Having Agency
BEFORE WE GET STARTED:
First things first, I want to wish you all a happy and healthy new year! I hope you rang it in however you felt best and got some much-needed time off. And I hope that in 2024, in whatever era of life you may find yourself in, you own it. Fully own and embrace your era of life, live it authentically, and wholeheartedly earn each piece of this next chapter. Even if that’s an existential crisis that inspires you to launch a Substack.
THE WEEKLY EDIT:
Reading: New laws in 2024
This morning while on a walk, I was brushing up on the legislation taking effect in 2024 surrounding minimum wage, abortion access, gun ownership, driving, gender-affirming care, and libraries.
Drinking: Internal water shower
For yeaaaars I drank hot water with lemon first thing every morning but as life shifted with kids, I’d find myself making it, waiting for it to cool, forgetting about it then never drinking the damn thing. So, I switched to drinking one big glass of room-temperature water every morning to flush my system, and love kicking things off with hydration. A little internal shower if you will.
Launch I’m excited for: The Uniform
Ali Pew, Goop's influential fashion and editorial director, left the lifestyle brand after six years and while I’m not certain where she’s headed next, I do know she announced a new Substack called The Uniform. Her taste is chef’s kisses and I’m excited to see what she puts out there.
Doing: OPEN Nervous System Reset 2024
A month-long daily challenge of breathwork and meditation? Sign me up! Who else wants to do it with me?
Wearing: Posture Brace
With the endless hours hunched over breastfeeding, my posture has gone to sh*t once again so I’m back to wearing a posture brace for an hour a day. I ordered this one after having Leo for the same reason and it really helped.
ALRIGHT, LET’S GET INTO IT:
Having Agency
I went to dinner with a girlfriend a few months ago, days after the writer's strike ended, and as we sat outside in Beverly Hills drinking passion fruit mocktails, I asked her what she was working on. Expecting her to burst with enthusiasm over the new screenplay she was writing, her response caught me off guard, but I was pleasantly surprised. "Well, one big thing I'm working on is having agency over my life."
“Having Agency.”
I loved this response and had to unpack it further.
“Tell me more.”
Her lens was particularly career-focused, which made sense given the feeling of no control over her career during the strike, but the conversation was a catalyst to something bigger, one that inspired me to write about it here. Particularly as we head into a new year.
Let’s define what having agency means to start.
Having agency: a sense of control in your life. It’s the ability to cut through what pulls at us, find emotional and physical balance, think clearly, and advocate for ourselves so we can take a course of action that makes sense. With agency, we feel more in command of our lives. We are, in essence, our own agents.
It's safe to say that we all strive to have agency - as do our children (if you have them) - we want to feel in control, and we want to feel powerful vs. powerless. But situations, circumstances, and relationships often arise where we don't. For example, the writer's strike in her case or in that moment in my life, having agency over my upcoming birth.
The next day, I drove back to Santa Ynez, the deep blue Pacific ocean layered with fog to my left and towering mountains hidden in the clouds to my right; my mind was fixated on the concept of having agency. And somewhere between Oxnard and Summerland, I began to reflect on my midlife crisis, a time when I didn't have agency over certain areas of my life: getting pregnant, my career, my purpose, my future, etc., and something clicked.
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