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.

Core Values

My most recent employer spent a significant amount of 2010 and 2011 navel gazing and thinking about what their values were, as an organization, and how to align goals, action plans, and ultimately department missions and work flow with that in mind.

I spent a large chunk of time in those years helping business owners and prospective business owners write and develop business plans. And, the first section of any good business plan is the mission statement. Often, if I would find items later in the plan that weren't working it was either because someone hadn't seen the longer term of logistics they were plotting. But, even more often than that I ended up in discussions with those people about checking the business decisions and progress they were planning against that stated mission.

We ask businesses and organizations to make statements of their mission and values, so why do we not ask ourselves as concretely what we strive for at our core? Someone recently, without me asking, stated simply that for him, he can strive for nothing more important than having connected deeply with his creative side and shared that in whatever way he could. It was actually . . . astounding to me. It's rare that someone can distill what most matters to them down to one sentence.

It got my mind onto what the mission statements would be of the people I love most in the world? (If I could author some of them, my bet is I have a friend whose mission statement would read,  "To pave a way of changing things for the better by a culture of learning and positive, thoughtful change." Another friend would be, "To do good by doing everything thoughtfully and well." And a third would be, "To know I chose.")  And how would it change people at large if they had not only a good grasp of their core values, but were checking in and aligning their actions and decisions and lives with that well defined core?

Is it shocking that asking myself what it feels like to change is really about thinking about what is most important to me and shifting myself to match up with that? No. And at this point, I shouldn't be surprised that my same blog-assigning friend said, "one of your next postings should describe your core values and how they drive your day to day decisions. What does it feels like when you are aligned with your core values and what did it feel like when you weren't aligned?"

It felt like a bone break. It felt like . . . it hurt so much to make every decision that I had to turn my thoughts off so I wouldn't notice. I have some experience with this. When I was in grad school, I had an adviser, who to put it mildly, was a nightmare. After stealing, well, a lot of things from me, and promising me things that she didn't deliver on, it was clear I had to leave grad school. My idea of what research was and could be was pretty wounded at that point, but, also, she was the only person working on language in my program. It was clear we couldn't move too much further forward, but also that it would be hard for me to do what I wanted to do without her. I determined that I would leave, but not without a piece of paper showing what I had fought for - not without my master's. What followed was an agonizing 4 months where she and I were in an unspoken grudge match. And because I had expressed concern about not only how she was handling her students and lab, but how my program was handling her, at that point, I was in a grudge match with the program as well.

I had no funding, so that summer I had to work a camp job from 7am until 3:30 or 5 each day, in the blazing heat and humidity, and then come home and somehow write, read, and revise every night. I settled into a pattern of cold shower immediately after work, dinner of yogurt, cucumber sticks, and vodka, and 5-7  hours of work before falling asleep on the hard wood floor underneath the paltry and ineffective air conditioner some time around midnight or 1am.

I wasn't often drunk while writing, but I wasn't often sober either. It occurred to me in the second week of this routine (such as it was) that the fact that I was crossing things off my grocery list in order to buy the vodka wasn't good. (I was so poor that summer. Ooof ) I promised myself that once I defended and revised I would take a drinking sabbatical for up to 6 months (and importantly, lived up to that promise) but I didn't stop drinking that summer. I explained to a friend, who I also used to help keep me accountable for this unhealthy behavior, that I needed to drink otherwise the voice in my head screaming, "This hurts and it is AWFUL" would be so loud that I would have no choice but to set fire to my master's and walk away. And I had locked myself down to needing to get it done so that I could walk away with more than ashes and scorched earth.

That decision offended me so deeply because it was an acquiescence to dishonesty, to fraud, to abuse. To doing the opposite of good. Nothing I was doing was going to change things in any measurable positive way - I wasn't going to change the horrible truth of how she treated students, or how the program held faculty accountable. I wasn't going to change what she had stolen from me, tangibly or metaphorically. All I was doing was making sure I didn't leave empty handed . . . which wasn't going to change my prospects significantly in the future. It was what I needed for closure, but it wasn't going to give me, or anyone else, anything bigger than that. It helped a little when in my exit interview from the department the chair admitted that the department owed me an adviser and a chance to dissertate and had let me down, but nothing could give me back those four years or the debt (financial and otherwise) that accompanied them.

That's how doing something against my core values feels. It hurts so much that I have to anesthetize. What worries me is not that I did it with vodka in 2005, but that I now do it without any conscious choice or substance involved. I realized this in mid-2011 when I was taking a respite in NJ with smart, awesome friends, and all of a sudden found that I was using a larger working vocabulary, handling more complex analysis, and feeling AWAKE. Then, startled, I realized, I had been numbing out for the months before. Waking up, showering, and then resolutely unplugging my brain so that I could go through the motions without having to look too hard at what I was doing or feeling. I said to my friend then, who happened to be the very same one who was my checkpoint during the vodka-soaked-second-master's-thesis days, "I somehow learned how to dull the roar of the voices inside me without alcohol." We both had a really long, sad, quiet moment then.

In grad school, I had aimed my life at certain accomplishments and milestones. It didn't negate my deep seated commitment to honesty, to fairness, to doing what's right, but it did back-burner some of those things some of the time. Ultimately, enough had gone wrong that I chose to leave, though I'm sure some people would tell the story differently saying I had to leave. Both things were eventually true, but one was true first. With my last job, that story was reversed, and it would have been better for me if it hadn't been. I should have made the same decision I made when I was in grad school. But . . . one of the things that made it hard to see how unhappy I was was that for a long time, I was doing some good there. And then when I wasn't, I spent an almost equal amount of time convincing myself I was making a difference. I thought I was pushing through something hard for the right reasons. Or that's what I told myself. I failed to pay attention to the fact that if something hurts so much that you have to turn down your brain, it usually means something is horribly off kilter. Pain exists for a reason, and it's to let us know when something needs attention. And usually what needs attention is for our health and well being.

Happiness isn't a value, but it is the canary in the coal mine. Someone very smart said to me, "Your core being defines the happiness you bring to your life." So many times I've seen the evidence in other people's lives that they are creating their own pile of misery. I can't pretend I haven't sometimes done the same. Or, to be clear, at least four memorable times in my life, I have signed on that dotted line for big-ticket unhappinesses. And that unhappiness was always-always-always about my choices, my actions, or something being so misaligned that even if I was acting on one value, another was slipping off the side of the proverbial table.

My values are clear to me. I don't have any hazy moments on what they are. I do have some concerns about trusting myself to act on my own best interests. I'm as self-involved as anyone, but I sometimes forget that acting against my values, even a little bit, wounds me so deeply.  So I need to make sure I sleep on things in order to check everything out with my gut and make sure my values are my first and last check point.

My values are:


Being truly awake - I identified this one very early in my life. You can't get far sleepwalking. You can look like you're doing well, walking down the street, whatever, but if you're not awake you're missing what you feel, what you see, what you hear, the chance to make choices, music, poetry, strange and weird moments, the things that you can pull together later to make sense of where you are and how you got there. I want to be AWAKE.

Honesty - I believe in all honesty, all the time. That doesn't mean I say everything at once, but it does mean I try not to leave things out, if that makes sense. It does mean I think the best thing I can do in most situations is to be honest over being nice.

Redemption - I am so bad at forgiving and forgetting, and am worst at this with myself. But I believe in second chances. (And sometimes third chances too.)

Life long learning - I think part of me would die if I stopped being interested in things I don't know about and just started spinning my wheels on things I'm already knowledgeable about. I am most alive and alert when I'm actively learning

Fighting for the right things - it matters to me to stand up when things are wrong. It doesn't have to be loud, or dramatic, but it has to happen. It matters to me to have the courage of my convictions. Conviction alone isn't enough - the courage to act on it is what makes our convictions a mission statement with an action plan attached.

Responsibility - If I commit to something, it's important to me to take responsibility for getting it done, taking care of it, and stewarding in the right way. Goldfish, work, treating people right, making changes in my life. And if I say I'm going to do something and then can't deliver, I have to own up to it.

Leveling playing fields - I believe that life isn't always fair. I believe that I learned as much from injustices as I did from mercy and fairness. I also believe that when injustices are on a large scale, and brutalize people that don't have the ability to choose other circumstances, it limits the accomplishments, the success, the right-ness of everyone else. I believe in doing what I can, however small, to locate and defend rightness, and to try and change wrong-nesses. My tool for leveling fields tends to be education and honesty, rather than bulldozers. In the same way that I think injustice makes all of us a little worse, I think that giving back makes all of us a little better, including, and maybe especially for the person doing the giving.

Words - I believe humans were built to use language to communicate. My linguistics training tells me that is about some magnificent intersection between evolution and biology and need and accidental benefits. It also tells me all kinds of nerdy things about how language is actually not always a completely efficient or effective for communication. Words fail, processing fails, wet computers in our brains fail, pressures and time and attention let us down. But, the me deep inside tells me that the trying matters. I believe in words, in writing, in language, in talking, and in communication, however imperfect and ongoing.


Your core being defines the happiness you bring to your life. Yes. This is who I am if you strip everything down. I'm not quite ready to pull this into a cleanly stated mission statement, but if I stop, and take a breath, everything that feels right to me, everything that makes my heart happy, boils down to one of these things, or a combination of them.

This is what I believe.