Do you know who you are?
I thought I knew who I was for so long... I'm glad I was wrong.
CARE.CHECK*:
Who are you?
I mean really… Beneath the story, the mask, the roles, the beliefs, the shoulds.
Who are you: right NOW? Today. Right this second. Do you know?
And if you just said “yes”: are you sure?
And if you want to understand what I mean and why I ask, keep reading below!
** First, if you’re new here, what is a Care.Check?
Self-care is the gateway to self-love, and self-love is the womb of self-creation.
Self-creation is how we become all that we were meant to be. How we turn our sacred dream into reality! How we embody our gifts so that we can share them with our beautiful hearts… and this extraordinary world.
THIS is why self-care matters so much. Because, ultimately, this is how we serve the world.
And to truly take care of ourselves, we need to understand ourselves—which means both our inner system and our vision of the world—deeply. We need self-connection.
Which is why we need to understand our body (our home and temple), our heart (our compass and anchor in love), our mind (our formidable assistant) and our parts (this inner family that has always lived beneath our skin and that IFS is revealing to us now).
So those weekly (newsletter) and daily (in Notes) Care.Checks are here to guide us back to our truth and intuition—while we travel this fascinating and soulful journey on Earth, together.
Hello my caring friend,
Today, the barista remembered what my Writing-For-Care.Check-Beverage is. That was an unexpected treat! That was an unexpected gift… The gift of connection, of feeling seen and known—in the smallest way, yes, and yet in one that counts.
Once a week, I drink a medium decaf oat milk latte while I write a letter to you, surrounded by flowers in my favorite upper west side cafe.
I love that someone knows that.
Speaking of the gift of connection: last week, Lee, a dear friend of mine mentioned that he hears my voice when reading my words and that warmed my heart in ways I can’t explain through words. I feel like the real me is sometimes so inaccessible to those I love…
She remains buried under an armor of should and shouldn’t, stuck behind a door locked by my fears of being hated or abandoned, and by my terror that my upbringers were right—that I was indeed a problem to be eradicated all along.
But when I write on this page, she’s in charge. She’s me! she’s real… Here, I can say what I mean and I mean all that I write.
I do change my mind very often, as Life keeps on giving me new puzzles, new clues, new answers and mostly many many more questions to ponder! But when I write I reconnect with the unmovable within me….with my heart—my heart, who says the same things my heart was saying when I was 5 years old. So I know that voice very well! The voice of Love.
The “me” that writes knows that singing is all I truly care about. That’s my magic. That’s my gift from God and to the world. She also knows that I NEED to write—to anchor in my writing as a way to tame the voices I inherited that still torture me daily…
Those tyrannic voices that are trying so very hard to save my life! Because that’s what those parts of us do: they sound cruel, unforgiving, humiliating and dictatorial. They do… and they are actually very young parts of us who believe that by talking to us this way, no harm will ever happen to us again. They’re too young to realize they are leading us to experience exactly what they’re trying to prevent. So our role is to anchor into our hearts and to reparent those wounded little ones that live beneath our skin.
So when my friend shared that he could hear me speak while reading, what I heard him say is that he’s getting to know the real me!
And he’s not running away. He’s not even taking one step back! He’s staying… If anything, he’s leaning in. Oh what a healing experience… What a GIFT. The gift of connection—the only one that truly matters in this world.
Which entails connecting with each other AND connecting with ourselves. That’s what I’m committed to doing now—and for the rest of my life: to shed all those layers of protection that keep me from me, and that keep me from you. Until you can SEE all of me! and even more importantly until I can feel all of me too.
* Here, I can say what I mean and I mean all that I write. *
So how have you been since last week? What have you learned?
What have you let go of? What did you receive? What did you welcome?
I’m always in awe of how much of a difference a day can make in someone’s life… and weeks are 7 whole opportunities to be transformed.
Since starting this journey of Self-connection, I feel like I wake up everyday unsure of who I am now—always more of me for certain, and yet less and less sure of what anything means, of what’s to come, of what is right or good or what is bad or wrong.
They are weeks that floor you, and there are weeks that inspire you. There are weeks that pass by in a blur and weeks where you feel every second. There are weeks that reinforce who you think you are and there are weeks that change in an instant, everything, everything you've ever believed in.
This past week felt like dying a thousand deaths.
This past week also felt like coming alive like never before—anew, humble and full of an un-understandable and yet undeniable rebirth of my optimism.
It's not that my optimism was gone, luckily it is my most loyal friend, my guardian angel, my lifeline… What I mean by its rebirth is that I didn't know you could trust Life this much. It’s a rebirth because my optimism was a baby tree before my last figurative winter, and it’s reappearing as a giant oak tree while my inner Spring is starting to bloom.
And I didn’t expect that my trust in Life would have deepened in such a dark pivotal moment... but here I am: exhausted, lost, unsure, full of grief and anger, and here I am: awed, alive, grounded in trust and full of hope, love and a renewed understanding of joy.
Here I am, drowning in the darkness, bathing in light.
I wanted to share that—instead of the gruesome details—because I believe that’s what we need to be brave enough to promise to each other. That’s what serves… The knowing that pain is not bad. That pain is the way in, which means it’s also the way out. That pain is not dangerous, pain is how we reconnect with joy.
We don’t get to choose our emotions. We either lose all of them or feel it all. I want to show up on this page and testify that it truly is true. That’s why grief is beautiful. And so is shame… That’s why grief really is love. That’s why shame is a doorway, not a trap.
I'm not the person I was a week ago, and as always such a change required me losing a part of me I thought I couldn't live without... and as always losing that part was what I needed to reconnect with what can never be lost: True Love. The love we have inside.
* Pain is how we reconnect with joy. *
** ABOUT LOVE
I’ve been following
’s invitation to write ourselves letters from unconditional Love for a few months now (if you haven’t yet, consider subscribing to her substack, and let it soften you open and melt you into awe), and I’m always so surprised about what Love has to tell me… (I shared one of Love’s letters to me HERE!):Those letters never say what I thought they would. Love never sees anything as right or wrong. Ever. Love doesn’t speak of abandonment or betrayal. Love writes about those who are connected to themselves and those who are not. And love never EVER once told me that there was kindness in tolerating abuse. Love doesn’t say “stay with them, they don’t know that what they’re doing is harmful”. Love says “stay with me and move away so that they can’t harm you!”
She also reminds me that when someone hurts us, they hurt themselves even more.
And that is very easy for me to notice inside myself!
Oh how painful it is to blame, to disparage, to deceive, to judge. How gut wrenching it is to remember times when my unconsciousness drove me to hurt those I loved most… and how heavy it also feels when I reflect on times when it drove me to hurt those I don’t love.
When we hurt others, we lose ourselves because in order to do so we must, we MUST disconnect from love. No one in their right mind would ever hurt a fly. I know I NEVER have an impulse that is not love, when I’m centered within my heart! And it doesn’t look like pink roses and golden chocolate boxes to be centered in love. It looks fierce, tender, vulnerable, strong, deep, wise, brave, and unapologetic.
So moving away from someone who hurts us is not only kind to ourselves: it’s kind to them. It protects them too from the pain of hurting us.
* When someone hurts us, they hurt themselves even more. *
Indeed, Love is not niceness and love is not fawning.
Love is not accepting what CAN be changed, avoided or edited out of our experience.
Love is not using hope against ourselves, by confusing hope with denial. No, Love is accepting what is and what is not. Love is not embodied by being loving to someone who’s brutalizing our values, our dreams, our parts. Love is not embodied by standing by those with whom we cannot breathe or be honest or be vulnerable. Love is embodied through loving acts and a radical commitment to follow our inner light and intuition. To follow the voice of love.
Love is rooted in accountability and there is nothing NOTHING loving in pretending that someone doing their worst is doing their best. I mean, yes, they’re doing the best they can in that moment, with their current capacity and state of regulation (or dysregulation!), but that’s not their BEST!!
* Love is embodied through a radical commitment
to follow our inner light and intuition. *
** ABOUT KINDNESS
Again, it is not kind to pretend that someone at their worst is doing their best; it is dehumanizing and almost cruel! It is disempowering the magnificent human being standing in front of us—because, to is core, what we’re doing is deciding that they were not graced with the same decency, humanity and essence that beats all of our hearts. It also robs others of their chance to face their ways, and to witness—deeply witness—the consequences of their thoughts.
I know I want to know when I hurt you!
I want to know if you feel unheard, unseen, misunderstood, unmet, lonely or afraid in my presence. I want to be told how my ways are impacting others, and then spend as many hours—or days or years!!—as it takes, to understand where the mismatch is between the love that sparks all of our choices and my behaviors that appear to someone else unkind or disparaging. To understand why my impact does not reflect my intentions.
I want to understand if there’s a value mismatch between you and me that invites us to put a little more distance between our hearts—to find the distance where we can love each other and ourselves simultaneously (as Prentis Hemphill taught us)—or if I have misguided ways of behaving that tell others the opposite of what I’m trying to say.
We all have blind spots. That’s why enlightenment cannot be reached in isolation.
Yes, it’s easy to love unconditionally when retreated from the world… I mean it’s not easy, but it’s simpler. At some point, we sink into ourselves and forget our needs for defenses, so we can embody our hearts. It’s a very different adventure to learn how to travel a world that pushes all our buttons all day long and to choose at every turn to surrender the armor, while wandering unarmed into the wild.
* There is nothing NOTHING loving in pretending
that someone doing their worst is doing their best. *
And so I’ll extend to others the kindness I wish for my own heart. I’m done shielding others from the consequences that their words and actions have on the way I think—and therefore feel—when I’m around them.
I’m also done accepting to be seen as who I am not, because someone else prefers that version of me!
Here’s a tiny mundane example: how many times do I hear people telling me that they prefer calling me Eleonore than leo?!?! Well, I’m sorry, my name is leo. If you want an Eleonore in your life, the good news is that there are hundreds and probably even thousands on Earth… However, it can’t—and won’t—be me.
And I just can’t let people relate to the physician I once was as a way to connect with me, either. That woman was a wonderful friend to me too—when I was blind and hollowed by my survival mode—but she was a mirage and she’s gone forever now. I’m sorry if some folks miss her… what prevails is that I don’t.
* I’ll extend to others the kindness I wish for my own heart. *
** ABOUT WHO I ACTUALLY AM
My life still looks like my past in certain aspects, because I don’t believe you need to burn bridges in order to hop on them and walk away… But I am finding my way back to who I was before the decades of trauma, before I started fading away and turning my feelings into ice, creating an inner iceberg that almost completely overpowered the fire of my heart.
I am finding my way back to being me, and even I don’t know who that is. But I’m letting that be okay.
I’m learning that we’re not meant to know who we are, per se. That’s not really a thing “to be someone”. We’re meant to be in progress, always—ever changing, ever shifting, ever becoming.
* I don’t believe you need to burn bridges,
in order to hop on them and walk away. *
Even so, I am finding my way back to being me, and the understanding I have of “me” is not fitting anymore ANY script of rescuing, teaching, fixing, controlling, doing-doing-doing, achieving and performing what is expected of me for me to be palatable.
The me that feels like me is devoted to her artistry, loves singing more than anything else is the world, loves New York, writing, heartfelt connections, mind-altering questions and soulful conversations.
The me that feels like me is committed to exploring every inch of the darkness and every spark of the light. The me that feels like me is not able to keep on pretending that those who abused her did not, for the sake of a prettier on-paper swan (story of who I am not: read more about the differences between the swans we are and the swans we are HERE, my friend).
* We’re not meant to know who we are. *
My denial is still strong, but it just doesn’t work anymore. It does not.
So I’m grounding in the me that knows that grief and anger are not dangerous, they’re good and sacred. The me that knows that joy and beauty are not frivolous, they’re holy and vital.
** ABOUT WHERE ALL THIS IS COMING FROM
And this weekend, the me that is me needed to see in the mirror the changes that are happening inside, because I felt like I was suffocating and living a lie, pretending that all is well while everything is in flames inside.
So I followed a very out-of-character whim and went, no RAN, to a hair salon, while promising to myself to turn my visit to the hairdresser into a ceremony:
I went to Masa Kanai, a NY japanese salon that had been calling my name since I moved to New York, and met the incredibly skilled and heartwarming Tsukasa. I told him that I had had the kind of week where everything changed! but nothing shows… And that I needed the change to be OBVIOUS—beyond what could be witnessed in my eyes.
And then I exhaled and leaned back… and he started cutting.
* I was suffocating and living a lie,
pretending that all is well while everything is in flames inside. *
With every scissor cut, I vowed to cut one tie to the past, cutting into those chains made of trauma that still keep me prisoner of a story I have gladly sacrificed everything I had built to release. I vowed to cut a tie to the roots I was never meant to keep, to the trauma bonds I had called romance or friendships, to a career that was never going to work for me, to the lies I had to tell myself in order to love those who could never love me.
I came into that salon with my oversized bag of anguish and unprocessed memories in my arms, and I surrendered it to the altar of the power that created me. I prayed and meditated, while I listened to the scissors’s melody and offered my pain to Destiny.
Finally, I opened my eyes, looked at my hair that had not danced this way above my shoulders in 20 years! And once again, I exhaled slowly.
I got up and walked into the street, feeling raw, exposed, vulnerable and committed to embodying the only identity I’m interested in: I’m a singer who lives in New York and who is committed to use her time on Earth—and her voice—to love, deepen, expand, soften, and rewrite every single day what it means to be “me”: especially anything that doesn’t FEEL like love, and anything doesn’t inspire me and/or allow me to… sing.
SINGING is who I am now.
Because, underneath it all, Singing is who I’ve ALWAYS been.
And I hope you’ll love me!
And I’ll still love you more than ever before, even if you don’t—because loving you has nothing to do with you loving me… and because I know now that you can only love me for who I am (not for who I am not). So there’s nothing I can lose on my quest for truth, but there’s so much more that we could share!
** ABOUT YOU !
I hope that this letter will inspire you to reflect on what “singing” is for you. (And I don’t mean it literally of course) :
How does it look like in your life? What is YOUR song? Your MAGIC… Your gift, that makes it all worthwhile, that you want to melt into, offer others and be loved through?
I hope that this letter felt like a PERMISSION SLIP to also redefine who you are according to your HEART—and not what anyone else think of you (and when I write anyone, I include you).
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo