Do you find yourself asking your people this more often lately? It’s a heavier question today than in times past, no? What are we really asking? What do we want to know (or not)? I opened last week’s post by asking, and again today; the redundance feels important and necessary.
It’s Pride Month, and I’m seeing a lot less of the “Wishing all the homophobes a super uncomfortable month” memes now compared to last year, which I’m glad about. I thought about updating my dissent post today, but I think it still stands strong on its own: “…The best intention of this message, I think, is solidarity and allyship. The impact may be very different. I can imagine someone who feels uncomfortable, for whatever reason, with non-cis/het identity feeling rejected, shamed, and even hated by this message. What response is this likely to engender? How does that make anything better for anyone? How does it advance the cause? “…If we were all better at embracing our various discomforts (healthy eating, exercising more, being more honest with ourselves and others, having the hard conversations, etc.), at making it safe for one another to engage with and overcome them, how would that feel? How would our relationships and communities be? Right now we make it safe to respond to our discomforts with rage, blame, and dehumanizing. When I see people wishing discomfort on others, I’m disappointed. “We can do better.”
A friend and I have exchanged messages about the value of discomfort, how it makes us stop and take perspective, how it shapes us and can make us better.
“A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.” –unattributed
I still never wish discomfort on anyone. But I’m happy to encourage folks to embrace its inevitability and possibility for growth through it. Let us seek and engage with the worthy discomforts–those which move us through our stagnant assumptions and mental rigidities toward creativity, discovery, and deeper connection. And let’s do it together–mutually supportive and loving, striving always for better understanding, acceptance, and community through the joys and challenges of diversity and inclusion.
Embracing our discomfort often means acknowledging and facing our fears. Fear is a legitimate and important emotion, required for survival throughout our evolution. Besides pain, is there a more uncomfortable sensation than threat and fear? Can we recognize when our anger, righteousness, arrogance, disengagement, and even hatred are all founded on unacknowledged, limbic, or even existential fear? Can we kindly, patiently, curiously, and humbly help one another explore and unpack it all?
How comfortable are any of us with any of this? How much easier is it to declare categorical truths with certainty and authority, dismissing nuance and complexity, suppressing doubt, and rejecting earnest discussion and debate?
We each get to choose how we show up to our fears, how we cope with discomfort. Sometimes all we can do is turn around and run the other way. We can deflect or armor up. They’re called ‘defense mechanisms’ for good reason, and the older I get the more I see and accept that we all have them. Each of us comes by our own honestly, and judging one another for them rarely makes anything better. Discomfort makes us squirelly at best, destructive at worst.
What if we shared our comfort with one another?
I messaged a friend last weekend: “Reconnected with (a guy friend) recently, who is now a transitioning woman and agreed to take me to my first silent book club at a lesbian speakeasy this month! [Mentioned here last week–I’m very excited about this.] “Omg dear one, our world is so chaotic and uncertain, and yet there is still SO MUCH GOOD in the day to day, face to face, in person connections of love and shared humanity. I hope you feel as surrounded by it as I do.” Clearly, I feel very comfortable with gender transition.
But I know people for whom transgenderism is extremely uncomfortable, an unfathomable and existential threat to their core values and beliefs about humanity. I sense their acute distress, their stuckness, their utter helplessness to understand or accept the concept and get to peace with it–especially when a loved one discloses and transitions. I wish I could take away their sorrow and anguish. I know it’s not because they ‘hate’ transgender people or wish for anyone to repress their authentic selves. Their discomfort is not rooted in malice. And their experience far and away exceeds ‘discomfort,’ but I use this example to remind myself that humans come to any given issue or idea with a vast variety and complexity of attitudes, histories, and comfort levels.
The better we can tolerate, embrace, and process our discomfort, the stronger and more resilient we can be in the face of adversity and true threats to our survival, I think. And I wish for no one to have to do this alone. Genuine human connection mitigates pain, suffering, and the extreme discomforts of fear, grief, and uncertainty. It is the most effective balm for what ails our hearts.
So this Pride Month and beyond, when we feel uncomfortable about something, anything, may we reach out with vulnerability and courage ahead of anger and antagonism. May our first instincts be to connect more than to judge. May we meet others’ discomfort with empathy, compassion, understanding, and patience. We can do this even in the smallest encounter, with few or even no words, with the most fleeting of looks. It takes practice. Thankfully, life presents us with the opportunity every time we meet another human.
“There’s no getting around anything,” Tyler says… “There’s only getting through things… I had to shine a light into very dark corners and just look, just see. See myself, and all the ways fear and guilt had trapped me. And I came to understand something while I was going through it. To be fully human is to be fully sexual. And while that doesn’t mean having sex, or even sexual desire, it does mean being fully in your body. It means recognizing that there is nothing any less holy about your body than there is about your soul. That as long as your body is treated with consent and respect and affection, and that you treat the bodies of others in the same way, there’s nothing inherently sinful about your flesh, about its desires or lack of desires, about what it does or does not do. You do not have the ability to tarnish her or yourself. That right isn’t given to any mortal person. She’ll be no more or less holy for sex. The same goes for the lack of it… Abstinence is asked of everyone at some point in their lives. Maybe a partner is not emotionally ready for sex. Or maybe they temporarily aren’t able… And for some people celibacy is not a struggle, just like fasting isn’t the same struggle for everyone, or giving up money or giving up spare time, or giving up sleeping in late, or, or, or… A life consecrated to God is a life where you give up personal desires to serve God instead. And there’s nothing more or less special about celibacy than there is about poverty, or seclusion, or sleep. And… it’s not always easy to discern God’s desires for us, because he or she wants us to be fully human and love each other as fully human, and that takes as many different forms as can be imagined… No way is any holier than another. Because our bodies are holy no matter what, and our lives are holy no matter what. Monasticism and lay life are just different ways of loving the same god and showing his love to the world.” –Tyler Bell, Sinner by Sierra Simone
How wonderful when a passage from one book so validates and reinforces the themes and threads of another? And how fascinating to find myself so lost for words to express the profound effect a book has had on me?
I came to this book, of course, through Shane East/Steve West. As soon as he said it’s one of his favorite emotional reads of the year to date, I knew I was in for something special. I listened, purchased a print copy halfway through, then listened again in tandem with reading, toggling back and forth. I have never marked up a novel like this before, and rarely used this many book darts for one volume. It’s my first novel by Alexis Hall, and will not be the last. The way he engages with readers, her openness and directness in their expressions about the world and us humans, and how s/he writes this story–I feel I have found yet another of my people in the love of all of humanity.
This story of male-male romantic love is so tender, so devoted, so tragically loving, so human. The caring and compassion Hall brings to these characters reminds me so much of Sierra Simone‘s reverence for both the deep faith one can have in the divine and all of love’s manifestations in humanity, even as supposed representatives and rhetoric of said divine in organized religion mortally condemn exactly some of these universally human expressions, in works like Sanguine and the Priest Collection.
Such thoughtful and poignant ethical and moral reconciliation through literature, the journey of empathy and compassion, understanding and reverence of and fidelity to our core humanity, is always what moves me most in any story. Looking back, it is exactly this thread that runs through the books I recommend most: Beastly Beauty by Jennifer Donnelly Never the Roses by Jennifer K Lambert The Crowns Trilogy by Nicola Tyche To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue
These books give me hope for bridging our ideological and political differences around sexual orientation, gender, and all other divergent and/or conflicted arguments about expressions of self and how we each/all choose to present in the world. It is our shared humanity, our capacity for curiosity and openness to the ‘other’, that will save us from causing one another the gravest harm, the deepest trauma, from destroying ourselves collectively. Literature like this humanizes us from the backs of our brains, where our deepest and most meaningful connections to one another live, if we allow ourselves to embrace the characters and empathize with their stories, because they could be any of us.
This historical love story between two complicated men, Thomas an Anglican priest and Micha an opium-addicted prostitute, accompanied by their friend Sheba, a former prostitute and single mother, “is tragically compelling from the start, paced such that we feel every nuance of emotion and plot with wrenching saturation,” I wrote on a Shaneiaks Instagram post. “Such lyrical and poignant writing, a wrenching and real, unvarnished and eloquent portrayal of the best and worst of us,” I commented on Shane’s Insta. “Lyrically written with emotional depth that captures one’s heart from the outset, breaking and bandaging, transforming us repeatedly alongside the characters. I listened, then listened again while reading, each pass a deeper and more moving journey. Every page is marked up. Steve West’s incredible care and devotion to the story and his craft shine through yet again, bringing all the characters, including the supporting cast, to life such that we cannot help but love them, in all their broken and imperfect humanity. Keep the tissues close.” –My review on Aubible. So I guess I mustered some words here and there.
Below the next graphic, I list the topics and concepts that stand out in this story. Below that, I have copied the most outstanding exerpts from the book to me–the ones I reread because they lift me in hope and connection. Read at your own risk–they may turn out to be spoilers.
My highest dream for this post is to bring readers and listeners to this story who might have otherwise rejected it. I wish to gently nudge a door open that someone may have thought permanently locked, to invite them (you?) to consider a perspective (or multiple) previously assumed to lie beyond understanding. This story is worthy of our time, our openness, and our reverent, thoughtful contemplation. Thank heavens for authors like Alexis Hall, Sierra Simone, and others, and for performers like Shane/Steve, who bring these stories to life in our ears and hearts, so we may connect on multiple, overlapping levels of consciousness.
May we all tread a little more lightly on one another’s souls, my friends. We are all healing from something.
Homosexuality Prostitution Addiction Religion Social norms and expectations Duty Suicide War trauma Community Self-acceptance Devotion Commitment Sacrifice Reconciliation Peace Innocence Honesty Earnestness Vulnerability Courage
“Have I looked thus upon other men before? Not to my recollection but perhaps I deceive myself?… There are many who would hold the thinking, itself a sin–ill thought, the brother of ill deed, whether it is carnality or doubt that preoccupies the wayward, imperfect heart. But I cannot believe that. I believe it is freedom of thought and deed that lends validity to moral choice and action… But if we felt no struggle, if we resisted no temptation, of what worth would be our capitulation to moral law, To God’s love? For what benefit free will, if we have not the mind to exercise it?” –Thomas Mandeville
“…But these thoughts, these thoughts that many would call iniquity, come from some part of me that, though only freshly discovered, seems inviolable. How can I repent that which I know to be wrong, yet does not feel wrong? If I am made in God’s image, then surely he make this also?…But mine must necessarily be a limited understanding. Is there not some plan, as I have often claimed to others? Some deeper meaning? But oh, what is it? What is it? I can find no sense in this. And I cannot see the harm.” — Thomas
“...the time will come that he may want to leave–I dread it and anticipate it, with almost equal fervour. When he is gone, I will be free. I will no longer fear myself and my sins…But it does not feel like liberty. It feels like loss.” — Thomas
“If this was strange, Thomas had no way of to judge its strangeness. There was already too much for him to feel and think. Knowledge that he had always known to be forbidden, revealed to him, in all its beauty, like a vision of heaven itself. To be like this, with another man, crowned in falling leaves and sunlight, seemd a blessing beyond any earthly reckoning. His heart over-spilled on the loveliness of it, and happiness–pure and clear as water–ran through all his veins, as riotous as spring after the longest of winters.”
“‘Micha, you must believe me when I tell you I have not guilt for this. No shame. I cannot. I can only thank you, with all my heart and soul.’ “‘I have always tried to live in accordance with my profession. Until I met you, I did not even reailse I was made this way… And it has been quite the loneliest discovery I have ever made.’ “‘I felt so set apart. So lost. Knowing there was a part of me, an unchangeable part of me, that would make others hate me… But today you showed me it need not be so… I can’t begin to tell you how it feels to know you are as I am. And that you like me too.’ “‘How remarkable… that in the vastness of the world, we should find each other. Some benevolence must have guided us together.'” — Thomas
“‘ …I just feel so very blessed…’ “‘You. Being with you. Knowing I am not utterly alone. And feeling, for perhaps the first time in my life, truly myself.’ “‘… I’ve never felt so confident in the beauty and benevolence of the world, and its creator, but I suppose I must be very far from grace indeed, to be who I am, and do what I have done… I presume an answer will come to me in time…’ “‘Oh,… if only we could be married…’ “‘How could love ever be sinful, whatever form it took? So really our only wickedness is fornication. And that is only because we are denied an alternative.'” — Thomas
“‘Well,’ [Micha] returned softly, ‘now we’re both damned.’ “Thomas did not flinch, did not stop touching him. ‘No, my love, that was a sacrament, not a sin…’ “‘We are fashioned in His image, Micha. To love each other is the most intimate communion with Him…’ “‘It’s all connected. There is no shame in love.'” –Thomas
“‘You know,… the strange thing is that I feel closer to God than I ever have, in ways I would never have understood before we met. But I can’t remain a priest…’ “‘It wouldn’t feel right, attempting to guide others to the grace of God, when I would be seen as excluded from it.'” –Thomas
“‘I’m scared. It’s frightening, to be who we are, and want what we want. Even though it’s no fucking different to what they take for granted.'” –Michael (Micha) Dashford
“‘And yet,… if you have never known love, the love of your father, the love–as a parent–you will feel for your child, or even the love for a sweetheart or a spouse, how can you even begin to understand the love of God? A love that’s as gentle as it is strong, as tender and as intimate as a lover’s embrace, as warming and wonderful as that first sip of tea. It seems impossible to comprehend, but it’s the nature of love to be all these things, all these things and more, both in heaven and in earthly counterpoint… And that is what I wish to think about today. The miracle of love, in all its multiplicity.’ “‘The more I live, the more I love, the more I know that this is what I want. It’s what I pray for, above all else. Simply that I may grow in love… That loving Him, and loving the world, is mediated through the ways we love the people around us, as partners and parents and lovers and friends. All love flows together, from Him and to Him. The multiplicity of love keeps multiplying.'” –Thomas
“‘Nobody gets everything they want in life. We all pay prices, make choices, accumulate regrets. There will always be paths we didn’t, or couldn’t, take. But I fell in love with you. I wouldn’t change that, even if I could. Even for every other dream in my heart.’ “‘And your God?…’ “‘ My God made me. He’ll work it out.'” –Thomas
Friends, how do you use social media? Is it a major source of information? Confusion? Connection? Thought provocation? Stress?
This year I find myself recommending specific accounts on Instagram regularly, so I thought I’d share them here on the blog. This post covers health and fitness entities I follow and recommend. I will share other topics in future posts. Which accounts do you follow and how do they serve you? At seven accounts, the list below is far from exhaustive. But whenever anything from each of these accounts emerges on my feed, I engage, and I am never disappointed. I have no financial or other interests in any of them.
The complexity of our world accelerates exponentially now, and we all have to learn how to filter and integrate all kinds of media assailing us all the time. Sensory overload is real and detrimental, and our management skills lag far behind their requirement. These accounts, in my opinion, help us cut through misinformation, inviting and guiding us to think for ourselves. They facilitate self-efficacy, which protects us from falling victim to those who would prey on our fears and uncertainties. I hope this list proves helpful and empowering:
Built With Science Founded by Jeremy Ethier, whom I found on YouTube for his excellent videos on how to lift heavy in the gym safely, BWS is my first online recommendation for evidence-based and accessible information on fitness and high level performance nutrition. It is truly founded in science, applied honestly and practically. Posts include primary literature citations, which I have not seen anywhere else. I did the two week free trial fo the BWS app, and I would use it if I were not already in love with my gym.
Nikki Georgeson Nikki is a former coach at my gym. She programs both exercise and nutrition, and I find her to be knowledgeable, honest, practical, and inspiring. Her advice is both relatable and evidence-based. Like BWS, Nikki’s posts educate, inform, encourage, and do not sugar coat or make false promises.
Sean Casey This young man impresses me to no end. He shares his own health transformation, and now leads an international community of folks from all walks of life. Like Jeremy and Nikki, his approach is one of self-efficacy, practicality, and community support. His posts are focused but nuanced, acknowledging the complexities and challenges of living healthy in an unhealthy world. The Glean app also has a free trial period which I highly recommend.
Kasey McKenney Kasey is the Director of Treatment at Ethos Training Systems in Chicago, my own gym. I share patients with Kasey and the Ethos team regularly. I most appreciate that Kasey brings together Traditional Chinese Medicine (which she has both mastered and can actually explain to the rest of us) and sports physiology. She practices a truly integrative and holistic form of physical medicine, and her posts and stories reflect this philosophy.
Will Flanary, Dr. Glaucomflecken Follow Doc Glauc for humorous and spot-on parodies of medical subspecialty personalities, lay explanations of the latest scientific research published in the New England Journal of Medicine as well as random medical topics we all had to study for our board exams, and strong advocacy for a more just and transparent healthcare system.
Dr. Jen Gunter I need to update my menopause post from 2024, but for now let me just recommend that we all follow Dr. Gunter. Subscribe to The Vajenda on Substack to receive her weekly newsletter on all things women’s health. Her most recent piece, “The Attention Economy of Menopause Medicine“, describes how the pendulum of menopause awareness and advocacy has now swung past useful education and application and well toward predatory hypercapitalist moneymaking. Her opinions are her own, they are strong, and they are evidence-based. She cites primary research literature and provides excellent context for her arguments and recommendations.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, ACOG It is not an overstatement that women’s health is under threat in the United States. ACOG is the medical professional society at the forefront of protecting and advocating for autonomy and access for women and their healthcare teams. ACOG posts about policy and educates about what is at stake for women when legislation and judicial position changes.
Healing Through Connection 