Recommendations from Every Era
Mid-Twenties: The heartbreak, healing and wildly specific practices that eventually led me to my husband
Last week I shared My Spiritual Origin Story and the five books that changed the course of my life in my early twenties.
That post reminded me just how many incredible teachers, practices, and strange wellness experiments have shaped me over the years. So I’m starting a recommendation series where I’ll share the books, rituals, teachers, and the occasionally unhinged wellness advice I’ve picked up along the way.
This week, our journey continues into my mid twenties, when love and the topic of being chosen became the great curriculum of this era.
Another way to describe this chapter is: the weird shit I did to eventually meet my husband.
If you’ve been around for a while, you may remember one of my earliest essays, The Time I Met My Husband While I Had a Boyfriend.
It’s an honest and bold retelling of a wild trip to Nicaragua that permanently altered the course of my life. A classic Sliding Doors moment. A “will they, won’t they?” Except the real question was: Are you really about to blow up your entire life for a guy you just met?
Well... we did. I was. And here we are, ten years later.
But first, let’s fill in the middle.
Last week’s post painted the picture of a pious young woman devoted to meditation, yoga, and spirituality. The kind of girl who spent hours wandering bookstores, standing on her head, and searching for enlightenment.
All true.
And then, at twenty three, my first real heartbreak cracked something open in me. Beneath all the yoga, the meditation, and the spiritual seeking was a wound quietly surfacing, will anyone ever choose me?
That question became the invisible compass guiding much of my twenties. My yoga practice was still there, but now it shared space with dating, clubbing and like many young women in their mid twenties, doing the exhausting performance of trying to be the perpetual cool girl.
After a few years of painful wishy washy scenarios of not feeling chosen, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I was tired of…
Sure, I like keeping things casual too.
Sure, it’s no problem that I don’t know if there are other girls.
Sure, take your time to figure out if you want to be with me or not.
My value was being outsourced to twenty seven year old wannabe firefighters, career bartenders and/or spiritual fuck boys :)
Over those years there were a few things I can recall that really changed how I felt about dating, love and being chosen. It was not over night. In fact choosing yourself is a lifelong journey that requires rigorous self attunement to not abandon oneself for the sake of pleasing another.
However, in that time I read, watched, wrote and did a few specific things that completely reorientated the way I related to finding ‘the one.’
The list is as follows:
