Monday Prompts 40: to 'look back with firm eyes/ saying “this is where I stand.”
December's theme: presence.
Welcome to Monday Prompts, where I share a poem, a personal story and reflection, and offer journaling and creative writing prompts for your week.
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‘Self Portrait’ by David Whyte
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
Or many gods.
I want to know if you belong — or feel abandoned;
If you know despair
Or can see it in others.
I want to know
If you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need to change you;
If you can look back with firm eyes
Saying “this is where I stand.”
I want to know if you know how to melt
Into that fierce heat of living
Falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing
To live day by day
With the consequence of love
And the bitter unwanted passion
Of your sure defeat.
I have been told
In that fierce embrace
Even the gods
Speak of God.
At the end of 2018, I moved to San Francisco after a very brief whirlwind long distance sitch. In a blink, I sold most of my furniture and my beloved bike, my best friend took over my apartment and kept what I didn’t sell on Facebook marketplace, stopped serving at restaurants, and my boyfriend at the time got me a job as a receptionist at the startup he worked at. You may be absolutely amused to learn that he showed me how to make a Google calendar invite the night before I started.
The vision for that role was to get my foot in the door with zero (zero) professional work experience, and because there was a lot (eternities, even, it turned out) of downtime, maybe I’d be able to write while on the clock. The reality was that my *only* tasks of the day were to unlock the door in the morning, and wait for Rob, The UPS guy, who would come around 1pm, and sometimes take a little lean on the wall and we’d have a 5 minute chat (bless him, he was the recipient of my overwhelming existential dread of that time, mostly: how the hell did this become my life?) and then I’d message people on Slack when their mail got there. My day became divvied up as so:
8:58am - 9am: get coffee, unlock office door
9am - 9:40am: read news, newsletters, and blogs
10am: second coffee
10:10am - 12pm: dread. Try to write. Look at fashion websites. Contemplate abyss.
12pm - 12:45pm: someone would relieve me of my desk watching duties and go eat lunch with assistants
12:45pm - 2pm: Contemplate abyss. Contemplate what happened that I became someone who worked in an office and not a musician/ artist/ dinner series host. Wonder if I’ll ever write anything again.
2pm - 2:07pm: yogurt pretzels from snack wall. Do an office lap.
2:07pm - 4pm: Watch Game Of Thrones with one headphone in and the browser playing it in just a teeny corner of my monitor (when I tell you, dear reader, that I watched five seasons in three weeks would you believe me?)
4pm - 4:25pm: scroll internet mindlessly
4:25pm - 4:59pm: disassociate entirely
5pm: GTFO
Exactly 4.5 weeks into this job, (well, three days in, let’s be serious, but the breaking point was at the 4.5 week marker) I reached out to a wise family friend who’s known me my whole life, who is one of those sajey savvy advice givers. I sat in a glass sound-proof conference room (skipped my yogurt pretzels that day to take the call) and warbled my admission of misery to her. I blubbered in that way where I hadn’t admitted something out loud, and so when I finally said it, I was choking on the words. I moved here to change my life, to take a chance on love (and also, admittedly, to escape the ravaging heartbreak of the love that I lost in Toronto, which is a story for another time). I moved here to become an adult and get my shit together and find a “real” job that would also give me some sort of work/life balance and also to live by the ocean, damnit. And I was miserable. There was no job in the office for me that could fulfill and sustain my spirit. I felt stupid that I couldn’t compartmentalize, I felt like a diva for not wanting to do a job I hated, and I felt like it was eating my soul. And this Sajey Savvy Family Friend said to me, “Jess, you are an artist, it is hardwired to your bones. And if you don’t create a life where you feel alive in it enough to feel inspired to create, then you will always feel like your soul is dying. Answer the call.”
It was like someone held a mirror up to me, pointed, and said, this is who you are.
My boyfriend and I had plans to go out for dinner, and I was all buzzy from this recalibration, and I was excited to share it with him. I’m an Artist. I must make art. I must write. And this dinner series that I’d started the year before and left behind in Toronto, this thing that made me feel alive, I would bring that to San Francisco. I’d get a part time serving job and meet people in the city (you don’t meet anyone while contemplating the abyss at the front of an office when no one sits close to you). I’d figure out how to bring the dinner series there.
Okay this is getting so long, more than a snippet… needless to say, SF Boyfriend did not receive my epiphany well. He thought he was helping me in my quest of Adulting, and was freaked out by me flipping the script (he also, I would learn a year later in couple’s therapy when everything was already shredded into pulp, that in this moment he didn’t want us to have opposite schedules because he was afraid I’d sleep with a bartender, so we were having the wrong conversation for the whole year, which is infuriating, and also another story for another time. Okay.) He wanted us to have the same schedule. He wanted me to want what he wanted. He wanted me to want to save a bunch of money up so we could go on two vacations a year. He wanted me to appreciate that he got me the job. He wanted me to be figureoutable. Go figure.
Anyway, this is getting wildly long. The short of it is that I stayed at that job, I stayed having the same schedule. That startup ran out of funding three days after we moved into our apartment together, so we were both jobless with a new lease. I got a job working as an executive assistant for a tech billionaire with my four months of receptionist experience, and all of a sudden had actual tasks at work, which was nice, and a salary, and health benefits, and I also worked 24/7 and drove the Tesla home from the airport and booked private jets and regulated a 50 year-old’s emotional instability and babysat 20 year-old Stanford prodigies and ordered lunch and set up Zoom meetings and picked up croissants for board meetings and became a zombie.
I had no idea where my feet were planted. I had no idea where I stood. I had no idea what my life had become.
One day, I heard Myself calling for My Self. I was standing at my dining room table that I loved that I can’t believe I had to sell when I sold all my furniture on Facebook marketplace again. Everything got very quiet and clear. I must go looking for myself. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know that it would be this. It had no shape, no name, no words, no color. But there was this teeny glimmer of light of a different life. And I had to go towards it.
The world wants to change us. It wants us, mostly, to get in line and play its little game. It wants us to be compliant and tired and distracted. It banks on us not being present to the living of this life, seeing how we all belong to each other, and realizing that there is not a single one of us who is actually voiceless.
I want you to know that if you are willing to plug your heart into the socket of the universe everything will hurt and everything will glisten with the spark of your soul becoming tethered to the source of living. Which is: you, firmly planted and free. You, saying yes over and over to whatever it is that makes you feel alive. You, alive and awake and aware of your living. You, alive to the consequence of love.
This week’s prompts:
Where do you feel like you belong?
Where do you feel like you’ve been abandoned, or have abandoned yourself?
Write a piece based on the line, ‘falling towards the center of your longing.’
Write a piece based on the line, ‘willing/ To live day by day/ With the consequence of love.’
[PS - Someone shared this David Whyte poem in Poetry Club last week and I can’t remember who it was! Thank you!]
Upcoming Events
Nest At Beach Garden: A Yoga Retreat with Cassie Connor & Special Guest: Me
January 29th - February 4th, 2024
I’ve paired up with my friend Cassie Connor once again, this time at her beautiful week-long yoga retreat in Costa Rica. I’ll be hosting Dinner With Strangers night one and coming up with journal prompts for us throughout the week. What a dream. Find out all the info here.
A Soft Resolution: Thirty-One Days of Writing Prompts
I’m starting to prep for a 31 day project for us all - thirty-one days of writing prompts, with 4 writing workshops on Sundays. A beautiful, gentle way to welcome in the new year.
Love this, Jess. The last paragraph resonates deeply with where I am at right now. It was me who shared that David Whyte poem 🙋🏻♀️ She’s a beauty 💛