Crunchy or Smooth? PYL In-Flight: Sept 19, 2021

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Terri Hanson Mead

5 min readSep 19, 2021

Welcome Back My Crunchy Passengers:

All was not well in my world last week. It was a hard week. A long week. And by Friday night, I was done. I had one call move three times in the matter of an hour. When I finally talked to the guy, he said his entire day had been like that. Ugh!

So, at 5 PM (ok, almost 5), I pulled out one of my favorite glasses, added a generous amount of ice, and poured myself some prosecco with Aperol (Aperol spritz?).

Violet had been patiently waiting to get out of the house, so I attached her leash, walked out the door, and let her sniff as we slowly circled the block. I (illegally?) sipped my drink and resisted the urge to race back to my desk and computer.

While I had a ton of work to do and felt so behind, I just didn’t have anything left in me and needed a break.

My husband Zeke was at work (his last day at REI) as was my second child Finn (not at REI) so I had the house to myself. I snacked on d’Affinois and baguette as I worked on a puzzle in front of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for about four hours.

I decompressed and reflected on just why the week was so hard. I realized that I’d been working on setting boundaries and establishing new relationship behaviors and was in the crunchy part of multiple relationship transitions.

Resisting the urge to fall back into comfortable but unhealthy behaviors is challenging and as a result, exhausting.

Wondering if folks will step up and in as a response, is excruciating.

As my friend Jacqueline pointed out today, when you break a pattern in a relationship, even if it’s necessary, it’s not uncommon for the other party to fiercely hold on to the old pattern, even if they want the change too.

Usually I lean on the folks in my inner circle when I have these types of struggles but this time, the crunchiness was with two people in my inner circle.

So I was doing the heavy lifting without my usual support.

I’ve talked with a number of people who are using this strange time to adjust how they operate in the world which includes how they interact with other people. Many people, especially women, are not accepting things as they were, and are asking for something different. I am 100% behind this and in this.

But this can feel pretty crunchy (yes, that’s crunchy peanut butter, the best peanut butter, so sit down all of you creamy peanut butter fans).

Fortunately, I’ve been through enough transitions to know that there’s goodness on the other side. I can trust the process as my executive coach Bev would say. I can not only avoid resisting feeling the discomfort, but I can lean into it.

I’m already on the other side with one friend thanks to a healthy, supportive and lovely chat this morning. As for the other relationship, we are on the right path and are both committed to smoothing things out in a new way.

In both cases, it isn’t just about them changing their behavior. I need to get comfortable with my new behaviors if I have any hope of avoiding some of the old, bad cycles.

What’s the specific example?

I have a tendency to overgive in relationships and eventually end up resentful and hurt that the other person isn’t giving enough back to me. (check out my video from May 2020 where I talked about going on strike in my household)

I’ve learned (this year in fact) that I often don’t leave enough space for the other person to show up in a meaningful and healthy way. They figure they don’t have to because I’ve got everything covered, or they don’t feel like there’s room for them so they don’t bother.

We all lose in this.

Because I am so worried that nothing will happen if I don’t do it, I don’t leave room for the goodness that others can bring and the resulting magic. Big sigh.

Can anyone else relate to this either on the giving side or on the receiving side? What do you do to more effectively manage this?

Also, how are you? How are you really doing? Drop me a line and let me know as I’d really love to hear from you and I promise I will respond.