Can I stay with myself?
Morning pages: July 4th, 2025
Happy Independence Day, Americans.
Given the situation our country is living through, perhaps today would be best spent in conversation with ourselves—individually. Me talking with me. You talking with you. About what exactly independence is.
Because we seem to have lost our way.
This is not a post about that—but in a way, it seems to have emerged out of that sort of self-inquiry. It bloomed forth this morning, five minutes ago, and I thought I might try something new.
What if I share it—just as it came—raw and real, without trying to make it into anything but itself?
So here you go.
Happy long weekend.
Amy
Notes from my morning pages, July 4, 2025
I’ve been working on a book for a long, long time. Several books, actually—each one crossing into and out of the others like strands of one long braid.
So far, I haven’t been able to make it all one big project—nor have I been able to keep each project cleanly separate.
Realizing this again this morning, I closed my laptop and sighed.
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the back of the chair. I breathed. Then, something clicked.
I pulled out my phone and started writing.
Is it possible that I am writing this book so I can buy a house—finally, before I die? So I have something of value to leave my children, besides the priceless value I gave them just by being their mother. If so, that is not a good enough reason. If so, I could literally, just buy a damn house.
My husband says that after his book is finished—after it’s published—then he’ll apply for a teaching job.
He wants to teach at an art school.
I keep telling him: it’s not the book that will get him there. It’s the forty years he’s spent becoming a master architect.
But this is his conversation with life, not mine.
His private negotiation with the fates.
It doesn’t have to make sense to me.
I, on the other hand, do want my conversation with life to make sense. And I want it to shift—now. I’ve been home too long. My senses dulled. My social instincts softened.
Yes, I had a stroke last year. Yes, I needed recovery. Yes, all of that was part of the story.
But now, it’s time to live again. To re-enter the world—and live better than before.
More alive. More engaged. More willing to be real.
In 2017, six months after my mother died, one month before my sixtieth birthday, I drove across the country alone. I wanted to see if the me I had become could live in the real world.
This me had taken two decades to be born—slowly, haltingly—through the quiet years of writing the angel column, through the listening years of teaching the Soul Caller Training. She was fragile at first. Wobbly but clear-eyed. Open-hearted.
So sensitive to light and sound she winced away from real life. But she’d come into form. Solidified. Held the space of her own emergence.
Now, I wanted to test her: Could she face the noise, the challenge, the pushback of the real world? Could she hold her ground out there?
I got into the car and began.
Photo: Me, July, 2017, on my way to California.
In the months leading up to that cross-country drive, this image kept returning to me.
A man of a certain age. Weatherbeaten. Skin sunburned so many times his face had leathered. Lines of his age and experience etched like dry riverbeds around his eyes.
I saw him waiting for me. The archetypal American cowboy, worn down by life but strong, standing beside a gas pump somewhere in the middle of America, as I emerged from my air-conditioned car with its New York plates and hopeful Obama bumper sticker.
The question wasn’t, Would he like me? I have always been likeable. Able to shapeshift - I could meet anyone where they were. Converse in their language.
The question was: Could I resist the urge to shift? Could I stay with myself?
Could I stay with myself?
It took a while to even HAVE that question to ask. I hadn’t known I was shapeshifting - changing myself to accommodate, to maintain peace (and safety). Hadn’t noticed how I never spoke up or spoke out.
The first time a healer asked me: What do you need? I burst into tears. I had no idea what I needed. Did I even HAVE needs? What even WAS a need?
It took years for me to detect need: to locate the absence, which is also a presence, that I had trained myself, somehow, to not feel. After years of dieting, I no longer felt thirst or hunger. I felt only craving - a feeling so ferocious that when it came, I was spellbound, unable to resist stuffing food into my mouth. Creamy and sweet: whipped cream frosting, dark chocolate. Savory: cheddar cheese omelettes, mustard vinaigrette. Salty: Potato chips, french fries. Flavor was my way of feeling. Craving, my version of need.
I was eating to narcotize. To silence the roar. To fill a hole that was unfillable. In the early years, I filled it with night life: vodka gimlets, mad dancing til four in the morning. Pre-dawn breakfasts in diners all over Long Island.
Later, I filled it with mothering. Cuddling, tending, soothing, purring, rocking.
Now, older, married, kids grown and flown, the emptiness returned.
I cooked. I ate. I fell asleep feeling full. I woke up feeling empty.
Last night, I started reading The Wedding People, a book I bought without fully understanding what I was getting into.
In the story, a woman checks into a posh hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, for one night. There, she has decided: she will kill herself. She has only the outfit she traveled in—and the outfit she plans to die in: a green silk dress she bought but never wore.
To her surprise, she discovers the hotel has been completely booked for a wedding.
Her reservation, which the hotel is happy to honor, should never have been taken. It was a clerical error.
In the elevator, on her way to the room, she confides her plan to the bride—a beautiful blonde woman who, perhaps because of the plan, starts pouring out her own misgivings: her true feelings about every member of the bridal party, her resentments of her mother. Her grief over the father who died, just a year earlier, leaving her one million dollars to do the wedding of her dreams.
Given her plan, Phoebe finds that she too can tell the truth—the absolute truth—to every person she encounters. As a result, people start to respond to her in a way no one ever has before.
With her filters off, she discovers: people like her. They are inspired by her. They want to be around her. Which makes her want to live.
In 2017, the year that I traversed the country alone—I found that yes, I was able to stay with myself but it only lasted while I was alone, on the road. I was better but when I was with my daughter in LA and back home, in NY with my husband, I found myself slipping in and out of the old pattern. I arrive as myself, fully integrated. I see my love standing before me and I slip inside of them - it’s all about them.
In the years since that trip, I am much better at staying whole - staying me. There are still ways that I am somehow, living beside her. Still aware of an other who watches, judges, holds us me and my real self ever so slightly apart.
There is still this hesitancy to give all of myself to this new way of being alive.
Last year, I had a stroke. In the hours just before it happened, I felt something come around me—a presence so real I could feel it wrap around me like a warm towel, a sun-baked tortilla.
A second body, made not of matter but of luminous fascia, swirling with stardust. A second body that was bigger than this one but lighter, somehow - spacious and springy, flexible and muscular - and filled with soft power.
I trusted it as it moved around me. As it moved me through the asanas - lunges and extensions, backbends and foldovers. Sphinx and Tree. I lifted one foot and pressed it against the thigh of the other. I balanced. And balanced. Amazed that I could.
Then, I heard a whisper that rang through my bones: “We’re going to do something hard now. I will be with you every step of the way.”
And I said yes. Full surrender. And we did something hard.
And maybe that’s how it will always be. Maybe we are not meant to flow, unassailed, untroubled, through this life. Maybe we were never meant to merge all the parts of ourself into one being. Rather, to move through this life accompanied by ourselves and others. To be aware of, and grateful for, the other who walks beside us, ever so slightly apart, so that we do not walk alone.
All of this, I offer, in shared contemplation. No answers. No conclusion.
Even as I sit inside of it myself.
On this Fourth day of July, I wish you all the blessings of the independence you already have. I offer this prayer.
May we notice and cherish
— and let ourselves receive -
the independence we have
worked so hard to achieve.May we rest - but not settle;
until all are free.Happy Fourth, Loves.
Amy
Thank you, Mary. :)