Grace

Grace is one of three concepts that hold everything I do together — alongside repair and intuition. This page is where I try to explain what I actually mean by it, because the word carries a lot of other meanings I'm not using.

What grace is not.

Grace is not forgiveness in the religious sense. It's not absolution. It's not permission to keep doing the thing you feel bad about. It's not spiritual bypassing — the move where you name something as beautiful or meaningful before you've actually felt how hard it is.

And it's not passivity. That's the most common misunderstanding. People encounter the idea of giving themselves grace and hear: be easier on yourself, stop holding yourself accountable. That's not it. That's the opposite of it.

What grace actually is.

Grace is pragmatic softness in the face of your own humanity.

It's the acknowledgement of reality for exactly what it is — without the added weight of what it means about you, what it proves, what it predicts. It's saying: this is what's happening. This is how I feel about it. And ending those sentences there, without the spiral that usually follows.

And then — this is the part that gets left out — asking: now what?

Grace is acknowledgement followed by agency. It's the move that says: I see this clearly, I'm not drowning in it, so what do I actually want to do?

The acknowledgement piece softens the rigidity. The now what piece keeps it from becoming passivity. Both halves are required. Without acknowledgement you're just forcing yourself forward without actually processing what's in the way. Without the now what you're processing indefinitely without moving.

Where I learned it.

Not from a book. From two specific moments, years apart, that taught me the same thing from different angles.

The first was in Geneva, in my early twenties, walking home from university. Running through my mental list — classes, work, social obligations, piano practice. I hit piano and felt the familiar weight of it. And then something shifted: wait. Piano is a choice. No one is requiring this of me anymore. I'm still here because I want to be.

As soon as I changed it from obligation to desire, the weight lifted. I walked home and spent one of the longest practice sessions I'd had in years — not because anything external had changed, but because my relationship to it had.

That was the first time I understood that the words I use to describe my experience are actively constructing that experience. I need to practice piano and I want to practice piano are not reporting two different moods. They're creating two different realities.

The second moment was in New York, at 23. Three days into a depressive spiral after an internship that had gone badly. Crying in the small room that was mine in my dad's apartment. The craving for a cigarette arrived — and at the same speed, the recognition: every time I've done this when I felt this way, it made it worse. The gesture relieves. It doesn't help.

So: now what?

What followed was a gratitude practice — not a performative one, just honest lines in the back of a journal about what was actually present and good in my life. It worked faster than I expected. Not because gratitude is magic but because it reoriented my attention from what was wrong to what was also true. Grace and gratitude are close relatives.

Grace in practice.

The simplest version: take whatever you're saying about yourself right now and add and I give myself grace to the end of it.

I am not where I thought I'd be at this point in my life, and I give myself grace. I said the wrong thing and I give myself grace. I keep making the same mistake and I give myself grace.

Then — now what?

That's it. That's the whole practice. It sounds too simple to do anything. Do it anyway and see what happens to the weight of what you just said.

The deeper version: acknowledgement without the story that follows. Most of our self-criticism isn't just observation — it's observation plus verdict plus prediction plus evidence plus everything else we've piled on top. Grace is learning to stop at the observation. This happened. I feel this way about it. Full stop. And then: what do I want to do?

Grace and repair.

Grace is what makes repair survivable.

Repair requires you to look clearly at what happened — your part in it, the other person's part, the pattern underneath the specific incident. That kind of clarity is genuinely hard to sustain without something softening the looking. Without grace, clarity tips into self-punishment. The examination becomes an indictment. You stop being able to see clearly because you're too busy convicting yourself.

Grace keeps the examination honest without making it brutal.

It's also what I bring into the container when someone is hardest on themselves — which is most people, most of the time, when they finally stop performing okayness and let what's actually there surface. The first thing that needs to happen is that it becomes bearable to look at. Grace is what makes it bearable.

Grace has saved my life. Literally.

I don't say this for effect.

Grace has pulled me out of suicidal ideation. It's pulled me out of the pits of depression. It's what allowed me to stop smoking — not willpower, but the moment of clear-eyed acknowledgment that the gesture relieves and doesn't help, followed by: so now what? It's what allowed me to own a serious mistake I made with a client — invoicing for work I hadn't done — and spend two years making it right. Not because I was forced to. Because I could look at it clearly without the looking destroying me.

It's deceptively simple. It's taken me years to embody it consistently. I'm still practicing it.

That's what I mean when I say this work is participatory. I'm not teaching something I've mastered. I'm sharing something I keep learning.