I'm an earnest weirdo. Are you?

This is another essay from the archives, July 2021. Enjoy! And thanks for all of your kind words about your village of weirdos from last week, too. I see you sensitive weirdos and misfits out there, and I want you to know that you belong here and I think you're exceptional and I'm proud of you.

Happy Sunday, Soothers. When did you first realize that you were expected by others to change? That you needed to change to be accepted? 

For me, it was 1990, and I had just turned 10 years old.

Up until that point, I had been a relatively unaffected, happy child. Introverted and a bit shy, sure. Probably spending most afternoons reading on the floor tearing through the Babysitters Club series? Yup. Least likely to raise her hand in class or stand up at the chalkboard to show off a math problem? Uh huh. That was me. Soft and shy, a little prone to nervousness, but funny, sharp, goofy, observant, and pretty much fine, just how I was.

At least I thought so. A year earlier, my parents had moved me and my two siblings out of Washington, D.C., into the suburbs of Northern Virginia, and I had started third grade at a new elementary school. The very first day there, Olivia, a beautiful girl with a curtain of black hair, decided to befriend me, and my nerves about the situation dissipated.

We spent the next year alternating playdates, right on the cusp of that tween age, where one day we could be cavorting with My Little Ponies, the next smearing stolen lipstick on our mouths and dressing up in our mothers’ cast off clothes, trying to pretend we were sexy 20-somethings.

Fourth grade started, and I remembered racing to meet Olivia on the playground after lunch. We had been placed into different classrooms this year, but I hadn’t thought to worry; our bond was unbreakable, and I was looking forward to another year of playground meetups in the circle of holly bushes that abutted our suburban playground. We had spent hours hanging out there, semi-shielded from the rest of the world, creating crowns of leaves and dreaming quietly in between complaints about math problems and annoying boys.

This recess break, though, I didn’t find Olivia. I ended up tagging along with a group of girls I only knew a little bit, shyly following them around the playground and mimicking their actions of bravado on the swings and wooden bridges connecting playground towers.

I found Olivia in line as we all queued up by the back door to enter school for the rest of the afternoon, and I raced up to her, breathless. She was standing with a girl who was relatively new to me, Ashley, tall, with Brooke Shields-like eyebrows, shaggy brown bangs artfully cut, and a veneer of cool disdain on her pretty face. I knew her a little bit, and hoped to make as good friends with her as I had Olivia.

“Hey guys,” I rushed up, bouncing with excitement at having found them. “Where were you? I missed you!”

“We were at the other end of the playground,” Olivia explained. “We found a new spot to hang out at, it has a better view of everything going on.”

“Yeah!” exclaimed Ashley. “I can’t wait for me and Olivia to set it up more. It’s really cool.”

“Awesome!” I enthused guilelessly. “Now we have the holly spot, this new spot, and all three of us can hang out wherever we want!”

What happened next was the kind of subtle moment where nothing really takes place, precisely, but a shimmer sort of occurs; a wave of knowing somehow invisibly settles down on shoulders, in your heart, and a deep understanding born of nothing more than an arched eyebrow is embedded heavily on you. You’re etched with a sort of knowledge, a silent threshold marking a before, and an after, and though you’re vaguely confused, you also totally exactly get it.

Olivia and Ashley exchanged a glance at my comment, and it was in that ephemeral moment that this mantle of invisible understanding was placed on me:

I was no longer enough.

From that day on, Olivia and Ashley avoided me, and though I tried half-heartedly a few times to elbow my way back into their budding friendship, I knew well enough what had happened. On this cusp of teenhood, I had been, without even realizing I was under consideration for it, deemed unworthy.

Weird. Not cool enough. Fringe.

Whatever you wanted to call it, I had arbitrarily been denied entrance into something I wanted badly: the acceptance of others.

And I would spend the next 30 years trying to shove my way through that door in order to prove to myself that I was enough.

The arbiters of these doors to acceptance, to worthiness, to enoughness, took dozens of different forms. Sometimes they were other female friends; more often they were romantic partners. Sometimes they were bosses, or coworkers; plenty of times, more than I’d like to admit, they were total strangers who weren’t even aware of my existence.

But over the course of three decades, I lived out patterns again and again, of knocking on the doors of others’ worlds, asking, “Can I have entrance? Can you let me in? Can you tell me I’m worthy? Do you think I’m cool? Please, just — just give me permission to exist.”

Swimming in the external awareness of other people — what they needed, what they wanted, what they thought, what their moods were — I became an extremely skilled expert at discerning the emotional states of other people, whether they were a best friend or a boyfriend or the barista at my regular coffee place that I barely knew.

Having honed my emotional observation skills in the hopes their abilities would gain me the recognition and acceptance of others, I could sense the energy of a room as I entered it; I knew immediately when a shadow fell lightly over the face of another person, indicating a swift shift in their mood; I anticipated the needs of a friend or a lover before it even entered their consciousness.

I was a shapeshifter, sensing the shifts in the emotional barometer of another, and immediately adjusting to what was called for before anybody else even realized that this was happening.

All this was done at great cost to myself. And I didn’t even know it. I spent the majority of my life unattuned to myself, whether it was a physical or an emotional need, unaware of a core inside of me that was crying out for tending, for me to turn my attunement, my empathy, my love, my knowledge, towards it instead.

By all accounts, to others, I was a successful 30-something, a full life, an expensive condo, a series of handsome boyfriends, impressive accomplishments trailing in my wake.

But because I had spent so long turning blind eyes to my inner needs and world, in the hopes that my mastery of what other people needed would gain me entry into feeling whole, the space inside of me had become hollow, allowing in all sorts of darker forces, open as my boundaries were.

There was a dark and deepening whirlwind of anxiety, perfectionism, shame, and angst that was sitting in the shadows of my core, and — though I didn’t really know or understand it at the time — running my life. I was making decisions out of fear; relying on external validation to make me feel good about my choices; consistently beating myself up; feeling completely disconnected from my heart and my body; judging myself and others; and caught on a hamster wheel of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and total lack of understanding my own worth, values, and needs.

I didn’t know how to make decisions confidently or from an authentic place. I was deeply over-identified with my career because I had no idea who I was outside of it. I didn’t feel fully vibrant or alive to the existing joys in my day-to-day. I felt like a passive participant in my own life, riding the current of a turbulent river I had no control of, but that I was too scared to step out of. And perhaps most importantly, I didn’t feel like enough — or that I deserved better.

I had spent so long ignoring myself, I hadn’t realized that I was the only person on earth who could grant me exactly what I needed in order to feel like I had a soul, that I was whole, that I was worthy.

Permission.

I was the only person who could give myself permission.

To be. To do. To have a right to exist, exactly as I was. To tend to my needs, to ask for my wants, to long, to desire, to be loved, to be attended to.

Over the past few years, I have sat with myself as I would a stranger, exploring this vast and unknown field that is my inner world, my desires, my soul. It hasn’t been easy — left so long unattended, this core person inside of me has been wary to let me in, to give me permission to relearn the landscape of my inner emotional world, wary to grant me access to deep desire and pains and stories and knowings. Rightly so.

But in this time, I have developed strategies, practices, explorations that have gotten me closer, inch by inch, to my own authentic self that lay fallow for decades. It’s been a tending of a garden, in a way.

It is this process and practices that I have developed that makes up Soothe, my year-long group coaching program, circle and mentorship for sensitive women.

Perhaps you see glimmers of yourself in my story. The reaching towards others for acceptance, or the chasing down of love and friendship. The sudden awareness that you have awareness of almost everything that is happening with others and in the world, but no awareness of your inner needs or desires. A growing realization that the permission you thought you had to earn from others, to be accepted, to be worthy, to be deemed enough, cannot come from them, as badly and as earnestly as you may have tried.

You know now that it must come from you.

But you don’t know where to start.

Well, I’ve got your back.

Whether you decide to join Soothe or simply continue reading the Sunday Soother or my other resources, forever will it be my mission to give you tools for your own gentle and authentic self-discovery. To give you assurance that if you were a young, sensitive and earnest weirdo like I was as a kid, you are so wonderful and welcome and wanted and never alone. To teach you how to compassionately explore your own measures of your self-worth, no longer defined by anything external. To show you how to turn and be with your own wounded inner child, who is so ready for your approval and attention and that connection. To be in community with others just like you, ready to cast aside the harsh rules created by others you've been following for approval, and to create your own path, with support and encouragement of others doing the same. To cast your own magic and dance with nature. 

This November, I encourage you to book a call with me about the Soothe program. (All the details you need about Soothe, including time commitment, payment options, and more are on this page, but you are also welcome to reply back to this email or DM me on Instagram any Qs you may have or clarity that you might need.)

Enrollment is open until mid-December, and if you enroll by the end of November, you also get nine months of free access to all of my current online courses and my Sunday Soother membership. 

Sending all my earnest weirdos out there lots of love. I see you, and you are beautiful.