If you’re just landing here, a little context. Every summer, To Be Magnetic runs a multi-week challenge built around a theme, a daily protocol of journal prompts and DIs (their deep imaginings, which are guided meditations turned all the way up). This year’s theme is being seen. Anything in your subconscious keeping you from being visible, expressed, looked at. I’ve been doing this work for six years, and when they announced the theme, I knew it was built for exactly where I am right now. I’ve been writing these dispatches as I go. There’s the pre-week dispatch and the week one dispatch if you want to start at the beginning.
This is week two.
It was Monday, midday, on my walk, and I could feel myself resisting the beginning journal prompt questions before I’d even started them. I’d wanted to sit down for these. Do them properly, at a desk, like a serious person. And then the day filled up the way days do, and I thought, well, if the plan was to talk my answers into my laptop anyway, why can’t I do that on a walk. So there I was. A little messier this way. It was what it was.
The prompt asked me to take the expression I’d named in week one, that imaginative, energetic teacher, and say what I actually wanted from it. Not the good version. Not the likable, humble, palatable version. The real outcome. The one I’d be a little embarrassed to say out loud.
And I caught myself, almost immediately, doing the thing. Softening the answer because I knew it was going to end up here, in front of you. I had to stop on the walking path and say it out loud to myself: this part isn’t for anyone else. This part is just true, for me, and I have to answer it all the way before I get to decide what’s fit to share.
So I did. And under all of it, under the wanting, was a sentence I didn’t see coming. If this works, if I really get what I want, it’ll finally prove I’m someone worth paying attention to.
A deer ran across the path right about then, quick and agile, gone before I’d fully clocked it, and I took it the way I take those things: a little sign from somewhere that a fast, clean adjustment was being made in real time, even if I couldn’t see the whole of it yet.
Because that sentence kept turning over in me. If this works, if I really get what I want, it’ll finally prove I’m someone worth paying attention to.
The flip side of it is the part that stings. If it works, I’m worth attention. And if it doesn’t, then I’m not. I’d made my own worthiness a thing I had to go out and earn, with proof, with results, with a big enough number, with enough eyes on me. And the trick of it is that if I’m waiting to become worthy once I hit some level of attention, that level never arrives. It can’t. I have to be the worthy one first. Move through my days as if it’s already settled. And then I get to receive and truly have the thing. Be, do, have.
The performance was never the problem
Here’s what I know about myself: I can perform. I have always been able to perform. I can put on the face, laugh louder, make the funnier joke, do the thing well from a near-flow state and have it look effortless. It is safe for me to be the best. I got that part sorted a while ago.
What I’m circling now is quieter and a lot more tender. Can I be worth attention when I’m not at my best? When I’m breaking down a little. When it isn’t going well. And the honest answer, the one my body coughed up on that walk (and I mean coughed, I had a genuine five-minute coughing fit right as this surfaced, the kind where you have to stop walking and cross your legs, this thing had apparently been irritating me for who knows how long and I didn’t even know it was in there), is that my whole strategy for those moments has been to disappear. Go dark. Handle it myself, privately, with my DIs and my podcasts and my breathing, and then re-emerge into the world like nothing happened. Maybe a quick fifteen-minute Voxer to a friend after the fact. “Sorry you haven’t heard from me, here’s what was going on, anyway, how are you.”
And that strategy works. It really does. I metabolize things fast. A friend once told me I’m the most anabolic person she’s ever met, that I take whatever’s in front of me and immediately go, okay, what can we make out of this. My ego loves this strategy. My ego was practically sitting on my shoulder going, yes, this is the one, do not touch it, this keeps us safe, look how capable we are!!
But shining your light, if it’s about anything, is about being a whole self. Not the shiniest bits. Not the parts we can zhuzh up for the room. The whole thing. And I want to tell you, plainly, that feels scary to me. I knew it would when I started writing here. I knew this was the part it was going to ask of me eventually, and there’s a core in me that wants it anyway, that says this is the spice of life, keep going. And then there are all the layers stacked on top of that core. The ego, the old beliefs, the high wire I keep walking between doing my best and not being seen doing it.
Two years old
Later in the week, the protocol had me do the inner child DI and then the unblocking DI, back to back. I laid down at nine-thirty AM on a weekday morning because I could feel this one wasn’t a walk-and-talk. It needed me horizontal, all the way in.
And I fell asleep. Both times. Fell asleep during the inner child one, woke up, drank some water, laid back down for the unblocking one, and fell promptly back to sleep. Ten in the morning, out cold. I was surprised by how much rest my body apparently needed, and looking back, of course it did. This week asked a lot of me.
What I remember is this. The child who came to me was two. Two years old, which almost never happens. I usually get six, maybe five at the youngest. But she was two, and she didn’t want to be coached or talked to or worked on. She just wanted me to sit on the floor and play blocks. Then she wanted to climb into my lap and play from there. No agenda. She didn’t even really need me to play with her. She just wanted to sit on me and be near me while she did her thing.
So I gave her that. And in the unblocking DI, when it asked me to bring in a grounding presence, the one who came was Lacy Phillips, which started happening for the first time only since this challenge began. That steady, mothering, I’ve-got-you-and-you’re-safe-here kind of presence. I trust the work did its work down there in the theta state even though I wasn’t conscious for most of it. I came up out of it from a dream where I was very small, on some amusement park water ride, alone, going fast and feeling like I was going to fall off.
Last week it was my twelve-year-old who needed a shield from the kids who had something to say. This week it was a two-year-old who needed a lap. A two-year-old who wasn’t sure she was worth attention unless she was performing. And this week, she got some. Just for sitting in a lap. Just for being there.
If that’s the only thing that comes out of this whole challenge, that one kid getting held without having to earn it, then that’s kind of the entire reason any of us do this.
So that’s where I am at the end of week two. Cracked wide open, no closure, no bow, right in the middle of the protocol where I’m supposed to be. My ego keeps telling me I’ve gone too far, honey, too far. And I keep telling her I hear her, and she can ride in the back seat. Week three brings the integration tools, the part where TBM stitches you back up somewhere sturdier than where you started. I don’t know yet what’s going to bubble up once there’s space for it.
I don’t know. Same as you don’t know. Week three dispatch coming next week.