Mojo Jojo Lobo Morrison was a very good boy.
65 pounds of energy and devotion…and fear.
I grew up with dogs. A black lab named Bala and a lhasa poo named Jade. We adopted both dogs from family friends. They weren’t perfectly behaved. Bala, for one, would eat anything—including my dad’s pager and a metal spoon. But they got along fine with humans and other dogs.
Mojo was a first in many ways.
My first dog adopted from a shelter instead of from people I knew.
Our first dog as a couple.
My first dog with behavioral issues.
They told us Mojo was reactive to other dogs when we first met him.
”He’s afraid of other dogs,” they told us.
”Will it get better? Will he ever be able to play with other dogs?” we asked.
”Maybe one day,” they said.
There was hope. We brought him home a few days later and gave him a toy that he promptly repurposed into an indoor snow globe.
I snapped a picture of the mess and posted it on Instagram.
Our first lesson: Mojo needed more durable toys.
There was more to learn. We brought Mojo to a six-week class for reactive dogs.
We learned how to read his cues, eyeing his lips, ears, and tail for signs of anxiety. Mojo learned to look to us when he got nervous, and there’d be a treat in it for him.
They taught us doggy massage techniques to counteract the cortisol that pumped through his system each time he so much as heard a dog walking outside of our window.
”His world might need to be a little smaller than a normal dog’s,” they offered. “But he can still live a fantastic life.”
So we did what we could to make Mojo’s world feel smaller and safer. We shut the blinds and played white noise. We played tug so much that, the next day, our core felt like we’d gone to a Pilates class. He wiggled his way into our queen-sized bed, and we let him stay, somehow delighted to have our space invaded.
I documented and shared the sweetest moments. The way he cuddled close to Matt in his mornings. How we ran to the door to great us. His head resting on my lap in a moment of post-zoomies replenishment.
But even the inside wasn’t perfectly safe. Mojo raced to the front door whenever the neighbors took their dog for a walk. He lost his shit when a dog barked outside. I wished he spoke English in those moments.
”They can’t reach you in here,” I wanted to tell him.
The outside was not safe. You don’t realize how many dogs live in your neighborhood until you have a dog who doesn’t do well with other dogs. Walking him through our neighborhood was like a game of Minesweeper where every square was a bomb.
It was too much for our Mojo. His anxiety grew. We couldn’t make a world small enough for him.
I didn’t realize how much anxiety I’d built until after we re-homed Mojo. For weeks, I had a sense of dread as I walked up to our building. My body thought coming home meant there was an imminent, mine-filled walk with Mojo.
Then the unexpected happened. My then boss needed to re-home his dog, and we said hello to Blue not long after we said goodbye to Mojo.
A new anxiety rippled from my reptile brain into my knotted stomach. I’d shared Mojo on Instagram, even made him an Instagram of his own like a true millennial dog mom.
How was I supposed to a) explain the fact that we no longer had Mojo and b) introduce Blue? Would people think I was an animal hater who saw dogs as disposable?
I found myself at the paper thin veil between my public and private life. The exposure tenderized my insides. I’d shared this piece of myself and now I felt obligated to share the emotional details of our interspecies heartbreak.
You might think I’d shrink in this moment. I did pull back a little, got more deliberate about what parts of my life I revealed. But only because I wanted a big life, one of public figuredom as an entrepreneur or a thought leader—or something. A small contraction to prepare for expansion.
Expansion happened, but it wasn’t what I expected. I publicly launched Inner Workout, a self-care company, in September 2019. Seven months later, we all searched for self-care in our lives and on Google.
Everyone wanted to talk about self-care with the pandemic, and, all of the sudden, I was contributing to the conversation on IG lives and podcasts.
My world got bigger.
When police murdered George Floyd a few months after the pandemic’s arrival, people suddenly cared more about my perspective as a Black woman.
My follower count grew as people included me in roundups and reached out to collaborate. Opportunities abounded. But in parallel, my sense of obligation to divulge, to opine, to perform grew.
Was this the big life? Opening up my life and opinions to as many people who would look?
I played the game, pitching myself and my business.
But, as the years passed, I no longer appreciated how the exposure felt. The wet wool heaviness of feeling that I had to speak up, even if I wasn’t emotionally ready or informed. The flitting question, “Are they offering me this invitation or following me because they care what I have to say? Or are my identities all they care about?”
It was all too much for me. My anxiety and self-seriousness grew. If this was the path to a big life, I didn’t want it.
Maybe Mojo wasn’t the only creature who needed a smaller world to feel safe.
I shrank my world so the world couldn’t shrink me.
The shrinking started slowly, expedited every time I released an obligation to grow my social media following or post more content or follow some other marketing trend.
To my surprise, there weren’t as many consequences as I feared.
I could move at my dichotomous pace, either far faster or slower than the average.
I could be more private, sharing what I wanted, when I wanted, and only in the spaces I chose. Sometimes that looked like writing a LinkedIn post, knowing full well that others view the platform as the height of corporate cringe. Sometimes that looked like texting a friend who knew more about a political issue than I did. And often, that meant keeping the sweetest bits of my experience offline.
I could stop making everything a forever commitment, with the belief that I needed to do anything—run a business, write a newsletter, continue a series—ad infinitum or else I failed.
All this, and my portfolio career still made me money. Opportunities continued to flow my way. The people who wanted to stay close did.
I discovered what made me feel secure. Having time and space to get my fill of research before processing my thoughts. Long walks in nature. Sharing rooted in the written word. Multiple streams of income and portals for creativity.
My world shrank, and I expanded.
