For the last few years, I thought their name was Roosh Li. Like the river at high season, they have a strength that doesn’t hold back. They flow. Their voice has the energy of movement and velocity. It’s powerful, strong, and voluminous. Difficult to contain, and it doesn’t need to be.
I first met this entity by participating in one of Yumi Sakugawa’s online webinars, “Discipline is Pleasure,” in the summer of 2023. A significant aspect of the experience was to meet your own Creative Being and establish a relationship with it. Our task moving forward was to get to know its wants and needs and commit to a regular practice of spending time with them. Just show up. Be present. Establish consistent spaces and compassionate containers where you could be together without any expectations or demands. I created repeating weekly holds on my calendar and called them “Roosh Li Dates.”
Yes, of course, the desire and ultimate purpose was to eventually be in a pleasurable practice of creating your art, but what Yumi encouraged reflects a more gentle approach to any kind of loving and kind relationship. Rather than impose or control the “what” or pace and timing of a relational dynamic, the practice is to be open and curious, to see what happens when you simply make time, hold space, and commit to be together. When we do not try to control or dictate some particular way of unfolding, the relationship becomes inherently more trusting, and the magic of creativity finds a more nourishing space from which to emerge. This all sounds right to me. At the very least, it proposes a much better alternative to being constantly disappointed, letting yourself and others down, and resenting when things don’t go as you expect (or aren’t as you think they otherwise should be).
I really enjoyed Yumi’s guidance because it posed one possible way out of a troubled creative corner that I’d been caught up in for a very long while. By that time, I had already spent over a decade feeling increasingly frustrated by my own walls and hangups around writing and sharing my work. One doesn’t have to look too hard to find a blog post where I drone on — again — about “wanting to write more” rather than simply writing about literally anything and nipping that problem directly in the bud. At times, I am insufferable, even to myself. That feels like the sort of thing that’s okay for me to acknowledge (and write about yet again) but not the sort of thing a polite person would ever point out. Please. Why rub someone’s face in their own shit when they already know it so well?
[Here’s an aside: I wrote all of what you just read and most of what follows at the end of April, before my May-nia began. And I didn’t publish it. As I write right now, May-nia ended ten days ago, I have lots to show for it even though not much was published here, and I’m still just trying to practice being in right relationship with This Voice. Part of that, for me, has been accepting that nothing is linear in my brain or process. So I just go with it. If you manage to find me and follow along in the web of thoughts, feelings, and activities, I love you for it. Now, back to the words of past me, from April…]
I am still haunted by something someone said during a phone conversation back in 2020. We were just barely getting to know each another at a very large physical distance. As such, they had done their supplemental research and read a few of my blog posts from years prior. Apparently, that provided enough material for them to nonchalantly state, “You hold back in your writing.” It was maybe our third conversation! But they already knew enough and they called me out. I felt caught. All this time, I’d been standing naked on the internet with my self-consciousness hanging out thanks to the trepidation of my stilted words. Now I knew it was just as obvious to others as it was to me.
This may all sound a bit overdramatic. But the point I’m trying to illustrate is that Yumi’s suggestion to cultivate a relationship with a separate entity resonated like the long-awaited balm I needed to soothe some pretty deep cuts. “You mean I just have to get out of the way and let the Creative Being do the work?!” Great news for inhibited me — Roosh Li’s whole personality was to let it rip.
The name Roosh Li came to me during Yumi’s online workshop. It sounds like rushing rapids and explicitly conjures force and power. It carries the wisdom of water, which is strong enough to wear down solid structures while flowing with the energy of effortless action. You may hear the echoes of Bruce Lee nudging, “Be water, my friend.” Honestly, at the time of the workshop, it was helpful to identify all of this in an imagined entity with which I was instructed to build a relationship. Most importantly, Roosh Li was not me.
Let me elaborate.
Between 2016-2021, I worked with a lovely therapist who was the first person to actually help me understand what it means to feel your feelings. I probably had a good experience with her because she was apt to stop me midstream of my verbal downloads and updates and ask things like, “Where do you feel that in your body?” and “What does it feel like to say that out loud?" (which I always hated, by the way). Maybe because she spent less time trying to reflect what I was saying back to me and more time encouraging me to pause and feel something that I rarely felt she didn’t understand what I was trying to express. Except for one time when I described in great detail what it felt like when I would say to her, or friends, or partners, “I feel too full.”
Typically, I would conjure up an image of having a body like that of the Michelin Man. It is made up of rolling water balloons that constantly fill at such a steady rate that, should relief come, it would feel like a mere pinprick. Whatever might be expressed and find its way out of my body would amount to a feeble, thin stream of water. Hardly any relief at all. This time, however, I described the fullness of an active river. I’m sure the imagery was overdramatic.
To my dismay, my therapist said, “It sounds like you need something to ground you, like how a tree has roots.” I didn’t know what I was feeling in that moment or where I felt it in my body, but I was sure she was wrong and I told her as much.
In March of 2023, I finally journaled about this particular experience in a style that echoes the affective energy of Nietzsche’s most colorful works (this, by the way, is an important note that probably has something to do with my desire to develop an epistemology of intimacy, to which I’d love to return at some other time). I posted it to Instagram with some photos and images I had just learned to create on an iPad, including this one.
At this point, I might as well just recapture what I wrote back then.
3.13.23
For years I have felt too full, like there is no way I could contain the sheer volume of connection and meanings and insights that churn inside my mind and the feelings that ground me in experience and memory and the visions and dreams that course through my body in between all other daily happenings, and yet only a tiny pinprick of relief is occasionally able to release into some small corner of the world beyond the limits of my own body. Contrasting the powerful flows that crash and tumble in a dance of currents like poetic, interconnected torrents, it takes that much effort to coax even a droplet of how I know myself to show itself “out there” in a way that feels meaningful to and with others. This is a great source of what I have come to know as my own alienation, which is just another dimension of a profound intimacy with myself that gets significantly deeper each day and every year as I continue learning how to tend to it with passionate honesty, compassionate generosity, and courageous curiosity.
Several years ago, my therapist, upon hearing me describe how “too full” often feels to me and how often I feel “too full,” suggested I might need something to ground me, like the roots of a solid tree. My immediate reaction was to dismiss this — the imagery was all wrong. I felt it clear she didn’t fully get it. I talk about volume, power, force, velocity, like a river in high season when the snowmelt rages by the pull of gravity. Yes, some trees coexist within a river, and there is something to be said about strength in resilience and flexibility, but I am not the tree. You can’t ground a river. It needs space and channels through which to flow! It needs valleys with high walls and the capacity to carry a constancy of kinetic energy. It needs strong boundaries that can hold the quality of changing, dynamic waters, or else it needs open plains to flood out and overflow. It might be tempting to think a dam is discipline. It holds back for a purpose — to put to use through harness and control. But dams are constricting. Restraint is frustrating. To ask it to stop is to request that it no longer be. A river is not meant to be a mechanism. A river is a river — beautiful and perfect. By its very nature, a river acts according to its own imperative, whatever season, however it moves across land to sea. I am a river, and all that I am courses through me!
As of today, a new feeling has been brewing.
Part river, part riding amongst its surface, I sense a shifting degree of…trust? knowing? Letting. It’s different from detachment or apathy. More like acknowledging that which is mysteriously how one day becomes into and out of the next. Seamlessly. Effortlessly. Assuredly. What is that force, that power that unflinchingly guides what is, making it seem as if all are imminents and inevitabilities? For now, I feel some whisper of ease, a way to accept the forcefulness and let into the way of being naturally buoyed along at whatever speed the season dictates. It will carry on, incessantly. I may be part river or the river is part me, and it is possible to be present to the journey. Undoubtedly, I will become the sea!
Ahh, be still, my Pisces Rising Heart.
I know someone who once described themselves as having “a rich inner life,” which, coming from them, sounded quite romantic and sweet. My inner life, however, is rife with some complex internal dynamics. Therapists I’ve known over the course of my life have not had it “easy” with me. Maybe you’re getting a sense for that by now. But let’s get back to the voices that live inside of me.
To recap what’s been established thus far, I am inhibited in my creative voice and even new acquaintances recognize that I hold back in my writing, which is extra unfortunate given that I constantly feel too full of the dimensions of my own, singular human experience that simply does. not. quit. This has been the case for years and years and years. And, if you are wondering, even despite introducing new entities like Creative Being Roosh Li, it is still something I wrestle with on a daily basis. Yes, especially currently, which is why I’m writing this post.
There are still more characters to meet.
Just a few weeks prior to Yumi’s webinar when I met Roosh Li, I was literally draped across the stairs in my house sincerely wondering if the answer to all my problems was to develop an alter ego.
I figured, if I can’t write as freely as I want in my own voice, maybe I need to channel some other persona with a wildly different personality and none of my hang-ups. Maybe I need to make like Nicki Minaj and have six.
Many people create alter egos or share their art under a different name. Thousands of people had done it before, and it makes sense why one would. It’s a standard move for artists, writers, musicians, and it’s a straight forward way to separate the “real” you from the “known” you. At the very least, it forges some space for distinction. At least, I think that’s part of what’s happening with aliases and alter egos. It’s a way to be known, but in a way of your own design, through a persona you create. An alter ego is an act. Technically, you are the performer, but it’s the performance people see.
My consideration of developing an alter ego lasted a whole night, but that’s it.
Immediately, I knew it wouldn’t work for me because everything I crave is centered in authenticity, vulnerability, real genuine and meaningful intimacy. This year, I’ve finally — consciously— been coming to terms with the fact that I struggle with the experience of a fragmented self. Compartmentalization? I don’t know her. Be someone else? Sounds kind of impossible. If we hide our true selves, how can we sincerely connect? Alienation from one another is a tactic of our enemies.
I suggest you take a breath with me, because this could all unravel pretty quickly. Or, perhaps this is all part of the wonder and exploration around how (if?) it’s possible to write our way into (through?) an epistemology of intimacy.
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