Third trimester update 🤰🏻

On building towards the unknown, or how I am teaching myself, this season, to trust that the process of taking things one mindful step at the time will eventually lead to the right destination.

Hello!

And holy cow the time has flown. There’s only a month and a bit left before the arrival of our baby girl. So for the past two months I’ve been working on things that land in one of three categories:

1. they need to be done before the birth, or

2. they prepare us for life after the birth, or

3. they prepare us for the birth event itself.

However, above all that, my most important item every day for the past 8 months has been to allow myself to just be pregnant, to watch my body create new life, and to take in and savour the experience fully.

From a neurodivergent/PKM nerd to you, would you like to hear my compressed reflections on pregnancy so far, followed by what I’ve learned after starting work on a project I thought I wasn’t ready for? Then read on:

Pregnancy: turning on notifications from my body; a cheat code for mindfulness

TL;DR: Pregnancy took me by surprise and I’m enjoying the whole experience much more than I thought I would.

I still remember a time not too long ago where the idea of being pregnant still scared me a lot. Thinking back to this version of me as I progress through the third trimester, I need to remind myself how much I’ve grown (literally, figuratively) since then. For one, I wish I could write a letter to my past self, letting her know that pregnancy has been pretty good to me so far and it has been far from the suffering I imagined in my head. (The huge caveat is that every pregnancy is different, but still, being pregnant has not been nearly as bad as I imagined it to be. Although, there’s still the actual birthing event to go through… 😬)

Prior to pregnancy and surgery I’ve tended to live almost exclusively in my head. I easily overrode my body’s signals, causing dysregulation in my sleep, bowel movements, energy… you name it. A lot of this, I would later learn, was caused by coping mechanisms for my neurodivergent traits. What pregnancy has restored, for me at least, is a direct connection to my body:

• I now respect my hunger pangs like an emergency call. I will drop everything or get up from bed in the middle of the night to feed a hunger that oftentimes doesn’t feel like my own because I know there are consequences.

• Any rapid or extreme movement is punished with round ligament pain or cramps respectively, so I now trained myself to ground every movement with (what I imagine in my head as) Tai Chi-like intention. No quick turns, over-extensions or explosive acceleration/tensing.

• Water retention and swollenness is real, especially in the last trimester. I feel like Michelin-man. Being in any one position for too long, especially if a part of me is folded, limits blood flow and feels uncomfortable after a pomodoro or two. This means I have to get up, change position, move around, or just do something different to snap out of the discomfort.

Pregnancy has been like turning on the sound and notifications for my body’s operating system, giving my body (and baby) a direct line into my mind.

ChatGPT’s interpretation of what turning on body notifications when pregnant looks like.

Recently, good friend

Christin Chong, PhD

made a video on what most people get wrong about mindfulness. I thought it was about a different way of being in the mind. It’s actually so much more than that. It is an invitation to not just be aware inside your mind, but to zoom out and be aware of your mind, and your body, and your context, and the present moment, and... During this season in my life, being pregnant has been a cheat code for practicing this definition of mindfulness. I feel like every waking (and sleeping) second is infused with an integrated presence:

• Tracking progress along the pregnancy timeline makes me truly feel the passing of time.

• Learning about how labour and birth taps into nature according to methods like hypnobirthing (another poorly-named thing, lots of luggage, argh) are an important reminder of the indisputable connection between mind-body-context.

• Noticing how my centre of gravity is different with a pregnant body is so grounding.

• Noticing the biological ebbs and flows of energy, hunger, thirst and so on take priority makes me feel so tapped into what’s basic and primal about life.

All of this is so refreshing to the hyper-cerebral part of me, and I love how it’s exposing me to a different way of being and sensing in the world.

In parallel, being pregnant has given me an opportunity to hyperfocus on pregnancy-related topics and there is SO MUCH content to consume, my brain has been having the time of its life learning about this too. Usually when I find myself in beginner-mode and learning/experiencing something new, I feel my mind viscerally swing wide open like how Germans (and Norwegians too) love to open windows wide to “air” out their homes… Out with that stagnant and in with the fresh novel air 🍃 it’s an addictive sensation for ADHD brains like mine.

That said, it wouldn’t be ADHD if I didn’t try to cram at least one other novelty project in to help air out my brain even more (in addition to being pregnant 😅):

My Act Two: digital gardening

TL;DR: This project has been a practice on listening to my inner voice, teaching me about how my brain wants to construct ideas and make sense of the world.

I’ve been working on a very personal project which has also been like opening the doors and windows into the stuffy place that is my brain: namely, building a digital garden for myself.

It has been a vision in the back of my head to create something like this for myself for years, and now that I no longer am engaged in a full-time job with a bit more time to myself before the birth of our daughter it was more realistic than ever to give it a shot. So to kickstart it, I decided to get serious about it as part of joining the first cohort ever of the 5-week program called Act Two.

Act Two is run by

Will Mannon

and

Dan Sleeman

, the same folks who ran the now decommissioned online writing course Write of Passage, which is how my writing on the internet got kickstarted way back in 2021. The structure is similar but this time it’s not just for writing, it’s for any type of project where you’re looking for a community with various types of accountability and support to get going.

I’m using a tiny plot on the internet to build/experiment on, which you can view here: Fei’s Garden. For the technical on how I’m building this, look at this and this.

ChatGPT’s interpretation of what the entrance to a secret digital garden might look like.

There are some definitions on what a digital garden is by folks like Maggie Appleton, but similar to how my Dutch professors back in undergrad would challenge us, I wanted to do the work to discover what a digital garden means to me, as I think it evokes something more rich and alive than some of the existing examples and definitions out there.

As I’ve struggled to find definitions that worked with my vision, I’ve been more successful finding authors and creators in general whose work exude the qualities that I’m looking for. Old favourites show up here, such as Maria Popova, Christopher Alexander, Chris Ware… as well as other more contemporary sources of inspiration.

Another way I have described the project to others: it’s like designing the medium for my message. In a world where our public self-expression is often shaped according to a format dictated by others (X, Substack, IG etc.), I wanted to see if there was an entirely different way to express myself that was more true to me, what I want to say, and how my brain works.

What this means is that there is no template, no clear end destination, and no existing precedent for this project. It’s entirely driven by what feels good and right to me and my brain. The wild thing is that I still feel so shy around it. It’s like having acres and acres of land to play with, but yet I stick to the edges only. I am noticing this and realize that this is exactly why I need to do this project: to give myself the space and safety to take up space... To practice asserting myself within the safe zone of a static website, in the hopes that slowly, the true and real me will emerge.

After working on my garden for only 5 weeks, writing this newsletter has made me realize how much my writing habits have changed since starting work on the digital garden. The writing coming out of me is much more wild. I’m finding that the Substack format is restrictive and unaccommodating to how my ideas want to take shape on the digital canvas. So I think it’s working!

What’s been beyond helpful for a fragile project like this is the community and structure that Act Two provided during the past five weeks. It’s very similar to the magic “sourdough starter” of what Write of Passage provided me back in 2021 that put my life on a totally different (but more internally aligned) trajectory. It’s a trajectory that only writing on the internet could have allowed into my life.

Beside Act Two’s 5-week sprints that will happen twice a year, Will and Dan are cooking up something called Citizens of the Internet, a 24/7/365 community for anyone who is looking for support from likeminded people to start/finish/continue a project. Interested in joining? Right now it’s invite only plus a waitlist, but if you think you’re the right fit for this and want in, send me a DM and I’ll see what I can do!

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Other things I’ve been doing:

• Enjoying the absolutely gorgeous summer and fall we’ve had in Toronto 🍁

• Hanging out with old and new friends before the baby comes ☕️

• Purging and reorganizing the home 📚

• Learning mahjong 🀄️

Where do you find yourself in the latter half of 2025? Are you confidently accelerating towards the end of the year, or taking a step back and slowing down? What fruits of labour, insights and realizations are you harvesting this fall? I’d love to hear about it.

Cheers,

Fei