I was not expecting the next self-positive move to be an egoless one.

Aukland, through the haze from Waiheke.

Abe and I had a spectacularly difficult evening breaking down the anger from the other day. I don’t get angry very often. A bunch of people noticed, some of whom felt a resonance with the subject matter, some of whom said woah hey there ease up on yourself a little.

My conclusion was good and valid: there is work to discover and to execute upon, and there is much more of that to grow into than I’ve allowed.

The hard part is letting go of the anger that got me there, to take the useful affects of a state of mind, and carry them forward without hanging onto their origins. Also it’s just confusing, to try to respect your own conclusions while recognizing and stemming the negative undercurrent.

Because there was an undercurrent, and it was a subtle fucker: Having decided that I need to make some changes, the easiest way there was by anger because it required nothing actually new. It cost nothing to light up all the old pathways of self-criticism and self-limitation and cowardice, and when they looped back around and into each other and were burgeoning with energy it was easy to start moving.

My conclusion was good and valid, but if it was born of a reach for greatness, it was — if briefly — colored by my smallness.

(A surprising portion of the feedback I got concerned shackles, or generally was on the theme of imprisonment. I usually think of that factor as an external one, as in the shackles forced upon you, rather than bindings you choose for yourself. Or that you find yourself wearing for purely internal reasons.)

And so that’s the egoless bit. To let go of my own negativity, even while (especially while) it’s the thing giving me energy and motivation, and to start laying brick for better, more sustainable paths. I talked earlier about sustaining the creative arc through choice, regardless of inspiration — laying in healthy/healing mental patterns is going to be part of it. (Writing this is a good example, actually, and I didn’t realize that until this sentence.)

I will say that it’s much easier to process all of the above and get to the other side when you have your other half staring you down and reminding you that not all motivation is constructive. \o/

---

Speaking of Abe, and of him being my other half, this came in yesterday and is a gooood way to close this out:

❤️ 🆙