Hi Friends-
Last week I turned 48. To celebrate, I hosted a potluck and an inordinate amount of my dearest friends showed up to support me, connect with each other, eat beautiful food, and dance. The next day, we woke up, grazed on delicious leftovers, and attended my upstate town's small but absolutely radiant Pride Parade. The weekend felt like a dense, rich infusion of love and community.
Immersed in what was unfolding, I took a break from the news for a few days. When I touched back in, it felt, as it often does these days, like the disintegration and chaos had accelerated exponentially. That what we had feared was now (again) beginning to unfold as Trump weaponized the military against immigrants and peaceful protestors.
These past few days my friend and I have been walking in the woods discussing how to hold all of this complexity: the paradox of the blessings alongside the destruction, the love alongside the grief, the laughter alongside the despair.
I don't know what the answer is. All I know is that the existing answers don't work anymore, so that's what this week's essay explores.
Sending you love & steadiness,
Jocelyn
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KILN: Chrysalis Edition
Only two days left to join!
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From June 17 - August 19, 2025, I will be leading a special edition of my creative incubator KILN — a container, a catalyst, and a community for transformative, creative change.
Whether you're working on reinventing your career, reconnecting with your creative practice, or simply moving through this time of uncertainty with creativity and grace, KILN will create a warm, nourishing space to support your evolution.
Registration is open through tomorrow, Friday, June 13th at 8pm EDT.
Learn more & book your spot →
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Got questions about KILN? Just hit reply and ask me. : )
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Down with Expertise!
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Wherein I talk about wearing "expertise drag", why playing the expert doesn't feel like it's serving me anymore, and how "not knowing" opens up new possibilities
When I describe my past, I often say that I was an "accidental productivity expert."
In the story that I tell myself, the universe sent an unwitting jocelyn on an underworld journey deep into the realm of productivity. There, I dug into reams of research, I learned the language and the art of the "how to" listicle, and I helped create conferences and book series that centered productivity.
When I emerged from my journey into this dark territory, burnt out and disillusioned, I had everything that I needed to begin to question this relentless cultural imperative to prove our worthiness through what we produce — through what we do rather than who we are.
I think part of the reason that I call myself an "accidental productivity expert" is because there's something that rankles me about wearing the mantle of the Expert. It feels itchy, overdetermined, constraining. I don't want to embody the rigidity or the seriousness of the Expert anymore (if I ever did!). I want to feel the freedom and the playfulness of the Fool.
Just think about how much effort you have to put into maintaining the facade of being an Expert — how much effort it takes to always appear as "the one who knows"… and compare that to the freedom and flow and playfulness that can open up when you really allow yourself to sink into not knowing, when you no longer care if you make mistakes or if you look foolish.
To be clear: I am not exactly there yet.
I aspire to the freedom of playing the Fool, but part of me is still deeply attached to being the Expert, to being regarded as "one who knows."
Part of me still rebels against saying "I don't know" in conversation because my petty little control-craving ego doesn't want to roll over and show its soft underbelly of vulnerability and not knowing.
Part of me still wonders if I have value if I don't know. What if my questions are all I have to offer? Is that enough?
But as I ask that question… about the value of questions, it is reminding me that I would always prefer a good question to a piece of "expert advice."
As you and I both know, it is incredibly easy to receive a piece of advice, and to know — intellectually — that it is good advice, and to even know that it's probably something you really should do, and yet —
You are unable to fully take the advice on board. You are unable to integrate it. Because you haven't lived it, because you haven't learned it the way that you need to learn it.
The thinker Richard Rudd says "awakening cannot be imitated." I think it's the same with advice. Sure, someone can give you the answer to the problem, but that's completely different from arriving at the answer yourself.
The integration is in the arriving.
Google maps is the perfect example. If you are given the map to your destination and you blindly follow it turn by turn until you get there… when you arrive — if you're anything like me, at least — you will have learned nothing. You will have retained nothing. The "answer" will not have been integrated.
By contrast, if you try to "wing it" on the way to your destination and allow yourself to take some wrong turns and make mistakes, it's very likely that you will remember how to get to your destination the next time — or that you will, at least, have a much better idea of how to get there. You will have learned something in the process, and you might have even stumbled upon something unexpected and magical along the way.
So if you tell me the answer, or I tell you the answer… if I sit up here wrapped in my mantle of expertise and I say: It is like THIS. Does anyone really learn anything? I'm not so sure.
The Expert can't learn because he/she/they have to remain rigid and buttoned up. In order to maintain the persona of being "the one who knows," they are not allowed to make mistakes. (Which, tbh, sounds pretty stressful and exhausting.)
On the flip side: Is the Expert really doing any good by doling out "answers"? Is it actually possible for anyone to integrate those answers — as wise as they may be — without going on their own journey? Without, in some sense, arriving at the answer themselves?
We have been conditioned to crave expertise — both to offer it and to receive it.
Because we live in an advice-driven culture, it pays to be the one who knows. The one who can tell you how to be more productive so you can get more done, or how to organize your closet so that you feel lighter, or how to generate more clients for your business so that you can be richer.
Decades of listicles have taught us to worship at the altar of "how to". Creating an expectation that there will always be someone there to tell us what to do, to break it down for us, step by step.
We have been trained into a kind of ambient craving for answers, into the idea that there's someone out there who has the roadmap, who can tell us how to get from here to there.
Similarly, there is a craving to be the one who knows, to be the expert.
And believe you me, I have had that craving, and I still have that craving.
Sometimes it still feels natural to slip into "expert drag". When I began writing this essay, my natural instinct was to begin writing in the tone of the Expert, but then I realized that I didn't want to speak from that energy.
So I took off my "expert drag" and I tried to feel into the freedom of the fool, to feel into the freedom of describing my own experience as it is, without needing it to be fully formed, without having to "know" all of the answers ahead of time.
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When I meditate, I often ask whatever or whoever I am communing with the question: What would you have me know?*
Almost exactly a year ago, I spent two weeks communing with the energy of rosemary, a plant that most of us know primarily as a culinary herb. She had much to teach me, and the first thing that she communicated to me, in response to my perennial question: What would you have me know? was this:
"I would have you know nothing, so that you can learn some new things."
Having now spent over a year exploring the vast landscape of my own unknowing, I am beginning to cultivate a new respect for the importance of unlearning, undoing, and unknowing.
I am beginning to understand that if we truly want to cultivate new pathways of being, we must be willing to release our attachment to expertise — both to wearing "expert drag" and to seeking "expert advice."
We must be willing to release our attachment to what we think we know — to let go of all of the "answers" we have been given that are so clearly not working — so that we can ask new questions.
We don't need more expertise, what we need is more freedom.
Freedom to play.
Freedom to experiment.
Freedom to make mistakes.
Freedom to question the norms.
Freedom to be foolish.
Freedom to not know the answers, so that we can discover new ones.
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* The question "What would you have me know?" came to me via my friend Sebene Selassie.
LINK ABOUT IT
Rebecca Solnit on the City of Angels and the nature of violence. "I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents." Solnit's related piece about her "she made him do it theory of everything" is also good.
Love Club: A beautiful essay series about love. Inspired by bell hooks, my friend Sebene reminds us to love: "Love Club invites us to admit that we care about love, that love is vital to spiritual life, and that centering love matters even if we are confused or nervous or weary about it all."
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. "In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it."
The fruits we bear — portraits of trans liberation. A tender Pride photo feature from Atmos: "Each generation of trans people has faced some kind of persecution. And each time, we refuse the scarcity myths handed to us, leaving the soil richer for the next ones."
A beautiful exploration of the flower drawings of artist Ruth Asawa. "I was aware that she was a famous artist, but I knew her first and foremost as a gardener. Because she was [there] with her hands in the dirt… working hard every day.'"
The sound of love. A randomized love song generator that also shares heartfelt personal reflections on what the songs mean to folks. Lovely.
Let the world have its way with you. From a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: "When I can bring presence to loss or resistance, this act makes pain itself luminous."
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SHOUT-OUTS:
The artwork is: David Drbal who is based in Prague, Czech Republic.
Link ideas from: Ann Friedman, Austin Kleon, Recomendo, and Sondra Loring.
You can support me & my work by: Sharing this newsletter with someone, signing up for my creative incubator KILN, or taking my course on heart-centered productivity, RESET.
Website: jkg.co
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