As someone who works around wellness and care and social justice, I hear a lot of rhetoric about what we “deserve”.

• You deserve to live life on your terms.

• I deserve respect and care.

• We deserve healthcare and housing and basic human rights!

I even use it in one of my subject lines for those who opt-in to receive for my new free resource, 7 Tools to Cultivate Revolutionary Relationships in a Dystopian World (get it, it’s awesome!) 

I had never questioned the use of this word until one of my teachers, James-Olivia Chu Hillman, told me “deserve implies merit”.

🤯🤯🤯

Do you have to earn the right to live life on your terms? Do I need to earn respect and care? Do we have to work/earn/achieve to have our basic needs yet?

Whether it’s not being able to reach my car brakes as I’m driving out of control like I’m in a cartoon or trying to find my house or car or anything that can get me to safety, not enoughness is a theme of my dreams. It isn’t surprising that it’s at the core of my mother wound as well…and yet! I’ve had these dreams for years, and it wasn’t until a few months ago that I put these two themes together 🤦🏾‍♀️ I assumed my anxiety was about the anxieties of daily life and not being able to get what I wanted done, like so many of us in the throes of capitalistic and patriarchal productivity demands.

Time itself is a mother of a concept to imagine, literally and figuratively. Between the abstract and the everyday, the quantum and the deadlines, the stillness and the urgency, we tend to just look at what’s next on our calendar and *maybe* see if we can squeeze in a meditation or a moment of stillness.

I wrote what I didn’t realize would be a love poem, what I didn’t realize would help me redefine the erotic, what I didn’t realize could be so healing…

The other night, Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End” came up on my Spotify, and I was IMMERSED. This song has been covered by many artists including Beck, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Crybaby, and Headless Heroes.

I just started playing the song while I’m writing now because I love to cry when I write (lolsob).

“What was your first memory of self-judgment?” the healer asked. The answer came to me so quickly. I was in Sedona, AZ for a retreat when I was received this question. I sat in a circle with three other people and the healer. He worked with us one-on-one, and I was last. After witnessing his power and intuition with the others, I was excited, but a bit scared, about what he had for me.

It’s no surprise that two of the most cited books about trauma and healing, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk and My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem, have references to the body in their title.

I have new grief. My dad died 10 years ago today in his ancestral home of India. Ten years later, my tears escalate when I think of his sudden death. This new grief surprises me, and it reminds me that my healing story is a love story.