Pop-Up Workshop 2: Calling the Shots

I'd say, I think of it as compounding. Interestingly enough, it gets faster rather than a linear one. It's not linear process where it's like, "Oh, it's going to take all these years."

It felt like really slow moving boulders up a hill initially when I had to get through the harder parts of the work.

I really love this quote that I'm going to butcher right now by Rumi, which is like, "Our task is not to find love, but to eliminate all our barriers to love." And I really think about that law where it's like, some of us have retained as a child, the ability to feel joy and explore that. But some of us have that just covered in rubble that we have to clear first. @

And so a lot of my early inner work had more to do with first learning emotional literacy. Because if you can't feel in one area, then you can't feel in all other areas. And then deeper work with a therapist on just understanding, where does a lot of my negative patterns come from?

What is attributable to my parents? What is attributable to my own decisions, and what can I do in that process? And then also being very lucky to explore a combination of like coaching, psychedelics, and other kinds of workshops that have continued to help me create and have language for the stuff, so that I can talk about it, realize I'm not alone, find other people working on this, figure out what works together, try things, and then realize like, "Oh, wow, like I'm no longer where I was like 10 years ago."

It's a very sudden transformation that is not sudden at all the realization that you're there in some way is sudden, so it's very un-intuitive.

There's a lot of different ways that this can be hard for individuals. For some, it's that you've never pursued pleasure or that has never been a priority. And so the journey for you then is to simply start, without even the consideration yet of, "Oh my God. Am I taking up too much time?" Because guess what? That's just your inner critic still screaming at you. So that's one variant of this journey.

Another journey is you can become too consumed, and too excited in the process that you are basically have you have blinders on, and you can no longer see the other person. You only see yourself and your own pursuit of enjoyment. For a person who has that challenge, it's about noticing what is happening in real time.

A lot of us actually, because of the way our brains work, live in mostly autopilot. Our brains are making all kinds of predictions so that we don't have to spend the energy dealing with what's new and surprising every single moment. Our brains are fried if we had to do that, and so a lot of us have these cached interpretations, but what's important is sometimes, you actually have to let go of some of that, and just focus on "When I do this, I know the impact it has on me. I'm enjoying myself, but what impact does it have on this person?" So you're not, you're now no longer just considering the scope of me, you're considering now the scope of us.

So you're expanding your awareness and you're like "What's happening in here? What do I need? What would be pleasurable in my pursuit of this? How is this person reacting to it? Are they tensing? Are they leaning back? Are they leaning in? Are they engaged? Are they disengaged?"

All of these things have to be calibrated into your pursuit, otherwise, it's just steamrolling.

So it's dual awareness expanding your awareness from not just me, but also us.

Welcome to being human. Welcome to discovering that your wiring has predisposed you to living this way, and that it's not your fault. It's just, it's just a default setting, like in a phone and no one thinks about the default, but then you're like, "Oh my God, like, what happens if you change this, right? So I understand the shock of what feels like a rude awakening, and your journey has finally begun.

And a way to think about this is, up until your life, up until today, there was this Google doc about your values and what you care about, where you should put your attention to. Guess what?

It was view-only, and the people that had edit access were your parents or society or friends, everyone else. And today, you looked up and you saw that you can now edit it, which is a scary thing because now you are the author of your own life.

What do you want to write in it? What would you change? What would you delete? What would you replace? And it's a scary thing, right? It feels one, first, like, do I even have permission to do this? Like, is this selfish? All the inner critic voices come up as soon as you experienced this, but start small. Start with each day, like lean into one thing, one moment that is particularly enjoyable and savor that just a little bit more. Because if you don't know what you enjoy, how can you ask for more? How can you ask for more? How could you lean into it? How can you design your environment to create that? You have been the piece in everyone else's Tetris game, but now you're playing Tetris, and you're like "Oh, let me rotate this piece here instead, right?" So it's like, instead of you playing into other people's games, it's "How do people fit into your life?"

And I only am able to share this because I've been through that journey myself. I went through my version of the quarter-life crisis. I had gotten very ill when I first started my career, and that was a slight, painful, rude awakening of like, "But I thought I'd be successful and happy!!" if I, you know, worked in tech, and it wasn't. It was not what I thought it was.

And when I sat with what I actually want, which was exacerbated by the sphere of mortality and death. That's when I had to actually face "Okay, so like what do I actually care about? What are all the "shoulds" in my life? What do you want to do with those things?" And so I had to basically clean the attic, clean the garage, cleaned the whole house, uhh... destroy the house, rebuild the house.

It's a whole process, and it's easy to share now as if like, "Oh, Norman just knows this stuff" And it's like yeah, because he clawed his ass through the Shawshank redemption sewer pipe, if any of you are familiar with that scene to get here. And so I am sharing this in empathy with you, knowing that this journey is hard. It's also exciting that it's beginning.

So as a gay man, I don't have a choice. It is self-preservation, and it's not even pleasure. It is no one wants me here. I grew up in a world where people throw around gay as an insult. "Oh, that's gay." I grew up in high school where everyone just threw around the word faggot. So I was closeted up until, uh, 21.

And when I first came out, I was scared out of my mind. I didn't know what to expect. And my parents received it with disbelief. Like "How could my son be gay?", as if that changes anything, but they spent years trying to shift the dealing with that revelation onto me by basically them not acknowledging their own denial.

So they would always respond to me with like, "Do you have a girlfriend yet? Who are you seeing? Is that a girl?" Like, just all this kind of denial stuff. And for me, I tolerated that for years until I was done, until I was so done that I pursued pleasure in too, aggressive of a way, whereas like, "Yeah, Dad, I date men. I sleep with men, Mom. It went that far where it's like, "No, I'm not taking your shit anymore. Like you're going to play my game. I'm not playing your game anymore."

And that completely changed the dynamic. It was no longer like, "How do I earn their approval and love? Like, oh my God, I'm a gay son. They don't love me."

That was the proving proving, proving, proving, proving. Cause I thought I was one down and had earn my way back into their good grace, until I was like, "No, I'm fine. You guys have some work. I will be patient, but I'm also going to be resolute. You will not move me. You will not shake me. There's nothing you can do."

And so through that, standing very strongly in like, this is what's real and true. You're not gonna change anything. They have to now respond to me. And over time they've becomes so much more accepting. They're still not like, oh, like tell us, how was your day? Like, there's I'm never going to get that, and I'm okay with that. But they're at least, "Who's your friend?" like dance around it with whatever words they want to use. And I'm okay with that. That's a huge shift compared to all the denial from the past. So like for me, because I grew up with these marginalized identities, right? That's just one of my marginalized identities and it's not like pain olympics, but like growing up also like being neurodivergent and having ADHD, it's like, I just had to fight my way.

I had to fight for my own happiness, but then I realized, I'm tired of fighting for my happiness and I'm just going to be happy. It's like, after that happens, then the true magic happens. So it took a long time for me to keep crashing against the wall and wondering like, "What's wrong with me? What do I need to do to get this and that?" until I was like, fuck that.

Like I'm okay. And I'm just gonna live my life and you can follow if you want. And if you don't, you can get out of my way. Like that's how I feel now. Like, I'm just move where I want to go. And if you're in the way, I'm gonna ask you to leave.