Linda's October Newsletter
A personal update.
I recently read a tweet expressing a desire for everyone to write a newsletter describing what they’ve been up to, so here’s my update.
Major life updates
After several years of being in a place I didn’t want to be and looking for a base in places where it wasn’t going to happen, I finally seem to have found a place I love where I can also stay!
At the beginning of September, I moved to Pontremoli, a little medieval town at the border between Tuscany, Liguria, and Emilia Romagna.
The story of how I found this place is entertaining. I spent months and months trying to get clear on my vision of the place where I wanted to be. I wanted it to be small, in Italy, close to the sea, with cool people around and some sense of community, but not a co-living.
Based on where I’ve experienced similar things abroad, I was looking for a conscious hub of some kind but didn’t seem to find one in Italy. A 3-hour convo with Claude, where I had it ask me very specific questions on what I was looking for and then summarize it for me, led me to search “digital nomad village Italy,” and I immediately found Pontremoli.
The funny thing is: there are hundreds of towns like this all around, more or less hysterically notable. But this one.. I’ve been here before! Almost 10 years ago, I had a crush on a guy, and we read a book together that was set here and decided to have a day trip. A lovely day, there are funny pictures. Our love story didn’t work, but he’s still one of my best friends. Anyway, when 10 years later, I found the same town in a completely different context. I obviously took it as a sign.
So here I am, almost 2 months later, quite happy with my choice. Some things I’m deeply appreciating about this place:
The community is lovely. It’s a great balance of being tight and open to newcomers. Despite being a random city in a relatively unpopulated part of Italy, it’s full of cool people doing all sorts of different things, and everyone has their own story of traveling and living abroad for a while and wanting to come back. There’s something comforting in sharing that experience and having the awareness of what it means to be on your own in some foreign country, far from delicious Italian food.
There’s a common space. As part of a plan to attract people, the municipality offers a free coworking space, and people come to work and hang out. Having been working remotely more and more, having a space where I can do that while being with people is doing wonders for my mental health. Beyond the shared space, everything is close by. There’s always someone to hang out with and all sorts of events happening. So good for my lonely soul.
I’m in love with the apartment I found. After a few somewhat difficult coliving experiences, I really wanted my own space. I found this very cute apartment a bit outside of the city, in an even smaller ancient Roman settlement - Arzengio -surrounded by woods and views of the mountains. There’s a stove and a beautiful garden where my landlady grows vegetables. Living in cities or close communities, I haven’t had the experience of loving neighbors in a while, and I’m now loving her and my other elderly neighbor. We cook for each other and exchange mushrooms found in the woods (a very common activity here!), jams, cakes, and all sorts of deliciousness.
I get to have guests! This has been difficult while living on the other side of the world than most of my close friends, and then again difficult living in co-livings of various kinds. But now I can delight in hosting people.
Oh my God, the food. You probably heard me complain about missing Italian food if you’ve been around me for more than 5 minutes. Well, now that I have easy and cheap access to all the food I want, it’s hard to understate how much that does for me. I still sometimes have a few tears of relief at the supermarket, where I look around and see real food. I’m cooking a lot more, eating out is cheap and delicious, people trade food from the garden all the time. I’m appreciating ever more how core food is to Italian culture and the deep love and reverence people have for it.
High-trust life. Another side of going from being invisible in the city to a small place where everyone knows each other. People are in each other’s business so much more, and surprisingly I love it. Also, people trust each other. You order whatever and you pay at the end. The mail delivery place has a pile of packages, you go there and find yours. I left my umbrella at the cafe, and the lady gave it back to me a few hours later. Got my tire fixed and didn’t have cash, the man just said to come by later to pay. Feels good.
What I’ve been up to
Work and purpose
From previous episodes in the series on Linda’s life, you might know I went through academia/research/existential burnout. After 4 years at Google and 2 years of AI PhD, I quit everything in the midst of panic attacks and deep depression, went all into healing, and then, kinda unavoidably, decided to start coaching myself. I took a Parts Work facilitator training with the incredible Ryan Albury and, for a while, gave sessions to people. But the absence of stability - not knowing where I live, struggling to have a routine, not enough income to survive, unable to pay taxes because I couldn’t find the place to register and all the issues that come from that - was really affecting me, to the point of recognizing I was in no place to hold others and referring all my clients to other practitioners.
So, at some point this summer, I surrendered to finding an actual job. In the last two years, I made some money with the odd job here and there, writing AI things, making websites, doing some PA work… So I made myself a real website (letting go for now of the glorious Google Doc “Who is Linda”) and did the bare minimum advertising. And it looks like I’m now officially a freelancer and entrepreneur!
I have a registered business, have been invoicing and paying an accountant, and learning more about Italian taxes and all of that stuff. Not very fun. But the work is fun! I applied for a few “normal” jobs and got very few answers, and I’m grateful freelancing is working out for now. Right now, there are three things going on: I’m building a tech tree for Foresight Institute, managing their social media, and writing copy articles for Upgrow.
Some aspects I’m particularly grateful for:
I’m currently working part-time, 20/30 hours a week, and everything is remote and very loosely managed. So I get to decide when I work and where, and I just need to make the things I committed to happen.
I’m getting to explore kinds of work I have never done before, and I am finding it quite rewarding to learn a lot of new skills. The world of social media and marketing is particularly interesting, and feels like more and more it’s at the basis of any business.
I’m learning to negotiate and value myself more. As an employee that was never quite an option (sure, you can negotiate when you join, but then it’s done!), but I now get to say no to projects that are not aligned, offers that don’t value my time, and to ask for more, and receive it too sometimes!
I’m trusting myself and life a lot more. Before leaving Google, I had a lot of fear of making it in the world out there. It was my very first job, and I didn’t even have to do that much applying to get it. And now I know because I’ve seen it that I can start from (almost) zero and still figure it out. There’s so much relief and freedom around this discovery. And it feels important to add this isn’t to say I made it by myself. I got a lot of help! And got much better at asking for it, and receiving it.
I’m enjoying learning about business and taxes and so on, I feel a connection to what money is for that I didn’t really appreciate in my life as an employee. I enjoy the agency of knowing I’m paying my taxes and there doesn’t need to be someone to withhold them for me.
So far, so good. Obviously, I’m still a beginner in this game, and I’m curious to see if the stress of not knowing what’s gonna come for me will become unbearable. My current main contract runs until mid-January, and the question of what happens after that is alive, however remote. Job offers and referrals are most welcome! All of my current things came from someone’s referral, and I’m very grateful for that.
The Work
My obsession with inner work is calming down a bit. The last two years featured periods of intensive healing/growth/coaching, being immersed in that world, investing ridiculous amounts of resources in it, looking for places to live where everyone is also in the same mindset, and so on. Lately, I’ve been feeling more resistance to it and a desire to re-engage with the rest of the world, with “normal” life.
I’m still arguably doing a lot of inner work. I’m averaging 2/3 Parts Work sessions a week, trading with two wonderful humans from the course I did and receiving from my teacher; I have 2+ RC sessions every week, and I’ve been doing breathwork on breathworkonline.com somewhat regularly.
I and two other incredible women I met last year have an accountability chat where we all write reviews of the day and intentions for the day after. It is such a supportive practice to know someone reads what I write, be reminded of the practice, and know what people I care about are up to.
And I’m currently enrolled in the Nervous System Mastery container, learning more about the low level workings of the nervous system and on regulating at that level. I got a scholarship for it, and that feels so supportive; I’ve been very inspired by how many inner work businesses are happy to offer a discount if asked, and trust the goodwill of people. I’m halfway and have been enjoying the experience. I have admiration for the ease and comfort that comes from super organised materials.
I’m finding the frame of looking at life from the perspective of nervous system activation useful in looking at my triggers and noticing in which direction they are going. I appreciate more the way my system struggles to downregulate, so when I get activated, I have brief periods of intense distress, when I cope hard but usually not enough, and then I go into shutdown/depression, where I spent most of my life in the absence of ways to regulate back and stay in the regulated zone.
I also appreciate doing sports again. Being able to reliably go to classes. I thought I’d be doing lots of yoga, but it turns out to be a boxing and acrobalance season. I’m embracing doing sports to keep my neurochemistry in a place where all the rest of the inner work can do something instead of trying to feel better by doing sports (which never worked!)
What’s on
A lot of this sounds wonderful, but of course, there’s always stuff going on. Things I’m grappling with these days:
Relating with my parents is quite tense. My dad is sick. Part of my healing was starting to address with them all the stuff my “good daughter” mask had been hiding. It hasn’t been terrible, but also not great. I went through many waves of deciding I’m done trying to connect in a way where I’m feeling loved and respected. As of now, I’m still trying again, getting hurt, and then trying again. But I am trying less, and trusting more in all of the social structure I have going on outside of my family.
Anger. Despite having done hundreds of hours of work in this direction, I still really struggle with feeling, expressing, and being with anger. I believe that’s the main thing that blocks my system, and I haven’t found a way to let it out that feels right. Starting boxing was partly fuelled by this search, but I’m finding myself more scared than willing to let aggression out.
Loneliness and romance. My desperation for a man to care for me remains. Having much more reliable social connections than I did in a while is so incredibly supportive (the days where I work at home are noticeably worse), and yet the deeply-held belief that I can only be truly happy if a man loves me is very much there. Accompanied by stories about how I must have been broken in some terrible way to be young and beautiful and yet single. Ouch. Also, I’ve been aware of the ways I’m hiding in this new social circle where a lot of the things I’ve been doing and engaging with lately are kinda weird, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do that anymore, and I’m still doing it. Maybe less, but still.
Purpose. I feel some sadness and guilt around “giving up on my dreams” of becoming a healer. Doing some normal work was partly supposed to help me be able to hold space coming from a place of abundance instead of survival because I needed the money, and now that I’m here, I’m worried I don’t actually have the energy to both have a tech job and take care of me and also coach. I do believe I still need some time to ground, and I have a desire to train more before taking on the responsibility, but the worry is there.
Home. While this is the closest to feeling home I felt in a very long time, I haven’t felt the full-on decision to just stay yet. Can’t say I love the heavy rain, some core things are a bit too far (the sea, people doing acroyoga), the apartment is on a monthly rental, and there’s a limit to how much I can make it mine, I am missing some kinds of events in the community here (ecstatic dance mostly). But the good news is I don’t have to decide any time soon.
Routine. Having some kind of routine is incredibly supportive, and still, I find myself stressed a lot, with too much energy to do anything, running from one thing to the other, or sad and tired and unable to move from the couch, more often than I’d like.
What media I’m loving these days
Music
I haven’t listened to music very much for a while, and now it’s coming back. I’m especially obsessed with Shanin Blake; I love her purity, and nature song is on repeat in my car a lot. I’m spending a lot more time listening to Italian indie and discovering Fulminacci. I got a ticket for a concert for the first time in forever, for the 10th year anniversary of one of my favorite albums, Costellazioni.
I’ve been utterly enjoying the soundscape being familiar in social settings. Being able to sing at parties, knowing the songs, having that emotional bond with them. I missed it in many lands of unknown sounds and words, somehow excluded from the connection that music brings.
Books
I’ve also restarted reading (Italian!) novels, again after a long time not doing that. I recently read:
Che la festa cominci. A remarkably disturbing book. I appreciate the somewhat surreal while mundane narrative that Ammaniti put together. I read this book as a teenager and wasn’t as impressed then.
Resta con me, sorella. A sad book, about the life of women in northern italy in the aftermath of WW1. Many tears, some reflections around how her life relates to the way I interpret life throught polarity teachings these days.
Splendore. A gay man’s story. Her writing is incredible and I need to stop sometimes and savour the way she conveys feelings, and it takes me a lot of effort since my default way to process written words is as fast as possible.
And also some non fiction - more inner work!
Hands of ligth. A physicist describing her experience of auras and hands on healing. Particularly loving her quant mind making sense of this other part of life.
Anchored. A book about polyvagal theory, recommended by the Nervous System mastery course. Pretty cool to learn I had some gross misunderstanding of how the nervous system works, even after paying a lot of attention to my experience.
A brief history of nearly everything. I thought I’d be reading something similar to Sapiens, but turns out to be more a history of how science comes out of human misery.
Opening Awareness. My meditation practice keeps being frustrating, so here I am, reading more meditation books. I resonate with the idea of embracing all of the experience instead of focusing really intensely on some bits only. Short read but it’s resonating a lot in my thoughts, how can I experience intensity, being with it, without engaging as much?
A couple of books on cults - “Don’t call it a cult” and “Is this a cult?”. Wish I read these earlier, useful frames for some of the dynamics in the healing world. And also easy to over victimise and miss the point of what’s happening.
Other media?
As I’m writing this list I’m becoming more aware of how I haven’t watched a movie in ages. I am spending more time on youtube - which historically I’ve struggled with - watching AI stuff, macrame tutorials, spiritual talks, marketing things. And listening to Jonny Miller’s podcast a lot, and to Tara Brach.
Just Miscellaneous thoughts
My thumb is increasingly sore and I’m unsure of how to address it. It pretty obviously seems to stem from texting/typing/mouse work. I got an ergonomic mouse, and I can’t say it makes a difference.
I did Kambo for the first time! It was a cool experience; I think it did something; I was more scared than necessary.
My new low-key hobby is macrame, and I’m enjoying it a lot. Appreciating the slightly bigger scope of embroidery and crochet, and the geometrical and structural aspects of it, the familiarity with the knots.
After a period of intense engagement, my desire to write on X is greatly reduced. Feels a lot more far away from my experience these days.
I’m building a sauna in the garden! With a lot of help from people here. So very exciting.
For the first time, I have my own altar at my place, and it feels really good. I did not expect to become the kind of person who has an altar, and keep finding that amusing.
Bye!
I’ve been meaning to write so many more updates than what I actually did in the last two years, and as I wrote this piece, the ease with which it came surprised me. It does feel like the end of a season, and it’s hard to talk about anything as it’s happening. I’ve been describing my move to Pontremoli as embracing a winter after a very long spring and summer. A season to nest and rest and integrate everything that happened.
May the next update come with more ease. May all beings be happy.