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In the old stories, autumn is a mother’s grief. As Persephone prepares to descend to the underworld, Demeter feels the loss before it arrives, as mothers do, and withdraws her blessing from the soil. The leaves turn gold and fall. The air turns cold.

Below, the god of the underworld had two names. Hades, the unseen one, was a name people feared to say. So they called him Plouton instead. The wealthy one. Because the earth's riches come from below. Gold and gems. Grain and seed. Persephone goes down, and when she returns, spring comes back with her. The Romans called him Pluto: the planet that now rules Scorpio.

Scorpio takes us down. The Taurus full moon is earth. And it eerily matches what I’ve lived this year: profound and palpable loneliness, grieving the gentle dad I once had, and the ongoing ego death of leaving my life and community in New York.

All of it composting, slowly, into this work…

It is late October in Beirut, and the heat is finally breaking. Thank God. Arlo’s nose against the balcony rail. The light is going gold earlier than I’m ready for. I realise how that sounds; ready for the cool but not necessarily ready for the dark.

North of here, a river rises from a cave at Afqa. Every spring it runs red. The ancients said it was the blood of Adonis — the beautiful one, gored on the mountain — and where his blood fell, anemones. Like Persephone, he spends part of every year below. The women of Byblos mourned him every year. Out loud. Together. They sowed little gardens in pots, let them bloom and wither quickly, and wept.

A place called Adonis sits on the road north of Beirut. It was always just a name. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a handsome man in mythology was called Adonis. I never connected the two. You don’t know what you don’t know, or at least, I didn’t: that the god of grieving flowers has been sitting on my family’s mountain this whole time. Waiting for the grief witch to come home.

Scorpio season, like it or not, is the month of going down.

If you’re new here: once a month I write about what is moving in the sky, in our hearts, in our minds. Every issue is a small practice of staying adaptable, available and alive.

the sky

Scorpio season began on 23 October. Water, fixed, unafraid of the underworld. Now the full moon rises in Taurus: earth, Venus, the body, the ground. Venus is retrograde, slipping back into Libra and turning us back toward what we love, and who we love. And Mercury has just turned retrograde too, in Scorpio: words, messages, what we say and what we don’t, all going under for review. Both turn direct on the same day, 13 November.

So this month's question: what are you willing to go down into? And what ground will hold you when you come back up?

the heart

Everyone I speak to is tired in a tiredness-in-the-bones kind of way. Braced bodies, shoulders up around the ears, holding. Holding a particular flavour of tension.

I keep asking myself: is this just my neurodivergent nervous system meeting the world? Or is everyone walking against the edges of their capacity? Is it just me, or are we all feeling this low-level, unasked-for unease?

What tension are you holding that you can let go of? How would it feel to let go, even just five per cent, of what you’re holding?

Not relaxing, exactly. Yielding. Softening just enough to feel into it, and to let what needs to move, move. The grief we’ve been holding at arm’s length. The desire we haven’t said out loud. I had this. I carried it. And then I said the thing. And now I wake up very differently. Taurus answers: then put your feet on the ground and eat something warm.

the body

I saw a reel from @meganswanwellness, founder of AltaVita Health, that stopped me this morning. Researchers at Cambridge and Fudan studied the blood of more than 42,000 people and found proteins linked to loneliness and isolation. Proteins of inflammation, of an immune system on guard. The same proteins were linked to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and early death.

I left my life in New York because I longed to feel deeply held. I came to Beirut because I wanted my father and my family to hold me. My dad holds me the way he knows how: roof over my head, feeding me, loving me the way he can. But I’m feeling braced, and I’m grieving the dad I once had, who knew how to be gentle. And despite reaching out here, being vulnerable, and saying out loud that I want—no, need—connection, it is hard to be met.

This city is not gentle. This phase of my life is not gentle. The uncertainty is not gentle. So I’m learning: Gentle. Gentle. Gentle with myself.

Your blood work was never just about you. It was always about your people.

the minds

Everything is too loud and keeps getting louder. I just asked the café where I’m writing if they could change the music from death metal (at 9 a.m., no less) to something softer, since I am the only person here. Then there are the machines, all of the machines learning to sound like us while we risk forgetting how to sound like ourselves.

Belonging has become an aesthetic, commodifiable, something we can package and distribute. A certain visual language signals appropriated ancient wisdom. Certain music signals transcendence. A carefully built persona signals authenticity. An online community hands us an identity. But belonging was never just a feeling to consume. It’s something we do with one another. Showing up. Being recognised. Having responsibilities to other people. Negotiating difference. Being inconvenienced. Caring for a place. Making something together. Being changed by an encounter we didn’t control.

reading & listening

This stopped me today: one of Maria Popova’s bird divinations, a found poem laid over a flamingo, about wading through the muddy rivers of change without sinking. It felt written for this month.

I’ve been diving deeper into her work. Her new book, Traversal, follows the intertwined lives of people who lived at the margins of their time: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, the crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, who mapped the ocean floor, and asks what makes a life alive and worth living. At its core is an image I am quite obsessed with: that we are proteins lit up with purpose, somewhere between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars. Proteins again. This morning they were in our blood, keeping the record of our loneliness.

Here they are, again, lit up with purpose.

I’m currently listening to the audio spoken version of Traversal on Libro.fm, a bookshop-friendly alternative to Audible.

You can find Traversal on Bookshop.org. This is my affiliate link, so I earn a small commission if you buy through it, and independent bookshops get a share too. Reciprocity, again.

Prompt 1: ATTENTION

Sit in the dark for ten minutes. No phone, no candle if you can bear it. Notice what your attention does when there is nothing to look at. Where does it go? What does it reach for?

Prompt 2: HEART

When was the last time you truly met a person? Write about it: who, where, what your body did. And if you can’t remember, write about that.

There’s no right way to do this. If you want, reply and tell me what came.

Prompt 3: INQUIRY

Where do you feel the difference between us?

First, land in your body: feet on the floor, breath in the belly, a hand on your heart if that helps. Then ask it again and again, and answer from there, not from your head. With a friend, a lover, someone you love, take ten minutes each: one asks, the other answers freely, and when the answer runs out, simply ask the question again. On your own, as self-inquiry, write the question at the top of the page, answer, and write it again. Keep going past the answers you already know.

This is love of truth inside relationship. Without merging or the need to manage each other. Let what is actually here between you be seen, and find that the clarity itself is a kind of intimacy.

The truth, the real truth, and nothing but the truth.

What I keep noticing is how rare and incredible it feels to share something true and have the person receiving ACTUALLY receive it: without shutting down, getting defensive or, even worse, accusing/stonewalling. Just: oh, we can share. The other half is how we share: with kindness, at the right time, with the right words.

I have a small practice for this. I call it the three Cs. Before I say something significant, I check:

• Context: where is this person right now, and can they receive this?

• Care: am I speaking for their well-being as well as my own?

• Curiosity: have I asked before I’ve told?

doorways 🚪

• The Encounter: a contemporary social ritual. Three hours. Phones at the door. Strangers meeting beyond performance, held with care. The first gatherings are coming. Subscribe (if you haven’t already) to be the first to know.
  

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• On Impermanence: an essay on being present with change: one of the great human arts, learned slowly through practice, failure, and return.

• 1:1 spaces are open in my private practice. Human Capacity coaching for sensitive, highly perceptive and neurodivergent people who are tired of adapting. Together, we work with capacity, pace, attention, and boundaries toward a life you don’t need to recover from. DM me, or book a conversation

• and last but not least, this month’s guided practice: a guided self-inquiry, recorded for you.

The Practice: Self-Inquiry

Eight minutes. My voice. One question, asked again and again:

This practice comes from the Diamond Approach, founded by A. H. Almaas, which weaves depth psychology with spiritual practice. I’ve been studying and practising it this past year. At its heart is inquiry: open-ended, curious, moved by what Almaas calls love of truth. Nothing to fix or solve: just the intention to find out what is actually here.

What moves me most about this practice is that it leaves nothing out. The tightness in your throat, the old wound, the jealousy you’d rather not admit: none of it is in the way. If you stay with it, without defending against it, it becomes the doorway.

First, find somewhere you won’t be interrupted. Headphones help. Before you press play, land in your body: feet on the floor, breath in the belly, a hand on your heart if that helps.

When the question comes, don’t go looking for the answer in your head. Let it drop into your chest, your belly, and see what rises. You’re not explaining. You’re tracking, in real time, what is alive in you. The first answers are the ones you already know. Keep going.

You’ll be doing this alone, as self-inquiry. But it works best if you bring someone with you. Before you press play, think of a person you’re in relationship with: a partner, a lover, a parent, a sibling, a friend… where you sense there’s something to still be discovered. Isn’t there always something left to discover? Maybe there’s a tension that has been sitting there quietly for a while, underneath everything. Or maybe it’s someone you want, even crave, to be closer to, and something in you holds back. Hold them in mind as the question comes. You don’t need to resolve anything. Just let what’s there be felt.

There’s no right way to do this:

Stay for a moment before you move on. Notice where you’ve landed. What’s here now that wasn’t here when you began?

If you want to share, leave a comment. What did your body feel like at the start, and at the end? What did you have to move through before something truer arrived?

If you’d like to try it with someone you love, do ten minutes each. One asks, one answers. Then swap.

Thank you for staying.

Return

Go down. Come back up. Stay soft.

Not the one who knows. The one who stays.

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The Temple of Attention is a recurring Sunday offering devoted to presence, practice, and the wisdom of ordinary life, informed by a lineage of contemplative teaching.

I took a lovely walk through Mar Mikhael this morning with Lolo; this is my latest pet name for my fur child, aka Arlo. Mar Mikhael is the neighbourhood I lobbied my father for when I first arrived here, because I knew I needed somewhere I could simply exist. A place with enough texture, aliveness, and other inked weirdos that maybe nobody would gawk at me. It is. They still do. I am working on caring less.

And somewhere on that walk between my morning Americano and twice-weekly pilgrimage to Bakelab Counter for a jambon et buerre baguette, something occurred to me:

I had to burn the old life down to make room for the new life I’m building.

Beirut is the place I write from. Where I moved after leaving behind nearly everything: the tech design career, the identity I’d built around it, ninety per cent of my belongings, the friends, the community, the shape of a dream life I had spent a near decade constructing. Everything except LOLO. He survived the cull. And even now, settled in Mar Mikhael, the neighbourhood I lobbied for, inside the busyness and the noise, I already feel the pull toward somewhere quieter.

Not long after I’d left New York, my friend sent a message: "Just used the hand mixer you so generously gave me & made the best pecan pie & whipped cream. Wish you could have a slice ❤️" And I spiralled. Why did I give so much away? I could have stored more. What was I thinking? I dieeeeeee.

Practice doesn’t make us immune, but what my practice gave me in that moment was the concept and the word for labelling what was happening:

[grasping, grasping]

This is noting practice: to not analyse the feeling, argue with it, or try to make it stop. You simply name it: grasping. It is through the profoundly simple act of naming that something shifts – because you are no longer inside the experience, over-identifying with it, convinced that it is you. You become the observer.

There is now a witness and a phenomenon.

The phenomenon arose. It will, by the law you have been practising, inevitably pass away.

The practice lives in the pause between what happens and what you make of it. And the labelling itself does something measurable. Neuroscience calls it affect labelling: when you name what you're feeling, activity in the amygdala decreases.³ The label creates distance. Space. The resulting spaciousness is what allows you to develop a completely different relationship to the experience rather than being completely swallowed by it.

[grasping, grasping]

And then, eventually, the ground comes back.

The grasping was real; the ache was real too (though it wasn’t really about the hand-blender, was it?) and I could be with it until it softened.

that’s the turn

Over a decade ago, I sat in satsang by the Ganges in Rishikesh with the spiritual teacher Mooji. A woman in the crowd asked him why she keeps suffering. I can't remember what her specific story was, but I do remember what he said: "You're not experiencing suffering. You are suffering your experience." An absolute banger. Clinging is the extra layer: resistance to what is already happening. The ache doesn't vanish when you stop arguing with it. But it does lose its edge; with awareness, we allow it to alchemise, to become texture instead of torment.

The Buddha called it anicca. Impermanence. The second mark of existence. And it was Joseph Goldstein who said;

“One of the most accessible avenues for the development of wisdom is to practice an increasingly refined awareness of impermanence.”¹

All that is of the nature to arise is also of the nature to pass away

The plant eventually wilts; the flowers, though magnificent in their beguiling beauty, every single one, will inevitably die. The gorgeous meal. The legible career. The life partner. The version of yourself you thought you were. The certainty that your life would stay the same shape it was. We do not suffer because of impermanence. We suffer because we believe anything is permanent in the first place.

We all know things change. But knowing it intellectually is not the same as knowing it in your body, as it's happening. That is the whole point of practice: "to go from that level to the level of direct, immediate experience of things changing as they're changing."¹

The deepest suffering we experience is not from the loss itself, but from being unable to meet the reality, as it is.

When I arrived here, I put a story on top of the experience, so I could suffer it; I’m all alone. I have no friends. I’m so lonely. Look how much I’ve lost.

All of this was true; the loneliness was real, it's still real, but there was something in the story that was doing extra work. The story doesn't make the impermanence stop. What it does is become ‘the second arrow‘: we layer suffering on top of suffering, resistance over loss. I was, with the story, trying to make meaning of the pain, hold it in place, justify the clinging. That was the mechanism. I noticed it take hold: standing inside change, trying to make it solid. Trying to find solid ground when there was none.

I had been a student of contemplative practice for two decades before I moved here. I am certain it is the only reason I could hold it without completely dissolving.

“When we realise the fact that everything changes and find our composure in it, that is the fruition of practice.” — Suzuki Roshi

Slowly, the grip loosens.

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The seasons are changing. There is something about autumn that makes impermanence impossible to argue with. The light changes. The warmth goes. The long evenings you didn’t quite appreciate enough: gone. The egregious humidity that was doing the most for your ageing skin: also gone; lines appear in their place. And every year it is a surprise, somehow. Every year the body resists it a little, reaches for what was just here.

This is why the teaching has to be embodied and practised rather than simply understood. We know, intellectually, that everything changes, and we still get surprised when it does.

I had a long exchange with my friend Kelley yesterday: talking about the polycrisis, about what it asks of us, about what kind of inner infrastructure a person needs to not collapse under the weight of it.

The previous night she’d been to a Taoist talk. The one thing she took away, another banger, was this:

Attention hygiene is not a luxury

Presence is not a wellness practice you do when you have time. It is infrastructure: the inner architecture that allows you to stay upright when the ground moves. And the ground is moving. It has always been moving. We are only now being forced to stop pretending otherwise.

I wrote an essay this past week about Beirut. Specifically about the price of diesel, about what is coming, about what it means to live in a city that has already been through collapse and kept going anyway. I am not someone who has lived through what the people around me have lived through. It’s important I say that. I came back to be near family, on our land. I know what people here have survived not from experience but from bearing witness; and that already feels like more than I can fully hold.

But I will say this: on the wall between my neighbourhood and Bourj Hammoud — the Armenian Lebanese quarter next door, where you can find everything, where the shawarma at Bastarama Mano is among the best in the city — is graffiti:

Resilience is a myth.

And then a Lebanese friend of mine posted something this morning:

I feel so much impermanence and all I want is stability. Not choosing an Arab life next time. Khalas.

I get this so much. And also, I wanted to say to her: no babe! This is the practice ground. We come from the practice ground. The Arab world does not give you the option of pretending things are permanent: it teaches you whether you asked for it or not. The question is only whether we learn it consciously. But I didn’t say it. I kept scrolling, then I wrote this essay instead.

It is for this reason I love Olivier Hamant's necessary distinction between resilience and robustness².

Resilience is: you fall, you get back up.
Robustness is: building the capacity not to collapse in the first place.

You don’t need to fall, and you don’t need to keep surviving the same collapse.

You need to develop something deeper: an inner architecture, a way of being with uncertainty, that holds before the breaking point.

That is what the contemplation and practice of impermanence builds: bandwidth, the capacity for some slack, and the ability to move with what is, before it takes you down.

The people of Beirut still go out. They dance, they dine, they look incredible doing it. They live off the grid inside a city that is giving, at times, Mad Max vibes, while also being strangely glamorous. They have been building robustness not by choice, but by necessity, for decades. The rest of us are being invited, urgently, to begin.

The teaching of impermanence is not abstract. It is preparation.

I want to offer you a provocation;

Lock in.

Get your head out of social media, reduce surface relationships and the noise of constant distraction. Lock tf in to what is actually important. Who is actually important. Into the cultivation of your own attention: your own deep, unhurried capacity to be present with your life as it actually is, not the version you’re performing for everyone else.

This is the moment. Not later. Now.

Most of us have at least one thing in our lives that has been signalling. A job that takes more than it gives. A relationship that stopped flowing both ways. An unwholesome habit that we keep returning to because at least it’s familiar. A city, a career, a version of ourselves we have outgrown but keep wearing because we don’t know who we’d be without it.

I think of the way Australian bushfires move through the eucalyptus, clearing what has become too dense and too dry. In those seasons, the fire is not the enemy of the forest; it’s what makes the next growth possible.

The teaching of impermanence is not asking you to burn it all down. But it is asking you to notice when something has already started to go, and for when nature finally intervenes, for you to let the fuck go, so something else can emerge in its place. The eucalyptus knows. The seeds are sealed, waiting until the heat arrives.

What in your life is begging to be released?

the unpleasant states are also impermanent

In the Buddhist tradition, we describe experience not as good or bad — those are judgments, overlays — but as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Vedanā. The feeling tone that arises before the story forms. And the teaching applies to all of it, equally. The pleasant passes. But so does the unpleasant.

The grief, the loneliness, the season of not-yet, the uncomfortable thing you’re in the thick of that feels like it will never shift: it is also moving.

It has always been moving.

It goes both ways,

AND THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT.

Impermanence is not only loss.
It is the very mechanism of becoming.

This applies to relationships too. A friend messaged me after reading an earlier piece. She’d read it on a plane. She said it helped her finally file a story that had been plaguing her for months — about a relationship that ended. The line that stayed with her:

two months of being soft with someone is still two months of being soft with someone.

We have become so accustomed to evaluating relationships by their outcomes — if it ended, we call it a failure; if it hurt, we look for the warning signs we should have seen — that we can end up rewriting the entire experience based on how it closed. But the ending doesn’t reach backwards through time and make it untrue. The impermanence of a connection is not evidence of its insignificance. We can grieve what didn’t become possible without dismissing what was.

I always pause before I describe something as good or bad because I’ve learned that my assessment of a moment rarely survives the moment. Just as I walked through the Mount Zirkel wilderness with my then-partner (no longer with me) through what looked like The Road; it turned out to be just the forest between fires.

(he’s not dead btw: he’s just a dickhead)

There are two orientations available to us: the ego’s path of wanting, fearing, and manoeuvring. And the heart’s path. The heart’s path will never require the circumstances to be different because it finds its footing inside of what is.

“In my world, nothing ever goes wrong.” — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

This is what practice has been teaching me in Beirut. When the inclination is to rebuild faster or recover the shape of the life I left, the practice is this: how to be here, inside the in-between, without making it mean more or less than it is.

The morning thought — I see now why I had to let go — was not consolation. It was composure: a moment of finding my footing. Not at the destination.

Just: steadier, here, in the middle.

The first time I felt impermanence working for me, I was in the park in Greenpoint on what used to be grass, before the dogs dug it all up into mud. I was out with Arlo, as I was three or four times a day back then, and I was doing what I often do: fiddling with my jewellery.

I was wearing a necklace I’d bought on my first trip to India: tiny sapphire and ruby beads, precious in every sense. My friend Sonia Rogers, may she rest in peace, had taken me on that trip. She flew me first class to India to hang out with Gurumukh, who just happened to be her bestie, and sit in satsang with Mooji. If you know, you know.

The beads scattered everywhere…

I laughed.

Standing there in the used-to-be grass, I thought: oh. Maybe it’s working. This contemplation of impermanence. Because somewhere underneath the laughter was the understanding that it wasn’t meant to last forever; nothing is, and somehow that made it okay. It didn’t make it painless. Just okay.

When I went back to Sydney recently, while going through some of the boxes still in storage at my mum's, I found my Nine Planets necklace: a navaratna, nine sacred stones, one for each celestial body in the Vedic tradition. From that same trip to India. Sonia bought it for me. I thought it was lost. We blessed it together in the Ganges; the only time I have ever dunked my full self in the Ganges.

I held it to my heart. Then I kissed it. And I was overjoyed: because despite losing Sonia, which was its own grief, I didn’t lose the auspicious gift she gave me. Both things can be true. Some things snap and the beads go everywhere and you laugh. And some things travel across oceans and through years and find their way back to your hands so they can continue to bless you.

You cannot know in advance which will be which.

Offered with gratitude to the teachers who have held this teaching across centuries — and to Sonia, who first showed me India and taught me, without meaning to, how to hold things lightly. She also introduced me to flying first class, and I have never been the same since 💛

If you want to keep reading the inner workings of my mind and practice, and support the writing that comes from it, you can become a paid subscriber below.

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Or, if life is full, you can buy me a sourdough baguette (and a cookie). ILY.

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If you want to go deeper & some references:

¹ Joseph Goldstein, “The Wisdom of Impermanence,” Be Here Now Network, Ep. 2:

² Olivier Hamant, Antidote au culte de la performance: La robustesse du vivant, Gallimard, 2022

³ Matthew D. Lieberman et al., “Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli,” Psychological Science, 2007

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My father and I bought an apartment in Beirut.

In a place that keeps asking people to leave, and too much from the people who can’t.

This is not a small thing. In Lebanon, property is a statement of faith, not of religious faith exactly, though there’s no shortage of that, but faith in the specific, stubborn sense of: we will stay. We are planting something here. We believe, nay, hope, there will be a here in the future, to plant it in.

We are still working through the practicalities. Kitchen build. AC installation: happening today. Tick. Plumbing. Tick. Converting a superfluous guest bathroom into a laundry room because I refuse to have a front-loader washer in the kitchen. Then, of course, the power situation, which in Lebanon is always the power situation, because the grid has been unreliable for decades and everyone runs on a combination of state electricity — when it comes, which varies — and a private generator (or two) shared with the building, paid for collectively, fuelled by diesel.

There is a little light on a tree outside our building. It tells everyone inside whether the government electricity is on or off. I can set a clock by my dad. We walk out of the house; he looks up at it and says: Ah. Still no electricity. Every day. The same words. The same humph.

I used to find it maddening. We know, Dad. We’ve always known. But I think what’s sitting under it is something else: a small expectation, renewed daily, that the normal system might have returned. He looks. It hasn’t. And the still in still no electricity is load-bearing; it carries something real: I expected it to be back. It isn’t. Maybe tomorrow.

Inshallah

Some days it ends there. The “still no…” and we go about our day. But on other days the topic descends into a frustrated blame game. The government. What are they doing? And the mobs? Did you know it’s a cartel, this generator business! A cartel I tell you!! But dad, I plead, where did the cartels come from? There was a gap, an opportunity, and someone filled it. Ahhh, he says, they’re all just after money. But isn’t that capitalism? And then he defends capitalism. So now I don’t know where he stands. I close down the conversation the only way I can: don’t hate the player, hate the game.

My brother-in-law, who is practical and kind and not someone who lies awake thinking about supply chains, said to me: look, don’t worry about investing in solar. By the time you spend the money, the generator works out just as affordable.

When my dad and I first moved into the rental, we were in the middle of making dinner — something in the oven — when the gas ran out. Of course the gas ran out. There are no gas lines here. No electricity, no gas. There are bottles, delivered by an entire ecosystem of small businesses you call when you’re running low. We hadn’t learned the system. We hadn’t learned the number. My dad mentioned it to a neighbor in the elevator. We’d never met them. They said: we have a spare, come and borrow it. Dinner continued.

There’s a version of this conversation that happens a lot. Someone comes back, or arrives for the first time, and looks at how people are living and thinks: why haven’t they fixed this? Why are they still burning diesel? Don’t they care about the environment? And the answer is: yes. they know. They’re also trying to get through the week. The generator isn’t a choice in the way we mean when we talk about choices. It’s what you do when the alternative is the dark.

I’ve been that person. I have to name that too. My dad and I can think about solar because we came back with options — outside money — that many people do not have. My brother-in-law was doing something different: advising from inside the city’s logic, from years of watching how this place actually works. People who know Beirut love to advise the returning diaspora — it’s a specific form of generosity. What he was passing on wasn’t scarcity math. It was fluency. And fluency includes knowing the gap between what looks like the right answer from the outside, and what actually holds up here.

On the ground, not theoretically.

And yet. I still take my Brooklyn-procured Baggu’s to Spinney’s. Spinney’s is the upscale grocery store — again, one of those places for people with old money or outside money, like most things in Beirut. I have multiple of them. The one with the strawberries. The miniature one in a lime-green Chagall-adjacent cacophony. The fluorescent pink one from Edys Grocer in Greenpoint — the local Lebanese grocer. All nested inside a She Wolf Brooklyn Bakery tote. If you know, you know.

When I first moved here, I sorted my recycling for six months. Plastics, metals, glass, each in their own bag. Patient. Principled. And then slowly I understood: there is no system to receive them. It all goes in the same dumpster. Not because the people here don’t care, but because the infrastructure for caring was never built. I stopped sorting. What replaced it wasn’t indifference. It was a different question: where can I actually put my attention so that something shifts?

my sister, god love her, still sorts her recycling; even though there is nowhere meaningful for it to go.

The people who go through that dumpster, by the way, are doing more recycling than I ever did with my sorted bags. They know which bottles have a refund, which metals have a market. They’re performing a genuine ecological service, with their hands and their need, while people complain that they make a mess. The recycling was happening the whole time. It just didn’t look like what I expected recycling to look like.

I heard him. I understood the logic. And I also felt something that I can only describe as incredulity — that particular, slightly dizzy feeling of being in two conversations at once. The one we were actually having, about pricing and practicality. And the one happening underneath it, which I couldn’t quite stop having, about diesel. Where it comes from. What it costs. What it will cost. The Strait of Hormuz. The supply chains. The downstream, the upstream, every stream.

I cannot think about a generator without thinking about everything a generator depends on. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to. It’s not anxiety. It’s just how I see.

My dad seems pretty annoyed (almost daily) that he has a Buddhist for a daughter. Turns out I ask too many questions about causes and conditions.

The night before I woke up thinking about diesel, I was listening to Nate Hagens interview Sarah Wilson on The Great Simplification. She has a new book — I Eat the Stars — and she was doing something I don’t often hear: giving a definition of collapse that doesn’t require you to be either naive or nihilistic about it. Goldilocks. Not too abstract, not too catastrophic. Just: here is what is actually happening.

She talked about the meta-crisis as a kind of narrowing. The systems that hold us contracting. The slack being taken up. The buffer between abundance and not-enough getting thin, then thinner. And she talked about how governments in Europe are beginning to quietly advise people: keep a few days of water and food. Know your neighbors. Think about a generator.

She’s Australian, Sarah. She wrote a weekly column in Sunday Life, the Sydney Morning Herald’s weekend magazine. I was writing one too; mine was about dating, in CLEO. She edited Cosmo Australia. I worked there too, just after her, in branded content, which is the polite word for advertising. She started a global sugar-free food movement. I’d started Living Lunchbox, a sugar-free organic lunch delivery company in Surry Hills. I find that interesting: the way some of us keep moving through similar orbits and end up asking similar questions from opposite sides of the world. Her in Paris. Me in Beirut. She has 550,000 Substack subscribers. I have 104. Maybe that’s the part where the road diverges

And yet. I’d never heard her say thoroughly human until this episode. I heard it and I was genuinely delighted. I spent years at Accenture during the Pierre Nanterne era. May he rest in peace. He’d wanted it to be the most truly human organisation in the world. I really loved that for us. I really did. That ship has sailed.

This is why I have built my work, the work I am doing in Soft Systems™ around human capacity, around the question: how do we cultivate what we need, collectively as humans, in a time like this.

“Be as thoroughly human as you can,” she said, the very last line of the episode. “Not least of all because it’s what brings us joy. It’s what actually is the point of it all. But also because it does stick two fingers up to the techno-fascists. While we are being as human as we can, they can’t get at us.”

The meta-crisis is meta for a specific reason. It isn’t just that multiple crises are happening simultaneously: climate, energy, water, food, multiple wars on multiple fronts, the possibility of worse. It’s that the people who need to address it are inside it. There’s no view from outside. No one gets to step back and manage it from a safe distance. We are embedded in the thing we’re trying to think about. And the crises aren’t linear — you can’t fix one and move to the next. They form a web. Everything affects everything else, all at once.

“It’s so complex,” she said. “It’s so interconnected. Plus, we’re in it and implicated in it. That’s what makes the whole thing meta.”

And then, somewhere in the space before sleep:

Oh. But wait. What about the price of diesel?

Lebanon has been in collapse — real, structural, grinding collapse — for fifty years. Arguably longer. We don’t tend to call it that, because collapse is supposed to be a future event, a rupture, a before-and-after. But for a lot of the world there’s no before. There’s just the texture of scarcity as the water you swim in.

We’ve had generators since before I can remember. Load shedding is called “the schedule.” You organise your life around when the power is on. Water comes twice a week, sometimes more, often less. You keep a tank. The tank needs cleaning and some people like to padlock their tanks, just to be safe, because you never know when someone might want to siphon your water. You learn, without being taught, that systems fail and you build your own bridges as the baseline fact of daily life.

The question Europe is only just arriving at — what will we do when it becomes unreliable? — Lebanon answered a long time ago, far be it from an elegant or equitable solution, and with enormous cost both environmentally, financially and spiritually. But it was answered.

“We can’t fix it,” she said. “We can respond to it.”

When Sarah talks about what’s coming, I hear it differently from here. “Collapse itself is a homecoming,” she said. “We’re being driven back into our full humanity again after we’ve wandered off.” Not with fear, but with a kind of recognition. That’s it. Yes. We’ve been living in that.

There’s this woman in my Therapy training, from Northern Europe, who once heard me talking about Lebanon. About looking forward to the imminent olive harvest season, eating termos (lupini beans) by the Mediterranean, and picking abundance of figs and apricots and cherries from trees. She listened. More precisely she overheard, and her face went soft, and she said:

Oh, that’s beautiful. We’ll all come to Lebanon when things fall apart.

😂 girl what?

(I am snortling writing this, but only gently because my throat hurts from the increased volume of diesel particulates).

So, I told her:

Lebanon has been post collapse for fifty years, I’m not sure it’s somewhere you escape to (or escape from) but for sure we can teach you something about how to get by.

Now, I understood what she meant, in the way she was reaching toward something she senses is coming; a way of living that doesn’t depend on the systems currently collapsing around us. A return to something slower and more rooted. She heard olive harvest and saw post-apocalyptic Disneyland.

Girl, no!

I wasn’t speaking to her. I was in a conversation with another Lebanese person, speaking about Lebanon the way we speak to each other about Lebanon: with pride in the land, in its bounty, in the upcoming olive harvest and the figs and the termos. That’s not a curated version of Lebanon. That is Lebanon. The bounty and the grief live side by side, co-exist: like The Mohammed Al-Amin Mosque — the big blue-domed one — and Saint George Maronite Cathedral, right next to each other in Martyrs' Square. A fact lebanese are also very proud of. We know grief intimately, and we don’t annotate every act of abundance with a footnote about the cost.

What her post-apocalyptic Disneyland doesn’t include: the drones. The absent water. The 80/90? percent generator dependency — nobody updates you on the exact percentage, you don’t get a status report. The cancer rates. The wages that don’t cover the cost of staying alive.

And then there’s the bill. Don’t get me started on THE BILLS. There is no paperless, no emails or digital notifications. Not even a direct debit. It is a hand to hand delivered piece of paper, someone quite literally knocks on your door and hands it to you. Sixty-four cents per kilowatt-hour — above the legal maximum, incidentally. My dad looked at it and said to the man: I want to speak to your superior. This is against the law. I know my rights. I will take this to the Ministry of Finance.

I love him so much.

Let me say this to everyone. Lebanon, despite what you might see on the cover of the New York Times or social media, is incredibly polarising: either death and destruction or the Assouline-nostalgic-glamour version. Not the in-between. Not the daily inconveniences. Not the panic attack you have when the power goes out while you’re in the elevator mid-shaft with not a speck of light. No, Susan: we are not the preview of your post-collapse dreamland. We’re the thing itself. Please. Do not romanticise what this costs.

who wakes up at 6 am with diesel on their mind?

Me. I do.

Roused awake not by kisses or good morning, darling! The price of diesel. It’s scarcity and what that means for a system that is already precarious at best. In Lebanon, diesel is the thing that makes everything else possible. It powers the generators that run the fridges that keep the food. It moves the trucks. It runs the pumps. It powers the AC’s that keep my perimenopausal body cool and regulated.

Olivier Hamant, on The Great Simplification, put it precisely: the people who never feel the fluctuation — who have the AC, the generator, the buffer — don’t read the signal. They keep optimising. The people living with the interruption start asking different questions. I am asking different questions.

What if we run out of diesel?

The cost of diesel is the barometric pressure of daily life here; when it rises, everything else gets harder.

I kiss the dog good morning, and I squeeze him awake, lying there with the fan on and doing the math as I always do. The generator runs how many hours, at how many litres, at what price per litre? And then: where does this diesel come from? And then: what does it cost the air?

Beirut’s cancer rates are not something you can look at comfortably. A 2022–23 study measuring air quality at three sites across the city found diesel generators accounting for 42 to 56 per cent of the carcinogenic particulate matter in the air. The estimated cancer risk from those particles exceeded the US EPA’s reference threshold at every site — and had increased 53 per cent compared with earlier measurements. Eighty-seven per cent of generator particles are quasi-ultrafine: smaller than 0.33 microns, small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. AUB researchers are actively investigating a link to Lebanon’s elevated bladder cancer rates, which in men have been recorded as high as 40 per 100,000. They haven’t established causation yet. But the question is being asked, which is its own kind of answer. There are bodies here that have been metabolising this longer than any individual can choose to opt out of.

I followed the thread upstream: diesel → supply chains → global energy markets → the exact forces Sarah was describing on the podcast. And downstream: cost → air quality → respiratory admissions → cancer risk → futures → who gets to have one and under what conditions.

Pull the thread anywhere and the whole thing unravels. That’s what a system is.

I got up and found my dad in the kitchen

I said: Dad, I woke up thinking about diesel.

He looked at me the way he does when he’s already been turning something over.

He said: I’ve been thinking the same thing.

That’s the conversation. Two people at a kitchen table in Beirut at 6 am, arriving at the same place from different directions. I told him about Sarah Wilson. He told me about the solar system he’d been quietly pricing.

This is what I mean when I talk about the human layer of the systems conversation. It’s what happens when you follow your own attention all the way down until you touch the ground it’s standing on. It’s recognising that your nervous system is already tracking what matters. That waking at 6 am with diesel on your mind is not anxiety; it’s a form of knowing. That the kitchen table is not separate from the large systems story. It’s embedded in it.

My dad and I are getting solar.

He left this morning to get the air conditioning installed at the new apartment, the one we’d just been talking about, the one that might get solar panels. And for the first time in a long time, he hadn’t argued. He’d agreed. You don’t know how good that felt.

Then he popped his head back inside before leaving and bellowed:

Nicole. The power is on. Turn on the AC. Do the laundry.

Fifty years of knowing it won’t last. So you use it right now. Every amp of it. Before it goes again.

“We need to get ourselves anchored,” she said. “Our nervous systems rock solid and sturdy, so that we are a place where people can come to.”

That’s the practice.

This one came out of a 6 am spiral about diesel prices. If you want to keep reading what I think about at six in the morning, and support the writing that comes from it, you can become a paid subscriber below. Or, if life is full, you can buy me a sourdough baguette (and a cookie). ILY.

BAKED GOODS 🥖🍪

thank you for being here. we survived eclipse season (just), and somehow there are more of you here than when I last wrote, which is wonderful. if you’re new, welcome.

and to everyone who has become a paid subscriber: thank you, truly. leaving a pretty prominent career to create something meaningful, for myself and for the people this work gets to touch, has been one long trust fall. your support is part of what’s catching me, and it means more than I can say.

how do we choose what gets to grow?

Last month I sat with the inquiry: what wants to begin without me forcing it? And in that time between then and now / now and then, much has begun. I won’t say too much, just that much, but it does seem to me that there is something very Venusian happening around here

(gestures to the entire universe).

Venus stationed retrograde on October 3rd at 8° Scorpio, and she’s now walking backwards through the sign. Around the 25th, she’s gonna slip right back into Libra, and then won’t turn direct until November 13th, at 22° Libra.

Everywhere I look lately, the questions are about relating: who we want, what we value, what we’re willing to exchange, what feels reciprocal and what doesn’t, what we’re holding onto because it’s alive, and what we’re holding onto because we’re afraid to let it go.

Right now I’m sitting outside a gorgeous café / organic store in Beirut with Arlo, having my morning coffee. It’s becoming something of a social experiment, because absolutely no one in this city can walk past him without screaming. They either scream with delight or scream with horror; there is no in-between. And Arlo, being Arlo, is completely unbothered by his status as Prince of Beirut.

From this vantage, I started thinking about boundaries; it was actually a post from Atmos that I saw on IG.

… boundaries become porous, and inside and outside blur

(also. if you don’t follow Atmos or listen to their podcast, you should.)

Virgo season always brings me back to discernment. Even though the Sun has since moved into Libra, I don’t think we ever really leave discernment behind; it’s something we keep cultivating and coming back to.

For me it’s a very ordinary, intimate kind of attention: noticing what is actually alive. What needs tending. What needs pruning. What (and who) can be left alone.

And the who, it turns out, asks more of us, because that’s where we meet the relational field.

We spend so much time looking at what’s coming that we rarely pause to ask what we’re gathering from where we’ve just been:

Venus Rx is the perfect moment for this kind of looking back because she’s literally retracing her steps, walking back over ground she covered only weeks ago.

the sky itself is asking us to review before we move forward

Venus is the planet of what we love and what we value. The planet of attraction, pleasure, exchange, and the art of relating. When she goes retrograde (roughly every eighteen months or so), those things turn inward for review: not necessarily to be resumed but to be looked at again with clearer eyes and some care and caution, as its also a time when old loves and old patterns tend to resurface.

This Rx begins in Scorpio, which is traditionally a difficult place for Venus. She’s considered to be in her detriment there, the sign opposite her home in Taurus. Venus in Taurus wants ease, pleasure, the body, the simple goodness of what’s in front of her. Venus in Scorpio wants depth. Intensity. Merger. The truth underneath the truth. She wants to know what’s really going on, and she is not satisfied with the surface.

Which is both beautiful and exhausting, because if we aren’t careful….
Scorpio Venus can turn every encounter into an excavation.

we have become very good at talking about boundaries

Too good, perhaps?

Somewhere along the way, the necessary language of self-protection got tangled up with a much broader cultural desire to never be uncomfortable.

protect your peace / you don’t owe anyone access / know your worth

some of this is genuinely liberating. esp for people who have spent their lives overriding themselves while tolerating mistreatment:

learning that a no can simply be a no is ENORMOUS

but what happens when protection becomes the highest relational good? When discomfort gets confused with danger? When being activated becomes proof that somebody has done something wrong, and every moment of friction becomes an invitation to dig until we find the precise psychological explanation for why we feel the way we feel?

At some point, I think we have to ask:

what is this discomfort telling me, and what, if anything, is actually mine to do about it?

I can feel constriction in my chest without deciding the person in front of me is unsafe. I can notice that I don’t want to move toward someone without needing to make them a villain in my story. And finally (this one was very personal for me), I can allow someone their own experience without agreeing with their interpretation of me.

A version of this played out recently in a training container I’m part of. There’s a woman in the cohort with whom I have very little relationship outside that space. We are fellows.

What we did have was small and real. Between modules, we’d done one inquiry together that was genuinely deep and beautiful, and at the end of it she told me, with some surprise, that she didn’t think we’d get along. After the last module, I sent her the softest, biggest hugs in the group chat and offered an inquiry whenever we were both back; she wrote that she felt seen and received. A few messages about hot springs in Tuscany followed. That was the whole of it.

Then, one Sunday morning, she asked whether I was available for an inquiry. I was at the café with Arlo, so I wrote back straight away: not right now, but I can do it in an hour or two. I sent her a picture of Arlo being cute, because of course I did. She said, great, let me know when you’re home. I told her around eleven.

Thirteen minutes later, she sent me a five-minute voice note.

Some context: we had just come out of a module devoted to the love of truth. The voice note opened with a workshop the day before and how activated she had been, and then it arrived at the point. She had to share her truth: that she didn’t feel safe with me. My first response, honestly, was: what the actual fuck?

Then I did what I’ve trained myself to do. I turned inward. Did I do something I haven’t seen? Is there a rupture I’ve missed? I sat with it. I listened to my body. I even went back through our messages. And what I found was… nothing. No unkindness, no buried sense that I’d behaved badly, no barrier on my side. If anything, the receipts showed the opposite.

That’s what integrity gives you: when you’ve been living from a clean place, there’s a record to check, and when you check it honestly, you can tell the difference between something you need to own and something you’re being pulled into. Sometimes discernment asks us to say it plainly:

This is someone else’s psychological material.
There is nothing here for me.
It isn’t mine.

What I did find was that a boundary had been crossed, and that was mine. Something heavy had landed in the middle of a Sunday I had protected, on a weekend when I’d only just found some settledness after a family rupture (on the streets of Beirut, no less). So I wrote back. I said I appreciated that this was her experience. I said the timing had felt like a boundary being crossed, and that I didn’t currently have the capacity to keep moving toward her with the same warmth. I suggested she inquire with someone she did feel safe with, left the door open for the next module, and went back to my Sunday.

There’s a small irony in it: in the very moment she named me as unsafe, she stepped over a line of mine. Discernment doesn’t automatically arrive with spiritual fluency. You can love the truth and still not know when to tell it.

That evening she apologised for not honouring my timeframe, accepted my decision to step back, and offered to inquire with me into “the barriers between us.”

And I remember thinking: Girl, what barriers?

A week later she reached out again. I didn’t reply.

Her experience was real to her; I don’t get to tell another person what they felt. But her experience of me is not an objective fact about me, and her desire to explore what she perceived between us didn’t create an obligation for me to enter that exploration with her. I could respect her boundary without accepting her interpretation of me. And I could decline a deeper inquiry into a relationship that, from my side, had been small, warm and uncomplicated.

that last part is what I think we don’t talk about enough. We’ve become so used to treating every interpersonal experience as something to work through that we forget that sometimes there is simply nothing to work through

Sometimes someone is not your person. Sometimes there’s no hidden wound waiting to be excavated, no attachment pattern demanding resolution. Sometimes you meet someone in a particular container and that is the entirety of the relationship.

A fellow can simply be a fellow. A neighbour can simply be a neighbour. A fellow traveller can be someone who walks alongside you for three streets and then turns left.

I think we’ve confused relational depth with relational virtue (a very Scorpio Venus confusion, if you ask me). Sometimes the mature thing is to communicate more, repair more, stay. But inquiry is a practice, not a moral obligation, and I’m more and more interested in the point at which it’s complete. There’s a form of self-abandonment that masquerades as self-awareness, where we keep turning the mirror on ourselves long after there’s nothing left to own.

Sometimes you look. There is nothing there.
And the most discerning thing you can do is stop looking.

That’s the gift hidden inside a Scorpio retrograde. Scorpio knows how to go all the way down, but it also knows about endings: what dies, what gets composted, what is released so something else can live.

Sometimes the depth is in knowing you’ve reached the bottom.

I keep coming back to the image of the membrane, and to that Atmos post: the idea that if we think through water or breath, the boundary of our skin stops being where we end.

A membrane isn’t a wall. It’s a living interface: permeable, but selectively so. It senses. It exchanges. It opens and closes according to conditions.That feels much closer to what I mean by boundaries now.

Sometimes the boundary is: let’s talk about this. Sometimes it’s not like that, but maybe like this. Sometimes it’s I need some time.

And sometimes it’s simply: I don’t want to participate in this. This isn’t mine.

Our attention isn’t infinite, and neither is our capacity for genuine intimacy, care, conflict, repair or witnessing.

Time is measured / Capacity is felt / Pace is designed / Attention is allocated.

There’s an ecology to a life. Every relationship I tend, every unresolved dynamic I keep investigating, every person I let deeper into my interior world takes energy, because a living system has limits. So choosing where my attention goes isn’t cruelty: it is a crystal-clear and compassionate stewardship of my own life.

Toward the end of the month, Venus backs into Libra, her own sign, where relationship is a two-way thing: balance, reciprocity, the scales. Where Scorpio asks how deep does this go?, Libra asks is this mutual?

First the dive. Then the weighing.

What I want is permeability with discernment. To meet people openly without assuming every encounter needs to become a relationship. To be changed by people without being colonised by their experience of me. To know the difference between a closed heart and a closed door, and when something is asking to be repaired versus simply released.

The relationships I want to tend are the ones where curiosity and attention move both ways, where there’s room to be surprised, to disagree, to remain distinct. Not because everyone else is unworthy, but because discernment isn’t really about deciding who’s worthy. It’s about noticing where my capacity wants to participate.

There’s an old image I love for this time. Venus retrograde is the stretch when the evening star sinks toward the Sun, disappears from view, and comes back as the morning star. Around October 23rd she meets the Sun at the very first degree of Scorpio, and then begins rising before dawn again. The ancients told this as a descent story: the goddess of love going down into the underworld, being stripped of everything she carried, and coming back.

I like the idea that love has a season of disappearing. That what we value sometimes has to go out of sight to come back clearer.

we have finite attention / capacity / seasons

Sitting here in Beirut, with Arlo asleep under the table and people still stopping to admire him, I’m thinking about how little of life actually requires us to force anything.

The things that are alive will feel unmistakably alive to us: a little pull, a sense of ease, curiosity that doesn’t feel compulsive, a conversation that wants to keep being had, a person you keep wanting to move towards. And there will be places where your body exhales; ah, this…

ALL OF THIS = INFORMATION

Discernment is learning to notice those things, and boundaries are about becoming intelligent enough at the edge of yourself to know what kind of exchange is possible there. Not protecting our peace so fiercely that nothing can touch us, and not opening so indiscriminately that everything gets in, but becoming alive to the conditions under which connection can actually flourish. Because to flourish, we can’t grow everything.

what gets watered is, eventually, what grows

Alongside this, I am in deep study with the Diamond Approach, working with the Lataif — the essential qualities of Being — through my therapeutic training.

Two bodies of teaching. The same mountain. These essays are my transmissions.

Come a little deeper into the work.

Upgrade to paid

I.

There is a version of authenticity that is still, if you look closely enough, a form of hiding.

It sounds like: I feel weird. Or: I’m having a lot of feelings right now. Or, if you’re really pushing yourself: I think I might care about you more than I’ve let on. These are true things. They are also managed things. They are the truth parcelled out in quantities that feel survivable — for you, for the other person, for the relationship as it currently exists.

I used to think this was courage. Saying the uncomfortable thing. Naming the feeling. I was wrong. Or rather, I was right: it is courage, but it is not the whole truest thing.

It is the halfway house of authenticity.

“Is that the truth or is it a substitute for the truth?”

In the Diamond Approach work I'm currently training in, this is called the False Pearl.² And the False Pearl is not simply an image of who we think we are. It is the ongoing activity of maintaining that person: polishing, improving, explaining, performing, proving, pleasing, controlling, achieving, rehearsing and managing how we are perceived.

Its defensive logic is simple: If I ‘appear’ whole, I never have to touch what hurts, and then it cannot annihilate me.

So you offer the managed version. The one that is technically true but quietly removes all the most vulnerable parts. And then you go home and lie awake, and the real thing is still there. Still there, pressing against the inside of your chest, unsaid.

II.

In Buddhist psychology, doubt is the fifth hindrance.¹ Vicikicchā. The word is usually translated as scepticism, uncertainty, the inability to commit. But in practice, in the lived, embodied practice of trying to say a true thing to a person who truly matters, it operates more like a very sophisticated editor.

Doubt doesn’t say: don’t speak. That would be too obvious. You’d notice it and push back.

Instead it says: not quite like that. Or: that’s a bit much, isn’t it? Or: you could say it more gently, more tentatively, in a way that leaves room to retreat. And so you do. You say the softer version. The “False Pearl” version. The one that is close enough to truth to feel like honesty, and far enough from truth to stay safe.

The teaching is that you don’t resolve doubt by waiting until you’re certain. You resolve it by catching it. Oh, I see you... Sneaky little... This is doubt. Doubt is here! Just that. Name it, know it, watch it.

And it’s mine.

Because the moment you see it as a mental event arising, rather than as the truth about whether you can trust yourself, its power starts to dissolve.

But here’s what the books don’t quite say, and what I’ve been sitting with: catching the doubt is only the beginning. Because underneath the doubt is the thing doubt was protecting you from. And that thing is usually much larger, and much truer, and much more terrifying than whatever managed version you were about to offer instead.

III.

I have spent years being authentic.

I have done the therapy, the inquiry, the somatic work. I have said hard things. I have named the feeling in the room. I have learned to stay present instead of deflecting into humour — or at least, to notice when I’m deflecting and name that too.

And still. When it comes to the people I love most, there is a version of the truth I carry that I have never quite managed to say out loud. Not because I don’t have the language (I have too much language / I live inside language), but because doubt arrives first, and what it offers me is a slightly smaller, more digestible, even palatable version of the truth that I can hold out like a gift and say: here. This is me. This is what I feel.

And it is. It just isn’t all of it.

During the module, I kept asking myself (and anyone who would let me):

Is that the truth? Is that the whole truth? And nothing but the truth?

It is a surprisingly devastating question when you mean it.

What I’ve come to understand is that most of what I’ve called authenticity is the False Pearl in good clothes. It sounds spiritual. It uses all the right words. It feels like vulnerability, and it is — just not the full exposure. Just enough to say I showed up, while keeping the most tender thing protected. Still.

There is a form of spiritual sophistication that can itself become a defence. Detachment, compassion, non-identification — these may all be genuine qualities; they can also be used to avoid a simpler, more ordinary human truth. The question is not whether what we’re expressing sounds authentic. The question is whether it brings us into fuller contact with reality.

IV.

The primary orientation of the Black Latifa (the teaching I’ve been sitting with in the latest instalment of my counselling training) is not power, and it is not even peace.

It is Love of Truth.

We become willing to know what is actually here, even when what is here contradicts our preferred identity. Not to get rid of what we find. To allow it to be known. What is fully seen, felt and owned no longer needs to operate from the shadows.

Recognise it. Feel it. Tell the truth about it. Own it. Don’t fight it.

This is not the same as the managed version. It does not negotiate. It does not curate. It asks: what is actually here — before the polishing, before the editing, before the doubt has had time to offer you a more palatable alternative?

The Pali tradition calls this sampajañña — clear comprehension.⁴ Knowing what is actually happening, without the overlay of what we’d prefer to be happening. The Buddhist psychology and the Diamond Approach are pointing at the same mountain from different faces. Both are asking you to stop the activity long enough to feel what’s underneath it.

V.

I sent someone pages of my journal this morning.

Pages, unedited, uncurated. The real pages, ones that said: I want to fold your life into mine like clean laundry. The way I long to step on forgotten LEGO pieces strewn across the floor. I love you in the language of care. I realised within me was a great tenderness.

Many hours later, they have yet to respond.

It was the Black Latifa module work — the inquiry into the False Pearl, into what I was continually doing so I wouldn’t have to feel what was underneath — that helped me see my own mechanism. And then, sitting with Goldstein’s sutta translation on doubt, vicikicchā, I recognised it: the same structure, named from a different direction. Two teachings arriving at once. The mechanism at work, tangible and observable.

Oh. There you are.

In the satipatthana, the Buddha uses the word pajānāti — bare knowing.³ Experience before the commentary. Before the story forms. Before doubt has had time to offer you a safer version of what you’re feeling.

That’s what happened this morning. I sent the pages before the edit could arrive.

I feel naked in a way I don’t feel after the managed versions. And that is how I know this was the real thing. The managed versions don’t leave you feeling naked. They leave you feeling like you did something brave, which is its own kind of comfort. The real thing leaves you with nowhere to hide.

There’s a name for what emerged this morning. The module calls it the Real Pearl. Not polished. Not manufactured. Not requiring the other person to respond in a particular way in order to justify its existence.

Not: Who must I be? But simply: Here I am.

The aim, the teaching says, is not to manufacture closeness. The aim is to tell the truth. Contact may follow.

Not: contact will come. Not: if you are brave enough, you will be met. Just — tell the truth, and then allow whatever is.

Doubt is very loud right now. It is asking: was that too much? did you read this wrong? what if you’ve made it strange?

I probably have ‘made it strange’, and yet…

I’m trying to do what both teachings say. To notice doubt as a mental event arising, and it’s mine, rather than as the truth about whether I can trust myself. To stay with the naked feeling rather than reaching for the retrospective edit.

VI.

Authenticity, as most of us practice it, is the art of polishing the Pearl just enough to pass for the real thing. Real enough to feel honest. Managed enough to survive being seen.

The practice is not about rejecting the wanting.

It’s about knowing it clearly enough to ask: is this mine?

And being honest, really fucking honest, about the answer.

Not the version of the answer that keeps things manageable.

The one that’s actually true.

VII.

“Did you know that a fig is just an inverted flower?”

A fig is an inverted flower. The whole bloom turned inside out — everything that would normally face outward, facing in. The fruit is the hiding place of the flower.

I discovered this during the module. Each day I would go outside and pick figs from a tree I had started calling the miracle tree. It just kept giving. I have never seen such abundance. AND I grew up surrounded by figs; they are in my body in the way certain things are. My giddu (grandfather) had a fig tree in Sydney, probably grown from cuttings taken from our village in North Lebanon, carried on the ship when the family left. This is not the truth but mere speculation. The truth, however, is that he used to sit on his balcony with a rope attached to the tree and bells tied to the end of that rope, and every time the birds came for the fruit, he would jingle them. There were always figs.

And still. I didn’t know what a fig truly was, botanically / structurally, until someone told me — Andy, a British person, which I mention only because I don't even know if they have figs in England. Just like the fig,

I realised within me was a great tenderness.

You already know what I’m saying.

And then I remembered I made a whole playlist for this.

🎧 plz be honest 🖤🌑
For the truth underneath the truth

→ listen on Apple Music

Almost two years of writing here, and I’ve finally turned on paid subscriptions. It only took me approximately forever

If these essays, questions, visual experiments and transmissions give you something to think about, feel, notice or carry into your own life, you can now support the work by becoming a paid subscriber.

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Notes

¹ The five hindrances (pañca nīvaraṇāni) are: sensual desire, ill-will, sloth-torpor, restlessness-worry, and doubt. For a full treatment, see Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (Sounds True, 2013).

² The False Pearl and Real Pearl are central concepts in the Diamond Approach as developed by A.H. Almaas. See The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being (Diamond Books, 1988). The Black Latifa and Love of Truth teachings are transmitted through the Ridhwan School.

³ Pajānāti shares a root with pañña — wisdom. From MN 10, the Satipatthana Sutta: “Breathing in long, he knows: I breathe in long.” Not conceptual knowing. Direct knowing, before the story forms.

⁴ Sampajañña — clear comprehension — comprises four qualities: knowing the purpose of an action, its suitability, whether it keeps the mind in its domain of practice, and whether it is free from delusion about a fixed self behind the action. See Goldstein, ibid., Chapter 6.

Further Reading

• MN 10, Satipatthana Sutta — Bhikkhu Bodhi translation recommended (The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Wisdom Publications, 1995)

• Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (Sounds True, 2013)

• A.H. Almaas, The Pearl Beyond Price (Diamond Books, 1988)

• Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance (Bantam Books, 2003) — particularly on the hindrances and the trance of unworthiness

When the third season of Euphoria premiered, much of the conversation revolved around whether it had become too aesthetic, too self-serious, too philosophically ambitious. People argued over whether the show was profound or pretentious, psychologically rich or emotionally hollow. I found myself asking a different question: what determines what we are capable of seeing in the first place?

This isn’t really an essay about Euphoria. It’s an essay about attention. About contemplative practice. About nervous systems, desire, equanimity, awe, and the strange fact that two people can encounter exactly the same piece of art and leave having inhabited entirely different realities.

Perhaps the most interesting question isn’t whether a work of art is deep but whether or not we even have the capacity to meet its depth.

I.

I’m on a red-eye somewhere over what I think is the Mediterranean. Slightly high from a gummy I dropped at the airport, returning home to Beirut after another module of my therapy training at Broughton Hall in the Yorkshire Dales; a place where time moves slowly, where Guy Fawkes was once a neighbour, and where one chilly morning I wrote in my journal:

All I did at Broughton Hall was stare at the moss.

This isn’t entirely true. There was plenty of moss, but the training itself is the kind of experience that asks a great deal of you while quietly rearranging you, the way a meat grinder rearranges cuts of meat. You’re still the same organism. The same particles, the same particulars. They just no longer resemble their previous form.

It was in that state that I started watching Euphoria, which was either a perfect choice or an absurd one.

Outside, somewhere over the Mediterranean, darkness. Inside a fluorescent diner, Maddie Perez is talking about equanimity.

Equanimity: the Brahmaviharā, the fourth of the four immeasurables, the quality the Buddha kept returning to as the ground of all the others. I’ve spent years contemplating and cultivating this quality, just this past week watching it move through forty-odd people, feeling it move through me, holding me steady. And here it was, in Maddie Perez’s perfectly lip-glossed mouth, on a red-eye to Beirut.

Of course I am thinking…

Why is Maddie Perez talking about equanimity?

II.

Travel has a way of thinning the membrane. Something about that particular cocktail of jet lag, delirium and emotional porosity; things land…

differently

I’m in bed after a cold shower. My iPad glows in the dark. I type what are people saying about Euphoria season three? into Google. Of course I do.

The responses are wildly polarised. Some call it surface-level. Others call it genius. People argued over whether the aesthetics were a cover for empty philosophy, or whether the philosophy was hiding inside the aesthetics...

Really?

Are we even watching the same show?

How much do we miss because we’ve already decided, already certain about, what we’re looking at?

The people calling it surface-level weren’t wrong; they were seeing surface. And what of it, when so much of modern identity is performed through visible surfaces: fashion, makeup, lighting, the performance of wellness, the aesthetics of self-curation.

The performance is the psychology.

I want to be clear that I’m not here to champion the fetishisation of women or suggest the show is beyond criticism. Those conversations matter. But I do wonder if Euphoria is holding a magnifying glass up to a culture that has already aestheticised adolescence itself. Boys and girls growing up inside of influencer culture. Algorithmic beauty standards. Pornography. OnlyFans. Front-facing cameras. Curated identities. Bodies becoming projects. Desire becoming content. Lives increasingly lived for an imagined audience. The show doesn’t invent that world. It dramatises it and exaggerates it until we’re forced to look at it.

As I was finishing this essay, I stumbled across a thoughtful Reddit post by u/comedyganggang titled Before You Call It Misogyny. The author made a distinction I think is worth carrying forward: the difference between depicting uncomfortable realities and endorsing them. That feels important. A work can immerse us in a culture without celebrating it. Euphoria doesn't invent influencer culture, aestheticised adolescence, or lives lived for an imagined audience. It holds a magnifying glass up to them.

What I was seeing was a dramatised portrayal of reality; something accurate, hyperstylised, sure, but accurate nonetheless.

The more I sat with it, the less interested I became in whether Euphoria was deep or shallow. I became fascinated by how people could watch the same scenes and leave having encountered entirely different realities.

Because we are never just neutral observers. We come with our particular nervous systems. Particular histories. Particular bodies. Particular capacities for attention.

We don’t simply watch what’s there. We relate to it.

There’s a scene: a child on his knees, a house that’s been robbed, a life already being shaped by forces he didn’t choose. The show isn’t telling you who this character is. It’s showing you how he came to be. It offers context—not as absolution, but as understanding—for how tenderness and violence can coexist in the same person.

I don’t quite see how that is surface!

For me, that’s deeply humanistic storytelling. It refuses the easy question—Who is this person?—and asks a harder one:

How did this nervous system get built? What kind of world rewards this adaptation?

I get that some viewers would want clean moral architecture = this person bad/this person victim/this person redeemed—but Levinson refuses.

Human beings are ecosystems. People are not random monsters dropped from the sky. They are shaped, conditioned, initiated into systems. Rewarded for dissociation. Taught what intimacy costs.

Art that asks, What happened to this person? instead of How should I label this person? is doing deeper work.

Not softer.

Deeper.

The Laurie scenes make this unmistakable. They’re filmed almost too calmly. The stillness. The transactional softness. The absurd quietness surrounding violence. They force us to confront the machinery underneath behaviour instead of remaining at the level of performance and punishment.

Again I find myself asking:

How is that shallow?

It isn’t.

It’s psychologically observant storytelling.

By now I’ve stopped wondering whether Euphoria is deep or shallow.

The more interesting question is this:

Why do we reject mirrors that reflect us too accurately?

III.

The comments were polarised. To demonstrate:

So excited.

Overrated.

This series is disturbing.

WE ARE SEATED FOR THE MESS HUNNI.

Then there’s this scene. The one I’ll call Desire & Takeout. Rue comes over to Jules’ loft. They’re lying around eating takeout from those classic Chinese paper boxes. Rue looks at Jules like she has something to say, but doesn’t say it. Jules, with sloppy chow mein still on her mouth, finally asks:

“What do you want?”

Rue deflects. Says nothing. Says sure, she’d kiss her. Says she finds her attractive.

I say, wipe your mouth first Jules.

Not just me. The entire Reddit.

Jules keeps cutting through.

That wasn’t the question.

What do you want? Not: would you. Not: sure. Not: I find you attractive.

What do you want?

And then Jules stops waiting for the answer and shows her.

You want to kiss me? Get up. Take my head in your hands and kiss me. Keep kissing me. Push me on the bed. Kiss me all over. You want more? Take it. You want me? Make me yours.

Earlier, in their first scene together at the loft, Rue says she avoids things that could destroy her life.

Jules looks at her and says: And yet, you showed up here.

That’s desire as a philosophical phenomenon: the full knowledge of the danger folded inside the walking toward it anyway. The contradiction is named, out loud, by the person who benefits from it.

From a Buddhist perspective, the Buddha wasn't asking us to skip over wanting. He asked us to look at it closely. Not to begin with peace or detachment, but with the ordinary experience of wanting and the ways it keeps us caught. We spend much of our lives either chasing what we want or running from what we don't.

What Jules is doing in that scene is almost a teaching. She’s not asking Rue to suppress desire or transcend it. She’s asking her to inhabit it fully. To stop the commentary. To stop performing “I find you attractive” instead of just... wanting. That’s the contemplative move. Not the elimination of desire but the full inhabitation of it. Presence inside the wanting. Desire embodied, rather than watched from a safe distance.

I recognised it because I am Rue and Rue is me. I need such an explicit invitation to be seen in my desire, to be allowed to express it, that sometimes I just... don’t. I sit. I wait for permission. I perform indifference so convincingly that I sometimes convince myself.

And sometimes the invitation never comes.

I go home and do a profit-and-loss analysis on my love life, convincing myself: This is not what you think. This is not that. They don’t want you, and you don’t want them either.

Meanwhile, on TikTok, the comments were asking about her lipstick. Someone deleted their HBO Max account. Someone else posted a sticker:

I don’t remember it being THIS BAD.

Same scene. Completely different encounters with reality.

One person gets their guts pulled out. Another opens the App Store. The people who felt it most simply posted a screenshot of Jules’ face:

“But do you want to?”

...and said nothing.

That screenshot got 1,132 likes.

That silence is the whole inquiry.

And then there’s the scene in Jules’ loft. Rue is living between here and there (sometimes at Lexi’s, sometimes at Ali’s, sometimes in her van), and she walks into the luxury apartment Jules’ sugar daddy is paying for and says, “Yeah, I work at a strip club, and I guess because I’m in a position of power the girls just throw themselves at me.”

That gap is everything. Rue’s performance of power comes from a position of total precariousness (no fixed address, floating between other people’s floors) while Jules has THE LOVER + THE LOFT, and somehow Rue walks in like she’s the one holding the room; swaggering like she is adulting, properly. The drama.

That’s not just a character detail. That’s the show understanding that desire reorganises hierarchy. In the field of wanting, none of the usual coordinates applies. Who has money, who has a home, who is stable: irrelevant. Rue says, “the girls just throw themselves at me”, and it’s hilarious and heartbreaking because it’s also true, and she knows it, and Jules knows it, and the absurdity of that truth is exactly why the tension is unbearable.

She’s living between worlds: literally and existentially. And she shows up to Jules’ world in the full chaos of her own and just... occupies it. That’s not confidence. That’s someone so unmoored they’ve stopped performing stability entirely.

Which actually makes “Then come here” land differently. Jules isn’t pulling toward her despite the chaos. She’s pulling toward all of it.

IV.

Desire, equanimity, awe: three things, a holy trinity, which I was not expecting to encounter while watching Euphoria.

Most people would expect Euphoria to be about desire, sure. Trauma. Maybe addiction. Maybe identity. But equanimity? That’s the surprise. And yet the deeper you go into the show, the more visible it becomes.

Euphoria spends an unusual amount of time refusing to rescue its characters from their emotional states. It doesn’t rush toward resolution. It doesn’t immediately convert suffering into lessons. It doesn’t explain people away. That’s actually very close to contemplative traditions. The characters are about as far from enlightened as they can be; yet the camera itself often practices a kind of radical witnessing…

Desire says: I need this.
Fear says: I cannot bear this.
Equanimity says: This too.

Jules is Desire. If desire was an invitation. That magnetism. You know it? The thing that opens the journey, that says follow this, even though you don’t know where it goes. Jules has always been the pulling force, the gravitational disturbance.

Maddie is Equanimity. And I mean this seriously, underneath the contour and the chaos. What Maddie has slowly become is someone who can remain. Who doesn’t need to collapse the uncertainty into a conclusion. Who can hold “I’ll ruin your life” and “have you considered inner peace?” in the same body without flinching. Maddie talking about equanimity while dressed like an erotic revenge angel isn’t absurd because it’s unrealistic. It’s absurd because it’s accurate. The sacred and profane living in the same body, which is, frankly, all of us in 2026. Spiritually yearning while checking our angles in the front camera. The Catholicism-to-equanimity pivot is so funny because it’s so true — babe, enlightenment, but make it contour — but underneath the joke is something real. Equanimity is not distance from the fire. It’s the capacity to stand near it without becoming it.

Staying.

As for Rue: Rue is Awe. That scene with the burning Joshua tree (the biblical imagery, the Psalms, the Amen), it’s not subtle, but it’s not trying to be. What Rue keeps circling is the encounter with something larger than herself, something that refuses to be managed or explained.

Awe is what happens when reality exceeds the story you were telling yourself about reality.

A surprise says: I wasn’t expecting that.

Awe says: I didn’t know reality could be that large.

Awe rearranges you. Surprise keeps the self intact. Awe briefly dissolves it. You come out of awe slightly different from how you went in, though you couldn’t say exactly how.

Three women. Three relationships to mystery. The show is less interested in resolving them than in letting you feel them.

Equanimity is a stance. Awe is an encounter. Equanimity is the capacity to remain present. Awe is what sometimes arrives when you do. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that the task was not to explain away mystery but to remain available to it. That’s not a passive position. It’s a radical one.

Desire reaches. Equanimity receives. Awe arrives.

V.

People who call Euphoria indulgent aren’t wrong. It is. It lingers. It refuses to cut away from discomfort at the moment when cutting away would be merciful. The lighting is doing things that no lighting strictly needs to do. The whole production is aesthetically intoxicated: excessively, defiantly so.

But here’s what I think Sam Levinson understood: the medium is the practice.

If you want to make a show about the emotional states most people rush past: longing, shame, grief, desire, dissociation, the performance of self, the spiritual emptiness hiding inside glamour, you simply cannot make a show that rushes past them.

The form has to enact the argument. The slow linger. The refusal to resolve. The camera stays on a face for ten, fifteen seconds past the point of comfort. The dialogue this season sounds like people who have been to therapy, read Buddhist quotes on Instagram, done ketamine twice, and still text their ex at 2 am. It’s ridiculous and weirdly fucking accurate.

The show is a training ground. Not telling you to pay attention exactly, but making you practice it.

VI.

There is a story about Moses and a burning bush. The bush was already burning before Moses arrived. Burning the way things burn in the desert — bright, consuming, ordinary in its violence. The miracle is not that the bush was on fire. The miracle is that Moses stopped. He turned aside. That’s the phrase in Hebrew. He turned aside to see. And it was in the turning, in the quality of attention he brought to what was already there, that the encounter became possible.

The bush was already burning. The question is whether anyone would notice.

Rue has her own burning bush. When she tells Lexi about the burning tree, Lexi isn’t quite sure what to do with it, so she tells Rue, “You’re totally welcome to stay here, but I have a lot of writing to get done.” When she tells Ali, he asks a different question:

“What did God say?”

That’s a radically different posture. Ali doesn’t immediately decide whether Rue’s experience was mystical, neurological, drug-induced, symbolic, or psychotic. He stays with it. He takes her experience seriously enough to ask the next question.

There's something deeply contemplative about that posture.

It reminds me of one of my favourite ideas in phenomenology: before we explain something, can we first stay with it?

It’s a small moment, but it reveals two entirely different ways of meeting mystery. One moves quickly to explanation. The other steps inside the experience.

The longing in Euphoria is already burning. The grief, the desire, the awe, the hunger for transcendence layered in lip gloss—it’s all already there. The show just turns aside to look at it. And if you’re watching with a certain quality of attention, you turn aside too.

VII.

Awe is what attention feels like when it encounters mystery.

The practice is not learning how to find meaning. The practice is learning how to pay attention, which is harder than it sounds, because most of us arrive everywhere already certain we know what we're looking at. We see what our questions allow us to see. We find what we came to find.

We miss everything our certainty couldn’t make room for.

What if the thing you’re looking for is hidden inside the thing you’re trying to get past?

I was on a red-eye to Beirut, slightly high, coming home to a city where the ordinary and the catastrophic have learned to coexist: drones overhead, coffee below, life continuing in the strange and ordinary ways it always does. And Maddie Perez was talking about equanimity.

I didn’t change the channel. I turned aside.

That’s all it takes. And it’s everything.

I’m trying something new, not new exactly, but something I haven’t done in a while, which is free writing something on a Sunday, every single Sunday. We will need to see how it goes because, since leaving my nine-to-five, I have struggled with calendars and scheduling. I’m no good at content calendars and regular posting because my work, writing, creativity, etc., seems to just pour out of me sometimes, and other times — nada. I’ve started to think of this process when it pours out as: emergence.

Emergence is something we create conditions for; it can’t be forced.

Right now I’m listening to the new Beautiful Chorus album and reflecting on my time away in Italy. I just returned from the third module of my Working With People holistic counselling training in the hills of Tuscany, where we took a deep dive into the Red Essence of AH Almaas’s Diamond Approach System, and it was BIG. In the words of Almaas, Red Essence is the aspect of individuation (also very Jungian).

In simpler language, Red Essence is basically your inner “no, actually.”

It knows what’s yours, and it stays there.

It’s the part of you that can disappoint someone without collapsing. That can be in a room full of opinions about you, with things projected onto you, and still know what you think, feel, and believe.

Almaas calls it Strength, and I’m quite sure it’s much less about power over others and more about not handing power over yourself away.

It’s the difference between being bold and being boundaried, so in that way, what I love about Red is that it isn’t loud or agressive. It’s just... unwilling to leave itself.

I don’t know about you, but I am quite done with leaving myself.

It’s hot here in Beirut. Yesterday required multiple cold showers. Cold showers are the move when there is no sea to leap into on the doorstep. I moisturised, and put my legs up the wall so I could listen to The Emerald podcast. I sprayed this beautiful Japanese vibe Shinrin-Yoku room mist that I picked up from Earl of East in Shoreditch, and put some flowers in a little vase that my friend Thalia—who’s actually here from New York—gave me today at the farmers’ market. I’m listening to a playlist titled ‘In The Gold’ that I curated on my flight back from Rome to Beirut.

I also cooked the most beautiful, perfectly cooked beef tenderloin from a recipe I found on the interwebs. They called it Million Dollar Beef Tenderloin and it was. Copious amounts of butter, garlic and rosemary heaped on top of it before I threw it into the oven. I had no meat thermometer but I managed by some miracle to cook it to perfection. Intuitively. My dad couldn’t stop raving about it. He kept saying it was better than a restaurant meal, which I was pretty chuffed about. Feeding people, as some of you might know, is my love language. It lights me up.

who doesn’t love a rave review?!

As I lay there in my bed, touching my own skin, feeling moisturised and rested, I was thinking to myself how much I love integration. All this time alone to sit and process and make connections and really land back into myself. It helps so much that I have no real responsibilities outside of Arlo, and cooking nice meals for my dad and me. I’ve been eating the most incredible summer apricots, and they’re honestly the sweetest, most exquisite things I’ve ever tasted. I’m just feeling so much aliveness and so much satisfaction. And I smile, remembering Pascale, my friend from the training, picking apricots for us from the tree in Tuscany in her bikini.

I’ve been writing a lot, as part of my process. I published something here on Substack today about how attention makes us more available for encounter. I guess what I was really writing about was presence. I can hear the call to prayer blasting in the background. It’s actually really beautiful. It’s such a contrast to hearing the drones all day, which honestly aren’t so bad anymore. You kind of get used to them. I actually laughed to myself when I got home, like, “Ah, thank God the drones are out today. I really missed them.”

And it feels really good to be so present, so with myself. I’m really, really enjoying being alone, which is such a contrast to two weeks ago, when I was approaching my birthday, my 48th cycle. I woke up a day earlier with a feeling in my bones and thought;

I am nobody’s mother, and no one’s wife.

In that particular moment, it felt heavy and lonely, and also, if I’m honest, like failure. That is the thing with societal scripts: they are stubborn and sticky and do not fall away so easily, despite what it might look like from the outside. I am living a life on my own terms, which is incredibly freeing and can be lonely sometimes. It’s both/and. It’s regulating to be on my own so much, and sometimes I just wanna curl up into a ball and be held so I can co-regulate with another safe ‘n’ lovely person.

Both/and.

Integration.

If I had to hold the whole week in one place, I’d say this:

I came into this module already knowing, through years of practice and a profound plant medicine journey, that I belong to myself. What Red Essence offered me wasn’t a new understanding of belonging, but the invitation to embody it. I discovered that sovereignty isn’t hardness, that authenticity has friction, that contact requires curiosity, and that I can remain in relationship without abandoning myself. YES, this: I can remain in a relationship without abandoning myself. What a revolution….

Belonging isn’t something I have to find anymore.

Now my practice is remembering to act like someone who already belongs to herself.

The hills were dry and golden. The heat was everywhere. The moon was full, isn’t it always? The roses were still blooming. It was enough.

Despite my long and complicated relationship with Instagram, during a recent — let’s say ‘exploration,’ because that sounds way better than ‘doom scroll’ — I discovered a flower.

It appeared between templated carousels, sponsored ads, a slew of acquaintances’ vacation photos and whatever else the algorithm decided might keep me hooked that day. On this occasion, it happened to be: a wild, dramatic iris; found only in the north of Mount Lebanon. It appears only for a week or two each year, in specific places, under specific conditions. It cannot be cultivated or extracted. If you pick it — which is illegal by the way, as it is both highly endangered and protected — it will wilt within the hour.

The Iris sofarana = instant obsession.

I read everything I could find. I saved photographs of its improbable purple petals. I imagined the mountain range where it emerges from the earth each spring — close to the mountain range of my ancestry, notably, with an elegant indifference to whether anyone happens to be looking, or not. There was something quietly miraculous about it, and whatever process of imagination it started, I am still inside it.

I found this flower on the same platform I have spent years interrogating. The machine that profits from my distraction handed me a reason to look up, which made me think:

What else have I forgotten how to see?

I have written about attention before: as a political condition, as the ground from which desire either becomes ours or is borrowed from systems that profit from our confusion. The first essay in this series asked how attention is taken from us. The second asked what it costs when we stop being able to hear ourselves.

But lately I find myself at a different edge of the same inquiry.

Not: how is attention captured?

But: once we’ve reclaimed it, what do we even do with it?

– The Third Wound –

I’ve been paying attention to a pattern in myself for a while now, and I want to try to name it precisely because I think it’s different from what we usually mean when we talk about distraction.

I have a pattern-recognition brain. It is incredibly perceptive and useful, until it isn’t. I notice repetitions quickly — the same ideas dressed in different language, the same aesthetics circulating endlessly across different accounts, the same aspirations and fears and performances reproduced until they become ambient noise. Sometimes it feels as though everything is a clone of everything else. Why is everyone all of a sudden peeling some variation of fruit in their Reels now?

The copies of copies of copies. This is the hall of mirrors I talk about.

There are days when this hurts my brain. Days when it hurts my heart. Days when it hurts my eyes.

Underneath the exhaustion, I realise, is grief. A very big and unmanageable grief. A longing to encounter something that possesses its own interiority. Its own intelligence. Something that was not designed to capture me, but simply exists according to the logic of its own becoming.

I’ve been thinking about this as a third wound; distinct from the first two.

1. Distraction fragments attention. You can’t settle anywhere long enough to enter into relationship with anything, including yourself.

2. Saturation overwhelms it. There is simply too much to metabolise; the receiver goes offline.

3. But homogenisation… homogenisation does something different.

   It deadens.

When everything begins to resemble everything else, when even “authentic” content follows a template, when even dissent has an aesthetic, when even rest is being sold back to us in optimised packages, the soul begins to ache for something more than observation.

I’ve been searching for the right word for what it aches for, and the word I landed on is encounter.

The opposite of homogenization is not novelty. Novelty is still a commodity. The attention economy serves it constantly, in new formats, new faces, new sounds, new provocations. No! The opposite of homogenization is encounter. A real flower. A real place. A real poem. A real conversation. A real hug. A real grief. A real wave breaking on the shore. Something that resists becoming interchangeable. Something that isn't a reference to something else.

Something that says: I am here. Will you meet me?

Can you meet me?

The Iris Sofarana interrupted the pattern. Not because it was prettier than what I usually see, but because it was genuinely itself. A flower that exists only in one mountain range, for two weeks each year, according to conditions older than the internet. It couldn’t be scaled. It couldn’t be optimised. It simply was.

Reality exceeds the template. And I had almost forgotten that was still possible.

– Your Eyes Are Gateways –

Years ago, back when I taught and practised Kundalini Yoga, we often spoke about the eyes being a place — a portal, even — where we lose our life force, where this energy is extracted.

I don’t know whether I believe this literally. But I understand it viscerally, in the way that a teaching arrives in the body before the intellect has had a chance to approve it. There are ways of looking that leave me depleted: porous, scattered, hungry for something I can’t name. And there are ways of looking that bring me back to myself.

This much I know.

The eyes are not neutral receptors. They are not cameras. They are openings. And attention is not free; it is an exchange. What passes through the eyes takes up residence somewhere in the nervous system, shaping what we become capable of feeling, wanting, and imagining.

I wrote earlier in this series that your eyes have become a site of extraction. Entire economies depend on it. Platforms compete for our gaze. Advertisers purchase access to it. Outrage, comparison, aspiration, insecurity; all of them asking to pass through the eyes and take up residence in the body.

But the way I hold that line now is different, something like an invitation, because if the eyes truly are gateways, if what we look at matters at the level of life force, then the question isn’t only: what is being extracted from me? It is also:

what restores me?

– Things That Have Their Own Intelligence –

When I say I have been looking at flowers, I am not speaking metaphorically. I really do mean that I stop in the street to encounter them and take a photograph. I buy them at the market on Saturdays and bring them home, and watch them unfurl on my kitchen table. I recently tattooed one onto my leg — a poppy, because poppies have always lived close to thresholds. Remembrance and forgetting. Sleep and awakening. Wildness and resilience. The ordinary miracle of blooming in disturbed ground.

What I’ve been trying to understand, through the flowers, is this: there are things in the world that do not need your management. Things that continue becoming themselves whether or not you are watching. Things that were not designed to capture your attention, but simply possess their own intelligence, their own interiority, their own way of being.

The Mediterranean tide, practising return against the shore. A body closing a wound without applause. Starlings murmurating — ten thousand birds moving as one body, with no conductor, no algorithm, no design. The Iris sofarana blooming for two weeks each year in a mountain range that cannot be replicated or franchised. A flower unfolding because the conditions are indeed: just right!

Or this: the particular shade of blue that belongs only to the Tyrrhenian Sea. This sea, right here, this light, this afternoon. Something so specific it cannot be generalised away. Something that asks you to be exactly where you are in order to see it.

There is relief in turning toward these things that has nothing to do with their beauty and everything to do with asking nothing of my performance. They are not optimised for engagement. They do not require my reaction to justify their existence. In their presence, something in me settles.

This is, I think, what the Kundalini teaching was pointing toward. Not: look away from the world. But: notice what happens to your life force when you offer your attention to something that has its own.

– Collecting Encounters –

I was just in Italy. Two nights in Rome as a treat to myself for my 48th trip around the sun, then a road trip with Jane — my friend from the therapy training I’m part of — along the Tyrrhenian coast through Monte Argentario, stopping at a lido in Talamone, picking up a trucker hat I ummed and ahhed about, then proceeded to wear every single day.

We drove to places we’d picked out on a map. No, we didn’t find them on Instagram. Some things still need to be discovered.

And as I moved through Rome and Porto Santo Stefano and Talamone, I made it a practice to collect encounters. Not a list exactly, more like a shared language that organically developed between Jane and me. Each time something happened that moved through us and changed something, we named it. Encounter. A number. A shorthand for: that. That just happened.

Encounter #1 was in Rome. I was standing outside a building, genuinely absorbed in the plants and the architecture, when a man noticed me noticing. He spoke Italian. I replied in mostly English and my abysmal attempt at Italian. He invited me into the foyer anyway. He talked. I had very little idea what he was saying. But I still nodded. We stayed there together for a while. What I understood was that he wanted to share something with me. That he had seen someone actually looking, and wanted to meet her there.

I have at least a dozen flowers etched into my skin. A stranger in Rome commented on them while we were standing at the bus stop in the beating sun two days ago. You have such beautiful tattoos, he remarked. Thank you, I said. It’s my garden [encounter #2]

By the time we reached the Talamone (42°33’N, 11°08’E) lido on the coast it was already approaching encounter #5. The day had been perfect, the sea a particular blue I kept trying to describe to Jane: not the Mediterranean in the abstract, not the Adriatic, not the Caribbean. This blue. This temperature. This light. My nervous system knows the difference. Water and air temperature are regulating for me in a way I have slowly come to recognise and trust. When it is just so, something in me opens. When it isn’t, like in Brooklyn last summer at a loft party, in the heat of Rome just days before, the same sensitivity tips into panic. The body does not lie about these things.

And then the storm came. A thunderstorm so immense it cleared the entire lido in minutes. Everyone scrambling for cover, sunbeds abandoned, wet and sweaty strangers pressed together under the restaurant awning. An older Italian woman sat down at our table and began talking to us. We couldn’t understand her. She couldn’t understand us. But she thanked us for the table. And we stayed there, the three of us, watching the lightning come in off the sea, in a warmth that required no shared language.

We saw each other. That was enough.

There was also Felipe — a beautiful, tattooed, Brazilian man (I need not say more) from my training. I went over to hug him at the pool. We have a shared language for hugs. As I hugged him this time, he looked at me and said: You looked so beautiful over there in the sun. It was so special. An admission that he had been watching, unbeknownst to me. Noticing me just being, not performing, not producing, simply sitting in the light. Basking in the sun. And in so doing, he handed me back a version of myself I had yet to see — through his particular eyes, in that exact light, in that specific way. Radiant.

I was encountered.

And there was Anna — a then-stranger at the aforementioned loft party my friend Ameerah was hosting, on one of the hottest days of the year. She always threw the best parties. I miss her parties. The heat was too much. My body was unravelling. Anna noticed. She didn't ask if I was okay. She went into the kitchen, wet some paper towels, put them in the freezer, and proceeded to press them against the back of my neck. I remember receiving this cool relief, this act of care and being genuinely moved. You did this for me. And I don't even know you. You don't even know me.

It goes without saying, but of course we became friends.

And then there was Jane herself. By the end of the trip, back in Rome, something had shifted. She had learned to notice when the heat was becoming too much, when a crowded space was starting to tip me toward overwhelm. She’d catch my eye and ask, quietly: Hey. How are you doing? Is it time to go? No fuss. No pathologising. Just someone paying close enough attention to read the signals I hadn’t even spoken.

I found myself thinking: oh. Here is someone who pays attention to me.

Not to a version of me that is managing and performing and holding it together. To the actual me, with an actual nervous system, that has actual limits. She was so attuned it was an encounter all by itself: not a single moment but something that accumulated, quietly, over days.

The last night in our hotel, cosily tucked away in our twin beds, which would be too close and too much for most nervous systems but was just right for ours, I turned to her and said — through tears — thank you for being amazing and for all the noticing.

You’re also the least irritating person I know.

She also told me, at some point on the trip,

…whenever I see moss, I think of you.

That might be the single greatest compliment I have ever received. To have become part of someone’s way of seeing the world. To know that somewhere, a patch of moss on a Roman wall is quietly pointing back toward you.

And she gave me a flower press for my birthday. My sister — the only person in the world who would think to bring me a birthday present wherever I happen to be — gave me a pair of second-hand pants. Jane gave me a flower press. Because she had been paying close enough attention to know exactly what would move me.

At some point, she called me over — Nico, look at this rose — and I felt something open. Recognition. Delight. Expansion. I said: I love that it’s you calling me over to look at flowers.

You’re reminding me to notice, she said.

That, I think, is what attention makes possible. Not just your own encounters. The slow, quiet changing of how someone else moves through the world. Jane will see moss now. She will stop for roses. She may or may not join me in pressing flowers, but the practice spreads, nonetheless. That is how it was always meant to work.

These cannot be manufactured.

As I write this, recalling each one, I feel something move through me. Something close to tears. And I think: this too is an encounter. The body remembering what it felt like to be truly met.

Encounter is not something that happens to us. It’s something we become available for.

– Becoming a Person Who Notices –

I keep returning to a small lineage of people who understood this intuitively, as artists, yes, but not just that, as practitioners of a particular kind of attention.

Mary Oliver noticed geese and blackwater ponds, and grasshoppers in the field. She spent hours walking, watching, staying long enough for the world to reveal something it doesn’t offer to people who are passing through. Georgia O’Keeffe looked at flowers long enough to understand that most of us had never really seen one. Nobody sees a flower, really, she said. She painted them large so that even the terribly hurried might be forced to pause. John O’Donohue understood beauty not as decoration but as belonging; a form of attention that reveals the hidden life of things, that makes us more fully present to where we are. David Whyte understood the world as something in perpetual conversation with us, asking us not to react but to respond, not to consume but to stay.

And Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose work I return to often: a botanist and Indigenous scholar who writes of moss and sweetgrass and strawberries as if attention itself were an act of reciprocity. As if noticing were a form of relationship, not just reception.

I don’t think these people noticed because they were exceptional. I think they became who they were because they practised noticing. They committed, daily and quietly, to stay in relationship with things that have their own intelligence. They became trustworthy witnesses to being alive.

In Tuscany, we drove through a field of sunflowers. As far as the eye could see in every direction, thousands of them, turning toward the same light. Overwhelming in the way that only abundance can be.

What I noticed was the ladybug on the back of one.

I want to be that kind of person.

Not in the artistic sense alone. But in the sense of becoming someone who has not lost the capacity to be astonished by what cannot be replicated. Who can still tell the difference between what captures the eye and what restores it.

And I’m learning that this extends to people, too. When Jane called me over to look at a rose — not because she loves flowers, but because she’s been paying attention to what I love — I felt it as one of the sweetest forms of intimacy I know. Someone noticing what you notice. Someone learning the particular shape of your attention and meeting you there.

This is what encounter between people looks like. Someone saying, with a rose in their hand: I have been paying attention to you.

– Flowering as a practice –

The poppy on my leg was not chosen as decoration. It was chosen as a commitment.

I wanted a flower I could not walk away from. A small, permanent reminder that some forms of intelligence don’t need to be seen to be true; they simply keep returning, season after season, from disturbed ground, from mountain soil, from conditions they did not choose and did not optimise and did not explain.

I have been thinking about flowering not as bloom, not as arrival at some perfected state, but as the practice of returning. Of moving attention, again and again, back toward what restores our capacity to participate in the world. Toward things that have their own life. Toward the particular over the generic. Toward relationship rather than consumption.

Participation > retreat.
Belonging > escape.
Return > optimisation.

The question I started with — how is attention captured? — still matters. The systems haven’t changed. The extraction is real. Homogenization is accelerating. These things deserve clear-eyed witnesses.

But I think there is a question underneath it, one that is worth repeatedly asking, one that has been creeping up on me over time:

What is attention for?

Not only who profits from it.

Not just how to protect it.

What is it fucking for?

I think it might be for this: learning to love the world with enough steadiness that we become capable of defending it. Noticing the exact blue of the sea and the market flower and the friend telling the truth and the body digesting breakfast without a single push notification.

Becoming, in Mary Oliver’s phrase, astonished. Staying long enough with the particular — this flower, this tide, this conversation, this life — that it changes the texture of what we are capable of wanting.

This is what I mean by flowering. This is not a state we arrive at. It is a practice of return.

The Iris Sofarana blooms for two weeks in the mountains of Lebanon, and then it is gone. I found it on Instagram. I have not yet seen it in person. But something in me is already on its way there.

This is part of an ongoing series on attention as an embodied, systemic, and political practice.

Reading & Listening Companions

• Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer. On reciprocity, attention, and the intelligence of the plant world.

• Devotions — Mary Oliver. Decades of practised noticing; what astonishment looks like as a body of work.

• To Bless the Space Between Us — John O’Donohue. Beauty as belonging. Attention as reverence.

• The Heart Aroused — David Whyte. On the conversational nature of reality, and what it costs to stop listening.

• The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist. How different modes of attention shape what we perceive as real — and what we lose when one mode dominates.

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For the tender ones, who deeply long for touch but are afraid of it anyway.

I.

We were sitting on his sofa with a glass of wine from a bottle we picked up at the corner store. In any other country, I would have called the police, but the wine in Lebanon is good, outrageously good, so even the $10 bottles I fuck with. As it turns out, we have been making wine here for 7,000 years.

7,000 YEARS!

The only reason I know this is because my dad made me watch a documentary-length feature on YouTube about winemaking in Lebanon, so hear me when I say: the Bekaa Valley has a Temple of Bacchus in it, the largest temple to the god of wine ever built, and we are not playing when it comes to wine.

He’d asked the shopkeeper if he had wine glasses. The man looked around, confused. then muttered something in Levantine Arabic close to ‘yeah… we have these," and pointed to those small plastic, almost transparent coffee cups they use to serve ahweh in.

LOL. No.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “We’ll just drink from a regular glass tumbler. Like in Italy.”

Sitting close enough that our knees were touching, which at first bothered me, because I liked it, and I didn’t want to like it. One, because we’re friends, and two, because there has been absolutely no indication of romantic interest whatsoever. At one point, when our knees touch again, I don’t rearrange myself

I stay.

It must signal something, because he takes my hand and holds it.

I notice how soft his skin is. His fingers. I’ve always thought the sluttiest thing a man can do is have nice hands. He gently pushes up the fabric of my long sleeve. Since I didn’t think it was a date-date, and still don’t, I’m wearing Adidas track pants, an oversized long-sleeve, the Anti-Apartheid Club one (because I knew he’d like it), and a cardigan. It was Marni, but still. I made zero effort.

He remarks on how soft my skin is. My face contorts, but I swallow the incredulity. Instead, I throw out something cute, like:

If I’d known we were gonna get cosy, I would have moisturised.

And of course he says: why? You don’t need to. He’s looking closely at my tattoos, inspecting the ink on my right forearm. “I love these,” he says. “They’re like a map.” And then, quieter: “I noticed them the first time we met”.

I could tell by the way his breath stilled that it was, in itself, a tiny confession.

I don’t know how much time passes like that; him touching my hair, caressing it. Being gentle. Me being embarrassed, a little coy about my dry platinum hair and my dark roots, and about needing a haircut. And him telling me I’m beautiful. That my hair is beautiful.

And I melt.

II.

Here is what I didn't say and understood anyway, somewhere underneath the wine: I had been starving. Not for him specifically, though him, yes, him, the warmth of his particular unhurried attention. But for the thing itself. Touch. Gentle, quiet, uncomplicated touch. The kind that doesn't want anything back except for you to stay there and receive it.

I registered this the way you register something you’ve been pretending not to need. With incredulity first. Then something that felt dangerously close to grief.

III.

I live in Beirut now. The economy collapsed. The port exploded. The electricity runs on its own logic: a red light that tells you whether you're on government power or generator, and you learn to read it before you do anything—washing machine on the generator? Laaah… you'll short the circuit. You negotiate your life around whether the small red indicator light is off or on. And yet: the people here are physically extraordinary. They hold your hand at dinner. They kiss both cheeks every time, sometimes three. Every single time. Even if they saw you two hours ago. They touch your arm when they're making a point, to make sure the point lands.

Touch here is grammar. Our way of saying: you are real to me. I see you. You exist.

I grew up in a Western city. I am also, as it turns out, on the spectrum. These two facts together mean I spent a long time running a very specific equation: how to be close without triggering the wrong response, how to inhabit proximity without seeming to need it, how to look like I was having a normal amount of feelings about being touched. Physical contact, when it came, usually arrived weighted: with meaning, expectation, someone else’s need. Very rarely was it just:

here. This. No agenda.

So when he took my hand, when he touched my hair like it was something worth being slow about

Something that had been braced in me for a long time went:

oh.

IV.

This is what I mean when I say:

Overstimulated. Underheld.

We talk a lot about stimulation, at least I do. The ambient hum of being pulled in seventeen directions before you’ve finished your morning coffee; the feeds, the news, the group chats. Much of my work circles the attention economy and how we stay human inside of it. For neurodivergent people, the volume starts higher: the world is loud and bright and demanding, and by the time I physically arrive anywhere, I have already been to twelve other places in my nervous system.

What we talk about less: the holding and the absence of it.

Stimulation and nourishment are not the same thing.

You can be flooded with input and still be starving. You can be touched a hundred times in ways that cost you something and still never have been held. We didn't stumble into touch deprivation. We organised a mythology around it. We called it independence. We called it maturity. We called it not being needy, which is maybe the most effective piece of social engineering the 20th century produced. The ideal subject of late capitalism is someone who has successfully privatised all their needs and farmed the rest out to consumption.

The ND piece is specific: there is a category of touch that dysregulates: too much, too sudden, wrong texture, wrong pressure, someone else's anxiety conducted through their hands. Then there is a category that does the opposite. That lands in the nervous system like a key in a lock. A lot of autistic people have been told their whole lives that they don't like being touched, when the more accurate thing is: the wrong touch is intolerable, and the right touch is everything. It's not between wanting contact and not wanting it.

It's between contact that costs and contact that restores. I wasn't rejecting touch. I was correctly identifying that most of what was being offered wasn't food.

One night in Brooklyn, at a restaurant in Bed-Stuy called Laziza (named, it’s not lost on me, after an old Lebanese beer), my friend was on a date with her old rich boyfriend. We can say, sugar daddy. I am quite sure he was her sugar daddy; I’m not sure why else she was dating him. He’d brought a friend along, and I was there because she’d assured me it was not a double date. But the way this man — the sugar daddy’s old friend, who looked as old as my dad — encountered me was not neutral. I’m used to being looked at. In Beirut, I’ve graduated to being stared at, which is the social norm. But this man was sitting right beside me, and at one point he picked up my arm — picked it up — like a trinket, to look at my tattoos.

Excuse me, sir.

I stood up. I said, matter-of-factly:

Can you please stop touching me now.

Two men have inspected the ink on my right forearm. One lifted my arm like something he was entitled to appraise. The other looked without touching, for a long time, and then quietly confessed he’d noticed it the first day we met. My nervous system knew the difference. It always does.

Trinket or map. That’s the whole taxonomy.

V.

Beirut: our city of contrasts and contradictions. This is its defining characteristic and also possibly its survival strategy. But the tenderness piece; the tenderness is alive here in a way that hums. You feel it constantly, at a frequency.

Everyone is habibi. The neighbour, the shopkeeper, the man who fixes your car and overcharges you and means it warmly. Everyone is tuburni—may you bury me, may I go first, may the world in which you no longer exist be a world I am not alive to suffer. This is a term of endearment. People say this to each other as easily as hello. Even Arlo is everyone’s habibi; strangers on the street stop to coddle him and shriek, yiiiiiiiii tuburni dashooo mahdooooom, by people who, in any other city, would walk past this dog without breaking stride. Next minute, someone else sees him coming and bolts to the other side of the street. Petrified. Of this giant teddy bear. I’m sorry, there are drones overhead and they’re bombing the city, but this soft-enormous-ridiculous-creature is the thing that undid you? I cannot.

The other day, I was walking to get coffee. A man I have never met and will probably never see again passed me on the street and said: sabah al khair. Morning of goodness. I said back: sabah al nour. Morning of light. The blessing reaches for my insides, and I glow. We kept walking. Here, this is the minimum, so ordinary nobody would think to mention it. And yet here I am, mentioning it, because some part of me still can't believe the baseline includes being blessed.

I walk Arlo through the backstreets of Achrafieh: the Ottoman buildings, the French-mandate staircases, the jasmine coming over the walls. There is a shrine to al-Adra on every corner, the Virgin draped in blue, small candles burning at her feet. And threading through all of it, five times a day, the adhan — Fajr at dawn, Dhuhr when the sun passes its peak, Asr as the shadows lengthen, Maghrib the moment the sun dips below the sea, Isha when the last light disappears. Not a fixed schedule. The sun decides.

Time here is still organised around something alive. The adhan wraps around everything, finding its way into every window, whether you share the faith or not. And wafting from somewhere: someone’s mother is burning bakhour, the thick dark oud incense that smells like Maronite mass. The birds are going. The car horns are going. The diesel from the generators hangs thick in the air, and underneath it, just enough cool sea breeze off the Mediterranean to cut through the humidity, arriving exactly when you need it, as if it knows.

Everything everywhere all at once.

The sacred and the secular and the barely-holding-it-together. The catastrophe and the jasmine. The drone and the double kiss. I have come to understand this as what it means for coherence to be ecological; the nervous system doesn’t only regulate through stillness. It regulates through the right kind of aliveness. The wrong crowd is exhausting. The right city is regulation. Beirut, improbably, is that field for me.

Under the cover of trees, these balcony sanctuaries have bullet-hole scars. I walk past them, and I wonder: how far from the front line was this? Who lived and who died, and what did they believe in?

The laundry is still hanging. The flowers are still pushing through the rubble.

Beirut doesn’t erase its wounds, nor does it ever have time to heal them. It just keeps living on top of them, around them, through them; something that is not denial exactly but another kind of steadfastness. The one without a choice. What it never surrendered, through all of it, was this: the hand on the arm. The double kiss. The morning blessed in both directions. The insistence that you are habibi, that you are loved, that the world is marginally better because you are walking through it.

VI.

He was not a stranger. He was a friend. One of my only real ones in this old new city, I was slowly, carefully beginning to call home.

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with starting over somewhere. I’d already done it once in New York, one of the most densely populated cities on earth, eight million people within arm’s reach, and I sobbed on the L train to Bedford Ave. For the first time in my life, in public. The particular cruelty of that loneliness is that it happens inside a crowd. You are surrounded by humanity and completely invisible to all of it.

Not the loneliness of having no one. I had people, quickly, because Beirut is that kind of city, but the loneliness of not yet having your people. The ones who know the context. Who don’t need the backstory. Who have watched enough of your specific texture of being alive that they can read your silences correctly. He had become, over weeks and then months, one of mine.

And then, on a sofa, with a glass of Lebanese wine, our knees touching, the thing began to change shape. Slowly, barely perceptibly, the way light changes in a room when the breeze blows the drapes. The warmth between us had shifted register, just slightly. Neither of us was saying so.

He took my hand. He touched my hair. He told me I was beautiful.

And I was embarrassed. I made a small joke about needing a haircut. Because that is what I do with things that are too large and too real: I make them smaller so they fit inside a moment I can survive. I’ve written about this — about not being able to survive intimacy. The bathroom at the crucial moment. The meme I sent instead of the truth. The frozen scream where I could access no sound.

But underneath the joke: oh.

VII.

I stayed.

Small, imperceptible. The kind of thing you would not even think to report. And yet: a nervous system changes the way Lebanon makes wine. Slowly, through the right conditions, through the accumulation of just enough pressure over time. Seven thousand years of knowing what the soil wants. One good harvest doesn’t make a tradition. But one good harvest, after all the failed ones, is the one that lands differently.

Here is what actually happened: the old program ran. Something in my nervous system said:

This is too large. Make it smaller.

And I did, briefly, with the haircut joke. That’s the reflex. My reflex.

That’s what forty-odd years of overstimulation and under-holding will build you: a very efficient smallness machine.

But then I let him look at me anyway.

That’s the new line. The software update. Not: no longer feeling the pull toward smallness. The new line is: running the old program and then, not quite. Letting the thing be slightly larger than the moment I turned it into. Softness is safest when it rests on inner ground rather than external certainty. He did not make it safe. I had, somewhere in the accumulation of all the small experiments that came before this one, made it marginally safer to be me.

This is so not a big thing.

Oh, but habibti. What if it is?

VIII.

There was a sofa. There was wine. Knees were touching. A sweet young man was being gentle with my hair, me feeling somehow too old for his attention and somewhat undeserving, being coy about my roots. Meanwhile, my insides were being rearranged. A tiny little software update happened in the background, yet nobody noticed anything. Nobody clapped.

So when I tell you I stayed. When I tell you I let the softness be softness, let the hand be a hand, let the warmth of being called beautiful land somewhere instead of getting efficiently redirected, I want you to understand that I’m telling you about a revolution. One that fit inside an ordinary Tuesday evening. One that leaves no scar except the absence of the usual wound.

In my therapy training, we have a name for this: steadfastness without hardening. In the Diamond Approach, steadfastness is a quality of White Essence, the inner capacity to remain continuous with yourself under pressure. To continue without collapsing or disappearing. The camel crossing the desert. One step at a time.

And in Arabic it is sumud — صمود. To remain. To stay. To refuse erasure. It is the word Palestinians and Lebanese use for the practice of not being moved when everything is designed to move you. The building with the bullet holes and the laundry still hanging. The city that keeps blessing strangers’ mornings under a soundtrack of drones. The flowers coming up through the rubble.

We remain steadfast.

The personal and the political are the same practice. The nervous system and the people. Both learning, under pressure, to stay.

I didn’t disappear. I didn’t harden. I stayed soft, and I stayed there. That is the whole of it.

IX.

The update doesn’t happen through understanding. You can know, completely and articulately, why you make yourself small in the presence of intimacy, and still find the smallness machine running when the moment arrives. Because the system isn’t waiting for your interpretation. It’s waiting for evidence.

The way it updates is through experience. A series of tiny experiments. The nervous system as reluctant founder: I don’t want to ship this. Fine. Here is the smallest possible version. The MVP. You stay for five minutes instead of leaving. You let the hand be a hand. You make the joke, and then you let him look at you anyway. This worked. Filed. Noted. The threat model quietly revised.

One Tuesday evening on a sofa in Beirut does not undo forty-ish years of calibrated smallness. But it is data. And I believe in accumulation. I believe in the seven thousand years of tending that produce a wine worth drinking from a glass tumbler like you’re in Italy.

Oh.

X.

We hung out a lot after that. It was simple, safe, lovely. We talked. We smoked cigarettes, perfectly rolled ones, that he rolled for me with his perfect hands. The soft ones. We hung out a lot until this one night,

when his dog bit me.

There was rupture. Not just of my fingers and my skin, but of the connection; that particular tenderness that had been quietly building between us, suddenly uncertain, suddenly complicated. The way rupture always is when it happens inside something you didn’t know you’d started to count on. And then it bleeds.

But then there was repair. As my fingers healed, so did the friendship.

Slowly. Carefully. One small experiment at a time.

Last night we rode his scooter to Ain el Mreisseh: The Corniche. People on rollerblades and rollerskates, and skateboards. People smoking shisha and cigarettes and maybe hash but maybe not, because it’s illegal here, not like New York. The Mediterranean on one side, the city humming on the other. Me in jean shorts and bare legs, touched by the humidity and his soft hands.

The revolution is not announced.

XI.

While I am learning to stay, a message arrives from New York. Pete. My best friend, now cohabitating with my other best friend, Zoe. We are both in Zoe’s car if you need to talk. I’m having kind of a hard time and I’d love to chat with you.

I sit with how much this message is doing. The asking dressed as an offer. The we, so I know he isn’t alone. The car, so I know they are somewhere contained, going nowhere, available.

I call Zoe’s phone and talk to both of them. Pete is beside himself with grief over a two-month relationship that was never meant to be a relationship, that he was never meant to lose his new New York self in. Somehow it happened without him realising it was happening. That’s the only way it ever happens.

I thought it was special, he sobs.

He says it like the ending travels backwards. Like losing it now erases the thing it was while it was happening.

And it strikes me, listening across an ocean: it’s Pete’s turn to sob in New York. Except we’re older now, and he’s crying in Zoe’s X5, where I was crying on the L train to Bedford Ave. The grief is the same. The difference is the holding. I was alone inside a crowd of eight million; he is in a parked car with one of his people, on the phone to another one of his people. The architecture was always there; we’ve been holding each other for decades. He just had the sense to reach for it before the train doors closed.

I don’t tell him yet that nothing has been erased. That two months of being soft with someone are still two months of being soft with someone: non-refundable, already metabolised, already his. Grief doesn’t take notes. It will have to be a series of tiny experiments, and he will have to run them himself.

Tuburni, I think, and hang up the phone.

XII.

Not every softness is a doorway. Some are just a blessing on the way.

Beirut teaches you something about the distinction between surviving and being nourished. You can make outstanding wine in a country that has been in some version of emergency for fifty years. You can find tenderness in an unexpected place. You can be, in the middle of everything; briefly, genuinely, enough

held.

It doesn’t have to go anywhere to matter.

This is the work I’ve spent forty years living inside. If it’s landing for you and you want to go deeper, I’m now offering a limited number of 1:1 companioning spaces in my practice. For now you can reach me at nicoledaboul@icloud.com

Before the café, there was another moment I need to tell you about.

We were having sex — beautiful, tender, alive, sweaty, breathtaking sex — and I started crying. He stopped. He asked me what was wrong.

I said: it’s nothing.

He said: don’t do that.

I can see now, with everything I understand about nervous systems and language and what it means to actually value the truth of a thing, exactly what he was doing. He refused to let me disappear even there. He wanted me to name it. He always wanted me to name it.

The truth, which I did not have words for then, was this: I was overstimulated. In the best, most luminous possible way. Nothing was wrong. Everything was almost too right. I cry when I’m overstimulated, always have, and this was the full spectrum of it. The good kind. The kind where the feeling is simply larger than the container.

I wish I’d had this language then. Not even the full articulate version — not I’m overstimulated in the best and most juicy possible way, please don’t stop. Something much simpler would have been enough. My autism, my nervous system patterns, the mystery of myself — all of it was still emerging, still becoming legible to me. I didn’t yet know that I process differently, that my body sometimes needs a moment to catch up to an experience before it can speak about it. Even just: give me a beat, I’m still processing would have been sufficient. Would have been everything.

Instead, I said nothing. He said don’t do that. And the moment passed the way moments do when two people are speaking different languages about the same feeling.

I have a tattoo on my arm that reads BABY CRIES A LOT. When people ask about it, I tell them it’s a PSA. But it’s really that moment, pressed permanently into my skin. An apology. An ode to a most beautiful boy.

We were there to sort something out. There had been dates. There had been intimacy. Paul had been very clear about who he was and what he wanted. I had been—well. Confounding. I was forty-four years old, and I was so into this man I could barely think straight, and I could not say it. When I am drawn to someone in this particular, terrifying way, aloofness becomes my strategy. I don’t care, and I will not show you how much I care, because then you cannot annihilate me. He had noticed. Hence the café.

Paul was beautiful in the specific way that certain queer men are beautiful, and I want to be accurate here, because I have a habit of precision. He was not tall — this was already notable; I have historically gravitated toward men who make me feel like a normal-sized person, which is its own essay. All his hair. Tattoo sleeves. Dressed in that particular queer way: quirky, considered. Shorts. The legs. Forty-five and physically strong in the way of someone who uses their body as both vocation and joy — he was a physical therapist, and he did trapeze. He told me he would take me sometime. I never went. Add that to the giant wound.

I should tell you that I was, at this point, still reluctant to date. Because New York dating. And doubly reluctant because — what does a straight(ish) woman want with a queer man? I was about to find out.

It started with a balmy summer night in Greenpoint. Achilles Heel. Outside. Shared plates, the kind of meal that becomes a conversation. And then he put his hand on mine and said: let me treat you, a quiet, easy generosity. I didn’t know what to do with it. I filed it away and kept eating.

There was something lit-up about him, like he had already made peace with something I hadn’t found the name for yet. He had been hurt before, deeply and genuinely, and he carried that. But he also had something I was not used to encountering in men: language. He could say what he felt. He could ask for what he wanted. He was clear in a way that I kept reflexively bracing against, waiting for the confusion that never came. Why are you not unavailable and confusing? my nervous system kept asking. Where is the chaos I know how to navigate? He was kind and self-aware and communicative and he kept showing up exactly as advertised. And I had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

What I knew, what I knew even then underneath all the static, was that I was encountering something rare. Compatible. Right. I did not have clean language for it at the time, but the felt sense was: oh. This is like me, but in a male body. And I like it.

The language I have for this now, for this particular feeling, is resonance.

And here is the detail that still takes my breath away when I sit with it: he was also offering me the relational structure I had always wanted but never had language for. I am not someone who has ever fit neatly into conventional partnership. I lean toward relationship anarchy,⁴ the idea that the organisms in a relational ecology make the rules that match their own natural needs and rhythms. For me, that has always meant both freedom and devotion. Not one or the other. Both. I had spent years not knowing how to name this, half-convinced it meant something was wrong with me. He was, in his own life and way, living exactly this. He was offering me the specific thing I had always wanted.

The stakes were so high precisely because the thing was real. Every axis. He was right on every single axis. And I still couldn’t say it. I wasn’t running from something imaginary. I was running from something true.

Vegan gluten-free pastries. Oat milk lattes. The kind of café that is shady and lush and quintessentially queer hipster Brooklyn, the kind of place that feels like it was designed specifically for conversations that change things.

We sat across from each other. His hand was on mine, tenderly, the way he did things, the softness of his skin against mine. He was deeply tactile, and I had discovered, to my own surprise, how much I needed that. Needed it. Not just liked. The touch of him was something my nervous system had been quietly starving for without knowing it had a name. At some point during those dates, I had told him, with complete sincerity, that I was a great communicator. I love to communicate, I said. He had no reason not to believe me.

He looked at me the way people do when they actually mean a question, not just the social shape of one.

“So, Nicole… what’s your heart’s desire?”

I stood up and excused myself. In this precise moment, I needed to go to the bathroom.

I walked away from the table, and under my breath, I muttered what I had been trained to mutter when I noticed myself retreating: God, I’m being avoidant.

When I came back, something in the field had changed. His body language had shifted. He looked at me with the particular steadiness of someone who has decided to be honest regardless of the cost, and he spoke.

I think we have great sexual chemistry. I love our conversations and hanging out. But this feels casual. Is this casual to you? Would you like to check in weekly or every other week?

He was giving me an exit that wasn’t humiliation. He was naming what he saw, offering me something clean and kind, and asking me directly to say what I wanted.

I had so many ways to pathologise myself, and I used all of them. Anxious avoidant. Disorganised attachment. ACE. CPTSD. Blah blah blah. Every label a new angle on the same unanswered question, every diagnosis a way of describing the shape of the hole without ever asking what made it. What I did not have was the words for the true thing, which was: no. This is not casual to me. I am terrified and I want you and I don’t know how to say that.

So I failed. Again. The same system, the same program, one more time.

That was four years ago. I have spent those four years doing what I do, which is look at things until they give up their actual meaning. I work in what I’m starting to call SoftSystems™, the study of how human nervous systems organise themselves in response to their environments, with particular attention to the intelligence embedded in behaviours that look, from the outside, like dysfunction. I have a lot of theories about how people work. I have refined most of them twice.

It took me four years to understand that I hadn’t stood up because I didn’t know what my heart desired.

I stood up because, for the first time in my life, I did.

Here is what was happening in my nervous system in the approximately three seconds between his question and my exit:

I desire him. I think he might desire me. If I acknowledge this, I have to know what I want. If I know what I want, I have to reveal it. If I reveal it, I could lose him. If I lose him, I touch something ancient.

The breaker flipped. Not because the system was broken. Because the current was too strong.

There is something else I need to name here. At the time, I was working in a high-pressure tech executive role, design leadership, the kind of job that quietly hollows you out while you’re busy being impressive. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was utterly fried. The nervous system has a window of tolerance,¹ a range within which it can process new information, stay present, take risks. Mine had been running at capacity for months, maybe years. What I understand now is that relating, real relating, the kind where you are actually seen and you let yourself be, requires bandwidth. It requires a nervous system with something left in reserve. I had nothing left. I was showing up to the most vulnerable relational moment of my adult life running on empty, and wondering why I couldn’t stay in the room.

And yet, this is the part I have come to love, the part that makes me want to pat myself gently on the back:

how brilliantly orchestrated. How elegant. A nervous system already at capacity, carrying forty-odd years of learned danger around visibility and longing, suddenly asked to hold attraction and queerness and mutuality and desire all at once, in the presence of a man who kept asking her to be real.

Of course it deployed every tool available. The aloofness. The humor. The bathroom. The preemptive nothing. Each one a small masterpiece of self-protection. Each one the system doing exactly what it was built to do, with the resources it had, in the conditions it actually faced.

This was not, I should tell you, the first time he had handed me a door.

A few weeks earlier, at his place, over Han Dynasty takeout, all from the gluten-free menu, steamed scallops, the works, he had said something I filed away and did not allow myself to fully feel until much later. Casually, sweetly, like it was nothing:

All my friends know you as Arlo.

On my Feeld profile, I had a secret name; my nom de plume was Arlo, after my beloved dog, my mythical creature. He had been using it. More than that: he had been talking about me. To his friends. Enough that they knew my name. I existed in his world, real and named and present, not a maybe, not a quiet almost-thing he was keeping to himself.

I did not know what to do with this information. So I did what I did with all of it. I kept eating.

Then he looked up and asked, “How do you identify? Are you queer?”

I said: “Oh no, I don’t know. I never really thought about it. My friends used to say that I’m a little bit wobbly.”

A little bit wobbly. To a queer man who was asking because he was interested, because he wanted to know, because the door was right there. I then, presumably, ate another scallop.

I didn’t understand it at the time, not when it mattered, but I had answered exactly the way I always did when something real was on the line. Reflexively, with humour. A light touch, a self-deprecating phrase, something charming enough to land and vague enough to hide behind. The joke was the cover. The deep longing stayed safely underneath it, untouched, unexposed. If I made him laugh, maybe he wouldn’t notice I hadn’t actually answered the question.

And yet. Wobbly. Not straight, not gay, just this other in-between thing. I want to sit with that word for a moment, because it turns out I answered correctly. I just wrapped it in comedy so it wouldn’t count. Wobbly is not nothing. Wobbly is exactly what he was asking about. Wobbly is, as I now understand it, somewhere in the neighbourhood of queer, or maybe pan, which is closer still. It’s the knowing that I have always been attracted to the person, the energy, the connection, the je ne sais quoi of it. Not a gender, not a category, but a quality of aliveness in another human being that calls to something in me. I never wanted to be a label. Labels felt like reduction, like being flattened into a box when the actual experience was so much more textured than that.

But labels, as it turns out, are how people find people like them. They are not cages. They are signals. And I had been wandering without one for forty-four years, wondering why I felt so hard to find.

I knew. I had always known, in the imprecise, pre-language way that the body knows things before the mind can bear to name them. I just couldn’t let it land. Not there. Not with him. Not when something real was on the line.

So by the time we arrived at the café, he had already tried once. He had watched me deflect with the particular grace of someone who doesn’t know they’re deflecting. He knew something was in the way. Hence: the sorting out.

He was so patient with me. He was so patient with me. This beautiful man who had himself been deeply hurt, deeply betrayed, who was trying — carefully, generously — to connect. And I kept handing him riddles instead of answers. I kept disappearing into aloofness and deflection and trips to the bathroom while he waited, quietly, for me to arrive.

The aloofness had been the first line of defense: keep your distance, seem indifferent, make yourself a moving target. It had worked, mostly. But he had called the meeting precisely to dismantle it. And when he asked the question that required me not just to drop the aloofness but to reach past it and name what was underneath, the system did the only thing left to it.

It went silent.

I had a name for this at the time. I called it avoidance. I had assembled a fairly sophisticated vocabulary for my own patterns: anxious, avoidant, disorganised, the full internet-attachment-theory starter kit, and I applied these labels with what I believed was self-awareness. What I didn’t understand yet was that labelling a pattern is not the same as understanding it. Avoidance describes the behaviour. It says nothing about what the behaviour is for.

Paul was, as I now understand it, a portal. Not in the sense that he was going to save me, or that I had projected some disowned part of myself onto him. The portal was simpler and stranger than that.

For context: there is a specific woman I dated, once, who perfectly illustrates the sapphic Hinge-to-friendship pipeline. We met on Hinge, and like so many sapphic Hinge stories, it became a friendship. This is what we do. We collect specimens. She refused to date short women, only women over 5’8”. I was one of her tall specimens. I remember walking around the Whitney with her two Prides ago, in a group of four other Hinge-to-friend specimens, and my not-so-tall friend from out of town leaned over and said: wow, everyone here is so tall. Yes, I replied. She collects us.

I tell you this because Paul was my first short king. I had also, I should mention, never dated a man under six feet before. I realise this is polarising. I’m including it because it matters: Paul broke the pattern on multiple axes simultaneously. He was queer, he was short, as such, he was not the physical type I had always reached for, and he was reaching back. My nervous system had no script for this. Every usual heuristic was unavailable.

He was a queer man. And in the specific, animal register of being in his presence, the warmth of his interest, the ease of both his body and his being, and the hand on mine, something in me quietly concluded: Oh. This is me, too.

The body knew before the narrative mind. The body knew before I had language for what it knew. And when he asked the question that required me to surface what the body already understood, to say, in words, here is what I want, the system did what it had been trained to do in the presence of things that felt too large and too exposable to survive.

I grew up in a house where my existence was, at certain temperatures, treated as a problem. Not consistently. Trauma is rarely consistent, which is part of what makes it so efficient. There were things said that a child should not hear. Things that a child cannot integrate accurately.

A child cannot conclude: my mother is dysregulated, and this is about her, not me. A child concludes: something about my existence is dangerous. And then the nervous system, which is nothing if not a brilliant engineer, builds accordingly.

I have a whole relationship with my mother now. A better one. A more real one. I am not telling this part of the story to shame her. I am telling it because the nervous system is autobiographical, and mine has a history, and that history matters for what comes next.

I used to have a recurring dream as a child. I would be in a situation that required me to scream. I needed help, someone needed to hear me, and I would open my mouth and nothing would come out. The scream was real. The urgency was real. There was just no sound.

When Paul asked me what my heart desired, I opened my mouth.

No sound came out.

The same nervous system. The same adaptation. Forty years later, different furniture.

I want to be precise here, because precision matters to me in a way that I have come to understand is not pedantry but fidelity. I am autistic, and one of the ways this shows up is that I cannot tolerate flattening, the collapsing of distinct things into one convenient label. Grief is not the same as wanting someone back. Attraction is not the same as limerence.² Intimacy is not the same as diffusion. Rage is not the same as dysregulation.

And avoidance is not the same as not knowing.

What I was doing at that table was not a failure of self-knowledge. It was, in the taxonomy I’ve spent years building, a successful deployment of a nervous system strategy that had kept me intact in conditions where intact was not guaranteed. The frozen silence was not emptiness. It was the opposite of emptiness, so full that the circuit couldn’t hold.

I knew, even then, that I was a highly sensitive person.³ I had always known that. But sensitivity was supposed to be a trait, a temperament, a thing you managed. Not a mystery that needed solving. What I could not explain was this. Why this man. Why this particular quality of reaction, this specific short circuit? This body behaving in this particularly discombobulating way? I was sensitive to a lot of things but I had never quite fallen apart like this.

So I made it my life’s work to find out.

There is a researcher named Patricia Crittenden⁵ who spent decades watching what happens to children in dangerous attachment environments and arrived at a conclusion that I find genuinely radical: people are not disorganised. They are brilliantly organised around danger. What looks like chaos from the outside is, from the inside, an extraordinarily coherent response to a threat that may no longer be present but was, at some point, entirely real.

That’s my hill. I will die on it. That is the thing I keep returning to, in every iteration of the work I do.

But the intellectual framework alone is not enough. Understanding that your nervous system is brilliantly organised around danger does not, by itself, soften anything. For that, I needed something else.

I found it through another portal: another devastating breakup, another moment of being face down in my own wreckage. My friend Jacqui spoke to me quite sternly and said, with the directness of someone who loves you, and I’m paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of: babe, you’re being really mean to yourself. Listen to this Tara Brach podcast.

Tara Brach talks about radical compassion: the kind that can look directly at pain without flinching and still choose tenderness. I listened. I kept listening. Then I walked directly to the Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street and St. James Place in Clinton Hill, the same corner with the famous Biggie Smalls mural. Radical compassion and the Notorious B.I.G., sharing a block in Brooklyn. I bought the book. And then I went on to study with Tara and Jack Kornfield⁶ for two years, during COVID, to learn the thing that had saved me well enough to teach it. Kindness. Self-compassion. The practice of meeting yourself, your whole, complicated, messy, defended, brilliant self, with something other than judgment.

Crittenden told me: you are not broken. You are organised around danger. Tara told me: and you are worthy of tenderness anyway.

SoftSystems™ and my work within it live in the space between those two sentences.

Jung⁷ wrote about projection, how we often see in others what we cannot yet see in ourselves, how we fall in love with our own disowned depths reflected back through someone else's face. I think he was right, but I also think the insight requires one correction. The attraction itself is real. The thing that comes alive in the presence of this person is not manufactured. That is not imaginary. That is you, recognising something. The projection is the story you tell about it. The aliveness is true.

Paul rang, and something in me began to vibrate.

That vibration was not delusional. It was not limerence. It was not anxious attachment or avoidant defense or any of the other names I had been applying to myself with the confidence of someone who mistakes vocabulary for understanding.

It was recognition.

And here is what the portal actually led to: after Paul, my queer expression flourished. By a lot. I found more of myself, the parts that had been waiting, unnamed, for the right conditions to surface. And because I became more of who I actually am, I found Jeremy. My best gay friend. Still my best friend. Still in my world. We could find each other because I had finally found enough of myself to show up to the meeting. I would find myself dancing at House of Yes with Jeremy on mushrooms, dancing like no one was watching, with a reckless queer abandon I had always dreamed of — and think: if only Paul could see me now. That's not nothing. That's everything that matters.

Here is what I have come to believe about nervous systems, having spent a considerable amount of time studying them and a longer amount of time living inside one:

They are autobiographical. Every strategy, every silence, every flight to the bathroom. These are not random. They carry a history. They are the record of what this particular organism needed to do to survive, in the specific conditions it actually encountered. You cannot understand the behaviour without the history. You cannot dismiss the behaviour without dismissing the intelligence that built it.

This is what I mean by SoftSystems™. It is not compassion, exactly, though compassion is in there. It is closer to reverence. And it comes from a specific place in how I am wired.

I am a systems thinker. I have always wanted to understand the thing behind the thing. Not just what is happening, but why, and what it’s for, and what the whole architecture looks like when you step back far enough to see it. This is how I approach design. It is how I approach organisations. And it is, it turns out, how I approach people.

The simplest version of SoftSystems™ is this: they hurt you? They must be hurting too. Not as an excuse. Not as a reason to stay in the path of the harm. But as a genuine inquiry into the system that produced the behaviour. Nobody arrives at cruelty or distance or emotional unavailability from nowhere. Every adaptation has a history. Every defense was once a solution. If you trace it back far enough, if you ask not what’s wrong with this person but what was this person trying to survive, you almost always find something that makes a terrible kind of sense.

This does not mean everyone deserves your patience. It means everyone deserves to be understood as coherent. As a system responding to its conditions. As something more than the sum of their worst outputs.

When I look at what my nervous system built, the frozen screams, the silent standing-up, the forty years of interpreting my own knowing as not-knowing, I do not think: poor you. I think: look at what you built. Look at the astonishing intelligence with which you survived.

I’ve written more about this concept — what I call Adaptive Intelligence — here.

The question the standard models ask is: what went wrong? What is the diagnosis, the dysfunction, the deficit?

The question I keep asking is: what intelligent problem was this nervous system trying to solve?

Those are different questions. They produce different people.

I noticed the adaptation that afternoon at the café in Brooklyn. I labelled it, filed it, and moved on. I just didn’t understand it yet.

Four years later, I understand it. I am approaching forty-eight. In a couple of years, I will be fifty, which feels like the kind of threshold that deserves honesty.

So here is the honest thing: the thing I have wanted most, for most of my adult life, is not complicated. I want a partner. Not in the abstract romantic sense. I want a ride-or-die-adventure-buddy. Someone to build a life with that is strange and specific and ours. And it has eluded me. Not for lack of feeling, not for lack of wanting, not because the right person never appeared. Paul appeared. Others appeared. And every time, something in me went sideways, aloof, silent, unreachable, in the exact moment the door was open.

For a long time I called this bad luck. Then I called it my attachment style. Then I called it a pattern. None of those names told me anything useful.

What I understand now is this: the body was doing what it had always done, keeping me alive, keeping me intact, keeping me from touching something ancient and annihilating. It was not avoidance. It was armour. Beautiful, precise, unnecessary armour, built for a war that had already ended.

After the café, after two opened doors and two Irish exits, I did what any self-respecting person in full possession of their communication skills would do.

I sent him a meme.

It was from Instagram. The text read: the sluttiest thing a man can do is have nice hands. He had nice hands. He had nice everything. I sent it.

He did not reply.

I called my friend Alina, who is a relationship and dating expert — the heteronormative kind — and told her what had happened. She listened to the whole café story, the questions, the exits, and then I told her about the meme.

She said: OF COURSE HE DIDN’T RESPOND. WHY WOULD ANYONE RESPOND TO THAT AFTER THAT?!

I sat with that for a moment.

She was right. I had been given two direct invitations to say what I wanted. I had declined both. And then, in lieu of the true thing, I had sent a meme about hands. My nervous system found a way to reach toward him. It just took the most indirect route available.

Something in me could not get over this man. I kept trying. I would reach out every so often, a message, a check-in, some small offering lobbed across the silence to see if the line was still open. I had deleted his number at some point, the way you do when you’re trying to be sensible about things. But I had also, before deleting it, written it down in one of my journals. Just in case. Both of those things were true simultaneously: I deleted it, and I kept it. I let go, and I held on. The same ambivalence, the same two-handed grip on a door I couldn’t walk through and couldn’t close.

I have not yet told you the biggest heartbreak of all.

About a year after the café — March 2023 — I reached out again from the number I had written in my journal. And this time — finally — I found some words. Not all of them. But some. I told him my therapist was bored of hearing about him, and that I was bored of myself for still thinking about it. I told him that meeting him had confronted me in ways I hadn’t expected, that I hadn’t really opened up to my own queerness or other relational possibilities before him, and that it had made me want — need — to stop hiding and express myself more fully. I told him I was grateful for that. I asked if he’d be open to connecting.

He replied: Arlo! What an amazing message to open my phone to. Short answer is yes, I’d love to meet up and talk about life love n all that.

I wrote back: You remember me. That’s good 😆

Still the humour. Still the deflection. Even there.

He remembered me. We reconnected. And I kept trying to repair what had frayed between us. But I still lacked the understanding and the nervous system capacity to actually meet this man — his particular, unique nervous system, his clarity, his willingness to be present. I could reach toward him. I just couldn’t quite arrive.

November 2024. Trump won the election over Kamala. We watched the results together. He sent me a Gotts Street Park track — Tell Me Why — and then: Hope you’re home safe. The sexiest politically devastating night I’ve ever had. I’m glad we got to share it.

I replied: Yeah it’s very discombobulating to feel so good and so bad at the same time.

Still doing it. Still describing the feeling without naming what the good part was.

I never sat with the words of that song until the day I wrote this essay. I don’t know what to do with that except tell you: tell me why I shouldn’t leave. The choice is yours. He was still asking. On the worst political night of the decade, he was still asking. And I still didn’t answer.

A few days later, a second dinner at his place. Before we met, he asked me very clearly: what are your expectations?

I said: nothing.

Because if you say nothing, you cannot lose anything. If you claim no expectations, you cannot be found wanting. The armour had just changed shape, from aloofness to preemptive surrender. Same nervous system. Different costume.

I was autistically overeager and overstimulated. Again, my words failed me. But he was generous. He was kind. It felt… nice. Safe, even. Like maybe something could still be salvaged, or at least tended.

One evening, I invited him to dinner. Lamb and Lebanese wine. He told me he had gluten poisoning.

The next morning, watching Instagram stories, I saw he was at a concert.

Something ancient flipped. I lashed out over text. This almost never happens to me. The freeze is my move, not the strike. But there it was. The frozen scream had finally found sound, just aimed in the wrong direction, at the wrong moment, for the right reasons.

He tried to call. I missed it. He left a text message instead.

I cannot remember everything it said. But this part is scarred into my memory, word for word:

Soften a little, Nicole. Not everyone in the world is out to get you.

Stay soft is my manifesto. It is etched into my skin.

It landed like a wound. Whether he meant it to or not. But here is the thing about soften a little Nicole: STAY SOFT was already tattooed on my body — relatively new ink, part of stepping more fully into who I was becoming. He reached for those words and found them already written on my skin.

He was not wrong about the direction. He was just late.

I called him. We talked. He said he hadn’t understood why I was so upset — I had told him I had no expectations, after all. He was simply taking me at my word. He was glad we were talking about it.

He was right. I had said no expectations. The armour had worked exactly as designed, right up until it didn’t.

After I hung up, we never spoke again. I unfollowed him on Instagram. He still follows me.

When I finished up my job at Accenture not long after, I changed my phone number. I told people it was because of the job transition. Really, it was because I wanted some control over being reached in a situation where I had never felt any control at all. I couldn’t say what I wanted. I couldn’t close the door with words. So I did the only thing left: I quietly made myself unreachable. The armour, one last time, doing its job.

What he did give me, what I will not diminish, is the portal. My queer expression flourished after him. By a lot. That’s not for nothing, as the New Yorkers say. I walked through the door he held open, just not with him beside me. I became more myself. I found more of my own language. The person I am now, the work I do now, it runs in a direct line through that beautiful, frustrating, tender, clarifying mess of a connection.

I have always wanted to write this piece. I just wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the full picture.

The possibility of him has never left me. It hangs around me in the air like an undigested grief. Not for him exactly, but for the version of me who could have stayed at the table. Who could have said: yes, I think I’m queer, and I think I want you, and I’m terrified, and I’m here anyway.

This is the gift I am giving my almost-fifty self: not the relationship I didn’t manage to build at forty-four, but the understanding of why. Because you cannot dismantle armour you cannot see. And I can see it now.

The more clearly I look, the less pathology I find.

The more clearly I look, the more intelligence I find.

I’m still making out the shape of SoftSystems™. It is a soft system after all, a living ecology. It keeps learning and changing shape, as we do. What I know is that it starts here: with the refusal to call a masterpiece a malfunction.

And I know it starts with that bathroom.

I am no longer a mystery to myself. I am the result of my environment, of everything that shaped me, everything that built me, everything that had to be survived before I could arrive here, at nearly forty-eight, finally able to read my own map. The wound has a shape now. A topography. I know where it came from. I know what it was for.

Oh, the mess we’re in.

And how extraordinarily, tenderly, worth it.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end, no small feat in today’s
attention economy. If you feel drawn, please share with a friend:

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For those who want to go deeper:

¹ Window of tolerance — a concept developed by Dr. Dan Siegel to describe the optimal zone of nervous system arousal within which a person can function effectively. Expanded significantly in trauma work by Peter Levine (Waking the Tiger, 1997) and Pat Ogden (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy).

² Limerence — coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love (1979). Describes an involuntary state of intense romantic obsession distinct from love or attraction.

³ Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) — a trait identified and named by Dr. Elaine Aron in The Highly Sensitive Person (1996). Characterized by deep processing of sensory and emotional information.

⁴ Relationship anarchy — a relational philosophy first articulated by Andie Nordgren in the 2006 manifesto The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy. Centers the idea that each relationship defines its own terms rather than following predetermined social scripts.

⁵ Patricia Crittenden and the Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) — Crittenden’s DMM of attachment and adaptation is a significant expansion of Bowlby and Ainsworth’s original attachment theory. Her work argues that all attachment patterns, including those labeled “disorganized,” are coherent adaptive responses to the specific caregiving environment. Key text: Raising Parents (2008). The International Association for the Study of Attachment (IASA) carries her ongoing work.

⁶ Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield — Tara Brach is a psychologist and meditation teacher whose work on radical acceptance and compassion is collected in Radical Acceptance (2003) and Radical Compassion (2019). Her podcast is available at tarabrach.com. Jack Kornfield is a Buddhist teacher and psychologist; his foundational text is A Path with Heart (1993). Together they founded the Spirit Rock Meditation Center and the two-year teacher training program in Mindfulness Meditation.

⁷ Carl Jung — the concept of projection is developed throughout Jung's collected works; the most accessible entry point is Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933). His ideas on the shadow and psychological projection are explored in depth in Aion (1951) and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959).

Earlier today, while going through my inbox, I came across a note from a recruiter.

“I hope this email finds you well... blah blah… we think you’d be just right for a Group Creative Director role we have in New York, which also offers a slew of benefits and a sizeable (very seductive) salary.”

It certainly does not find me well. It finds me forlorn.

It finds me in Beirut, where I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon drinking coffee to the soundtrack of drones, and wondering whether I’ve accidentally blown up my entire life in pursuit of some vague spiritual hunch. It finds me missing my apartment. Missing my books and my Philips Hue lighting system. Missing the uninterrupted Manhattan skyline. Missing that bottle of Aesop Reverence hand wash with the little gritty bits in it that somehow convinced me my hands could be both clean and holy.

Dear God, I miss my nice things.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about taking a mini-retirement, or a career break, or a creative sabbatical—whatever language makes you feel least irresponsible. It can feel like a million tiny deaths. Nobody tells you that while you might intellectually and physically reject the Western capitalist idea that your worth is tied to your productivity, you’ll still wake up on a Wednesday morning and realise you’ve somehow forgotten how to be a person.

Maybe that’s because so much of what we call identity is really just borrowed structure. Somebody else’s scaffolding. Meetings. Sprint plans. Priorities. Deadlines. Endless emails. People needing something from us so that, in some quiet unconscious way, we get to feel that we matter.

I matter because I solve this problem. I matter today because my team needs me. I matter because somebody is waiting for my replies on Figma.

Take all that away and, for a little while at least, what’s left doesn’t necessarily feel like freedom. At least it didn’t for me. It feels like standing alone in a vast open field with no map. And no flowers.

Desolate.

Beige.

Boring.

Because a Group Creative Director role in New York isn’t just a job listing, it’s a portal back to an identity I inhabited extremely well. I know how to be that woman. I know how to walk into those rooms, lead those meetings, and make beautiful things. I know how to wear the right coat and order the right natural wine and buy flowers on the way home because it’s Friday, and that’s just what my life looked like.

Halfway across the world from where I used to call home, and halfway through a course that comes with absolutely no guarantees, my inbox quietly whispers:

Heyyyy, girl, you could stop all this uncertainty tomorrow.

And honestly?

It’s tempting.

In fact, as I write this, I’m sitting on my balcony, rolling my own cigarettes, drinking sparkling water, occasionally dipping into a tiny secret stash of cannabis that has somehow survived three international flights, and privately entertaining the idea that I’ve become the spiritual, slightly cleaner version of Hunter S. Thompson.

Which, admittedly, is not a sentence I ever expected to write.

And yet here we are.

It’s feeling like a very specific kind of midlife crisis that I’m in, which makes it especially hard not to find that job with that kind of money seductive. And the more I sit with it, the more I realise it has very little to do with wanting to go back and everything to do with one simple fact:

I miss knowing who I was.

And maybe that’s the real work of liminal spaces: surviving the inconceivable and uncomfortable in-between for long enough to become someone new.

I was telling my friend Lavinia the other day

“I’m in some kind of chrysalis stage.”

“That’s beautiful,” she said.

“No, babe.

I’m disintegrating.

I’m literal goo.”

The mythology of transformation skips over one important detail: before the butterfly, everything falls apart. And I get why the chrysalis sounds beautiful. I really do. It seems like it’s something sacred, ancient, important! Transformative even.

Of course, I had to Google “chrysalis,” just to be sure, and the results were harrowing.

Inside the chrysalis, as it turns out, much of the caterpillar breaks down into what scientists call imaginal soup, while tiny clusters of cells survive the dissolution and eventually become the butterfly’s wings, eyes, and legs. And all I’m thinking is that imaginal soup sounds like something on the menu at a vegan café in Brooklyn.

The caterpillar turns into goo.

And yet, humans love butterflies. Whether it’s a fleeting sighting in a garden or etched onto skin forever, it’s a symbol we’ve been obsessed with for thousands of years. I even have a butterfly tattoo. I think we keep returning to them because they seem to offer an answer to one of our oldest existential questions: how do we survive becoming someone else?

What we conveniently skip over, however, is that the caterpillar doesn’t simply grow wings and become beautiful.

It fucking dissolves first.

At the same time, I’m also realising that a human being can be deeply engaged in an inquiry into the nature and essence of self while simultaneously spending three hours looking at pictures of chrysalises online and concluding that they mostly look like little hanging ballsacks.

Which I find strangely reassuring.

Maybe that’s the real spiritual path. Taking yourself completely seriously and not seriously at all.

I wish I could tell you I’ve figured it out. I haven’t. I can’t neatly wrap up this chrysalis chapter with a little lesson or tie it off with a bow just yet. All I have is this enquiry: Maybe the butterfly doesn’t emerge because it knows what it’s becoming. Maybe it just keeps unfolding because that’s what living things do.

I’m still here in Beirut. The empty days still feel a bit empty. I’m looking forward to the next module of my training in Italy while simultaneously wondering whether liquefying my entire identity was perhaps a little premature. The recruiter email, somehow, feels a little less tempting after sitting with it for a while.

That’s how your email finds me.

P.S. Have you ever actually looked at a chrysalis?
Google it. It’s not cute.
Neither, as it turns out, is transformation.

If any of this resonates, I’m opening up a very small amount of space for one-to-one enquiry work. If you're navigating a life transition, an identity shift, or simply asking bigger questions than the world seems to have room for, I'd love to hear from you.

My career spans more than two decades across Sydney and New York, where I worked as a creative director, strategist, and design leader, helping organisations understand people, navigate complexity, and create products, services, and experiences that shaped everyday life for millions of people. Design was a natural home for me because I’ve always been fascinated by people and the systems we inhabit. Long before I had language for human-centred design, systems thinking, service design, or organisational strategy, I was paying attention to the ways people moved through the world, the stories they inherited, the patterns they repeated, the things they longed for, and…

the often surprising gap between what people say and what they actually do.

At its best, design is a practice of observation. It asks us to notice what others overlook, to look beneath symptoms, to sit with ambiguity, and to understand how seemingly unrelated forces interact with one another. Over the years, I learned how to study behaviours, cultures, environments, relationships, incentives, and systems, and I became increasingly interested in the question beneath the question.

What is really happening here? What forces are shaping this outcome? What are we missing?

For a long time, I directed that inquiry outward toward products, organisations, teams, and institutions. Then, a period of burnout, grief, and profound disruption required me to turn that same inquiry toward myself.

At first, I was trying to understand why certain things felt harder than they seemed to be for other people. Why some environments energised me while others left me completely depleted. Why I could hold enormous complexity in some areas of my life and feel overwhelmed by seemingly simple things in others. Why there were aspects of myself that I could never quite explain, despite years of self-reflection and personal growth work.

For a long time, I was very hard on myself. I assumed I needed more discipline, more consistency, a better system, a stronger mindset. I thought the answer was to try harder, to become a more optimised version of myself, to somehow overcome the parts of me that didn’t seem to fit.

Instead, what followed was one of the deepest periods of inquiry of my life.

What I actually needed was understanding, and perhaps even more than that, compassion, as a way of relating more gently to myself. The more I learned about my brain, my nervous system, and my patterns of relating, the more I could meet myself with curiosity instead of criticism. I stopped seeing my differences as flaws to fix and started seeing them as information—clues, perhaps, to how I was actually designed.

Today, I identify as AuADHD, a framework that has brought tremendous clarity to experiences that once felt fragmented, confusing, or contradictory. More importantly, it transformed my relationship with myself. Many of the things I had spent years judging turned out to be information. Many of the things I thought I needed to fix turned out to be signals. What I had experienced as fragmentation was often a lack of context.

Did everything suddenly and miraculously become easy? No. But my relationship with myself changed. I stopped treating my differences as evidence of failure and started approaching them as information. The more context I had, the less energy I spent fighting my own nature, and the more energy I could devote to building a life that fit.

That experience changed the way I relate to myself, but it also changed the way I relate to other people. Once you begin to understand how profoundly our lives are shaped by context, relationships, culture, family systems, nervous systems, history, power, and circumstance, it becomes much harder to reduce people to simple explanations. You become more interested in complexity. More interested in nuance. More interested in curiosity than certainty.

I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life building a life in the space between who I was told I should be and who I actually am.

As a queer woman approaching fifty who has never been married and doesn’t have children, I’ve often found myself living outside some of the stories that society offers as markers of success, belonging, or adulthood. For years, I assumed that eventually I, too, would arrive at the life I was supposed to want. Instead, I’ve gradually come to understand that my work has never been to fit myself into an inherited template. My work has been to pay attention closely enough to discover what is actually true for me.

That process has required me to redefine success more than once. It has taught me to value friendship as a primary relationship, community as a form of wealth, and meaning as something we create rather than achieve. It has also taught me that there are many ways to build a beautiful life.

Arlo, my dog and frequent co-conspirator, appears regularly in these pages for precisely this reason. He has been one of my greatest teachers in presence, joy, devotion, and the quiet importance of daily rituals. He reminds me, often, that life is happening now.

Around the same time, I found myself asking questions that extended beyond my career, as I began to suspect that vocation was something larger than my LinkedIn identity. I became increasingly interested in the parts of life that rarely appear on résumés but quietly determine the actual quality of our lives: friendship, grief, belonging, attention, community, beauty, spirituality, embodiment, and the countless small acts of care that sustain us through periods of uncertainty.

Those questions eventually brought me to Beirut, Lebanon.

Living on the land my family comes from has changed the texture of my attention. It has deepened my understanding of interdependence and sharpened my interest in examining life through anti-capitalist and decolonial lenses. It has reminded me that even amid instability, uncertainty, and loss, people continue to gather, cook, joke, flirt, pray, make art, raise children, care for one another, and create beauty. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to these ordinary acts because they reveal something essential about human flourishing. They remind us that life is not waiting somewhere on the other side of crisis. Life is happening here.

Over the years, the forms have changed, but the questions have remained remarkably consistent. Whether I was working as a designer and leader, studying mindfulness, making sense of my own neurodivergence, returning to Lebanon, or training as a holistic counsellor, I have found myself returning to the same inquiry again and again: How do humans flourish? What helps us become more fully ourselves? What shapes our behaviour? How do we create lives that feel meaningful? How do we navigate change, grief, uncertainty, and transition? How do we pay attention? My work today, whether through writing, teaching, mentoring, inquiry, or one-to-one containers, is less an attempt to provide answers than an ongoing exploration of these questions.

SoftSystems™ is simply the home I’ve built for that exploration.

It is a place where I explore the invisible systems that shape our lives and the softer ones that help sustain them. Through essays, courses, conversations, and experiments, I write about attention, mindfulness, nervous system awareness, design, creativity, grief, belonging, leadership, community care, and what it means to remain human in a world that often encourages us to become harder, faster, and more disconnected from ourselves.

The longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that attention is one of the most important capacities we can cultivate. The things we learn to notice shape the lives we create. The things we ignore shape them too.

In addition to writing, I also hold a small number of one-to-one containers for people navigating periods of transition, uncertainty, creativity, burnout, grief, or change. My work isn’t about fixing people. It’s about creating space for deeper understanding, greater coherence, and the kinds of questions that help us move toward lives that feel more aligned, more intentional, and more our own.

If you’ve found your way here, I’m really glad you did.

I hope you find something useful, something beautiful, and perhaps a few ideas that help you see yourself and the world a little more clearly.

Yesterday, during an enquiry session (part of my ongoing therapy training), the woman I was working with began describing a blockage in her chest.

When I asked her to stay with the sensation and describe it more closely, she called it:

a tightly wound ball of twine.

At one point during the enquiry, she said she wanted to ask it to simply “move aside.”

But instinctively, I wanted to slow it down and stay with the ball a little longer.

Partly because the image stayed with me, and partly because I know how powerful a metaphor is in this kind of healing work.

Perhaps it’s even more precise to call it becoming work. Becoming more yourself beneath the adaptations. “Healing” can sometimes imply that something is inherently wrong or broken within us, when often we are dismantling layers of protective strategies that arose intelligently in response to relational, familial, cultural, or systemic conditions.

In my work with Karima, my mentor and holistic therapist of more than twenty years, metaphor has often become a doorway into the psyche, through either image, sensation or symbology.

Something that initially sounds simple, but carries an entire emotional architecture beneath it.

During one session over Zoom in the COVID lockdowns, I described a feeling of numbness. A kind of emotional “meh.”

Karima then invited me to bring texture, colour, and sensation to the feeling.

What emerged was:

grey.
flat.
stale bread.

Stale bread!

And I remember thinking, “I never would have imagined stale bread could unlock a breakthrough, but here we are.”

Because metaphor allows the body to speak in a language more ancient than analysis. And sometimes, if we stay with the image long enough, it begins to reveal not only the wound, but also the wisdom inside the adaptation.

What if healing then is not about forcing the ball of twine out of the way? What if healing is instead about slowly unravelling it in the same way it formed?

Thread by tiny thread.

Every time we:

• overrode our instincts

• played small

• swallowed our truth

• dismissed a creative impulse before it could fully arrive

Sometimes to keep the peace. Sometimes to avoid shame or ridicule.

When I asked her what playing it safe had cost her, she answered immediately:

no daring.
no excitement.
boring. routine.

And I thought: yes!

Because protective strategies do protect us.

And at the very same time, they can slowly narrow the range of aliveness available to us.

So perhaps this is not about the dramatic removal of the ball, but the patient unwinding of it through just enough attention, honesty, expression, and release — ensuring we do not overwhelm the system all at once, allowing the nervous system to stay with itself.

In Somatic Experiencing, this principle is called titration: the slow and careful unwinding of activation in manageable amounts, rather than overwhelming the system through force.

And perhaps that is exactly what the ball of twine was revealing:

that what we call “the knot” is often adaptive intelligence.

a protective structure formed slowly over time.

Because something in the person learned:

This is how we survive here.

This is what I mean when I talk about Adaptive Intelligence: the body developing protective strategies before the conscious mind has language for them.

Often, this looks like staying quiet, being agreeable, over-performing competence, disconnecting from desire, becoming hyper-independent, becoming funny, becoming useful, becoming small, or even becoming exceptional. (Hiii!)

These are not random personality traits floating in space. They are often exquisitely intelligent responses to relational, familial, cultural, or systemic conditions.

The knot is not evidence that the body failed.
The knot is evidence that the body succeeded in protecting the person.

That shift in orientation matters.

When we begin to understand our adaptations as intelligent attempts at protection rather than personal failures, we often become more compassionate toward ourselves. And that, for me, is everything. Love and compassion are the connective tissue underneath all the work that we do in SoftSystems™.

Because where there is compassion, there is usually less judgment.

This is also why force rarely works in healing.

If a protective structure is formed through adaptive intelligence, the nervous system will resist anything that feels like violent dismantling. It will interpret that as danger.

Which means healing often requires:

• respecting the adaptation before trying to change it.

• understanding what the strategy protects.

• creating enough safety for new responses to emerge gradually.

That is why the twine metaphor stayed with me.

A ball of twine is not chaos. It is organised and intelligent tension. It formed slowly and carefully through repetition, over time, and the unravelling cannot be rushed without creating more tangling.

The body is not irrational.

The symptom is often a strategy.

The protection is often intelligent.

Adaptive intelligence is the nervous system’s attempt to preserve belonging, safety, dignity, attachment, or survival under imperfect conditions.

And perhaps healing begins the moment we stop asking:

“How do I get rid of this?”

and begin asking:

“What was this trying to protect?”

This reflection is informed by my ongoing therapy training, mindfulness practice, and studies in somatics, nervous system regulation, and embodiment.

Don’t worry. I’m not here to talk about football. Or what he wore. Or who is or isn’t a Zionist talking head. You don’t need my hot take. The internet is already oversaturated with moral verdicts disguised as analysis.

But what really stopped me in my tracks, what kept my mind whirring long after I put my phone down, what had me waking up this very morning still thinking about it, was a tiny little ig comment.

A Latinx person offered nuance. A very clear, very sober both/and: yes, we know the NFL doesn’t love us. Yes, we know these industries profit from us. And also, it still mattered to see one of our own on the world stage. It still mattered to feel seen.

And the reply they received was essentially:
“Oh, so you like being exploited.”

I’m paraphrasing, but the energy was… off.

And that comment wasn’t just “a little rude.” It was structurally violent in the way it dismissed someone’s lived reality and replaced it with a smug moral verdict. It was the kind of flattening that says, "I get to decide what your joy means." I get to decide what your survival means. I get to decide what your complexity costs.

It had the familiar tone of someone who has never had to wait to see themselves reflected back. Someone for whom representation is so abundant that it can be treated as disposable. Someone speaking from the comfort of distance, mistaking moral superiority for moral clarity.

And I couldn’t shake it.

Not because I’m interested in defending celebrities. Not because I think we shouldn’t critique empire. We absolutely should. But because that comment revealed something I’ve been watching happen everywhere lately.

Because here’s the thing: the heart of this isn’t the halftime show.

It’s not Bad Bunny. It’s not football. It’s not Zara. It’s not even the Super Bowl.

–> It’s the nervous system politics of both/and.

It’s the false binaries the internet keeps trying to force on us, especially in moments of collective grief and political horror.

As if the only options are:

Critique the system, but don’t feel joy.
Feel joy?
Ok. But now you’re complicit.
Fail purity?
Now you’re disposable.

And I can feel how seductive that kind of thinking is right now. Certainty feels like safety when the world is burning, but…

no babe. life is not legible like that anymore.

Maybe it never was.

Because here’s what I know: we are speaking to each other’s nervous systems, whether we realise it or not…

: certainty feels like safety

We are living through genocide. Mass death. Starvation, displacement, and state violence unfolding in real time. Institutions fail to act. Power stays protected. Empire reveals itself, not subtly, but openly.

And everywhere you look, people are putting their bodies on the line to say: enough. Meanwhile, the machinery of impunity keeps turning. The rich stay insulated. The powerful stay protected. The rest of us are asked to keep scrolling as if any of this is normal.

Rage is not irrational here. Rage is the sanest response.

But when people are overwhelmed—grieving, furious, exhausted—the mind craves certainty. It doesn’t always crave truth. It craves relief.

And the internet is the perfect delivery system for that craving.

Because the internet is not built for grief. It’s built for velocity.

And velocity is not the same thing as truth.

: a small primer on nonviolent communication

One of the frameworks I return to again and again is Nonviolent Communication (NVC), developed by Marshall Rosenberg. It’s a practice for staying human when everything inside of you just wants to win.

At its core, NVC is built on a radical premise:

And what NVC teaches is that we are rarely in conflict over needs themselves. We are in conflict over strategies: the way we’re trying to meet those needs.

Someone’s strategy might be to boycott.
Someone else’s strategy might be to find joy where they can.
Someone’s strategy might be to call out.
Someone else’s strategy might be to build quietly.

And NVC reminds us that beneath the comment-section warfare, there is often something painfully human: grief, fear, powerlessness, the need for justice, the need to belong, the need to feel like, for a moment, we are not alone.

Even when someone’s behaviour is harmful, it is often an attempt to meet a need.

Misguided, yes. Sometimes violent, yes. But still… an attempt.

To be clear, this doesn’t ever excuse harm. But it does change the question, and I am always interested in changing the question:

Instead of asking, “Who is the villain?”
We can ask, “What is the need underneath this?”

That’s where discernment begins.

I studied NVC, or “Wise Speech”, with Oren Jay Sofer, whose transmission of it is so beautifully woven in with the dharma. And I don’t say this lightly: in this heated world, a world addicted to outrage, this is revolutionary, and it’s what I mean by compassion with teeth.

The work here, as Sofer is pointing to, is not to abandon accountability. The work is to stay precise enough to name harm without turning people into monsters.

: right speech: the Buddha’s checklist

The dharma has always been clear about this: how we speak is not separate from how we live. I think it is basic human training to learn how to communicate non-violently. Do with that what you will.

We need to learn how to have integrity under pressure.

Right Speech is often taught through four or five deceptively simple questions. Some traditions also include gentleness as its own criterion: not just true, but spoken in a way that doesn’t harden the heart.

Is it true?
Is it beneficial?
Is it timely?
Is it spoken with goodwill?

It’s a checklist that sounds almost quaint until you try to practice it on the intwernet. Pretty sure if the Buddha were teaching today, he’d absolutely be like:

”WAIT…before you hit send…BREATHE…”

Because, unfortunately, online discourse is designed to reward the opposite:
speed, certainty, cruelty, performance.

And that’s where we get into trouble…

Because when we encounter each other, we are not just exchanging opinions.

We are shaping nervous systems.
We are either widening the world,
or tightening it.

The Buddha’s questions already contain everything we need. In many ways, they are the definition of skillfulness.

But sometimes I can’t help but imagine what those contemplations would sound like if the Buddha were alive today, in the age of comment sections and quote-tweets. In the age of algorithms that reward outrage. In the age of discourse, moving faster than our nervous systems can metabolise.

Maybe the questions would sound like:

• Am I addressing harm… or performing superiority?

• Am I speaking to a human being… or to an idea?

• Am I trying to win… or am I trying to stay human?

Not as a replacement for Right Speech, but as a modern doorway into it.

That last one is the question I keep coming back to:

Am I trying to win… or am I trying to stay human? Oof.

: Jesus was radical

I said what I said.

He was not a polite man. He was neither interested in optics nor in appearing righteous. He flipped tables. He disrupted markets. He confronted power. He was, by any modern definition, radical.

And what’s always struck me is that his compassion wasn’t sentimental.
It wasn’t performative.
It had teeth.

He loved the unlovable. He ate with the outcast. He stood with the diseased and the downtrodden – those people society treated as disposable. And he reserved some of his sharpest critique not for the sinners, but for the righteous. The ones performing holiness while withholding their kindness.

I don’t say this to indict Christianity. I’ve met Christians whose faith is luminous, embodied, and deeply liberatory. But I’ve also witnessed the dissonance: people who speak the language of love and then move through the world wielding breathtaking cruelty.

And sometimes I want to say, in the gentlest possible way:
You do realise Jesus was a revolutionary… he was friends with Mary Magdalene. Hellooooo! It was mercy that moved him.

Because whatever we believe spiritually, the lesson holds.

If our values don’t make us kinder, more humane, more willing to protect the vulnerable, then what exactly are we practising?

SoftSystems: awareness without resourcing becomes cruelty

This is where my SoftSystems™ thesis comes in.

Being politically awake without being resourced doesn’t make us powerful. It makes us brittle. It makes us reactive. It makes us easy to manipulate.

Awareness is essential. We need systemic literacy. We need to see the machinery. We need to understand extraction, empire, capitalism, propaganda, and how the attention economy shapes what we believe is real.

But awareness without resourcing turns into overwhelm.

And overwhelm turns into cruelty.

So the question becomes: how do we stay awake without becoming hardened?

That’s what staying soft means to me.

Not spiritual bypassing. Not passive kindness. Not “good vibes.”

It means staying regulated enough to remain human. It means staying resourced enough to keep our hearts online. It means having practices that keep us grounded in the body so we don’t outsource our pain onto strangers in a comment section.

Systemic awareness is the seeing.

Resourcing is the staying.

And staying is the discipline.

: before you speak, ask

If you want a simple practice for these times, here it is.

Before you post. Before you reply. Before you quote-tweet. Before you flatten someone into a villain for the dopamine hit of being correct, ask:

Is it true?
Is it beneficial?
Is it timely?
Is it spoken with goodwill?
Is it kind?

Because critique is necessary. Boycotts matter. Accountability matters.

But cruelty is not the same thing as justice.

And punishment is not the same thing as liberation.

: metta for this moment

May we be ruthless with systems.
May we be tender with each other.
May we practice discernment without cruelty.
May we build liberation without losing our hearts.

Both/and 🕯️

I’ve been circling this question for weeks now, since the start of the year, since the analogue aesthetic started moving faster than the things it claims to slow down. Since the feed suddenly filled with record players, film cameras, linen notebooks, and stacks of paper books arranged just so.

Suddenly, everything is a guide:
How to live an analogue life.
How to unplug and feel human again.
How to recover the lost art of analogue living.

Checklists. Mood boards. Fifty ways. Five steps. One aesthetic, endlessly replicated.

It’s earnest. It’s well-intentioned. And it’s almost entirely focused on how, with very little curiosity about why this hunger is showing up so loudly in the first place.

But for me, writing as much as I do about attention, I started paying attention to what was actually being reached for beneath the objects.

Because the pull of analogue right now feels less about longing for the past and more like a response to pressure, saturation, and a culture that cannot let anything—an album, a thought, a feeling—play all the way through without interrupting itself.

People aren’t craving vinyl. They’re craving continuity.

And continuity, it turns out, is one of the first casualties of our time.

We live inside systems that fragment attention by design: notifications, feeds, tabs, endless choice disguised as freedom. Time flattened into an eternal now, where nothing has a beginning, middle, or end; just a loop. Attention is treated less like a human faculty and more like a resource to be extracted, measured, and optimised.

So, of course, people reach for analogue. Of course, they want weight, texture and friction. Of course, there’s a yearning for something that unfolds in the right order.

But here’s where the misdirection creeps in.

The market is very good at noticing longing. And even better at selling it back to us as objects.

A turntable will fix it.
A film camera will fix it.
A stack of paper books will fix it.

And listen, I love a paper book. I love the weight, the whisper, the promise. I, too, have been seduced by the fantasy that if I just assemble the right analog shrine, I’ll be delivered back to myself.

Capitalism, of course, is very happy to sell us that dream.

But what’s being named here is quieter.
And far more subversive.

The unspoken luxury isn’t having the analogue thing.
It’s not replacing the absence at all.

Reclamation doesn’t ask for new objects.
It asks for different conditions.

This became clear to me on a morning walk with my dog, Arlo.

The sky was an unapologetic blue. The sun was already warm, over twenty degrees, sorry to my friends in Brooklyn. Not a morning to optimise. A morning to be led.

I put on Bad Bunny’s Grammy Award–winning album – or at least, I meant to. I was walking the streets of Beirut with actual pep in my step, an occasional boogie, letting the morning hold a little celebration: history made, joy intact.

The first song finished.

Then it shuffled! And what came next wasn’t even Bad Bunny. The album and the mood dissolved into something else entirely, without my consent.

Arlo didn’t notice. He stayed with the sidewalk and the sun on his back, unhurried.

Those conditions returned in a more dramatic form on a hike I took with a friend. A waterfall. No cell signal. My phone left in the car. He brought a book. I didn’t. All my paper books are in boxes in Brooklyn, and a screen wasn’t right for a place like this.

So I sat. I nestled myself between rocks… into a space I sensed could hold me. I felt their coolness. The earth underneath. The sound of water. My friend went and perched on a rock in the stream, but I stayed where I was. For an hour. Maybe more.

No pages.
No plot.
No substitute object.

Just attention, allowed to widen because nothing was interrupting it.

And this is the part that the analog trend can’t sell.

What we’re actually reclaiming isn’t a past era or a set of tools. It’s the conditions that allow a human nervous system to settle, orient, and complete its own cycles. Conditions where attention isn’t constantly pulled, and where rest doesn’t have to be earned or displayed.

Where absence is allowed to remain…

empty.

What’s at stake when nothing gets to finish?

We rarely talk about what happens in the body when experience can’t complete its own arcs.

Attention isn’t just mental. It’s physiological. It moves through the nervous system in cycles: activation, engagement, settling, release. When something captures our attention, the body expects a kind of completion, even if it’s subtle.

When those cycles are repeatedly cut short… by interruption, redirection, constant reselection… the nervous system doesn’t reset. It stays slightly unfinished. Not alarmed exactly, but unresolved.

Over time, this shows up as thinning. As restlessness without relief. As the sense of being perpetually mid-thought, mid-feeling, mid-breath. Nothing quite lands. Even pleasure feels oddly fragile.

This is what’s at stake when nothing gets to finish: the body never gets the signal that it’s safe to rest inside an experience. Meaning doesn’t consolidate. Presence doesn’t deepen.

Attention doesn’t return.
It just keeps scanning.

Continuity isn’t a preference. It’s a biological requirement.

You can feel this in the body. In the need to sigh, constantly. Those deep, involuntary sighs that seem to come out of nowhere. They’re not boredom or annoyance, but the nervous system’s need to finish something. When experience doesn’t get to complete its own arcs, the body improvises an ending.

Which is why letting something play all the way through (an album, a moment, a morning) can feel quietly reparative. The nervous system finally gets to complete a cycle…

and to land.

The sigh is an exhale long enough to signal: something has landed, even if only for a moment.

Much of what’s circulating right now about analogue living is framed as instruction. How to reduce screen time. How to live more slowly. How to opt out, simplify, and replace digital tools with physical ones. And to be clear, that kind of content can be genuinely helpful. You do you.

What I’m more interested in is the question underneath it. Not how to live differently, but why this longing is showing up so insistently now. What is being starved in the first place? What human capacity is trying to come back online?

Without that inquiry, the how risks becoming just another loop – another set of behaviours to optimise, another lifestyle to perform – rather than a response to something real.

My view is simple: the analogue revival fails when it replaces objects instead of restoring conditions.

Reclamation doesn’t require purchase.
It requires removing what interferes.

Some days that looks like a forest with no signal. Others, it’s just turning off shuffle and letting something, anything, play all the way through.

“Nothing else is happening now — just washing the dishes.”
— Munindra

I came across Munindra by accident.
Or what Chögyam Trungpa once called the pretence of accident: the way something seems to arrive out of nowhere, when really it arrives into readiness.

I’d heard of Munindra for years through my teachers, but I had never sat with his life or his teaching in this way. Reading now, I felt immediate recognition…

The way his teaching style landed in my body was gentle, curious, and unforced.

Keep it simple.
Keep it easy.

His instructions didn’t privilege special conditions or an ‘ideal life’. They trusted ordinary human experience as sufficient, even fertile ground, for awakening.

Sharon Salzberg once described Munindra as whimsical and relaxed, dressed all in white, someone who delighted in ordinary beauty: stopping to rejoice at a tree, a flower, an animal. His teaching, she said, reflected his favourite refrain: just be simple and easy about things.

Early in her practice, Munindra said something to her that stuck:

“The Buddha’s enlightenment solved the Buddha’s problem,” he told her.

“Now you solve yours.”

Sharon said it felt like the first time someone really looked her in the eye and said, simply and directly: you can do it.

This makes sense to me because the tradition I was trained in never treated sitting meditation as the gold standard. From the beginning, the emphasis was on presence wherever you are: walking, standing, waiting, living. As Sharon has taught for decades, the grocery line that isn’t moving, the traffic jam, the moment of irritation: these are not interruptions to practice. They are the practice.

In a world of constant stimulation and demand, practice has to be portable. Attention can no longer be something we schedule for ideal moments; it has to be something we return to, wherever we are.

I think this is why the teaching landed so clearly for me now. The conditions we are living in don’t leave much room for separating practice from life.

It has to meet us in movement, in fatigue, in the ordinary moments.
In the mundane.

So when I read a story of Munindra teaching one of his students, I felt recognition rather than surprise. She was a mother with children, responsibilities, and very little time for formal sitting.

He didn’t see her family life as an obstacle. He saw it as the path.

When he learned that she spent much of her day washing dishes, he seized the opportunity.

“Nothing else is happening now, just washing the dishes,” he told her.

No need for perfection or performance.

Guiding her to have awareness of her hands moving.
Paying attention to sensation.
”Notice the temperature; is the water warm or cool?”
Picking up a dish. Soaping it. Rinsing it. Putting it down.

When her mind wandered — to worry, to planning, to fear — he didn’t correct or judge. He simply invited her to note:

worrying, worrying,
or
planning, planning…

And then guided her to return to the simple act of washing the dishes.

He guided her with the same seriousness as though she were on formal retreat.

This kind of teaching has shaped my own life. I was formally trained in a tradition that decentralises the cushion and returns us, again and again, to the body in motion. Over time, dishwashing became a devotion for me; not because it was prescribed exactly this way, but because the training taught me to recognise that attention itself is the offering. The sink became a place of return. The body, a place to listen.

There is a sentence my aunt once said to me that has stayed with me.

“Of course you can meditate,” she said. “You don’t have a husband. Or children. Or grandchildren.”

She didn’t say it unkindly, but from a tired body.

So I didn’t hear judgment in her words.
I heard endurance from a life shaped by love, family, and survival.

For her, meditation belonged to the unburdened; to those with time, space, and fewer demands. And yet her life itself has been a practice of extraordinary devotion. Showing up. Carrying on. Holding more than one body should ever have to hold.

This is what makes Munindra’s teaching, and the tradition he stood within, feel so radical and so kind.

“What’s happening now?”
— Munindra

He didn’t ask people to leave their lives to wake up.
He trusted their lives enough to teach inside them.

The hallway became a place for walking meditation.
Ten steps at a time.
Unhurried. Unworried.
Just walking.

The chores became teachers.
The body became a bell.
Attention became refuge.

Not everyone gets to sit.
But everyone gets moments of return.

Some people awaken on cushions.
Others awaken between plates, in hallways, in tired bodies that keep going anyway.

Offered in gratitude to Munindra, and to the teachers who carried his light forward.

I keep coming back to bioluminescence.

Not as a metaphor I went looking for, but as something that keeps finding me. Dark water lighting up from the inside. Waves breaking and suddenly, blue. Not one blue, but many, as my eyes adjust in the dark. What’s lighting up doesn’t change so much as my ability to see it. Light that doesn’t arrive to fix anything. Light that only appears when something moves through the dark.

It doesn’t end the night.
It doesn’t promise morning.

It just responds.

That feels important right now, because I’m trying to figure out how to live honestly inside a world that feels increasingly incoherent. Or maybe a world that’s just stopped pretending to be coherent.

Some of us were shaped by places where crisis wasn’t an interruption.
It was the weather.

I’m Lebanese. My family is from here. But I didn’t grow up inside continuous instability. I was raised in Australia, far from the daily realities of war. I didn’t live under bombardment or evacuation orders.

What I grew up with instead was proximity.

Crisis arrived through phone calls. Through my father’s body, and the way the atmosphere in a room would shift when news came from home.

I remember the first time I saw my father cry. He was on a landline with his brother, who had walked out of a building moments before it was bombed. It had taken many attempts (sometimes hours, working through an operator) to just get connected. Sometimes he would give up. Not because the need disappeared, but because trying again cost too much.

I didn’t experience that moment directly. But I experienced what it did to my family. How danger travels. How quickly an ordinary day can become one you never forget. How people take in things like that, metabolise it, and then keep going.

In this very special place where I’m from, people don’t narrate themselves through catastrophe. They don’t linger in explanation. They say, heyda Lebnan (that’s Lebanon), and they carry on. Not because it doesn’t hurt. Not because they’re not tired. But because weathering is part of how life continues.

That kind of inheritance is subtle: quietly teaching you what can disappear from moment to moment, and how not to rely on guarantees.

When this is your baseline, shock doesn’t organise your attention in the same way.

Acceleration doesn’t feel like rupture.
It feels like recognition.

That doesn’t mean less grief. It doesn’t mean some special resilience. It just means your body learned early not to expect permanence. You don’t wait for clarity. You don’t assume continuity. You learn to orient by subtler cues.

So when people talk about how sudden everything feels right now, I get it.
And I also feel something else.

Not comfort.
Just familiarity.

I want to be clear about where I’m speaking from. What I feel first (and what I keep feeling) is deep compassion. Deep respect. I find myself worrying about people I love. I said to a friend in New York the other day, almost instinctively: I hope you don’t feel like I abandoned you! Not because I’ve gone anywhere, but because what’s unfolding can feel isolating in a way that’s hard to name.

And at the same time, I notice something tender and strange: many of the people I love are watching this happen, horrified by it, angry about it, and yet still not deeply affected in their daily lives. Not yet. Because part of what’s so destabilising is that this wasn’t supposed to happen to them. It was always happening somewhere else.

That doesn’t make anyone naïve or bad. It makes them human, shaped by a system that taught them distance was protection. But for people from places where crisis has long been part of the weather, distance was never the thing keeping us safe.

What I feel isn’t judgment, it’s care mixed with recognition.

Marine creatures; fish, squid, tiny crustaceans, even algae, produce bioluminescence for very practical reasons.

To confuse predators.
To attract prey.
To lure potential mates.

Not to be beautiful.
Not to reassure anyone.
Not to announce that things are safe.

The light is strategic. It costs energy. It only shows up when it’s needed.

Sometimes it startles a predator just long enough to escape. Sometimes it draws something closer. Sometimes it’s just a signal: I’m here. Something is responding.

That shifted something for me.

Because in that frame, hope isn’t goodness winning.
It’s life, figuring out how to keep relating under pressure.

I’m not the first person to think this way about hope. And I’m not going to be the last.

I read Hope in the Dark years ago. It offered a way of thinking about change that felt truer to how things actually move; slowly, unevenly, and often without guarantees.

Solnit writes about hope as something that exists precisely because the future isn’t finished, because outcomes aren’t sealed. Because history keeps turning on small, collective acts that rarely look decisive in the moment; because so much of what shapes us exists beyond what we can foresee, or even imagine.

What I’m circling here lives in that same terrain, but from a more bodily place. Less about political outcomes, more about how attention stays alive under pressure.

I also want to be clear about where I am now.

I’ve deliberately slowed my life down. I’ve reduced inputs. I’m not living inside constant urgency or noise. I have time to walk. To read. To sit with questions without immediately turning them into answers.

That’s a privilege.

The pull I feel toward nature, toward ecology, living systems, patterns older than whatever collapse we’re currently inside is inseparable from that choice. I can afford to look this way because I’m not in immediate survival mode. I can listen because I’ve created some quiet.

I don’t experience that as escape. I experience it as responsibility. To pay attention carefully. And to be honest about what I’m noticing, without pretending it applies evenly to everyone.

There are many ways to live inside crisis. But not all of them are honest.

Some ways keep things functioning by shrinking the truth.
Some keep calm by refusing to name what’s happening.
Some look quiet because attention has learned how to pace itself.

From the outside, those can look the same. Internally, they’re not.

Not reacting isn’t the same as not seeing.

And hope in the dark, real hope, belongs to the kind of staying that doesn’t lie to itself.

Bioluminescence isn’t constant. It doesn’t glow endlessly. It flickers when something passes through the water. When there’s contact. When there’s friction.

Hope in the dark feels like that.

Not a permanent emotional state.
Not something you hold onto.
Not something you manufacture.

More like something that appears when you stay in contact with what’s actually happening, without demanding relief, without numbing out, without insisting on a redemptive arc.

It’s not a promise.
It’s orientation.

Lately, the questions I’m asking have gotten quieter.

Not How do we fix this?
But How do we live truthfully inside it?

Not What comes next?
But What’s still responding?

In the dark, you stop looking for floodlights. You start noticing smaller signals. What still connects. What still moves. What still lights up when touched.

You let your eyes adjust.

Hope in the dark doesn’t ask much of us emotionally.

But it asks a lot of us relationally.

It doesn’t ask us to feel inspired.
It doesn’t ask us to feel certain.

It asks us to stay.

To stay honest when denial would be easier.
To stay responsive when numbness is tempting.
To stay long enough for something to answer back.

Not forever.
Not perfectly.

Just long enough.

If crisis is becoming part of the weather in more places now, then maybe the work isn’t to recreate daylight. Maybe it’s to learn from living systems that already know how to glow without it.

This isn’t consolation. Its orientation.

And orientation, in the dark, is everything.

This is the second part of something I started a while back. The first piece was about how our attention gets taken. This one is about what happens after, when you can’t hear yourself anymore.

Which, I think, is different from being disconnected from yourself. Disconnection you can feel. You know something’s off. Not being able to hear yourself is sneakier, because it doesn’t feel like a problem at all. It feels like functioning. Like keeping up. Like wanting what everyone around you seems to want: and there’s real comfort in that, even belonging, and none of it asks you to stop and listen for the thing underneath that might break the spell.

Borrowed desire

Simone Weil got here long before screens. For her, attention wasn’t focus or effort; it was closer to prayer (she literally wrote that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer). It shapes who we become, and, I’d add, what we become capable of wanting. When attention is always yanked outward, it never stays still long enough for anything true to surface. And then what we want isn’t really ours. It’s borrowed. Girard would call it mimetic. Loud, convincing, someone else’s.

And it isn’t a personal failing, even though it feels so personal. Tristan Harris has spent years telling us, pretty bluntly, that the environments we live in are built to keep us facing outward—reacting, comparing, refreshing—so our attention never lands. That’s the business model. So of course we can’t hear ourselves when we’re saturated.

Here’s how I tell the difference in my own body:

When my attention is pointing outward, it’s busy more than chaotic. My gaze sits slightly ahead of me, tracking, adjusting, scanning for the next thing. I feel informed and weirdly hollow. Motivated but untethered. I know everything that’s happening, and I have no idea what I want.

When it turns inward, it’s quieter. Kind of boring at first, honestly, and often uncomfortable. Less commentary, more sensation. I’m not looking for anyone to confirm anything; I’m listening for what resonates. Time gets longer. Decisions slow right down. I feel less sure and more honest.

Neither one is good or bad. We need both, and most of us move between them all day without noticing. But you can feel it when you’ve been stuck out there too long: a kind of disharmony, a hum.

Looking outward isn’t the problem. Forgetting the way back is.

This is old knowledge. Most contemplative traditions teach the difference between outward- and inward-referring attention right at the start, because everything else builds on it. Even Paul, writing to the Corinthians: though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

And once someone shows you this, you can’t unsee it. You start to feel, almost straight away, when you’ve been pulled out too long and haven’t had a chance to come back and settle. The discomfort stops being something to fix. It’s just telling you something.

I should say — when I talk about outward attention, I don’t mean caring about the world. Community, mutual aid, care work, activism, showing up for each other: that’s outward, yes, but it’s rooted in something inside you. It comes home. I mean the other kind. The compulsive, reactive, extractive kind that leaves and never comes back.

So this isn’t an argument for withdrawing. (I did withdraw, a bit. I’ll get to that.)

Amishi Jha, whose work I lean on a lot in my teaching, puts all this in brain terms: attention is a limited biological resource. When it’s fragmented and depleted, we don’t just lose focus. Working memory goes. Emotional regulation goes. We fall back on habit and reactivity. That means “what do I want?” is a pretty unreliable question when your attention is shot. The answer’s probably in there somewhere. You just can’t hear it over everything else.

What it costs to hear clearly

So turning the volume down isn’t always calming. Sometimes it’s the opposite. When the noise drops far enough — just you, the room, a pin dropping, your dog barking at the Uber Eats delivery guy — what comes through might not be gentle at all. When you finally hear yourself, it can sound like a scream.

A primal one.

Because what’s usually waiting in the quiet is discontent. And discontent doesn’t stay quiet for long.

Once you can hear, it gets harder to ignore what doesn’t fit anymore. The work that drains you. The relationships you’ve been managing rather than choosing. The pace. The agreements. The version of you built to function within other people’s expectations. For me, clarity came with a reckoning, and it looked like scorched earth. It’s not gentle. I’m sorry. After that, the little tweaks — curating my feed, unfollowing accounts, app limits, promising myself I’d just “check less” — stopped cutting it.

And it’s not only tech. Attention is social. It’s contagious! When most of us have never been shown how to tend it, we end up living inside wants that belong to the system rather than to us.

For me, it was slow. I deleted the dating apps first, the obvious attention thief. Then I stopped pouring energy into the casual, surface-level relationships that kept me occupied but never let me settle. That felt more extreme, and it was. Then, eventually, the big one: I left New York, out of the constant hum of capitalism and striving and grasping and self-optimisation, and went somewhere quiet to do what I already knew I had to do. Not to escape the world. To hear myself clearly enough to come back to it honestly.

I’m not especially disciplined. I didn’t have some great insight. I changed the conditions around my attention, and the signal changed with them. What I heard wasn’t new. It had just been drowned out.

And the answer, annoyingly, isn’t to swing hard either way. Not total retreat, not total immersion. The middle way. Not too tight, not too loose. Enough inward attention to stay oriented, enough outward to stay human. Attention that can wander off and still find its way home.

Goldilocks is basically a Zen koan, if you think about it. Not too hot. Not too cold. Not too much. Not too little.

No grand philosophy.

Just that felt sense of ah, ok… this works.

A few companions for thinking about attention and desire:

• Gravity and Grace — Simone Weil. Fragments on attention as the ground of truth, not a productivity hack. Exacting. Uncompromising.

  The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist. How the way we attend shapes what we see, and what we end up valuing and wanting.

  The Burnout Society — Byung-Chul Han. Short and brutal, on what happens when the whip moves inside and we start exploiting ourselves.

  Eros the Bittersweet — Anne Carson. Desire as distance and longing. Devastating in the quietest way.

  The Way of Zen — Alan Watts. For the middle way, and for coming back.

These works approach attention not as focus, but as orientation: the ground from which desire, truth, and meaning become visible.

Where Attention Goes

Mindfulness has always been the foundation of my work, and later, of Soft Systems. For me, it’s a way of orienting to experience: learning how to stay in wise relationship with the present moment as it unfolds. Attention is the starting point. Without it, nothing else coheres.

The stakes feel different now. As Jon Kabat-Zinn has said, waking up is not a luxury; it's a necessity.² Life has always involved suffering and uncertainty. What’s changed is the context: prolonged conflict, the quiet removal of rights, the normalisation of authoritarian logic, and systems that profit from fear and distraction. Under these conditions, attention is under siege, and without it, our capacity for discernment, solidarity, and wise response erodes.

Mindfulness, at its core, is not about escaping reality. It’s about being present for it. We all know what presence feels like, particularly in those moments when life meets us fully: playing with our dog, eating an incredible meal, being moved by nature, making love, arriving somewhere new. That aliveness is not exotic. It's ordinary. The mundane is the doorway — the dog, the meal, the way the light creeps through a window. And yet, most of us spend very little time there. So where do we go instead?

I’ve been teaching this for years. What I keep seeing isn’t a dramatic collapse; it’s the quiet slide. You don’t notice attention going. One day, you just look up, and it’s already gone.

In Soft Systems, this is why attention is treated as a principle of coherence: it’s what makes everything else possible under pressure.

I see this most clearly in the smallest moments. Open Instagram “just for a second,” and suddenly I’m watching someone give a meticulous account of their Trader Joe’s haul. Tangerine Creamsicles?! Noted! Who can relate?

It’s not because we lack discipline. It’s because the system is rigged. Our hyper-connected, always-on world is intentionally designed to extract and monetise attention. When we’re scrolling, clicking, or stuck in doom loops, someone is profiting, and it isn’t us. This is the reality of the attention economy. Which brings us back to the question that matters most: how do we take our attention back?

Mindfulness training is one way, and not in the way that the West has co-opted mindfulness for productivity or optimisation, but as a practice. Not striving towards a special state, not visualising a better future, not to fix ourselves. As the old Zen saying goes, you can’t push the river, and it isn’t wise to try.

Mindfulness is a way of being, not doing. It takes life itself as the focus and meets it with presence.

Embodiment Inside the Machine

I worked in tech at a time when AI was rapidly reshaping what was possible and what was profitable. While I wasn't designing attention systems, I was inside the environment that rewards them. With a strong awareness practice and a deep sensitivity to patterns, I began to experience repeated threshold moments — bodily signals — about where the work was heading and what it was quietly asking me to participate in.

The language at the time was optimistic. We talked a lot about Human + Machine: designing for AI and human ingenuity. The intention mattered. But over time, I started to feel a widening gap between the rhetoric and the lived effects: the systems accelerating faster than our capacity to metabolise them, and incentives shaping behaviour long before ethics could catch up. Those signals didn’t stay abstract for long.

I remember this most clearly during an interview process in New York. I’d been referred, which, in that ecosystem, means everything. The role was prestigious. The money and benefits were excellent. On paper, it was the kind of opportunity you’re meant to feel grateful for. And externally, I responded the way I had been conditioned to: You should want this. This is what success looks like. Don’t be foolish. Think about your 401K.

What unsettled me most wasn’t just the money or the prestige but the nature of the work itself. This role was explicitly about designing systems to optimise behaviour: how to get people to spend more, stay longer, engage deeper. That’s not new, it’s capitalism in its most distilled form. But what’s changed is the scale and intimacy. With AI, this optimisation has become increasingly more predictive, adaptive, and invisible. We don’t just encounter persuasion — we’re shaped by it.

My body knew before my ethics caught up. I could feel the logic of strategic competition pressing in. If this company didn't do it, another would. If I didn't design it, someone else would. That logic makes refusal feel irrational, irresponsible even. But that's the moral dilemma: when systems reward speed and extraction, opting out requires swimming upstream, both economically and psychologically. My mind kept rehearsing gratitude and opportunity while my body kept signalling something else entirely: tightening, resistance, a loss of breath. Saying yes would have required a kind of internal splitting. Refusal felt all at once like grief and relief.

That interview named something I'd been feeling for years: attention is political long before it becomes ideological. Where attention goes, inner states follow. Systems that shape attention don't just influence behaviour, they condition what we're able to feel. They train us to tolerate incoherence, override our bodily intelligence, and accept extraction as normal. Under these conditions, embodiment isn’t simply a lifestyle choice; it becomes a site of resistance. Attention hygiene becomes a political practice because it interrupts systems that rely on our disconnection to function.

Attention is political because it conditions what we can tolerate. In extractive systems, dysregulation isn’t a side effect; it’s a feature. Discernment starts in the body we inhabit. That's not a preference, that's a survival strategy.

The problem is, most of us are not even in our bodies. We have left the building.

Unwholesome States & Systemic Design

Unwholesome states are not accidental in extractive systems; they are useful. Agitation, fear, comparison, urgency, and low-grade anxiety keep people alert but not reflective, reactive but not resourced. A nervous system that is braced is easier to steer than one that is settled. A person who feels perpetually behind, threatened, or insufficient is more likely to click, buy, defend, lash out, or comply.

Dysregulation isn't a failure of design — it's the point. It keeps attention circulating without ever arriving at rest.

Buddhist psychology names unwholesome states not as moral failings, but as conditions that lead toward suffering when repeated. These states map almost perfectly onto what performs best in the attention economy: outrage travels faster than care, fear converts better than steadiness, and comparison (which deserves its own essay) keeps people scrolling longer than contentment ever could.

The system doesn't need anyone to be malicious; it simply rewards whatever keeps attention fragmented and mobile.

Unwholesome states narrow what's possible. When we are dysregulated, our capacity for cooperation shrinks. Nuance feels intolerable. Complexity becomes exhausting. We become more vulnerable to zero-sum thinking — us-versus-them, win-or-lose, now-or-never. A population trained into agitation is easier to divide, easier to distract, and harder to mobilise toward shared futures.

This is why I believe, and this is a hill I will gladly die on, attention hygiene is a foundational human coherence practice. Choosing to notice when attention produces contraction rather than clarity is a political act. It's how we know when something feels off; when someone is lying, when a situation is asking us to betray ourselves, or when we've drifted from what we actually value, for example. That noticing is where agency lives. It's where choice becomes possible again.

Wholesome States & the Possibility of Cooperation

Wholesome states, by contrast, are politically inconvenient. They don’t spike engagement. They don’t produce urgency on demand. They require time, regulation, and enough internal safety to tolerate complexity. But they make something else possible: cooperation. When the nervous system is settled, attention widens. We regain access to curiosity, patience, and discernment. We can hold more than one truth at once. We can stay in relationship without collapsing into reactivity.

• They support capacities that extractive environments quietly erode.

• They increase tolerance for ambiguity.

• They restore the ability to listen rather than scan for threat.

• They make long-term thinking possible again.

A regulated body is not easily manipulated because it doesn’t need constant stimulation to feel alive. It can pause. It can choose. It can refuse false urgency.

Cooperation is not an attitude; it's a state-dependent capacity. Mutual aid, collective care, and shared futures require nervous systems that can stay present under pressure. Wholesome states make room for trust, and trust is what makes cooperation possible at all. They allow people to remain resourced enough to act together rather than fragment under stress

This is why attention hygiene is not about withdrawal or disengagement. It’s about cultivating the conditions under which cooperation is even possible. In a hall of mirrors, choosing attention that supports wholesome states is a quiet but consequential act; one that strengthens coherence in ourselves and in the systems we’re shaping together.

Game theory gives us language for why this matters.¹ Cooperation isn't just a moral preference; it’s a fragile condition that depends on trust, time, and the ability to tolerate uncertainty. In zero-sum environments, defection is rewarded: acting fast, optimising self-interest, securing advantage before someone else does. The attention economy mirrors this logic perfectly. Content that provokes fear, outrage, or urgency incentivises defection; snap judgments, polarisation, and self-protective reactivity. Wholesome states, by contrast, support non–zero-sum dynamics. They allow people to stay regulated long enough to coordinate, repair, and act together. When attention systematically trains us into unwholesome states, cooperation doesn’t fail because people don’t care; it fails because the conditions required for it are never allowed to form.

The Hall of Mirrors

I notice this most clearly with reality television. I've watched friends put on shows like The Real Housewives or Love Is Blind while folding laundry or decompressing at the end of the day, and that part isn't the issue. But the container is gone. There's no longer even a pretence of inquiry, experiment, or social context. Instead, the same handful of traits are amplified and recombined: volatility, desirability, chaos, dominance, humiliation. The loudest, most reactive, most destabilising personalities are pulled from across franchises and collapsed into one place. Not to learn anything, or offer anything of consequence, just to see what happens when intensity feeds on itself.

The clearest signal I get is the way my body braces; I can feel the flattening. And it sucks. Attention gets hooked by escalation, not curiosity. Everyone is performing for an invisible audience; every reaction is sharpened for effect. It’s a hall of mirrors: drama reflecting drama, outrage reflecting outrage, until nothing new is actually happening — just faster, louder repetition. What’s rewarded isn’t depth or repair, but defection: snapping first, dominating the frame, staying visible at any cost. And it sucks.

I’m not anti–brain McDonald’s. I am deeply unapologetic about sometimes wanting to watch (nay, needing) something glossy and unserious to let my mind melt a little. I’ve had the same spiral watching Emily in Paris. It’s beautiful. It’s absurd. And at a certain point, my body goes, Hello? She absolutely cannot afford that wardrobe. She is never truly unsettled by anything. There are no consequences. No digestion. No repair. Just killer outfits, vibes, and a soft reset by the start of the next episode.

That’s not a moral critique, it’s a body-based one. I can feel the difference between entertainment that lets me rest and entertainment that erases all signs of friction. One feels like a break. The other feels like a flattening. The problem isn’t that these shows exist; it’s that their logic is increasingly everywhere. When even our “downtime” rehearses unreality: desirability without cost, intensity without consequence. This is what I mean by the hall of mirrors: the system is no longer pointing at reality. It's reflecting itself. Content begets content. Drama generates drama. The reference point disappears, and what's left is just the loop — faster, louder, more.

The hall of mirrors tightens just a little more.

What unsettles me most is how unapologetic this has become. The goal is no longer to tell a story but to farm attention. And culturally, we've adapted. We’ve learned to tolerate more chaos, more noise, more cruelty — because the system keeps serving it. Defection stops looking like a choice and starts looking like the water we're swimming in. A collective nervous system trained to mistake intensity for aliveness, and spectacle for truth.

The same logic shows up online in a more accelerated form. AI-generated personas, hyper-curated influencers, and synthetic lifestyles flatten reality even further; desirability without consequence, intimacy without risk, success without friction. It's the Kardashian phenomenon, on crack. Exceptionality stripped of context and scaled infinitely. These ‘characters’ never age, they don’t repair, and seem to rarely, if ever, metabolise loss. They exist entirely outside the limits of embodiment, and yet they’re training our attention all the same. The hall of mirrors tightens, once again. Performance reflects performance.

And lived experience quietly, and sadly, recedes.

Choosing Coherence

Attention hygiene isn't about being better or more disciplined. It's about staying coherent in systems that profit from our fragmentation. In a hall of mirrors, the body becomes the last reliable reference point — the place where we can still tell the truth. Choosing where we place our attention won't fix everything. But it shapes what we're able to feel, and what we're able to build together. That's why attention is political. And why tending it is no longer optional.

Notes

¹ Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (1984); Your Undivided Attention, “What Would It Take to Actually Trust Each Other? The Game Theory Dilemma.”

² Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses (2005).

Reading & Listening Companions

• Coming to Our Senses — Jon Kabat-Zinn
  Attention as a civic and ethical capacity, not just a personal one.

• Stand Out of Our Light — James Williams
  A lucid critique of the attention economy from inside the machine.

• The Burnout Society — Byung-Chul Han
  Psychopolitics, fatigue, and the internalisation of extraction.

• Rest Is Resistance — Tricia Hersey
  Embodiment, refusal, and rest as collective resistance.

• What It Takes to Heal — Prentis Hemphill
  Nervous system coherence, accountability, and collective care.

• Your Undivided Attention — episode: “Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech”
  On persuasion, power, humour, and reclaiming agency inside attention-shaping systems.

  
  This work also draws from Buddhist psychology and somatic traditions that understand attention not only as trainable, but as the ground condition for trust, cooperation, and ethical response.

This is the work I offer: supporting attention as an embodied practice.
If it’s landing for you and you want to go deeper, I’m now offering a limited number of 1:1 companioning spaces in my practice. For now you can reach me at nicoledaboul@icloud.com

I’ve been listening to a lot of dharma lately. A lot of lineage stuff, like how to meditate broken down into excruciatingly precise steps. I keep returning to talks from teachers I love, and replaying them because there's so much to be learned in repetition, right? Like, not grasping for the new, but sitting with something again and again and again.

Ajahn Brahm tells a short Buddhist parable about a cat that went to heaven — a bedraggled, one-eyed stray taken in by a poor painter and his wife after being largely unwanted by the world.

Later, the painter gets commissioned to make a mural for the local temple of all the animals that gathered around the Buddha. But there’s a rule. Cats are not to be included. Because they’re blamed for killing the Buddha’s favourite mouse. So they don’t belong in the story, or the painting.

The cat is there watching the painter as he works away, adding the animals, one by one, to the mural. A deer. An elephant. A lion. A horse. And the cat sits nearby, observing as the painting fills up. This one then that one, but still no cats? He’s not making a fuss, but it’s as if he’s shrinking… disappearing in on himself. And the painter notices. He’s watching the cat watching him, and he keeps getting sadder.

Eventually, the painter can’t take it anymore. He can’t stand seeing the cat like that. So he says, “Okay, fine,” and paints the cat into the mural too. And when the cat finally sees himself there, included, reflected, he is so overjoyed that his heart bursts from happiness. From pure bliss.

And then he dies.

Can you imagine? He dies from happiness.

Later, when they talk about taking the painting to the temple, there’s some concern. There’s a cat in it, so it’s not traditional. It breaks the rules. They even talk about burning the entire painting.

But when they go to the temple the next day, the painting is hanging there. They didn’t burn it after all.

The only thing that’s changed is this:
The cat is gone.

He disappeared from the painting.

What really stayed with me about this story is the quiet precision of the compassion.

The cat isn’t chosen because he’s special. He’s not enlightened, useful, beautiful or even symbolic. Remember, he’s bedraggled and a wee bit ugly. None of that matters. He’s chosen because he’s there. Because he’s alive. Because he’s hurting.

That kind of kindness has no hierarchy. No calculation about who deserves care and who doesn’t. It’s just responsive: suffering noticed, and met.

The painter is simply paying attention, and in Buddhism, that kind of attention is devotion. To truly see another being, how they move, how they wait, how they love, is itself the practice. It’s how love shows up in the world.

The painter knows the rule. Everyone does. Cats don’t belong in the story, but he paints the cat anyway. Why? Because he can’t bear the cost of following the rule anymore.

That’s the teaching that gets me every time:

When rules come into conflict with compassion, compassion wins.

And the ending (the cat disappearing) feels important too. Once the cat has been seen, truly included, he doesn’t need to remain in the image. He doesn’t need recognition or proof or preservation. Something has been completed.

At its core, this story is about belonging. About who we let into the circle, and who we quietly leave out. About how much harm comes not from cruelty, but from omission. From following rules that numb our humanity.

It asks uncomfortable questions, gently:

• Where have we learned to withhold care?

• Who have we decided doesn’t count?

• What are we obeying that costs us our tenderness?

And then it doesn’t answer them for us.

It just whispers; calmly, kindly… “You already know what to do.”

Why is this particularly urgent?

I need to anchor this reflection to this moment in time. If you’re here (if you have the time and attention span to read my essays), you’re probably pretty tuned in to what’s happening in the world. In the United States. In Iran. In occupied Palestine. In Venezuela. It’s a shit storm.

And I keep asking myself: how do we function inside this? How do we inhabit the world (and our bodies) in a way that doesn’t harden us or numb us out?

And this part feels important:

There are rules everywhere right now. Rules about who belongs, who gets protected, who is allowed to stay, and who is considered expendable. Rules that ask us to look away, stay compliant, and keep our circles small.

Which brings me back to the cat.

Not because the story is comforting, but because it’s precise. It shows how often harm happens quietly. Not through cruelty, but through omission. Through watching and not intervening. Through following rules that can often cost us our humanity.

As I was writing this, I heard this from on ig:

“One of the most powerful acts of resistance that any population can take is just considering more people friends. And so if you’re someone who considers themselves an activist, someone who wants to fight oppression, you need to start thinking very carefully and very seriously about how to make friends and how to spread friendship throughout your community.” @themacadamien

That’s the cat story, told again, but for this moment in time!

Friendship as resistance.
Attention as devotion.
Belonging as a political act.

The painter doesn’t overthrow the temple or argue with the rules, but he refuses to let someone remain outside the story.

And in a moment like this, that feels like the invitation.
Not to fix everything, but to widen the circle where we can.
To notice who is shrinking, disappearing, or despairing…
and to choose compassion over compliance when we can.

As often as we can 💕

Thank you for reading. I loved this story, and I hope it stayed with you. xx