Stories
Riding the Current
April 26, 2022
Right now, I have a lot going on. I know, I know, I’m usually super busy and ever-active — that is, when I’m not crashed next to an always-napping Wasabi — but currently my family is dealing with some serious health issues, we just moved and I’m in the throes of coach training and starting a business, so yeah, my stress level has crept up to an 11.
A couple of weeks ago, I felt so dispirited and derailed, that I almost wanted to throw in the towel on coaching. I was letting feelings of “why bother” and “this is hard,” derail me from where I wanted to be. I shared these feelings with my coach when she asked where I was feeling stuck. She wanted to know whether I have seen the new National Parks series, hosted by President Barack Obama on Netflix. I hadn’t, so she preceded to tell me a story from the show about condors, you know, those huge birds in South America. Apparently, condors are too heavy to fly by flapping their wings alone. To be able to soar, they need to use warm air currents to help them gain altitude. The currents allow them to flap their wings once an hour, propelling their heft through the air, while conserving energy.
Maybe I had to be like the condor right now, she suggested. Doing the minimum, while letting the currents (which in my case are realistic expectations, support from friends and permission to take breaks) help me through the next couple of months. Over the course of the call, I realized that one of the best things about being coached was that I was not only encouraged to excavate my feelings, but that I had tools to re-frame my situation. I left the conversation with a renewed conviction that I was okay giving in, but I wasn’t going to give up. For now, I could trust that the current would take me where I needed to go.
Fluent in Love
February 14, 2022
In case you haven’t noticed, today is Valentine’s Day and while romantic love seems to be the focus of every advertisement, not only are there are a multitude of different types of love, but there are also multiple ways to love.
One of the most interesting books that I read last year is The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. Chapman’s thesis is that we experience love in two of five ways, one that is primary and the other secondary. They include:
1) Gifts
2) Words of affirmations (compliments)
3) Quality time
4) Acts of Service
5) Physical touch
Most people give love in the way that they experience it, and if their recipient has the same love language, it helps make for a sympatico love match, since the giver and receiver both express, and in turn, feel the same love language. What happens when two people have entirely different love languages can often be dissonance. Chapman writes about kids who feel unloved by their confused parents who say, “Of course I love my kids, I give them everything they want,” which is true for a parent whose love language is gifts. However, for the kid(s), whose love language is quality time, or physical touch, they may feel unloved no matter how many gifts are given.
It’s easy for two people to love each other, and yet not feel loved because they are not hearing their own love language. Chapman challenges his clients to not only observe how they express love but to analyze what their loved ones enjoy or complain about and adjust their acts of love to serve their beloved.
There are no value judgments about each love language. While for me words of affirmation ring hollow and I don’t react to compliments, that doesn’t mean that my friend who does love them shouldn’t get them, or that her love language is not valid. I also don’t recognize physical touch as a love language (it could be because of a shit ton of attachment issues that I developed as an orphaned baby/toddler) so it feels super awkward for me to give someone a random hug or neck rub. Like many of us, I need to actively remember to express love in the ways that aren’t in my language.
My primary love language is quality time, and my secondary is gifts. Within each love languages lies a spectrum, and some of the challenges and joys in a relationship lie in figuring out where your loved ones reside. Chapman doesn’t explore how we develop our love language; perhaps they come about through nurture or nature. I suspect that it is a combination of the two. In the meantime, if you are unsure of someone’s love language, you can always be like my dear friend A, who covers all the bases. She’s fluent in all five love languages. Makes me wonder whether she’s been struck by cupid’s arrow, or better yet, maybe she’s cupid herself?
Starve a Fever: Not on my Watch!
April 20, 2020
I once read that everyone believes they are the hero of their own story. Don’t believe me? Next time someone goes on about an encounter they had, listen to how they frame it. “Sure,” your dopey cousin will tell you, “I hit that runner in the road, but the sun was in my eyes, and I was rushing to the ER, and my mom made me late, and even if it was my fault, I’m a good person, and this isn’t who I am!” See? Cognitive science has shown that we literally can’t make ourselves be the villain. If this is true, then everyone believes that they make decisions using facts and reason, because facts and reason are what heroes use, correct? Not so fast.
Those of you who know me and have been to my house know that on the spectrum of owning stuff, I’m a minimalist. I was Marie Kondo-ing my life before she was telling us to toss everything that didn’t spark joy. I look at sleek magazine spreads with nothing on the kitchen counters and five artfully placed books on the bookshelves and think — GOALS! This extends to my fridge and cupboards as well. I hate nothing more than a full, over-crowded fridge. I love the European habit of running to the store every morning, or at least a few days a week, and picking up something fresh for dinner. You can probably see where this is going in the age of Coronavirus, where grocery trips are supposed to be weekly or bi-monthly and currently feel like a run through Mad Max territory.
A long time ago, before I even formed memories, I was malnourished. Through no one’s fault, I languished in an orphanage and had so little to eat that I didn’t have the energy to lift my head. Forget growth charts and percentages, with so little food I was the size of a toddler into my preschool years, and when I was in second grade I wore a dress that fit my daughter when she was four. Other things were affected by my lack of nutrition, including needing special ed to work on my balance and small motor skills, my abysmal math abilities (my daughter’s former pediatrician told me that math skills are affected by being malnourished, and I’ve never felt more validated) and there’s the medical theory that my type 2 diabetes may have been triggered by childhood malnutrition. I’ve adapted my life around those challenges, and they are truly no biggie, but here’s where having no food has scarred me.
I CANNOT DEAL WITH NOT KNOWING WHEN I’LL HAVE MY NEXT MEAL.
I am terrified of having no food. It’s a visceral, howling at the moon, beyond-hangry, terror felt deep in my bones. It makes no sense. I understand that I have the money and wherewithal to get my next meal, but I have to know I can get something to eat when I want it. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to have anyone else determine when I eat — from the friend who invites me over for dinner, but isn’t clear when we’ll sit down, to the travel buddy who doesn’t want to stop for lunch, to the husband who can literally go 12 hours without eating and doesn’t worry if there will be another 12 hours till his next meal. These struggles are real.
In normal times, like when I could run to a store or go to a restaurant (god I miss sitting down at a restaurant), this was no big deal. When it didn’t feel like I was putting my life on the line to shop, I never stocked up too much. And yet here I am, living in an apartment on the other side of the country from my old house (which had a gourmet kitchen with a French door fridge, huge pantry and extra freezer), surrounded with cans and boxes of food stashed in random corners: an insult to my minimalist tendencies, but a concession to my terror of having nothing to eat.
Is this reasonable? No. Do the facts support my fear? Not at all. But I have this quote on my board from Eric Weinstein: “You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into” which I deeply understand. We are emotional creatures and it’s our emotions, not reason and facts, that propel us through our life. This is neither good nor bad, but it is helpful in understanding what makes us who we are.
In the meantime, the old adage “Feed a cold, starve a fever” may hold true, but any virus that wants to get me will have to make its way through a layer of food lining my walls.
Life Interrupted
March 21, 2020
Today my kid was supposed to be in NYC, celebrating her birthday with a few of her buddies. A dear friend was supposed to be heading to Hawaii to take her grandkids on a long-awaited vacation and we had been looking forward to showing my parents Washington DC at the end of the month. Another friend’s son is getting married in April, they’ve been planning the wedding for almost a year. And two close friends have kids who are graduating college in May or June, and for all we know, that’s on hold.
It can almost seem bearable to socially distance, to have life interrupted when there is nothing special planned. But when you have an event; whether as small as a dinner party with friends or as large as a wedding, you might have feelings ranging from slight disappointment to crushing sadness to see it canceled.
A few years ago I met a woman who is now a good friend, and for me she’s been a walking lesson in grief. I don’t mean that in a bad way. She smiles, she jokes, and her energy is a beautiful luminescence, but until meeting her, I had never been able to hear intimate stories of grief, with the specific language she uses. Her husband was diagnosed with a cancer that tore through his body in a matter of months, leaving her to raise their young child alone, picking up the pieces of her shattered life. One night a group of us were talking about the days after the 2016 election and for all of us, there was a feeling that something had died after Trump won. The something was specific to each of us, but we behaved the same. Waking up thinking it was a day like any other before “the event” and then realizing that no, it wasn’t. Feeling an undue amounts of anger, or aggression. Replaying how things were supposed to be in our head. Yes, she nodded, that’s grief. Over the years, she has turned her experience into a business/social mission to help the bereaved and I’m grateful for her guidance.
I remembered this conversation when I spoke to my friend who was so sad to cancel her vacation with her grandkids. She had so many ideas, plans and desires wrapped into this trip and it’s not going to happen. “You’re grieving!” I told her, “It’s okay to feel sadness, because it’s a loss.” Fortunately for her, the grandkids live close, so she can see them as much as she’s able–with social distancing and all.
Things are going to get worse before they get better. I’m not one to give false promises. We are going to know people who are going to lose their jobs, who are going to get sick, who are going to die. Maybe from the virus, or maybe because their hospital was overrun with virus patients and couldn’t treat a heart attack or massive stroke. It’s going to be horrible and there will be a lot of anger, sadness and yes, grief.
I’m also not one to share platitudes, because I believe no amount of positive thinking stops cancer, child abuse or poverty and telling someone to reside there, just leaves the afflicted feeling like shit. But I do write fiction and I believe in a satisfying ending. Maybe not an ending that the main character wants at the beginning of the story, but the one that she can live with, that she had to live through to grow into who she is. These endings may break hearts, but in doing that they remind us of our humanity, which may be all we have when things fall apart.
But I believe that nature is still on our side. As much as I am an avowed city girl, who would rather dine at a café in the heart of Paris, than reside in nature, I’m not immune to the buds on trees, the daffodils boldly growing out of snowy ground, and the first warm breeze and I remember that you can cancel all sorts of shit, but as Tom Waits says, “You can never hold back spring.”
The Gift of the Year*
December 4, 2019
I love the holidays. I love the sight of a newly decorated Christmas tree, its branches bearing the history of holidays past, I love the smells of molasses and ginger cookies which I bake only at this time of the year, and I love the music which, in our house, I’m not allowed to play before October. But most of all I love the gifts. I love seeing packages wrapped in beautiful paper, tied up with bows, reflecting the twinkling lights of the season.
Before Martha Stewart was around to sew specially made wrapping paper and weave trim with tinsel, my mother was inspired to spend hours wrapping each gift under the tree so that it coordinated with matching ribbons and bows. Every year her theme would be different, and always more surprising than the last. One year the gifts that graced the living room were wrapped in an elegant toile paper–each tied with large black silk ribbons. Another year it was a retro-cosmic foil paper embossed with stars, that hid our gifts, blindingly bright under the tree. Perhaps the goal being that they shine enough to be a beacon for any wayward spaceship crashing into the atmosphere. But the most memorable year was the one where she spent hours gluing glitter onto Superhero print paper. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman kapowed and bamed their way across the gifts, while the presents they jumped over sparkled under the tree, carefully outlined in glue and sprinkled with a heavy dose of silver, green and blue glitter which dropped to the floor and remained a permanent part of our living room décor. All of this from a woman who worked 60 hours a week managing her own clothing store which was overrun with holiday shoppers, while her three kids at home took for granted her handmade cookies, lavish display of gifts, and all that was her one-woman Christmas-time factory!
Yes, it was the most wonderful time of the year.
As I got older the gift-giving part of the holidays lost some of its luster for me. Perhaps it was one As Seen on TV gizmo too many that changed my attitude about holiday overindulgence, but mostly it was that I was tired of receiving so much stuff I didn’t need, and, in turn, I started feeling guilty planting further excess on those I loved. Before my husband and I participated in a voluntary simplicity discussion group in 1998, we had felt some gentle rumbling about what was gradually becoming a season of discontent. The paper, boxes, and mostly unwanted items, that we knew would eventually end up at Goodwill or in a dump were not adding to our sense of holiday merriment. Not that we’d qualify for the Mohandas Gandhi award for our simple lifestyle, but we had reached a saturation point in our lives, where if we hadn’t already purchased it, we probably didn’t need it. During and after the voluntary simplicity group, we had heart-felt talks about consumption, affluenza and American excess, and realized that we were not crazy, alone or unreasonable in wanting to create a holiday that reflected our values, not one that celebrated shopping for shopping’s sake.
We are happy to give donations to our favorite charities, it’s special to say that we gave each other a flock of ducks for a gift, yet not have the messy aftermath since they are living on a farm in Africa. Yet somehow the holidays still don’t feel right to me if there isn’t something under the tree and I’m not wrapping presents. Was there anything else that granola-eating, nature-loving, environmentally-sensitive, politically-aware, anti-clutter, holiday practitioners like us could do? For ages I’ve been telling my husband to just wrap stuff up around the house that we already own and stick it under the tree. I pictured him wrapping up the cheese grater, or a box of Kleenex, or the latest Oprah magazine laying around. It would have been an only slightly wasteful gesture, even though it seemed a little pathetic. I’d get my traditional holiday thrill of seeing presents but wouldn’t have to find new places to put things, or feel the guilt of seeing so much unwanted stuff go to the landfill, except for the wrapping paper (which is an additional layer of blight we need to come to grips with). Not sure if he would look nuts for doing this, or if I was truly sincere, he wisely hesitated.
A couple of years ago, he finally took me seriously, but he put his own special twist on it. It was Christmas morning and our five year old daughter had opened her gifts from Santa and was pulling out the gifts for me from under the tree. “There are so many, you didn’t buy me more crap did you?” I ungraciously asked my husband, noting that not all the wrapping paper matched, but they did coordinate to some degree. The first gift I unwrapped was a book, but not any old book, it was the owner’s manual to our first new car, still cold as he had grabbed it out of the glove box that morning. Taped on the book was a note he had written that said, “I love driving our new car.” Whoa, this was going to be good. Next I unwrapped my old pair of glasses, no longer needed since having laser surgery that year. Inside the case was a note that said, “I love gazing into your eyes, now that you are glasses free.” After that I opened a half-empty box of English breakfast tea we kept in the cupboard, a reminder, he wrote, of the high tea we had at the Butchart Gardens on our trip to Canada the previous summer. The best and final gift I opened from him was a piece of a two by four, carefully wrapped and beribboned. The note on it said “I’m so happy we remodeled the basement together this year.”
My old glasses, an opened box of tea, a piece of scrap lumber, and our car’s owner’s manual–this had to be the best haul of Christmas presents that I had ever received since being a child! No, we had not taken a vow of poverty or spent nothing, yet nowhere were Santa-topped toenail clippers or a homeomedic massage gun. Here was a whole year of our life: celebrated, remembered and gifted to me. What more could I want from a holiday present?
We quickly adopted this as a family tradition. Last year my Christmas morning treats included an extension cord (for a backyard beautification project), a couple of used paint stirring sticks (stained with the colors from a few rooms in our house which we had re-done that year) and a pair of chopsticks (from a trip we took to Japan). Some women want diamonds for Christmas, and I hope I’ll be getting my own rock this year. We put a patio in our backyard this summer, and there’s still a substantial pile of gravel in our driveway. That’s sure to add some bling to my holiday!
Now my husband and I are thinking of phasing in this arrangement for our daughter. Maybe we can replace a few of the presents in the 3-foot-high stack she normally receives with some reminders of the happy times we had together as a family during the year. Instead of one more Barbie outfit, perhaps she’ll receive her training wheels wrapped up as a reminder of her first bike ride without them last summer. Maybe she will look back on her childhood and have fond memories of finding gifts under the tree that remind her of the good times she had all year, not just in December. I envision a future where she will be wrapping up a lost tooth, a spelling test, even a college essay, and presenting it to us– in coordinating wrapping paper, of course!
*This was originally an essay I wrote and read for Live Wire! in 2004.
*This year our daughter will get a loving reminder that we paid her first month’s rent on her first post-college apartment.
The First Step is Forgiveness
September 25, 2019
You may have suffered a staggering loss, or come home with a new family member. It may be recovering from an illness, or accident. Or as it was in my case, a cross- country move that involved downsizing, two massive road trips and a golden retriever with separation anxiety; but no matter the reason, life happens and sometimes we fall off the wagon, lose our game, the train runs off the track, or whatever euphemism you want to use to describe what it’s like to take an unplanned sabbatical and not create.
There’s a lot of recrimination and second guessing that goes into dealing with the emotions that arise after you have passed through the most intense period that’s taken you from your desk, easel, or studio. For me, writing 500 words that came out clear and cognizant used to be so simple, or at least straightforward, but now, it feels like I’m starting over. At this point I start playing head games and asked myself, do I still want to do this? Can I do this? Am I really a writer if I’ve been away from my writing for months? The answers are all a resounding yes, but I need to do something very essential. I need to forgive myself.
See, writing is a discipline that involves the writer, the reader and the muse. Setting up the time, honing the craft and channeling the energy to create, edit and polish involves a commitment and when one doesn’t show, the others can feel a bit — dumped. I don’t know about you, but when I feel that I’ve disappointed someone, even myself, one of the first emotions is shame which is often expressed as self-loathing where I play the mental tape that says “I’m a loser, I’m a failure, and how did I even think I could be a writer?” Not that any of that is helpful, it’s not. But it’s happens to a lot of us and I think rather than fight it we say, “Yup, okay. I was away for a while and I know you missed me. Hell, I missed me. I didn’t mean to leave for so long. Things got tough, but I’m back. The muse drinks the wine you poured, the reader eagerly reads what you’ve written and you forgive yourself for being gone.
After that it becomes easier to recommitment.
And if we do that day after day? I not only have faith you and I can be where we were months ago, but move even further in our practice because we can use the lessons learned during our time away and plumb into deeper depths that will enrich our work. It’s what creative people have done for ages to bring us incredible art, and we’re just part of a legacy that we’ll pass down when other artists tell our stories of how we walked away and returned.