Oct 19, 2021 • 11M

Folding in 5

no pressure to improve.

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Sarah Blondin
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Sarah Blondin is a free weekly newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $7/mo, you’ll gain access to my monthly Q&A and my serial-Folding In. The work I create here is reader-supported, hence the lack of ads and sponsors. Thank you!


Get lost in your life—no pressure to improve.

I have spent long hours and years pinning to find my unflawed likeness. The one without anger, contempt. The one without fear and worry. I have long thought that she is somewhere in me, and I am poor because I have yet to meet her. But I have found this very dream- this notion of some out of reach, better me- is but the piece of braided hide I keep lashing across my back. The hard slap that will not let me rest, as I am: imperfect, learning, and alive.

Driving down a pebbled road, I heard my son whisper to himself, "everyone is perfect except for me." When we got out of the car, I kneeled to ask him if he believed the words he said, if he felt like the world around him was decorated with perfect things, and he the one rusty hinge on the outside of it? He answered, "Yes, and sometimes no." At seven years old, he has met what I have met, what each of us has. The critic that makes us feel like somehow, we aren't getting it right. He has come to the painful yet unavoidable moment of his development, where one splits off from our sense of wholeness into duplicity, the separate, individual, I. With this division, we separate from one river into two. At this moment the critic is born. The entrancing voice of judgment, set against us. Eventually, the waters will converge, and we return to our nucleus, but not until we have walked many a mile away from it. Not until we have reached the exhaustion one does when they realize they can't go one step further without the other half. Not until we stop listening to the sound in us, forever holding us back will we be humbly returned to the expanse of the unadulterated heart. So, I lay the image of me ever becoming perfect down. I let go of the thought entirely, for me, for my son, for each of us. With each exhale, I drop more, and with this quiet relinquishing, I feel myself returning to the buoyant water of trust. I hear the tide rushing to meet the other river.

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