For the past decade I have been sharing my life online.
All of my thoughts, my processes, my opinions. My entire journey, my travels, my successes and creations and missteps.
This was fueled mostly by my need to express. To be all of me in the world. To say the things that people shied away from saying.
There have been many times I have taken a break from social media. Either because it was deleted and taken away from me, or because I needed to feel myself without it, for a little while.
But there is this feeling that has been coming up for me lately, getting louder and louder and more.. pressing.
And it doesn’t have anything to do with social media, not specifically.
I always felt like no matter what happened, I would continue sharing myself. In the same way I had always done.
And… I don’t want to anymore.
It is a bizarre place to find myself in. When I look back, I see obvious ways that this was coming. But to me it has felt, somehow, sudden.
I want privacy.
I want to make beef cheeks and cherry pie and not show anyone besides my closest people. I want to grow a garden full of thriving plants (or dying plants) and not have the internet know. I want to learn and change my mind and not tell everybody what has changed. I want to pray and go on hikes and learn about pregnancy and birth and decide what kind of birth I will have and discuss it with very few. I want to become pregnant and have barely anyone know when I am due.
I know that this comes from getting ready to be a mother.
There is this fierce protection that I feel, like I want to go into our own bubble here on our beautiful island. Spend time with friends and family that I love. Be in my community. Tend to our land and to my body.
There is medicine in expression, no doubt. I have learned that. I don’t know that there are many more ways I could possibly learn that. Everybody has known exactly what I think and what I care about and how I am changing, often in real-time. And I have faced mirrors of myself in every way. And it has been healing.
And now I am ready to learn what privacy has to teach me.
The internet is loud, and I want to be quiet.
I want my life, right now, to be quiet.
What this means, in a more practical way for anyone following along, is below.
I won’t be on my personal social media account, much if at all. I am going to take a break from my podcast – what is up will become “Season 1” and we’ll see what the next season brings. (There will be one final podcast episode for the season coming out Monday, where I share more about all of this and wrap it all up). I will still be posting occasionally on the @healingwithmen account.
I am still writing my memoir. Or maybe I should say, I have written my memoir, since I have 60,000+ words and have written for 99 days straight. (!) But of course there is lots of editing to do, and I’m sure this book is still years in the making.
Jordan and I have a membership called The Circle. He mostly holds the space and the calls but I have been teaching in there monthly-ish and will continue to. Past and upcoming workshop topics include letting in a partner that meets you, healing your relationship with the masculine, processing emotions in a healthy way, pleasure & sex, grief, and so much more. This is the only place I will be teaching in the coming years. It is really beautiful what we are creating there.
To be clear, teaching feels really nourishing for me at the moment – what I am moving away from (or at least taking a break from, I don’t really know) is sharing my life real-time.
The best place to stay connected is my email list. I will be writing less, but I will still be sending updates to let you know when a Circle workshop is happening or if I do write something new here on my website or whatever else.
It’s so strange, I have never in my life had a desire for privacy. But Saturn has entered my 12th house, and it feels like there is something here for me.
Privacy, feels like this safe cocoon around my body and my house and my family. Privacy feels like sweet moments and laughter shared with friends in the woods alone. Privacy feels like sending photos to my loved ones and my loved ones only. Privacy feels like finally feeling like I have a genuinely fulfilling and nourishing in-person life and don’t need to find it elsewhere. Privacy feels like reading and wondering and not knowing. Privacy feels like a flower blossoming with no one watching.