Must Love Crows

Personal Growth. Self-Compassion. Writing Consulting.

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Letter To A New York Times Best Selling Wellness Writer

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This morning I saw a post on Instagram by a very well-known author – I’m talking New York Times bestselling wellness writer.

The post pissed me off (more deets on why below) and though I thought about working towards letting it go, I passed on that pretty quick, ’cause my frustration was 40 proof.

I’m not in the business of shunning my feelings. If they are coming up there is a legit reason for them.

I love myself, therefore I value the whole package, even the not-so-societally-celebrated strong feelings.

Most of the time. Wrinkles are hard to embrace at the moment.

I quickly realized my frustration did not warrant trolling, as nothing ever warrants that. But it was something I was willing to write about.

And write about it I did. I formulated a post, and was close to publishing it, when I realized, “Hmm, this isn’t helpful at all.” Writing a post she will never read doesn’t serve anyone, other than my fired up ego (it was blazin.)

If I want any chance of inciting change over an issue I feel strongly about, then I gotta lady-up and write this chick personally.

I have to constructively communicate what I see as being a red flag issue, ie, advice she’s offered that could be potentially detrimental to someone’s mental health.

Never mind that she may never read my message or respond to me or even give a shit about what I have to say. That’s not for me to decide.

I gotta try. And I need to get in the business of being courageous enough to speak on things that aren’t supportive of self-care and mental health advocacy in the wellness industry.

Even the stuff coming from the mouths of the most popular wellness writers in the world.

I need to live up to what my Instagram profile says and BE a mental health and self-care advocate. So I did just that: I wrote her a long form note via Instagram, and this is what it said

Hello <name redacted>. I just read your latest post re: the fan asking what to do about feeling like everyone hates her. I felt the strong pull to communicate my concern over your response, so here goes.

Someone who believes everyone hates them needs therapy. This is distorted thinking as a result of damaging beliefs. “Just be you” is a recipe for a person to feel ashamed of how they feel. “What’s wrong with me, if trying to just be me doesn’t work? I must be a loser. There must be something innately wrong with me…” Enter more shame, more pain, and more distorted thinking.

I appreciate your beautiful intentions to help others while affirming that “just be you” has the ability to minimize a person’s struggle. Healing is not that simple. It takes work. And I get that we are all attached to our pain and we could do with focusing on it less and being more grateful. But we still need to look at our pain. We need to process it.

People need to be validated. The complexity of their pain needs to be heard and understood, particularly for people with mental health disorders like PTSD. BTW, I wonder if this person has PTSD, particularly abandonment-related PTSD. (There is a great book by psychologist Susan Anderson about it.)

And finally, IMHO, “Just Be You” isn’t realistic. It’s the goal, yes, but a sense of self to house new beliefs that help he or she understand and process the feelings that are leading them to believe that everyone hates them is a required precursor to someone being able to follow through on “Just Be You” advice. 

That’s it, that’s all. I thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate you. And I hope you have a wonderful day. Andrea

Boom. Speaking up when I feel the need to, 1. Complaining via blog post, 0. 

It might have taken me a lot of therapy and many complaint pieces through my blog to get me here, but the air feels cleaner in Courage-To-Speak-To-Someone-Directly town. So I’m going to stay here. For good.

xo

A

PS: Guess what? I’m working on personal development material (ugh that sounds so dry – think workbooks that speak to rewriting beliefs that are hurting you) right now.

If you want first grab at them and a freebie in the next week or so, sign up for my weekly, curated with love and unfiltered truth, newsletter. ❤

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Why I’m So Damn Tired

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I’m tired, Y’all.

I’m tired of seeing and hearing women embrace the patriarchy, and shit on and minimize other women.

I’m tired of witnessing women refuse to do the work required to see the truth below their lack of empathy: that they don’t like or trust themselves.

If you’re a woman, and you feel the need to slap hurtful generalizations onto other women, you’ve got some work to do.

And I feel for you, babe. It’s not easy work. But being awful to your fellow females is gonna make things even harder for you in the long haul.

‘Cause, it feels so shitty to be mean – just awful.

To be clear, when someone acts shitty, it’s not the human being that’s awful, it’s their behavior.

It’s much more humane to separate the human being from their actions – This opens the door to forgiveness, which opens the door to connection.  

I’m tired of doing the empath/narcissist dance, too – Lord grant me the strength in that department. 

I don’t want to be better than anyone else. I just wanna get clear on how to not enable behavior that attempts to minimize other people’s feelings, without having my soul sucked dry in the process.

I’m tired of feeling like I have to fight for what’s right, but hyper-aware that it’s what I need to do at times.

I’m tired of feeling uncomfortable, but cognizant of how prevalent discomfort is in the growth equation.

What I really want is for things to be easier for everyone. And I want things to be easy because I occasionally subscribe to the greatest indoctrinated falsity: that life can somehow be easy.

Now, to my dearest full moon, the biggest and most powerful one of the year:

You are making me tired. I love you girl, but I just can’t wait until you leave town.

Seriously. The last week or so has been madness. Absolute emotional madness.

See you all in a few days, on the other side of all of this very human frustration/confusion.

xo

A

 

Cultivating One Sided Kindness: It’s Possible

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I believe…in our ability to be kind even when someone isn’t kind to us.

Said another way:

I believe we can cultivate one-sided kindness.

I didn’t always believe this. I used to be trigger happy when it came to showing people what was up when I sensed a millimeter of fuckery being directed my way. I was addicted to the rush, and the subsequent high, of demanding respect from people who didn’t want to give it to me.

Until I started to see the correlation between stepping back from being a just under 5’3” fire hydrant of aggression and being happy (I have always felt the need to be very specific about that “just under” part. 😂)

I still feel the pull to react. It will always be there because it’s the result of my life experiences.

Defensiveness and vulnerability: I learned that.

But in reconnecting with the soul living below the layers of fear I’ve learned that strong emotions don’t need to be acted on. They can be given time to be felt without letting them screw up my sense of calm.

I don’t always get this right. I still feel slighted by people on occasion, and I still get pissed off, particularly amongst excessively unsupportive, contempt carrying people. It takes a bit of work to shake off interactions with folks like that.

But I’ve learned in recent years that much of the time people aren’t intentionally screwing us over – they’re just not thinking about us at all.

It’s the memories of betrayal that attempt to command us to take their lack of empathy personally.

So, varying degrees of supposed disrespect may actually be someone being incapable of thinking about how something might affect you. It undeniably sucks, but I know from experience that coming at someone like an emotional battering ram isn’t going to make them respect you or act the way you want them to act.

You can’t bully someone into being empathetic.

You’ll never get people to act exactly how you want them to act. But if you act last – that is, after you pause and allow yourself to process strong emotions – the whole scene will end in a less traumatic fashion than it will if you fly in with your emotional guns blazing.

🖤

A

crazy uncomfortable truth

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The past few days have been crazy uncomfortable for me.

It hasn’t been bad enough for me to regress and make shitty decisions in an attempt to quell my discomfort. It just had me admitting:  “I gotta sort these feelings out because I am not going back down that road.”

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Putting yourself out there is tough, because it opens the door to rejection.

In the thick of emotion, it’s hard to envision someone rejecting your truth as ever being easy to take. Particularly when they do it in grandiose, mean-spirited fashion.

But when you put yourself out there, people might be dicks. And as much as I don’t like it, it’s par for the course.

Sometimes social media is just too much for me. There are days when I wipe my iPhone clean of all apps because I am so not in the right head space to deal with the unpredictability factor. You never know what someone is going to say. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat: until you open up that DM or check that comment, the message is both positive and negative.

So yeah, super uncomfortable stuff, particularly when you start receiving unsettling comments.

I can take logic to that kinda stuff: angry, bitter, aggressive people exist. They don’t like who they are, so they reject people who do.

I mean, why would they want someone to receive acclaim for being who they are, when they loathe their own existence?

But answer me this man: why you so angry?

Actually I can answer that, because I used to be that mean: because there’s no love.

As I said in my Huffington post piece,

When love is missing, a lot of negative stuff comes out of the woodwork: anger, resentment, fear, jealousy.

And here’s a few other things I have learned over the past couple years, and in the days following the publication of that piece:

  • You being you is contagious, like laughter or yawning, which makes it totally worth the risk.
  • When you start doing what feels right for you, instead of what will soothe the vintage beliefs of others, you flourish.
  • You gotta put in the time and effort to get where you want to be, constantly educating yourself, and never settling for the belief that you’ve aged out of needing to know more.
  • You might have to open up dusty trunks filled with undesirable truths.
  • Sometimes it’s crawl-outta-your-skin horrible, as in acknowledging the “I am that which I loathe” principle. That’s not a fun one to accept.
  • If you face the gross feelings, they won’t be able to take up so much space in your head anymore.
  • Once you get out the other side of feeling shitty, there’s a whole pile of feeling good to be experienced.
  • The gross feelings serve a purpose: they can be used as a radar system to navigate your life. If you listen to them, they will steer you on the right path.

Final thoughts: go easy on yourself, even if other people don’t think you have the right to do so. And don’t let your mind run away with some mean comment by some random person who’s trying to make you feel like shit for being you.

Don’t fuel that hateful stuff, or you’ll invite more of it into your life. Do what you gotta do to get right with yourself. 

Now, I shall take my own advice and exchange the heaviness for some lightness.

Cupcakes are light…right? hmmm.

A

Poetry and Ramblings On Mercy and Freedom

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I dig the word mercy. Perhaps because I was disconnected from it for so much of my life.

Sometimes when things are going haywire in the old head, I take a big breath in, and on the exhale I say — “I am mercy.” Because I want to be mercy incarnate.

Mercy: an act of kindness, compassion, or favour — so says one of many definitions.

Mercy to me is release. It’s when you stop trying so hard to win the fight, or look the toughest, or be the best.

When you give in to what you are feeling and just feel it — even if it feels shitty.

Or when you give in to peace rather than going all-out gangbusters on some thought train that’s counterproductive and exhausting and annoying to think or speak of.

Mercy is like, “ugh, this way of thinking makes my skin crawl” so you choose to be compassionate and loving instead of fearful and aggressive.

Mercy is when you breathe through the rage, and plaster a smile on your face and say, “I fucking got this.” And then you walk away in your mind, with the swagger of a 90s supermodel in a George Michael music video because you are that solid on the fact that this love over hate thing is THE WAY to freedom.

Because mercy is freedom — that’s why I’m drawn to mercy.

poetry on mercy and freedom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Let Me Tell You A Story About Me

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Let me tell you a story about a girl who spent 20+ years of her life trying to be cool.

She used all of her time and energy trying to fit in with everyone and anyone she came into contact with, and it was exhausting.

She was always depressed and tired, with no energy or means to cultivate the greatness that already existed within her. Meanwhile, she became obsessed with the outside, not realizing that all the activities she partook in to make things look good on the surface were unnecessary, as what she was so desperately seeking outside of herself was inside her all along.

Yes, that girl was me.

Screw being cool: be yourself on every occasion. Go where the love is.

Create your own community.  Don’t listen to fear when it tells you to do something or be something outside of who you are.

And whenever thoughts of self-doubt start whispering or screaming at you, remember this final piece of wisdom I will bestow upon you right now:

you are fucking brilliant

xo

A

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