Holly, your writing is fucking phenomenal. A friend turned me on to your Substack and, frankly, I’m much better for it. Your candor, insight, and style hit all the right notes for me. Thank you for putting your work out into the world.
This is an excellent collection of thoughts that has prompted some interesting reflection. We seem to be creatures who crave control, ‘purpose’, ‘meaning’, and some sort of coherent path; your experience is an illustration of how difficult it can be to tackle the inverse of these, the liminal spaces in our lives - especially when they last longer than expected. These are difficult waters in which to wade, but they’re so important.
#2 especially hit home for me. The ‘healing as performance’ concept is something I’ve been grappling with for awhile now, especially as I’ve started writing more. There seems to be a natural compulsion to tie a neat bow on all experience, to complete (or, to your point, construct) the narrative arc. When I asked a group of other writers about this phenomenon, one response was that “people want to see your scars, not your wounds.” And yet you often write about your wounds, and I find it compelling and meaningful and real.
All of this is to say: great stuff. Thank you. Keep it up.
Thank you so much for this post, as well as the earlier one on transitions.
I quit my faculty job in December (I was a professor of Biology), and moved across the country. None of the new careers I was sure would pan out did, some in ways that felt very much like the universe was trying to keep me in "the in-between". I relate to everything you wrote, but especially loved the sections on finances, and on feeling left behind, unproductive, and lazy.
I am so grateful for your writing here, that you are so honest and share things in the moment rather than after everything is instagramable again.
Once again I need to say thank you. Your words make me laugh and cry. Reading that being lost just is, helps me to just be. Grieving the loss of a partner after 40 years together, and i have nooooooo idea where I will end up, is enough. I didn’t think I could manage it without drinking or smoking and yet I do every day, I just dont do a lot of other things lol. I will hang in there and not know for as long as it takes. So much love to you.
Holly, from an outsider's perspective and for what it's worth - you opened up an entirely new conversation around women and drinking, catalyzing a movement that has literally ***saved lives***. You alchemized the detritus of your own pain and suffering in addiction. I view the work you have done with the Home Podcast/Hip Sobriety/QLAW as taking your own soft, vulnerable, beating human heart out of your chest and sharing it with those still caught in the shame and confusion of addiction. AND you are doing it again, writing another book mining your experience of publicly losing your company and the aftermath of the entire experience, how it completely and utterly upended everything in your life. The business world is fucking merciless, cutthroat, and cruel - the staging ground for what they talk about in Buddhism for the Eight Worldly Concerns/Dharmas to play out on - pleasure and pain, fame and disgrace, gain and loss, praise and blame. With the public nature of your work, there's then the momentum and pressure to pleasantly package, narrate, and monetize a deeply painful and personal unraveling. From where I stand, I don't think you owe anyone any kind of explanation for why you needed to press the pause button and chill for a hot minute in your bathrobe. I think what I'm getting from reading this piece is that this entire experience of having everything of worldly and reputational and personal value taken away from you and being plunged into your worst fears and personal hell has helped you get in touch with that which is indestructible and ever-abiding and most precious in you. Your spiritual values, your good heart, your Buddha nature. Your ability to simply take pictures of the sun and feel a sense of inner completion and sacredness. There's a saying in Tibetan Buddhism (Pema's lineage) related to starting spiritual practice: Perhaps better not to start, but once started, better to finish. It's a wild ride, and it defies the conceptual mind, the self's desire for personal safety and consolidation, and it absolutely doesn't really make sense to our deeply confused, social media driven samsaric world. In the Buddhist tradition, the definition of a Bodhisattva is someone who is able to reach nirvana (whatever that is) but delays doing so and sticks around out of compassion for suffering beings. For what it's worth, I deeply appreciate your willingness to take the whole shit show and alchemize it into art, another gift to the suffering world.
Holly, thank you so much for the depths of wisdom and experience you've excavated from your own life and put into beautiful words for us! It means so much to me right now (access to this post is what convinced me to become a paid subscriber).
I went on leave due to burnout from a demanding, "prestigious" job almost a year ago, not imagining for a second that I would be gone for so long or that I'd evolve to a place where my former life feels completely incompatible with who I am. And I am lost lost lost. I've found significant new inspiration, been cracked wide open, experienced wildly new ways of seeing the world - it's a beautiful journey. But it is so untethered and scary and outwardly "empty-handed" too. Despite trying, I can't seem to dig my way out of this so I'm trying to make peace with the fact that I'm not supposed to (cue the face-offs with the "why the fuck can't you just snap out of it?" voice). But it is a trippy trip and I'm deeply grateful for your writing; yours is the most relatable and profound description of this experience I've found. The sense I had of being seen and comforted from this post brought me to tears. Thank you!!
Thank you, this is beautiful and helpful (within and around the helplessness) as always - just to feel less alone is such a powerful uplift! Echoing other comments - you are quite literally saving lives. Xxx
..."you manage it by remembering you are choosing to live the way other people will not so you can live the way other people cannot." Woof. Thank you Holly.
“What if there are new unthinkable desires, and I just haven’t given myself the grace to find them?” I love the challenge and the creativity that emerges from this sentiment. I started reading Charles Eisenstein, and it’s there too; a challenge, an opportunity. I love thinking about how to apply this to myself (what else could arise for me?) and to social systems (what other kinds of economies can we think up?). Thanks for the thought challenge and reading recommendations!
I’m 42 years old and I’ve been floating after retiring (for mental and physical health reasons) from a thirteen year career as a hairstylist.
I’ve spent twenty months adrift. During this time I’ve reached fifteen months of sobriety. I don’t know if the sobriety would have happened without the letting go of my career.
This whole time there’s been a blank space when I think of what’s next for making money.
Because I was focused on sobriety I kept moving along without a destination.
I was gathering information.
Getting a picture of my aura taken.
Sleeping a lot.
Filtering.
Meeting with a psychic.
Not showering.
Designing a life I wanted to live.
Reading.
Having my birth chart read.
Staring at the ceiling.
Lots of walking.
I didn’t have a how yet.
Finally a, very faint, tiny spark of an idea that felt right came into my horizon.
It’s very new and very tender. I want to shout it out and also hide it away.
People can be so destructive.
This piece you wrote was my most favorite. I feel seen. Thank you 🙏
What you describe so eloquently has been me for the last 4 million years. Fine, seven years. In this liminal space — like a fucking ghost person waiting in a train station for a train that has been delayed so long I can’t remember where I was even supposed to be going. And there is no screen telling me when the fucking thing is going to arrive and I’m the only one here so I can’t ask anyone what’s going on. And my phone is dead and my heart is broken and I don’t have a book to read. I really want to go the fuck to sleep and wake up when I hear the train pull into the station but the bench is so fucking uncomfortable I can’t. And I couldn’t get the train back to where I started this shitty journey even if I wanted to, because that train is currently a burned out shell of ash and bad decisions. Sometimes I think this cold train station is actual HELL (like with demons and shit). On better days I lean more towards purgatory. When I’m feeling particularly positive I imagine I’m caterpillar goo in a cocoon of physical pain and loneliness. A blob of primordial ooze. I don’t give a two shits about becoming a “butterfly”, but imagining myself as a blob of nothing in this way implies that one day I might be something again. In the meantime, words like yours help so fucking much, so thank you.
This is another wonderful piece. On the subject of “Healing As Performance” you’re so right that we don’t have to treat every period of suffering as something to turn into a success or emotionally “monetise” in some way. Life for all of us is mainly made up of travelling between places with very few destinations so it’s better if we can just experience whatever the road throws up rather than trying to work out how it might lead us into town.
I’m so boring. Again, your writing is so good. You make me think. And as always , through all the intensity, and density of intellect, and angst, you hit me with, “and my cat ate my eyeballs.” Thank you so much for those laughs. Love always
Needed this sooooo much right now. Everything is falling apart and I’m constantly fluctuating between keeping the faith and knowing this has to happen and screaming internally “this isn’t faaaaaiir why is this happening to meeee, everyone else has their life in order and mine is in disarray, uurrgh”. Challenging times.
Holly, your writing is fucking phenomenal. A friend turned me on to your Substack and, frankly, I’m much better for it. Your candor, insight, and style hit all the right notes for me. Thank you for putting your work out into the world.
This is an excellent collection of thoughts that has prompted some interesting reflection. We seem to be creatures who crave control, ‘purpose’, ‘meaning’, and some sort of coherent path; your experience is an illustration of how difficult it can be to tackle the inverse of these, the liminal spaces in our lives - especially when they last longer than expected. These are difficult waters in which to wade, but they’re so important.
#2 especially hit home for me. The ‘healing as performance’ concept is something I’ve been grappling with for awhile now, especially as I’ve started writing more. There seems to be a natural compulsion to tie a neat bow on all experience, to complete (or, to your point, construct) the narrative arc. When I asked a group of other writers about this phenomenon, one response was that “people want to see your scars, not your wounds.” And yet you often write about your wounds, and I find it compelling and meaningful and real.
All of this is to say: great stuff. Thank you. Keep it up.
Thank you so much for this post, as well as the earlier one on transitions.
I quit my faculty job in December (I was a professor of Biology), and moved across the country. None of the new careers I was sure would pan out did, some in ways that felt very much like the universe was trying to keep me in "the in-between". I relate to everything you wrote, but especially loved the sections on finances, and on feeling left behind, unproductive, and lazy.
I am so grateful for your writing here, that you are so honest and share things in the moment rather than after everything is instagramable again.
Once again I need to say thank you. Your words make me laugh and cry. Reading that being lost just is, helps me to just be. Grieving the loss of a partner after 40 years together, and i have nooooooo idea where I will end up, is enough. I didn’t think I could manage it without drinking or smoking and yet I do every day, I just dont do a lot of other things lol. I will hang in there and not know for as long as it takes. So much love to you.
Grieving the loss of a 30 year relationship. Being in Limbo, every day a mystery, an unknown. I wish you grace and peace.
Holly, from an outsider's perspective and for what it's worth - you opened up an entirely new conversation around women and drinking, catalyzing a movement that has literally ***saved lives***. You alchemized the detritus of your own pain and suffering in addiction. I view the work you have done with the Home Podcast/Hip Sobriety/QLAW as taking your own soft, vulnerable, beating human heart out of your chest and sharing it with those still caught in the shame and confusion of addiction. AND you are doing it again, writing another book mining your experience of publicly losing your company and the aftermath of the entire experience, how it completely and utterly upended everything in your life. The business world is fucking merciless, cutthroat, and cruel - the staging ground for what they talk about in Buddhism for the Eight Worldly Concerns/Dharmas to play out on - pleasure and pain, fame and disgrace, gain and loss, praise and blame. With the public nature of your work, there's then the momentum and pressure to pleasantly package, narrate, and monetize a deeply painful and personal unraveling. From where I stand, I don't think you owe anyone any kind of explanation for why you needed to press the pause button and chill for a hot minute in your bathrobe. I think what I'm getting from reading this piece is that this entire experience of having everything of worldly and reputational and personal value taken away from you and being plunged into your worst fears and personal hell has helped you get in touch with that which is indestructible and ever-abiding and most precious in you. Your spiritual values, your good heart, your Buddha nature. Your ability to simply take pictures of the sun and feel a sense of inner completion and sacredness. There's a saying in Tibetan Buddhism (Pema's lineage) related to starting spiritual practice: Perhaps better not to start, but once started, better to finish. It's a wild ride, and it defies the conceptual mind, the self's desire for personal safety and consolidation, and it absolutely doesn't really make sense to our deeply confused, social media driven samsaric world. In the Buddhist tradition, the definition of a Bodhisattva is someone who is able to reach nirvana (whatever that is) but delays doing so and sticks around out of compassion for suffering beings. For what it's worth, I deeply appreciate your willingness to take the whole shit show and alchemize it into art, another gift to the suffering world.
I second that.
I will never stop loving your words. I will never stop needing your words. You are so golden to so many of us! xoxo
Andrea, you said what I feel in my heart so I won’t even try to express myself differently. Thank you.
Holly, thank you so much for the depths of wisdom and experience you've excavated from your own life and put into beautiful words for us! It means so much to me right now (access to this post is what convinced me to become a paid subscriber).
I went on leave due to burnout from a demanding, "prestigious" job almost a year ago, not imagining for a second that I would be gone for so long or that I'd evolve to a place where my former life feels completely incompatible with who I am. And I am lost lost lost. I've found significant new inspiration, been cracked wide open, experienced wildly new ways of seeing the world - it's a beautiful journey. But it is so untethered and scary and outwardly "empty-handed" too. Despite trying, I can't seem to dig my way out of this so I'm trying to make peace with the fact that I'm not supposed to (cue the face-offs with the "why the fuck can't you just snap out of it?" voice). But it is a trippy trip and I'm deeply grateful for your writing; yours is the most relatable and profound description of this experience I've found. The sense I had of being seen and comforted from this post brought me to tears. Thank you!!
Thank you, this is beautiful and helpful (within and around the helplessness) as always - just to feel less alone is such a powerful uplift! Echoing other comments - you are quite literally saving lives. Xxx
..."you manage it by remembering you are choosing to live the way other people will not so you can live the way other people cannot." Woof. Thank you Holly.
“What if there are new unthinkable desires, and I just haven’t given myself the grace to find them?” I love the challenge and the creativity that emerges from this sentiment. I started reading Charles Eisenstein, and it’s there too; a challenge, an opportunity. I love thinking about how to apply this to myself (what else could arise for me?) and to social systems (what other kinds of economies can we think up?). Thanks for the thought challenge and reading recommendations!
I know now that I'm not alone.
I’m 42 years old and I’ve been floating after retiring (for mental and physical health reasons) from a thirteen year career as a hairstylist.
I’ve spent twenty months adrift. During this time I’ve reached fifteen months of sobriety. I don’t know if the sobriety would have happened without the letting go of my career.
This whole time there’s been a blank space when I think of what’s next for making money.
Because I was focused on sobriety I kept moving along without a destination.
I was gathering information.
Getting a picture of my aura taken.
Sleeping a lot.
Filtering.
Meeting with a psychic.
Not showering.
Designing a life I wanted to live.
Reading.
Having my birth chart read.
Staring at the ceiling.
Lots of walking.
I didn’t have a how yet.
Finally a, very faint, tiny spark of an idea that felt right came into my horizon.
It’s very new and very tender. I want to shout it out and also hide it away.
People can be so destructive.
This piece you wrote was my most favorite. I feel seen. Thank you 🙏
What you describe so eloquently has been me for the last 4 million years. Fine, seven years. In this liminal space — like a fucking ghost person waiting in a train station for a train that has been delayed so long I can’t remember where I was even supposed to be going. And there is no screen telling me when the fucking thing is going to arrive and I’m the only one here so I can’t ask anyone what’s going on. And my phone is dead and my heart is broken and I don’t have a book to read. I really want to go the fuck to sleep and wake up when I hear the train pull into the station but the bench is so fucking uncomfortable I can’t. And I couldn’t get the train back to where I started this shitty journey even if I wanted to, because that train is currently a burned out shell of ash and bad decisions. Sometimes I think this cold train station is actual HELL (like with demons and shit). On better days I lean more towards purgatory. When I’m feeling particularly positive I imagine I’m caterpillar goo in a cocoon of physical pain and loneliness. A blob of primordial ooze. I don’t give a two shits about becoming a “butterfly”, but imagining myself as a blob of nothing in this way implies that one day I might be something again. In the meantime, words like yours help so fucking much, so thank you.
This is another wonderful piece. On the subject of “Healing As Performance” you’re so right that we don’t have to treat every period of suffering as something to turn into a success or emotionally “monetise” in some way. Life for all of us is mainly made up of travelling between places with very few destinations so it’s better if we can just experience whatever the road throws up rather than trying to work out how it might lead us into town.
I’m so boring. Again, your writing is so good. You make me think. And as always , through all the intensity, and density of intellect, and angst, you hit me with, “and my cat ate my eyeballs.” Thank you so much for those laughs. Love always
Needed this sooooo much right now. Everything is falling apart and I’m constantly fluctuating between keeping the faith and knowing this has to happen and screaming internally “this isn’t faaaaaiir why is this happening to meeee, everyone else has their life in order and mine is in disarray, uurrgh”. Challenging times.
Wow, this is really beautiful.