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.

Flaws

Recently, I posted about romance and reality. Reality isn't always as pretty or clean-shaven or over-the-top emotional as a Meg Ryan movie, but it is honest. And honesty and romance have been irrevocably intertwined in my head. As I was doing some "field research" for the romance post (aka asking deep questions and sharing my thesis with my dear friends via skype) I found myself tearing up and getting the wobbly voice when I said, "I've just been lied to so much in my life by so many people . . . " A Facebook post my friend put up recently struck me as the simplest way I can state how profoundly important honesty is to me: The truth may hurt for a little while but a lie hurts forever.

I've, of course, written about honesty before. A couple of times at least. I value honesty in all the relationships I have, from the friend who tells me, "Umm, no, you can't put your hair clip like that. Only a good friend would say that to you though," to the sibling that says, "You're difficult but that's part of YOU." And I try to give as good as I get. To me, trust comes from saying what you mean, and then following up your words with actions.

I am lucky that I have some good examples of people I know finding ways to thread honesty, accountability and romance together, like my friends who, instead of traditional wedding vows, had a conversational set of promises they made to one another (in front of us). I also, in my research of what people promise each other, was sent this fabulous example of how honesty can meet humor, fun, and romance. (These vows are heartfelt, to be sure, and so true - not IF you get sick or IF you get angry but WHEN -  and genuinely loving. And let's be clear, I wish I could have zombies at any party or wedding celebration I might plan in the future.)

What strikes me is that honesty, like terror and charity, begins at home. For me, perhaps honesty trumps flashy shows of romance because there was such issue with it in my home. I come from a family that struggles with honesty - with one another, and with themselves. In my house this didn't always mean outright lying, but often just a lack of the whole story being conveyed about any number of things or willful ignoring of the skeletons in the closet . . . this is, after all, how it happens that I have a sister I didn't grow up with.  (In point of fact, I didn't know she existed until I was 21 and she was almost 30.) This is how people I lived with for years and love and share blood with ignored the obvious problems while deftly stepping over that lump in the rug barely concealing what they swept under it. Their stories aren't mine to tell, so I won't talk about what I see when I tentatively lift the rug up, but the important realization for me is that I don't just crave honesty. I worry over it.

I make it a deep and daily concern to check in with myself and try to take stock of my ability to be honest with others and myself because, I think, deep down, I am afraid that if I relax on that priority, I will find proverbial rugs and more than proverbial lumps swept under them. I live in a hardwood floor apartment for a reason, and I don't own any rugs other than bathmats, so, this would be alarming.

For me, honesty is, in huge part, about knowing one's self. It's hard to "speak from the heart" if you can't hear your own inner voice, and it's impossible to react and communicate honestly if you don't know how you feel. And for me, an important piece of that is trying, whenever possible, to trace backwards far enough to know WHY I feel that way. More often than not, my feelings come from fears, limiting beliefs, judgment, and insecurities. And more often than not, those fears and insecurities and weak spots in my tough-girl armor come from knowing how flawed I am.

The word flaw actually means: a feature that mars the perfection of something, defect, fault.

This always reminds me of craftsman looking at a piece of wood and rejecting it because of a knot too big to work into the chair or wall they aspire to make, or a big dark spot in the middle of a diamond. Something visible. Which is ironic and alarming, because I work so very hard to make sure my flaws are as invisible as possible. I want the world to see good hair days, no pimples, and certainly not the moments where I am fighting the tears over having to send an email that makes me judge myself by imagining how someone else will judge it. I want those things tucked under the floor boards (since I live sans rugs).

But, I've been brought up short by being unemployed, by going back to therapy, by realizing that people love me not because I am perfect but for other reasons, by seeing a moving TED talk about vulnerability and then reading the researcher's book, and realize now, the flaws in the wood make it richer and more interesting, and I've never cared for diamonds anyways.

So, in going back and re-reading Elisabeth Glibert's book, Committed (about marriage and misgivings and love and honesty and tradition and ways to buy into it without the bullshit . . . in my opinion, better than her more renowned Eat, Pray, Love ) I was reminded that something she and her beloved did before confirming they could marry (even with misgivings) was to present a list of their own flaws to one another and . . . double-check that they were ok with what they were signing up for. They were searingly honest. Witness:

1. I think very highly of my own opinion. I generally believe that I know best how everyone in the world should be living their lives - and you, most of all will be victim of this.

2. I require an amount of devotional attention that would have made Marie Antoinette blush.

3. I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy.  In my excitement, I routinely take on more that I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion.  You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I've overextended myself and then fallen apart.  This will be unbelievably tedious.  I apologize in advance.

4. I am openly prideful, secretly judgmental, and cowardly in conflict.  All these things collude at times and turn me into a big, fat liar.

5. My most dishonorable fault of all:  Though it takes me a long while to get to this point, the moment I have decided that somebody is unforgivable, that person will very likely remain unforgiven for life--all too often cut off forever, without fair warning, explanation or another chance.

What made it ok for her and her partner to leap into this cesspool of uncertainty was BECAUSE they could share these lists of terribleness with each other and say afterwords, "I can work with that."

It sounds terribly unromantic (even less romantic than slaying a zombie head in a wedding ceremony in lieu of lighting a unity candle) but it is an incredibly loving act for another person to say, "I take all of you. Even the hard parts. Even when you make them sound really bad." It makes me wonder: how many of us are able to love ourselves that deeply, looking really deeply into the mirror and seeing every visible flaw, every humiliating or hurtful moment, everything under the rug and beyond? I don't. Do you?

How many people spend the time to know themselves that deeply and then say, "I love me anyways."

If I inventory my flaws, I sound really terrible to myself.

1. I talk too much, think too much, and generally cannot rest until I've analyzed the breath out of everything, everything, everything. Myself, how best to set up the laundry room shelves, my family, my goals, what shoes to buy, how to get $10 a week off my grocery list . . .  This data gathering and analytic machine does not rest and it is exhausting for every other human on the planet, but I can't stop.

2. I am a really judgmental person. I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things. Generally, I don't make snap judgments (see above: data gathering) but when I've thought something over, I typically have a pretty good idea of what I think should or shouldn't happen, how to implement my plan, and why it will be awesome. My niece once asked me if my plans always work out and I answered, without missing a beat, "When my plans don't work it's almost always because someone has failed to follow them." I have tried, in recent years, to speak up promptly when I have no opinion because there are times I meet a topic where I genuinely don't care or haven't formed a thought on, and I want people to get a break from my constant assessments and perspectives. I've tried also to get better at making room for new data, to have my mind changed, and to hear others. I've tried most of all to recognize when judging others comes from judging myself (Almost always! SHOCKER!) but it remains true that I am the most outspoken, annoying, insufferable know-it-all most of you will ever meet.

3. I am what some people call stubborn or persistent. Those are far kinder words than I think apply. I am beyond determined, I am attached to willing things to be the way I need them to be. This often gets me stuck in a rut of patterns that aren't working for me, or what one friend charitably described as me being "dogged, at times." Yup, that's me.

4. I am very attached to my plans, my pride, and my independence. This means that I will jump in and help almost anyone, almost all of the time but will refuse to let my person take a shopping bag from me when he sincerely offers to carry it. I will run myself into the ground being a caretaker for others, all the while ignoring my own needs. It's extraordinarily unhealthy and detrimental to seeking balance and although I've addressed it with a vengeance this year, it will be a lifelong struggle for me to put myself first, ever, and not feel shame about it.

5. I'm deeply principled, and hold myself and others to painfully high standards. But mostly myself. When I can't meet them, as I've described, it's not a matter of failing and then picking myself back up. It's inevitable failure, then kicking myself while I'm down, beating myself up after the kicking, rolling around in the mud, and then expecting myself to write an essay about how I'll do better. This means that although I've been successful at many things I have no natural aptitude for, I'm not what you call resilient. I rebound . . . eventually, but it takes me an inordinately long time to pick myself up after a fall and because I'm so resistant to help (see above) taking a hand up doesn't even occur to me, even when it's offered.

6. I am tough, sassy, and strong. I have same-day surgeries without pain killers, travel like a champ, have almost no phobias, and generally act like I am unaffected by pain, injury, illness, and fatigue. Yet, I have incredibly thin skin. Even small accidental moments can hurt my feelings and sting years later. Having an unyieldingly killer memory does not help this cause.

7. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in letting go of anger and wounds, because otherwise you carry them with you and hurt yourself and others with them over and over. I believe in second chances. I often give third and fourth and fourteenth chances, because despite all of my toughness, independence, and judgment, I see the good in almost everyone. But, when someone has hurt me badly enough or often enough, when all trust or faith in their ability to be decent has been eroded, I am completely incapable, at that point, of the kind of forgiveness that leaves what happened in the past. (The memory thing doesn't help much here either.) It would be far kinder for EVERYONE to just stop earlier and close the door more gently on people that aren't good for me.

8. I have only felt pretty, smart, and appreciated all at the same time for three or four days of my entire life. This means, that when someone tells me I am attractive, I am suspicious they think I'm stupid. When someone praises my intellect, I wonder if that is code for them thinking I'm ugly, and that if they see both, I assume I'm unappreciated for these and any other good qualities. I am constantly undermining myself by playing old tapes in my head of being unworthy of real belonging.

9. I have a horrible, horrible habit of making fun of things I actually care about quite a lot because I can't quite bear to let people see me care that much and be that vulnerable and drop the sarcasm. I suspect this is offputting or at least tiring for many people.

10. As in introspective extrovert (or a very social introvert depending on which test I take and how I interpret questions as applying to my life ) I am often caught up in being what is needed by everyone else, and, as mentioned above, caretaking everyONE but myself. But, I also require an enormous amount of time and mental resources to process all of the data I'm gathering all of the time. Sometimes this all comes to a head and I find myself lying on the couch watching terrible re-runs or staring at the ceiling and not having the will to do anything for a couple of days at a time. At these times, I'm completely incapable of taking out the trash, doing my dishes, or meeting friends when we've made plans. This means my people get lots of attention from me when I am "on" and then suddenly, when the switch flips, I am suddenly 100% MIA. I know I hurt people this way.

11. There is almost nothing in my life that goes unprocessed (see number 1). But, I am accustomed to delaying emotional processing. This leaves me isolated, and often angry, and it puzzles and hurts people when something they thought nothing of resurfaces as an issue I'm still dealing with days, weeks, months later.

How can that list be compatible with being lovable? And yet, despite all of these things working against me, I have friends who call me family that I've had, respectively for 33 years, 17 years, 15 years, and 12 years. There must be something there. I reason it this way - they don't HAVE to see me at Thanksgiving and pretend to like me, they choose me over and over, and I them.

I saw a cartoon once that showed on the left pane, a field of flowers. Daisies, lilies, pretty, pretty flowers. Underneath it, it said, "How we see flowers" In the right hand pane, the same flowers, but with faces in their centers, and all of the faces had big ugly glasses, warts, crooked noses, pimples. Underneath that it said, "How flowers see themselves."

While we are staring in the mirror and side-stepping the lumps in the rug, we're all the while consumed with the pimples and the secret-keeping, which makes it impossible for us to see what is wonderful about us. We're burdened with the things that are less than awesome because we have to carry them around on our backs, and are always angling to stand in front of them so that no one can see what is behind our backs . . . like when we were children trying to smuggle cookies out of the cookie jar by keeping our hands tucked behind our backs. If we stood those things up in front of us and made peace with them, maybe we could see what was fun and useful and easy and memorable about us to others. If I loved my flaws, the bumps and knots in the wood, would I see the good things more easily?

Here's an interesting thing that happened as I was writing this post. I had assembled some of the pieces of this post last week, and sat down to write last night. I got about as far as I had hoped I would (up to the sentence, "If I loved my flaws the bumps and knots in the wood, would I see the good things more easily?") but knew I wasn't finished. So, I decided to sit down with Brene Brown's book. Her writing is just as captivating as her presentations are. I found myself laughing and empathizing as she shared her own struggles with imperfection and courage because they are all of our struggles - being too busy, trying to hard to fit in at the risk of missing real belonging, wanting to send angry emails to snarky people, etc. But I also found this quote:

"When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness - the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don't fit with who we think we're supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing and proving. Our sense of worthiness - that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging - lives inside of our story."

When I read this, I realized, if I had just dug into this book a month ago then I wouldn't have needed to spend the 2 hours it took me to pull the pieces of this post together and write all those paragraphs. Brene has already said it more articulately for me.

My story is one of hustling, as she says. Of trying to prove, to please, to make my worth and value known by showing others how useful I can be, how hard I will work for it, how much I am willing to do for others rather than just locating my worthY. When I do this, I attach my feeling of being good enough to external things. Accomplishments and work are the main culprits. And, so, when I look at it that way, being unemployed is my first opportunity to stand apart from what I do or who I am in service to others or my job title. It is, if I do it right, a chance to get very honest in a way that isn't hurtful to the person I'm looking at in the mirror, but instead embraces the knots in the wood so that I can clear a path to seeing how I am good enough, job, no job, and whatever else comes next.

Coming out

I've outed myself a couple of times in online places. Back in February, I admitted on FB that I actually really like Hot Chelle Rae. I know - it's not good music, but it makes me want to MOVE and makes me sing and smile simultaneously. I outed myself long ago as being bisexual, and it was an important point in this post. And a couple of days ago, I admitted the possibility that after all these years proclaiming my extrovertedness, I might be an introvert (gasp!).

Now I'm going to come out on something else. I'm a (mostly) centrist liberal. I'm not registered with either major party (I know, gasp again!) and I believe very much in individual rights. I know that we sometimes have to consider the needs of the many over the needs of the one, but as the balance of how that feels and works tends to vary from person to person, whenever it is possible to uphold the rights of an individual without endangering others, I think that should be the priority. A lot of my politics come down to privacy and individual rights . . . thus, mostly a liberal.

But I'm a liberal who believes that life begins at conception. (I hope you saved some gasps for that.) I will likely be asked to leave the liberal enclave now. I might even be escorted out. Does this mean I have to leave the club? Start listening to different music? Be a suit? I hope not.

I said "life begins at conception" in the long, awkward-sentence way because I am NOT pro-life. (not, Not, NOT!!).

In fact, I really hate the idea that this question can be broken down into two camps at all, but what I might hate even more is the inequality between the two. Pro-life vs. Pro-choice? Soooo, if you believe in a woman's right to choose (or her partner's, for that matter . . . because, I don't know if you know this, but - pssssst!! - men are involved in making babies. I say this because we seem to have forgotten about male participation in pregnancy in this country of late.) you are . . . Anti-Life?

Moreover, a woman who considers an abortion clearly has no respect for life, if things are broken down this way . . . she hasn't, for instance, considered what kind of life that baby would have, if born, or how she would or wouldn't be able to provide for it, health issues, issues about parenting and her partner's involvement. (Sarcasm is dripping heavily now)

I have to be honest here and say every single woman I've known who has considered abortion, much less had one, have had the long view on life and asked themselves not just "how will this impact me?" but "what kind of life would this child have? Am I prepared/ready/able/supported in order to give them the best life possible?" Every. Single. One. (Certainly, there are women who may have abortions blithely, but I don't know them.)

On the other hand, I have never heard someone who was vocally "Pro-Life" (yes, the scare quotes are necessary) clearly answer what should happen to the unwanted, unplanned for children that they think should be born regardless. Their interest seems to end in making sure that the woman cannot get access to a medical procedure protected by law, or that she is intimidated out of it. What happens with that child seems to be someone else's issue to sort out.

Granted, in the last couple of years I haven't asked any of them . . . there were some really scary people who used to gather outside of the building that was next to my Physical Therapist's office. There was a cordoned off area, and 6 times a week, as I drove down and back that street, I saw them very visibly and audibly praying. It took me going during a snow storm to see they the sign they were congregated in front of - "Boulder Women's Clinic" - before I realized they were there to pray away the patients and doctors of that facility. Maybe I should go back and ask them if they have thoughts about what someone who is emotionally and financially unprepared for parenthood should do once their baby is born. Maybe I should ask them if a mother who already has children should lay down her life in the situation where its a health risk for an unborn baby. But instead I limped by in my knee braces and said, "It's nice how your right to scare people is protected."

(And please, let me be clear here. I support their right to pray, just as I support Rush Limbaugh's right to say putrid things about women, or my friend's who did get an abortion having the right to take that action. My issue is . . . if you believe prayers are heard, if you believe prayers are answered, if you believe prayer can change things, then you must also believe that there's no difference between praying at home for abortions to stop, and praying at the doorstep of the abortion clinic. In which case . . . why are you at the doorstep again? Oh, to intimidate people with your prayer. Yes, because the sacred act of praying and communing with God should always include that.)

For me, this came to a head one VERY early morning driving through deepest, darkest Pennsylvania. It was, no joke, like 5am. And as the sun rose over the rolling hills, every mile, on the mile, there was another graphic billboard showing, as it proclaimed, "the results of abortion." I mean, first of all, ick. People have children in their cars. (do the "Pro-Lifers" care about them?) And, also, it was 5am and as a 25 year old, I didn't need to see that. I'm all for truth, and information, but people can get that without it being splashed all over the road. They can go looking for it when it's pertinent to them. As it happens, I was driving to Connecticut that morning having worked late the night before. And I was driving to Connecticut to babysit my foster-brother while my mom went to some function.

And it hit me. What would happen if the pro-choice "side" advertised similarly, showing, "the results of unwanted children." Because, my foster brother was the best case scenario. He was neglected, but as far as anyone could tell, never abused; malnourished, but not unfed. He was developmentally delayed but not irreversibly damaged. And (and this is key) he was removed before his first birthday.

But I know something about babies that people have but don't raise. And I can't think of anything worse than that.

If those beaten, neglected, starved, emotionally-handicapped-for-life children were depicted graphically on billboards supporting Pro-choice you can be sure the "Pro-lifers" would cry foul saying it was overblown, predicting or even marketing abuse, and that the pro-choicers were using pain and suffering for their own political gain.

Umm, hi. Do you not think the woman who chooses abortion feels pain, remorse, regret? And also, dear "Pro-lifers" - whose life are you protecting? Do you have a way to help ensure that child you're insisting needs to be born will have the opportunity to have a good life? What about the woman? Her partner? Her other family? Other children she may be supporting? Yup, this is why "Pro Life" is in scare quotes for me.

So, I support my friends who have chosen abortion. Because children need so much that if you know you can't give it to them, or don't want to, or aren't able to . . . your having had sex, or birth control that failed, or whatever happened shouldn't doom somebody else to a life that can't be what it might have been in different circumstances.

I say all of this, and still admit it: I think life begins at conception. (I think it, but don't know it for sure. And it's important to note, it's what I think, and there's room for other people to think differently.) It would take out a piece of my heart to walk into "Boulder Women's Clinic" with or without the prayer-scarers. It would take very special circumstances too. I don't know what I believe about souls, or God, or "the right to life" (it seems like we are so casual with our other rights, I'm not sure why this right should be more important than others) but I know I think that whatever makes a person a person starts at conception not some magic date later. And still, I don't think it's my government's place to decide that for me, or anyone who may disagree with me. I'm not going to raise the children of those people, and neither are the prayer-scarers, or the "Pro-lifers" so who am I to make that decision for them?

It's also worth noting that . . . it's easy for me to say how difficult or impossible it would be for me to choose abortion since I'll never have to. This is perhaps the upside of having my junk be so jacked up as to be almost totally infertile - I can hypothetically take a hard line because I'll never be in the shoes of the women who actually have to make hard choices about their lives, their childrens' lives, their partners, and quality of life.

So, I'm a life-loving Pro-choicer? A Pro-lifer who protects choice? I'm not sure. But I do know that when issues as complex and personal as this are boiled down to two sides, everyone loses, and that in a free-society we should spend some time reflecting on reasons to make something illegal, not the reasons to legalize something; so I continue to straddle this line but not because I'm wishy-washy but because I object to the line in the first place.

The story of this blog

Out of the mud, grows a lotus. 

This is literally true, of course. But more figuratively, this is mentioned and quoted in different ways in Buddhism. Thich Nhat Hanh was quoted as saying, "There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus. "

At the moment that we're in the mud, of course, we don't think about the lotus. We think about the cold, the mess, and the feeling of being stuck. From down in the mud, beneath even the water, and the algae, the mud doesn't feel good, and it's difficult to see the flower that isn't yet.

But, creativity and pain correlate. Beethoven lead a miserable life, and (not BUT but AND) produced some of the worlds most recognizably moving classical music. It is the foundation of so much music that came after it. Writers, artists (just look at Frida Kahlo), most anyone with a creative bent will acknowledge that even if they were not able to produce at the moment they were in the mud, they were inspired by the time they spent down there.

It's not really any different for me. I mightn't ever produce things that move or reach people as much as the artists I know best for being inspired by and then out-stripping their pain in order to create, but all of my biggest creative projects came from distress.

My 365 photo-a-day self portrait project came from the realization that grieving the loss of my father and my relationship in one fell-swoop had shut me off to living and knowing the new and beautiful place I was residing in, and because I tried to mourn both at once, I had done neither properly.

My best poems were about that processing.

And this blog . . . well, it came from recognizing the need to, as the wonderfully wise Pema Chodron says in her best book, "lean into the sharp points of life."

Recently, a friend asked me about this blog. Why I started it, what inspired me, how I held myself to such a high standard of honesty and where my topic ideas "come from." She said she felt she was creative and prolific when it came to fiction writing but was having, "a difficult time when it comes to writing about 'real life.' I know the question might be a bit simplistic, but am really curious, and value your opinion as a fellow writer."

Well, first of all, anyone referring to me as a "writer" flatters me more than I can say. I think of myself mostly as a hack who can't keep herself from begging for attention. So, being included in the "fellow writer" circle with someone who had the guts and talent to go the hard road of getting a degree in writing is a sure bet to make me blush.

I gave her advice that may or may not have been satisfying, but also told her the story of this blog, at least partially.

This blog was in my head for months before it was ever on this site. And . . . even when it was one this site, I wrote three or four posts before I announced it on Facebook . .  . thus allowing everyone to see it, and then show it to everyone else. If I think very carefully, this blog started with a piece I wrote for a friend's book about a year before I ever wrote the first post.

This friend is an incredibly talented chef, and when her family began getting various diagnosis where diet changes could make a big difference, she made the command decision to do a full cleanse. As a family that was already Orthodox Jewish, and thus, keeping Kosher, dietary limitations weren't news in her house, but she then added on top of that: wheat free, gluten free, and dairy free. And yet, she magically makes some of the most amazing meals and baked goods I've ever had the pleasure to eat. In a series of long and long-distance conversations, she shared with me that she wanted to write a book. Not just a cookbook with recipes, but essays, research, and discussion on the benefits of eating and cooking your own food, how to do a cleanse and determine food sensitivities, and how to plan meals and events with this lifestyle of mindful eating. I had been experiencing a complete mental road block on the poems I was writing (see above) and found myself one night sitting at my neighborhood pub, drinking a beer, and just gushing out hand-written paragraphs about how eating and health aren't or shouldn't be disconnected from our other life choices. It was edited as an intro to her book.

But it got me thinking about how food worked for me, or didn't. It stayed on my mind and I found myself watching myself from the outside.

Then, another friend inspired me. One of my mommy friends started a blog writing about her family, the intentional and mindful child-rearing decisions she was making, health, and finding balance in her life as a mom and still being a person outside of that. I can't link to it because she ultimately decided to end the blog and give that time back to her family, but the simple, clear, straightforward way she spoke to these topics was compelling enough that I read it eagerly despite being a non-mom. It also taught me that real life doesn't have to be spectacular or exceptional to be interesting.

I carried these ideas and inspirations with me for several more months though, before doing anything with them.  I tentatively started a list of possible topics, but couldn't quite make the leap to writing anything online that others saw. What I found though, was that I started to notice myself from the outside with regard to those topics. One of the first ones on the list was "Perfect is damaging." What's ironic about this is not just where this topic arose from, but that it has yet to be written! The act of putting that topic idea on a list caused me to notice things about it, and it spawned other topics. As I started to observe myself, and how I made day-to-day decisions around those topics, how I thought about them, how I would reason them out if I was discussing them with a close friend, other things started to drift up against those ideas. Quotes. Things my friends said or did. Something I saw or heard in a movie. Some of these things, in turn, got re-purposed into other topics when the ideas got too big to be under one umbrella. Before I knew it, I had a list of 15 or so ideas and some skeleton structure for where I would go with them.

And still I didn't do anything.

It really wasn't until August of last year that I had the will to write and post. And at first I let just a few, select, people in on those posts. (One of my friends who had seen my 365 creative efforts on Flickr, another friend who had a secret blog, and a third friend I discovered had a blog on this site.) The right questions to ask was EXACTLY what my young writer friend asked - what motivated me to do it? What pushes me to be this publicly honest? She remarked that she knew her question was "simplistic." The answer is simple, but in the discipline of doing this, nothing could be less simple.

I was finally moved to do this because I was hurting inside, and the jagged pieces were no longer ignorable. I was faced with a choice of numbing myself and furthering the feeling of being broken and having jagged, broken edges poking me from the inside, wounding me further, or leaning into the pain and letting it teach me and guide me to new places. I chose the latter, but it meant acknowledging the mud I was in.

That mud included far too many dysfunctional relationships. I was not merely dissatisfied at work, I felt . . . misled and neglected to the point where neglect becomes passive abuse. I was noticing addiction everywhere in my loved ones. And I was in a romantic relationship defined by lies and denial. It hurt, but more than that, it made me sick because my engine runs on integrity and honesty and the chance to learn and contribute to making things better. I had sugar in the gas tank, which is a sadly hilarious metaphor since sugar was part of what I turned to in my brief stint of trying to deaden the ache.

It didn't work of course. And so, I did a bunch of things. I started going to a 12-step meeting for the loved ones of addicts, I got myself a therapist, I looked long and hard at a proverbial mirror and tried to come to terms with my beliefs and my needs, and I created some systems of accountability and honestly with myself, including this blog. I told my "fellow writer" friend that, "I started this blog at a time when I was facing a lot of dishonesty. Dishonesty at work, dishonesty in what is now my previous relationship. I was seeking more open doors." I truly felt like it was the element in my life that was lacking, like not getting enough sun or water. So, I decided I needed to BE the change I wanted to see. I had no idea how far I was going to have to reach down to do that, and so the other piece of this story is that when I find myself hedging around something now, I imagine my (incredibly loving, generous, extremely tiny and fierce) grandmother saying, "Now, Christie. Is that the whole truth?"

The short story is, we can be moved by the art, the ideas, the things happening around us, the people who teach us and show us new things, and I am. But I had to be in the mud to make a go of this kind of writing. As much as it feels like a bruise on my soul to be writing this post five months after losing my job with no new career in hand, I was far more wounded and far less functional and healthy on August 27th, 2011 (9 months ago, with a job!) when I first sat down to write something here. I know I am a better version of me now, I know the things that aren't ideal will change and change again. I know more about who I am, and who I can be, and what lengths I will go to to make that positive and meaningful, and I see myself in a much kinder light. I know everything is impermanent and I'm learning how to breathe through that. I know that I bruise easily, but that as thin as my skin sometimes is, the rest of me is tough and keeps going.

The long story is the tale of a blog that started with an idea about accountability, eating mindfully, exercise and health, and became a blog about the work of looking at myself, health in much broader terms, and the occasional post about zombies.

You know how people who lose 200 pounds always say, "I'll never go back to that. This feels too good." There is more behind that story. There is also the fact that there are days where it has to also be true that it doesn't feel good. Where putting the time in at the gym is the last thing they want to do. Where all they want is ice cream. But they know how working past those hard moments makes them better able to enjoy everything else, gives them more opportunities to feel good. Because when we dampen down pain, we aren't able to selectively anesthetize just pain. We shut out out good things also. That's me. It doesn't always feel good to feel all of my feelings. It's harder than going to the gym (which, let's be honest, I still don't always like doing). But it is better than being dishonest with myself, knowing that that leads directly to accepting dishonesty and dysfunction from others. And it makes me better equipped to feel and see and accept good things in my life. Sometimes leaning into the sharp points of life is like using sandpaper to uncover the natural beauty in the wood grain and shape us into something even better.

So, in that vein, I've decided to bring back another venue of creativity, structure, accountability, learning, outlet, and feedback into my life.

Welcome all to the first day of my second 365 (well, ummm, second in terms of it being version 2.1 since I did start a second 365 in 2010 and then . . . failed to finish it.) with a photo collage acknowledging that this is not just my birthday but the fourth anniversary of my residence in Boulder. I hope you enjoy it because I got up at 5am to make this happen!

We are bound together

You will all remember that last week saw me reflecting deeply and walking through the emotional quicksand of my past employment in order to start the process of working with the recruiting team I have contracted with.

In theory, I adore their approach. They are very intent on determining what pushes people to perform and show their best side, and to help people identify the jobs and opportunities that will contribute to a career - not just a paycheck. Clearly, this is what I was aiming at when I wrote a description of my ideal job. And in other ways, writing about my core values and thinking deeply about what matters to me, and how I know rightness from wrongness, is about finding the right fit too. I can't go back to how I was before, to that lifestyle, certainly, to giving too much for too little in return. But also, I can't go back to being numb and only letting myself measure myself against my values when on the therapy couch. I'm awake now: I feel. I see. I remember.

I can't go back. this means I have to go forward. So, in theory, the idea of testing my skills and competencies, but also having a recruiter strap on a harness and a flashlight and go caving with me to deeply excavate what motivates and excites me is exactly the right step. But in practice, it's hard emotional work for me right now to try and stay present, in this moment, but think ahead to what I want at the same time.

Wanting things is akin to expectations. And expectation can lead to attaching myself to outcomes that may or may not happen. And that is one slippery slope away form disappointment. So, wanting things feels scary to me right now.

But, of course, I do want things. I want a job I can stay in for 3-5+ years; long enough to not just build skills and extend my experience, but to grow into different responsibilities and/or titles and influence positive change. I want not to move out of my condo. I want to go see my friends on the east coast. I want things.

So, when they asked me to write about what motivated and inspired me, what I thought was, This is the mission statement I can't quite get condensed and succinct enough to write yet. But I sat myself down and made myself write the following:
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I care about people being the best they can be, for themselves first, and for one another as an extension of that. As James Taylor says in one of my one of my favorite songs (If you like this blog AT ALL please click the link and listen, as a favor to me), "We are bound together by the task that stands before us. By the road that lies ahead. We are bound. And we are bound."

I believe people owe it to themselves to be aware, to develop core values and to try and check themselves, their decisions, and their impact on others around them against those values. To be responsible for what they bring to others, and for themselves, and to be thoughtful about who they become. I came from a family that was dysfunctional in most of these ways, but had formative experiences that showed me how deeply people are connected, and how powerful it can be to share positively, and to inspire people to investigate their limitations and make a plan to reach for more.

"There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist, there is a hunger in the center of the chest. there is a passage through the darkness and the mist. and though the body sleeps, the heart will never rest. "

I sing because it opens me up to the vulnerability needed to investigate my deepest emotional motivations. I write because I can’t not write. I pursue photography because it helps me stay awake and aware to how I see things and how they can be seen differently. I am not an artist, but it makes my heart stir to create and contribute.

"It is a hunger in the center of my chest, oh yes."

I spend time with children, and students, because it is a reminder to me of the importance of asking questions, seeing things in new ways, and the excitement of seemingly ordinary things. I am a committed life-long learner because stagnation and complacency are the enemy of the kind of considered growth I care about contributing to.

I care about data, because analyzing information is how I form a picture of what has happened, and where new potential lies.  I run and swim because it gives my mind time to process these things. I organize, and plan because I want to be able to do the most I can do, and get the most out of what I am doing.

I give to charity because I know there are problems I can never fix, but not doing what I can do to make things better isn’t something I can live with - not and look at my reflection in the mirror.

"Oh let us turn or thoughts today to Martin Luther King. And recognize that there are ties between us. All men and women, living on the earth, ties of hope and love. Of sister and brotherhood." 

I place deep attention on being honest and maintaining integrity, even when it costs me, but I try also to balance this with being fair and sensitive to other people involved in any process I’m engaged in.

"Shed a little light, so we can see. Just a little light." 

I am an introspective extrovert, and that allows me to reflect deeply on my motivations, and to listen carefully, collect the data on others' passions, and to draw them out to share that information with me. Knowing people, their plans and passions, allows me to best counsel, consult, and train towards better outcomes. I want to create the opportunity for people to be just uncomfortable enough to experience real change and growth, but not so uncomfortable that they turn away from the moment where they can truly not just see potential for change, but can actually put it into action. I put a lot of my energy into careful articulation and communication in both verbal and written form because persuading and exciting people starts with trust and belief, and communication is one of the best foundations for that that I know or can offer.

I want to impact positive change in the world, in my community, in my loved ones and friends, and in myself by carefully considered analysis, thoughtfully matched goals and action plans, disciplined and inspired life-long learning, and providing and accepting the support to see areas of improvement and work towards taking responsibility to change and grow. 
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Ties of hope and love, my dear readers, hippie and tree-huggery or not, it's what I really think. I didn't use all of those song lyrics in what I wrote for that office, (in fact, I quoted James Taylor only once) but the truth is . . . I have seen that the thing that most stops work, productivity, creativity, and growth are problems between people. Its the moments when people stop talking, and start assuming, blaming, yelling, striking, or giving up on each other that alters the path irrevocably. I've also seen how getting things done, how momentum and growth and contribution is so powerfully impacted by people working and playing well with one another. When we connect mindfully, when we use it to do good things, it is the best thing.

Some day I'll be able to boil all of this down to a mission statement, but for today it was enough that I could articulate that on paper for my consultant, and have deep conversation about it and related topics. Whew. And now . . . I'm tired!!!

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.

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.