“You can’t think and feel at the same time.”  I rejected this notion with a misplaced conviction that my attention acted as a gatekeeper for my senses.  Want to feel something?  Place your brain there to find it.  I saw it as an element of focus instead of an opening, a claiming instead of a receiving, an inefficient distraction that took me away from where I wanted to go, at a slower speed than I held favor to.  Confusing trust for truth is a terrific way to territorialize yourself into a tiny fiefdom, where the trumpets play exactly what you want to hear, but it’s always the same song.

You don’t know any better when you are unwilling to experience something different, something you aren’t also the mastermind behind.  Dabblings outside of your familiar are gathered together and wrapped in the cloak of your knowing, packaged into an offering that really acts as a tithe.  The clink of coins drop at the altar of your figuring, but you don’t need a box with a lock on it if you trusted the world not to take from you.  Security is how well you wall up and self-protect from the disorganized chaos outside you.  Safety is the calm recognition that you don’t have anything fragile or extraordinary to defend.

Control is a hard thing to let go of, particularly when you’ve identified as an outcast, and particularly when you’ve aligned that ‘difference’ to what makes you exceptional.  Designations of success when you are both judge and jury don’t think to ask whether you could dream bigger or want more.  The lens you are looking through to confirm your satisfaction uses the same eye that frames everything else.  To change means exposure, and that threatens every self-protecting instinct that has gotten you where you are, especially when you’ve come to believe you like where you are. Being your own North Star is a potent cocktail of power and righteousness that keeps laying down evidence that your way is what’s best for you.

Attributing your bounty to your intellect sidesteps the acknowledgement that you also process your feelings there.  Sincere amnesia is another fun trick divorcing and distancing you from the world you’ve convinced yourself you don’t want to know or be a part of.  What connection even is gets skewed.  You base it on provision and being useful.  Listen and supply what they lack before they have to ask.  Just as long as what they ask for isn’t you.

A protective brain never gives them command over your belonging.

Belong to yourself.

Befriend yourself.

Reject before you’re rejected.

Don’t want to be known.

Keep adding skills and tools like you’re collecting wishes.

Eventually you’ll come across someone who will feel loved in the receiving of these things.  Your consistent offerings will make them feel so seen and understood that they’ll try and love you.  They might even be really patient about it.  But your plotting nervous system will sever you from them at their birthday dinner.  Not the last one, but several before.  And they won’t even know it.

But you’ll feel it.

You can’t fake feelings.  Delude yourself into believing you can, but you can’t.

Thinking justifies and categorizes things.  It drives actions and behavior.

Feeling forces you to sit with, and compels you to stay.

It releases you from control.

Then asks you to allow.

Not neglect, but realize and accept.

To be moved through instead of doing the moving.

“You can’t think and feel at the same time.”  As much as I didn’t want to believe this, I’ve come to find that it is true.  That’s the thing about beliefs — it’s the most biased #science there is.  Thinking has served me well.  It has established parameters that I can only explain as being able to love and be with myself, all the things most seek to find in another.  About a decade ago, a group of gal pals threw out a scenario:  If you had 48-hours to live, how would you want to spend it?  I had my answer immediately, but I waited until I was called on to say.  I listened to these women include their partners and kids in every facet of joy and sorrow and last-hurrah togetherness.  They were not alone in their future story.  My response?  “I would lie on the bed and think.”  I viscerally saw this happen in my imagination, and it was lovely.  It still feels lovely now as I remember the scene.