Living Intimacy, Not Exile; Practicing Trust
Hello, friends —
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Things got rather busy in the final semester of my dissertation proposal, and any writing or reading outside of that felt impossible. I’m here now, and grateful. I have some life updates to share, though I’ll save those for later this summer. Until then, I’d like to offer a more personal reflection, inspired by a recent road trip to Colorado.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of trusting in life. I have learned that to trust in life and to be in direct relationship with reality requires a radical openness to what is, rather than to what we would prefer to be true—or perhaps, what we fear might be. It means meeting life not just with intellectual acceptance but with active, embodied participation. It’s engaging with what unfolds moment by moment without trying to control or subtly dissociate from it. Trusting in life isn’t the same as assuming everything will work out in a linear, favorable, or “good” way. It’s closer to trusting that life is—and that it reveals something real, even if painful, uncertain, or mysterious.
That kind of trust is courageously active, not passive. It asks us to stay awake to reality rather than retreat into idealism, avoidance, or false certainty.
Being in direct relationship with reality, to me, means shedding the filters of projection, ideology, nostalgia, anxiety, and the distraction of our attachments. It is intimacy with what’s here. And that intimacy is, at times, torturously vulnerable. It may mean facing grief, contradiction, joy, loss, death, and rebirth not as concepts, but as lived, embodied experience.
For years, I’ve been in deep practice with the processes of abiding-with, equanimity, and clear-seeing. By this I mean: the values I hold have shaped my life such that the conditions now support somewhat consistent mindful presence and practice, a foundation for response instead of reactivity, the capacity to choose equanimity (with varying success across a wide spectrum), and the fifth precept—refraining from intoxicants in order to see life clearly. And I want to be clear: sometimes it really sucks and pushes me to my edges. I was recently in a sea of suckage (and beauty), and there were moments of real suckishness where I thought, wow, this is why I used to drink alcohol. And, still—attention, presence, and responsiveness are sacred acts. Reality, in its rawness, holds the potential for transformation—not through fixing it, but by being with the suck.
And! Here’s the paradox: reality is always mediated by our senses, our history, our culture, and our social positionality. So being in “direct relationship” is also a practice of discernment—of noticing what’s real beneath the noise, and relating to it as honestly as we can. In Buddhist thought, this is akin to sati, or mindful awareness, and to dharma, the way things are. I’ll also briefly mention non-attachment to self or view—but that’s a topic for another time.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that trusting in life isn’t naive—and it certainly isn’t rose-colored. It is a discipline. A daily, sometimes trembling “yes” to the unknowable path, to what is revealed in each moment, inside and out.
Life, at times, clarifies hardship—and we should still trust in it. Why? Because I believe a mature heart and spirituality don’t demand ease or transcendence as proof of meaning. Instead, we may recognize that clarity often arrives through difficulty, not despite it. As my somatic therapist recently told me:
Resilience isn’t about not going through hard things—it’s about how we rebound from them.
Simple and true. In that light, hardship isn’t a sign that life has gone wrong, but a portal into deeper contact with the real.
The ebb is not a mistake, even if our culture is addicted to the idea of the flow. Our non-equanimous preferences may be keepers of comfort, but they are ultimately arbitrary in the broader arc of our becoming. Authentic experience includes hardship. And we have the choice to affirm reality as textured, not curated. Grief, longing, rupture, beauty, loss—all are invitations into intimacy. When we value direct relationship, we’re committing to a non-escapist orientation to existence.
Sometimes, I think those of us living in the U.S. are shaped by a culture that conditions us not to be in contact with our resilience. It encourages a subtle, normalized exile from our own lives. We are trained to live at a distance from ourselves—through abstraction, distraction, consumption, and performance. Productivity is valued over presence. Control is preferred over contact. The unknown is sanitized and pathologized. Vulnerability is privatized. Death is hidden. Suffering is medicalized or moralized. Even joy is often commodified, rendered into spectacle rather than felt experience.
Instead of being taught how to stay with life—its rhythms, ruptures, and revelations—we’re taught to optimize, transcend, or numb it. We chase curated identities and external validation, often at the expense of intimacy with the inner world. And we mistake comfort for safety, busyness for purpose, avoidance for peace.
This cultural exile is not accidental—it functions to uphold systems of power, extractive economies, and colonial modernity. A society that depends on people staying disconnected from their bodies, their grief, their land, their interdependence, is a society that can continue to exploit without resistance. Disembodiment and dissociation become tools of control.
And when we don’t believe in our own resilience—and therefore can’t trust in life—we tend to contract. We brace, withdraw, or over-control. Reality starts to feel adversarial, not relational. And when life feels like something to survive rather than to be in relationship with, we often lose the capacity to receive its meaning, its beauty, and its invitations.
Without trust, life becomes a series of threats to manage rather than mysteries to meet. We may hyper-rationalize, dissociate, numb, or cling to certainty because the unknown becomes unbearable. This can manifest as cynicism, burnout, spiritual disconnection, or fragmentation—where the self is no longer oriented toward growth or connection, but toward defense and containment.
If we don’t believe in our own capacity to metabolize pain, loss, or uncertainty, then trusting life becomes too risky. But paradoxically, it is through the act of trusting—in small, lived ways—that resilience often emerges. Not the kind of heroic resilience that pushes through, but the quiet, relational resilience that comes from allowing ourselves to be changed by what is.
Without that, we risk living in exile from our own life. But to return to life—to feel, to grieve, to trust, to engage in reciprocal relationship with the world—is deeply subversive. It reclaims our autonomy and our relationality. It insists that we are not machines or markets, but sensing, meaning-making beings whose lives are woven into the world.
And honestly—it’s deeply okay for things to be scary and to suck sometimes. At least it’s real. And we get to practice with authenticity and our own capacity to meet reality with sincerity and heart. Maybe we even support each other through the process—reminding one another that we’re not alone in the work of staying with what’s real.
And it’s led me to wonder: Do we have to first trust ourselves in order to trust life? And I’d say, on one hand, yes—trusting ourselves can be the foundation for trusting in life. If we don’t believe we can meet what life brings—if we fear we’ll shatter under grief, lose our way in uncertainty, or collapse in the face of change—then life itself begins to feel unsafe.
In this view, self-trust becomes an inner anchor. It says: Even if I don’t know what’s coming, I know I can stay present. I can feel, adapt, respond, ask for help. That self-trust is not confidence in control—it’s faith in capacity. And from that grounded place, we can enter into relationship with life less defensively, more openly, more willing to be shaped by it.
But on the other hand, sometimes trust in life precedes trust in the self—especially for those who have been wounded, abandoned, or fragmented. Sometimes it’s a glimpse of something greater—something mysterious, alive, or quietly holding us—that helps us begin to reassemble a self that can be trusted. A moment of awe. An act of grace. The softness of another person’s presence. These can be invitations back into the self.
In Buddhist terms, this could be likened to saddhā—a kind of intuitive trust or confidence that opens the door to deeper realization, even when the ego is shaky.
So the relationship isn’t linear—it’s reciprocal. Sometimes we trust ourselves enough to trust life. Sometimes life breaks through and teaches us to trust ourselves—as it has in my own life. Often it’s a spiral: small acts of trust, small returns to presence, gradually rebuilding the ground under our feet.
And when we trust in our own capacity—not in a performative, hardened way, but in a tender, integrated sense—we become more available to others. Not as rescuers or fixers, but as companions who can witness and affirm the strength already alive in them. When we’ve touched our own resilience, our own grief, our own capacity to stay with the world, we stop needing to deny or minimize those things in others. We can hold space for their uncertainty without rushing to fill it. We can meet their sorrow without turning away. We can recognize their capacity even when they can’t yet see it themselves—because we’ve walked the dark and found the thread.
That, to me, is the essence of true care: not imposition, not saviorism, but resonance. Intimacy, not exile.
P.S. In case you’ve been out of the loop: I recently did an interview with Betsy Mikel of The Akenside Project, a Chicago-based writer who runs a Substack interview series called Home Stories, where she features writers shaped by their childhood homes. Our conversation is the most recent feature on her page—if you haven’t already, feel free to check it out!