You’re not a product to be optimised.
There's a capitalist paradigm that says to succeed, you need to be an Übermensch, devoted to becoming your 'best' self and constant self-improvement. And this journey, we're told, is by necessity lonely.
Picture the hero facing monsters, fighting demons, climbing that lonely mountain, until victorious and alone they arrive at the top, having conquered all.
The hero’s quest is such an archetypal part of our human story that Joseph Campbell even wrote a seminal work on it, mapping out the key elements of the journey.
And ever since many of us have used it as the map to our own personal transcendence. It’s been a sort of compass to how to fix ourselves, how to repair the brokenness and reach some optimum state where happiness becomes the operating norm, success is a snap of the fingers away, and the messiness of our human selves is rendered perfect. Where God can love us.
The very idea that there's a better version of you — someone you must become to be acceptable — is rooted in a capitalist notion of you as a product that needs optimising to be sellable. Add to this the way we’re encouraged to be individualised personal brands, with metrics and engagement statistics to tell us how we’re doing, and you have the recipe for human misery.
Allow me to open a window right here and YEET that whole screwed-up paradigm out.
My love, you are not broken. You don’t need fixing.
There is nowhere else to go to find yourself.
There is no mountain left to climb.
You ARE the mountain.
You are already here, your joy buried under old belief systems that tell you something is wrong with you. The people leveraging those old belief systems have something to sell you. And they’ll tell you that buying their thing is only way to be okay.
I’m here to tell you, the journey back to yourself doesn't have to be lonely and it doesn’t have to be hard.
It gets to be fun, and more importantly for our purposes, it gets to be shared.
Working with me is not about repair or improvement.
It’s about uncovering, embodying and allowing who you already are to shine through.
There’s a story of you that’s already there ready for you to live into it and let it breathe.
If you’re done climbing that lonely mountain, and you’d rather go on a shared journey that’s grounded in joy, fun and shared growth, I have just two more places left in my pilot program - The Joy Spiral - kicking off in May.