Growing in Reverse

From regressing to reclaiming and feeling good instead of looking good 🌀

I didn’t improve this year. In fact, I may have improved backwards.

I’ve regressed and gotten worse.

I make less money than I did at the end of 2023, I’ve ghosted friends, accrued credit card debt, took an extended leave from work, and my screen time is depressing.

I have nothing to show for what I’ve done this year except a crumbling business and the jowls I swear I’m getting at age 29.

I scroll past internet trends like “75 Hard” and “Sad to Savage” and wonder if I need to be more disciplined. Maybe there’s a habit or morning routine that will transform me.

2024 was the year I dissolved into a goo-like substance. I’ve become unrecognizable, yes, but it hasn’t been a glow up.

I would love to say I’m proud of how I leaned in to the grit of this year and let go, but I haven’t reached the enthralling rebirth phase yet. I’m still floundering—like bits of carrot and beef bubbling in a simmering stew.

While nothing has taken form yet, I am proud of the internal shifts I’ve made to get here. From the outside, it looks like I’ve drastically regressed, but inside, I’ve grown—just in reverse.

Tetiana Pchelnykova, Eva’s Legacy, 2023 via Pinterest

I joked with a friend this summer, 2024 is the year of the bad girl! We’d chuckle, this is our *bad* girl summer, riffing on the brat summer we’ve collectively shared. A declaration to mark our Saturn return: we were done with being culturally comfortable and understood; being a “good girl” was out. Instead, we’d reclaim our shame and embraced the things that made us “bad” in the eyes of patriarchy and society at large. Being bad was decidedly in.

“Good girl conditioning” is an experience I believe all women share. How could we not? To be good brings us closer to the intoxicating and often life saving allure of patriarchy.

Throw in a very British family line, and the drive to be seen as “good” cuts deep. And like the British Empire, contrived goodness and ideals of propriety only serve as a mask for dark, dark shadows.

But unlike colonialism, my shadows weren’t entirely mine, either. They were shards of thorn left behind—remnants of deeply pointed shame. Every negative thought, every fear lead to shame and the belief I was inherently defective. Surely, there had to be something wrong with me. I was bad.

As I began to mine the shadows of my badness, I realized much of what made me feel bad was the chagrin inherited from other lost souls.

Jaime, the girl who teased me in rhythmic gymnastics after school. Ms. Stelter, the teacher who body-shamed me in gym class. Nikolina’s little sister, who commented barfing smiley faces (pre-emoji) on my MySpace account. The sheer reality of being a tall, awkward 13-year-old girl among tiny best friends—always the last chosen, the ugly duckling, the sidekick, the third wheel; emphatically “too tall” to date high school boys.

Relinquishing my shame became a practice of returning to sender. To stop making excuses for someone else’s cruelty (me) and to put down what was never mine to carry.

As I’ve deliberately worked to reassign my shame, I’ve come into greater contact with my actual goodness—the goodness inherent in me, the goodness I believe is inherent in you, too. None of this amounts to a smaller body, better hair, or the down payment for a condo. But what it does give you—or at least what it’s given me—is the dignity to be a person with a heart; a person with a body and feelings and needs. It’s given me a sense of self and centre for the first time in my life.

For most of my life, I attributed being good with being successful—not how success felt for me, but how it looked to others. I cared more about looking good than feeling good. I was like a bobble head, body and mind connected with nothing more than two small pieces of metal.

As I began to reorganize my body toward feeling good, the louder it became. It whispered in breadcrumbs of pleasure and goodness, while screaming, eject! to the garbage I was still carrying: the self-extracting work, the overconsumption, the “yeses” that were really hard “nos.”

Overtime, the year of the bad girl became a challenge: how socially unacceptable and unimpressive can I become? Like a weathered crone, puttering about her garden, cawing at children to stay off her land, I wanted to shape-shift into someone real, deep, and cackling—unrecognizable from the pressed, goodie-two-shoes of my past.

I yearned to boil it all down and brew myself a potent potion—one capable of melting the shame and lies I’d been force-fed, hopefully revealing a truer experience of myself.

I’m still in the pot. It’s hot and uncomfortable in here.

It’s also comforting. Uncomfortable and comforting; terrible and it’s right.

So, while I’m no crone in the garden (yet!) it feels right to release myself of the hoops I once jumped through. While painful, I know I’ll survive without the cookie or a pat on the head.

A concept I quite love is looking at our lives akin to nature and the seasons. To allow ourselves to have inner winters, where we must let our lives decompose, trusting we are being made into the fertile soil necessary for new projects and dreams to be realized.

Something I’ve been considering, as my impatient heart always wants the winter to be over fast, is: what if we sometimes had entire years dedicated to the composting process? As to invite ourselves to fully rot and dissolve, with not a clue what germinates in our soil? What if we embraced the slow rot, as opposed to rushing our own metamorphosis?

Rotting is wildly uncomfortable, in fact, I might actually hate the process, but it’s a possibility I’m entertaining in dream space. In the personal and collective exhaustion we feel, what if this was the antidote to our despair? To do, as the wise Mary Oliver cries, and “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Or, in my case, let the soft animal of my body need what it needs. Rest.

Xx,

T

P.S. An apt song for today’s newsletter, especially given the end of the Eras tour this weekend. A show, yours truly, was in gleeful attendance of.

Peak joy: my first Eras experience the last night of the tour.