Tending the Animal
On surrender, urgency, and becoming a gentler creature.
Hey there. Spring has arrived in New England & god, my soul needed it. This song is the perfect companion to this morning’s newsletter. I also included a little photo dump at the bottom. Thanks for being here. xoxo maggie
I’m learning how to tango with a complicated dynamic: listening to my gut, my heart, and, more often than not, doing the exact opposite of whatever frenzied command my brain is barking at me.
For months, I’ve been stuck in a loop — strategizing, plotting, Googling things I already knew the answer to — desperate to create a plan that would give me something solid to hang on to.
Dormant patterns, hardwired into my nervous system, and thought loops that had been on mute for years suddenly lit up all at once. The sensations in my body threw me into the past and my mind scrambled to negotiate the sensations with reality.
How long can I keep going like this?
Quickly morphed into: I can’t keep going like this.
I think I need help.
Turned into: You don’t deserve to ask for help.
And so, with every internal alarm flashing at once, my marvelous, pattern-detecting brain doubled down — convinced that if I could just get more clarity about why this was happening, I could find the silver bullet. I could fix myself.
Instead of allowing myself to suffer, I tried to explain my suffering — to others, to myself — showing up with the trifold brochure of all the contributing factors.
Pain doesn’t like being sorted into columns.
Urgency shrinks me.
Makes me reactive. Desperate.
Makes me grasp for whatever will make the panic and pain stop right now.
Sure — in appropriate times, in moderated doses, urgency has its place.
It can save a life. Push through a deadline. Light a necessary fire under inertia.
But as a lifestyle?
At least for me — it’s unbearable.
It wears down the edges of who I am until all that’s left is a raw, frantic version of myself, surviving minute-to-minute.
When everything feels urgent, there’s no room left for choice.
Somewhere along the murky, damp floor of this particular rock bottom, I somehow — again — surrendered.
Found the thin, stubborn thread of compassion.
Honored the truth that even though this time, I know the way to move through it — Notice. Allow. Tend. Soften. — trying to hasten the process is not only pointless, it’s counterproductive.
This time, I can't think my way out.
I can't strategize or white-knuckle my way to safety.
Because some of the pieces — the trauma stored in my body, the way the world is unfolding — are not mine to control.
I am an animal.
And the best thing I can do is slow down.
Create the most favorable conditions for my own survival.
Tend to myself the way you would a wounded creature: gently, consistently, without a stopwatch in hand.
Let the healing happen naturally, in its own unknowable time.
Sit with the anger that no one will ever fully know the depth of my pain — because it’s not their experience.
It’s mine.
To witness.
To tend to — carefully, curiously, begrudgingly, some days.
This is agency.
Agency says: Pause. Breathe. You are allowed to be deliberate, even here.
You are allowed to trust, even when the world feels like it’s cracking open at the seams.
You are allowed to move at the pace of your own life.
Agency offers sovereignty.
I’m learning that life expands in the places where urgency gives way to care.
And so here I am.
Palms open.
Knees in the dirt.
Heart still cracked.
Chest tight.
Breath still shaky.
But here.
Listening.
Allowing.
Softening.
Tending.
Some ways I’ve been tending to myself lately and turning down the urgency. What does that look like for you?
