comfort

pay attention to when you feel most at home in yourself

The Swan No. 2 by Hilma af Klint

Lately I’ve been feeling really at home in myself. Which is to say: I feel settled, tethered to the world in a stable, smooth way that feels really comforting. This a noticeable shift from how I felt when I was in a chronic state of performing. Then, I never felt at home in myself. Unless I could go for long stretches of time—like vacations or long breaks—without putting my performing-mask on, I was always scrambling, trying to grasp at my sense of self but never really able to hang onto it, like clenching at a fistful of sand.

Eventually I got tired of this feeling—this unrelenting sense of unease, the feeling that I could never sit still, that I was never really comfortable.

While I could talk around this problem at the time, I couldn’t quite label it, because I was still living it. I was in this chamber of discomfort, and I couldn’t tell what was outside of it. I didn’t know what feeling totally comfortable even felt like.

To remedy this, I took a somewhat radical approach and essentially dissolved everything that was gluing together my experience at the time—which, ultimately, manifested in me quitting my job and completely changing my day-to-day routine. I told myself that my only guiding principle was to follow what felt right. Pure, juicy intuition. Logic and rationality, for the first time in my life, had to take the back seat. In my view: there was no other way to rediscover my sense of self. I needed to shed the constraints that were producing my discomfort and let myself poke through the performative web I had been spinning for so long.

As I prioritized my intuition, the most noticeable shift that emerged was that I began to re-develop my preferences. The things that made me me were reappearing, the grooves in my life that reflected me were deepening. I was starting to recognize myself again. I was actually me, instead of someone else that I was trying to be. As this surface area of familiarity began to spread over my life, I started feeling at home in myself again. I began to feel comfortable with who I was.

trusting what feels right

This sense of inner comfort was importantly preceded by my decision to create space for self-expression. I gave myself total permission to lean into whatever felt right, natural, organic. It took me some time to even detect the signal of my intuition. I had spent so much time stomping on it that its voice had withered, barely whispering back to me when I asked it what it wanted. But as I paid closer attention to it, the vocals of my intuition strengthened. I could see myself in the world again. I noticed my attention snagging more naturally on what felt like a reflection of me, my focus flooding into places where I could express myself. I could also see what was not me—where I had no interest in being, my focus yanking itself away from places without the opportunity for self-expression.

The underrated thing about intuition is that it’s just as helpful in revealing what you should not do, as it is about pointing you towards what you should do. The overwhelm of indecision and uncertainty we feel when we are scribbling down pro and con lists, asking everyone for advice, and running through a logical justification for every possible option in our head simply melts away when we prioritize our intuition. When you realize that it is only you that can make the right decision because only you know what feels right (and only you will be living with the choice you select so clearly your opinion is most important!), you no longer feel the need to get approval from everyone else. You no longer feel the need to justify your choices. You develop clarity by simply listening to yourself.

accepting what feels right

After creating the space for it to speak up came the second half of nurturing my intuition: acceptance. Acceptance is where comfort comes from—first listening to, then following your intuition. Comfort is really just another way to say alignment, which is where intuition points us. So, if the first half of comfort is listening to the intuition’s ask, then the second half is accepting what it asked for. Enacting it. Executing on it.

But: this wasn’t as easy as flipping a switch. The decision to just trust myself proved to be much more confronting than I had anticipated. I was asking myself for a fundamental paradigm shift in how I related to myself—in what I viewed as most valuable, as most me.

masculine vs. feminine—the internal tug of war

I was basically asking myself to go from prioritizing my masculine side, to trusting my feminine side. My life until this point had been almost entirely dominated by my masculine. I didn’t let myself make decisions that I couldn’t logically understand or explain to myself. It always needed to make sense. Feelings seemed like a distraction, a triviality. Something that those who couldn’t justify their decisions with rigour depended upon.

Of course, I was totally wrong about this. Feelings are incredibly valuable and informative. Maybe even entirely informative (i.e. can be used in isolation to make decisions) if you know how to sort through them properly. Ava describes how emotions can tie into rational decision-making quite well in this thread:

It’s true: we rarely need more external knowledge (we usually feel paralyzed by large decisions because we have too much information, not because we have too little). What we need is more inner knowledge: self-awareness and self-trust. I realized that my feelings could often be explained by logic if I spent enough time with them, but they usually didn’t need to be. My intuition was pretty much always right, insofar as it was right for me—which is all that really mattered to cultivate comfort within myself.

logic does not lead to alignment

No matter how logical the decisions I made were, if they weren’t aligned with what I wanted—with what felt right—I would never be comfortable with them. This is critical! I can’t emphasize how life-changing this single realization has been for me: logic could never get me to alignment—only intuition could do that. As someone who was always rewarded for my assertive, execution-oriented, rational nature (my masculine side), I always dismissed the important of my feminine—the importance of how things felt, how I could express myself through my decisions. It was only when I acknowledged that my power rested dormant in the things that felt so right I could barely tear myself away from them (like writing!!) that I could actually unlock alignment and find the the inner comfort paved by intuition.

I’m still working on this. My masculine decision-making faculty is not going down without a fight. And of course, I don’t intend to dispose of it entirely. After I select the decision that feels right, I need my masculine side to dial myself in, focus on execution, efficiency, output. But the critical thrust here is that my masculine needs to follow my feminine. Intuition, then execution. Not execution first. And this is precisely the mistake I was making: I was focusing too much on doing things, and not enough on what I was doing and how it felt.

When I re-callibrated to lead with intuition and follow with execution, I felt internally comfortable while my drive simultaneously ramped up. Being pointed in a direction that I was excited about, that felt right, that was full of abundant opportunities for self-expression, made me want to activate my masculine even more to operate effectively in that arena.

self-trust precedes comfort

In a society that mostly rewards masculine qualities, re-training and strengthening our feminine—or more explicitly: our feelings and intuition—is the secret to feeling comfortable. To settling into yourself. To feeling at ease. You can never get to that comfortable-but-driven pocket when you’re doing the wrong thing, no matter how well you do it. When you aim somewhere that feels right, the execution comes from a place of flow, from seemingly endless energy and excitement, instead of executing from a place of fear, scarcity, self-resentment, or optimization-obsession.

If you want to feel more at home in yourself: pay attention to what feels right and cultivate more of that. What you think you’re trending towards by being purely execution-obsessed—focusing solely on excellence, success, achievement, whatever—will flow more powerfully when you are in your zone of genius, which is where you are uniquely capable and inspired. You can pretty much only find this zone through feelings and intuition, though. From asking yourself: what do I feel most comfortable doing, that I am naturally skilled at, that I would love to continually improve in? Following that arrow leads you to your pocket of comfort, where you will be excited to seek discomfort and push yourself to be better.

Don’t underestimate your feelings. Find the right setting for your effort before burning yourself out somewhere so ill-fit for you that your body shuts down. An external stamp of approval is never worth the price of endless discomfort and the loss of your sense of self. Or at least, that seems like a pretty bad trade to me. But hey, you don’t have to listen to me—these are just my feelings.

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Work with me 1-1: I help people discover their true desires and align their actions with their values to cultivate a life that feels true to them. This unfolds through a guided process of conversation, introspection and conscious action. Learn more about working with me here.

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PS—if this resonated, say hi on Twitter. You might also like a piece I wrote about intensity.