it has been one year
making direct eye contact with our younger self
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It is Saturday morning, just past 10:30 am AM and I am sitting in my sunroom, writing this message to you. Juniper is playing, a song that freely occupies the empty space in my head.
I am thinking about how in high school, I would drive around Cypress, TX playing Rilo Kiley and think about how one day I would think back about driving in my car and listening to Rilo Kiley and how I would feel a certain way about that memory. Planting the seed for my own nostalgia.
I still do this. I am drafting the script in my brain to write in my journal later. I can play the movie in my mind and press pause at the exact time mark that the moment hit right. I spent my teenage years watching indie movies and listening to indie music and generally investing in these indie moments that expressed things I didn’t quite understand but that I knew I felt so I paused the scene or the song so that I could mentally type the script and lyrics in my mind to remember. Raise your hand if you were also this type of freak as a teen. 🙋🏾♀️
Today I turn 33 and this newsletter turns one. I am me and this newsletter is me, so I am both ages, living in simultaneity and getting closer to understanding the time-knife. Like last year I started telling my friends how when I’m sitting on my fire escape, I observe people passing on the street as they clock me. And how 23-year-old me would likely look up at fire-escape me and covet this current life.
Lately, I’ve been really trying to sit with this 23-year-old self, and with all the younger versions of myself. I am not a person who would scoff at doing inner child work but I can’t say that I’ve ever purposefully, intentionally, spoken to the younger versions of Jessica to ask them what they need, what they want, what they think is going on. My analytical mind could tell you that my shit is tied to stories that are a result of past traumas that are linked to how I learned to protect myself as a child. But, it is one thing to know this and it is another thing to be in direct conversation with that younger self. It has been a revelation to me that these young parts of me don’t realize how old I am, that in their role in “protecting” me, they shifted into a completely different timeline that has been operating on its own. Bringing them into the current timeline, asking 7-year-old or 23-year-old me to turn around and look at 33-year-old me, is a big part of my getting unstuck. Inner child work! Sometimes you gotta laugh at how cliche healing yourself is.
“Most [parts] are young - even the ones that dominate your life and can be quite intellectual. After parts unburden, they will manifest their true nature in valuable qualities (like delight, joy, sensitivity, empathy, wonderment, sexuality) and resources (like the ability to focus, clear discernment, problem-solving, passion for serving others or the world) that you have new access to and enrich your life.”
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with The Internal Family System Model by Richard C. Schwartz, PhD
All in all, I think 23-year-old Jess would be very happy to see what 33-year-old Jess has built for herself. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for ten years (another marker of time) and mostly, it is a miracle to feel so grounded and at home in this city. Thank God for friends, thank God for the unknown, thank God for dharma, all of which provided enough support in my early NYC years to move toward quitting a job with nothing lined up and following my inner wisdom toward what felt warm.
May we all make direct eye contact with our younger selves. May we all travel toward what is warm.
xo Jessica
Thank you for being here. I started this newsletter because I am always writing in my mind and I felt that it was time for me to begin sharing - because I would always find an excuse to not be ready to share so the only thing I could do was begin to share - because I believe in vulnerability as a method of awakening consciousness and processing and minding and closing the gap so I began to share.
The last couple of months of this newsletter have been stop-and-start. For April, I wrote you something and then I got busy with work and didn’t have time to edit it. This month, I thought I would release something special for my paid subscribers. It was gonna be a celebration of one year of slowly, slowly and an incentive to continue to be a paid subscriber (if you are) because when I started this newsletter there weren’t a lot of Substacks and now I’m like “Wow The Market is flooded, people are going to unsubscribe because there are so many other Substacks now by people who are influencers and I am not that.” Then I had drinks with a friend and told her I didn’t want to push and that I don’t think people subscribe to this because they’re waiting for the paid subscriber bennies.
So instead of pushing, I’ll say thank you again. For being here and witnessing this vulnerability. This is a community of over 100 peoples(!). If you are a paid subscriber, my extra gratitude to you. I will have something special for you soon but I will not be stretching past my capacity to get it to you (I hope you understand). If you decide to become a paid subscriber, my future gratitude to you. And if you’re a free subscriber, I love you a lot and you can support me in non-monetary ways (like sharing!) that mean just as much as $$$.
Work with me.
You can find me weekly at Heal Haus, monthly at Inner Fields and five days a week at Arena.
🌞