LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Jamia Wilson

Sacred unraveling

Dear Lovelets,

I have been in Mexico all week, teaching at the Modern Elder Academy alongside my beloved friend and hero Dr. Tererai Trent. And the whole week has felt like a giant Letters From Love family reunion! Not only is Tererai a former LFL special guest, but so is Chip Conley, who founded MEA as a way to help people in middle age transition creatively into the next chapters of the lives. And most of the women who signed up for this retreat are Lovelets.

Listen, people, we are EVERYWHERE. (And we are growing!)

How appropriate that our very special guest this week — the radiant light who goes by the name

Jamia Wilson

— shares with us a letter that is all about being a cycle breaker: one who shatters the oppressive status quo within culture, within family, within self.

The timing for her letter could not be more perfect, because breaking cycles of dysfunction is pretty much all I have talked about in the last few days with Tererai. She is a Zimbabwean woman who pulled herself out of illiteracy and poverty and colonial oppression and misogyny in order to earn a PhD, and who then returned to her community to start schools that have now educated over 40,000 children.

When Tererai helps people find the spark of inspiration in their own lives, she does so by asking What breaks your heart? The answer to that question will often lead you in the direction of service, and help you become, as they say, the change you want to see in the world.

Here’s what breaks my heart: watching women oppress themselves. It’s bad enough when that oppression comes from external sources, but when women oppress themselves through self-hatred, self-harm, a reluctance to create, a refusal to be seen, a silencing of their own voice, a fear of imposter syndrome, by pretending they don’t know what they know, or by remaining in relationships and roles that harm, drain, and demean them — that breaks my heart.

Everything that I do and create and put into the world these days (including these love letters) is my response to that broken heart — and my effort to encourage you, us, all of us, to break free.

One precious soul at a time.

Jamia Wilson is someone who thinks about all of this both professionally (as the author of Make Good Trouble: Discover Moments That Sparked Change), and personally, as you will read in her astonishingly poetic and powerful letter.

What will your letters about breaking cycles of dysfunction in your own life tell you? I can’t wait to find out!

Love,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about breaking dysfunctional cycles?

Sweet tendril, you call it “breaking” but we just call it “awakening.”

Innocently, when you were a teeny little baby sprout, you believed everything you were told and taught by culture and family about, well, pretty much everything.

And why would a child not believe everything they were told and taught — especially a good child, eager to learn, eager to please and be praised? Eager to get gold stars and good grades?

But over time you started to notice that when you lived your life in obedient alignment with everything you had been told and taught by family and culture, you suffered — and interestingly, so did others. And you noticed that life didn’t even seem to be working out that well for those authorities who told and taught you everything. Meaning, simply, that the rules weren’t even working for the rule makers and the paradigm upholders, because the rule makers seemed to be more anxious and intense and unhappy than anyone. And you started wondering, “Are these paradigms working for anybody?”

And that is the beginning of awakening.

Cycle breaker, it is easier to end cycles than you might think. All you have to do is stop. Stop participating in them. Don’t do that anymore. Leave.

No more language about “This is how I was trained and shaped to be.” Well, we are training and shaping you to be something new. In small and big ways: change. Don’t wait for culture to change. YOU change. Someone will see your transformation and think, “Oh I didn’t even know that was possible.” And that’s how it happens.

Darling let us put an example in the simplest terms. The first 50 years of your life were spent serving men. Pandering and performing for men. Pulling a man’s attention towards you however you could and, once you had gotten him, shape shifting in any way necessary to keep him at all times pleased. You also wrote books that were about men and for men, and you worked for men’s magazines celebrating male culture, and you did all you could do to be at the center of men’s lives.

It’s okay, dear. You are not the first woman to have done this — to have mistaken proximity to the power that men hold for power itself, and to therefore align yourself with them, thinking that they were going to take care of you. Thinking that their power would keep you safe.

But honey, how many years did it take you to notice that every single time you thought a man would end up taking care of you, you ended up taking care of him? Only 100% of the time, right?

And what if you took all that energy that you spent taking care of him so that he could take care of you and you just cut out the middle man, and YOU took care of you? And then how much more energy might you have free to share your life with others?

Darling, this is your awakening, and here is your instruction.

The second half of your life will be spent serving women. Not in a pandering or pleasing or needy way but just through honoring and honest uplifting. Clearing paths, making space, sharing space. Redistributing resources, time, and attention. Taking that big heart of yours and pouring it into the most beautiful love story of all: friendship. Friendship stories across the world. Supporting and encouraging and helping and healing and hearing and seeing women who have for too long been degraded, dismissed, and demeaned.

Be comfortable saying this aloud and knowing that it is truth. We know that you love all the people. But you are here to serve and uplift the women.

This is what we are asking you to do. Ecosystems are healed through the restoration of balance — and you will be part of that rebalancing.

The more strength and autonomy and emotional sobriety and self-friendliness and true kindness that you generate within and toward yourself, the more surplus love and joy and energy and encouragement and resources you will have at your disposal to share with your sisters.

This is your awakening. This is your call to joyful action. This is your beautiful future.

This is how we break you awake.

Open your whole entire heart to these words, to this truth, our beautiful Lizzy.

This is what you are here for, and it is simple. It is what is next.

Prompt

When people use the term “cycle breaker,” it’s often in the context of multi-generational family dysfunction, but today let’s widen that view. Let’s consider not just patterns within families, but also the status quo, the traditional practices that exist in the places where we live and work. Join me in posing a question that might (I hope) help guide us away from doing things because that’s how they’ve always been done: Dear Love, what would you have me know about cycle breaking?

Because she is pure joy, here are two videos that capture my friend Tererai — first, the moment I gave her a copy of my upcoming memoir, All the Way to the River:

And here is an Instagram post from a few days ago with original poetry about the call of the ocean to “the Awakened Woman” —

tereraitrent

A post shared by @tereraitrent

May we all feel this same childlike exuberance and release this week!