.SOMETIMES RAW.

I knew nothing about owning a home, or any property for that matter, as I have always rented based on how things were looking, and I thought I will most likely rent for the rest of my life. Here’s what I assume owning a home is like:

There is a lot of dust everywhere. You spend 60 to 70 percent of your time dusting, but the house is never fully clean. In general, a home tends to be a dusty shrine to dust, hellbent on being dusty, and you must constantly rage against this. All homeowners have a duster thingy to clean spiderwebs —that’s one thing I know for a fact.

You’re always on the cusp of purchasing “a few chickens” to roam around the yard. Hell, you’ve got the space.

You host (garden) parties and invite friends, family, and—most importantly—neighbors. Children are all left with the neighborhood thirteen-year-old for the duration of the party or simply play with all the other kids at the party.

People are always coming to your door and either giving you stuff or asking you for stuff. People greet each other, even in the car on the street. People talk to you. Like people always have something for you (bread, jam, a ladder, tools) or want something from you (bread, jam, a ladder, tools). And they know you by name. Because you’re a homeowner and everyone knows homeowners by name.

Okay, so houses are either free or come at the price of your immortal soul, which is usually, in most cases, damned to hell for eternity. This is called a mortgage. If the home is free, it is usually due to a well-timed death in the family, I think?

You sometimes have to peel up your floor to see what’s underneath, and sometimes there’s a surprise. It could be tiles or just more floor but, like, better, or sorrowful letters from the previous owner dating back to the 1860s (best not to touch these because of curses and all that).

Owning a home means you also definitely have a book deal in the works. These two things go hand in hand. This is because houses have libraries where you can store all the books.

Also, ghosts live in the house and you have to befriend them. They like to open things and close things and you have to let them. It’s a nuisance, but sometimes they’ll sing for you.

You have at least one—and more than likely, two—serious chill out lounges. You sometimes cannot decide where to hang out at night because they are all so comfortable.

You have lots of toilets. And if you clog one, you can just use another one. And then you don’t have to unclog any of them until they’re all clogged. It’s maybe the number one benefit of owning a home.

You eat three meals a day at a table (square or round, both can fit inside a house) and talk with the people you’re with. These people tend to be your loving life partner as well as the child you didn’t think you would ever get, but have grown to love. You have to do a lot of talking because houses are big, so you don’t actually see these people very often.

You never lock your doors, but you have a floodlight over your driveway that even the slightest gust of wind can trigger. If this happens, you have to go downstairs and check to see if someone is trying to break into your house and murder you. You usually bring a tool with you in this scenario, and I believe the options are: a baseball bat, golf club, or heavy book. I could be missing a few.

Lots of dancing. Very spontaneous, late-evening talks, the silhouettes of you and your partner visible from the outside, contoured against the warm light from your fireplace.

I do not, under any circumstances want to do Zumba with you. Workout classes, I am sorry to say, are the opiate of the already fit, or the already thin, if we are being quite honest with ourselves. I know. I know I am allowed to “go on my own pace” in theory. But in practice, you want me to keep up with people who can do that thing where you hold your leg up in the air while standing. The cheerleader thing. You know what I am talking about. My hips need to be opened? They are open, and even if they needed to be opened, I am not trying to solve that in front of twenty-five other people in a mirrored room. Certain things just don’t make sense. Like earlier today when I googled “what to do when ants invade your home” and got an Amazon recommendation for “vagina oil”. My first thought was: What on God’s still somewhat intact earth do you need vagina oil for? What does it….do? Do vaginas need oiling like the Tin Man? Per their website, their oil “smooths, brightens, and moisturizes vulva and labial skin”. What does this mean? Is the vulva meant to shine like a Batman signal in the night? Do people these days believe they had a bad, un-oiled vagina? Sorry, I got off on a tangent here. Back to the gym.

Why the hell would I want to work out with other people? Every friend of mine tells me, “It is not competitive – just focus on yourself; no one is looking at you.” That’s bullshit and we all know it. If I was really focused on me, there wouldn’t be mirrors and there wouldn’t be other people and here wouldn’t be an instructor at the front of the room with a Britney Spears headset on, shouting inspirations at me. Everyone is checking each other out. We are human!

I took a couple of Zumba classes in New York at the urging of a friend of mine to check out the “hot instructor”; it was a full-frontal nightmare. Not only was I red, sweaty, and wondering what I am doing the entire time, but I never got the moves. I looked like a clown having either a tantrum or an exercise-induced asthma attack. I could never tell what I was supposed to do when the instructor was facing me. Did I have to reverse his moves and mirror him? What was the plan here? He was hot, though.

I don’t mind working out. I like it when I go for a nice run in nature because it makes me feel good after I am done. Workouts are a necessary part of my life that I do a couple of times a week if I can and if I cannot, oh fucking well. There was a time when I worked out every day. Every single day! I lived in a building in New York with a gym. This gym had glass walls, which I guess are technically just windows. Everybody could see in because of all the windows. Who designs something like this?

I felt shitty about it, but I was also trying to get fit. What I don’t like at the gym: the smell. And most of the people. Again, I prefer nature. So, when I still had this gym membershi(t)p I was using an arm machine; I don’t like using any machines other than cardio machines, because the bigger weight machines are usually dominated by men. Some men make going to the gym a living hell; however, with a gym that’s open 24/7 like the glass box was, you can usually stay up late enough on a Friday or Saturday that no one is there. One day, I decided, due to a distinct lack of men around, to try using a weight machine. No one else was in the gym with me.

I sat down on one of those arm machines where you face the machine. You know when people have sex in movies where one person is sitting on the other person’s lap? Well, this is what it looks like when you sit on this workout machine. You sit on the machine’s lap and then you reach your arms around like a big sex hug. Of course, eventually, the idea is to pull your arms back in sort of a rowing motion. I started with zero kilos to make sure I got the vibe. Good to go. And then I upped the weight to twenty kilos. And then I upped it again and again. I was feeling myself. I was like, “Wow. This is fitness. This is health. Look it up, friends, this is wellness.” Until, from behind, I got a tap on my shoulder. I took my headphones out and turned around. Standing there was the guy from the front desk. I thought maybe I had broken a rule. Maybe I was there too late and the gym wasn’t actually open 24/7? Maybe a water pipe broke under the gym and they needed to shut it down and do reconstruction. Maybe there was a fire and all the exits were blocked and he and I were going to die together in the glass box and everyone would remember my commitment to fitness? No such luck. The guy from the front desk had seen me through the window-walls of the gym and wanted to come in and tell me that I was actually using the machine incorrectly.

He was like, “You need to keep your shoulder blades down. Pretend that there is a walnut in between them and you are trying to squeeze it.” I remember him saying this because I was like, first of all, why the fuck on earth am I trying to squeeze a walnut? Do you mean to crack a walnut? Why specifically a walnut? Am I overthinking this? I was so stunned that this stranger was correcting me that I let him guide me through a few more reps and then he just walked away super-satisfied with himself, his charity work done for the year.

He gave me his number and a vanilla protein shake. Three dates then I cancelled the membership because he wanted to get married and have at least three kids. I never used these arm machines again.

Have you ever had an afternoon free, or even an hour you could be resting or doing something you enjoy, only to wither it away thinking about past disappointments, worry about the future, or replaying embarrassing moments or awkward conversations over and over? Many of us spend a lot of time thinking about something other than what we are doing. While it would be unrealistic to eliminate our negative thoughts altogether—the human brain is primed for distraction and negative thoughts can provide helpful information—but perhaps we can shift dwelling or ruminating on those that don’t aren’t offering such insights.

One example for me is ruminating on what other people think. Often, when we are worrying about what people think of us or what we’re doing, we are really just worrying about what we think they think. 

This is not only a guessing game but one that actually has no bearing on who we really are. Yet we can easily obsess and spiral in this projection, and become stuck.

Perhaps here, we can take a lesson from the cosmos. Recently, I saw a documentary with astronomer Greg Quicke who mentioned that it is helpful to think of Pluto, not the dog from Mickey Mouse but the planet. There’s a lot of debate about whether Pluto should or shouldn’t be included in the solar system. But as Greg points out, for Pluto, what we think doesn’t matter so much.

We can be just like Pluto – again, not the dog. What people think of us really doesn’t change us—it’s about finding our own internal direction and feeling a sense of being okay in our place. 

So, when I find myself overthinking instead of resting, or obsessing about what I think people think, I’ll say “Be like Pluto.”

It’s a simple practice, perhaps even a trivial one, but maybe a tangible step towards change. When I’ve experienced a period of unhappiness in my life I’ve often sought external change—my job, hairstyle or even home—only for such feelings to eventually find me again. After all, wherever you go, there you are. 

So instead of getting stuck or making a drastic life change, we can perhaps become more aware of our thoughts and allow for the moment we are in.

This works for me sometimes, but I needed more mind-opening and booked a meeting with a friend and Shaman a couple of weeks ago. Besides having had an awesome new experience that opened my mind, she suggested a simple thought exercise that involved tracking your most common thoughts and devising a new set.

For the first week, I noted and catalogued my thoughts in a journal and take deep breaths while going inwards. She told me to just “freeze”, breathe, and observe. My themes were clear pretty quickly – worrying about the future; beating myself up for perceived flaws; negatively internalising other people’s actions or words; and ruminating on the past. 

What was most startling when reflecting on this list was that each worrying thought was outside of my control. What people think of me, the future, and what other people do is not something I can change by mulling over it. For the most part, I can’t control what happens in my life, but I can control how I think about it.

Then I developed an alternative thought to each on my list. In the following weeks, each time I noticed myself falling into the mental loop of worrying about anything, I would tell myself, “I’m doing what I can now with what I have.”

If I found myself lost in thoughts of the past or replaying interactions, I repeated what she told me, “Be open to the surprises in the present.” 

A simple reminder when I was slipping into another negative thought spiral was simply to ask myself, “Can I control or change this?” 

She further told me that when we test and probe our most common thoughts, we begin to see how our thoughts are constructed—and how much control we really do have.

What became clear to me is that we can’t believe everything we think. We have choices. We can apply thought awareness, get creative and develop a new set of thoughts, or simply let our thoughts pass without overthinking or attaching meaning. 

Negativity, stress and even worry serves a purpose—it enables us to think critically about our environment and actions. But that’s not to say our thoughts couldn’t do with a good spring-cleaning once in a while.

So, to reframe your thoughts or unwind from this spiral of thoughts, take note of them. Spring clean your mind. Focus on what you can control. And worry less about what you think people think, and more about what you think.

Spring-clean your mind with my friend(s) who are Shamanic Practitioner(s). It is an enlightening, awesome experience!

Be happy. Be healthy. Be open to something new.