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!

Change and inspiration

A new friend and I have found ourselves in a recurring conversation. The conversation goes something like this. There are two different kinds of people in the world. Almost everyone sorts themselves primarily into one of these two categories, though of course, almost nobody is an absolutist about this. There are people who enjoy following a process, having a routine, and completing tasks generally by checking things off a list. They may or may not have been involved in creating that process or generating that list, but once there is a flow chart or operations process in place a process person will follow it unless there is very strong motivation to do otherwise. Then, there are people who look at a process, list, or assignment and instantly start thinking of improvements, ways to be more efficient, or something cooler to do. These are the people who would not do well as a personal assistant or as a prep chef - they're not going to do it the way someone else wants them to do it, but rather in the way that makes the most sense to them given their knowledge, experience, what seems most pressing at the moment, and what results they place weight on. These people won't follow a recipe, but they'll happily make one up. Or take a recipe and completely deviate from it and re-invent it. And it will at least be interesting, and likely be very good.

It will not surprise anyone to hear me say I am more the former than the latter (I know. Me, solid and boringly process oriented. You guys are all going to have a heart attack and die from that surprise). At least in things I am less confident in, I really want external validation or need to be seen as clearly doing a good job and so I'll revert to a process or shadow someone else's footsteps before I carve my own path. I once stood in a friend's kitchen an chopped root vegetables into a dice finer than a Kitchen Aid could have delivered, and was completely happy for that hour. (And if I do say so, made a fine white-goy-girl contribution to a Sephardic Orthodox Pesach with that salad) When I bake cookies, they are placed in rows as they cool. (Unless Rob is around to make fun of my and push my boundaries all at once by quietly and wickedly rearranging and de-row-ifying them. Smile) And I am the queen of checklists.

It's not an absolute for me, and there are places where I am more creative. There's no right and wrong in my writing life, so there's no operations process to measure myself against. More to the point, my writing isn't anyone else's writing so it's not really worth the time to compare apples to watermelons when I consider my writing. But if I'm baking, my mother is somewhere metaphorically over my shoulder, so yes, I am following the recipe exactly. Then again if I'm cooking? Anything could happen. I'll cook following a recipe only a few times a year and when I do, I'm usually starting to alter it about two steps into the process . . . vegetable broth here instead of water, less sugar there, and this should have rosemary in it!! I also stopped following anyone else's process for teaching after teaching my first course and find it reee-heeally constraining now if I'm limited by curriculum, materials, or too-specific expectations of what I'll deliver in any class meeting. So, I'm not all process, but I'm certainly not firmly planted in the camp of innovation either.

I am driven, often, by concern about doing things well. I suppose I never felt particularly competent at anything growing up, and didn't have a lot of confidence. That started to change for me in college, but it was late in coming. In the back of my head, there is usually a recurring floating thought of, "Am I doing this well enough?" And doing something well is easy to confuse with doing something right. I often feel like what I'm really hoping for is an unambiguous right way to do something so that there is no question of how well I'm going about whatever is in front of me. So, if handed a checklist, I'm likely to follow it for a decent bit before questioning if it's actually working to get the results I want. Over the years, I've gotten better and better at really analyzing what I'm doing or what I'm being asked to do to in terms of what goals I'm trying to achieve and then thinking about the process I'm following, working backwards from the result I want to the process to get there, further back to the starting point I'm standing at present. But if pressed, if it's important to me to seem like I'm doing a good job, or to be seen as being reliable or competent, I'll stfu and follow the process, whatever it is.

There are good things about this, in that I have learned how to be extremely driven, determined, and to make a process work. I am reliable and can often get significantly reproducible results. If given a goal, I will set to meeting it, and then exceeding it as soon as possible. I take everything seriously, even blog "assignments" my friend gives me . . . which this topic is. I will get things in on time, and early. I can translate what someone else was doing into a process, and then write a manual on it. And, no bed that I sleep in ever doesn't have hospital corners. Process people are good for some things, methinks.

The downside is that I often get . . . stuck on things I don't like or aren't working, and fail to evaluate if there is another, better way to tackle it. If I'm teaching, I'll back out and try again. If I'm writing, I'll take a break and then come back and see a better route to go. If I'm cooking, or if I'm doing a job function I've already excelled at, I'll suggest better ways to go about things. But, the rest of the time . . . hospital corners, cookies in rows, and assignments done the day before they're due.

Recently my therapist said to me that with "my personality type," skills, and accomplishments, I am the kind of person who can do something that "changes the world." (Not my words. His. I thought, "umm, really? The WORLD?") He said that people like me who have balanced out all of the pathologies, analyzed, processed, and integrated can write books, give speeches, become president, start movements. (Sidenote: It's always a little hard for me when he talks about "my personality type" because he hasn't really told me what he thinks that is . . . but I'm going with it.) This shocked me, since I'm such a routines person and fall so heavily on the "process" side. Aren't we the boring people? Aren't we the people who become the quiet backbone of the exciting, innovative people's work? Then again, I did very deliberately go to a college where absolutely everything was open ended and structure was there only if you created it for yourself so . . . maybe.

Of course, at the end of this impassioned speech he was giving me, there was a huge BUT. And it was, "you can do amazing things BUT you won't be able to do anything but make the same choices over and over if you don't change this pattern right now. " He was deeply convicted and passionate about this. Any of you who read this blog will not be surprised that some of the things he named as needing to change were making the safe (easy) choice, steeping myself in judgment and obligation, leading to feeling resentful, and taking care of others or considering it my responsibility to fix others before myself. We had talked a lot about patterns in my life, patterns in my family, and hard choices I had made in the last 20 or so years so none of this was surprising to me. And he's not the fist person to note that the overwhelmingly negative voices in my head sometimes outweigh my ability to function as highly as I could - to hear the creative muses, to feel my feelings on time, to think bigger than my little corner of the universe.

I don't actually want to become president, or be a politician of any kind. But moving people, making people think, generating and sharing big ideas does sound like the person I set out to be when a much younger me left home. So I had to sit up and pay attention when he said this. Not because he was flattering me, but because he was describing the painful way in which I have often found myself painted into a corner, holding the offending brush, paint gleaming as it drips down my arm and wondering how I got there.

But changing things means more than just not picking up the brush. It means not going near paint for a long time. It means avoiding corners and their very tempting gravity.

It means doing almost everything differently and shedding all the things that were holding me back before. It means that when I think about working out, I have to remind myself that it's now my pleasure to work out, and get out of the house and out of my head. It means seeing food differently, and giving myself a hand when I get it right. It means I have to find the "grateful" in folding my laundry, which I used to avoid. It means I have to not spend time on people or places that aren't good for me or that hold the same kind of dark gravity corners do. It means considering possible jobs I didn't in the last couple of years, and imagining myself making not just those tasks work, but that lifestyle work. It means asking potential employers hard questions instead of just nodding my head and accepting a job offer in a parking lot an hour after my final interview (which . . . perhaps I did about 6 years ago. Perhaps).

If I look very thoughtfully and brutally at the last two years of my life I see that I fought to find the time and opportunity to put singing back into my life, but somehow stopped listening to music for fun. Not at work, not in the car, and rarely at home. I made lists of what I should and shouldn't eat, but basically stopped cooking - which is really sad since I cook pretty darn well. I started writing, but only read about 5 books last year. How does that make sense? All of this speaks to me that I was very, very unhappy but avoiding staring that unhappiness in the eye. Had I looked long and hard at it, I would have been forced to make some changes, and as I wrote to a friend earlier this week, "You know how flexible and gracious I am about change." (He was my boss and the lead Sensei at a Karate studio and once, at work, gave me the "Most flexible and adaptable" award. Ha! It was ironic because I could do full splits but would have to take a moment to get over my attachment when he needed me to change lesson plans. )

So, now I'm scared . . . you know, more than a little . . . but happy. Sometimes it takes a scary moment, or 2 months of them, to force change. It's funny to me, actually, how I got launched into this by other people's decisions. I am not sure I would have made these decisions on my own, but I am weirdly grateful for them, and learning to find the grateful in folding my laundry too. It's also amusing to me because there are people in my life who see my rows of cookies, and want to mess with them to point out how structured and "process" I am. (I'll note, some of those same people roll their eyes at my itemized shopping lists but are forced to admit that they helped get the shopping done faster, and with no return trips. Ahem.) But then there are people who look at me and say, "you are so brave. You'll just go out there, see what needs to change, and do it." Those are actual words from another friend.

I suppose process vs. innovation is relative. I won't keep doing things once I'm sure they aren't getting me where I need to go. But, I don't always see what isn't working for me personally. As a consultant, I was incredibly skilled at examining other people's data and summarizing what I thought was the right story to tell about successes and areas of improvement from that data. I would do my homework with this data, engineer a conversation where someone would begin to see for themselves what I had already seen, and then use it to convince them of some things we might work on changing together. I think my instructors thought of me very often as being the harbinger or agent of change. Or maybe they just thought I was pushing them to break out of doing the same things over and over and making them change . . . sometimes painfully.

If I think very carefully about it, then, change for me is about three things. The data demonstrating the need, the will to do it, and a thought about how to change or how to go about doing things differently. But then, I also have to say, I need to unglue myself from whatever structure existed before, and that requires some inspiration to motivate me because who has two thumbs and loves structure? Not me. I have no idea what you're talking about. So then . . four things.

But, here is something else I know. There is a limit to how much change a single person can make. Running an entire region by myself for more than three years, I learned that lesson over, and over, and over again at work. I'm not sure it's different if the thing I am trying to change is me. Someone I really think highly of commented early  in this blog that the crux of what I was writing was boiled down to, what would I change, how would I change it, and how much can I change. I think that is still the main focus .  .  . just a lot of things have changed since then! I still need this accountability and mirror. And I'm still seeking other opportunities to push me when I feel like digging my heels in and pointing to  a process I'm comfortable with.

An important friend told me recently, that you never know who is watching you. Who is inspired by you. Who is moved by you. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. I think I . . . focused so deeply on the process that worked for me at work last year, that I stopped thinking about how I looked from the outside. I stopped thinking of myself as an agent of change for those people, even though that's what I was, to them or anyone. My friend is, I think, a little supernatural. She and I hadn't spoken live in weeks when she gave me a blog assignment last week that spoke to the exact thing I had been struggling with in that moment. This week she asked me to write about this just as I started digging deep down into what needs to change for me in order for things to be truly different. And in the same moment where someone else said to me, "I see and appreciate what you've done, what you've walked through, the struggles you've done. You have more courage than anyone I know."

I want that to be true. I want to be brave enough to do the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing. I want to always walk out the door with the courage of my convictions. I want to have the insight to look at my own life the way I used to analyze business data, and pick out what is working, what isn't, and how to change things so I keep the things that are working, and kick the things that aren't straight out the door.

The thing is, I want it to be true more these days because I want to inspire myself to do things, than I want to do it for others. I want, more than anything, to stop caring so friggin much about other people's expectations. I want to define for myself what winning looks like, and then do that. And. Nothing. Else. All the time. I recently said to someone, "when it comes to getting through school, I think inspiration matters more than we often talk about." I was inspired when I was in school. I haven't been since . . . I'm not sure when it wandered off but it now seems to me to be the only way for me to get back to being happier.

It's strange, right? To say I want to be more self-centered? I think it is, but it is also probably the only way for me to be the change I want to see in my own life.

I might be onto something. I sleep better now, read more, write more, listen more, eat healthier, enjoy my runs, and feel somewhat released from judgement. I've made it this far in the process, able to sleep at night (more than I used to!) and look myself in the eye in the morning, and I've done it mostly by not caring what other people think I should do. So, now the voice in my head is usually mine, and not the voice of what I think someone else thinks. That means, if I lie very still, I can hear what I really want and need now, and if I'm feeling judged or penned in by a process or habit, I'm doing it myself.

Change is painful, but funny too. I laugh a lot these days.