As I step back into another week, I could feel my old mental patterns screaming at me, “Danny, it’s time to get back to work.”, “You have no time for this. You have to do this and that, so get to it. You will have time to deal with this later. That is what being professional means.”
But here’s the ugly truth: When I look back on the past 20+ years of living with this inauthentic self that I have allowed to perpetuate, he has always tried to skip over doing the hard work of sitting with the pain and ugliness. For years, everytime after some bad happens, Weizhi would feel “guilty”, or “bad”, but that is all he ever does. He would sit in that emotion and then almost immediately brushes it aside and move on with his life. He would use one of those excuses I have named above as a way to justify why he should “move on”. But the truth is, he was only trying to escape the discomfort of sitting with the ugliness of his own mistakes. Instead of really fixing the root causes of the problem, it was swept under the rug, buried deep down, but it was never really gone. And every single time, when the next incident surfaces, it isn’t just about dealing with that one incident, it was compounded by the previous incident that wasn’t properly dealt with.
Today, as tempting as it is to want to dive right back into my freelance work, I am forcing myself to do the opposite from what Weizhi used to do. I’m choosing to sit with the full ugliness of everything that I needed to face. That means the whole 20+ years of ugliness that I have allowed to perpetuate. No matter how genuinely innocent the initial reason was to allow an inauthentic self survive in the world, it is also the key reason that caused so much recurring and compounded damage over time. Choosing to sit with this pain and ugliness goes against everything my mind and body is used to, but I also know that in order for real, long-term transformation to take place, this is something I have to face now, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month.
Danny's 
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