Reading · Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay

The local hang out in Einbeck, Germany, where I found myself confronted with my own prejudices and prudery

I thought today I do something completely different. Today I share with you a recorded transcript of my handwritten journal, unedited, raw, as the words have been transferred from my thoughts, through the nib of my Pilot Capless in green Pilot ink into my Journal.

During my coaching, my coach asked me, usually after a year, to take stock and take the time to answer some interim review questions. As I haven’t done one in quite some time, I found that this time, where I find myself today, in quite a liminal space, after a major turning point inside of me, is indeed, a wonderful time to start to take stock. Look back and into the future. This might become a series of some sort. Me answering her slightly modified questions, to fit them to my own current process. There have been nine questions in German language in the original assessment, yet as one concerned solely the quality of the coaching process, I will skip that one.

The first question of her questionnaire, the one only looking back is:

Why did I start on this path and began coaching? What did I want to achieve for myself?

I have edited the transcript, from the video I took reading my journal aloud, only slightly for clarity and to get rid of obvious errors in transcription.

Einbeck, August 16th, 2026, 8.54 am, balcony.

Why did I start and continue on this path? What did I want to achieve for myself in starting this path?

There was this imagined flatline somewhere in the hospital two miles away on 11.37 am, March 6th, 2020.

I felt it manifest into reality by the bone-deep chill and cold shiver running through my veins and bones. Somehow I felt cut off, cut loose, being left behind. It was shortly before the pandemic hit with full force. There I was, having given the privilege to experience the last breath of their mother alone, to the three children of hers, me sitting at my desk in her former company. I felt it so literally that the ringing phone around 11.45 am was no longer a surprise, yet a confirmation of what I had already experienced with them.

Only now, six years later, do I know what gift she handed me in her last breath. The gift to embark finally on a journey into my own life.

I always felt paradoxical about her death, right from the start. The predominant feeling having been rather gratitude than grief. I still don’t know where it came from. Having back then thought it might have been my life experience of having prematurely lost already my father, my mother, my brother, and now her. In the first three instances, grieving had only made me feel heavier, more depressed, more exhausted, more sad. It had this tendency to linger for ages, like the unwanted guest making itself at home in your beloved chair, visiting to stay.

And because that first pandemic march turned out to be, economically at least, the best month, revenue wise, in the whole history of the company, how ironic, her death month of all, being the best month her company could ever achieve.

I needed all my energy, capacity, and then some. So we, a small team that we were, would be able to whoop the massive increase. The increase at the beginning of the pandemic was literally flooding us with. And then there was also the fact that only two weeks after Connie’s death, my colleague’s mother died, leaving the next of then five employees stricken by grief and in need to process everything entailed with the death of a mother. And two more weeks later, we mourned with the next colleague who had lost her father.

Something inside told me wallowing in grief might not be helpful at all and that I better try another approach in dealing with her death.

That’s when I found gratitude.

I made the deliberate effort to cherish the time we had been given together instead of mourning and resenting the time we now would no longer have.

What I can see only from afar after six years is how much this reframing was already the key to everything that would follow in the wake of her death. How much perspective change would become a daily exercise in everything I was about to discover about me, my beliefs, my values, my expectations, my sorrows, the ills of the world, and those that have happened to me. It would be over and over again the change in perspective and perception that would be going to make the biggest differences in how I feel, how I am in this world, and in the end how much it would transform me. Or shall I say rewild me? 9.33 a.m.

9.46 a.m. It was during that time when the awareness arose in me of not being able to find one single goal to pursue within me. I worked 14-15 hours days, slept four to five, and in the remaining time I said thanks to the pandemic which had stilled and then halted all social activities, shut down all bars and restaurants, and encouraged distancing me and my tedious thoughts on the balcony.

Having started to write letters about my day to my former partner became a lifeline which I had taken up on the day she died. I missed our daily exchanges of what had happened and relocated them simply to the page in words to her. Two and a half years straight, every single day, I wrote, as my coach would later noted, myself back to life, one word, one thought at the time.

I have stopped counting them, yet I feel I left five million words long behind me, maybe nearing 10 million by now. It was what helped me sorting, reflecting, and finally making sense of everything that had happened to me and in my life, and it all started consciously with this one realization.

I was unable to find one single goal of my own. It could have been a great tip off and had I been able to focus on the word my in that sentence, yet I focused on goal instead. Of course, I was aware and had learned all these tools around goal setting, yet still to this day I prefer to sit in tension, maybe an aspiration, yet I don’t do goals. Yet it was an as good starting point as any.

I started to pull the thread and followed it. I revisited all the literature I could get hold on and she might have at that time thought — yes, I was still a”she” back then — she should have gotten the knack of it by now, six weeks in. Only I haven’t. Four weeks, six weeks, no progress at all. It was kind of frustrating.

Well, I thought maybe widen the lens, maybe look at the problem from a different angle. Try some different approach. Again, I see now I was once again changing my perspective. Left the beaten part, started to explore something new, something I hadn’t considered before. While writing this, I realized I had done that over and over in my life after most of the many blows. When I found one path blocked, yet again, big boulders, rocks or even a landslide, to even consider clearing the way myself was insanity. And so time and again I started to discover new paths, workarounds with ladders, knit ropes, anything that would enable me to move again. Everything to no longer be stuck there in the hole, I was feeling to be almost buried in.

By the end of April 2020, I had found first Anne Heintze and shortly thereafter her maybe American role model Barbara Sher. Both wrote about scanner personalities. People with so many interests, they simply couldn’t lock on one single goal or a few, because it felt like abandoning themselves in the process. Though I no longer believe that this is the reason at all, my personality surely fit into their boxes. I of course took all the tests freely available and got a match at all of them. Scanner personality, highly gifted, highly sensitive, highly sensible. More labels I could place on me.

I became very good at acquiring labels, distinguishing, and at least that’s what I thought at the time, finding explanations why I felt so different from everybody around me. By the end of June, I had remembered what a school friend of my wife, a professor of psychology, had once told her, that I might be an Asperger. Asperger, wow. Down that rabbit hole I went. It turned out that beside me having several of the traits clinical tests described — I found a free one including the clinical evaluation form for doctors at Cambridge University UK — and I took it. I evaluated myself for Asperger and because it was part of the distinguishing process there, autism. For once, I failed the tests. Yes, I had still marks that made it probable that I had at least some of these behaviors, yet not enough to establish either one.

Yet during that assessment and excavation, I came about the term neurodiversity. So I started to research that. What is meant by it? How do they assess it? Which conditions should be true? The highly gifted, sensible, sensitive part together with highly empathic already gave me pointers. So all in all, I came to the conclusion I might be indeed have a very high probability to be neurodiverse or neurodivergent as some dub it. Fine, another batch I could pin on and still, I wasn’t much wiser yet.

All those labels other people had invented to create categories of people had added only knowledge. Yeah, to be fair, some insight as well, yet no lasting change. Today, I’d say they brought short-term relief like any diagnosis from a doctor after having visited many of them without a clear answer would bring. “This finally someone starts to make sense of what is wrong with me.” Today, I see that much more differentiated yet it would take me another three to four years to get there.

I see all labels, categories, diagnoses, all those boxes I and others placed me in, way more critically today. They are to me today much more like boundaries placed up in me from the outside, drawers to be placed in, boundaries of my being to be confined in, boxes to fit into and they are not who I am. They shine a spotlight on a single trait, ability, skill, capability, deficit and plunge the rest of me into the dark relegated everything I am who I can be apart from them into invisibility. Don’t get me wrong, there are contexts in which they are both helpful and might even be justified. In my disability pension process, for instance, when it comes to institutional settings or even if one is looking for a group of people with a similar experience and yet if I see myself only through the lens of these boxes I am placed into it I am placed into by others I feel rather severed from the multifaceted being I am.

11.03 am. Five years later I would return to that by researching the origins and at the end of that process arrive at the very differentiated and quite different view of all those labels, boxes, drawers, diagonals, categories, compartments and other means of comparison. One where I would see rather how small and therefore controllable and segregated and often severed from the vastness of our soul diverse humanity they are keeping us most of the time. Yet I would also be able to see when and where they are helpful useful even to create more equity in a world of vast inequality and inequity. I use them as means to serve my well-being and no longer truly make them my sole identity. I am so much more than all the labels placed upon me and let them no longer confine who I am and can be.

The next change came in July. Summer had loosened the vast pandemic restrictions and at least outside it was able to meet people at our local hangouts again. On that specific evening I sat with people being very much into grungy medieval role play and the black and gothic scene in Germany and oh boy I had no idea whatsoever what I was about to get myself into. It started harmless enough about the outfits yet when the topic weird to metal chastity belts and bras worn solely as the only piece of clothing I felt myself becoming extremely uncomfortable. I was so way out of my league and experience here. My inner unpleasant feeling grew by the second until I quite hastily excused myself lamely and bolted literally. I couldn’t get away from this conversation and table fast enough.

It took me about 200 meters maybe a couple of hundred steps until I found myself rooted to the spot right there realizing I had — at least in my head — done what I despise so very much from other people doing to me. I had been quite harshly judging them in my mind sorting them into compartments of good of and bad of decent and indecent behavior. Exactly what I resented other people when they did it to me and furthermore these thoughts had at least for myself ruined an otherwise truly enjoyable and fun evening. Not what they talked about had ruined that. It was a very it was very very clear to me, my own thoughts, my own compartmentalization, my placing them into categories in my own head had done that.

It truly opened something for me there rooted to the spot all those insights tumbling down like a waterfall into my consciousness, I vowed to myself to get literally to the bottom of them. Where did they originate from? Who had placed such prudishness inside my head? I thought somehow I need to be better than that. In the future aspire to react differently in similar environments discussions, more open-minded, welcoming the perspectives and experiences of others, with what I soon learn to be to be the “beginner’s mind”. Not to have any expectations and surely not place them any longer into these good and bad bowls, black and white, and yes I’m still working on that, too. It happens less and less now and I learned such ingrained behavior takes time to replace with a different one.

I eventually found it in my mother’s past and upbringing during the most prudish time in the German contemporary history. The end 1950s when she was becoming a young woman being born 1944 she was about 15,16 and also being triple influenced, as I have learned later, by the home economics or domestic school she was heading to at that time and her Wilhelminian dragon-like grandmother, the one who had taken “the burden” to raise my grandmothers children, two girls and turn them into proper mothers housewives and human beings themselves. That was when I first realized just how big a transgenerational influence combined with socio-political and cultural influences can be. Without this deep dive into history I would never have uncovered the reason for my own unconscious compartmentalization and prudery in that split second at that table. It had left a lasting impression on me long beyond that evening and it gave me the first inkling that I might have discounted the influence of others, even long dead people, on my own life by very far.

I started meditation that month and it has brought a well of insight from me. I’d go so far as to say without this kind of meditation —Theravada, Insight — I might have needed much longer time to arrive where I am now if I would have arrived there at all. It gave me new tools and measures to register what is going on in my life and taught me patience and not rushing away from unpleasant feelings. It might have been essential for me in staying with this process that started on that March 6th 2020 until today August 16th 2026 and beyond. It together with all the insights that followed got me hooked and helped me bit by bit to believe a change might after all be achievable.

Oh and I did apologize for my bolting later and explained how they inadvertently helped me gaining deep insight into myself and my life. I’m still in this process. 11:55

As always, Thank you for reading and following.

xo Jay

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Taking Stock. A Reflection. Part One.

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