We are entitled.
I keep coming back to this. The way we move through our lives expecting them to feel good. Expecting resolution. Expecting that if something is hard, if we are dropping the ball on our responsibilities, the reason must be outside of us. The kids. The work. The partner. The weather. The government. Scary AI. Something.
Anything but the simple fact that we are the ones living this life and we are not, at the moment, willing to sit with what it asks.
The machine feeds us this.
It tells us that any friction is a sign something is wrong. That if we just optimize, identify the right outer obstacle, swap the right input, tell it like it is, say no more often - life will smooth out. So we go looking. We go looking for the thing to blame. The thing to fix. The thing outside of us that is the reason. We rarely find it. Or we find it and the relief lasts a week and then we are back, looking again.
I read something today about how everything human is holy. I sat with it. If the human is holy, then everything that comes from being human is also holy. The anger. The jealousy. The charges. The protection. The wanting. The needing. The reaching for someone. All of it.
We are working very hard to delete this. To become chill. To become cool. To become detached. To be self-regulated, as they say, at all times. To not be too much. To not need too much. To not feel too much in any direction that makes other people uncomfortable. We call this growth, but growth has positive relationship evidence.
We are not growing. We are erasing.
We are avoiding our collective initiations.
If you want relationships at all, you are going to have to come back. To the body that wants and feels and protects and reaches in messy ways. To the part of you that is not chill and fake green-flag.
You are going to have to stop trying to rub yourself out of existence.
You are going to have to go down into the sludge of your own emotional world and stop looking for any outer cause. Especially when you are 100% sure that your partner or your boss is at fault.
You’ll have to stand naked in front of everyone and yourself.
Repeating: This is it. This is who I am. This is all I am.
That is the sentence.
I have tried to think my way out of being human.
My clients have tried.
We have all tried to spiritualize our way out, therapize our way out, optimize our way out, divorce our way out.
None of it works. You come back. You always come back. To the wanting. To the needing. To the charge. To the part of you that is messy and inconvenient and alive.
Make some peace with your human.
She is holy too.
He is holy too.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.