What story are you telling about yourself?
Learn to hear emotions beneath words, treat love as courageous practice, shift your self-story from victim to agent, and direct relationship power from control to creation.
October 11th, 2025 - Issue #139 - read online
👋 Welcome to Pursuit—your weekly pause for intentional living, self-discovery, and inner clarity. My name is Amir, and every week I share four carefully chosen ideas to help you design a more fulfilling life.
This week’s reflections:
👂🏼 Listening between the lines
🫶🏼 Advice I love about LOVE
🦸🏼♀️ What story are you telling about yourself?
🔒 Boundaries make intimacy possible
👂🏼 Listening between the lines
We think arguments are about words—but they’re actually about unspoken emotions. When someone says, “You never call,” the issue isn’t missed calls; it’s loneliness or feeling unloved. Defensiveness focuses on facts, but understanding comes from hearing what’s not being said.
Effective communication means decoding underlying feelings. Recognize when someone uses fear, obligation, or guilt (FOG) to sway you. Don’t react; pause and reflect.
True resolution comes from seeing clearly through the FOG—responding not to the words, but to the emotions beneath them.
🫶🏼 Advice I love about LOVE
All roads ultimately lead to the same place: Reality is one of ultimate unconditional boundless unwavering love. That is what you already are. The work is in seeing through the obstructions that cloud that truth.
The point is not to destroy the ego. Understand the ego and how it forms, be aware of it, loosen its power when it comes from lower energy states, magnify its power when higher energy states illuminate it, let it be a tool to achieve Love’s aims. Let life use life.
Heal yourself then raise the ceiling. Too much inner-work and past rumination can be counter-productive. Eventually you have to expose yourself to high stakes situations: falling in love, doing risky things, manifesting brighter futures. In this way you experientially teach your “parts/stories” to trust and surrender to your “Higher Self/ a new story”.
For things like love and the things they pour into (career, another person, a child, a dream) there’s no going halfway. Because love is about blind faith. You have to just send it. There’s no consolation prize for going halfway. It will not happen. You have to fully go into it.
🦸🏼♀️ What story are you telling about yourself?
We often underestimate the power of the narratives we create about our lives. But through time I’ve learned that how we tell our story determines how we live it.
People who consistently frame themselves as victims—blaming others or circumstances—rarely thrive. This narrative traps them, limiting their growth and keeping them stuck. True healing begins when we recognize our own role in shaping our experiences.
The language we use isn’t trivial—it shapes our reality. By shifting our story from victimhood to agency, we create a narrative that empowers rather than imprisons.
💪🏻 Power lives in every relationship
Power lives in every relationship, at work and at home. We speak often about expectations, boundaries, and trust, yet we speak less about power and when we do the focus tends to be abuse. There is another view. All relationships involve power, and it is neutral. It can harm and it can create. A helpful lens is the difference between power over and power to. Power over dominates or coerces. Power to is generative. It enables action and invites collaboration. The same income can illustrate both. In one partnership the higher earner decides where to live and how to spend. In another the same earnings fund a degree, a studio, or time to care for an ailing parent.
Power is also an organizing feature. Some situations need leadership, and leadership creates hierarchy and structure. When parents refuse their authority, a vacuum forms and the child ends up parenting the parent. Teams without direction face the same vacuum. Either someone else steps in, or the group slides into chaos. The same logic holds in communities and politics. Power is voted, chosen, earned, attributed, or stolen, and in every case it shapes the system. Power is not the enemy of love or collaboration. It is the current that runs through them. The task is to direct that current wisely. Turn power over into power to. Use influence to enable growth, protection, and shared purpose. When power is acknowledged, bounded, and put in service of the relationship, it becomes a force for creation rather than control.
🇵🇸 If you want to support my work, commit to donating €5/month to the children of Gaza—living in what is now the deadliest place on Earth.
🎵 Music I’m listening to
You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶
🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🦥 Slow rave: Sleepy techno for tired danced
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments
Previously on Pursuit:
