Are You More Curious Than Afraid?

cosmic girl reflections & taking a break

I’ve been an avid journaler my whole life, like many recovering overthinkers with delusions (though I don’t love that word…) of grandeur. One random day when I was in middle school, I switched from faithfully cataloging my boring days to dreaming of my adult life, writing journal entries from the perspective of an imagined grown-up Lola who’d finally fled the New England suburb my family had recently moved to and escaped back to Manhattan, where I rightfully belonged. In these dispatches from the future, I wrote for a living among other creative projects, but mostly I bopped around the city being funny and cool, and I spent inordinate amounts of time shopping at Bergdorf’s, since that’s what the characters in the Gossip Girl books did. 

During these journaling sessions, I’d sometimes become overcome with emotion, so much so that I’d feel woozy and warm, in a good way. Now that I am that grown-up Lola (or a version of her, anyway), I realize that I’d unwittingly stumbled upon scripting, a powerful visualization technique wherein you write your goals and dreams as if you’ve already achieved them. This plants the seeds for this imagined future reality in your subconscious mind, the part of our consciousness that contains all our memories, the habitual practices we do on autopilot, and the piece of divinity within each of us we can tap into to create the lives we want. However, even with this new knowledge, it wasn’t until I recently saw a picture of my middle school self and felt an enormous rush of affection toward that awkward, ambitious kid that I finally understood the feelings I’d have then while journaling about my future. I was feeling the love of my adult self, who I am now, who I am becoming, thanking her for starting this journey all those years ago without even realizing it. These are cosmic girl activities, obviously,  but it’s also in line with the Block Universe theory supported by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which posits that in a four-dimensional universe (the ‘block’ in question) the past, present, and future are all happening concurrently. Even then, I was at the center of what I called an “infinite love loop” at the beginning of this year, feeling the self-love I always had (but couldn’t always consciously access), moving from past to present to future and back again. 

I began thinking on this again when I started reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame, a manifesto of sorts about living a creative life. The book kept intruding upon my reality: in conversations with friends and strangers, and I saw it twice in two thrift shops – and didn’t buy it either time, even though I felt a pang of emotion each time, what I should probably know by now is a message from Future Lola telling me to pay attention. It wasn’t until I saw the book highlighted at my local Barnes & Noble that I chose to buy it for full price like a clown, because I’ve had enough cosmic experiences to know when something moves beyond coincidence and into divine synchronicity. The book has been a game changer for a lot of reasons already, but a revelation I knew would change my life came early in the text. 

I happen to do creative work, but in the early pages of the book Gilbert is quick to assert that “creative living” has nothing to do with our profession; she defines the practice as “living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than fear.” Without knowing it, this idea has guided many of the seemingly irrational decisions my Type A ass would periodically make throughout my twenties, always returning to the image of my life I’d constructed as a kid. Even with all my deranged five-year-planning, I’d always revert back to pursuing the original dream, since my emotions wouldn’t relent until I did. Journaling would come back to the forefront of my mind. Whenever I needed to make a decision, I’d write at the top of a blank page of my journal “what would happen if I…?” and then I’d explore, through what I now know to be scripting, the potential outcomes. I’d usually decide that the best case was more likely than the worst, and typically end up somewhere in the middle the spectrum – but usually tending toward good. I’ve always been more curious than scared. So when I opened a page in my journal with “what would happen if I took a longer break from the internet?” I was surprised at the fears that popped up, enough that I scarcely felt free to be curious at all. 

Getting over/making space for/moving through fear has been integral on my journey – which is to say, my life – and indeed, it was one of the reasons I began this newsletter almost a year ago. But I’ve realized recently that a new fear is threatening to take root, which I touched upon when I took a break from social media earlier this summer: the fear that everything I’ve been building online will dry up overnight should I dare to touch grass for too long. This isn’t true, obviously, the way that none of the worst-case scenarios our monkey brains like catastrophize about are true. It’s especially silly that I’ve gone down this way of thinking when I’ve considered taking a break from this newsletter, since I’ve literally just gotten back on social media after a brief absence and realized that, like most things, it simply wasn’t that deep. So yes, this is my way of sharing that I’m honoring my curiosity instead of being restricted by my fear and temporarily pausing this newsletter and my podcast while I pursue some offline opportunities and give myself enough space to get excited again about the work and art of communicating. I paused paid subscriptions earlier this month, and will be keeping them off until I’m back to posting regularly. That’ll probably be mid-fall, but we’ll see. 

Writing this newsletter has been a trippy little journey. It’s been absolutely surreal to build a community of readers just off the vibes tbh. I’m incredibly grateful to be read, to receive your DMs and emails, and the random pieces of media you send my way because they seem like something I’d like. I’m always screaming from the rooftops about killing the desire for external validation, it’s true, but at the end of the day I’m just a girl – and it feels good as hell to know that people are actually reading your shit! But as I’ve said before, I’m not an expert or a guru – just a young woman living my life and sharing what I’ve learned along the way. That being said, I suppose this is just a long winded way of saying it's time for me to do some living. I’ll report back with my findings soon. 

Lola xx