Hi, beloved listeners. This is Adrian and I've been going through it lately and I finally wrote about it for my blog and wanted to share what I wrote here with you all as well because I know some of y'all are my readers, but a lot of you are our listeners and I think that.

What I'm learning and sitting in might be of use to you as well. So the post was called in case it helps slash bell hooks a shame.

Hi, beloved blog readers. I haven't been writing here as often. I'm writing so much in so many places, but I haven't forgotten you.

I come here when I want to share something more tender than social media, more precise than a podcast, more intimate than an essay.

What I want to share with you today is that this year nearly took me out. It didn't. I'm still here, but the simplest truth is that I have been struggling.

I am tethered by a close circle and a set of small repeated practices to keep moving through the days.

I want to share in case it helps, especially to those who follow emergent strategy and pleasure activism and maybe think I have it all together. I don't.

As far as I can see, no one does. Nor is that a reasonable goal in this moment. We are living and this falling apart, stumbling, flying and feeling is how we live right up until the last moment.

I didn't realize I was struggling until I was in the danger zone. I am a highly competent person, just trying to live a good life.

But it felt like those humbling moments when I wanted to go for a swim in the ocean and couldn't get past the break.

Instead, getting pummeled by every wave, unable to find a rhythm salt in my throat and eyes.

And of course, because I am me, I wasn't trying to just solo swim, but to simultaneously teach others about swimming, call out tips on how to best navigate tumult,

and occasionally save others from the breaking waves of loss, the encroaching trials of our bodies, the betrayals of our inner plans for forever.

Which was hard because I was upside down with sand up my nose trying to figure out where the fuck the shore went.

It wasn't until someone dear snatched me out of the path of the next monster way that I realized I was in trouble.

I wasn't swimming, I was flailing, I wasn't really helping anyone, I was just wearing myself out trying to avoid my own big feelings and I was in danger.

The moment I had a breath in my lungs, I started crying and I couldn't stop for days, for weeks.

I kept trying to explain why and the why was a tsunami that never ended.

Every pain that had poured into me, every loss, every disappointment, every fear, everything I had unconsciously been smoothing over as less important than what others were holding.

It came out in a wall of weeping.

I'm sitting on a metaphorical sand dude now, still catching my breath.

The tears come less frequently with much more ease, the breaths are deeper, the ocean does not look like a menace.

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