Novaturient

A friend posted this on  Facebook recently, and "tagged" me in it.

Why, yes. That's me. I'm going to not concern myself too much about this word not being found in dictionary.com and accept this not only as a description, but a compliment.

It's probably no secret that I'm feeling a bit shocked to not yet be in the next job on my career track. I've gone through a variety of emotions about this from angry about my title and paycheck disappearing to grateful to be released from a job and set of expectations that was weighing me down to optimistic about new work possibilities to pessimistic about new jobs back to angry about the vagaries of unemployment and optimistic about applications to pessimistic about how "the system" (doesn't) work and all the way back to grateful again.

This trip I'm on is a funny ride. It seems to drag out much longer than the tickets I exchanged to get myself a seat on this roller-coaster would normally give me time for. It seems somehow as though I've been around the roller-coaster track more times than I thought I was signing up for. But at the same time, I blinked and it was September. I put in one breath at a time and before I noticed, I was one week away from the fourth quarter.

Roller-coasters being what they are, parts of this ride have been exhilarating and thrilling and even fun while other parts have been harrowing and crazy-making. But like the roller coasters I rode at Busch Gardens last fall, I'm never sorry afterwords. I get that not everyone is an adrenaline junkie, but I kinda am. I used to spar BIG men who were faster, taller, and stronger than me because the rush of getting a strike in was . . . well, a rush. I used to cliff dive. I fully intend to jump out of a plane someday and I love me some roller coasters. (It didn't hurt that I was riding with a stone-cold awesome pre-teen who also loves him some coasters and was stoked to share the experience with me.)

In part I love them because my dad trained me up early to love them. My mom suffers from serious motion sickness and my dad really wanted me to be able to get on rides with him so he started early by putting me on rides that spin and go up and down as soon as carnivals would allow it. But mostly I like these rides because the experience is thrilling and often thrilling+unnerving AND it never fails to make things look and feel different afterwords. Things we take for granted like walking and balance are suddenly not to be trifled with, my senses are sharpened and colors are brighter. I like the quick "boot to the head" perspective change.

This metaphorical ride shares characteristics with real roller coasters. I feel things differently. It causes me not to take things that seem "basic" for granted. I am forced to evaluate things in a different light and . . . while it's scary to step outside the bounds of how I always thought things should be, it's not all bad. For one, as I recently reported to a friend I had not been in as frequent touch with as I'd like to be, "This is scary and hard, but strangely, still happier than I was in my job at this time last year. "

The other thing that is not just "not all bad" but actually GOOD is that I am very, very awake and aware that I'm not just hoping/wishing for things to be better, but seeking change actively. It's not that I was completely unaware of this before . . . I mean, let's be clear. I knew I was unhappy and that things in my world had reached a dangerously, precariously, out of balance place in my personal sphere when I started this blog. But, I had no idea what to do about it. I had no perspective on the whole picture and so I could see good days and bad days, days where I wanted to live inside a box of cheezits and days where salad and chicken seemed reasonable and even preferable, and individual unhappinesses with work or family or myself or relationships. But all my senses were dulled by accepting less, expecting too much from myself, and not seeing the whole scene. Sometimes it takes things getting turned upside-down in order to see the whole picture. This is the use of roller-coasters.

And breakdowns. For some people this is the reason for drugs and mind-altering experiences. And for others jumping out of planes does it. But every once in awhile we need to remember that there's more than one way to look at things. Every once in awhile we need to have the snow-globe we're trapped in turned over so we can see THAT view and notice the things that seem commonplace otherwise completely anew.

Brene Brown jokes about her breakdown/spiritual awakening and how it rocked the foundations of her internal assumptions (roughly 11:20 in this video if you're interested). The joke isn't that she saw things more clearly and made changes to the way she walked through the world, and the impossible track and pace she had set herself to. The joke is that without what felt like a complete earthquake to her, she couldn't have had that epiphany and awakening.

I know the feeling.

My therapist and I have discussed that I was never going to pull the trigger. I had just enough in the tank to turn a vague "break" (one of many I will add) into a break-up but it took enormous piles of data showing me that that person was irrevocably locked into a cycle of denial and dishonesty with me. And I was left so miserably exhausted by the process that not only did I not have it in me to leave my job (even when the piles of evidence that the job had grown  unhealthy for me were so big as to nearly block out all other views), I had halted what (at that point) had been a year long job search because I just didn't have it in me. I was in line to board, but I was never going to get on this particular roller coaster on my own. I needed a solid shove to the center of my back.

This is why my therapist wanted to congratulate me on the day I lost my job. I get it now just as surely as I wanted to smack him in the face for saying it at the time. You know that "aha" moment you might remember having when everything came together as you completed a long algebra problem? I have this  in terms of LIFE on a near daily basis now.

Without a powerful force working to jolt and shake me out of the routine of being ok with things being less than ok pretty much all of the time I never would have calculated up the numbers this way and seen how sub-par had become so normal for me that I felt helpless to do anything but numb it. And as Brene says (and others, to be sure) in her TED talk about vulnerability that one cannot "selectively numb emotion." (15:30)  You can't say I don't want to feel X without numbing the more comfortable emotions. As she predicts, I numbed everything, and that meant I couldn't feel my pain fully but this also meant I couldn't feel my joy. Without joy, I couldn't reliably steer towards anything better. But without my pain, I couldn't be informed about what was truly wrong and wounded and needed to be tended to.

As Pema Chodron says, prophetically I think:

"In life, we think the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem. The real truth is that things don't get solved. they come together for a time, then they fall back apart. Then they come together again and they fall apart again. It's just like that.

Personal discovery and growth come from letting there be room for all of this to happen; room for grief, for misery, relief, for joy.
....

Let the hard things in life break you. Let them effect you. Let them change you. Let these moments inform you. Let this pain be your teacher. The experiences of your life are trying to tell you something about yourself. Don't cop out on yourself. Don't run away and hide under the covers. Lean into it. "

- When things fall apart: Heartfelt Advice for Hard Times

It's hilarious to me (in a head-smacking-palm way) that THREE DIFFERENT PEOPLE recommended this book to me starting from last October . . . a month which we are now a week away from again. This is to say, a year ago, it was apparent that I was in trouble and needed some strategies and that was when I was with-paycheck as opposed to now, sans-paycheck.Wow, Christie. That was time well spent avoiding the truth, avoiding things that would help me. Siiiiggghhhh. (shakes head)

This is my ("fricken" 8:00) breakdown/spiritual awakening. Of course, as Brene calls us to admit . . . it may not be possible to have one without the other. I have to be angry. I have to be sad. I have to have the long, hard, two days I had last week where I panicked, cried, felt crushed by the weight of "what if" and then, ultimately, my face and head a mess, looked at my person and said, "I can't be tough about this all the time." And a few days hence followed that with the difficult question, "Can you please tell me something I'm doing right - I feel like I am utterly sucking at everything right now."

I have to remember the other parts of Brene Brown wisdom about vulnerability and shame (6:00 or thereabouts). "Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change." She also says, prophetically I hope, "Vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage. "

When I am feeling . . . untethered and scared and dark and pessimistic, there are a few things I can point back to and know I am still better off on those days than I was on days I felt sure and grounded and had a plan I thought I could/should count on. For one, even when I'm feeling pain, I am feeling. For another, the realization that plans aren't always where it is at shakes the foundations of my life. But I think those foundations were pretty cracked and worn from all the weight of the plans I had piled on and on and on. I am still working on separating out could from should, and that is a dark rabbit hole for me to travel through. My whole life has been about what I SHOULD do. When my therapist said, "You have the kind of personality and ability where you could do things that change the world. But you never will UNLESS you make a complete break away from how you've done things in the past, the judgement, and the constant weight of expectation," I cried not from sadness but from recognition of truth staring me down.

Finally, pessimism is an interesting marker of hope. As a very wise friend said to me about my religious musings, "you can't be angry at a God you don't believe in." True story. I'd add to this that one can't be pessimistic about things they don't harbor some hope for. Another way to say this is that even when I'm feeling rooted in anxiety about this not turning out well, it means that somewhere I have some thought that i could turn out as a full bowl of awesomesauce.

Seeking powerful change can't come without fear, and that fear can't be navigated without vulnerability. This is a profoundly opening experience. I feel raw and skinless on a regular basis. (As I relayed to one of this year's bestest gifts, my new friend, the other day, this is not always helped by the fact that I am trying to learn three brand-new things all at once right now.) I make harder and harder decisions each week and am scared each and every time that I am on the precipice of the next choice that I will make the wrong one. But once the roller coaster turns on the track, I don't much find myself looking back. (Perhaps this is the gift of roller coasters - the velocity is so  great that it physiologically prevents us from looking backwards.) This means, I think, that despite all my vulnerability and dark and twisty moments, I am more confident about my core worthiness, my ability to build a life of meaning, and what may come than I was when I was working.

I have learned not just about leaning into pain and being it's student, but also that vulnerable moments are my best opportunities to be honest and brave. I have considerably more courage than I had ever plumbed the depths of. It's one thing to ride a roller coaster, and another to do it with your eyes open. But there is someone else very literally driving that train. So, getting on a bike that has to be powered by me (and perhaps more notably, balanced by me. Eeeeeeee!) is far scarier. The thing about doing scary things is that they leave you exposed. But it's that feeling, it's the "here I go, sparring someone much better than me" or singing on stage (alone!) that are most thrilling. I am most inspired and feel so much via those experiences that are most intimidating because taking charge of them, moving through them, leaning into them, reveals the me under-my-skin that is more powerful, authentic, and lovable  than I could see with my armor-skin on. "Do it anyway" has become a bit of a motto for me. "Risk it anyway," is the only way I can navigate this.

I say this by way of apology to my readers (who are also mostly all my personal friends. Nice how I can kill two birds with one stone, eh?) because my breakdown/spiritual awakening certainly wreaks occasional havoc on my writing. At the moment that I'm most dark and twisty, the tears and swollen eyes and second guessing don't lend themselves much to writing . . . hence the pause in the blog the last couple of weeks. And I can't promise a steady pace moving forward. I can't say what will happen next, or how I'll feel about all of this tomorrow. And I know that for every dose of wisdom and positivity I feel, there's probably enough negativity and difficulty and dark and twisty to seep in here anyways.

What I can tell you is that I am changed by these 9 months, and even on bad days, I know I am changed in good ways. I can tell you that reading Brene Brown's book, The gifts of Imperfection, speaks powerfully to me because perfect is so damaging in my life when joined by it's evil twin judgement (and it is ALWAYS joined by the evil twin. They are conjoined, for sure). I can tell you I should have listened to advice sooner to read Pema Chodron and I know that this won't be "solved" but simply change, and then change again. I need to be able to roll with that and so this ride is teaching me not to focus on much more than today (whenever possible. Ahem. Ok, let's be clear: I am still a planner. I still have a color coded calendar. Three, really. It's a process, ok?).

I know that I have to feel this much, and it has to be this alarmingly, gapingly open and vulnerable in order for me to really change. And I know I want the creativity, the innovation and the change. Novaturient, yes. Powerful change, progress towards a better me, regardless of jobs and title and paycheck, I HOPE.

Failure is not an option

As it turns out, my friends are a very accomplished bunch. Lots of Master's degrees, PH.Ds, fancy post docs, and important jobs that actually make people's lives better. As a result of aiming high, it means that there is a lot of success, but also a lot of experience with falling off the proverbial horse and fighting back.

As my Sensei used to say, increasing success means increasing failures. In theory, the idea is that by increasing the number of attempts you make, you may have more failures, but you will also make enough attempts (and learn from the failures) such that you achieve success faster. In reality, it means having the resolve, the resiliency, and the relentlessness to keep getting up each and every time you fall. And it means having a deep confidence and unshakable faith that getting up each time matters and will cumulatively get you that much closer to your objective.

I've been thinking this a lot as I've seen the stars align or not for me, and for my friends over the last few weeks. One of my beloved friend's succes and a new option might mean a drastic change for another friend in how he looks at his future employment options. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, another dear friend has worked his everything off to jump through hoops and get all the appropriate initials after his name, to find an environment that not only matches his qualifications and interests, but that allowed him to positively impact others only to give them 2 years and not be invited to keep infecting others with his passion next fall. I have as many friends in academia who have jobs as those who don't, at this point, and let's be clear - these are not just very well trained individuals in their fields, but also some of the smartest people I know in real life.

Of course, I thought I was leaving that game when I Mastered out of my Ph.D. program. And now I lie on my couch and marvel at how people with degrees from MIT and people who have Ph.Ds from top 10 programs in their field are asked to take more time to do post-docs (read: supervised research paid at a very low rate in some OTHER ostensibly "more established" Ph.D's lab) and postpone their career . . . you know, after passing every exam known to man, defending papers and proposals orally, living on pittances for 5-7 years, and achieving graduation from the 23rd grade. Yes, absolutely, more training and waiting to dive in is what makes sense, no? And how can these people not being able to find good employment that aligns with their passions be in common with me?

When I left grad school, it followed what I can only describe as prolonged trauma that made it impossible for me to continue the research I had entered my studies aimed at. That trauma was what caused me to pack the personal items I had in that lab and on my desk and become a nomadic grad in one of the rotating "TA" offices for the year. I spent a semester looking for a new lab and advisor, but politics and circumstance prevented that avenue of soldiering forward as well. So . . . I made plans to exit.

Sounds simple, and logical, right? It was anything but. It was everything but. There were a lot of exit interviews and job hunting, but mostly there were two tapes I had to keep playing in my head and two I had to try and drown out. The two loops I had to try and eliminate from my internal sound-system were, "You're a quitter," and "You will regret not sticking it out." The two tapes I tried to queue up over the top of these were, "You're stopping something that is harmful. You are preventing what amounts to abuse. It's not the same as quitting. Not the same AT ALL." And, equally important," you WILL get a job and figure out what happens next."

I got a job out of sheer will and luck and persistence and putting the time into job hunting over and over and over. But I had to play these tapes in my head diligently every day in order to keep moving forward as options I pursued winked out one by one, moving to different labs, moving to different programs at different universities, jobs I wanted and didn't get. Otherwise, it would have been very easy to feel defeated, which would have been the worst response and would have prevented me from seeing the new opportunities popping up. So, I kept moving forward, choosing to feign faith in the results I had no idea if I would garner.

Failure wasn't an option, and so I made it work that way. I had a six month deadline to get a full time job or else commit myself to summer jobs that it would then be very hard to back out of. And I got a full time job about 2 weeks before I had to set all of that in motion. I "made it so", in Picardian fashion. It wouldn't have been terrible to run 4 weeks of Karate camp and have taught for 6 weeks but it would have meant remaining engaged with the university I needed badly to leave, at least for half of that work, and perhaps worse, I would have had 10 weeks where it would have been very hard to extract myself for interviews or to start better jobs with futures beyond Labor Day. I posted a note in my kitchen saying "Failure is not an option," and adhered to this. This was a throw back to the one or two all nighters I would pull every year in college trying to complete final calculus assignments, take home logic finals, and papers after having worked until midnight or so. (The busiest times for Hampshire's version of RAs to pull off programs and events, do peer level counseling and meetings, and actually work with students during house office hours were . . . go figure, the end of the semester. And of course, this was also when we were hiring staff for the next semester so, what was a 15-20 hour a week job always became a 30-40 hour a week job during the last 3 weeks of the term. at least some all-nighters became expected for me as a matter of reality, not bad planning.) I used to hang this sign off of the nearest book shelf, facing me, as I feverishly revised papers. And it worked.

So, why hasn't it worked for my friends? They too need jobs and not to need to take steps backwards. Bills to pay, households, marriages, and responsibilities to tend to. They need to not do stupid things for money, and things that take them away from their chosen professions . . . at which, I would add, they are not only very well trained, but exceedingly skilled and good at. And, why hasn't it yet worked for me in this job search? In this case, I do not have stupid summer jobs lined up. Failure really, really, truly, really-really is not an option. I can tutor for $13 an hour this summer, and find some other part time job to try and fill that gap. But, in actuality, that's going to put me in a hole pretty fast. So, for reals now, a job before my birthday is what's needed.

I shall note it on my birthday list.

I'm of some different thoughts about why the failure isn't an option strategy isn't getting results now, for me, or for my friends. On the one hand, finding the right job, the job that makes you want to get up in the morning, the job that pays you well enough and allows you to have the work-life balance that works for you and yours, the job that excites you enough that you're willing to pitch in on the un-thrilling days . . . well, that's a bigger problem to solve than finishing a paper. That's a bigger problem than trying to finish four papers .  . and that's saying something since my papers at Hampshire were often 30+ pages! You can't just will it. I mean, I did, but (and here's the other thing) - that was six years ago. So, yes, that's right, I am going to reference how bad this job market is (for what I believe is the first time on this blog). Six years ago was a different story, for shiz.

I also think that it's possible that we three have not had exactly the failures we need yet. That, in reality, of course, failure is an option and may be what paves the way for success. That failure has uses, even when it feels . . . untimely or inconvenient or even beyond uncomfortable. As in, "Ok, it seemed like a good job on paper, but now that I've interviewed I see what they really meant when they said ____ in the posting and that should've been a red flag," or "Hmmm, next time I should follow up on that app sooner so I can stay on their radar."

Or, it's just possible that this will be like what one of these very friends mentioned above told me once, on a bitterly cold night in January as we waited for a bus. He said, "At the moment I give up, it will arrive. But I can't tell myself to give up and fake it out. If I'm only saying I give up, then it won't show. But at the moment I truly am done believing then the universe will provide."

This is hard to explain to people who don't know him but this was the first moment I knew my friend to be a hopeless optimist. Possibly glass overflowing, sappy, optimism at times. He may, occasionally, show some sand-paper to the world rather than baring his skin. He also is steeped in how to make things better and in his world, this means being very clear about what is NOT optimal. To some this looks like complaining, but to me, I know it comes from deep belief that things CAN be made better and a logical progression that requires him to fist be explicit about what needs to be improved. I didn't know it until he talked about how giving up being related to how good things happen, But he believes in some structure of the universe. Some force for good. Some way of creating balance with the force.

It may seem strange that I've tagged this post about failure with "optimism" but I think what I'm saying is, failure sucks. For me, it hurts and wounds and leaves bruises. It makes me want to give up and pull covers over my head in the moment. But sometimes it makes me step out of things that weren't working for me. I failed to get a Ph.D, but succeeded at standing up for myself, getting a Master's, and finding a job in my field. I have failed, so far, at finding the right new job in 2012 (but I only have to get it right once, eh?), but have succeeded in purging a lot of demons from my head, and reconfiguring how healthy and ambitious can align in my life moving forward. And while I've had some very disheartening interviews and frustrating almost-job-offer situations in this four months of unemployment, I've also honed in on a closer approximation to what kind of jobs could turn into the right ones for me. It only takes one thing to change and turn all of that into total success - and not just success that looks like a paycheck, but success that looks like a wholly renovated life for me where all those failures stack up to me sitting in a completely different place, with a much better view than when I had my last paycheck.

I think that I still think that the universe will provide. And I think I still think it will happen before my bank account hits zero. And I think my friends will find what they need for right now, and, eventually, in the long run. So, even though the glasses have some failures in them, and though they may not be half full, I think there's enough there to keep us going. That is the most I can ask for today . . . but watch out when my birthday approaches because I will certainly feel free to ask for more then.

Trust, belief, and responsibility

I realized recently that I spent 24 years in school. When I left, it was because I left, not because I quit. But I think I never really left school. I treat everything as an assignment. About a month ago I admitted to a friend that even the smallest, least important deadline for me is serious, serious business. If something is "due" I'm late if I get it done the day of, and it is on time if I am done a day early. I may have left school but it never really left me. I still approach things as homework. My trainer gives me a workout, and we agree on what I will do for cardio, and I refer to it as my exercise "assignment." When I was working, if I didn't have enough office time then my "homework" was to sit on the couch at night and catch up on my reports. (This is ironic because my office was 4 feet away from my couch so my homework could have been "office work" but . . . you know.) Even now that I'm not working, I make long to-do lists for myself each week and break them up by days and treat the things on them as my assignments. If I don't find a job in the next month I will have failed to complete my job search "homework" on deadline, on some level, even if that's not a reasonable reconciliation with job search realities or finances. So, when a friend texted me today and said, "Blog assignment . . . Trust. I would like to see what you have to say," I set aside the post I was writing about something else and began working on thoughts about trust in earnest..

I've written, not once, but twice about honesty. I've written about patience and forgiveness. I've even spent time talking about faith and confidence. Three of those posts were thoughts that burned deep and that I couldn't not take the time to fit words around. The fourth was a request from this same friend. Not an assignment, I can tell, because I sat on it for almost two months . . . and needed to because I had been grappling with it for many more months before she suggested it. It's probably important to note that this friend has a way of pinpointing the exact thing that is paining me; the thing that my skin is barely covering at any given moment. Who knew that such a bond could be formed over treadmills and swim practice?

I think some people are born with an innate sense of who to trust, how to trust, and how to be vulnerable and open with people that they trust. Or maybe I am wrong and everyone is born with an intuition about this. I've won enough children over to liking me (and in my not-expert-but-deeply-analyzed opinion having a young child like you is synonymous with them feeling safe enough to trust you to do right by them) to know not everyone does this at the same pace. Some kids have to gauge things over a few encounters, or watch others interact to get a sense of what they think of a new person. Others dive right in. If I can be vain for a moment, I've never had a kid NOT come to the conclusion that I was worth a shot, but have had a couple I've had to work a bit harder on. Is it their personality that makes the difference? Is it their life experience? Some of both? In two young-child anecdotes I have in mind, I can tell you that I am completely certain those were kids who have naturally cautious personalities and who take their time with everyone and everything. In two other cases, I know there was damage done before I met those little boys, and that it had shaped those younglings to fear judgement, reprisal, and to play everything close to the vest.

I remember so, so much that I wish I could forget, but it's impossible for me to look backwards from where I stand now and tell you what kind of kid I was. Was I one that ran headlong into believing in everything and everyone? Was I cautious and guarded, taking my time to warm up to people? I can't be sure, because I know everything I see from this stance is colored deeply by how little I trust or believe in fully now. I have to consciously choose to trust or be open to most people and have written much about the tough outer shell that not everyone cares to crack. I'm not pessimistic, exactly, it's more that . . . I'm never done collecting data and am accustomed for looking for the downside as a firmly instituted countermeasure to my tendency to so easily see the good in someone or something.

Trusting someone, and caring for them or loving them are two very different things. I can list for hours the people I love and care for. I see good in them. I've seen moments of amazing intellect, accomplishment, grace, talent, and good-heartedness in every single person that is in my life.  Generally, I believe Randy Pausch is right when he says in The Last Lecture that if you give people long enough they will show you their good side. I see it in abundance and so there are many people I love, who I suspect love me . . . I guess no one can ever really know what someone else feels, but in as much as I can know, I know those people love me too. So, I trust some people to love me, but not to be there for me. And some, I trust to be there for me, though they might not be the people I feel love from. I can count on one hand the people I trust to both love me and to be there for me.

The sad part of that statement is probably not that the list is so short, because the people on it are phenomenal. I would trust them with my life. In fact, one of them is my power of attorney, so I have literally trusted him to end my life according to my wishes. There is nothing sad I can say about these people but it is less than stellar that I'm not always on my own list. I don't always trust myself to show up for my own best interests. If I'm being honest, I've seen amazing growth in this area in the last two years, but some of it has been either thrust on me, or, it has to be mentioned, is marked also by huge failures in this area (and hopefully, equally huge comebacks). I think, for me, how this works is that I go through growth spurts with this. I grew immensely in college in being able to see myself as being worth trusting . . . and it's probably not accidental that that happened because I left home fully. I grew immensely in this area as I was deciding to leave grad school. I grew painfully as I discovered a way to stay here even when the reason I had come to Colorado had left. I think I'm now in the middle of another growth spurt, and it does make the joints a bit sore, but it also means I maybe have a clear image of not just who I am, or how I am, but how all that I know about myself can be trusted and loved.

For some people trust and feeling safe and secure comes from being able to predict what will happen, or how another person behaves. And for some, I think it comes from knowing that they if they can't see everything coming, they can at least trust someone to have good intentions and to do everything to act consistently with that. I grew up with a lot of inconsistency when it came to both of those routes to building and maintaining trust. And I've had a lot of experiences since where it has become painfully obvious to me that predicting how someone will act is just asking for trouble, and that I have imperfect intuition when it comes to who has my best interests at heart and who doesn't . . . On the one hand, I have 5 people who I know would walk through fire for me. On the other hand, I've been engaged twice and then walked away from those people, entirely because of trust issues. I had a friend break-up that affected me at least as much as those breakups. I've had advisers and mentors let me down, and I've placed my trust in people who didn't deserve it.

It's maybe not surprising, given all of this, that my brain is committed to collecting data. Whatever else I am doing, there is always some corner of my psyche that is collecting information, and either filing it or future use or stopping to analyze it against other data points. My therapist recently said, "You can't analyze your way through that one," about something we were discussing. I sat in shocked silence for about a minute after he said that because if analysis was off the table then . . . what else? It's also perhaps, not shocking that I use structure to control so much in my life, or give the illusion of control. Predictability gives me a chance of feeling secure, and collecting data gives me the best chance of seeing people and situations for what they really are.

But, ultimately, what has evolved is that trust for me comes from something much simpler than predictability or believing that someone has a good intention in their back pocket. I believe that the five people who I both love and trust have good intentions, and since I have collectively known those people for more than 50 years, while they may not be predictable, I know enough to make some good guesses. But, what ultimately sets those people apart from others in my life is . . . they are heartily responsible to something higher than today and tomorrow. We all have inconsistencies, but these are people who have worked hard to define their own values and principles, their own benchmarks of morality, and to live up to that. When they make mis-steps they feel remorse, but also a need to take responsibility for not falling into the same hole again. Anyone can trip and fall down a well, and people can even get lucky and find a way out, but it's the people who get out, step back, and do everything in their power to make sure they don't put themselves or anyone else in that situation again that earn my trust.

For me, trust is then not about what I feel for someone, or even about whether or not I think they have good intentions towards me, but so much more about a person's actions. I'm a verbal person. So, tell me you care, and I will listen sincerely but don't expect me to believe it unless you SHOW me. Tell me your plan, but don't expect my buy in until I see you take action. I may have faith on someone's ability to change, grow, or progress, but until they take responsibility for it I'm unlikely to have a lot of confidence.

This is maybe the heart of finding fidelity with myself. I haven't always been a person of profound integrity, but I have been deeply, profoundly defining myself by my honesty for more than two decades. I wasn't always this way. Like most children, as part of normal development, I tested the boundaries of honesty. I maybe tested these limits a little more or a little longer than some - probably it was normal, maybe it wasn't, but it was most definitely not treated as normal in my family. Looking back that seems to me to be significantly about the need to break out of the intense limitations and expectations placed on me, or even maybe the fact that not all of my needs were being met. But, since my view is very much from the inside I can't be sure about that. What I can be sure of is after about a year of that, it occurred to me that it felt horrendous to know that people didn't trust me, and it felt good when people did believe in me. It was that simple.

What I had to do to be trustworthy was ACT different. If being dishonest meant people couldn't trust that I would do what I said, I had to be careful to say only what I could live up to, and to then DO it. It's not small to me that I figured that out before I was old enough to choose important things for myself. And my convictions about honesty over social niceties, personal responsibility and independence, and moral structure followed from those actions and results. In this way, I feel down to the marrow of my bones the difference between an orthopraxy and an orthodoxy. When I don't find myself trustworthy to myself, it's not because I believe anything different, it's because I haven't taken responsibility to act that way. It's because I've drawn a moral line in the sand, and then tiptoed backwards across it. It's because I've declared a need for accountability and then eaten more than the designated 3 cups of popcorn for a serving of carbs.

Being trustworthy is extremely important to me. And the only way I know how to do that is to be honest. All the time. Without fail. Even if it costs me. And to back it up. To act consistently or own up to it when I haven't and sincerely try to change so that it doesn't happen again. It is how others see me as being worthy of keeping their confidences, of being let into their inner circles, of walking their dogs and holding their babies, as being loyal or compassionate or reliable is all in being talk plus action.

This is, of course at the heart of my issues with God. I can believe in all kinds of things when it comes to my spirituality, but it's hard to measure actions when it comes to God. In my post about ATM fraud, I talked about love providing and protecting. But I also admitted that it was impossible to separate whether it was people and systems or some bigger force acting through people that accomplished that. And I flat out refused to answer the question raised at one of the last church services I was at of whether or not we can trust God. Do I trust God? I suspect this is at least in part the question my friend was really hoping I'd tackle. And I might answer that question differently, moment to moment, especially right now. But, I'd probably have to say something towards what I heard in a 12 step Al-Anon meeting last summer - the speaker said that if she had to bet something that mattered, like her kids' lives, on God existing, she wasn't sure she could answer a resounding yes. But, she knew with certainty that she was more successful, more healthy when she acted like she believed and turned things over to her higher power because it meant she spent less time being crazy about things she couldn't control.

I want action. I want answers. It's hard to bang a trash can and get God to do that on my schedule or to get my higher power to make it clear that the things I'm experiencing are by design. And because I'm not just a "walk the walk" girl of action, but also not blessed with a lot of intuitive trust or innate faith, it's a hard problem for me. I'd rather act and see if belief takes root from that (orthopraxy) than believe and not act (how many approach orthodoxy). Put another way, I'd rather act and then believe than believe and NOT act. The words of my sensei come back to me, "Fake it 'til you make it."

Here's what I trust. I trust five people in my life to care about saying things that matter, and living up to them. I trust that when I don't know what to do, I can talk to them and get a meaningful reality check. And if I can't talk to them, I can ask myself what one of them would think of what I'm doing or how I'm doing it. I trust myself to act in ways that maintain their trust in me, and I'm learning how to treat myself as well as I treat them in that respect. I want to be the sixth person on that list of people. And I have a handful of candidates to round out that second hand of people I can count who I love AND trust. I trust myself to do the right thing, according to my values, as long as I take a beat to line everything up in my head and collect all the data in one place. I trust that I can't control everything, but I know too that controlling a certain amount of my environment helps me function. I trust that If I keep doing these things, I will someday be able to match my intuition with the data in the corresponding basket. I'll never stop collecting the data and analyzing, but maybe I'll be able to someday trust the picture I see forming from it.