Hi,
I keep writing these newsletters because it feels like a way to stay alive inside my own experience.
I find myself wondering, are you feeling this too? This dimension can be heaven and hell at once. The wounded exploit the wounded.
Nature gets pushed aside while the ego moves to the center. I, me, mine. The victim. The edge. The reaction! Always the reaction, ugh...
When we react too quickly, we create distance. We abandon compassion and rush into a story about what just happened to me.
I know this pattern well. I’ve spent 25 years working on myself, and still, I find myself here, reacting too fast, pushing away the very people I want to be close to. I reach for intimacy, for acknowledgment of all I carry.
But what does that reaction actually create? A distorted kind of intimacy, charged, negative, and fleeting.
I grew up inside a kind of emotional triangulation where love and tension were intertwined. It taught me that being loud, claiming space, would earn attention. It was survival. It was not a conscious choice, and it did not leave much room to discover who I actually was then. Now, at 43, there’s a kind of shock in realizing how much of my way of loving was learned under pressure.
And still, there was real love too. Tenderness. Closeness. But it was mixed with something else, something that shaped these deeper, automatic responses. It was my childhood that was highjacked by my parents trauma leaking into my world as a youngster.
So now the work is quieter. It’s learning to check in with myself before I speak. To notice the tone of my own inner voice. To meet moments with a steadier presence. To return quickly when I’ve gone too far, to repair before the moment hardens.
Our humanity asks us to stay present. The way we speak to ourselves becomes the way we treat the people we love. And, eventually, the way we meet the world.
With Gratitude,
Matthew Schildkret
Founder & Maker of Miracles,
Late Sunday Afternoon
