I do a lot of self care and reflection work as a mom. My philosophy includes the idea that in order for my children to be their healthiest then I too must be at my healthiest. If you can imagine this includes all the kinds of healing. Nothing really ever pushes your boundaries as much as being a parent. As you learn your triggers and your glimmers it is a truly humbling experience.


Closer to twenty years ago now than ten I had an injury that changed my life entirely. What began as a normal day ended with a spinal injury that I would eventually get surgery for but it took a year for doctors to agree on my treatment. Over the course of that time I felt more pain than I had known was possible. Physical pain absolutely but also psychic pain. A kind of shock from waking up and going to sleep in pain that no one should ever experience. That sort of relationship with pain will alter the way you think and the way you move through the world.

It’s not so much a question of if you have addiction or not but moreso what level of torture is going to unlock that sort of begging for relief in you. Some people beg to go very high and chase dopamine in the form of sky diving or extreme workouts or even cocaine or maybe meth. Some people go deep into the depths of their darkness, isolating, using opioids, slowly, slowly finding a pain relief that has its own personal demons attached.

In this way I think that everyone has a deep connection to addiction; the need to temporarily escape pain.

The modern world has no time for grief. There is no time to stay home and mourn when life as you know it falls apart. You only have to keep going. And if there is no time to mourn and die then there is also no time to be born and expand. They are, as it is said, two sides of the same coin.

But as the saying goes, when you don’t pick a time for your body to rest, your body will choose that time for you.

There is no grief, no pain, without the capacity for deep feeling. We love people in part because their time with us is finite. We might not know when and how or where they will leave us, but at some point they will.

Perhaps this is why humans have loved dogs as companions for so long.

With their different sense of time, seeing us after a few hours away, brings them such an enormous joy. That and their loyalty is such a kind welcome for any person with a heart that beats.

Plus they’re excellent hunters and alarm systems.

I wrote about this more in my book, but during that year of pain before surgery, I was deep in a painful spiral. My ego played tricks on me and told me that I wasn’t addicted to the pain as a survival mechanism. I don’t know what would have happened if I had just stopped and felt the weight of a medical system that did not have my back (*see what I did there 😉 .) and the crushing and all consuming weight of my spine, my physical, in this world, support system, also not supporting me in a less painful way. Some kind of collapse might have happened, I guess.

My body unlocked something deep in my DNA that allowed me to survive but it did come at a cost. I refused to die or to stop and grieve but all of a sudden, one random afternoon many years later is simply all caught up with me. There was nowhere left to turn, nothing to do, but finally collapse and begin to understand the weight of what I had actually survived. I am very lucky because some people do not make it back after that collapse.

At the time though I had this idea that because I was not on a street corner shooting up heroin it somehow translated to a moral success. It did not. There was something evil lurking inside my belief system somewhere that I didn’t even know existed that felt like as long as there was someone doing worse than I was I couldn’t be doing that bad, it could always be worse and I could always be doing that. It wasn’t until years later when people started believing anything about me that I could finally understand how painful that is. To be the one that someone points at like a tiger in a zoo, caged and contained in the expectations or ideas of another person who uses you like a human example; telling their children that if they don’t do x, y, and z, they can end up just like you. A sad anecdote to an unfulfilled life. In fact, the idea to compare oneself to another person is always rooted in that kind of ideology of supremacy.

Whether we think someone is doing better than us or doing worse than us is always a line of questioning that brings us down to some pretty cruel places, and getting out of them is harder than getting in, I’ll tell you that easily.

At once it can justify subjugation or subhuman treatment of another person or even groups of people or self satisfy our own need to feign helplessness when we are not ever truly helpless. It can give us an excuse to sit down and point the finger like that overused Leo DiCaprio meme that shows us that someone else had a better opportunity than we did and why should we even try?

yeah. But I think somehow this is connected to the work of practicing buddhism. Working with the middle path. Literally not falling into despair because of a living faith. This is the work of all spirituality and religions. This is the realm of faith, of which trust is its child and humble pupil.

Trusting that things will get better is a truly insane thing to do. It is one that requires faith in a different way of being. Faith that things will get better, perhaps that we will get better, that our pain will one day be less, and that one day things will be just better. This is the work of ancestral healing in fact, and this is the root of the work of parenting.

Believing in the earth enough to hold something so massively important of your own creation. Getting up each and every single day with someone so new that they are a moving and breathing expression of hope.

Once, I believed becoming a parent was the most narcissistic thing a person can do. Now I believe it is the most brave.

So my mind is coming together after its long time in the trenches of pain and addition to quiet superiority and I can breathe again and show my face in the world again even if I do have a crushing anxiety as a result of these journeys to hell and back. I’m working on it.

And randomly yesterday, my son who has a little cold which makes me feel like the most vulnerable person in the entire universe because I can’t just take his pain and sickness away, sat with me and was full of a bubbly, giggly, energy from not being outside all day (the damp, wet air and blustery gray skies were not conducive, ‘play outside‘ weather for a boy with a cold) and I was just tired. I just remembered something he said so I played a little game of harmless comparisons with him.


Who’s the better streamer, I asked him, craftee or doodle and arkey?
whose the better streamer, adley’s family or lankybox crew?
who’s the better streamer, ishowspeed or mr. beast?

Perhaps admitting that my son knows who Mr. Beast is, a man who is like an actual, living breathing, super villain, Lex Luthor, just bad man, shocked me into action, and I told my son we were going to check out ishowspeed together.

Imagine my surprise when I opened instagram and saw these really powerful acts of human persistence and fun and joy.

I mean, I watched as Ishowspeed jumped over 2 moving cars, and into this mouse trap that just got smaller and smaller.

We watched for about thirty minutes before bed and really just had fun and were in awe. I remembered that we all have different dimensions, different limitations, and I felt proud to continue to live in a world where people with really just an idea and practice, can be almost anything they want to be.

As a content creator mom, this is me too, and I felt glad to be living my beliefs and practices and being that kind of model to my son; That when you simply don’t give up, you can go so far as to create new genres – new ways of being here on earth.

shout out to the internet, faith, creatives, and our physical vessels here on this planet.