Your First Midstery: what comes through after the truck hits.

I was recently reading the book ‘On Our Best Behavior’ by Elise Loehnen - for about the third time now - and the following line really struck me. “To be alive and human is painful because we’re not really sure what we’re doing here.” And it’s true! So often that is the number one thing a client will say when they book a session. I’m not sure if what I’m doing is what I’m SUPPOSED to be doing. I don’t feel like I know my purpose… I’m scared I’ll never figure out who I am and what I want to do with my life. 

If you think about it, we go through adolescence and school - jobs, relationships and partners. By the time we reach our Saturn return around 30, we double down on being responsible and discover that busyness covers up some of that pressure. We become so busy we numb ourselves out of feeling difficult emotions and problematic relationships. And it’s super easy to keep going because there’s never someone waiting at a finish line to flag you down and tell you you’ve made it and it’s time to rest. In fact we get rewarded for being busy. You ask a friend how they are doing “oh I’m so busy! I’ve got the job, the kids, the trips, the family, the side hustle and I’m great, how are you?” So we respond not only verbally, but physically, by picking up the pace and remaining busy. Busy is productive. Busy is successful. Busy is the way of life. 

But this funny thing starts to happen. You'll feel like a stranger in your own life. For me it was around 38. For others it's 42, 45, or even 50.  You might suddenly get anxiety attacks and feel burned out. Crying in the parking lot at the grocery store and you don’t even know why. You won’t know when it’s coming, but it will happen to you and when it does you'll want the plate number of the truck that hit you. 

That's not the part I came to tell you about, though. The truck is loud. Everybody talks about the truck. What nobody warns you about is what comes through the hole it makes.

We're taught that work is the clearest path to becoming someone better. The promise is peace. But I think we're confusing peace with security.  We think if we work hard enough we’ll earn nirvana. But it’s a giant lie. We’re buying ourselves a momentary break from the fear of being alive without a purpose, but we miss out on having enough energy to pursue the things that actually light us up.

That’s the part of us that snaps. Like a dried out rubber band, stretched too tight we become brittle. In mid-life we wake from an almost dream-like state and question how the hell we got here, and why we aren’t happy and is it even possible to fix it without turning ourselves and our lives completely inside out. 

I call it a midstery. Midlife, mystery. A midstery is when magic stops being just a theory. Something magical happens in your own life. It stops being a thing that happens to other people, and you start running toward it, fascinated. 

And most of the time a midstery doesn't announce itself. You’re not on a retreat in Sedona when a woman in white appears to descend from the clouds and hands you your life purpose. No, it usually shows up while you're doing something completely unremarkable.Loading the dishwasher, sitting at a red light, folding a fitted sheet, asleep.

A midstery reorganizes what you're able to notice for the rest of your life.

To add some fun to the load we’re already carrying, women have historically been portrayed as freeloaders and walking wombs. The very idea of hunters and gatherers supports this. Women, picking a few berries but mostly lying around, waiting for men to return from the hunt so we can be fed and protected, bear the most children physically possible and then die before we get too disagreeable and lippy.

It’s no wonder we don’t think very highly of ourselves and feel like we need to work harder and faster than our peers. We’re earning our worth and staying to busy to acknowledge the bone level fear and exhaustion that’s building up inside. And this very notion of busy is what is keeping you numb to your own intuition. 

You might not even believe that you have intuition. And that’s the trap we’ve fallen into. 

In order to connect with our intuition, we have to slow down and get quiet. How many women do you know that have time in their lives for that? I’d tell you to pause the episode and count but you and I both know the answer is zero.

Developing your intuition requires rest, self-care and support. It takes boundaries. It takes giving up on being perfect. And it takes really getting curious about your own brain, which almost none of us do, because we're too busy running everyone else's!

Here's the part that got me.

There’s science to prove that women’s intuition is more accurate and isn’t some woo-woo thing but real physiology. Women pick up more subtle energy, more quickly. Your 5 senses provide your brain around eleven million pieces of information every second. Your thinking mind, the one keeping busy - that catches about forty of them.

Forty. Out of eleven million.

So when you tell me you don't have intuition, what you mean is you haven’t been quiet long enough to hear the other ten million nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and sixty bits of information trying to get your attention.

And you're far better at it than you've been told. 

A recent article reported that a majority of women - just women - outperform federal agents FBI, CIA... the trained ones, with the badges and the interview rooms and the gajillion dollar budgets, are only able to spot a liar about fifty-four percent of the time. That's a coin toss, with an office. That's the professional standard. 54%

Meanwhile, you knew about your friend's husband. You knew layoffs were coming at work before the email went out. You knew your child was getting into trouble. You. Knew.

I have my own theory about why true crime is a woman's genre. Because we're not morbid, for the most part we’re not learning as much as we can to perform our own. We're practicing our intuition. You call it in the first fifteen minutes, the reveal at the end proves you right, and you get a little hit of dopamine that's really your body saying your intuition works.

Now imagine running that intuition on your whole entire life.

So this week, don’t do anything dramatic. Don't quit, don't confront anyone, don't blow up your relationships. I want you to do this one simple thing. When you get an intuitive hit, write it down. Date it. Don't act on it and don't defend it to a single person. Then let time tell you whether you were right.

You're building a case file. And it gets very hard to call yourself unintuitive when you have documentation.

Until next time.

xx-Emily + her stars