Sitting at the desk, signing in for Sunday church class, first class back after 2 weeks away. Teaching a retreat in Koh Samui followed by some travel; a beach in Koh Phangan and the wild chaos of Bangkok.
Student: I love your red nails, she said, looking at my hands, typing her name to sign her in.
Me: startled by the compliment… Oh thanks.
Student: I read your Substack; I really love what you write. It resonates, it feels real. It doesn’t feel like AI.
I ask her name and sincerely thank her for the compliment. It’s the reason I keep writing; it’s the fuel for the typing fingers.
It’s interesting; I reflect to her how often we can’t see our own gifts; we rely on others to validate, to make it good, to give it value. To make it real.
I sit down in front of the class; this is real. There are 50 people sitting and waiting for me to speak, to guide them through a journey of movement, of energy. They will have an experience in their body; they will feel things; those things are real; they are real for them.
I share a story with the class. Yesterday I sat with my son’s friend; she’s 16, we spoke about her feelings. She doesn’t like the way her boyfriend speaks to her, putting her down. She told me that sometimes, when she's with a group of friends, he makes fun of her. “It makes me feel bad, but I don’t know if it’s real because no one says anything, so maybe it’s just me, maybe my feelings are wrong? Maybe it’s not real?”
Pause, take a breath, can you relate?
She is questioning if her feelings are real based on other people’s reactions. She doesn’t trust her own feelings; she can’t tell what’s real.
Circle back to my conversation at the desk; I did not trust my writing to be good until validated by my student (and a few others).
The inner critic is harsh, but it can be taught; it can be loved enough to let down its guard and allow us to believe in what we do, or to set good boundaries with other people.
The topic of what’s real and what’s not is a big one these days; the capacity of AI to mimic humans, to look and act exactly like us, is becoming a new frontier in the advertising and media world. It’s going to become harder and harder to know what’s real and what’s not on a screen, which means that we need to spend more time with ourselves to strengthen the inner knowing of what’s real on the inside. To get to know ourselves, take the time to do the inner work that’s required to slowly, piece by piece, accept and love ourselves.
Seeking external validation sometimes is ok; allowing a compliment of your work to inspire you to create more, not because you needed that affirmation to know it’s good, but because it made a difference in someone’s life.
My humble advice to the young woman, and to myself at the desk, and to anyone reading this on a screen: if you feel something, it’s real. It’s yours, and it’s ok. Listen, and take care of those feelings; they are the truest thing you own.
The red nails, the words on a page, the ache in a sixteen-year-old’s chest; real is not something the outside world can always hand us. We must learn to recognise it from the inside on our own. The more time we spend in there, the less we need the screen or the compliment to tell us what we already know.
XX,
Tahl
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