06/14/2020
Let’s talk about being uncomfortable. 🌿
In my prenatal meetings with clients, we talk about the difference between pain and discomfort. Often these are lumped together, but they are very different things. 🌿
In labor, pain is expected— the pain of contractions, of pushing, of crowning, the . But discomfort, which might be brought on by exhaustion, fluids exiting your body, nausea and vomiting, your baby’s head so low that you feel like you have a bowling ball in your butt, or just the idea of being so vulnerable and exposed— these feelings of discomfort can throw you off even more than the pain you expect to feel 🌿
In that discomfort is the seed of growth. In the unnerving, in the upset, is possibility— to transform, to learn, to love, to find a new version of yourself. Birth is very much a transformative experience in large part to facing discomfort head on. 🌿
Pivot: There are important and increasingly prominent conversations happening about racism, both institutionalized and internal, rightfully and finally led by 🌿
If this makes you uncomfortable, or what you hear from them does, embrace your discomfort, examine it, turn it inside out. 🌿
Your discomfort is far easier to manage than the pain and suffering of those who are making you uncomfortable with their anger and indignation and calls for what may seem to be radical change. 🌿
As a Mexican-American raised in a comfortably middle-class area, who can pass as white and who has personally experienced racism in relatively mild forms, I have had to sit with my own discomfort and watch it eclipsed by the narratives of my black friends and strangers. 🌿
I hope the discomfort continues.
