VOL. 1  ·  SATURDAY EDITION

I Build This Every Day.

On purpose, strength, the hard days, the resources that keep me upright, and a mission I didn’t choose so much as discover I’d been living all along.

The Long Pour, Vol. 1  ·  Companion to this week’s Nicole’s Notes podcast

If you haven’t listened to this week’s three-part podcast arc — God, Guts & the Physics of Survival — this essay will still make sense. But it will hit differently if you have.

I want to tell you something I have never said cleanly in one place. Not in a speech, not in a podcast, not even in my journal, which has heard most of the ugly drafts. I want to tell you where my purpose comes from. How I actually build strength on the days it feels like there is none left. What I reach for when I am losing. And why, after fifty-three years of this particular life, I still get up every morning convinced that showing up is worth it.

Not because someone told me it would be. Because I decided it would be. There is a difference, and that difference is everything.

How I Make My Purpose

Nobody handed me a purpose. I want to be direct about that. There was no divine assignment, no clear calling, no morning I woke up and knew. Purpose, for me, has always been something I built the way you build a fire in bad weather, slowly, with whatever is at hand, shielding the flame from the wind with your own body if you have to.

For a long time, my purpose was to survive. That sounds dramatic until you understand that surviving with cystic fibrosis is a full-time job. Actually, it is more than a full-time job. It is 24/7. I am constantly shifting my day to manage symptoms and unexpected challenges. Diabetes was added to my plate in 2014, a ‘side effect’ of CF. So, not only am I managing my weight (I need 4,000 calories a day just to subsist), but now I have to manage my sugar levels. The 2 of them are diametrically opposite. I need the calories, but I can’t just scarf down a donut. I have to factor in my workouts as well. It is actually a live game of Tetris for me, going hour to hour. I have Airway clearance twice a day. Enzymes with every meal. A fitness routine that is not optional and never has been. I inject, ingest, or inhale over 18 different types of medicine. My pantry looks like the back shelf at a pharmacy. Let’s be honest, the discipline it takes to maintain a body that is actively trying to undermine you, that is a purpose of its own kind. Unglamorous. Non-negotiable. Mine.

But somewhere in the years of doing that work, a second purpose quietly assembled itself. I kept noticing that the things I did to survive — the refusal to accept limitations, the willingness to be publicly imperfect, the choice to fight loudly rather than suffer quietly- were landing differently on the people around me. People kept telling me I changed how they thought about what was possible. I did not set out to do that. I set out to breathe. But the breathing, done fiercely enough and publicly enough, became something else.

“Purpose isn’t something you find. It’s something you keep choosing, every day, in the specific direction of what matters most to you.”

My purpose now is layered. It is to use the platform I have built to help people think more clearly, live more fiercely, and refuse to settle. It is to make people feel seen — specifically, to reflect back to them how extraordinary they already are, because most people are walking around with no idea. It is to leave every room, every conversation, every piece of writing slightly better than I found it.

That last one is the manifesto of my entire life. Leave it better than you got it. I will come back to that.

Where I Get My Strength

I am going to answer this honestly, which means some of the answers will surprise you.

I get strength from my body. Not despite its limitations — because of them. Every morning that I do my airway clearance, every workout I show up for when I would rather stay horizontal, every time I take my medication without resentment and without drama — I am making a choice. I am choosing my life. That act of choosing, repeated daily for decades, builds something. I do not have a better word for it than character. It is the accumulated weight of all the times you could have quit and didn’t.

I get strength from my family and friends, who have tirelessly held up my walls when they were about to crash to the ground, Winston George, who is seventeen pounds of emotional support in a dog-shaped package and who has never once asked me to be anything other than exactly who I am. Something is clarifying about the unconditional regard of a creature who has no agenda.

I get strength from my own history. This is underrated as a source of fuel. When things are hard now, I have an extensive archive of hard things I survived. The Summit Foundation. Selling Chinook CrossFit. Completing the CrossFit Open with lungs at a fraction of their capacity and placing near last over five weeks, and doing it again the next year anyway. Volunteering and mentoring for all causes that I hold dear. Finishing three degrees. None of those things felt possible before I did them. All of them are evidence. I have learned to treat my own past as proof.

“I treat my own past as proof. Every hard thing I survived is evidence for the next hard thing. The archive is the argument.”

I get strength from the work itself. Writing this. Recording the podcast. Doing the research. Building the platform. There is a specific kind of energy that comes from making something that did not exist before you made it. It is not the same as happiness. It is better than happiness. It is aliveness.

What I Do When I Feel Like I’m Losing

I want to tell you the truth about this because the polished version is useless to you. The truth is: some days I feel like I am losing badly.

Not losing to CF specifically, though that happens too. Losing to the weight of the work. Losing to self-doubt that shows up in the small hours and is very convincing at 1 am. Losing to the particular loneliness of being someone who has always had to figure out how to be themselves in a world that did not have a template for it. Not having a partner who could share the load makes things even more disastrous at times.

Here is what I do. First, I do not pretend that it is not happening. I have found that the fastest way to extend a bad day is to perform okayness over the top of it. I feel what is happening. I name it, at least to myself. This is hard. I literally talk to myself. While I was struggling with my weight, I would tell myself, “Get your ass over to the kitchen and get those high-protein nuts, you actually love, and eat 10 of them, now DAMN IT!” Me and myself get into a full blown argument quite a bit. For those of you who know what a hot head I can be, you could imagine what it would look like to peer into my kitchen and watch this fight in real time. I am struggling right now. That naming does something. It makes the thing smaller. Not small. Smaller.

Second, I go back to the physical. Always. My body knows things my brain forgets. I do my airway clearance. I move. Even on the days that feel impossible, especially on those days, I get up, and I move through the routine. The routine does not care how I feel about it. It just works. That reliability is its own form of comfort. I look at the workout and tell myself, just do one round at the very least or one set of dumbbell rows. Just one.

Third, I look for the one next thing. Not the whole picture. Not the plan. The one next thing I can do. Write one paragraph. Make one phone call. Take one walk. The one next thing is always manageable. And once you have done it, there is another one next thing. You can get surprisingly far this way. I also break down. I put on the saddest music I can find and let myself crumple to the floor and cry. I feel sorry for myself. I feel victimized by this disease, and I pity myself. I don’t stay here long; that is a very bad idea. I get up, wipe the mascara that is running down my face, put my hair up into the crazy pineapple, you see women do, when they’ve had enough, and it’s time to kick some ass. I might add a shot of tequila just to get the party started. I talk about this one time when I was trying to vacuum my house and my oxygen and the central vac decided to start doing the Samba together. I trip and fall onto the bottom stair and just yell “Fuuuccckkkk” as loud as I can and start bawling. At that very moment, I have this very brief flicker of “I am so done with this life”.

“The fastest way to extend a bad day is to perform okayness over the top of it. I name what is happening. That naming makes the thing smaller. Not small. Smaller.”

The Resources That Keep Me Upright (other than family and friends, OF course)

I am going to give you the real list. Not the aspirational list. The actual things that keep me functional when the wheels are threatening to come off.

Trikafta. I will never stop leading with this because it changed my life in a way nothing else has. The ability to breathe clearly, to wake up without drowning, to move through a day without my lungs being the loudest thing in the room — that is the foundation everything else is built on. Medicine is a resource. Taking it seriously and without shame is a practice.

My journal. Six-plus years of daily writing. It is the place I think out loud, where I draft the hard conversations, where I catch myself lying to myself and work out why. If you do not have a journal practice and you are navigating anything complex, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. You do not write in a journal because you have things figured out. You write in a journal to figure them out. I also recommend actually handwriting this. Typing your thoughts out feels wrong. (As I do that here😂)

Movement. Specifically, heavy things and hard effort. I have been a CrossFit athlete. I know what it is to push a body past what seemed possible. Physical effort is one of the few things that reliably interrupts the loop of anxious or defeated thinking. Your nervous system does not know the difference between a crisis and a hard workout. You can trick it into burning off the crisis chemicals with the workout ones.

Books, specifically the ones that refuse to make it easy. Philosophy, psychology, history, and political theory. I read to be challenged, not comforted. The comfortable books are fine, but they do not change how I think. The ones that argue with me do. I also have notebooks full of random information. I wanted to learn about the difference between the terrorist groups in the middle east and what they were fighting for or defending. So I grabbed one of my textbooks and the internet and drafted a 4-page summary of the history of some of these groups. I have also really leaned into Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He is best known for his archetypes and individuation. I am doing a lot of companion work in this area after reading a couple of his books. If we can integrate our subconscious with our conscious, it is then that we are fully discovered. It is then that we are truly our authentic selves. In fact, this topic will be my Long Pour Blog for next Saturday. You will be shocked by how applicable his thinking is to right now.

And finally: a Coke on the rocks in a wine glass. Which is not a resource in the therapeutic sense, but is absolutely a resource in the ritual sense. The glass is the signal: this is your time. Think. Sit with it. You are allowed to just be here.

When I Feel Proud. And Why Any of This Matters.

I feel proud when someone tells me I changed how they think about what they are capable of. Not the big public moments, though those land too, but the quiet ones. The message from a woman in her forties who listened to the podcast at 5 am before her kids woke up because she needed something that wasn’t going to talk down to her (true story). The person with a chronic illness who felt, for the first time, seen rather than pitied. My best friend texted me to say, ‘Thank you for writing what you wrote, it really resonated with me.’

I feel proud when I finish something hard. Not because I did it perfectly — I rarely do — but because I did it honestly. The amount of knowledge and skill that I have acquired over the last 2 years at university might outweigh all that I had acquired up to that point. I have shocked myself on what I can do now. If you need any design work, HMU. I’ll do it for a case of coke and 3 Big Turk chocolate bars. 😁 The podcast episodes this week were hard to record. Saying out loud that I no longer believe in God is not a small thing. I recorded them anyway. That is the pride I am most interested in: the kind that comes from doing the thing you were afraid to do.

“The pride I am most interested in is the kind that comes from doing the thing you were afraid to do. Not the applause after. The moment you decide to do it anyway.”

Here is the mission, stated as plainly as I know how to state it:

Leave it better than you got it.

Every room. Every conversation. Every relationship. Every piece of writing. Every platform I build. The city I live in, the communities I have been part of, and the people who have sat across from me in the hard conversations. I want every one of them to be in a better place after the encounter than before it.

And connected to that: I want people to know how remarkable they are. This is not sentimentality. I have watched enough people move through the world in a state of profound underestimation of themselves, smart people, brave people, people doing extraordinary things and apologizing for the space they take up while they do it. This drives me batshit crazy. That is a waste. I have no patience for it.

When I am at my best, I am a mirror. I reflect back what I actually see, not the performance, not the polished version, but the actual human in front of me, who is almost always more interesting and more capable than they believe. If that is all I ever do, if every podcast episode and every essay and every conversation leaves one more person slightly more convinced of their own value, then I will have done exactly what I came here to do.

Not because God assigned it to me.

Because I chose it. Every day. On purpose.

This week’s podcast — God, Guts & the Physics of Survival — is the audio companion to this essay. Three episodes. About thirty minutes total. Start with Episode 1: The Wrong Question.

I’m Nicki Zeller. This is The Long Pour.  Stay fierce — the world will adjust.