showing up & self-love
“fake it ‘til you make it,” they said
so i did
but all i got
was a crushing case of neuroticism
and this lousy t-shirt (which, coincidentally enough, is two sizes too big)
Over the past few months—a period I’ve come to think of as a “soft relaunch” for unspooling—this Substack has become an abundant source of wisdom, healing, and guidance for me. I’m thrilled to have received these benefits, of course; but my intention was to sow, not reap. unspooling was meant to be an offering; whatever fruits my calling yields, are intended for you, dear reader. And yet, it appears that I have become the primary beneficiary of this literary experiment, quite contrary to my design.
But I suppose that’s how life often goes, isn’t it?
By some happy, cosmic accident, unspooling has become one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had. (My sincerest hope is that there’s plenty of surplus beneficence left over for you, dear reader.)
Whodathunkit…
Oh!—and if you’re new here (more and more of you are these days); welcome! I hope you’ll kick your feet up and stay awhile—but I also thank you kindly for stopping by.
here we go again
When unspooling launched in mid-June (2023), I had just a handful of subscribers, all of whom were family and friends I knew personally. My social circle is small, so when I say “a handful,” I’m not exaggerating. (Hi, Mum!)
Well, the Fates must have lost the paperwork or something because, somehow, unspooling failed to achieve meteoric success overnight. (I mean, what’s the point of even calling it a “launch”?!) It wasn’t until the final day of August that my “first” (if you catch my drift) subscriber signed up. And it was radio silence again after that until the second half of October, when the next “new” subscriber came aboard. At that point, unspooling gained a bit of traction—just a bit, mind you (but, also: a whole freakin’ bit—thank you very much!)—and it’s been growing slowly, but steadily, ever since.
Now, I have no qualms about how much work remains before my writing provides a sustainable livelihood, nor am I blind to the dangers of wishful thinking, but that the metrics are trending in the right direction seems to be feedback that I’m doing something right. For awhile there, however, it was tough to gauge much of anything, good or bad, because week after week, unspooling was met with unyielding silence.
The memory of the Quiet Months remains palpable. Enduring them was painful—excruciatingly so, at times—but it was well worth it. Because, having survived the Quiet Months, I learned something invaluable about showing up. Specifically, I learned about the intrinsic connection between showing up and self-love. It’s a connection so important, in fact, that if we don’t examine it, our ignorance will prevent us from fulfilling our potential, from being better people, and from achieving our dreams.
Now, when I say “showing up,” what do I mean?
Great question, I’m glad you asked.
Showing up is choosing to make yourself available to pursue your calling.
Whatever your calling is, it draws you in with an intense magnetism that’s impossible to ignore. It invades your mind and scratches away at the seams of your attention. You could attempt to lock it away and ignore it but, I assure you, captivity won’t contain it; your calling will always escape. It has a kind of power over you but it also gives you power.
It is what the French call a raison d’être—a reason for being.
For me, that’s writing.
Do you recognize this thing I’m so clumsily describing, dear reader?
What is your calling?
chapter two, turn another page
We all have a calling—a truth, admittedly, that can only be felt intuitively, rather than understood intellectually—but we don’t all show up for it.
You can tell that many of us struggle to show up by the way we behave.
When we fail to show up, it tends to make us rather miserable people to be around.
As Nietzsche once wrote,
… one thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisifaction with himself—whether it be by this or by that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefor; we others will be his victims, if only by always having to stand his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes men bad and gloomy.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Book IV [290], 233.
On my worst days, I resemble that remark and… I really don’t want to. I don’t want to be a cantankerous, miserable bastard frothing with unabated rage. I don’t want to transmute my self-loathing into a lifestyle or fashion my frustration into hateful little projectiles that I can spew at anyone unlucky enough to come with spitting distance.
So the question is: how does one avoid such a regrettable fate?
But you already know the answer, don’t you?—so say it with me now: you show up!
But there’s a catch.
There’s always a catch, isn’t there?
The catch is that showing up can be really, really hard.
Showing up always been the most difficult part of writing for me. Summoning the willpower to plant my ass in front of the keyboard takes a Herculean effort, at times. (Ditto for keeping it there when the cacophony of voices in my head begins to bellow.)
Say what you will about the difficulties attendant to starting or concluding a story, creating characters and worlds for them to inhabit, and polishing shitty first drafts into something vaguely readable—and make no mistake, these aspects of writing are difficult, but these types of challenges generally present while you’re writing and tend to work themselves out in the process.
It’s kind of like how lifting heavy weights isn’t the “hard” part of maintaining an exercise regimen (although it constitutes “hard work” by any definition). Do people abandon fitness routines because they find lat pull-downs (to pick an exercise at random) simply too arduous? Maybe. But I’ve never heard of it. The fatigue that makes the final set of reps a challenge is readily overcome. Having already shown up, you’ve virtually guaranteed that you’ll get what you want out of your workout. No—the true difficulty lies in getting yourself to the gym in the first place, in summoning up the willpower to grab your runners, and show up.
“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, 146
Showing up is an act of self-love. A powerful one. And, for me at least, that’s where the problem lies. As someone who finds their storehouse of self-love rather barren at times (okay, most of the time), showing up can feel like it exists on a spectrum between “unbelievably difficult” and “utterly impossible.”
So, okay; let’s imagine a scenario—I feel my calling and know I must answer it. But I find myself feeling rather wretched and my self-esteem is in the pits. I feel my calling but I can’t summon the self-love needed to show up. So I don’t. But, in not showing up, I’ve added fuel to the vacuous self-loathing that siphons off the meagre reserves of self-love that I’ll need in order to show up tomorrow. And so I wake up the next day, drained and dreadful, utterly unable to show up. Again.
And the cycle repeats.
Ad naseum.
(Oh, now would you look at that… it’s another one of those Carousels from Hell we’ve heard so much about!)
i’m walking in the rain
I’m fascinated by the trappings of reality television. Each season brings a new, unknown cast of characters, so reality shows rely upon other aspects of their production to demonstrate continuity and familiarity to the viewer.
Anyone who’s watched a few seasons of Survivor, for example, will be familiar with the vast array of tag lines and vocal cues wielded by host Jeff Probst which bookmark each episode. The hollering of “Come on in, guys!” signals the advent of a challenge; “Cody, wins immunity; safe tonight at tribal council!” indicates a life saved... at least for the moment; and “the tribe has spoken…” serves as a kind of death knell, bringing the episode to a close with the extinguishing of a flame and the crushing of a dream.
I want to introduce you to the *absolute* *best* reality tv tagline in history.
“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen up in here?!”
Each episode of the hit reality tv series, RuPaul’s Drag Race, concludes with these iconic words. Typically, the remaining queens give a particularly effusive“Amen!” in response. Distraught, having lost a beloved sister, and yet ecstatic to be one step closer to the crown, the queens must endure one hell of a roller coaster ride in pursuit of their calling. But they do so happily; because you don’t make it onto RuPaul’s Drag Race without knowing how to show up.
But I’ll never get over how great that closing line is…
.. I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the most profoundly wise aphorisms I’ve ever encountered.
Drag Queen. Singer. Actor. Author. Reality tv host. Supermodel of the world. Philosopher?!
I mean, what can’t this bitch do, am I right?
But, seriously, chew on that for a moment—“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”
paint a smile on my face
If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to show up?
Hint: you can’t and you won’t.
The secret to showing up is finding consistency and stability in your reservoir of self-love.
Not to sound too dramatic, but this discovery has meaningfully altered the course of my life (perhaps even saved it, in some sense).
But it’s tricky, too, because another thing about self-love is that no one can do it for you and you can’t fake it. You’ll know the difference between genuine self-love and fake self-love when you see it, because the evidence is inescapable.
You either show up; or you don’t.
Many (probably most) of the drag queens that appear on RuPaul’s Drag Race have tragedy lurking somewhere in their backstories (k and I are often moved to tears when the queens share their backstories—one thing the show has made clear to me is that some parents do not deserve their children). The queens must endure myriad challenges on their journey to reality tv stardom. The world is tough. And when you’re branded as an “other,” it’s even tougher. Just to show up for their calling, the queens must survive a world that’s constantly attempting to ground them down into nothingness. And to endure such a cold, unforgiving, and inhospitable world, they learn to foster tremendous amonts of self-love, which they use to combat the hateful messaging they so often receive from society. They use it as fuel to show up.
To a discerning eye, every episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race powerful demonstrates the critical connection between self-love and showing up. You can see it in the queens’ utter self-assurance, their bordering-on-delusional confidence in themselves. You can see it in their joy to be a part of something greater than themselves and in their genuine affection for their competitors. You can tell that they could have listened to their demons and taken a far different route but, instead, they have elected to take the path leading to their calling. When they rise to the challenge demanded of them, week after week, you can see how their ability to conjure self-love is a necessary component of their ability to show up for what is an objectively challenging gauntlet in reality tv making.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say—and I’ve noticed the same trend in my own experience.
I wish I could tell you about some foolproof method for cultivating self-love but I don’t think there is one. (And I suspect that anybody who tells you differently is either grifting or sorely mistaken.) There is no short-cut to self-love. You’ve just gotta figure it out for yourself.
That’s the bad news. I’ve dumped all of the puzzle pieces onto the table in front of you, only to tell you that you’ll have to finish all 9,000 pieces on your own.
But the good news is that you can do it. You can solve the puzzle (even if it takes you half a lifetime). You can find the self-love you need to show up for your calling. I know you can. Because if I can do it; you can too.
I think the reason why showing up during the Quiet Months was so difficult for me was because of the story I had been telling myself.
You see, I launched unspooling because I had recently finished graduate school but had been unable to win entry into academia and employment prospects were either non-existent or completely unappealing. So unspooling was both a much-needed creative outlet and a Hail Mary at the same time. But while my heart knew that it was time to pursue my calling, my mind lacked the self-love needed to show up the way I needed to.
The Quiet Months allowed me tell myself a story about how I pretty much just suck at life and should probably find a very high place from which to swan dive.
The Quiet Months allowed me to tell myself a story about how I’ll never amount to anything—how everything I’ve ever attempted in the past, has amounted to nothing—and that I shouldn’t even bother trying to show up.
The Quiet Months allowed me to tell myself a story about how I don’t deserve my calling, or even love, for that matter—self or otherwise.
Well… I’ve decided its time to start telling myself a different story.
A story about resilience and perserverance. A story about practice and acceptance (and patience, especially patience). A story about growth and honesty and vulnerability and all of the wonderful things I had previously left out the the frame.
I know that I can’t rely on others, nor can I draw my sense of self-love from the fact that someone other than my mum now reads these newsletters.
I have to figure out for myself what I need to do to create an immovable monolith of self-love.
I sense that unspooling is an invaluable part of that.
But it’s not a cure-all. The problem and the solution lies within. Even if I had a readership of millions, I’d still struggle to show up because I’m still at the stage where it’s a struggle to generate self-love.
All you can do, is your best (and be ever-vigilant of self-deception). Day in. Day out.
I don’t know how durable a solution this will prove to be but the early results have been fruitful and, again, there really is no faking this, so the proof will be in the pudding.
So, let’s wrap up with a promise to each other, okay?
I’ll promise to keep showing up.
I’m committed to unspooling but, even more importantly, I’m committed to myself. By showing up, I am committing myself to a journey of self-love. One that I hope will culminate in the fulfillment of my calling.
As for you, dear reader…
Make a promise to yourself; make a promise today that you will love yourself a little bit better than you did yesterday. And when you wake up tomorrow? Make the same promise again. And make it again the day after that. And the day after that, too. Then keep doing that until your self-love is as big as the ocean.
I’ll be—now would you look at that… finally, a carousel that doesn’t seem so bad! Who’d have thought we’d see the day?
Until next time,
Be well and stay on the path, my friends.
- c.d.
Love this line “Showing up is an act of self-love. A powerful one.” As difficult it is to show up, especially when other people are depending on you- showing up for you can be so hard. This is a good reminder to take care ourselves first.
Well my friend this is a profound bit of writing. I applaud your dedication and courage to this commitment. I shall be here to read all your next works.
Cee cee
Tracey