What Do You Want to Be Known For?

Jun 01, 2025

I did a border run yesterday, crossing the Thai-Lao border to stretch my time in Thailand a little further. It was a long day. I had a lot of time to sit in silence and stare ahead at the road, or stare out the windows at the rolling tropical hills.

And somewhere in the middle of that, I had a very simple and casual question put to me: what do you want to be known for?

I had a reflexive answer, of course. All the things I make! I'd love to be known for my Deep Aliveness course, my writings, my 1-on-1 work, my work with Somatic Resonance and Imaginal Journeying! I've put a lot of work into those, please know me for them!

But that thought felt pre-packaged, nowhere near the marrow, so I looked again — and it pretty much all fell apart.

1 - Writing Is Nice, but it Ain't It

I've been a writer and hedge philosopher about as long as I can remember. Really, some of my earliest memories are writing simple little mysteries in my childhood bedroom. I spent a lot of high school scrawling out literary fiction as stiff vehicles for little philosophical ponderings I had.

These days, I've gotten a lot of what I hoped to get out of writing. People who were distant heroic figures just a few years ago have now scheduled meetings with me and told me how much they admire my work. I've sat in sharing circles where multiple thanked me and told me my writing affected the direction of their lives. People send me messages to remind me of an article I wrote a couple years ago, and to tell me it's been a north star for them ever since.

You can't buy that kind of high, for a writer. It's dream-come-true stuff.

And it's not just that I've gotten used to it — it's that being praised for this has shown me just how misguided my whole writing practice has been.

I poured a couple decades of my life-force into getting good at writing, getting good at taking what was inside me and putting it on the page for people to see, to resonate with, to use as a thread they could follow back to me. I was a lonely kid and I just wanted to be seen, I just wanted to be felt by the people around me — but that was impossible, so I learned to craft it on the page, to hope Someone Out There would see it and Recognize me.

And like, to be fair it worked. It worked really well. My life is currently full of close, beloved friends and connections who found me through my writing, or were introduced to me by people who found me through my writing. So like, go me. Yay.

But really, what I wanted, what drove all those hours of practice year after year, was that I just wanted love (duh). I wanted to give and receive love, to be warmly received by the people around me and to warmly receive the people around me.

And honestly, I'm better than that now than I've ever been in my life, by leaps and bounds — and I'm like... okay at it. Kinda mid.

So being known, where I'm known, for my writing is nice in a lot of ways, and has opened up a lot of doors in my life. But also, it's a bit embarassing. It's this big shining badge of the ways that I got confused and poured my skill points into something only mildly related to the thing I really wanted.

The fact that almost everyone else does this too is some comfort, but not a ton.

2 - Not My Survival Dance

Bill Plotkin uses the term "Survival Dance" to note the things we seekers do to stay alive and functional in the world while we continue to practice, evolve, and develop. For some people, the survival dance is software engineering, or consulting, or selling cars; that's how they get their money while deepening their practice and aligning their life with their soul.

For others of us, the survival dance involves showing others what we've learned on the path. Running embodiment workshops, or breathwork weekends, mushroom ceremonies, imaginal journeying sessions, coaching work, etc.

As I mentioned at the beginning, it's very helpful for me to be known for my survival dance — my courses and 1:1 work and such. But one thing that seems to be clarifying for me (I'll probably write something about this later) is that my survival dance is in fact about survival, much more so than Soul or Mission.

Being known for my work on somatic resonance or deep aliveness or the rest of what I'm doing — it's very helpful for marketing reasons — for helping me get by. But honestly, if I woke up tomorrow to some grant or patron or donation that made me financially free — I'd probably do very little of this work. I'd definitely do it in a very different way. The closest thing I can point to is that I'd probably follow the thread I'm chasing with MYSTERIUM much more fully — that feels like my most aligned project at the moment. (And, tellingly, it's a project that I'm likely to make very little money off of.)

Beyond making enough money to pay my rent and my medical bills and such, I don't have a ton of drive to be known for this side of my work. I love running cohorts and I love helping people one on one, but I can always do those. Some of the best work I’ve ever done has been for free in impromptu situations where I just meet someone who it seems like I can help. What my soul really wants to do in my work is something else. Something closer to MYSTERIUM, a multi-week co-creative small-group deepening into Mystery and practice. Something that deepens into aliveness, openness, and enchantment in ways that are far more effective and rewarding, but that are, unfortunately, less reliable on the monetization side (at least for now).

Even if I were able to run events like that reliably and without compromise, I’m not sure they’d be my answer to what I want to be known for. They’d be on a list, but if I was picking one thing, that wouldn’t be the one.

I have an answer now — maybe only a partial answer, and likely not a permanent one — to what I want to be known for. It feels clarifying to have a sense of a deep desire that I couldn’t have articulated until yesterday.

It’s obvious in retrospect — I’ve talked about it a fair bit, oriented whole sectors of my life towards it quietly and not so quietly over the past couple years; but even so, I wouldn’t have noted it as What I Want To Be Known For until yesterday evening, when I managed to hone in on it in my journal.

No, I’m not gonna tell you what it is. Sorry. I’ll keep it in a sealed envelope and maybe tell you in a couple years, when it is in fact something I’m known for.

Until then, I kinda wanna know what you want to be known for. Do you have some obvious answers to that? And if those answers were bullshit… what might your next answer be?