Welcome to I Got You Fridays.

You in? Read on.

But first, an excerpt from my latest: How To Be A Model

If I throw a stone, can I skip it across time and water? Would I catch it as I stood at table 20, taking an order for the turkey meatloaf with ginger ketchup, hold teh garlic mashed potatoes? Or, would I just look around, startled and confused, as to how a stone fell from the sky?

Who will love me like that? I wrote.

Do you know how many times I have written (and thought) a version of that over the last, say, thirty years? If I tell you I will have to kill you.

I find this paper and yell at it- it can hear me, it does have its own version of ears you know, just like I do.

I yell: Who will love you? How about: who will you love? Who will I love? How about that?

Now, in my fourth decade of life- and nearing the end of that decade, for that matter- I feel a kind of rage bubble up as I think of young me obsessing over signs of aging. How I believed it somehow made me unlovable.

How I equated what I looked like to the entirety of me. As if there was nothing to me besides a body, a face, hair, and a voice that spoke things like You guys ready to order?

I hated the sense of desperation in that restaurant, the way everyone was dying to be seen and chosen, picked for part, told they mattered.

I hated it even more because I was the same. I rolled my eyes at those people who came in for important movie meetings and career making business lunches with their big-shot agents and managers to discuss THE SCRIPT.

Yet, there I was over there eating crumbs and pretending I was full from them.

Hi there ProofOfLifers,

If you’re here, you are a POLer.

Meaning: you are ready, or sorta ready, or wanting to be ready to live your life fully, on your own terms; whilst in community with a bunch of other loving weirdos.

The I Got You community.

We are your I Got You People. Please engage! Talk to me. To each other. To yourself. (I do!)

I have been painting up a storm and lately writing again, which feels good, and is my Pastiloffian style- I have no rhyme or reason and loads of typos.

If you missed my latest, How To Be A Model, check it out. It’s insight into why Proof of Life is also my book title (my forthcoming one.)

It’s also a commentary on the insidious ways we are taught to hate ourselves.

Excerpt:

I did not know who I was, or so I thought. And so, I looked under every table and into every customer’s eyes for some kind of answer.

I tried to find myself in mens want. Their desire my gauge.

I also tried: in my ability or inability to make customers laugh. In attempting to make my body smaller and smaller until it almost disappeared- so I’d have to get saved and then that’s who I’d be! Someone who needed saving, someone who got saved, someone who was never saved.

I was judging those fuckers-but then there was me, begging someone to love me.

I thought I could be loved, by someone else, out of my self-hatred.

Doesn’t work that way! I yell again to the old poem on my desk and to the young girl trapped inside of it. The one who can’t stop looking at her imaginary twenty-something-year-old wrinkles.

You should see them now, you Nincomcoop! I say to her. Lovingly, this time.

And softer still, I say: They are like full on feet of crows and they are fantastic.

When do you think it starts, this deterioration of self-possession? Did it start with our grandmother’s grandmothers?

Maybe it started before time- when everything was dark, except for the light of woman? Maybe that felt like too much to bear, that brightness? So, eventually the light began to dim.

Look: you can only be told who you are so many times before you start to believe it, and then, eventually you start to see it too. And even if you don’t, you’ve been told enough times that your eyes decide it is true, what they say.

The world starts in on you, telling you all the things you are, all the things you aren’t, and before you know it, you’re asking Siri and strangers on the internet for ways to fix all the things wrong with you. All the problems of you. The faults.

You start to accept that the facts of you are something that needs to be solved.

Or, maybe you were born into this lie. Maybe there was no deterioration of self-possession. No eventual acquiescing into accepting that you are not good enough.

Maybe you were taught that in the womb. Or, silently, as a baby, when you watched adults around you mishandle each other’s tender hearts.

You act like you are something to be fixed. Like you are a puzzle with a few missing pieces and those missing pieces are out there somewhere.

For a cost.

In my communities I use Fridays to ask how we can practice the I Got You Effect.

Welcome to I Got You Fridays.

Leave a comment how we can support you.

Do it. Don’t be weird. Be weird, but not about that!

It can be anything. Do not get in your head like but I don’t have a book or business and I am worthless bla blaaaaa.

Nopeville. That is a bs story if I ever heard one (I have!)

It can be that you need a friend, a rec for a good book, your own book, a site, your business, help getting word out about anything, words of encouragement, good deep listening, friendship, resources, advice. Anything. (Within reason.)

My ask is that we all take time and read through and do what we can do. That’s all we can ever do, isn’t it?

We grow together. We are weird together. DON’T YOU DARE MAKE ME DO IT ALONE.

I’m coming to London for an afternoon workshop March 23.

lumipoweryoga.com/workshop/creativity-c…

I am learning this app so I don’t know how to embed. Or make my bed.

Although it is held at a yoga studio-my home there (where I do my stuff) it is NOT a yoga workshop.

It’s an afternoon of connection and creativity. My friend Simon Pegg, a nice English chap who happens to be a kinda sorta famous guy, shared it and I got loads of signups so it is getting full. I say that so you don’t pull a P.

(A P is a Pastiloff.)

Meaning: don’t be like me and wait. I sit on everything. (Hello, overdue book 2. I see you. Go away Inner Asshole of mine, I am talking. to my friends!)

Also: I have an in person retreat in Ojai May 24-27.

Then my heart of all hearts. Italia! Sep 14-21. Email me to apply.

Applying is code for let me know a little something something about you, ya weirdo.

I am so looking forward to reading your words and to getting to know you better. I am so grateful and, as my friend Faith Scott says (an amazing poet and human): I love you so stupid much. (Isn’t that amazing? It’s totes hers though so credit her cute ass.)

Your presence here is giving me the confidence and support and faith to move forward. especially with my book. With my divorce. With life.

As Freud says (or so they say he said:) How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

If you became a paid member or a founding member, I humbly thank you.

If you want to, but money is the thing- reach out to me. If you are flush as f*ck, consider donating or gifting a subscription. I do a lot of scholarships and mutual aid etc and your support helps me keep this eco-system a system.

If you want to pay it forward, share about this. There are so many ways to be an I got you, to say I love you, to lift each other up.

Part deux of I GOT YOU FRIDAY’S:

We do both parts here at my school. my school is called THE SCHOOL OF WHATEVER WORKS.)

• After you share how we can support you (if you don’t know, that’s okay. Use it as an invitation to consider. Skip to part 2 if you’ve got nothing, although I don’t buy it. We all need support.

• After you share yours PLEASE SHARE HOW YOU WILL BE AN I GOT YOU FOR SOMEONE ELSE.

• How you intend on supporting or lifting someone else.

• Or, lift someone else up right in the comments. You can love on them, highlight them, talk about their new book or business or what a good friend they are. Anything!

This village (they say that’s what it takes) is filled with (and will keep getting filled with) I Got You People.

I want the comments to be filled with you asking for what you need AND you lifting someone else up. Big or small. It all matters. You in?

There is no downside to this.

My ask: share my substack and pay if you’re able and/or to get my memoir (from library is great too) On Being Human. Writing a book is hard and book 2 is… harder. Mainly, that you keep being your gloriously weird self and that you never ever hide your light.

My lift up:

my gal Kristen McGuiness. She is a wizard. risewriters.com/rise-retreats.

I wouldn’t have sold my book if it weren't for her because I suck hairy balls at proposals and SHE DOES NOT.

Her novel called Live Through This is incredible (she published it through her own publishing company that her crazy ass started because SHE APPARENTLY DOES NOT SLEEP and you can find it on her site or anywhere books are sold.)

She has a course starting Wed 3/7 that I recommend more than salt and vinegar chips (that’s one of those words that I can never spell. What are your words like that?) The word recommend not chips, silly!

It’s called 5 months to memoir. Reach out to her with any questions or sign up with that link. She is a master and just so, so generous. (And funny.)

It’s raining here in Ojai.I am going to clean up* and paint and write some poetry and read your comments and pick off my fake nails BECAUSE I CAN’T STOP WHY CAN’T I EVER STOP PICKING SEND HELP.

*lie. I am not.

Love, me

my email isjennifer@jenniferpastiloff.comby the way for the reteat stuff or if you just wanna say like, hey Jen, you’re a weirdo. But I am too.