“Honey, you’re not made for manual labor.” My Grandpa Tom told me that when I was fourteen and looking for my first job. He would know. He grew up in south-eastern Missouri picking cotton, then hopped freight-trains to find work during the Great Depression.
“You’re so good at putting oil on troubled waters.” My Grandma Sue told me that more times than I could count. She would know. Time-after-time she saw me sooth the dysregulated people around me, even though that was never the responsibility of a child.
I spent most of my life trying to figure out who I was through the reflections of what other people saw in me. The reflections were helpful and completely lacking—because two things can be true at once even when it causes discomfort.
I’ve been trying to figure my role for what is happening in the world right now. I think of all the things people have told me I can or should do and find myself paralyzed because none of it feels like it will be enough.
But in the space between my thinking, there is feeling, and I know myself well enough to know that feeling is something I do better than most.
I feel your pain. I feel your joy. I feel your confusion. I feel your desire to heal. I feel your rage. I feel your love. I feel your abuse. I feel your victory. I feel your past. I feel your future. I feel all of it, not just for you or the person in front of me—I feel for the whole room, the whole building, the whole block, the whole city, the whole state, the whole country. I feel it all.
There was a time when all of that feeling threatened to straight up destroy me. Had me curled in the fetal position, questioning my sanity, begging for any possibility to make it stop. Then one day I pushed through my fear into a man’s apartment where he said, “What if it’s not about turning them down? It’s about turning you up?”
And with that one little phrase I understood. I had fragmented myself into what other people could bare to see, what was palatable, what kept them comfortable. I was scared to pull all of myself together because what if it was too strong, too loud, too much.
I walked out of his apartment a changed woman. My nervous system no longer able to be hijacked by other people. An ability to alchemize all of the emotion others were unable to hold now activated.
I’m not made for the manual labor part; I’m made for energetic co-regulation. I’m made to amplify the calm so people can intentionally respond instead of blindly react. I’m made for the part almost none of us can see, but every single one of us can feel.
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If you don’t know what to do either, that’s a very normal feeling for right now. Watch the 7 cards clip this week and see if it brings any clarity to how you are best suited to help. I promise you, there is something.