How I'm finally embracing my slow 🐢

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Happy Sunday, Soothers. I have decided to just claim: I am a person who processes the world and moves through it slowly. I make decisions slowly. I need all the time in the world both in larger decisions and in the day to day (like, three hours each morning to do my own thing sort of time). I do best when I have nearly nothing to do in a given day. Slow.

Slow seems to be the way that works best for me, despite my best efforts.

Perhaps there's a reason I randomly chose a turtle a few years ago as my sign from the universe.

Slow like...

I was friends with AJ for three years before I worked up the courage to admit my feelings to him.

I thought about becoming an entrepreneur for two years before doing anything about it, then took another two years to make the leap.

Buying my condo was a process that took me about 2-3 years to steady and ready myself for, financially, emotionally and psychologically, and now that I'm ready to buy a house, it is a process that seems to be taking me another 2-3 years (I started thinking about it and desiring in 2020).

I need days to recover after travel.

I have to take long walks each day, for like, an hour or two. I wake up around 7am or so in the mornings and I'm nowhere near ready to see people or sit down and do work until 11.

For so long I've hidden this slowness, shamed it internally, and presented a face to the world of somebody who did All The Things, All The Time, and Really Fast. Taking on way more at work than I could handle, but nobody would have suspected (both in my corporate career and in my current self-employed life coach business). Running marathons. Packing in a lot socially. Handling a lot emotionally. Reading all the books. Doing all the self-care. Taking on Doing as an identity, as a badge of pride, and Speed as another medal to hang around my neck.

It's only in the last couple of years, since I entered my 40s, that I started to question if I was truly like this or if this was an adapted identity, a mix of nature, nurture, trauma, white supremacy (who prizes urgency as a cultural tenet) and ultimately speed and doing a lot as a method of safety, of proving myself, of never being left behind.

What if instead I could start to see my slowness as a feature, not a bug? As a path forward to reclamation to wholeness, to the work I'm meant to do in the world? As part of the way I'm actually designed?

I started to wonder if I could see the good side to slowness. If I could look at slowness like sweet honey.

Some examples of how slowness has been great in my life, or things that are even better when they're slow, BECAUSE they're slow:

My mastermind for sensitive women, Soothe, is a year long. In a world that prizes fast track transformations, I decided my first group coaching program would be literally 12 months.

Slow cooked meals.

Babbling brooks and lazy rivers.

Rambling walks.

Long and pointless meandering conversations.

Books you start reading and seem to take you months to finish but you don't necessarily mind.

Doing less and less in my business even though it terrified me at first and I thought I would for sure be on the path to failure, but now I mostly take Fridays off regularly, which still sometimes feels very wrong to me.

I've talked a lot about parts work/Internal Family Systems styles of self work and healing, which have been very powerful for me. I often have an overwhelming amount of parts, like my Queen of Shoulds that I wrote about last week, who wield a variety of clipboards, timers, and whistles around their neck. They're my managers and protectors; they keep me safe by keeping me going fast, doing everything ahead of time, and fitting as much in as possible as quick as possible.

One recent session I was doing some parts work and one of these parts got activated. She was talking to another part, harried, worried about all she had to do, and generally freaking out.

"What if I slow down permanently," she fretted. "I have to keep going fast. It's all I know."

Suddenly, as often happens to me in parts work, I was transported to a vision in my mind's eye of this part, sitting with Self, as the highest version of you in parts work is often called, on a beach.

My Self put her arm around the part that wanted to go fast, and said, "The only thing is, when you go too fast, you'll miss all this."

We spent the next several moments just sitting and watching the waves crash on the beach.