If you read my stuff, you probably know that the last eight years have been a journey of profound healing and a full life reset (new profession/ city/ partner/ phase of life).
The part of the healing process I haven’t really talked about?
The fun. The play. And yes, the partying.
The truth is, I think I “healed” just as much from letting myself have a ton more play and fun as I have from all the “shadow work” I’ve been up to.
If you want a woo version of this: I learned a lot more about how to dance with the universe on acid at Burning Man, than I did in a retreat center weeping about my childhood (also very valuable, but not enough on its own to reset my entire existence).
To get even wooer: I’d go as far as to say that learning to embody higher and higher frequencies of fun and play has made it possible for me to understand what it would be like for my work, motherhood, and other “more serious” parts of my life to also feel like fun and play.
Here’s my journey from London-girl-type fun to oh, this-is-so-fun-it’s-holy.
In high school I was hungry to bypass college (which felt like more school) so I could get on with living the Sex and the City lifestyle I was surely meant to embody.
And, in my early 20s, after a mostly miserable three years of undergrad, I moved back to London and finally lived out this dream.
Most of my peers during this decade considered me one of their more “fun” friends. I didn’t just excel at a series of bigger and bigger jobs - I also went out more, stayed out later, and could be counted on to arrange a glam night out in the Big City or a girl’s vacation in Ibiza. And I always had a story up my sleeve from my latest date-gone-right or date-gone-wrong.
In short, the vibe was “Miranda crossed with Carrie plus a dash of Samantha”.
And I definitely thought I knew how to party.
Despite the weekly crippling hangovers, the nagging feeling I didn’t belong in most of the rooms I found myself all dressed up in, and the fact I had very little to show for all the nights on the town beyond a few short-lived romances and a lot of fancy clothes.
Around my 30th birthday I plotted with two friends to go to Burning Man. I worked in tech, casually knew a few people that went, and trusted myself to “keep my head screwed on” while taking in the spectacle (after all, I’d been going to Ibiza and the Greek party islands for years without turning into a hippy).
Now, I did NOT take to Burning Man like a duck to water.
In fact, I spent my first year very much on the edge looking in.
Too shy to make new friends, too scared to try the drugs that everyone seemed to be having so much fun on, confused about the electronic music (so boring?!), and unwilling to call in a boy who fancied me to be my social gateway into a new scene… a tried and tested technique from decades of feeling socially awkward on group holidays and at fancy weddings.
Instead, I felt like I’d discovered my Westworld - an alternate reality that I was totally fascinated by, but was going to need to study carefully to figure out the rules before I dived in.
The next year was very different.
My mother died three days before Burning Man.
After 11 years at the mercy of a rare kind of Alzheimer’s, my father and I (and her doctors) let her succumb to complications from a lung infection.
The next morning, my father looked at me and said “You still want to go don’t you?”.
And I did.
I didn’t know why exactly.
But I felt sure I needed to process it all in “my place” and, despite the outside-looking-in experience of the year before, “‘my place” felt like it was a temporary city of 70,000 people in the Nevada desert.
So I went.
And it was in the Nevada desert, a week after my mother died, that I learned how to really party.
I was in a perfect mental state - pure carpe diem - and was finally primed to understand what it is to be an all-in participant in the rite of the Bacchanal: a time and place where the rules don’t apply, where hedonism is a big part of the game, and anything can happen next and often does.
In my raw, f***-it state I just did whatever I wanted and trusted that my new friends would catch me.
They had no preconceived notions of who I was, and suddenly neither did I.
One of my most vivid memories from that week starts with a handsome and pretty jacked man pulling himself up a 12-foot rope to dance on the back of an “Art Car”. He turned back to invite me to climb up and join, and me, the weakest, least coordinated girl in every gym class at school - powered solely by the sense that I was a whole new person - somehow found myself climbing up and boogieing beside him.
Who was this woman?
I had no idea… but she was way stronger and wilder than I had realized.
And yes, I did try the molly and the mushrooms.
I did experience new levels of oneness and unity on the dancefloor and ‘get’ electronic music.
I did go to the workshops about sex and philosophy, and spent hours talking to total strangers about death and life.
And I spent hours crying and journaling and building a small shrine to my mother in the temple.
I estimate I processed a decade of grief in 10 days.
As I write this, I’m 8 months pregnant with my second child and will be missing this year’s Burning Man.
But after 7 “Burns” in ten years it still has a massive pull over me and I understandably get asked a fair amount why I keep going back.
After all, I love newness, and how new can the same festival in the same desert with a lot of the same people be?
It’s a pilgrimage home to the wilder parts of myself.
It’s the ultimate playground, the perfect place to hold an agenda of pure presence and see how the universe wants to play with me in any given year.
And as a city that emerges from nothing over a week (and disappears just as fast when we’re done with it), it is the ultimate reminder that everything in our world is made up - and we can make up anything we want for ourselves. A truth I now know in my bones, and still benefit from recalibrating to on an annual-ish basis.
In our culture, we treat partying like it’s for teenagers… a way to let inhibitions down, explore a boundary or two, let off some steam.
When grown-ups like to party we typically treat them as having failed to outgrow adolescence, having failed to “get serious” and “take responsibility in their lives”. We assume it’s a sign of a character flaw.
Grown-up partying introduced me to sides of myself I love and had never met before.
It brought me an entire group of friends, who in turn brought me my life partner, and now my daughters.
It brought me a crazy bunch of dreamers to build stuff with, including a shared vacation home in Big Sur that is my ultimate happy place and teaches me so much about community, beauty, land, and nature.
It brought me the confidence and freedom to blow past what was expected of me, the old stories I had of what it might look like to fulfill my potential and embrace an entirely different career and way of relating to the world.
And my partying years have introduced me to a fundamentally different level of self-expression. Confidence in my taste, in my body, in my words, in the gift of my very presence.
So what about you? Is it time to let yourself go?
Your version of the Bacchanal doesn’t need to include music, or art, or dance, or any particular activities or substances at all.
It’s any time and place where the rules don’t apply and where play and fun and pleasure get to take the lead.
There are 10 days left in August before September brings us back to earth - go forth and have FUN.
It’s good for you.
I promise.
Katharine x
Ps. Apologies for the brief newsletter hiatus, a combination of launching my new website plus growing Baby 2 (she demands we nap!) plus relocating to SF for the summer so Jon could take his new company through YC has not been supportive to my preferred writing cadence…
Pps. Yes I am 8 months pregnant! I am wildly excited to meet this new human and less excited to take a break from the writing and coaching I so love. But this is how it goes when you’re building a life and work you adore - all the things, but not all at the same time.
That said, if you’ve been thinking it’s time we talk about working together let’s have a chat in the next week or so, and we can either do an Exponential Clarity Session before I go on maternity leave or earmark time to start something bigger and deeper towards the end of the year.