Holding space for joy

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Well, apparently November slipped away from me, though not without notice. I started the month with lots of hibiscus and green tea as my evening drinks, now I'm graduating into saffron chai as we complete the first week of December.

If you follow my instagram stories, or reached out to booking within the past week, you're aware that I had a dental emergency over the weekend and tended to on Monday. Texting a new friend, I wanted to explain it as the universe giving me a bit of a brake check. If you're still waiting on you response– or if you were in the screening queue from beforehand, trust I'm catching up as quickly as time allows. On the more positive part of this, I've found explaining to others the context of my delay has yielded me some needed grace. There's a very universal empathy in the category of dealing with the inevitabilities of mundane life– teeth & taxes.

I was yapping this week on my personal socials about a time in undergrad where I was having frequent anxiety dreams about my teeth falling out. You can read, or project, whatever allegory onto that which you want, but my personal favorite– and probably most appropriate for my personal experience in it– is the subconscious belief that things are catastrophically out of your control, and now everyone around you can see that.

I manage my anxiety with a lot more practice these days, even during waking-life tooth-related situations, but I think the theme in these two events connect. When I was younger, I felt a lack of safety in my ability to be vulnerable, and that fed into a fear that I was never allowed to express stress– so my brain fed me visions where I would be forced to do just that. At present, I find practicing vulnerability in appropriate measurements to the context, I am more often met with respect and understanding, contrary to what anxieties can tell us.

I feel very privileged in my work that I get to create an atmosphere where people are allowed to be as vulnerable as they want to be in the moment, and I get to meet them where they're at. Vulnerability is rarely just pillow talk or sharing your ghosts, but even moreso intimacy is built in sharing joy. We can talk about and process our hurt as much as we need to, but at some point, taking the risk of building new connections to joy is the next logical step.

I love sharing music that's familiar to both of us, making jokes about our unconscious quirks, or sharing deferred dreams we're now making space for in our lives again. I love building intimacy through play, paired equitably with quiet stillness, and holding space for vulnerability doesn't mean reserving that space for just resolving grief.