The Salmon Test

What if compatibility isn’t about finding the right person for this season of your life—but finding someone who can make the next migration with you? Using the remarkable biology of salmon as a metaphor, this episode explores adaptability, identity, and why the healthiest partnerships aren’t built around a single environment, but around a shared capacity for change.

Transcript

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I'm Ashley, and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth, not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry. So I recently got a piece of advice. Keep your heart open to love. Actually, it was delivered more like keep your heart open to love. And on its face, that's just good advice. Like fine, great. But it was offered to me in a very specific context. That's why I emphasize the you, because over the past few years, I've been building a life that demonstrates over and over again, I hope, that I can hold it down on my own. That means many different things, but across the board, I can hold it down on my own. Creatively, financially, spiritually, as a parent with an asterisk, because I don't think it's fair to say that I'm doing that completely alone. But across so many parts of my life, I've been proving to myself that I can stand on my own two feet. And somewhere along the way, I think that consistency started to crystallize into a belief. And that belief is maybe I'm meant to do it alone because I genuinely love where I am right now. I love my own energy. I love being the master of my own field. I love the feeling of building something that's mine. What I hadn't really considered is the shadow side of loving that feeling. And the shadow side is believing that partnership would require me to lose it. That if I ever became deeply intertwined with another person again, I'd have to give up this sense of sovereignty that I fought hard to build. So when this person said, make sure you're keeping your heart open, they weren't talking about romance, the generic sense, right? They said, I actually think you're someone who could deeply benefit from an equally yoked partnership. And that landed, unfortunately, because I realized my heart isn't closed to love. It's closed to that, to the idea that another person could actually make my life larger instead of smaller. That partnership could be additive instead of diminishing professionally, personally, romantically across the board. I did a gut check, or maybe I guess a heart check, and realize, oh yeah, that door is still very much closed. So I see why you gave me that advice. Keep it open. Um, funny thing is though, this entry isn't about how I plan to do that because honestly, I do not know yet. Um, you know, I'm taking the note that I should uh the advice was keep it open. After my heart check, I realized that I think it's all right, I've closed it, but I will begin the work of reopening it. So I'll circle back to that when I have something useful to say. On that front, this entry is about something else, a little bit in that it's about getting incredibly specific about the kind of partner and the kind of partnership that could actually be healing for someone like me. And so, with that in mind, I want to talk about salmon because I don't actually think the question is whether I'm open to love anymore. And the question is what kind of person can survive the life I'm building? And strangely enough, I think nature has already given a pretty good metaphor for that. So, what exactly makes a salmon so remarkable? Most of us know one part of the story, right? Salmon swim upstream. It's become almost cliche. It's the metaphor people reach for when they want to talk about resilience or determination. Okay. But for me, right now, in this entry, the remarkable part is not that they swim upstream. It's that they spend their lives moving between entirely different worlds. So salmon are born in freshwater, that is to say, lakes, and as they mature, they migrate downstream into the ocean, where they spend years living in salt water. Then when it is time to reproduce, they make the extraordinary journey back upstream into freshwater. That process alone I could zoom into, but I'm not. Often, though, returning to the very river where they were born. So now here's the part that fascinated me. That migration isn't just geographical, it's also biological. Freshwater and salt water place completely different demands on the body of the fish. A fish perfectly adapted for one would naturally typically struggle to survive in another. So before a salmon enters the ocean, its body begins to change, its physiology recalibrates. Scientists call this process smultification. Its body learns a new relationship with the water around it, not because it's becoming a different fish, but because it's entering a different environment. I think that's one of the most beautiful distinctions in nature. The salmon adapts without abandoning itself. It changes without becoming a different species. Its environment changes, its biology responds, but its identity remains. So over the past, frankly, three decades, I've crossed industries, I've crossed tax brackets, I've crossed cities, I've crossed communities, I've crossed identities. I've gone from executive support to sales back to executive support, I've become a parent, I've become a creator, I've had to learn entirely new languages, literally, that is to say, linguistically, but socially, professionally, and emotionally. Every new environment asked something different of me, a different way of relating. And every single time I had to ask myself the same question: how much of me needs to change, and how much of me needs to stay the same? Because changing environment isn't the same thing as changing yourself. And I think that's the first lesson the salmon has to teach us, and it's not about adaptability. So often when we describe someone as being adaptable, we usually mean they're easygoing, right? Flexible, even able to fit in, maybe even agreeable. But I don't think that's what adaptability is at all in the biological sense, because there's a version of adaptability that's actually just people bleating. There's another version that's performance. There's another version that's shape shifting, becoming whatever the room rewards. That's not what the salmon is doing. The salmon isn't trying to become an ocean fish. It isn't trying to stay a riverfish, it's remaining unmistakably a salmon while allowing its relationship to its environment to change. That distinction has become one of the most important ideas in my own life because over the years I found myself in rooms that required completely different versions of competence. Corporate America, Creative Spaces, again, sales, motherhood, different communities, different social circles. Every one of them had their own language, their own etiquette, their own assumptions, their own version of success. And every time I entered one of those environments, I had to adapt. But I wasn't trying to become someone else. I was trying to become more fluent. That's different. Fluency is not identity loss, it's identity expressed in another language. And I think that's where so many of us get into trouble. We confuse adaptation with assimilation. Adaptation says, I've learned how this environment works. Assimilation says I've forgotten how I work. One preserves identity, the other trades it away. You see, the salmon doesn't survive because it found one perfect body of water, it survives because it learned how to move between many of them without ever forgetting what kind of fish it was. That is to say, its duty to the ecosystem. Right? And I think that's one of the deepest forms of sovereignty there is. So let's go back to where this episode started. Keep your heart open. When I sat with that advice, I realized the question I was asking myself wasn't, am I open to love? It was what kind of person, what kind of partner could actually build a life with me? Because if my life keeps changing, then the relationship has to survive changing water. And that's where this metaphor stopped being about me and it became about us. I realized I'm not looking for someone who's perfectly calibrated to the river I'm standing in today. I'm looking for someone who can make the migration. Someone whose identity isn't so dependent on a particular environment that everything falls apart the moment life changes. Because life will change. Careers change, money changes, cities change, health changes, failure changes you, the water changes. And most of my relationships don't end because love disappears. They end because one person was only ever calibrated for one body of water. They knew exactly who they were as long as life stayed familiar. Then life migrated and they couldn't. That's the salmon test. Not can you swim? Most people can swim, kinda. The question is: what happens when the river changes? Can you learn a new language without losing your voice? I'm mixing mixing analogies and metaphors here, but do you get what I'm trying to say? Can you enter a new environment without abandoning your values? Can you become more capable without becoming less of yourself? Because I don't think I'm looking for someone who thrives in one body of water. I'm looking for someone who can make the migration, someone whose adaptability isn't a performance. It's their nature. And unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to know with absolute certainty whether someone will make the migration. Life has a way of asking questions that dating never does. So you don't find out who someone is when life is good. You find out when the river changes, when the job disappears, when the child arrives, when the city changes, the money changes, the dream changes, when the identity you've spent years building asks to become something even larger. That's when adaptation stops being theoretical. It becomes embodied. And maybe that's why this advice landed so deeply. Because I realized I wasn't actually afraid of partnership. I was afraid of becoming smaller. I was afraid that loving someone could require me to stop migrating. That partnership would ask me to stay in one body of water because that's where the relationship began. But that's not the partnership I'm looking for. I'm looking for someone who understands that if we're lucky, we'll both become strangers to our current selves several times over the course of our lives. Not because we'll lose ourselves, because we'll keep growing. It will be can we adapt without abandoning ourselves? I think that's the relationship I want. Not one that's built around a particular season, but one that's built around the confidence that whatever season comes next, we'll learn that river too. Maybe that's what equally yoked actually means. Not matching each other's strengths, matching each other's capacity for growth. Because life doesn't ask us to remain the same, it asks us to remain ourselves, and there's a difference. So that's my salmon test. Not whether someone fits beautifully into the life you have today, but whether their nature allows them to make the migration, whether they know how to change without becoming someone else. And if I'm honest, I think that's the kind of partner I'd like to be too. So I will leave you with this. If, like me, it takes conscious work for you to keep your heart open, what would someone actually have to be capable of for that openness to feel safe? Let me know. We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.