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As I’m heading into a series of initiations, I’m sharing a few challenges (opportunities!) that I’m sure many of you are familiar with: our struggle to prioritize ourselves, worrying over what will happen if I slow down, wanting to have faith in myself in the way that I have faith in other people and in the world. In this month’s solo episode, I’m also sharing a bit about my upcoming move from Substack to Beehiv, a sabbatical of sorts that I’m taking, and what’s coming up on the podcast.

Dre Bendewald on Pulling the Thread: “When Women Tell the Truth About Their Lives”

Uta Opitz

Harriet Lerner on Pulling the Thread: “What Our Anger Teaches Us”

Francis Weller on Pulling the Thread: “There Are Two Moves When Faced with Uncertainty”

Carla Schwiderski

ELISE:

So friends, without going into too much detail, I will get to detail in the coming months when I have more to share and report. I find myself going into a rough initiation and it’s actually multiple initiations. This is a term from Francis Weller who has been on the podcast talking about this concept, which is this idea that life confronts us with these doors that we’re forced through, that we would not choose to open on our own and that we’re sent out on a journey that’s not by choice, not preplanned, not expected, and yet a durable part of life and something that can’t be avoided either.

So I don’t want to talk about the specifics right now because I’m still understanding the specifics, but I’m going on a journey and there is nothing life-threatening about this journey. I am not scared of this journey, although I’ve come to understand there are lots of parts of it that are deeply terrifying to me and I think those parts are also quite universal. So that’s what I want to talk about today, which is as I get ready for the summer and what’s arising, I’m having a really hard time putting myself in a circle of care or allowing anyone to help me. And it’s funny, I have an amazing episode with Sharon Blackie coming up on the podcast. She’s the author of Hagitude and her newest book is called Ripening, and it’s about the need for fairytales for women, how desperately we need them because these are essential stories that erupt in cultures across the globe, which share similar themes.

We were talking about the hero/heroine’s journey and she was saying that one of the hallmarks of the journey for women is that we always have friends. They’re always friends on the journey and often women are in these fairytales have to make new life from old dead things. They have to bring things back to life and they do this always in relationship with ... there’s always critters. There’s birds and bugs and bees and wise old women in the woods and there are always these unexpected helpers along the way. They never do this alone. Keeping this in mind, I have this lone wolf tendency, which is, I got it, nothing to see here. Don’t worry. Other people need more concern and care. And this is of course true, but in this particular phase, I feel like the syllabus for me is to learn how to accept care and be in community with people instead of just patrolling.

I wrote about this in one of my newsletters, but I like to patrol the edges of the circle and look for who needs what and what can I reflect back to someone and what’s happening over here? How can I serve? How can I be helpful? Which I know is resonant for probably a lot of people who are listening to this, a lot of women. I’m like, “I’m good, I’m good, I’m good.” And there’s a certain grandiosity to that, which I’ve had to confront in myself. I’m somehow better than all of you who need things because I don’t need anything. And if I need anything, I will take care of it myself. And this is what I’m going to get is medicine in the contrary, which is that I do need help and I do need support and grappling with that is the really scary part of it.

I’m going to talk a bit more about the specific anxiety and fear that comes up for me because it does of course in some ways impact all of you. I just want to name that, that I have a lot of trouble. And I was explaining to my friend Dre, Andrea Bendewald, who’s been on the podcast before and who leads these incredible circles and she’s leading a circle for me and I participated in one that she did a couple weeks ago where I’m like, “Dre, I see this syllabus. I know the lesson I’m supposed to learn here, but it’s like I cannot get into the classroom.” And there’s that part of me that’s just give me the reading and I’ll go figure it out, but I have to take the class and I have to figure out how to get across the threshold and I don’t know how.

I don’t know another way to explain this feeling that I have of I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this. And of course I’m trying to figure out how to do this, but there’s no way to figure out how to do this except to let it happen. So that feels big for me and that maybe I’m getting a couple of opportunities to learn this lesson now, which I didn’t really learn in the past. I fell off a horse and broke my neck in 2022 and just managed to escape. I got very, very lucky as a nurse said, “There’s someone who’s holding you when you fell.” And I felt that way too and I just managed to sort of skirt around any real encounters with helplessness. I was sidelined, but I was still working my way through it with my little neck brace on and there were certain things that I wasn’t allowed to do, but I was completely and totally fine and I will be completely and totally fine, but I feel like maybe I missed ... I didn’t pass that class guys and I’m getting that class again.

And I know I’m not alone. I know how many women just cannot accept care and I’m going to talk a little ... I’ll get into more specifics in next month’s solo, but Music kills us. This inability to sort of prioritize ourselves is quite deadly. We have obviously in episodes past talked about this idea of overfunctioning versus underfunctioning, which is a concept from Harriet Lerner. I’ll include a link to her episode as well. We didn’t really talk so much about this as we did about anger, but this is her sort of theory, which I think tracks to reality that there are two camps of people. There are the overfunctioners and the underfunctioners. The underfunctioners hit a crisis point and collapse. They just fall apart on instinct and they just can’t deal and overfunctioners on the other hand hit a crisis point and it’s like they come alive and they don’t only know how to deal in a crisis, but they are just like, “I will get through this.”

Any feelings about anything gets sublimated entirely to their competency as they’re sort of taking care of everything and crossing things off to-do lists. And I’ve written about this before as I am an overfunctioner. And again, there’s grandiosity there. I take pride in the fact that shit’s hitting the fan, I got it. I’ll take care of this. I will make this better. And there’s a real cost as much as I can sort of feel myself and feel my competency in those moments, there’s a real cost to that. It’s like I was doing an energy healing session with Uta Opitz the other day and I was having this physical experience in my chest where she was like, “What’s happening in your chest, the solar plexus?” She was like, “It’s so intense.” I’m like, “Yep, it’s really painful.” And then I could feel it sort of like a not unwind and release and then just like that another, to me it felt like files emerging out of a file cabinet.

Then there was another tightness and a release and then another and another. And I don’t even know what tiny percentage I managed to release in that hour long session, but I just was like, “Oh, I understand. I have just been taking things throughout my life that happen that are stressful and I file them. I just overpower myself in the doing, file them away and never tend to them. I never take care of sort of the work required to release them from my system. And this is probably why I’m so breathless and why I struggle with anxiety. So that’s where I’m at.

So the fear that I’m feeling that’s very pronounced for me isn’t about sort of my life or life expectancy. It is about the fact that my livelihood, value, my worth is attached to what I create and in every single one of my many, many jobs I am paid based on output, whether that’s sort of downloads of the podcast that advertisers sponsor or Substack where actually very few people pay me, it’s like 2% of my audience, but where I am sort of put myself on a plan where I write a newsletter every week and do office hours and workshops and whatnot with my clients where I do consulting, they are paying me for a certain amount of output. They’re paying me to be me, right? Some of it’s helping them think through big intractable problems and some of it is actually tied to physical creation of copy.

And then of course there’s my books. Everything I do is on me and as a solo person, I don’t have an HR company to go to and say, “Hey, I need to disappear with any expectation of being paid.” And so consciously and unconsciously, I’ve set myself up just for a bit of a high wire act that’s where I get just really scared. And some of this is rational and much of it is irrational, but there’s a bit of a trust fall that I need to take with this community, those of you who are listening now and the people who I work with who have all been amazing of, “Will you still support me even if I can’t produce at the same rate or I need to take a sabbatical and focus on myself and will you still care? Will you come back? Will you forget about me?”

And that’s where a lot of my real terror lives is can I have faith that there is support outside of an immediate compensation for what I produce for people and every part of this life that I’ve structured, particularly in the last six years when I’ve been just fully off of people’s payrolls is that leaning on myself, using myself as my structure and feeling like that’s where it is. It’s all on me. It’s all on me guys. And then to sort of say, “Actually, that’s not sustainable and I can’t even really sustain this pace even without other things going on in my life. This is too much.” But to say, “Can I trust fall into this community knowing that they will support me or have my back even when I can’t show up with the same regular intensity that maybe they’re used to?” So that’s big for me.

Again, this is the rough initiation that I am in where I physically will not be able to maintain this pace. I’m going to need to take some sabbaticals and the specifics of that and please, again, this is my sort of request to this audience. Please stay with me. I am going to take at least a month away from Substack where I’m not going to be writing original essays every week and I will just be publishing show notes. It might be longer. I’m actually using this opportunity to transition off of Substack to Beehiv. Many of you have messaged me saying, “Are you aware of everything that’s going on?” This is in terms of not even the platforming of people like Andrew Tate and neo-Nazis, but also the way that the Substack business model works. They’ve really painted themselves into a corner where they’re being enriched by those people because they take a significant chunk of our revenue as writers.

So I am moving to Beehiv and there will be a newsletter explaining the implications of that. Most of you might not even notice, it will just look different. For those of you who read in the app, I will no longer be publishing there so you will have to subscribe and put in your email address. And for those of you who are generously supporting the show and the newsletter through Substack, that should for the most part port over seamlessly because it’s Stripe, the backend is the same. So you shouldn’t notice anything, although there’s amazing customer support at Beehiv to support anyone who’s having any issues. The only people who will need to sort of resubscribe or recommit as readers and/or as paid subscribers are those who have paid or subscribed through the app and you will get a message about that. So anyway, that’s some business semantics, but that’s underway.

I’ve been working on it for a minute, but I think actually it makes sense for everything to just move while I am not actively writing. So that’ll be the month of June. It might be a little bit of July too depending on how I’m doing, but that’s going to happen and I’m excited because Beehiv has a lot more functionality. There are things that I can build and offer down the line that we talked about in that survey that I sent and just more ways to engage without and support this work and/or join things like workshops without needing to be a monthly paid member. And so yeah, there’s that. So please stay with me. And then the podcast, which is probably what you guys are most curious about since you’re listening to this here, will continue. I have an amazing month of June that’s already recorded and loaded and ready to go.

I have some really great conversations coming. I’ll be back at the end of June to talk a bit more about what’s happening with me and then in July I think I’m going to go into my archive and pull up some big episodes that many of you may have missed or that are worth re-listening to and I’m going to recontextualize them for you in this moment in time. And then I’ll be back in July also with my solo, sort of an update. But that’s the plan. And then August, maybe business as usual, but I’m in deep surrender so we’ll see. I also, since these solo podcasts feel like the inner sanctum, I’m going to be using this time where I’m stepping away from the weekly race to really work on my next book. It’s sort of a sabbatical recovery, but I need to go deep on that.

I’m very excited about my next book, I have to say, and there will be more to come on that soon, but it feels alive and important and like I’ve really found the book. And I’ll talk more about that process because I know many of you guys are creatives, but we’ll do that another day. What it looks like to sort of find the book, just the process, because it’s always interesting to me how hard it can be even when you’re writing something to understand what you’re writing until you’re done writing and then often you have to go and rewrite it. It’s quite painful I have to say.

Yeah, this is the first time in my career and in 25 years where I had, like many of you guys, a bit of calm in 2020, 2021. I had sort of this year when I didn’t have my day job and I was just working on my book and I was not yet allowed to launch a podcast. And so I didn’t have that and I didn’t have a newsletter and I experienced as I was writing On Our Best Behavior a lot of focused time just exclusively on that. And that was wonderful. I loved that as much as I missed being in people’s ears every week. Yeah, this is the first time that I’m doing anything like this and it’s a big confrontation with myself. What happens if I take the foot off the gas? What happens if I do less? I was talking to my son Max today.

I was driving him to school and I was explaining, he was asking me if I was scared and I was like, “No, what I get scared about is exactly what I’m explaining to you guys now.” And he was like, “Yeah, don’t you just think people are going to think that you’re lazy?” And I was like, “That is precisely the point Max. That’s it.” But that laziness is tied to livelihood.I’m not so worried. I don’t think you guys are going to judge me. I just think that there’s a lot of competition for people’s attention and time. And then it’s like, can I have faith actually in this container because there are moments where I’m like, “Oh my God, this show really after all this time it should be sort of quote unquote bigger and this is very difficult.” And there feels like all the countervailing forces are kind of against smaller shows like mine and is this even worth it?

This show barely covers the expenses of creating the show. It’s not a profit center for me, I’ll put it that way, but I just so love it. I love it so deeply. And then every time I’m sort of feeling that way, I encounter people in the wild who listen to the show and feel moved by it and the people who come on to share what they know. And I am just reminded of how amazing this community is and how desperately I would miss it if I weren’t doing it and that of course will always keep me going. I love it. This is not what pays my bills, but it feeds my heart and maybe it will pay my bills someday. You just never know. The world is wild. I’m working on this week’s newsletter right now, which was supposed to go out a few hours ago, but it’s about sort of the marketing tides that I’m observing and how things are shifting.

And I do feel like there’s about to be, there is a fracture. I don’t know how obvious it is to the general public yet, but that this manufacturing of virality is starting to become in this age of transparency really quite obvious. And I think in that process too, not only will it become obvious, it will become irreconcilable. So we’ll see. And that I think is a benefit to anyone who is trying to create something that’s a little bit more organic, durable, et cetera. And that’s what I remind myself too in these moments where I get scared because I am like, “Oh, and this community has been slowly forming. A lot of you have been with me since I worked at Goop and did that podcast and others have joined more recently, but it’s a bit like it’s a slow iterative, it just doesn’t disappear.” So that’s what I’m really working with.

Can I have faith? I have so much faith for other people. I have so much faith for the world. I think everyone else is sort of deserving of that embrace of faith. And that’s where I’m like, oh, and I don’t have any faith when it comes to myself. I have this, I got it, God, or divine or universe. I got this. Go worry about everyone else. I’m a good student. I’m a good soldier. I’m a good patient. I’m good. I’m good. I’m good. Don’t worry about me. And again, it goes to the grandiosity that I talked about at the beginning, but also I do need to have some faith for myself and I’ve never tested it. This is a trust fall for me, but I think I’m having going to have faith that I’m going to be very moved by just even, okay, Elise, from this, what if you slowed down?

What if you didn’t write every single week, but maybe you wrote every other week? Or what is a more sustainable structure for me going forward where I don’t paint myself into this corner where I have so much anxiety? And the anxiety is kind of funny because I don’t ... Substack is really supportive, but that’s not where I get my livelihood either. But I would love it to be. I think that’s the other thing that’s coming up for me is all the ancillary things I do so that I can do what I love and really leaning into actually I would love for what I do to be supportive enough that I could do less of the things that I don’t love as much. And could I have faith in that? Could I have faith that I can do good and do well simultaneously? Can I have faith that this show could be bigger and more financially remunerative even though I have no idea how to make that happen and no one really does?

But yeah, can I have more faith in this community? So there we go. And for anyone else who’s like, “Oh, I am on a rough initiation. I’m on a journey too. I am with you. “ These are funny things too because it is also something that as much as I’m like, “Oh, it needs to be relational and I need the birds and the trees and the whatnot.” This is a journey I have to take with myself and I know that people who are like, “Oh, I’ve been on a journey, know exactly what I’m talking about.” Where it is a little bit of that as well, where it is actually this is an individual process that I’m going to do with support and the person who I feel like I’m really taking with me and this is something I’ve been thinking about deeply and don’t yet have sort of the wisdom to reflect back, but I feel like there’s a need.

The person I’ve been taking with me who is so present every time I go into a meditation or do an energy healing, the person who is so present is my inner child, little Elise. And I can’t remember who told me, oh, I don’t know, half a year ago or a year ago. It was some sort of healer, maybe an astrologist that was like, “Your inner child is pissed.” But that’s what I’ve been working on too is mending that relationship with this inner child that is very tired and feels overpowered and feels like she doesn’t get to play. And so that is who’s consciously coming with me on this journey. Almost everything that I’m doing right now is focused around her and I wish I could be more clear about what that means. I just don’t quite know what that means either. I just know that there is a part of me that really wants my attention and that is who I am bringing with me.

That is who I’m going to let drive the car through this entire experience. All right, friends, I hope that wasn’t to again, like nothing that’s going to happen is earthshattering or even very scary. I will be right here with you if not in your inboxes. And as always, thank you for listening and being there. I remember Carla Schwiderski, who’s an energy healer who I love, who has written for the Substack a bit. She’s a Brazilian queen and she was saying, she’s come in contact with some parts of this community just through what she’s shared. People have gone to her. She does group healings and also individual work in person and remote.

She calls everyone sister, “Sister, you know sister.” She was like, “You are part of a wave. Your community is a wave and everyone is in this wave together and you guys are all moving vast amount of energy in the collective all over the globe and it’s a wave.” And that to me is an image. That’s beautiful. And I love that sort of this many leaders, everyone part of the same body of water moving in the same direction with power. So thank you for being in this wave with me and I will speak to you soon. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing.