Amping Up Your Beautiful Weirdness

As a 6’0” American woman, I fall in the 99.38th percentile of height. (Info courtesy of this calculator).

People see my tallness first. It’s the thing about me that’s most noticeable and conspicuous.

People often look at me with wide eyes and say the obvious, “you’re tall.” (or random dude on the street one day: “your daddy must be biiiiig!”).

People ask me if I play basketball. Or used to model. Or if my (male) partner is shorter than me (he is) and how he feels about that (totally emasculated, obviously).

All of this is only sometimes and sort of annoying (and there’s actually a lot of social privilege in being tall), but my height is definitely a thing. It leads the way and defines how I show up and occupy space in the world.

After the awkward teen years, I got better at standing up straight, not shrinking away, and enjoying the benefits of getting things off the top shelf and being able to see and breathe fresh air in crowds.

But I pretty much always wore flat shoes. Because I thought I couldn’t wear heels (isn’t it awkward and rude to tower over people like that?) or because I thought I wouldn’t be able to walk gracefully (higher center of gravity and all).

But I recently got a couple of pairs that make me about 6’2”, and the experience of wearing them has rocked my world.

These shoes make me feel like I have superpowers, which makes sense – because they do amp something about me (my tallness) that actually is a sort of weird, mutant superpower (statistically speaking).

It makes me wonder: why don’t more of us amp up rather than tone down what makes us weird, different, and special?

The places we don’t fit (maybe literally) are portals into so much beauty, power, and realness.

I’m finding that for me, wearing shoes that make me taller is an act of embracing my bigness – not only my actual physical size, but also the fullness of who I really am.

And there’s something catalyzing and life-affirming about stepping into that simple truth.

It feels good to feel like more of myself.

I’m tall. So I might as well own that shit.

Is there anything about you you've been toning down that wants to be amped up? Where is your invitation to step into your bigness?

Whatever weirdness, uniqueness, or realness is waiting to find deeper expression in and through you, I encourage you to embrace it, own it, and let it take you to truer depths of your vast and beautiful being.

Art as Hope

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that art reemerged in my life at this particular moment – that my impulse to begin tinkering with watercolors happened in the midst of deep grief, hard uncertainty, and painful despair.

There have been some really hard things happening in our country and world, and I realized at some point along the way that denying, minimizing, or bypassing any of it would never work. I had to accept its realness. My task is not to make the horror other than it is. My task is to find a depth of beauty that matches the depth of despair – to find a goodness that can stand its ground and hold its truth in the presence of swirling grief.

When we have been pulled into new depths of despair, it simply means we have to go deeper to find a love that can meet it.

Art helps.

When I’m tempted to believe I’m powerless, creativity reminds me that no, actually I am still in possession of immense power. Because when I’m creating, I’m using the power of my aliveness to dream up visions, put energy into form, and recognize beauty. Art – my own and others – reminds me that aliveness is thriving, as is our collective power.

In other words, art is an answer to despair and creativity is an act of hope. Because it’s hard to keep believing there is no possibility when I am literally creating it inside of me.

So please keep creating, friends. Your art matters.

Containers for Rightness

In matters of discerning and deciding, I’ve often been obsessed with getting to the “right” answer or choosing the “right” thing.

But I’ve found this approach to decision-making often devolves into chaotic flurries of mania, pressure, and obsession that, even if it all ends well enough, leaves me in a state of exhaustion and disarray.

So now rather than asking: is this right? - I ask myself this instead: is this a useful container for rightness?

Because I’m learning that most of the time rightness isn’t really found in external circumstances. Instead, rightness lives within me, within all of us - it is a frequency that inhabits the core of our realest selves and truest desires. Our task then is to find those spaces, containers, and portals that will hold that rightness, hum along with it, and reflect it back to us in ways that expand and enliven us.

Seeing it this way has lifted so much of the pressure I used to feel around “getting it right” - because actually, what I need to do first is connect with what already lives within me (and always will) and then explore and play to find those resonant matches and dynamic complements that will expand and deepen that rightness.

There are so many roads to destiny, connection, freedom, and truth - so many ways to love well, wander bravely, and live truly.

So rather than obsessing over which decision is the right one, I remember to live a big life, explore my edges, dive deep, seek out the sacred, set myself free, and create beauty - to focus there first and then ask myself which avenues will best support these projects and aspirations second.

In other words I ask: which directions, containers, and pathways will open up space for what I truly want to do and be in this lifetime? And more often than not, next steps seem to materialize and new roads tend to open from there.