Jumping into the unknown
Hey there. My name is Chloe, founder of the Dots Directory. It’s lovely to meet you, albeit through the words on this page. I am so happy and grateful to have you here and for you giving me a slice of your precious time.
That’s me in the photo taken a few months back, the day before my adopted daughter was born in Salt Lake City in Utah on Earth Day. I am day tripping on Antelope Island, the largest island in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. It’s quite a unique corner of North American wilderness full of flies, bison and yup, you guessed it, antelope (for context I’m a Brit by the way from the North of England, normally residing in Europe, but currently living in the US as I embark on this adoption journey with my wife. Anyway, I digress and will indulge you in that story for another blog!) 😉
The image does a good job of depicting how I felt inside those 24 hours before our little girl was brought to us, quite honestly, through a miracle – I was jumping for joy at the prospect of being a new mum and welcoming this beautiful being into our lives; I was so excited yet absolutely frickin’ terrified all at the same time. I am jumping out of the life as I knew it and was about to embark into the unknown on probably the most life-changing journey I have taken in my life. And what a wonderful roller-coaster of ride it’s been so far!
The photo also represents how I felt quite a few years back when I started another life-changing journey, when, little did I know it at the time, I was a literal frog jumping out of boiling water into the scary unknown of personal healing. The journey that brought me to the developing the Dots Directory and offering it to you. Allow me to explain.
Boiling Frogs… Hmm, what?
The boiling frog analogy is a metaphor that describes a frog slowly being boiled alive. The premise is simple yet profound: Imagine a pot of lukewarm water placed on a stove with a frog inside it. The water is initially at a comfortable temperature, allowing the frog to remain calm and content. As the heat slowly increases, the frog doesn’t notice the subtle rise in temperature. By the time the water reaches a boiling point, the frog is too lethargic to escape and ultimately meets its demise. On the other hand, if a frog is placed into boiling water from the get go, it will immediately jump out to escape the danger. Most of us, as I was, are frogs just chilling in lukewarm water not even noticing that the temperature is rising…
The analogy serves as a powerful lesson about complacency, gradual change, and the importance of awareness. It can also be applied to various aspects of life, from personal growth to societal and environmental issues. It highlights how small, incremental changes can go unnoticed until it’s too late to react. Take minor issues in relationships for example, where small signs of discontent or miscommunication, if left unaddressed, can lead to a relationship breakdown, similar to how the frog fails to notice the rising temperature. The frog analogy also relates well to our health, the environment (climate change, hello?) and the gradual erosion of democracy. Growing up in a functionally challenged family, like I did, is also another example of this analogy… for many of us though, we can’t see it until “something” jolts us out of it. For me, that was my divorce from my ex in 2018.
Learning the hard way or maybe I got lucky?
As American poet, Marie Oliver, once said, “someone I loved once handed me a box of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift”. That was what my divorce did for me. The pain that was served for me on a platter gave me two choices – to bury it (what most of us do as we just aren’t equipped to know how to handle the tsunami of emotions which comes with these types of huge life stressors) or to face it.
After quite some wallowing, I couldn’t stand the pain that was surfacing for me any longer, so I took the rope and I decided to dive head first into the darkness inside of myself and start to heal all that was coming up during that time. Once on that journey, I soon discovered that the unhealed pain went way deeper than what my divorce had initially brought up for me, that was just the portal, the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, to my deeper unresolved childhood wounding that was playing out across my life (Side note: I do not blame my parents whatsoever, they did the best they could with the tools they had -childhood wounding happens for all of us to some degree or another and it’s up to us, as adults, to take responsibility for our pain and our own healing. Another side note: wouldn’t it be great if we were taught all of this in school rather than learning the hard way?!).
This box of darkness was exactly the jolt that launched me out of my boiling pot of frogs and into the unchartered territory of waking up and becoming more conscious to who I really was and now, who I have become. No more complacency, no more zombie asleep at the wheel merely going through life on autopilot. No more being a frog slowly being boiled alive completely unaware of what is happening.
Down the proverbial (google) rabbit hole I went
So, I started digging. I spent hours, days, weeks, months, years even poring over everything, and I mean everything, I could find on the internet that could somehow answer the questions I needed answering around the pain and what I was feeling which was basically a sense of complete helplessness, belongingness and lostness. It was incredibly overwhelming at first with all the information I was finding, but slowly over the months, which then turned into years, I started to piece it together, sifting through the stuff which was useful for me and those which weren’t so much, discarding and storing as I went along. It had to speak to me on a soul level. I needed raw unadulterated authentic speak which resonated with the pain I felt so deep inside of myself. And I did, and I found a lot.
I unearthed books written on this stuff, incredible people who had been through their own pain portals and are now talking about behavior patterns and attachment theory on podcasts. I joined soul driven groups; I went on inner growth retreats; I had so many different types of healing therapy that it was coming out of my ears. I exposed myself to a world that I hardly knew about and I found others that were also doing the work, that had also been through their own inner crises and were now finding their way beyond the veil of consciousness and sharing what they had uncovered with the world. It is thanks to these resources that I have been able to start to heal my relationship and childhood wounds, learn my emotional landscape, step into my calling and live a more conscious and awakened life. And I have never looked back.
Who am I today and what do I stand for
I think it’s important for each and every one of us at some point in our lives to do a bit of self-enquiry, otherwise, I would argue, what’s the point in living? Thanks, Socrates for that nudge over 2000 years ago 🙂
To best answer here, I will quickly summarize who I was before all this began: I was a person that operated in survival mode usually in some kind of flight or flight, I did not know how to self-regulate very well even at all, I was unable to experience my emotions as they were and not get caught up in their frantic whirlwind and at times project onto others, I was disconnected to myself and had limited sense of self (my internal world was rarely reflected back to me as a child, nor for my primary caregivers when they were kids, so the inter-generational trauma cycle simply continues on until we break it). I reacted rather than responded to the world around me and I ran from most things that made me uncomfortable as I didn’t have the tools or the know-how to navigate difficult conversations and express complex feelings. I lived in my head, rather than with a heart, body, soul and mind connection.
Today, whilst I still have an anxious disposition (I thank the likes of thought leaders in this space like Sarah Wilson for normalizing anxiety and seeing it as a gift rather than a burden), I have learned to instill a sense of calm into myself as much as I can, I use my breath and body to ground myself during emotional times, I trust more and I am better at not controlling outcomes by surrendering to life unfolding around me. As I continue to build up my true and authentic sense of self, I have learned to use my voice and stand up for what is important to me. I am a proud twice married gay woman and an adoptive parent to a beautiful baby girl. I am a divorcee who has learned my lessons and made amends with my ex and some. I own my sh*t. I deal with my sh*t. I take responsibility and accountability for my actions. I have figured out my values and I tried to live by these every day. I try to live as consciously as I can and live in the present moment – always work in progress!
In terms of what I stand for – that’s simple as its basically the framework upon which I have built the Dots Directory:
- Working on myself to become a better version of myself every day.
- Learning my emotional landscape and listening to my body so I can respond rather than react to the world around me.
- Treating myself and others with respect, compassion and kindness. To listen better 🙂
- Growing through conflict rather than shying away from it, setting healthy boundaries and cultivating conscious love.
- Living by my values and discovering what gives me real meaning in life. Letting my creative juices flow.
- Being as much of a conscious parent as I can in this crazy digital broken-system age, present with my baby girl and attuning to her needs.
- Looking after our Earth, informing myself about what’s going on and how I can get involved to fix these broken systems, as micro as my actions might be.
- Collaborating and building communities to do good in the world.
- Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable (i.e. talking about Death rather than living in denial of it – having had two parents pass away earlier this year, this topic has been very close to me.)
- Living more wisely inside and out. Raising human consciousness as much as I can leading by example.
- Being grateful for what I do actually have rather than what I don’t, and yeah, a lot of peace and love.
I was once asked what my personal theory of change was – great question, but I didn’t have the answer back then. Now I have had time to think about it and again for simplicity purposes: I believe that in order for us to heal the world and save it from total collapse and save ourselves truth be told, we have to heal our inner worlds and the unresolved trauma from our past that resides in most, if not all of us. We have to confront ourselves. Hurt people hurt people. Fractured souls and beings create fractured systems and societies. Inner transformation and healing are key for this outer transformation. We need to do the work on ourselves, and not be complacent and totally unaware like our boiling frog friends. This is the pathway, I believe, to healthier individuals, a healthier collective and ultimately a healthier world.
Let us commence this journey together
So, as I get to the end of this nice long juicy first founders blog, and I hope you are still with me… let us dive into this work together. It is time. And there is no better place to start than immersing ourselves in the great work that has already been created and developed for us by those awakened souls that have taken the plunge before us.
The Dots Directory contains a lot of these resources already and will be added to over time building up a unique repository that we can all dig into; resources we can learn and grow from so that we can all become the best version of ourselves, shed our pain and wake up to what it means to truly live a fulfilled, connected and harmonious life – will you join me?
Check out our site and sign up for FREE to start browsing our expanding repository of resources today and see what you think!
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Last words of thanks
Before you get on that journey, which I am sure by now you are chomping at the bit to get going, I just want to say a heartfelt thanks to all those close and far who have supported me as I have meticulously put these resources and this platform together. This project has taken hundreds if not thousands of hours and has been an absolute labour of love, born out of deep passion and a profound calling and probably a good douse of urgency (have you seen the current state of the world out there?). I want to take my hat off to Modern Day Strategy in Cape Town who have painstakingly worked alongside me to develop this beautifully designed architecture that sits behind the resources – without this most fabulous and talented team, none of this would have been possible. And lastly to my friends and family and especially my wife for her unwavering patience as I have worked on this over the last years, I couldn’t and I wouldn’t have done this without you. Peace, love and gratitude to you all. I hope you enjoy the platform!
