Five Vulnerable Things: Vol. 21

On beauty, magnets, being misread, totems, and the cost of running on empty

Mar 13, 2026

Monsoon Season is a newsletter and podcast living at the intersection of culture, consciousness, and creativity. It is about the messy, beautiful, non-linear work of becoming. The courage to be seen. The belief that the most spiritual thing any of us can do is be vulnerable, and that showing up exactly where you are, is its own form of sacred practice.

1. The investment you make in beautiful things invests beauty back into you.

There is a desk sitting in a local shop right now that was made by hand in Indonesia, and it has texture and character and a kind of quiet beauty that an ergonomic standing desk with a power strip zip-tied to the back could never have. I know this because I recently got rid of that standing desk, the industrial white one my partner bought years ago during his consulting days, and I spent years sitting at it feeling nothing. Every time I sat down to create, it gave me nothing back.

We have been conditioned to choose the smart option. The practical one. The one that makes the most sense on paper, the one with the best reviews, the one that checks all the functional boxes. And what we don’t talk about enough is what it costs us energetically to be surrounded by things that don’t move us. Things we settled for. Things that were fine.

Here is what I want you to consider: the investment you make in beautiful things invests beauty back into you. It changes how you feel when you walk into a room. It changes what comes out of you when you sit down to do the work. You don’t need to spend a fortune. You need to stop choosing things that ask nothing of you and give nothing back. Honor your eye for beauty. It is not vanity. It is vitality.

2. You will repel people by being fully yourself.

A magnet does two things. It attracts and it repels. You cannot have one without the other, and a magnet that tries to attract everything becomes no magnet at all. My friend and intuitive coach Zoey Greco taught me this, and I want to pass it directly to you because I know how many of you are shrinking yourselves trying to be palatable to people who were never meant to be in your orbit to begin with.

The wound underneath the need to be liked by everyone is real. It is not shallow. For a lot of us it goes all the way down, this fear that if we show up too fully, too specifically, too much as ourselves, we will be rejected. And so we water ourselves down. We become a vague, abstract version of who we actually are, and then we wonder why nothing is sticking, why the right opportunities aren’t finding us, why we feel like we are putting ourselves out there but nothing is landing.

Here is the truth: you will repel people by being fully yourself. And those are exactly the people you do not want. The more dialed up you are in your actual essence, the more potent your magnet becomes for the things and people and opportunities that are genuinely yours.

Stop trying to be a signal everyone can receive. Be so specifically, audaciously you that the right ones can find you from miles away.

3. They will misunderstand you because they misunderstand themselves.

One of the most common fears I hear from people who want to show up online, step into a new version of themselves, or share their work with the world, is this: what will people who knew the old me think? And when we pull that thread, it always leads to the same place. The fear of being misunderstood. Of being cast out. Of being seen wrong.

I want you to sit with: you misunderstand yourself most days. You are still figuring out who you are, what you want, what you believe, what chapter you are in. You misread your own emotions. You make decisions you don’t fully understand until months later. You are a work in progress that you yourself cannot fully interpret yet.

So of course they will misunderstand you.

Not because you are confusing, but because they are also just trying to understand themselves and mostly failing at it. Most people are living on autopilot. They don’t have the bandwidth to accurately see you because they are not accurately seeing themselves. This is not an excuse to stop showing up. It is a reason to stop making their misunderstanding mean something about your worth.

Let them misunderstand you. Better yet, forgive them before they even do, and go for it.

4. You need a totem.

There is a small bronze figurine of Ganesha (the deity most known as the remover of obstacles) that I will not let anyone touch. It has a very specific weight to it, specific edges, and the moment I hold it in my hand I know exactly who I am and why I am doing this. It is my totem. The thing that pulls me out of the noise and back to myself.

One of my favorite filmmakers, Christopher Nolan, built an entire movie around this idea. In Inception, a totem is a small personal object whose weight and feel only you know intimately, and it is the thing that tells you whether you are in a dream or in reality. I think about that a lot, because most of us are walking around in a kind of waking dream, caught up in comparison and fear and other people’s timelines, and we need something physical, something tactile, to snap us back.

Yours might be a childhood photo of yourself. A little version of you who had no agenda, no performance, no armor yet, just pure being. My artist friend Hannah keeps a childhood photo of herself, a little reminder that says this is who I am painting for.

That is a totem. Find yours. Something you can hold, look at, return to when you have drifted. Something that reminds you of the reality of who you actually are underneath all the noise of who you are trying to become.

5. You cannot receive more because you can barely manage what you have now.

Oof, Okay. I want to hold your hand when I say this, because I am saying it to myself just as much as I am saying it to you. I have been sitting with this humbling truth for the better part of this past year. The reason you are not growing the way you want to grow, the reason the things you are calling in keep sliding just out of reach, is not because you are not talented enough. You are not expanding and getting what you want because you can barely manage what you have now. And the people who struggle with this the most are not the lazy ones. They are the high-capacity ones. The ones who feel everything deeply, who want to give everything fully, who have been running so hard for so long that they never stopped to notice the tank was empty.

A lot of us who want expansive, high-capacity lives have been running on adrenaline for so long that we have never actually replenished. Surviving, not living. Doing, not restoring. I spent so long pushing through depletion, wondering why the things I was working toward weren’t sticking, and the answer was always the same: I wasn’t ready to hold the weight of what I was calling in. You cannot build a bigger life from a depleted nervous system.

The work right now is not hustle. It is repair. Sleep. Long walks. Tending to the fundamentals until you have enough vitality, enough prana, enough actual life force to sustain what you are trying to build. Getting your head above water takes longer than you have patience for. I am still in it. But that is the work.

First we survive. Then we build. In that order, always.

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