The Messy Part

Anger is our fiercest protector, yet it is often misunderstood and underexplored. In this episode, Adeline and Linda define anger and peel back its many layers, recognizing the ways anger shows up quietly. It turns out they each have different relationships to angers long after an incident has passed. They realize they relate to anger in very different ways: for one, it feels final and contained; for the other, it’s constant, shifting, and evolving. Needless to say, there’s a lot to be mad about - from work, to  the state of the world, and even at themselves. Together, they ask: what is anger trying to teach us, and what vital information and energy is it offering? 

Mantra #31: My anger is necessary. I am allowed to feel my anger.

For Your Consideration: What is your anger trying to tell you?

Care can be sustainable. On this episode, Adeline and Linda are still distinguishing the difference between caring and coping. They are learning to care for their communities in ways that feel supportive without consistently overextending themselves. This conversation is their persistent attempt to disrupt the endless cycle of showing up long past their capacity allows. They don’t want to turn into a pretzel AND they want their people to be well. They accept their responsibility as caregivers and know that they can’t be effective ones if it constantly leaves them empty. Sometimes you just have to say no in the short term to say yes in the long term. They ask the question: what do people owe them (hint: apparently nothing).

Mantra #30: I love myself enough to say no. I love my community enough to say no.

For Your Consideration: How care deprived are you? How do you practice self preservation in the midst of caring for others?

Repetition is a tool. We tend to forget that we see the world through our specific experiences and those memories color our present. In this episode, Adeline and Linda return to their roots. They spend the episode orienting themselves to each other by walking through their personal histories. In Cambridge and Coney Island, wealth and need lived side by side, classmates with abundance and neighbors without homes, all existing blocks apart. As a result of their observations, they dedicated themselves to answering the questions that their younger selves had about the world. By orienting to the questions that stuck in their heart, they began to trace the fault lines. They stayed with these contradictions and in naming those gaps, they found their compass, shaping the values they hold close, the communities they build, and the labor they offer the world. Orientation is the intentional practice of returning to yourself, your history, your patterns, your memories, your inherited context, in order to understand the lens through which you see the world.

Mantra #29: Reduce the gap between your actions and your words. 

For Your Consideration: Who are you to yourself? Who do you want to be to yourself?

You are what has come before you. In this episode, Adeline and Linda express a desire to start traditions of their own, while holding close to the ones that feel like second nature. They anchor themselves in the question, “what do we want to hold on to?” and spend the episode exploring traditions: the mundane ones, the unintentional ones, the sacred ones. They think deeply about what they want to remember and what has already been remembered for them: by their communities, the lands they’ve touched, the keepsakes, and stories repeated. They learn it's worth the investment to research what traditions people before you chose to keep alive through practice.Mantra #28:I can create my own rituals and traditions.I am grateful for everything I've been given.I am committed to learning, sharing and teaching. For Your Consideration:What in your life would you enjoy archiving and in what medium?

Hair is care. Hair is community. It breaks and forgives. It teaches every lesson about self care and the consequences of not tending to yourself. It is something we take care of our entire lives. It demands our attention, discipline, compassion, admiration, and exploration.

Our hair is not a third party. It is a living and breathing example of our health, our wellness, our desire to play, and our willingness to center ourselves.

There is an intimacy we have with our hair that exists in tension with the way it is publicly perceived. It is not an uncommon experience for us to be fetishized, treated as spectacle, something to be touched or examined,often with little regard for the person it is attached to.

It should be straighter

It should be smaller

It should be longer

It’s too voluminous  

It’s too dry

It’s distracting

It seems like EVERYbody got an opinion, an assumption, advice, some lore about our hair that is rooted in something deeper than they admit. It’s one of the first ways the world interacts with us and determines our value and professionalism. Our ability to hide it well determined how well we were treated. From a young age we’ve been taught that our hair can speak for us and be easily misunderstood. It is a problem to be fixed. And therefore we were responsible to suppress it, control it, tame it, put out its fire no matter the impact on our sense of self.

Our relationship with our hair can reveal our relationship to control. There exists a multimillion dollar industry that profits by telling us that something is wrong with our hair and that it is our responsibility to fix it only by consuming more products that have severe consequences.

Despite that we are choosing

To learn our hair

To listen to the lessons it is trying to teach us

To invest the time and community it takes to tend to it

To muster up some discipline for the sake of our well being

To let our hair roam free.

Mantra #27:

I can learn to have a healthy relationship with my hair.

My hair is not something to be controlled, it is something to learn and be a student of.

I can love my hair through its transformation.  

For Your Consideration: What’s one kind word you want to say to your hair today?

We did the best we could, with the year we were given. On this episode, Adeline and Linda, forgot what 2025 felt like and dug deep to remember. (Yay! Disassociation) They considered their highs and reaffirmed the things they are certain of. They spent some time centering wins because we’re programmed to focus on what falls apart. They know the shoe will drop, the anxiety will come. They practiced looking at what’s good and getting better anyway. In that spirit they decided to dedicate their discipline to things that please their senses.

Mantra #26 Seek pleasure with intention and create beautiful things at your eye level.

For Your Consideration: What do you want to see in the first 6 months of this year?

Not knowing is okay. On this episode Adeline and Linda practice learning in real time. Often not knowing something can feel embarrassing. They accept the challenge of learning in public. This episode is a testament to their commitment. They set out to have a serious conversation deciphering something hard and end up somewhere messy and playful. It was a good reminder to hold on to levity and laughter. We’re deeply committed to giggling often here at The Messy Part.

Mantra #25:

• Laugh often
• Laugh at yourself
• Laugh when its easy
• Laugh when its not
• Laugh once a day even when you don’t want to

Rest is worthwhile and stillness is as necessary as movement. Even if we do not recognize it, our bodies know how to rest. It is one of those gifts we take for granted and something we have learned to deprioritize. In this episode, Adeline and Linda take a breath and ask themselves, 'Who would we be if we were well-rested?' They accept that moving their bodies prepares them for stillness. Adeline and Linda explore the two-dimensional rest they’ve been taught. Often, rest is a reward granted after we have deemed ourselves productive enough. In fact, what’s offered after being productive is not rest, but recovery. 

Rest serves a deeper purpose. It keeps your mind clear, your heart calm, and your body regulated. It's the warm lights in your house, the slow morning you give yourself, the no you extend when you don’t want to be social. Rest is how you keep your capacity, how you keep an open ear to listen to your body. On the other side of rest is a cleansed spirit, joy, imagination, and calmness. 

May we all practice rest and remember we are worthy of resting. One way we can rest today is by leaning into a layered rest, one that doesn't have to be earned, and it’s simply ours because we exist.

Mantra: Start from a rested place. We will rest well and often. 

For Your Consideration: What type of rest can you give yourself today?

When women don’t speak, we suffer. Research shows that 80% of women are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases when we suppress our rage and silence ourselves. In this episode, Adeline and Linda reflect on the stories they’ve inherited about womanhood, and how often they are unlearning and (learning) what women endure.

Being a woman is complicated, beautiful, filled with pain, joy, community, longing, and so much trauma. May this life and this reflection offer them the capacity and community to sit in the middle, next to other women, and on the shoulders of all the women that came before them. Sharing our lived experience with one another is what makes healing possible.

They walked away from the conversation with one ask for their listeners: read the stories of other women. Archive your own. We go through so much that sometimes it feels like being a woman is terrible. We are women who have survived insurmountable trauma, but in silence we suffer more. Not sharing our experience makes someone’s hell feel new, but we know it’s not. Sharing our troubles with women makes that trouble not trouble anymore. We have the difficult experience of living on this earth longer, and we live longer because we talk to each other. The most beautiful part of womanhood is our ability to build expansive communities, with range and a deep well of knowledge. To be a woman is to be held by other women. So, archive the hard days, archive the easy days.

Mantra: Sisterhood is medicine.

For Your Consideration: In what ways has guarding yourself protected you and when has it hurt you? Does it still protect you?

Nothing that is worthwhile is done alone, we need each other. In this episode, Adeline and Linda reflect on what it means to practice relational and personal repair. If we are learning not to give up on people too quickly, perhaps we must also learn not to give up on people too soon. They talk through what skills they need to be in relationship. We owe ourselves a life of authenticity and the labor of learning what that authenticity feels like. Sometimes that requires learning about boundaries and feeling empowered to name and honor them in ways that feel natural. They agree that to be in relationship is to accept the risk of being hurt, and it is how we respond in those moments that magnify our relational skills. Sometimes repair is possible and transformative. We only learn that if we name the hurt and stay in conversation. How can harm be transformed to build stronger and deeper relationships, is the question they are interrogating. Learning to be in community is messy at best, may we all learn it well. 

Mantra #22: 

I am allowed to practice 

I am allowed to learn and change my mind as often as I need to.

For Your Consideration: How do we stay in relationship when hurt is inevitable?