Resounding Reinventions

and other metaphors for living

Welcome to DPP, a weekly newsletter about the real-life trials and tribulations of pleasing, and how I leverage emotional intelligence for proper recovery. Letters land on Tuesdays and sometimes surprise days, please consider me a first-class seat with your inbox?

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🕯️ Today's letter is dedicated to those who have lost someone(s). If this subject is too painful for you to swim in, I’ll look forward to seeing you again next time. 🐞

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Dear People-Pleasers (and allies),

I almost shied away from sending you anything this week. The past 7 days we’ve been apart have been filled with a bumpy ride of emotions, and my practice of leveraging EQ (emotional intelligence), has been tested.

In true people-pleasing fashion, I was about to reserve any letters here out of “protecting” you from my lull. I didn’t even realize that I was doing this until my mind got quiet enough to tell me ONE thing at a time. I was sitting outside, drinking in the Sunday Sun, smeared in a mixture of sunscreen and tanning oil, which made it impossible for me to touch my library book (just started Martyr!). I was so greasy I couldn’t distract myself with ANYTHING- no books, no journals, no phone.

I heard my mind whisper, “Withholding, retreating, and hiding away is just another iteration of people-pleasing!”

Here I was: taking my emotional burden off your plate, out of your inbox. While I don’t need you to regulate my emotions FOR me, it has only just now occurred to me that you may be willing to process life, WITH me.

Self-Management, the second pillar of emotional intelligence, I have tended to practice…alone. As in, by mySELF. There are several ways I have learned to regulate and manage my feelings, including writing them out (private journaling), reading, coloring, crafting, or walking. I am working on verbally processing my emotions by openly sharing with others, to feel WITH me. I’ve struggled with vocalizing my feelings practically all my life. Practicing self-management requires that we first need to capture self-awareness (the first pillar), and that can be the HARDEST part of becoming emotionally intelligent. Especially for people-pleasers. I tend to hyper focus on the emotional state of everyone else FIRST, then figure myself out - or try- when I am alone, and in a safe and quiet environment. Quiet doesn’t show up often, which means I don’t often know how I am doing. Over the past year and a half, I have actively been working to find that slice of quiet, become aware of how I am, and then I can work to regulate.

So, what’s causing this lull, you ask? Get in line. I’ve been asking myself this question all week.

Something that took me down a couple of notches on the LOVE & HAPPINESS meter was an excerpt from this book I’m reading. It’s called Crafting the Personal Essay, by Dinty W. Moore.

Here’s the part that kicked me in the ribs:

“…a big, earnest blob of me-first sensibility… a pierced-navel-gazing orgy…[and] a journalism of the self… reaching for a phantom nipple.”

-James Wolcott regarding memoir writing

Then, another POV by New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani:

“The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is theraputic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and that has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shameless are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.”

Well, then.

Basically, everything I write is reflective of my life experience. While I don’t classify myself as a memoirist, I have recently discovered that my form falls under the umbrella of “personal essay” writing, which, according to Moore, overlaps with memoir-ing. Closely.

This perspective plugged me UP. I kept asking myself, “Am I narcissistic because I write about my life?” I do care about other people… 😭 WTF do I do now?!

I sulked throughout the rest of the week, influenced by these idiots reviewers.

Then, good ol’ grief paid me a (distant, but sharp) visit. Since I don’t know the family personally, and nothing has been confirmed at the time I write this, I won’t share any names. Thursday night I saw a video that alluded to a very famous influencer family losing their 3-year-old son by way of accidental drowning. I’ve been following along the life of this family for well over a year, and this child frequently made online appearances, making it feel like everyone who followed the family online knew him firsthand.

I immediately collapsed into waves of deep, deep, grief. Uncontrollable sobbing. Getting down on the floor and asking, “Why?!” Anguished, as if it were my own child…

Classic Kübler-Ross, after the initial shock and denial, I found myself arriving at a simmering anger towards myself. Why was I reacting this way? Did I feel close to this child because he lives locally? Knowing that innocent children are dying every day overseas, in a war they never asked for, why am I not on the floor every night crying for them? Did this question bring up a sense of guilt in me? YES.

It took my Sunday Sunshine Sit to work out my self-loathing accusations. I realized that I am, of course, devastated over the loss of all children. No parent should have to be here on Earth without their little legacies. What made this loss different had nothing to do with his location or skin tone. It was that it was not so abstract. Not a headline, or statistic (which, let’s face it, are necessary- but not the best at storytelling).

This was the life of a boy I witnessed growing up. I am grieving the loss of familiarity. I would react the same way if (god forbid) anything were to happen to my family or my neighbors. We know their lives, their personalities, and the place they take up in their household. That familiarity is what bonds us.

We are sheltered from the lives of those overseas. We don’t get to see them in their daily routines. Playing, eating, picking flowers outside…pranking their siblings for the 12th time today. Perhaps there’s a strategy there. If we don’t know them, we won’t empathize with their lives, or lack thereof. Keep our heads in the sand, and cheerio into tomorrow.

I have been lighting a candle, praying for this child's family (and all grieving people) every night since last Thursday. I’ve been going to bed thinking of all mothers. Baby brothers. Grieving fathers. I wake up thinking about how (if rumors are true), this family will need to learn how to live, without their son, brother, nephew, grandson… exactly how all people experiencing grief will have to learn how to carry on.

Their pain is irreversible. Reality cannot be bargained, or shifted. All they can control, all any of us can control, is how we react. How do we reinvent ourselves in the face of extreme, unwarranted change?

Liz Gilbert spoke about the concept of reinventing ourselves in a recent

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

post. I thought about how all people who have lost a Love, have to go through this transformation. Cocoon up, process the loss, learn how to survive, and operate in this world as a new being. Different from who we were before, when they were still here. With us.

I eventually went back to my book on Crafting the Personal Essay. Even after the heavy accusation that non-fiction writers are self-indulgent, I found myself being pulled back to the page to carry on. To reinvent my relationship with this critique.

What I had missed when I tossed the book aside was Moore’s rebuttal to these external excerpts, bringing it all back home:

“Memoir is not about “look at me, look at me” at least not when done well. Instead, it is about trying to understand the vexing mysteries of human existence.”

and

“Author Kathleen Norris suggests that what we are looking for, in the exchange between writer and reader, is resonance. To be resonant, is to be strong and deep in tone, resounding. And to resound means to be filled to the depth with a sound that is sent back to its source. An essay that works, is similar; it gives back to the reader a thought, a memory, an emotion made richer by the experience of another.”

This is why I write. Holding the “vexing mysteries of human existence” under a magnifying glass. Untangling a ball of emotions, one feeling at a time, across a blank page. A new opportunity, each day, to reinvent myself, or my understanding of life’s latest curveball. And in doing so, my greatest hope is to unlock that same feeling, in you. I like to believe this is why many writers find their way to the page.

🕯️ Go light a candle, if not for yourself, for everyone out there having to learn how to live in a world without their most cherished Loves today. 🐞

Wishing you a peaceful, resounding, reinvention of yourself today,

xX kaylen alexandra xX

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p.s. I realize nothing about my letter today (or last week!) was comical, the way my substack bio promises. Sometimes, funny is a form of deflecting. Sometimes, life actually is, just FUNNY. I promise to show up here in alignment with authenticity. You might laugh, you might not! Thank you for being here, regardless. ♥️

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