Unbalanced Harmony

Episode Summary

This week, Amber is on the mic solo to welcome back the community and reflect on the heaviness that we can’t seem to shake as we enter this third year of our very not normal “new normal.”

Show Notes

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Transcript

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Amber Burns  
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to thank you for asking, Oh, it feels so good and admittedly a little bit awkward. It's been a minute since I've done this. But I'm so excited to be back for season two. You know, we took a couple of months off. I'm sorry for everyone who that just triggered because all we do is think in Tik Tok sounds now but the team you know, we took a couple of months off. We got to reset. We got to grow our team a little bit shout out to our new pod assistant Kingston, we had some conversations about the conversations we wanted to have on the show. And if I'm being totally honest, the show's break was a little bit longer than I anticipated it was when we wrapped season one. I know a few of you sent messages or left comments, or DMS or whatever, asking, when is the show coming back? When is the show coming back. And I definitely felt a little bit like Adele because week after week, I felt like I was checking in with the team and checking in with myself. And I was just like, Guys, my show, it ain't ready. And I will spare you my bad British accent but you get it. I know that I'm not the only one who's been feeling like everything is just 10 times harder. In this third lap of the pandemic, where if I think something is going to take me an hour, it's probably going to take me a day. Or if I think I'm going to be able to be back on track and into a routine within the next week, it might take me a little bit longer than that. And yeah, that's kind of what the holdup was. But we are back and I'm so excited to be back. When I sat down to write out my notes for what the season would be. And what I wanted to talk about in this first episode with you all, I knew I wanted to route everything in the very communal feelings and experiences we're all having right now. I knew exactly what kind of conversations I wanted to have, which as a creative as a good sign for me, like when I feel just super sure about something I know I'm on the right path automatically, intuition alignment. And in the conversation that I've had with so many of you on and offline lately, I had a feeling that this was exactly the path I needed to go down. You know, when the idea for this show was born, we were a year into the pandemic. And things were kind of weird, right? Like, we just come off of 2020, which was a year of massive grief and change and confusion, we were all uncertain. A lot of us had just been forced to exit our daily routines for a life of work and life from home. There were, again off again, lockdown situations you couldn't travel, there was a major social justice movement happening. We were trying to change fundamentally, socially, in many ways, communally. Because we now have this huge public health crisis that was supposed to be uniting us, but wasn't really, there was an election, there were call outs, it was intense. And how I felt at the end of 2020 was that we had kind of brought all this mess out onto the lawn, right? Like we were laying it on the table. This is who we are, this is the stuff that we have to deal with. It wasn't pretty. And We admitted that we had a lot going on, it was going to take us a minute to kind of sift through it organize it, it's like you know when you clean out a closet for the first time, and it has to look really, really bad before it can start to look better. So now you just have all this stuff out everywhere. There are piles of things all around you. But you have a plan, right? Like there's there's a goal to get to a better side of this. And then 2021 happen. And 2021 brings with it the great resignation, right? Where we're all like, hey, there's a lot of this mess out. And I don't think I like it. Like, I don't think this works for me anymore. We didn't really have a system in place of how we were going to organize our mess and sort through it all. But we had kind of reached the conclusion that this was not it. We were recognizing that the safety nets that we thought existed weren't real, and that the things that were real, did not serve us at all. I know a lot of people became parents in the pandemic. And when I look at my friends who have small kids, and now we're trying to navigate being a person, being a parent, being in charge of a small human navigating all these things, you just realize how much society has not set us up for success. We, as a community don't have it together to the point where we can support one another. But are we kind of acting like we should. That brings me to 2022 We're here. The mess is still out. We have some bins but none of them are full right? Like there's still more mess than organization and structure. But it feels like everyone is trying to ask me ask us to pretend like the room is clean. Like it's organized and 2020 was what was 2021 is in the past as a new clean slate, a new normal, quote, unquote.

And we're all moving forward. But when I walked in to the New Year, I brought in the New Year solo at home, which no regrets there. But I didn't feel like we had really wrapped things up in 2021. I honestly don't know that we even wrap things up from 2019. And I don't think that's a problem. I don't think that every year has to feel like this grandiose closure and reentry, every single year. Calendars are arbitrary, right? Like, that's not really possible every year. But I do think that if we're going to say we're moving forward in a thing, we should have done something to at least clear the pathway to moving forward, right. So when I sit to write my notes for season two of this podcast and think about the kind of conversations that I wanted to have, I wanted to acknowledge the fact that I think that everyone is kind of feeling a little bit gaslit. And rightly so. I mean, I can't speak for everyone around the world. But if you live in America, especially you are absolutely feeling like the advice that you're giving being given is conflicting, right? It's like, yes, white supremacy and misinformation are wrong. Unless they all they are in a private company. 10s of billions of dollars, in which case, it's fine. It's free speech, and you should be okay with it. And it's, we should all be leaning into rest, but also go back to the office full time, not much has changed on that landscape. It's go with the flow of life and take it easy on yourself and give yourself grace. But you should also be trying to be that girl, Are you tapping into your main character, energy, it, go to therapy and work on yourself, but not here is how to deal with the days we're going to therapy and working on yourself are so hard that you're not able to be that girl, you're not able to be the main character because the main character doesn't get days off, and you need a day off. I don't know if there's a better word for this feeling, especially because I do think it is so communal. So we're all experiencing it at the same time and one beat, I don't know that there's a better way to describe it other than feeling gaslit. But I just thought it was important to start off the season, acknowledging that you're not the only one who feels pulled into separate direction and is just trying to find a little bit of peace in the center. Last season, we wanted to focus on getting to the root of the question, How is everyone doing this? Like? We were, like I said, a year into the pandemic? And the question was really simple. Like, how are we all navigating this weird space of being in a pandemic, but also trying to be a person and working and parenting and being in your craft and growing and healing and meditating and reading and housekeeping and all this other stuff? How is everyone doing it all? And I felt like that was a really important question. Because when you see other people's process, it gives you ideas for your own process, right, you become a collection of the things that you observe in here. And you take a little bit from here a little bit from there, and you build your own best practice. But this season, the question that I'm really wanting to focus on is, am I the only one, because I think a result of all of us feeling a little bit gaslit, by everything that's happening around us is that we do feel like, even though we see these ripple effects of what's happening, you feel like it's happening to you in a silo, or that it's happening to you at a different level. And then there are levels to all those things that are happening, right? I can speak for myself. Right now. I'm on the cusp of turning 29. And so I'm wondering, Am I the only one who has a lot of preconceived notions about what this last year of my 20s is going to look like? And do Am I the only one who feels like there are things that I should have figured out that I just don't have figured out yet. Like health insurance premiums,

I just know that eventually someone's going to ask me for some money, I'm gonna have it or I'm not, or financial decisions, or even bigger, more like fundamental or philosophical things like finding the one the quote unquote, one. There's just so much going on. And it's hard when you do feel like you're being constantly pulled in two different ways to know, which is the right way to go. Which way is going to actually lead me to a place where I feel comfortable and confident and assured and not like I'm always about to be split into. That's what I've been focusing on personally in these last couple of weeks. And that's what I hope that we bring to this season of the show so that you feel like yeah, there is a way forward where I'm not constantly feeling like I'm about to break into pieces. The area where this seems the most apparent to me because it is so much of our lives when we look at our relationship to work. I have been examining my relationship to work. I feel like since I was 22 years old, to be honest, and I've had peaks I've had pits. I feel like right now I'm in kind of a pickle And I'm really ready to plateau where, you know, I left a job in 2021 and started freelancing and working for myself. And that has been quite a peak and pit journey of its own. But at first I was like, Okay, maybe the goal here is to just find a really good workflow a good balance, like, I got to be present here, but also present there. And then how do I split the different sides of all the work that I'm doing so that I'm fully attentive and fully present in all of them, but still equally attentive when I close the laptop at the end of the day. And so I was constantly struggling, even when I was reporting to me to find the balance the work life balance, and I've heard so many people, especially women give this advice before that balance is so precarious. It's so easy to become off balance, right? Like, if you are walking, and you only stand on one leg, and then you're trying to switch to the other, eventually, you're going to lose your balance a little bit, it's really easy to not be in a state of balance, especially when so much of that balance state depends on factors that are outside of your control. Like we can only do what we can do, right? We're not the economy, we are not society, we are not the ones who are pulling all the strings. And honestly, for good reason. So that has left me asking the question, well, it's not about work life balance. And I think it's also telling that when we're looking for balance, the things that we're always trying to balance our work and life as if those two things aren't extremely intertwined. And that we can really fully separate one from the other. Right? Like if I have to go to work, I'm not pausing life while I'm at work, life is still very much happening. It's an endless cycle, right? Like, if you go to work and you're not living, chances are you're not alive, right? Like, there's no way that we can really put those two things on different sides have a balancing scale, and expect them to even each other out. So what we look for instead, instead of trying to constantly pit your work, and your life, or whatever your two things are against each other, and balance them so that you're giving, you know, a pebble to one and a pebble to the other. I've been really focusing on trying to find more harmony in life. Harmony means that you are reassessing the way that you integrate things into the things that are so how do I integrate, wanting to write more into my life? How do I integrate wanting to bring back the podcast integrating, having a better morning routine, integrating my relationship with sleep, integrating more movement into my days, my weeks, my month? The goal here is not to feel like you're checking off boxes by giving a little bit of attention to one and a little bit of attention to other but realizing that everything is kind of existing on a spectrum, it means that you have the chance to be fully present, when you're doing things that are work related and fully present when you're doing things that aren't not because one is more important than the other or because you're in a zone for either, but because those two things are intertwined. Allegedly, this is what we were supposed to be moving towards after the pandemic, right, it was supposed to be like, Okay, we see you guys have more than one facet to your life. So we need to make work a little bit more fluid so that it can integrate more seamlessly with life. And we haven't really done that on like a large scale corporate scale. And again, like I said, you can only do what you can do, there are some things that are just out of all of our control. And we're kind of at the will of the people that the employers the the powers that be will say, but there are little things that I've been doing to try to just make this a more harmonious phase of life, despite it also being an incredibly anxious and still weird to navigate phase of life. One thing that has really helped me a ton with this is to physically eliminate in my organization and like calendar methods, the way that I separate work and life. Because what I was realizing that I would do is I would have like a calendar that had all of my work tasks, and then a calendar that had all of my personal tasks. But if my Work calendar was overloaded, it didn't matter if there was space in my personal because I only have one energy source. So I'm doing a ton of stuff Monday through Friday for work. It doesn't matter if I have space to have brunch on Saturday, I'm going to be so exhausted, I'm not going to show up fully at all to brunch, but if I put them all on one page, right? So I have one week's worth of available resources, energy, time, brainpower, capacity, all of that. And now I can say, Okay, well, this work task will take away some of that. And then this personal task will also take away some of that. And because everything is just in fluid motion together, I

do feel less chaotic about it. And it makes more sense when I'm actually enjoying doing the things that I wanted to do. How many times have you gone to like hang out with your friends and you wanted to hang out with them. You wanted to be fully present but like you're still recovering from that meeting that you had on Tuesday that literally suck the life out of you. I've been there 2021 also saw the shakeup and kind of cancellation of the Girlboss movement to where we were all supposed to be, you know, epic, iconic founders. And I wake up at 4am to have a shot of green juice. And then I work on pitch decks and do all this. And we were kind of okay with hustle culture, hustle culture in the name of the Girlboss empire. And now that's done. So if our goal isn't to build, build, build these mega empires, of which we are these empowered female leaders, and what are we left with? Well, instead, we work on building powerful lives, lives that resemble an empire, because to me, it's not worth it to have all the things in my life sucks. I say all that to say, if you are also struggling to find harmony, if you're still chasing balance, if you're feeling like, for some reason, things still just aren't clicking. You're not the only one, you're not the only one trying to figure everything out whether you're 22 or 52. You're not the only one who's trying to navigate all these different intersections that we all live at. Because there really is always something isn't that like the, the most undersold terrible part of adulting. Every time you finish a thing, there is literally always going to be something else. And it requires a lot of attention. When we brought all of our mess out onto the lawns, and 2020, a lot of us realize that we had internalized so much of the mess, like the ways of doing things that they'd become, essentially our personalities. If you knew me, in college, you knew me as a workaholic, I was obsessed with doing as much as I possibly could my entire personality type was being an overachiever. So when I hit a wall, where I could literally no longer over achieve, I had to redefine who identified as as a person, that is a hard thing to do. And it's not a clean process. It's something that takes time and iterations. And I will probably be doing for the rest of my life, always figuring out who I am and how I want to show up outside of just the things that I'm doing. It's so easy to get caught up in the things that we're doing the things that we're committed to the roles we take on the projects we take on. But that's not who we are. That's not the totality of our identities ever. And if it was, that would be very boring. And we would be very stagnant, uninteresting people. But I'm not the only one who's always figuring things out either. Have you seen that meme? That is like, I think it's a tick tock that says it's time to wake up in the morning and cosplay as a person who has their life together. I think a lot of us have been cosplaying for a long time. And now that we've taken off our costumes, and we're left with all this mess, and everything is so conflicting. It's like well, do I get to just be who I want to be? Do I get to just make my own narratives. And that is very scary. I will leave you with a little wordplay because one, all I do is look forward to my morning Wordle to stimulate some brain activity every day and to you know, I'm a word person. So the difference between harmony and balance, harmony is bringing about a chord, right? It's bringing agreement to things, it's making everything come together in a way that is beautiful and sounds good. Think about when voices harmonize. Balance, is when you're bringing things that don't go together and trying to make them fit. It's literally putting a square peg in a round hole. So if you're so tired of hitting the wall, if you're frustrated with your puzzle pieces not fitting, I hope that this season on the show together, we get to have conversations, answer questions and get some moments and that make us realize that we can integrate the pieces of our lives without driving ourselves crazy. And if something just isn't integrating, if it can't fit if we've tried over and over to make it gel with the things that we do prioritize and do value in our lives, and it just isn't a fit anymore. It's time to let it go.

So here's to that. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I'm so excited to be back. If you haven't already make sure to rate and review the show and Apple podcasts give us five stars you know you want to and it helps us so much it helps people find the show. Thank you for asking as a production of read more media. Our producer is Kingston saline. I'm your host Amber burns and I will see you back here for another episode next Thursday.