren’t real. Stepping out of a role takes time. It’s a million little choices that feel excruciatingly uncomfortable before they feel like freedom.
Trauma doesn’t change the genes; it changes the expression of the genes, which some people like to call the memory. The genes have memory. But what we find in our clinical work is that we don’t only inherit the anxiety or biological response to the trauma; our minds also know something about the actual content of the trauma.
Every single person has some element of trauma that is generational. And the pain of generational trauma will have some form of rage. That’s righteous rage. It’s rage that has to be honored.
Understanding why we are the way we are isn’t just about learning what happened to us and how we survived it; it’s also about learning what happened before us and how they survived it.
We view gender as inherent and inborn—something that just exists. But in reality, we make gender exist by giving it meaning.
We create gender by telling a child who they are a thousand times a day, even before the child is born—through our overt and implied expectations, reactions, fears, and goals for them.
It’s so funny to me that people accuse trans and nonbinary people of imposing this gender conversation on them, when the real imposition was dividing billions of complex, divine, nuanced souls into two categories: men and women. They tell you that there are only two genders, and they get away with it because they kill, disappear, erase, discredit, and delegitimize all of us who, for hundreds of years, have lived alongside you. Alok
Girls are always being trained to choose their own inner conflict instead of daring to create outer conflict.
When white women are challenged about race, we often become so stunned and defensive that we cry. We evoke sympathy to avoid accountability. If you’re thinking to yourself, Well, that’s not me, I don’t cry, that’s defensiveness.
When white women go straight to defensiveness, we’re proving the very fragility that we’re denying. Our white lady fragility is not fragile like a flower, it’s—as Frida Kahlo said—“fragile like a bomb.” When we white women wield our power as weakness, people die.
The same thing is true of fragility. White people can’t position themselves as the center of existence, exacting diabolical harm to the entire world for generations, and be fragile at the same time.
When you hear “white supremacy” and “racism” and “slavery,” you think: Wow, what was done to Black people is horrible. But understand that it was actually also killing you. It is spiritually killing for a white person to believe that they’re superior in some way to another divine human being. That is a spiritual deficiency; that is a disconnection to your power and to who you are. That has robbed you of your own humanity as well. That’s why this work is global. It’s not just for Black people; it’s for anyone who needs to disrupt and push back and heal. Tricia Hersey
I had set out to reinvent myself, but it turned out that I didn’t have to start from scratch. I just had to dust myself off because the best parts were already there. Tarana Burke
The Self is who you are at your essence. This part of you knows how to relate to the other parts of you in a healing way and knows how to relate to other people in a healing way. This Self in you has wonderful qualities. I call those qualities the Eight C’s: Calm Curiosity Compassion Connectedness Confidence Creativity Courage Clarity It turns out that virtually every spiritual tradition knows about this Self, whereas almost no other psychologies do.
When life became one flat gray relentless to-do list, I was officially gone. When there was no difference between the things that I should be looking forward to and the obligations I had to meet. When catching up with friends and getting the work project finished were both just things that needed to be done.
It’s really important to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Billie Jean King
My self-sabotage leads to suffering. Because I hadn’t let my body rest when it asked for it, my self-denial created self-sabotage, which literally made me sick. Self-sabotage is how we rebel against a culture that wants us to deny our needs.
Your true nature is trying to trick the system into letting you be free. Self-sabotage is the truth trying to get you out of the cultural matrix to which you ceded your freedom.
We don’t always need the next strategy to cope with our life. Sometimes we need to create a life that requires less coping.
Glennon: You write about how wise we were when we were younger, before we learned all this crap that made us stop trusting ourselves. You wrote, “When my life was new I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.” What does it mean to believe your bones? Do you believe your bones now? What does that feel like?
If you want to know what intuition is, ask yourself: What does ten-year-old me need? Because ten-year-old you is not going to say that she needs a new business strategy. Ten-year-old you is going to say, “I need rest. I’m hungry. I want to feel safe. I need fresh air. I need to scream.”
Both paths were so beautiful to me. Choosing either one meant forsaking the other. The cruel reality hit me for the first time that choosing one thing you love means losing another thing you love.
Authenticity is not a destination, it’s an orientation, and what matters more is that you’re showing up, not where you’re going.
Natalie Portman: I’ve been working with an executive coach, Diana, who has been helping me learn how to recognize my desires and undo my people pleasing. She’s taught me to pay attention to my body. She calls it a “full-body yes.” Think about something that you have a full-body yes to. You feel it in your body. Now think about something that feels like a full-body no. Feel what that feels like in your body, name where it shows up. And then feel something that’s in the middle. In your life, practice moving toward things that are full-body yeses. It’s a physical experience, practicing: What is
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Resentment and jealousy are in fact very helpful data points. When I’m feeling jealous and resentful, it may come out as “I don’t like that person.” But likely it isn’t even about that person. I’m probably just super annoyed that they’re always posting their #FriYAY Date Night pictures, and it makes me think I don’t like them, when it actually means I just really need a #FriYAY Date Night.
Amanda: I’m trying to understand the question. Are they trying to figure out, “Do I just want to become free of this thing because it’s hard for me?” Or, “Do I want to be free of this thing because it’s not for me?”
always talk about this Fannie Lou Hamer quote as the way that I orient around the right kind of hard. She says, “If I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.” That’s how I know it’s the right kind of hard. It doesn’t mean my knees ain’t scraped up; it doesn’t mean I didn’t lose some skin. I might be bleeding; I might have broke something. But am I closer toward my own revelation of my divinity than I was before I started? If so, then I’m doing the right kind of hard. I’m doing the work of reclaiming my liberation. A lot of people don’t do this work because
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I define boundaries as “needs that need to be expressed verbally or through your behavior.”
The hard part of setting boundaries is not the setting of the boundary; it’s withstanding the discomfort of whatever happens next.
You need to take those feelings somewhere else, whether it’s a friend, a coach, or a therapist. I make little notes on my phone—a log of the boundaries I set and the feelings that come after. So you write down: That time when I said no to making cupcakes for my kids’ school, I felt like this. And then two days later, I felt like that. That’s a nice reminder for yourself for the next time you’re wanting to push back against the social expectations.
I did not know I was codependent. I thought I was just being helpful. I did not realize how much I’d stunted anyone’s ability to grow. My personal work for the last year and a half is figuring out how to let other human people just be human people. All the way. Good, bad, hard, making good choices, making terrible choices. Because they’re a person, and that’s their life. It’s not my life. Jen Hatmaker
Glennon: Yeah. I love your advice: You don’t always have to decide whether or not you like the other person. You do have to decide if you like yourself around that person. And if you don’t like or trust yourself or feel calm or safe, then that’s enough information.
I love endings. We should celebrate them just as much as we celebrate beginnings. Because it’s just as important, wise, and brave to know and accept when something beautiful should end as it is to know when something beautiful should begin. An ending shouldn’t be thought of as failure. Endings are a necessary, beautiful stage of a creative life. Glennon
Sometimes you may decide that a relationship was a beautiful love story, but it may not be a life story. You don’t have to squash the love in order to move on. You may just say, “This love is precious, I will hold it dearly, but it is not going to be my life.” There are beautiful rituals to honor the intimacy while also inviting the relationship to end or transition. You can start with “I’m here to say goodbye, and this is what I wish for you.” And bring an object to represent what you want the other person to take with them. “When I think of us, these are some of the main images, memories,
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I had a big year. But grief is a bill that has to be paid eventually. And I was a little bit putting that bill off. I also don’t want to judge myself for that because that’s what I needed to do. I couldn’t pay that bill right away. It was too big.
One of my favorite words in the English language is alchemy. For me, it’s about taking the thing that you’re most afraid of and transforming it into something meaningful and useful, maybe even beautiful. During the moments in my life when I’ve felt most powerless, that process of alchemy has given me a sense of agency.
When we lost our pregnancy, one of my really good friends sent a box of gourmet cheese and stuff to go with it from our favorite cheese shop. She and I love cheese; cheese has been a big part of our relationship. When I got that package, I felt so seen because it wasn’t about this horrible loss that I still hadn’t even processed; it was about me. Show up in a way that reminds people who they are at their core. Marisa Renee Lee
The best kind of showing up is when you make an offer of specific help. You don’t text someone and say, “Let me know if you need anything.” Because if they’re like me, they will never ask for help. And I think the best specific offer is the thing that you already love to do, maybe that only you can do. If you love dogs, you offer to walk someone’s dogs. If you love mowing the lawn, you go and mow someone’s lawn. I’ve been the recipient of so many beautiful acts of showing up.
People who address issues with their friends have more intimacy and closeness. Psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner talks about how you can have flaccid safety in your relationships, which is “We’re close because we pretend there’s no problems.” Or you can have dynamic safety, which is “We’re close because we rupture and we repair and we rupture and we repair.” Dr. Marisa Franco
It turns out that friendship is what you need in the foxhole; it’s just that all of life is a foxhole. It’s not that we pay the price of being in connection with our friends so that when life is unbearable they’ll show up; it’s that the connection we’re making with our friends is the showing up in each other’s lives—and that is what makes life bearable.
Behind criticism, there is often a wish, a longing; behind anger, there is often hurt. When we criticize our partners, we express unmet needs or unfulfilled desires. It’s a common way of asking for something, but criticism will typically result in the opposite of what we really want, which is: to be told we are loved.
The willingness to bring conflict to the table, to make yourself vulnerable, shows a faith in your relationship, an investment in a relationship, a belief that your relationship could be better than it is. For me, when someone is not bringing up conflict, that is being unfaithful to the relationship. It’s an abdication of your role in the relationship, and you are actually dumping all of the responsibility on your partner to make things better and to resolve your conflicts—burdening them with the sole responsibility to speak those things out loud.
When talking about how to share difficult emotions with your partner, I like to use this very ridiculous metaphor of the sleepy hedgehog. When you have a difficult feeling, imagine that it’s like a sleepy hedgehog that’s just sitting in the bed and you’ve got to do something about it before you can sleep.
