(If you’re new here, welcome! This is the Friday Missive, a little love note I send out to my tribe each week. Usually I try to keep these useful, upbeat, and wildly entertaining, but this week we are somber.)
Oh, what a week.
Do you feel like your heart has been trampled by steel-toed boots? Me too.
It’s complicated, this week. Grief for the lost lives in Orlando. Fear, because the people in that club were just like me. Worry, because who will take care of my children if I get killed at Pride this weekend? Guilt, because my traditionally femme appearance means that I experience very little overt discrimination. An intense desire to tattoo “dyke” on my forehead and shave off my hair to remedy that fact. Fury at American lawmakers who pretend not to see the difference between a rifle or handgun and automatic assault weapons. Hopelessness, because if we didn’t change gun laws after 20 children were gunned down, how will anything change now? More guilt, because horrible things happen around the world every day, but I felt this one so very intensely because it was so close to home. Soberness, at what an incredible privilege that is.
My heart is heavy.
All week I have been trying to think of something useful and hopeful and uplifting to say to you in this missive. The problem is that I’m not feeling incredibly useful or hopeful — there’s almost no uplifting left in me.
Here’s the thing though.
We EFBAs (epic fucking badasses), we don’t quit. We tell the truth about what’s happening around us and we don’t quit. Life carries on. So while all of this sadness fills my soul, while I hold my loves just a little bit closer, we are still moving.
And by that I don’t just mean that life is moving forward– I mean we are moving HOUSES. In a few days. This move will not wait for my spirits to lift. It doesn’t give one shit about my feelings. I bet your life is like this too, often; it very politely just has zero fucks to give about your tender feelings; it requires things of you whether you feel like it or not.
This is when we have to be bigger and braver than we thought we could be.
There so many things to do on my daily compass (this is my way of keeping my brain on task, a wondrous and majestic sort of to-do list). There are dishes in need of intense quantities of bubble-wrap. Questions from Craig’s List to answer. Furniture that needs to be tagged for the big moving sale I’m hosting tomorrow (if you’re in Portland, you should come). A daughter to love, who’s going through her own big transition and big feelings. Friends to drink last-minute bubbly with and say hard goodbyes to. Family to eat meals with. Bathroom toiletries to conquer. File systems to simplify. Closets to empty.
Sometimes when we are tired, and heavy, it is just not the time to lie down and rest. Instead, we reach deep inside and find a new source of energy. We put on music and get our hips swaying and make a cup of tea and dig deep and muster up a little fireball of momentum when we didn’t think we could.
Because guys. I’m just getting started. Next week I’ll set up new systems in my new perch here in Portland, and then I’ll hope on a plane and begin merging my life with my new family up North. (If you’re new here, what happened was that I fell in love with a Canadian and my life got turned upside down in the best and most dramatic possible way.) Together we will set up new budgets and negotiate drawer space in dressers and my delicate candlesticks will fight for shelf space with my love’s sharp geometric metal things. And I won’t even get you started about the junk drawer that’s waiting for me up there. Oh the things I have left to tackle in this beautiful little world of mine.
I need a big sweeping gust of fresh air. A big whoosh of new energy. An infusion of momentum, beauty, clarity, and forward motion.
To state it simply, my life, it is about to be ready for one hell of a Queen Sweep. It’s time to find a place for all of our things and papers and clothes and all of our big feelings and different ways of doing things. And I don’t want to just get it done– I want to do it playfully, with beauty and good company and laughter.
So I’m throwing a FREE 10-Day-Mother-Fucking-Queen-Sweep! I’ve just disassembled my life and beginning June 27th I’m going to put it all back together more beautifully than ever. I’d love nothing more than for you and your friends and your mother-in-law and your sister and hell even your dentist to join me. Because there’s power in community. There’s power in all of us wise women coming together and saying “YES! My life will be beautiful goddammit!” Because when we get our own personal shit together, we’re that much more powerful out in the world, too.
So tell your friends sing it from the rooftop. Sweep out the clutter of your life with me so we can make space for the beauty.
Join me by signing up here:
much love,
Anna
