Overriding wants, or, "What Detroit's got to do with it"

Every morning, after ramping up with a mug of weak tea, I have one giant cup of incredibly strong coffee.

Almost immediately, I am filled with focused energy, high spirits, and love for my fellow man. Which, even though it's happened every single day for the past 30 years (give or take the occasional streak of repentance), still manages to surprise me each time.

It feels so surprisingly good, in fact, that as soon as I finish my giant cup of coffee, I want another one. Just today. Just this once. Because that first cup really put me in the right mood, only I didn't quite get everything done that I wanted to while I was riding the black wave. And I have a lot to do. And, hey, it's Thursday (or Monday, or Saturday) and sunny (or hazy, or sometimes, even raining), and no one is the goddamn boss of me—why the hell not, right?

The part of me that's self-actualized, well-shrunk, and sober enough to remember the vapor trails of coffees past knows why, of course. It recalls that while one is good, two is more likely jitters, or a disruption in sleep cycle, or even (you'll pardon the indelicacy) significant gastric distress. And it further recalls, with no small quantity of shame, that two often leads to three, which inevitably opens the gateway to a flare.

But that un-evolved bundle of impulses that's jacked to the tits on Shortcut Joy Juice? It couldn't care less; it just wants more, please.

Now.

* * * * *

I'm not a Desire Noob. I grok the whole Buddhist "attachment is suffering" thing—intellectually, anyway. I'm aware that quite often, in the same way that thirst or sleepiness can masquerade as hunger, objects of desire stand in for other, less-easily identified or fulfilled (or acceptable) needs. I definitely understand that when I'm going after something outside of myself, it's usually because I'm feeling unfed somewhere inside of myself.

Where and what are a little harder to suss out.

The Universe, for its part, seems to love nothing better than a good self-improvement project, so it's been throwing resources my way.

One book I've stumbled on describes extramarital affairs—a veritable hotbed of attachment and suffering—as a duck-and-run for something each party involved would prefer to avoid addressing in himself. Which on the one hand is kind of a gigantic "no duh" and on the other, is a little unsettling: all infidelities? For all parties—transgressors and aggrieved?

So for fun (because this book sure isn't), I leaf through the back catalog of my own sordid past—the wrongs I've done, the WAY worse wrongs that have been done to me. And I reluctantly admit to myself that indeed, in every case, we were a trio of self-deluded, sometimes self-righteous jackholes who were, in one way or another, refusing to live in our truth of truths.

Another book helpfully provides a definitive list of things that spur us on to do other things. Things like wanting sex & love or fame/money/power are, no surprise, at the top, followed fairly logically by things like "master mind group" and shared survivor experiences. (Also, surprisingly—but awesomely—music!)

At the bottom, the author lists two negative change agents: fear and drugs/alcohol. Which at first seemed nutso, until I really thought about them as part of a hierarchy of intentions. After which I had to admit, they made a lot more sense: the same rotten conditions that can foster a peaceful revolution can, when you add fear, create an angry mob and insalubrious changes. And chemically-altering substances can foster all kinds of actions, but erratically and unreliably.

By this logic, it appeared that if it was my desire to feel energized, focused, joyous, and loving that drove me to drink coffee, it would take some equally strong—if not stronger—desire to counter it.

* * * * *

Speaking of sex and love, back when I was in the process of quitting smoking—which basically involves stopping all at once, then keeping yourself from starting over and over (and over) again—I remember thinking how great it would be if, every time I wanted a cigarette, in lieu of lighting up I could grab someone and make out with them. I hadn't worked out the why of it, exactly; I think I likened it to that thing where you distract yourself from an aching tooth by pinching your arm really hard. Only this would be a craving that could cancel out another craving.

Now I wonder if that wasn't what smoking was for me all along—a way to distract myself from a powerful but terrifying craving to create and/or connect with the All-That-Is.

Perhaps it wasn't ever the nicotine I really wanted, but feeling at one with all life.

* * * * *

I'm officially on the road now. San Diego and Boston last week, Minneapolis this one, a U.S. City Near You coming soon. In just over two months, I'll have traveled more than I did in the first nine months of the year combined.

This is not a complaint; I'm out there doing what I love and getting paid for it, which is something I've worked toward for a long time. It's just a reality that constant travel is far harder on my current body than the one I had when I first envisioned this as a viable lifestyle. (And that's not even getting into how travel itself has declined since my previous traveling heyday, aka the '80s.)

However, the travel is good for my body in one way. Because my desire to do this work is so strong, whatever helps me do it serves as a powerful motivator for not doing something else—in this case, drinking that second cup of coffee. When the urge to re-caffeinate comes on, I now ask myself: "Do you want that cup of coffee, or do you want to go to Detroit?"

I get that "Detroit" might not work for everyone. Right now, however, it works for me.

* * * * *

One final thought on using will (or greater, future-you wants) to override current wants: some compassion is necessary. Because change is a process, not a switch. Some days, I have the best intentions of sticking to one cup...then wash them down with a second. Other days I slip up (or back, or sideways) in other ways: I'll eat something that's not on the SCD, or I'll stay up too late and clip my sleep on the other end, or I won't go for my walk, or I overindulge on wine or (legal) sweets.

Not that any of these things are terrific, but what's worse is beating myself up over it. Note, correct, and move on. If there's time in there, I do some sussing for triggers. If not, don't beat myself up over that, either.

Because beating myself up doesn't get me closer to anything. Even Detroit.

xxx c

On becoming a reliable conduit

Once upon a time in a dingy Hollywood studio far, far away, I took my very first acting class.¹

I was there because it had been suggested to me by my improv teacher that while my writing was passable, my ability to convey actual human emotion onstage was somewhere between "painful to behold" and "chair", and that if I wanted a chance at surviving the increasingly brutal cuts up the ladder, I should hie my civilian ass to an acting school now.

I wanted that chance, all right, and a whole lot more. Things I wouldn't admit out loud: to be rich, for example, and famous, and the envy of anyone I'd ever envied. But also things I couldn't articulate yet because it would be years until I understood them: to tell the Truth, to serve with meaning, to live. I'd wanted all of these things, the ignoble and the good, so very much and for so very long that when I stepped up to work on my very first exercise in this new acting class, I was like a human funnel for raw, super-concentrated desire. It was, by all accounts afterward, electrically exciting to watch.

The next week, I got up in class to do the same exercise again and I sucked. Hard.

And continued to suck, over and over, week after week. Well, that's not completely true: occasionally, something...magical happened, and I did not suck. On certain of these rare occasions (and, significantly, when I was either exhausted, well-coached, or both), I could move emotion as well as the most skilled members of the class. The difference was that, unlike them, I had zero control over this ability; it would either be there or it wouldn't. The experience was not unlike showing up every week for a bus that might take you on a champagne-and-donut-filled ride to Disneyland, or that might drive you to the wrong side of town, strip you down to your underwear, dump you by the side of the road and make you find your way home. At night. In December.

Finally, after about a year, I became reliably good at the exercises. Never brilliant, like that first day, not once, ever again, but good enough that people didn't shrink from being assigned me as a scene partner. One of them even suggested it might be time to move to another class, a more advanced class at a different studio.

I checked it out, enrolled, and promptly reverted to sucking. Immediately, this time, without even the whispery hope of a first, great at-bat to see me through the humiliating 18-month slog to the next plateau.

* * * * *

Here is the mission statement I came up years ago, sometime after my bloody epiphany but before I started dating things so I could place them later:²

To be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love.

I've since been taken to task by my more focused friends (i.e., all of them) for establishing an overarching goal of the mushier variety, my goal does not stand up well to the heat and pressure of daily life, nor does it offer many clues as to what "done" looks like. (If you spy any, let 'er rip.) It's even difficult to hold opportunities and projects up against a "goal" like that to see if they're a good match. Or rather, too many things end up being a good match, and I miss out on the kind of focused intent required to build empires.

Then again, I'm coming around to the idea that empires are a lot like boats, vacation homes, and fancy cameras: it's nicer to have friends who have them than to deal with the upkeep yourself.

* * * * *

There is a wonderful novel I read last fall that haunts me still. It's called All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, and if the horrible title doesn't put you off of reading it, maybe this will: it's about the life trajectories of two students of a masters program in poetry. (I know, right?)

Maybe after I've read it a few more times, I will be able to write a real review that does it justice. For now, the salient point is this: the author uses these two intertwining stories, one of a graduate who achieves early acclaim and concomitant financial rewards, the other of his friend who does neither, to paint as fine a picture as I've ever seen about choices, consequences, and the day-to-day costs of "success" (deliberately left in quotes). This is a chief gift of art, its ability to bypass logic and pierce the heart of the viewer, or reader, with truth through the use of meticulously crafted obliqueness. Great art may be the ultimate in teaching a man to fish: when someone connects the dots themselves, the resulting pattern truly belongs to them.

Communicating on this level, like any kind of deliberate transfer of emotion, requires off-the-charts levels of mastery. In order to do it well and consistently, provisions must be made. By the artist. At what sometimes look like extraordinary costs.

Don't kid yourself, though: there's a cost to everything. It's only the currency that varies, and the payment plan.

xxx c

P.S. Looking for links to old posts I could not find did turn up this and this (from 2008!) on the rather annoyingly sloggy slog this kind of work can be. Then again, I also found this (from 2005!) and this, which provide some actual, concrete steps one can take to ease the pain of conduit-refinery. The blog giveth, and the blog taketh away.

¹I'd actually taken some acting classes as a kid, and even one in college. But this was the first one I'd taken where I wasn't, you'll pardon the pun, just playing around. I really and truly wanted to be an actor. Stakes change the game.

²I worry sometimes that this portends a future for myself fluttering with yellow sticky notes placed on everything, like that man who mistook his wife for a beret or just a garden-variety Alhzeimer's victim. Given how much I fear winding up with a faulty mind in an unbroken body, you'd think I'd be better about floating it in warm baths of alcohol, caffeine and sugar. Let us just say that my capacity for tricking myself has grown right alongside my other abilities.

Image by Matalyn via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

What taking care of yourself looks like in real time

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but when I was a girl, I had a brilliant notion: what if I could have all of the sicknesses of my lifetime at once, rather than having them parceled out here and there, when they were least expected and seldom welcome?

Or, because I quickly figured out my genius solution would probably kill you (after a few mind-blowing days of unspeakable agony), what if we could at least choose when we'd have them, rescheduling broken bones and burst appendixes from rare or inconvenient times (holidays, big presentations, nice weather in Chicago) to dull stretches where nothing is going on, anyway?

Like most things that seem like a great idea until you see them played out on an episode of Twilight Zone, I eventually figured out the flaw in Plan B as well: there is never, ever a time when it's good to be sick; there are only times when it's less awful than other times.

* * * * *

Staying healthy has both hard and "soft" costs attached to it, just like getting sick does. But because we don't notice health nearly as much as we do the lack thereof, it's hard to get people to pay upfront. Nothing new here. And of course, this refusal to deal with something until it's in tatters or on fire, demanding our attention, is not limited to our physical well-being. How many people do you know who have harnessed the Magic of Compound Interest by maintaining a fully-funded 401-K from the time they entered the workforce? Or, closer still to home, who have never run out of toilet paper? I mean, really, toilet paper! If there's one thing that's easier to make sure you have handy, I don't know what it is. And yet,

Well, let's leave this train of thought while the disembarking is good, shall we?

* * * * *

It is very, very easy for me to tell myself I will pay myself Thursday for a hamburger today, and gladly. To stay up late working or, even more stupidly, watching Jackie Brown for the 57th time. It is easy to say I should go to a particular event, that one of my promises to myself was to keep my promises, and that breaking them will cause me as much or more stress as keeping them. It is easy to not exercise, to drive rather than walk, to eat poorly rather than well. It is as easy to say "yes" as it is hard to say "no", and the consequences of a flippant choice are so far down the road that surely, we reason, a conveniently-timed meteor or other bit of TBD pixie dust will save us between now and then.

For me it is easiest of all to work, and to work poorly, honoring neither the time it takes to do work well, nor the extracurricular effort that goes into maintaining the infrastructure upon which the work relies. Forget what's theoretically possible; being ill these past five months has forced me to examine what is honestly possible, and desirable, and tenable.

While I've (mercifully) always been a woman of narrow interests, this go-round of illness has forced me to narrow them to a point I would not have believed possible.¹ These days, I work and I take care of myself, and that's about it. Sometimes I marvel at all of the purely social activities I hear other people talking about (on Twitter and Facebook, since I rarely go out). To me a weekend is just a calmer, quieter couple of days where the phone stops ringing, the emails at least slow down, and I feel less of a pang shutting down operations to get some rest. And I'm fine with that, there will be other times with a different mix of activities, just like there were before.²

For writers, at least, good work, like contentment, comes from boring, well-ordered lives.³ The more mental and physical clutter I removed from my life, the more room was left to do my work.

But the clearing also makes more obvious the crufty tangles that are left. Money murkiness. Patchy systems. Sludgy workflows.

So part of taking care of myself has been crazy stuff you'd think had nothing to do with taking care of yourself, all of it having to do with imposing structure. For example, my return to the uniform: establishing one look and investing in multiples to reduce stress around dressing and traveling. Dividing my week into sectors for reading, writing, and talking. I can't speak for the BDSM crowd, but in my little pedestrian, decidedly non-kinky way, I've found constraints very freeing, so much so that I continue to implement new systems as I tweak the old ones, testing for friction all the time.

The biggest recent shift in my self-care has been a rededication to GTD. Although really, what I'm doing has a whole lot less to do with any particular system for organizing one's stuff and a whole lot more with slowing things down to get clear. Which is, I think, what the best systems are: clearly thought out. Eight years after discovering David Allen's book, I'm finally getting that the crux of the system is the questioning: What's the next action? Where does this go? What does "done" look like? And that the questions themselves must be asked every single time, slowly and painstakingly before swiftly and organically. Organization doesn't come from occasional actions any more than health comes from popping an occasional vitamin. Truly taking care of myself means living in truth all of the time, not just when it is convenient.

I don't know yet what "well" looks like. It may end up not looking at all like robust good health I've been dreaming of since my Crohn's onset, health that lets me spend my energy as cavalierly as I did in my 20s and 30s.

But as I finally (knock wood, throw salt over shoulder, stab a leprechaun) pull out of this flare, I have a better idea of what putting "well" first looks like for me. It is as predictable as a uniform and as strictly run as the Catholic elementary school I wore mine to for eight years. It trades the highs of coffee for the gentle buzz of tea. It favors dollars placed toward proper food and time invested in preparing it. It goes to bed early. It enjoys fellow travelers. It dislikes drama. It spends a surprising amount of time in the bathtub and on foot.

It's my boring-ass new life, and it is awesome.

xxx c

¹When I was in recovery from my Crohn's onset, back in 2002-03, my illness was so profoundly far-reaching that convalescence was the sole item on the menu. This particular almost-flare is more like having a flu that's constantly teetering between a plain old cold and walking pneumonia that'll put you down for months, or descend quickly into some unknowable, unnamable worse. Gray areas are the hardest to navigate on your own, health-wise. At least, they are for workaholics.

²Okay, I don't solely work and rest. Over the past several months, I've lunched and dined with friends two handfuls of times, seen at least one movie in an actual movie theater, attended a party for at last a half-hour, and been to hear live music, a comedy show and a play. The play, which is running through May 29, I highly recommend (and I recommend very few plays). If you live in Los Angeles and like your theater well-done and funny, it's a must-go.

³ This gets into semantic jockeying, but for our purposes, that other contentment-plus stuff I find comes more from peak experiences. That poor, poor word "happiness" has been so batted about that I wonder what it means anymore. I tend to think my friend Gretchen, who for my money is the smartest, most accessible writer on the topic of happiness today, really writes about contentment. But it's not her fault the filthy hordes came in and mucked up a perfectly good word.

Finding a way to not start

For a long time, I've been aware of the most obvious form of addiction in my family: alcoholism.

First of all, because Mom drank. A lot. And so did Mom's dad and some of Mom's brothers. A lot. Once it spirals out of the societally-determined safe zone, alcohol addiction gets obvious fast, what with all the clanging empties and lack of employment and whatnot.¹

It took me much longer to spot the other, less obvious manifestations of the addictive temperament in my gene pool, Dad's workaholism, for instance, or my maternal grandmother's massive sugar jones, or everyone's need to have the television on as loud as possible as often as possible, especially when someone else was in the room. Hey, those aren't problems, they're part of being American!

I will pause for the briefest of moments to say I'm going nowhere near any discussions of the root causes of addiction, of whether addiction is a disease or symptom (although I suspect the answer to that is "yes"), or of where addiction and compulsion overlap. I am not a mental-healthcare professional nor have I done any scholarly boning up on addiction and its underlying/concomitant behavioral disorders.

What I can say, and with the rock-solid confidence that only years of experience and obsessive (haha) self-observation can bring, is that the triggers that set my own self-destructive behaviors in motion are manifold and insidious.

* * * * *

The purpose of drinking too much or working too much, like all self-destructive behaviors, is to create distance between you and something else: Distance between you and your feelings, usually the painful ones. Distance between you and another person, usually one whom getting close to would involve the stirring up of painful feelings. Distance between you and the truth, which, as time and the behavior goes on, becomes about how much distance between you and your feelings or you and your loved ones your addictive/compulsive behavior has created.

Most of these buffer reasons for addictions are pretty well-established. Freud was hip to them, for crying out loud. You do something bad because somewhere in your brain, you think it's keeping you from something worse.

Your first order of business in changing this stuff seems to be sussing out the "why": I work too much because no matter how well I did, I was told I could do better if only I worked harder. That I should do this was left unspoken, but hung thickly in the air at all times. So I work too much because it puts distance between me and the fear that I am not enough, and that I am unlovable as I am.²

Okay. I get why I work too much. What I didn't get, because I couldn't make it fit, is why I couldn't get to the work of working too much. I mean, seriously, if I love work so freakin' much, why am I screwing around in Facebook? Why am I checking my email for the 57th time, hoping against hope that it holds some horrific fire that must be put out NOW? (Or, barring that, a really, really important and necessary special offer that must be acted upon immediately?)

And then, like a bolt from the blue, I got smacked upside the head by Captain Obvious: my incessant fiddling, my noodling, my (say it with me, now) P-R-O-C-R-A-S-T-I-N-A-T-I-N-G is there to put distance between me and starting, so that I don't have to fail by finishing.

Given my fondness for the work of Seth and Uncle Steve, not to mention my up-close-and-personal experience with the Resistor and all those years of shrinkage, that this lightbulb moment comes so late in the game is more than a little humiliating.

On the other hand, I'm a shoo-in for Dumbass of the Year award. And I do like me some award-garnering.

Lest we end this section on a sour-ish note of self-flagellation (more distancing!), I will add that like all discoveries of a disastrous or humiliating nature, if I can really and truly turn them into lessons learned, I win.

And I really, really like winning. Obviously.

* * * * *

So. How does one turn a discovery into a lesson really and truly learned?

On a recent episode of my new-favorite podcast-slash-obsession, the host, Marc Maron, who quit drinking 15 years ago, describes the process of his getting sober.³ For a long while, it sounds like he had a waking-up to how drinking (and for him, drug use) was really taking away much more than it was giving. Once he really and truly got that, he said, he had to find a way of not starting, which sound like what the Program was for him. AA is all about not starting, not taking that first drink. If you don't have the first one, you can't have all the subsequent ones, which are what get you into trouble.

Not-starting looks like not-doing, but really, it's doing other things. Taking other actions. Probably small, simple actions (although we're not going to be foolish enough to bait the Resistor by calling them "easy"). And probably many actions, over a long period of time. There may be the occasional grand, cinematic gesture, like throwing a half-full pack of cigarettes into the trash just like that. But the real work begins with the not-starting later: not fishing the pack out again four hours later when you get back from dinner really wanting a cigarette. Not buying a fresh pack the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

And my own experience of becoming a person who didn't smoke after having been one who did, and like a chimney, and for 12 years, was that while the story of throwing away that half-pack was great, it was the actions I took that got the job done. The stupid mantra. The mass quantities of cherry Halls Mentho-Lyptus cough drops. Inventing errands. Making myself go places where smoking was not allowed (much harder to do back in 1980s-era Chicago). Keeping my hands and mouth and brain busy with something, anything else.

I do these things so I do not do that thing. I choose these actions so I do not lapse into that one.

* * * * *

Fortunately, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about this shit. On the blog alone, I've got over six years of obsessive self-analysis. Then there are the volumes of journaling and morning pages, the now-hundreds of hours in the Google Wave with Dave (I'm kind of glad I can't see those stats), the countless discussions with friends and fellow travelers, the aforementioned years of shrinkage. Plus, in case you hadn't noticed, I read. A lot. (Obsession: it has its upside, too!)

Between all of the talking and all of the thinking and all of the reading, I've learned a good deal about the nature of what I want to stop, i.e. both "work" that gets in the way of Work and too much work, period. At almost-50 years old, I think it's safe to say that I will be addressing their root causes, fear, mishegoss, until they scatter my ashes at sea. But I'll also say that at almost-50, it is beyond time to put on my Big-Girl Pants and do some of the tedious, outside-in work of taking actions, if for no other reason than the idea of not being able to do my Work or to work or even to "work", if it comes to that, is anathema and time and gravity are conspiring against me. Those cocksuckers.

The actions?

Well, I have a long list. I may get to itemization in future posts. Or I may just dive into action and leave you hanging. To spend any longer on this post would be a starting, not a not-starting, if you catch my drift.

For now, I will leave you with my vaguely-defined commitment to (a) establishing actions that support Work and (b) establishing additional actions to ensure not slipping into "work" and overwork. These include, but are not limited to, such incredibly mundane and tedious actions as brushing my teeth, logging time, and processing emails according to a specific protocol. In other words, a lot of things I either do or should be doing regularly.

I will also leave you with this excellent post by Ramit Sethi on barriers which I wish I'd read five years ago. Or that maybe I did read five years ago and was too dense to get. Whatever. It's excellent, and pertinent to this discussion.

And, finally, I will leave you with this exhortation: try to be nice to yourself. At least as nice to yourself as you'd treat someone you were indifferent about, preferably nicer. Not in an indulgent way. Just nice.

It's not going to fix everything. But it's a start.

xxx c

¹It's also terrifying enough to serve as a deterrent: I drink, but I scrutinize my intake ruthlessly, one might even say with an obsession that borders on the ironic, for fear of ending up like the family drunks.

²I would assume I also work too much because it puts distance between me and the fear of dying, probably because I always say I'm not afraid of dying, and the lady doth protest too much/etc.

³More on this soon enough, much more, but if you like your introspection served up with a healthy dose of wit, heart and savoir faire (and don't mind swearing), do yourself a favor and subscribe to the WTF podcast. Insanely good, obsessively so, even.

Image by chilebeans via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

What it takes to hew to you (Part 2)

This piece builds on this one, which you may or may not want to read as well.

Once upon a time, when I was very much like I am today, only with a lot more income and a lot less happiness, I found myself shopping in a store that sold nothing but sexy ladies' underwear.

Now, if you know me in even the most passing of ways, you know this is a very unusual thing, and if you've known me in the Biblical sense, you're probably re-reading the above sentence to make sure it says what you think it said. For I am no more a lady of lingerie than I am a lady of pedicures, blender drinks or fancy jewelry. Not that I judge! To each her own, and more power to her. But I buy my panties plain, on the cheap and under duress. Any top/bottom color coordination happens strictly by accident, luck of the drawer, if you will, and most of it looks better off than on. Which, to my mind, anyway, is the main point of underwear vis-à-vis your vis-à-vis-type situations.

True to form, I was there at this sexy lingerie store under duress as well. My boss at the time, a chic and lovely woman whom I'm sure had no end of matching drawers in her own drawers, had extracted from me a promise: that while I was in Los Angeles on my next production gig, I would go to this particular lingerie store and buy myself some high-end undergarment of the completely superfluous variety. It had to be expensive, in other words, and it had to be sexy.

Half of the store was dripping with lace and the rest of it vibrated with the various colors of the rainbow. Promises or no promises, there were some depths to which I would not stoop, which pretty much left Sheer, Black and Clingy. I found some one-piece something or other that looked okay, sexy, even, I guess, given the right lighting and enough liquor. It cost $75 (I still remember!), it itched (the better, I supposed, for wishing oneself out of it) and served no actual, foundational purpose.

I tried it on at least fifty times, and wore it exactly three. Each time I felt not only stupid for having wasted $75 on a shitty piece of nylon but whatever the opposite of sexy is. And itchy. Off it went to Goodwill.

I am sure it made a terrific addition to some girl's Slutty Olympic Swimmer costume that Halloween.

* * * * *

I was having coffee with The Chief Atheist while back, one of those occasional treats I look forward to with a genuine pleasure I would not have believed possible ten years ago when we were fresh out of the marriage. He is a sincere, smart and forthright fellow; also, he is hilarious. And for my part, I am fairly pleasant to be around now that I'm not a miserable wannabe stewing in her own hot soup of envy and denial.

At some point during the conversation, we were talking about the shapes our day-to-day lives had taken now that we were no longer together, and now that I was (finally) living alone. His, as always, is filled with lots of laughter and activity, always well-populated with friends, colleagues, or loved ones. Mine, by contrast, is filled mostly with quiet and work, punctuated by spikes of peopled activity, and dotted lightly with extremely low-key relaxation amongst one or two close friends. Excepting perhaps the financial freedom to have it all more so, neither one of us could be happier with the way things had turned out.

We had just about wrapped up the topic when he paused, smiled just a bit and said, "I never really got it while we were together, but I finally realized it recently: you weren't kidding; you really did need more time alone than most people."

He's right, I really do.

* * * * *

The good news about the Internet is that it makes it really easy to get ideas; the bad news is that it makes it really easy to think you should be applying them to yourself, now!

The always-on, always-up nature of the Internet is great when you're feeling low and need to get you some hot baby penguin action. It's not so great when you're feeling unmoored and adrift, in an in-between phase, unsure of what the next shore will look like, much less how to get there. This accounts for a lot of the business bipolar disorder you see on the web: constant overhauling of business models, flip-flopping of pricing, re-branding of websites, and of course, rampant copycatting of UI elements, visual identity and even language.

I'm not talking about evolution or emulation. Things can and should change, and we all learn by adopting and mimicking the styles of those we admire, all of us, even the geniuses (and if you don't believe me, go rent the Scorsese documentary on Dylan. It'll blow your mind.)

But if you're doing things because you see other people doing them, beware. If you're using things because so-and-so is, beware.¹ Not only do you have no idea of why they've chosen do x, y, or z, you can't even be sure it's working for them. Or that it will for much longer. To borrow Seth Godin's astute summing-up of the futility of emulation in this era of constant and rapid-fire change, "if you're looking for a map...you've totally missed the point." He was talking about business models, but it works for positioning, for identity, for personal trajectory as well. Today's opportunity lies in uniqueness and novelty, in innovation and personal touch, and the quickest way to quash that is to lose the thread of yourself in the tangle of other people's business.

Does this mean you should not surround yourself with people you admire? Read good things? Take in with an eye toward what works, what draws you in and delights you? Of course not. If anything, I would do more of it, and more broadly. As with food, so with brain food: the healthiest diets seem to be the most varied (provided you're not just varying which drive-thru window you pull up to).

A good exercise for making sure you're hewing to you is to be able to point to any element of your life and say why you chose it and why you love it. A sofa. A fragrance. A logo. An entrée. A cellphone. A lover. A project. A pair of jeans. A business partnership. A morning spent on Facebook. An evening spent with American Idol.

Even a blog post.

I wrote this one because I get challenged a lot for my business and marketing decisions, or the lack thereof.² I can point to much of what looks crazy to the outside world and tell you why I do it my way. But there's a distressing amount that I cannot explain with anything better than I don't want to be like them. Or I hate that thing, over there. Or just I don't wanna! You can't make me!

Which, for a person who not only is into the whole self-actualization thing but who also hires herself out to help people sort out what's working and what's not, is not only hypocritical, but more than a little nutty.

On the other hand, who among us isn't a work in progress?

* * * * *

Are you a philistine for not personally sweating each individual detail of your life? Hell, no. Neither am I, and I'll wager I have a helluva lot more free time to muse about these things than you.

Could you benefit by thoughtful ongoing review of particular elements of your life, your work, your outward face, your inner workings? I cannot see how you couldn't. The unexamined life, and all that.

If you don't know who you are, start there. If you've got a pretty good handle on that, pick one aspect of your life (or your business, or your marketing) and start doing an inventory to see if things jibe.

Is this me or is this something I'm defaulting to? Is this something I want, or something I think someone else wants of me? Is this an outdated me, and am I okay with changing it?

It is not a speedy process; when you rush it, you end up with things like a $5000 website you hate in three months and want to completely change. Or a $75 onesie for whores.

Do not look to the left or the right. Look at yourself.

Chances are, that's what that other guy you admire so much did...

xxx c

¹And of course, if you're using things you dislike because you think you should, or you think it will get you there faster, just stop right now.

²A lack of a decision is always a decision. Think of it as passive-aggression against yourself, and see if that doesn't move you to get off the dime and do something about something.

Image by k david clark via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

The 24-hour writer (or, "It's not you, it's You of the Past")

Warning: while this essay is really about writing, it contains highly descriptive talk, and quite a bit of it, about poop. If you're very sensitive to poop-talk, you may want to skip it. Plenty of other stuff for you to read on the interwebs!

Back when I was first diagnosed with Crohn's disease and trying to figure out this crazy new way my body was functioning (or not), I kept several diaries.

The first was a diary-diary, where I'd blather about what was happening in my brain and my heart because of all the upheaval in my gut. This is the diary that kept me sane, along with a few very carefully chosen friends who were good at dealing with illness and could either look at me without draining of color or talk to me like this was just something I was going through, not something I was destined to be.

Within this diary, I also kept a kind of secondary diary-slash-visualization-map of my gut healing, drawing my poor, broken colon every day with all of its current inhabitants: the Asacol, prednisone, Cipro, and mercaptopurine; the "bad" bugs that had taken up camp and brought me to my knees; and the "good" bugs that I was now sending in via massive infusions of SCD-legal yogurt. I added callouts and anthropomorphized the bugs with little faces and talk bubbles, using a lot of gentle encouragement to usher them out, with plenty of "Thanks for the help, we'll take it from here!" reassurances from the new troops.

But in addition to all of this fairly squishy emotional stuff, I also kept a ridiculously comprehensive third diary of input and output. By which I mean I wrote down everything that went into my body and everything, including the quality and consistency, that came out. We called them "food logs" in SCD parlance, but let's face it: they were poop journals, filled with page after page of Mr. Hankeys and the stuff that made them.

I kept this diary daily for well over a year, refining and finessing it as I went along. As I became sensitive to things that might impact my intestinal health, I'd add them: my menstrual cycle, my sleep (both quantity and quality), my external stressors. After a while, it became ridiculously obvious what worked and what didn't, what I needed to do more of and what, or whom, I needed to do my best to avoid.  Toward the end of the first year, my father's Crohn's took a severe turn for the worse, and his organs began shutting down. The day I got the call, almost immediately, I started bloating and cramping. And sure enough, the next morning I was gifted with an enormous explosion of diarrhea lurking behind the perfectly normal poop that had formed in the chute before the bad news.

The good news, however, was that I'd determined what bad news, or too much broccoli, or too few hours of sleep, would bring.

* * * * *

I have a friend who is a sort of Program maven, by which I mean she has spent a lot of time figuring out how 12-step thingamajiggies work, and the patterns they tend to follow. And one of the central tenets of all Programs is bringing your full attention to that which, up until now, you have not. You start with the obvious thing, your drinking, your beating yourself up over someone else's drinking, your sexual fixations, your spending, and you note it. All of it. She told me that in Debtors' Anonymous one of the mandates is that you keep a diary noting every penny that goes in and out of your life. Every penny, no rounding!

What it does is bring awareness to the actions you likely had been sleepwalking through before: picking up "just" a pack of gum at checkout, sticking a couple of quarters in the parking meter, blowing a month's rent on the third race at Santa Anita.¹ As an experiment in untangling my own clutter around money, I test-drove an index-card hack my friend Alison came up with, for two weeks, I noted every expenditure or bit of income, and any emotions that bubbled up around it. It was illuminating and not a little alarming, seeing all the anxieties secretly embedded in each transaction. Were I to do it long-term (like the Debtors' Anonymous tool) and add a lot of surrounding detail (like my poop diary), I'm guessing I'd start to see some pretty helpful causal connections.

* * * * *

Writing is physical. There's an emotional component, certainly, and maybe even a mystical one. When I get cranking, it certainly feels like I'm channeling something that's not exactly me.

But physically, it's your ass in the chair and your hands at the keyboard (or on the pen, you freak, you). Even the rogue, fairy-dust stuff is fueled by whatever keeps your brain floating in a happy mix of water and salts. And none of those things work as well, your ass's ability to stay put, your hands' ability to move, your gray mass's ability to process, unless a whole series of things have happened before. Things like eating and drinking the right things in the right quantities. Things like exercise and rest and full-on rest, a.k.a. adequate sleep. And high-quality sleep: sleep begun and ended at the right times, uninterrupted, if possible. I have written enough and long enough that I can power through a crappy body day, but it all goes much, much more easily if, for at least 24 hours before I sit down to write, I have been living right. Because writing takes literal, physical energy.

If it didn't, Laura Hillenbrand would have 14 amazing books written by now and I'd feel even worse about my inability to produce a single one.

* * * * *

It's easy to mock the body optimizing movement: Tim Ferriss has done some pretty extreme and even borderline creepy things in the name of getting the most out of his original-issue equipment. What's more, he's done it in such a way that it would be equally easy to chalk it up to hubris, a need for attention, a desire to cheat death, a lust for winning. But that would be me (or you, or anyone else) judging: even if he was completely forthcoming and totally forthright about his reasons, it's still him articulating them, and there's still some part of the spectrum we're all unable to be completely honest about because we can't access it: we have a blind spot, we don't know what we don't know, and because we're constantly evolving, we can't know everything about ourselves. (Although with time and practice, we can get a lot better at guesstimating.)

But I'm starting to get it now, on a deeply personal level. While I don't fear death, I live in abject terror of a long, slow, decline. I am wild at the idea of not being able to get all the music out before certain music-making parts of me shut down. What a cruel joke, that I finally start to "get" it, and another "it" is taken away. So I stay in and soak in a hot bath when I might rather go out. I forsake my beloved espresso for weak black tea, and slowly work in green instead of even that, though it always and forever will taste to me like drinking a wet lawn. I note the days when the writing comes well, and what I have and have not ingested/done/experienced in the hours leading up to this.

I am not just a writer when I sit down to write: I am a writer three hours before, in my last REM cycle. I am a writer 10 hours before, when I forgo another half-hour of BBC porn on my laptop for a (fiction, non-self-improving) book to wind down with. I am a writer 14 hours before, when I make my worker-bee self stop for the day.² I am a writer 18 hours before, when I elect to do my stupid Nei Kung instead of answering another 10 emails; I am a writer 20 hours before, when I stop myself from eating a Medjool date, yes, that's what it's come to, and have some yogurt with applesauce instead. (No one can say I don't know how to live it up, baby!)

The gift of operating a writing business from a rapidly decaying, overused-and-abused bag of aging parts is that I see with far more clarity what works and what gums up the works.

To be a better writer today, I had to start yesterday.

Fortunately, to be a better writer tomorrow, I can start today.

xxx c

¹Hey, I don't judge, I'm the lady who spent the better part of a year divesting herself of (mostly, for nothing) what it took dozens of years and thousands of dollars to mindlessly acquire. And when Brooks helped me bring my awareness to the tangle of emotions I had caught up in my clutter, he did it the same way: we looked at each item, one at a time, and asked whether I still needed it or could let it go.

²If you're doing the math as we go, I usually start writing at 9am, which means I'm still stopping my work day late, at 7pm. Worker Bee is working on it, okay?

How to be a better writer

A good friend of mine has some issues with language.

She is, by her own admission, a lousy speller. While her vocabulary houses more than a few five-dollar words, they're as likely as not to turn up as malapropisms when hauled out. Her sentence construction can be choppy, her grammatical structure inelegant and her punctuation, when she uses it, would most charitably be described as "creative."

My friend is one of the best writers I know, and I'd read almost anything of hers I could get my hands on.

* * * * *

I get asked sometimes how to be a better writer. Me! Who, if writer prizes were being handed out would almost certainly win the one for Least Aware of Her Own Process. (Note: I'm currently taking pains to change this. They are painful pains. More on this shortly.)

Sometimes it's the earnest request of a person wildly capable in another arena, or someone who came up in another language, then moved to the U.S. and got by on things like wit, smarts, hard work and the acquisition of practical skills. Usually, anyone who bothers to ask me this isn't half-bad at writing already, but is frustrated with not being as good at writing as they are at their core competency, or is embarrassed by their lack of facility in arcane areas like grammar and usage.¹

Other times, it's the annoying non-question of the dilettante. They don't really want to know, or rather, they have no interest in actually doing the work required to get there. They're looking (maybe) for a class or a book or a coach, a silver bullet.

But I tell them the same thing I tell anyone who really wants to be a better writer: (1.), read more good stuff; (2.), write more, period; and (3.) if you're already doing quite a bit of both of those things, consider taking an acting class or an improv class or something that will get your stubborn head connected to your damned heart, along with the rest of your organs.

While good teachers and coaches and classes can absolutely help move things along (and make the moving-along way more pleasant), there's really no avoiding numbers 1 and 2. (You can get around #3 via other kinds of emotional education, either on a shrink's couch or in the classroom of life. Budget accordingly.)

* * * * *

This how-to-get-better-at-writing business has been much on my mind lately.

Partly because I have been getting a lot of very nice compliments recently via the electronic mails about my own writing. (You know who you are, and thank you. They have been lifelines to me lately, especially given my low spirits from the Crohn's flare.) I usually look at my own writing with a giant shrug of "Meh.", because I'm always looking at other people's writing and comparing it to that. Yes, Mark, I know comparison is from the devil. But I've only recently been made violently aware that I am actually comparing my struggles with writing to other people's finished writing. Talk about your a-ha! moments.

Anyway, sometimes the nice things are just nice things, but sometimes they come bundled with a query for writing services. While I know there's gold in them thar hills (and I also know the only thing I'll never say "never" about again is saying "never"), I'm afraid that's off the table for the foreseeable future. Call me superstitious, but I couldn't write a damned thing of worth until I'd put a fair bit of distance between me and copywriting, and I'm terrified that picking it up again might the writing equivalent of shaving Samson. Or worse, something of more lasting or even permanent nature, a really, really strong depilatory or a laser or something. Besides, at this point, my voice is so my voice, I would probably be a rotten copywriter. I think the best ones are great mimics who thrive on perpetual new intake. So not me anymore.2

But another big reason it's been on my mind is that finally, FINALLY, I am preparing to teach what I know about writing. A very particular type of writing (blogging, natch), but still, writing. I feel woefully ill-equipped for the task. I feel stupid and ungainly and lost. I feel 100% certitude that I am worse than every other teacher of writing who ever taught.

In other words, I feel like those people I'm always fielding the "how-to-be-a-better-writer" question from.

* * * * *

So that thing about pain I brought up, above? We're back to that. Lots and lots of pain and shyness and anguish and nervousness. As I slow down to look at the things I already know. As I bring my full attention to all the things I do not know. The good news in this is realizing I'm actually a better writer than I give myself credit for most of the time. The bad news is everything else: The unknown! The fear of failure! In public! The anxiety over not feeling good enough!

And at the same time, I know that putting myself through this not only will teach me how to teach, but will teach me more about writing. And probably speaking. And definitely learning.

Everyone who is any kind of a writer worth being always wants to be a better writer. The reading changes, and should keep changing. The form the writing takes changes, and should keep changing. But it keeps on keeping on.

Everyone who is any kind of a writer worth being is also, on some level, balls-out terrified. Because if you are really becoming a better writer, while you are certainly building on what you have done, you are always, always, always doing something you have never done before. You are living, you are improvising, you are making it up as you go along.

Which is why no matter how great a writer you are, you should have a few butterflies scattered around the joint. Because if it ain't butterflies, it's probably buzzards.

Remember my friend, the great writer with wobbly vocabulary and the rickety foundation of grammar and usage? She is a great writer because when she writes, she is 100% alive. She is living, which is to say growing, changing, in that very moment. So life pulses through her writing, and flows through you as you're reading.

* * * * *

Read more (good) stuff. Write more, period. If necessary, please do get some improv training or qigong lessons or your head shrunk.

If you really want to be a better writer, though, learn how to make friends with fear and open your heart to change.

And then get yourself used to the idea of doing that forever.

xxx c

¹And I get why they sweat it, some people are horrible snobs about usage. I wish I could remember who said it, but someone big, like, Seth Godin-level big, went on record as saying a lot of our grammatical and usage rules are b.s., elitist, kept in place to make people feel bad about themselves. English is crazy plastic (callback alert!); we're adding "bad" pronunciations and rules along with new words all the time. I can be a little on the snobbish side myself, dangerous in someone who plays pretty fast and loose with rules she's not 100% sure of, but only time it really bothers me when people "break" English is when they are trying to make themselves seem more educated than they are. Even then, I mostly just feel sorry for them now that I am all grown up and full of equanimity and stuff.

²I do have an inkling of how I can employ my writerly skills to help you out, though, so if you're interested, watch this space. Better yet, get on the newsletter mailing list.

Image by milena mihaylova via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Making allowances for the way you work

Yesterday morning, I finished reading Unbroken, the true-life story of Louis Zampirini's triumphant, plague-filled journey from punk kid to Olympic runner to WWII Air Force bombadier to POW to haunted veteran to redeemed hero. It's an amazing story.

As I tore through it on my Kindle, the only way for the spindly-limbed gal to fly when it comes to oversized books, I kept thinking three things:

1. Damn, this is an amazing story!
2. Would I have what it takes to make it through this?
3. How in the wide, wide world of sports did Laura Hillenbrand write this with CFS?

The joke answer, of course, is "very, very slowly." It would take a wildly robust writer a long time to research and write a compelling and historically-accurate 400-page book about a series of events in a time when everyone's last sneeze was not recorded for posterity*; it took Hillenbrand 10 years.

* * * * *

I didn't pick up Unbroken because Laura Hillenbrand has a chronic illness and I have a chronic illness and hey, why not be inspired by a writer whose chronic illness is a thousand times worse than mine to get off my lazy, relatively well ass and write, dammit; I picked it up, well, downloaded it to my electronic reading device, because I'd heard people rave over and over about what a gripping tale, what an immersive experience it was. Hard-core lefties, Republicans, old folk, youngsters, literati. Enough of a spread to render the thumbs-up agnostic.**

I picked it up because I had a long plane ride ahead of me and, thanks to tailwinds, a longer one back, and I fly in the back of the bus, where postage-stamp-sized trays jutting out into what could only laughably be called "room" preclude any sort of real work, much less 15" laptop-opening. It's a situation that calls for books one would describe as "gripping" and reading experiences one would call "immersive."

I picked it up because, after a rough three weeks patching myself up from a foolhardy near-crash outside of San Francisco, I knew I'd be spending more time alone in my hotel room resting when I wasn't strictly needed in order to spend the energy my job called for when I was.

* * * * *

Toward the end of my talk, I got a question that comes up so frequently, I may end up adding it to the presentation proper: How do you do all of this?

You see, I've just spent 50 jam-packed minutes going over Right Behavior online in our fast-paced-and-rapidly-changing modern media landscape (and indicating that much of it is now expected, if not required, in real life). All the ins and outs of tweeting and Facebooking and policy-creation and email-sig-shortening that you need to know so you don't fall behind, or worse, come off like a thankless jackass online. Understandably, this is overwhelming to people at the beginning of the learning curve. Just the idea of doing it is overwhelming, never mind the actual learning and doing.

I get this; I do. And while I answer for myself, because really, that's all one can do, I am really giving the answer for everyone, everywhere, regardless of the condition of their health or the state of their business or the vigorous and very real demands on their life: you make accommodations for what is important to you. My work is important to me, so I don't do or have a bunch of things normal people have. Lately, I've realized that my health is important to me, so I'm learning to accommodate that, too. Slowly. And, if I'm honest, as much because I'm terrified at the thought of not being able to work as I am not being able, period.***

It may help to remember that while I'm relatively facile at this whole being-online thing, I have my own c*cksucking boulders to push up my own motherf*cking hills. For example, I have always just been lucky enough with money and modest enough in my desires that I didn't have to learn anything about it to get by in relative comfort. Now the economy is squeezing me along with everyone else, AND I'm (almost) 50, AND I want a couple of bigger things that are simply not going to be possible without winning the lottery or changing my rhythm. And I don't play the lottery.

* * * * *

Everyone has their basket. The older I get, the more I think that most choices boil down to love or fear, and most of the pain in the world is caused by choosing the latter. It is much, much easier to do the scaredy-cat thing and peer into the tippy-tops of other people's baskets and become covetous or enraged or pitying or what have you. It is much harder to look at yours, get down with what's in it, and get to work. However you work. Whatever your "work" is.

But that's what's required: complete honesty looking inward, and complete love looking outward. Honesty and love. No more, no less. Not very sexy, but there it is.

I'd be surprised if anyone gets all the way there, ever, before the lights go out. I have a looooong way to go, which is why I'm spending more time in hot baths liberally sprinkled with Epsom salts than I am at the discothéque. (Well, and also because I don't think there are such things as discothéques anymore.)

Give yourself the room you need to live the life you want. That's what all this stuff about decluttering and streamlining and goal-setting is really about. Room to do what's right, and what feeds you, and what saves the world. Once you have enough room, see about what you can do to provide someone else with some before you get yourself more. (Because really, beyond a certain point, how much room do you need?)

We all know what's best for ourselves. And we can all start making sure it happens right now.

xxx c

*Actually, another thing I kept wondering while I read was how these men in the Japanese prison camps managed to keep diaries at all, much less preserve them for 60 years. Their ingenuity and stubborn determination made me ashamed of my dithering over writing software programs and WordPress glitches.

**Speaking of agnosticism, I almost certainly wouldn't have picked it up if I'd known there was an actual religious redemption in the story. In the context of Zampirini's life, though, it not only makes sense, you're happy when it happens. I'm wary enough of organized religion to say my own, little "hosanna" when one of the good guys turns up.

***I know, I know, it's messed UP. I'm not saying this is a good way to be, or that it's a place I want to stay. I'm just being brutally honest about where I am. Because in my experience, skipping that first step really makes the whole thing go farkakte.

Photo © Addison Geary Photography.

The good news is the apple kicks your ass

Pulling out of a flare is a tricky business.

You get better on a very slow upward trajectory, with occasional "two-steps-back" days from eating too volatile a mix of ordinary ingredients (oh, BOY, do canned tuna and hard-boiled eggs not mix) or too "advanced" of an item. Yesterday, after weeks of not tasting an uncooked vegetable or piece of fruit, I broke down and got jiggy with half an apple. Look out, world! I'm eating an entire HALF of a raw apple!

A half-hour later, I was soaking in a hot Epsom bath to ease the cramps shooting across my lower back.

What's really odd about this particular flare is that while I wouldn't say I'm overjoyed to be dealing with it, neither is it bothering me as much as the past few have. For whatever reasons, age? wisdom? resignation?, I've adopted an attitude that much more closely matches that of my initial recovery, back in the fall of 2002. Or maybe it's just that this time, I'm back to me being able to rest on my own in my sweet little apartment, all tidy and peaceful and filled with the comforts and treasures that soothe me. While I no longer have the huge financial cushion I did (not to mention the assumed easy earning power of a robust economy once I was well enough to rejoin the living), I have enough, thanks. (And I'm probably even more deeply grateful to have it.)

Work is another thing, and an exceedingly interesting one. I haven't not been working; I've just been working very carefully, chipping away at things here and there in the background. Pulling things off the home page of the site. Tweaking things quietly, in the background. Writing, writing, writing. There is more time for this because I am not getting out much right now, but I'm still capping things at a reasonable (for me) 7 or 8pm and climbing into my salty tub. On top of a, shall we say, leisurely-paced day. The work comes more slowly when I'm impaired, but I am able to pay closer attention to the way it comes as well as the words themselves, if that makes any sense.

For instance, I notice myself getting upset over getting stuck in certain places (a "way" thing) and I notice myself (over)using the same words or construction (a "word" thing). Slowing down to see this has created room for me to relax and let some other solution bubble up, getting up and moving to my analog desk, or grabbing a stack of index cards to do my version of my friend Daphne Gray-Grant's excellent advice to mind-map pre-writing. (If you sign up for her newsletter, you'll get a copy of her mind mapping instructions. It's plenty to get started, and the newsletter is consistently useful if you do any sort of regular writing, or just want to understand how writing works.)

Slowing down is just outstanding for noticing things, period. Those of us who operate in overdrive probably do so at least partially to blow past certain parts of the scenery we find a little unattractive. My personal adopt-a-highway program has made great progress along certain stretches of road, but when I slow down, I'm embarrassed to see the junk I've allowed to accumulate near certain scary underpasses and dark tunnels.

I feel a little guilty bringing up the feeling poorly. I find myself impelled to do so, though, because I'm not good enough at saying "no" sans explanation; I almost always feel like "no" is not enough, that "no" needs some accompanying excuse. (And I know that's not true, I'm just saying that so far, that's how I've operated.) Inevitably, it brings up expressions of sympathy, because people are kind and empathetic and such.

I am coming around to the idea, though, that illness isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is just a thing, like tallness or shortness, bigness or smallness, oldness or youngness, singleness or marriedness. There are times when it is better to be tall than short, and being very short, I can enumerate them with alacrity. On the other hand, "tall" is a distinct disadvantage in the context of "commercial aircraft." I have been single and married and everything in between and guess what: so far, I prefer single. Try traveling back in time and telling 25-year-old me that, though. You couldn't: she was too busy doing actuarial calculations to avoid ending up chairless when the music stopped. (Hint to 25-year-olds: the music always starts up again, there are all kinds of nice chairs nowhere near the ring, and you may not be the sitting type.)

Do I very much look forward to having a great deal of energy again? I do! Even more, I look forward to using it wisely, so that it comes in a steady, sustainable flow, not pedal-to-the-metal bursts followed by a blowout. I look forward to it so much so that I am moving hyper-slowly now. It is not exactly pleasant, all this noticing, but it is one of the most fascinating shows in town...

xxx
c

P.S. One of the crazy little things I did was to put up an FAQ, something long, long on my to-do list. More on that later, but man, do I ever see how a well-done FAQ might significantly reduce drag on the average one-woman operation. Talk about enhancing sustainability!

Image by iMaffo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Why I never pass up an opportunity to quote Beverly Sills

A good friend of mine recently decided to quit smoking.

She'd quit before, which obviously means that the quitting didn't quite "take." So this time, she decided to quit differently.

First, she's investing money in the deal. For them amongst us what is on the cheap side, money can be a powerful motivator. As my friend said, "I'll be damned if I'll spend this much and not quit."

Second, she's spending it on hypnotherapy. I quit the cheap way, but I'd raved to her about my experience with using hypnotherapy to get back on the diet for my Crohn's last fall: one session, one recording that I listened to for about two weeks, and done. I still look at potatoes or rice or a McDonald's drive-thru sign with longing, but the impetus to go for it is gone. It was a singular and fascinating experience which I've not shut up about since.

* * *

Hypnotherapy done right is part of a larger self-excavation process: getting at the "why" sandwiched between the smart, true part of you that doesn't want to smoke or eat or do crack and the part of you that has, until now, reached for a cigarette or french fry or crack pipe regardless. My friend's "why" is her business, but anyone old enough to want to read this blog has more than a passing familiarity with the many, many shapes and sizes a "why" can take. "Less-than" Why. "Angry" Why. "Social Anxiety" Why. "Why, Oh" Why, a.k.a. "Woe Is Me" Why.

If any of these look like variants on "Fear" Why, it's because they are, of course, every last damned one of them. My god, what won't fear stop us from doing? Or keep us doing, depending on whether the action is salubrious or not. Based on my own experience in talk therapy and reading eighty bajillion self-help books, it's pretty clear that fear is the biggest "why" there is. Fear lies underneath feeling less-than, underneath social anxiety and anger and woe. If there's one thing I'd like to impart about fear, it's that if you scratch pretty much any kind of yuck, you'll find fear under there somewhere.¹

My friend knows from fear. She's lived long enough to experience several expedient fear delivery systems, plus she's done time on the couch. She gets it. But when you start looking at your fear through the finely-ground lens of doing one monumental thing, when you slow down and take the long way home, you learn a few things you didn't know. The depth of your fear, for starters, and a peek under the tent at a few other ways fear might be stopping you that you didn't even realize. It's fascinating stuff, this just paying attention. And an excellent value proposition, so much more bang for your buck.

Even if it is painful and dull and embarrassing. Which, if you're spending a significant amount of time and money, there's a very good chance it will be.

* * *

There is a very strict order of steps involved in quitting smoking this particular way. There's no jumping ahead, no skipping steps. Instead, there is an intake date, an agreed-upon quit date (or "start of your smoke-free life" date for you optimists) and a whole lot of exercises between. A lot of looking, a lot of thinking, a lot of noticing. My friend said she was ready to quit a week early. Her hypnotherapist said sorry, but she was not.

* * *

Which brings me around to the title of this here piece. My favorite quote and main mantra for the past four or so years, well, other than THAT one, has been this one:

There are no short cuts to any place worth going.

It is attributed to the American opera singer Beverly Sills, and if the "opera singer" part of that last phrase wasn't enough, read a bit of her history and you'll know that the lady knew whereof she spoke. Whether the ass-end of your proposed journey is being healthier, happier, wealthier or wiser, there's no getting there faster. 10,000 hours. Rinse/repeat. Park your ass under the Bodhi tree, bub, and make sure you do plenty of wandering first.

If it feels a little grim, I assure you that it is far less so than the mood I'm usually in when I conjure up this line. Remember: practice is painful. Change is excruciating. Feeling stupid feels awful. (To me. Although if they didn't to you, you'd probably have clicked away long ago to see what was happening on Facebook.) Sure, I could find a happy-happy saying full of cheer and sunshine and optimism. But you know what using it under those circumstances would entail?

Skipping steps.

On the other hand, when you resign yourself to this way of thinking, or rather, when you surrender to it, the way women of grace do with time and gravity, you bring yourself back to plumb pretty quickly. Of course I feel this way, you realize. That is what feeling is! The depictions of change we see in movies and books blip over a lot of this stuff, or make it look sort of sexy-frustrating, with lavishly-produced montages or deftly-condensed metaphors which are, wait for it, boring and time-consuming to produce, at least for long stretches. As I said in last month's newsletter², when you see something good, you're not seeing the mountain of shit someone shoveled to uncover it.

* * *

My friend Brooks³, who calls himself a clutter-buster, uses the simplest process possible to help his clients to let go of things that may once have served them well but now are serving only as impediments. He has them hold up one item at a time and asks the same question of each one: "Do you need to keep this, or can we let this go?"

This is how you went from being a person who'd never experienced smoking to one who could not imagine life without cigarettes. This is how you get from "good" to "bad" and back again. (And for the record, "back again" isn't necessarily better, but done thoughtfully, it's far richer.)

Look, I am doing this. Why am I doing this?

Can I let this go?

xxx
c

¹With "and EVERYONE is scared about something, even people you'd never dream of." For more cogent and inspirational stuff around this, read Krishnamurti and my friend Ishita's monthly magazine.

²It's not up on the archives page yet, but if you subscribe, the nice Emma robot will automatically send you a copy.

³Brooks has a really good post up today on how he clutter-busts over the phone.

Image by mariachily via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Lessons from 2010: Maximal joy, minimal hoo-ha

I have been thinking a lot about love and friction, only not in the way your mind maybe-perhaps just jumped to, if you are like me and we are both, like, 12.

I have been thinking about love in terms of what I love, and whom I love, and how those two things intersect. For example, I love figuring stuff out, reading and taking in and mulling over and hashing out and finally, getting some semblance of a clue. I can do all of these things on my own; I must do quite a bit of it on my own. Maybe the ratio changes as one gets older and, presumably, wiser, but for now, I'd reckon I spend three to four times as much time taking in and hashing out and so forth as I do actually gaining semblances of clues, much less putting them out there.

But while the part that I'm actually sharing with others, the "talking" here, in posts, and in the comments, and in social media, as well as the talking-for-real one-on-one, in groups, during talks, takes up perhaps a smaller amount of time, it delivers a disproportionately large part of the thrill. Which makes sense: We are social beings! We like being around each other! Wherever two or three are gathered! And so on.

So the answer to love seems pretty straightforward: figure out what it is you really and truly love, and move toward it. Do more of it, be around more of the people who facilitate it for you. Relentlessly hew to your love, and ignore that other stuff, or just deal and dispense with it as quickly as possible.¹

Friction is more complex. More obviously complex, anyway.

For our purposes here, "friction" is what stops you, or slows you, what creates drag. And the tricky thing is that you don't want to get rid of it entirely, because some of the friction is good for you, and arguably necessary: who learns from easy? You may like easy; I certainly do.

Trickiest of all is that friction can be fun, in the right amounts (cf. that thing our 12-year-old minds immediately went to). The right amount of push-back in a conversation is thrilling, even (or especially) when it borders on maddening. Worthy opponent, and all that. Ditto solo problem-solving and, jeez, is it just me, or is all of this tinged with innuendo today? Well, you get my point. (Point? Really? Argh!)

In the wrong amounts, of course, friction is dreadful, even deadly. Too much friction will grind you to a nub. For me, advertising shifted from the good, learning friction to the bad, grinding kind. So did acting. So did, I'm ashamed to say, more than one long-term relationship.

Most pertinently to me, so did the confluence of friction-filled endeavors that led to my Crohn's onset. First, because since my collapse in September of 2002, I can no longer count on Powering Though Shit as a modus operandi.² Second, because that sucker crept up on me, and while I was, or thought I was, moving toward love. I wasn't in advertising; I was acting, and in a great play! I wasn't in an unfulfilling marriage; I was in a wildly passionate relationship!

Yeah, I know. Nothing like a good, clear view from the outside. Or hindsight.

What about the present, though? Because like it or not, that's where we're all doomed to live, no matter how much we look back wistfully or project ourselves into the future.

My suspicion is that the clearer one gets about love, what love means to one, what one cares about more than one's own small human self, the simpler it becomes to discern that line where useful friction shifts into fruitless grinding.

My other suspicion is that for those of us who are good at kidding ourselves about what love is, who are good at "keeping things vague," as my old Method acting teacher used to say, the very most useful tool of all is the truth. Relentless truth. Gentle truth. Simple truth. The truth at the core of the Method: "Where am I right now?"

• I am at a party, late at night, having fun.

The first two items are facts; the last is a state of being, or an assumption based on the first two items. Provided we're playing what we'd call in the Method class a "simple" scene, drama or comedy with a clear who/what/where, as opposed to the kind where there's a lot of dramaturgy required before you can make heads or tails of it, we start with these tangibles. And we challenge the assumptions.

• I am at a party, late at night. It is loud, and I am unable to hear the person next to me without him shouting and me straining to listen. I was up early this morning and up late the night before. I am tired. My attention is straying elsewhere, mostly to thoughts of quiet and sleep.

So I am not in a party, late at night, having fun. Maybe I was having fun. Maybe I am supposed to be having fun. But now, at best, I am having "fun".

This may sound ridiculously obvious: You're at a party and you're tired and not having fun? Leave, dumbass! Who's keeping you there? And who needs an exercise for this?

Well, maybe you do not. In certain situations, more and more of them, thankfully, I do not. More and more I am awake and attuned to my real feelings, and more and more I am inclined to act on them. Still, I have blind spots, both unavoidable, the ones I don't know about yet, and willful, the ones I'm still, for whatever reason, unwilling to give up. I power through, I blip over, I look away out of fear or politeness (which one could argue is a form of fear).

One big truth at the end of last year was that the way I was working was not working. After a year of both musing and actual, physical testing, I think it comes down to this: I had stopped being truthful about what it was I loved, i.e., the thing I care about more than my own, small human self, and stopped being careful about managing friction, i.e. the physical realities that made it possible to pursue it. Now I don't have to just guess whether MORE ROOM makes for a happier, healthier, more productive and loving Colleen; I know it.

I know I need a certain number of hours of sleep per night and the right kind of food and enough exercise.

I know I need a ridiculous amount (to some) of time spent alone, and in a quiet, nurturing environment.

I know that doing the shit out of something is fine, but that it may involve equal parts pursuing the something and lounging on the bed or in the bath, reading, and not just reading books that will obviously move me toward my goals, but engrossing novels, vivid memoirs, enchanting graphic novels.

I know that it is as important for me to take an hour to walk as it is three to write. It is as important for me to take three hours to shop for real food and prepare it as it is to work on my PowerPoint deck.

Those 16 non-working hours in a day aren't for squeezing more stuff into; they're not even for making the eight working hours work better, although you can use them for that, which I confess is largely why I started turning my attention to them. They're for living. Living! Who knew?

My (slightly) older but infinitely wiser friends Hiro and my First-Shrink-Slash-Astrologer both advocate more being, less doing. In my heart, I know they are right; I also know that to tell a doer to Just Stop Doing It is like telling snow not to fall or water not to move downstream. For the time being, then, for 2011 and beyond, I will continue to look at different kinds of doing. Switching doings. Working, yes, working, on further reducing drag.

Finding ways to discern and describe what it is I love in real terms. Finding ways to reduce drag on my movements toward them.

With joy! Towards love! And as much as possible, out in the open, where it might be seen and made use of. But working.

For now the "being" will have to take the form of "being okay with that."

xxx c

¹It may take a while to discover exactly what it is that you love, but there are tools for that: The Artist's Way is a good start for those who self-identify as creative; plenty of tools and exercises for excavating your truest, purest self, for me, the part that is still 10, before my dreams started bumping up against the world's expectations. Until I was 10, I was an artist, I didn't have to think about whether I was, or what it meant, or whether I was a good one, or whether (and this is a big one) it was practical or not. I just was.

²This does not mean I have not tried; oh, me, how I've tried! Each time, a little less successfully. I tire astonishingly quickly now compared to the rate I did during my 20s and 30s, or even my mid-40s, and my bounce-back rate gets slower and slower.

And we're back in 5...4...3...

I officially ended 13 months of Self-Imposed Sabbatical this past weekend, in rather a hootenanny-ish way, ergo my delay in actually getting something posted today. I'll write much more about the event, about the sabbatical, about the lessons I took from them and the ideas that have begun coursing through me again largely because of them, but for now, just a few quick top line observations:

It's not just you. If there is one thing I learned over this past year in general, over this past weekend in particular, even, it's that everyone is confused and everyone is learning and everyone is terrified and everyone is cautiously/secretly hopeful (if only spasmodically) and everyone thinks it's just them, and they'd better shut up and keep their head down and try to look normal, or spout some party line hoo-ha about Tough Times. It's not just them, er, you. It's everyone. It's me, and pretty much everyone I've engaged in conversation on the topic, a rather wide swath of humanity. (Note: I've been taking the bus more recently.)

I am not sure how much of this we can blame on the outrageously sped-up change cycles we're enjoying these days and how much is just part and parcel of the human condition. What I do know is that if you can take a little risk to let down your guard and float it out there, you're likely to find someone to help you carry your load. Or at least commiserate over the size of it.

There is no "done." You will doubtless find this hilarious, but in my naivete I thought of this sabbatical thing as I did muffin-baking: throw a bunch of stuff together in a bowl, add this or that until it tastes pretty good in its raw form, stick it in a medium oven and 35 minutes, or 53 weeks, later, bing! Muffins!

It is not like that at all. In fact, it resembles quite uncannily what I remembered to be the drawing on the cover of The Artist's Way, an endlessly winding road carved into the side of a mountain, where at every level the view was somehow different, yet somehow familiar. Only it's not the cover of The Artist's Way; it's some other idea of a mountain I'd heard of or dreamt of from somewhere else. Maybe it was "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

So there you go: no "done." Just give that up. (And if you don't believe me and several millenia of philosophical teachings, check this out. That's business modeling, baby, no squishy woowoo stuff there.)

The soft things may be the most necessary. This is not the case for you if you are a big lounger on chaises longues, but if you are, you're not reading this anyway, you're lounging on a chaise. I hit seven out of ten goals for this past year. (My years now run from mid-February to mid-February, but let's just say it's unlikely I'll publish three books in a fortnight and call it a day, shall we?) All seven were "soft" goals, reading more books, connecting more often with friends, eating right, exercising adequately. That sort of thing. My three token Masters-of-the-Universe goals all tanked. Yet I've probably made more progress this one year than I have in the past five or six put together, if we're going to call "living happily in one's own skin" a worthy ambition. And I do. And if you don't, well, I wish you well, but we're probably going to be spending even less time together in the future. I'm turning 50 this year; I don't have as much dithering time as I once did.

And finally?

It's good to be back.

xxx
c

Image by stevendepolo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

The value of the right questions, Part 1

I've done a handful of interviews for the presentation I'm giving later this week, which has renewed my appreciation for the skill involved in asking the right questions.

My previous experience with this valuable journalistic skill has been minimal, but similarly instructive. It took an shockingly long time to draft a set of questions for Seth Godin that would be useful (to my readers) and worthy (of Seth's time) for my leg of the Linchpin "book tour" last year. You wonder why those legendary Playboy or Rolling Stone interviews from Back in the Day are so good? Or, for that matter, why Colin Marshall and Jesse Thorn have such compulsively listen-able podcasts today?¹

It's the questions, stupid.

Good questions make for interesting answers, and interesting answers get you thinking about all kinds of questions you suddenly want to ask yourself. Good questions wake you up to the world around you, and get you reengaged with life. It's a huge gift to be interviewed by a smart, generous, curious interviewer. First, and foremost, you have a blast. A conversation all about the things that interest you, with someone who is (purportedly, anyway) interested in how you came to be that way? What's not to love?

But what's really wonderful about a great interview, an interview designed to liberate valuable information from your skull for the purposes of sharing it with other people who might then learn from it, is that it forces you to focus, but frees you to do it. You could wander off into the poppy fields, and I do, frequently, but there's that nice interviewer, ready to lead you back to safety. Or on to a more interesting topic. Or whatever. Someone else does all of that hacking-a-path-through-the-jungle stuff. Someone else keeps an eye on the map and the compass, and allows you to wander around, commenting on this or that fascinating sight, and the eight things it makes you think about, in glorious freedom. Rather than facing a blank page, which I realize is my main job as a writer, but which absolutely gets tiring at times, someone gives you some structure, some prompts: What about this? And this? And this other thing?

It's such a valuable thing for showing you parts of yourself you might not otherwise see and training you to think in a way you might not ordinarily think that if people are not lining up to interview you, I'd look for ways to give yourself this gift. The Proust Questionnaire is a great place to start: not only has it withstood the test of time, but you can compare your answers (afterwards, please!) to a world thinker so great, they ended up naming the damned thing after him.

My friend Gretchen Rubin (of Happiness Project fame) is terrific at posing thought-starters. Check out her question frameworks for coming up with resolutions that will be more satisfying to pursue, making better decisions, keeping your temper. I also enjoy reading the interviews Gretchen does with people she's interested in. Like the Proust Questionnaire, the questions remain consistent, so you could certainly use them to do your own (unpublished) Gretchen Rubin Happiness interview.

Whatever your means, it might be useful to start turning your attention to good questions, what makes them, where to find them, rather than focus quite so much on tracking down answers. Not that there isn't still a place for plain, old information (God Bless Wikipedia, and long may it reign!), but the knowledge that you piece together as the result of good questions is the information that really keeps on giving.

It's a now-hackneyed tradition to end a blog post or seed one's Facebook wall or cop out on meaningful Twitter contribution by asking a question. Too bad, because asking good questions is not just a way to gain eyeballs or get a break from the relentless feeding of the beast or incite the troops to (heaven help us) "join the conversation," but to stimulate actual, creative thought.

Still, this is a post about questions, so I will scatter a few about on my way out the door, mostly as fodder for you to think about as you move through your day. (Although the comments are, of course, open, they're even unmoderated again, assuming you've previously proven yourself to be a friendly nation.)

• Where is the last place you (unhappily) found yourself that felt so familiar, you were finally moved to take action?
• What is your favorite color? Was it always? When did it change? Where is it in your life right now?
• Replace "color" (above) with "book," "song," "teacher," "friend," or "food."
• What five songs make you the happiest when you hear them? Have you learned the words to them?
• What song could you sing right now in its entirety? Do you like this song?
• What is your greatest fear? How are you living with it (or not)?

xxx
c

* * *

COMING UP WEDNESDAY: A fun question-and-answer exercise to lively up your next gathering. You're subscribed, right?

* * *

Speaking of someone who knows how to ask the right questions, my longtime blogging pal, Marilyn, did a really challenging one with me that she's shared on her new site, La Salonniere, today. I'm especially thrilled because I love all the previous interviews so much: between her eclectic interests and her devotion to learning how things work, she is one amazing interviewer!

* * *

¹In the case of the live interviewer, it's all about the ability to improvise. Jesse probably has the edge here, improv fanatic that he is, although that could be my bias toward comedic presentation. I'm also mad for Adam Carolla, whose podcast was killer out of the gate. Nothing that 20 years of assiduous practice on terrestrial radio and crappy comedy stages can't buy you.

Image by Pittaya Sroilong via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Life in the silo

I believe in the essential goodness of people.

I may forget it here and there, when I'm pressed for time, or not well-rested/-fed/-clothed, or when some deep, emotional trigger gets pulled. But usually, and fairly quickly, I recognize these lapses as such. They're my (temporary) deviations from an essentially optimistic, basically loving worldview, brought on by my own forgetfulness in administering self-care.

What reels me back in varies, but the underlying, foundational bit of knowledge I'm operating from goes something like this:

I do not change the world I live in by reacting to it like a jackass, except for the worst.

This is not a bad thing to keep in mind all the time (along with useful stuff like "breathe!" and "stop!" and "when's the last time you ate, anyway?"), but it's a really, really good thing for me to remember when something awful happens. It is quick and easy to reach for anger, for outrage, for righteous indignation. There they are, all handy and stuff, just like the drive-thru window of your favorite fast-food place. And hey, everyone else is at the fast-food place, right? Damn right! That's why this #$@(!) line is so long! *HONK!* *HO-O-O-O-ONK!*

At a little gathering this weekend, someone reminded me of a great assessment device for making sound decisions: what would your future self want?

Will your future self be happy that you shaved a half-hour off of your afternoon by picking up Extra-Value Meal #9? Or would your future self prefer to continue fitting comfortably in her pants, remaining ambulatory and independent into her dotage, continuing to poop from her factory-installed organs?*

The nice thing about this kind of projection is that it is easily (okay, SIMPLY) reframed to encompass more and more compassion and awareness as I get better at it. Does my future self want to wade through a world thigh-deep in single-use plastic? Or, how might my future self feel explaining to her theoretical nieces and nephews as we all munch dejectedly on our Soylent Green that yeah, we could sure use some of those resources my cohort and I burned through, but man, were those burgers fast-'n'-tasty! And, as you see, so on.

I am not always the best at considering Future Colleen. Far from it. One thing that really seems to help is keeping myself a wee bit uncomfortable. Not in a martyr-ish way, necessarily, although putting a cap on the thermostat, or asking whether you really need this or that important doodad, doesn't hurt. (More on that, and 2011's theme of Conscious Stewardship, to come.)

No, I'm talking about the discomfort involved in stepping out of the silo and bumping up against my fellow man. I dread the thought of socializing. Amazingly, more and more the actual experience usually varies from "pretty good" to "awesome," but even if it's objectively a low-grade Torquemada-fest of enervation or bombastery, if I can muster the right mindset, it's usually enlightening and it's always strengthening.

There are degrees of this, then, too, bumping up against lots and lots of my fellow men, in small groups and the occasional noisy crowd. Meeting them on their home turf. Acting as leader, or hostess. Things that are terrifying, at first, but that one gets better at. No, really. I'm not just a reasonably assimilated introvert; I'm so acclimated now that more often than not, I pass for extravert.

Achieving even this level of comfort took years of assiduous plugging away: Nerdmasters; networking practice, under the kind and patient tutelage of another reformed introvert; hurling myself again and again into scary, unfamiliar circumstances. In other words, not easy, not overnight. But oh, so well worth it.

I know how annoying it is hearing people parrot platitudes like "Be the change!", especially on Twitter or Facebook. Knee-jerk anything is suspect, save perhaps the impulse to throw oneself under a future bus to save one's theoretical niece or nephew. But at almost-50, and having foregone a great deal of potential income in favor of exploring more existential concerns, I think I've earned the tiniest right to suggest that maybe, just maybe, this lack of tolerance thing is kinda-sorta becoming a problem. And that perhaps, just perhaps, we might do well to bring a bit of awareness to it. That's all. I don't have a handy app or pledge page for this; just raising a thought. Maybe we could start small (it's usually best, in my old-lady opinion) by listening more. Literally.

There are all kinds of ways to start. Anything, I think, can be a start, provided you're bringing a loving intention to it.

Me, I'm going to go out and meet up with some people this week. Some old friends, some new ones. Maybe even some weird ones. (It's L.A., so definitely some weird ones.)

Because I have a silo, but I live in a world. Your world, my world, our world...

xxx
c

*On the other hand, if you're opting for the Filet-o'-Fish rather than ripping someone's head off and crapping down their neck, your future self thanks you, as does mine. It also gently and lovingly suggests you bring some attention to this "solution," and start exploring alternatives.

UPDATE [1/10]: A lucid, thoughtful, somewhat charged (he's blunt, folks!) piece by Jon Armstrong on the genesis and implications of the Giffords shooting; his wife Heather Armstrong also has a short but very touching post on what I think is one excellent way to move forward.

UPDATE [1/11]: Another excellent piece by Penelope Trunk on the role mental illness played both in the shooting and the tragic story of Bill Zeller. Link to Zeller's lengthy, sad and well-written suicide note via the previous link, or this MetaFilter post, or directly on this Gizmodo post and Zeller's site (as of this writing, anyway). My favorite takeaway from this horrible series of events came from a comment on the MetaFilter post:

The best I can do with something like this is to remember to always be nicer, because you truly never know what someone may be dealing with inside.

If I could make just that change, I think I could call this a live well-lived.

UPDATE [1/12]: Via Jeffrey Zeldman on Twitter, a very sharp op-ed in the NY Times on the role fear plays in all of this, and a reiteration that this is not a left/right issue, but an issue of thoughtful engagement vs. fear-mongering, isolationism and other insalubrious human tendencies.

Image by sillygwailio via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

It's just Monday

It was 1.1.11.

The first day of a new decade, all shiny, all ones, all the promise of a big, brave, beautiful new year stretched out before us.

It was the reboot, the fresh start, the alpha to 12/31/10's omega. It was hope, objectified. It was intention, projected.

Or, you know, it was what we called it the week before:

Saturday.

***

One of the reasons I decided, finally, to opt out of the Race for the New Year in December of 2009 was because of the pressure. So much pressure to get it right, to start out right, to not screw up this fresh chance to not screw up. Instead, I decided to roll with December in January.

It turned out to be one of the smarter moves I've made, but not for the reason I thought. Yes, there was less stress, not compounding a searching moral inventory with the demands of a holiday. My god, have you experienced a holiday recently? By which I mean "have you endured one?" BAH. And humbug.

I haven't really even celebrated the holidays since my split with the Youngster back in '02, and I find them off-the-charts stressful by osmosis. The world gone mad, right up in my airspace. And my left-turn lane. And everywhere else on the roads, in the stores, at the bank, and the etcetera.

No, the big "win" I got from pushing everything off for a month, and then five, six, seven weeks before locking down the program for the upcoming 52, was realizing that I could do it. That I was the boss of me, not some calendar established by a powerful pointy-hat-wearing patriarch four and a half centuries ago. To catch a plane, to make a meeting, to honor a birthday in a timely fashion, yes, I will adhere to the almighty calendar; to determine my present and future well-being? No way, Pope José.

***

I quit smoking on a Thursday in September over 20 years ago.* I started this blog on a Monday in November over six years ago.

I have done everything that changed my life for the better on a day.

On the other hand, I have done plenty of things that went absolutely nowhere on a day. You never know what will come of a day, and what will not. Sometimes you stick a flag in a hill and things work out; sometimes, not. But most of the time, it is the picking, not the day.

What I know now is that today is as good a day as any to start something. And that no day is a good day to stop without intent. Opt in or opt out, but opt. Pick a hill. Start pushing. It's as good a day as any.

***

Then again, sometimes the thing picks you.

My ex-boyfriend told me that one day a voice in his head told him, "Get a dog." And he did, and the dog was Arnie, and it was good.

And yesterday, on my morning walk, a perfect one-word theme for the year floated by: SHIP.**  I have never picked a one-word theme for the year, although reading about it has piqued my interest. Many years ago, I would have sweated and fretted my way to a one-word theme, with the probable result of it not fitting, not working. Finally, I am learning a thing or two about ease. And about how other people's "instructions" are of far, far less use to you (or me) than their stories. No two paths are the same. No two interesting ones, anyway.

***

So. It's just Monday. What are you up to today?

xxx c

*Thursday, September 17, 1987. This is one reason why I will never, ever throw out my journals, they are my outboard brain.

**Seth has been talking about this for months, for years; I've been resolving to do it for almost as long, at least since I talked it over with him at this time last year. Oh, the plans I had for 2010! The resolve! The three books on the docket! Of course, I still have them. Only on a much longer, far more sensible docket. Although there's still the outside possibility that I could get three books in some ship-able state by the third week of February. But I wouldn't take that bet.

Photo by Evil Erin via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. And yeah, "Bench Monday" is a thing..

Poetry Thursday: Slow death by bullshit happiness

You think to yourself: "I can do this!" or "This will be good for me!" or even "It doesn't matter."

And so you smile when someone asks how things are going, broadly, you smile, with most of your teeth, and you flick aside what's left of your heart, and you stick out your hand and say, "Grrrreat!" or "Couldn't be better!" or, when life is particularly bleak, "Things are looking up!"

And you recite from memory a menu, several pre-selected items from columns "A" and "B", of all the marvelous wins and fabulous opportunities and other stale pellets of extruded terror formed into appetizing, life-like shapes, tarted up with brio and garnished with a wilted sprig of false humility until you question whether you can even remember what it felt like to really, truly feel anything.

What happens, I wonder, when you just fucking say, "Damn, I'm tired. Business sucks, traffic was awful, my husband left me, my hard drive crashed, the dog has cancer, and the Emperor's ass is a flat, pale, pockmarked bucket of sad the sight of which is going to take years to wipe from my memory banks. What's new in YOUR world?"

Whether everything is awful right now or everything is perfect right now everything IS right now.

And I can't think of a single thing that doesn't get a little bit better served up fresh and truthfully, with humor, with tenderness, with the judiciously-chosen expletive, dependent on company.

Besides, what's the alternative, slow death by bullshit happiness?

The end is coming, either way.

And I'm guessing, just guessing, mind you, that if you let at least some of it hang out, the two of you might even toast to the ironies of life, and the way a bump in the road can turn two complete strangers into fellow travelers.

xxx c

The phlegm that says "I love you"

Back in September of 2002, I started drawing my colon.

I first drew it on the day after my second-ever colonoscopy, the day I was finally told how bad off I really was in unequivocal, Western-medical terms ("aggressive onset," white-cell count, colostomy, etc.). I continued drawing it once per day, every day, for months afterward, well after I was out of the hospital and back to work.

It's nowhere in the journal entries that precede the drawing itself, but I am fairly sure of the genesis of the sketching-as-therapy endeavor: several years earlier, during her first bout with cancer, my mother shared with me her own hoo-doo sicky-sick ritual. She did not draw, but she regularly visualized the diseased parts of herself¹ slowly getting better as cancer cells were politely escorted out by the contents of the chemical drip in her arm. This image was easier and more pleasant for her to fix on, she said, than the war-like one some people favor: This radiation is KILLING my cancer! This chemo is KICKING THE SHIT out of those mutant cells!²

I had no better ideas, so I did the same.

The first drawing is hastily done; my intestines look more like a really poorly rendered black-and-white sketch of the Yellow Brick Road cover than actual human organs, and there is nothing as specific and action-oriented as escorting going on. The next day, however, features a fair approximation of a colon, along with some very dynamic-looking action lines. By Day 6 (see above), the drawings are not only more specifically rendered, but more lovingly. The joint is lousy with hearts, for cryin' out loud! And on Day 11, I have the whole exit/recovery strategy meticulously mapped out: the meds and SCD-legal food, rendered as hearts, are waving at the mischievous buggies on their way out.³ To an actual toilet. (God is in the details, amirite?)

Whether or not you hew to the woo, there are some useful aspects to the practice of embracing an illness in this way.

First, it gives you something to do besides fret, nap, and watch Murder, She Wrote on an endless loop. I am way too good at fretting, way too bad at napping and even I can't watch TV forever. There was something very calming and focusing about drawing my colon every day. I'd reflect on the shape of it, add nuances to the exit strategy, draw a few more "good" bugs and a few less "teacher" bugs with each rendering. Plus, you know, super-nifty illustrated journal after the fact.

Second, reframing the illness made it much easier to get down with the slow pace of returning to wellness.⁴ Rather than looking at the whole thing as a "woe be me!" experience, I was able to look at it like a class, albeit a really tedious one with an unusual number of bathroom breaks.

Third, drawing every day helped to keep me in a state of gratitude. Because making the bugs my teachers made it impossible to feel completely angry with my disease. And because I chose to render the medicine as little hearts, I remained grateful to my I/V drip, my medical team, my health insurance, my amazing bed with the remote control that made it go up and down, up and down.

I bring all of this up because I'm sick right now. Not with Crohn's, but with an annoyingly trenchant and inconveniently timed cold. At least, for now it's a cold; one person I know had this whatever-it-is morph into bronchitis. I am not a fan of bronchitis. I quit smoking, some 23 years ago, because of incipient bronchitis.⁵ Not to mention I don't have the margin for error with antibiotics I did pre-Crohn's, in my blissfully sturdy 20s.

I am no saint. I can piss and moan and resist acting in my best interests with the best of them, even though the consequences of not doing so are intimately known to me.

And yet it is getting harder and harder to stay there. Hooray, middle age! Hooray for you, too, hundreds of hours of therapy, reading and purposeful self-reflection! I finally get that it's more useful, not to mention delightful, to treat myself with a little consideration, and to turn my attention to the nifty side of things. If I can't do my usual long, power walk, I am treated to a the beauty of my neighborhood in super-slow motion. If I cannot be out and dashing about in my usual can-do fashion, well, for the short stretches I do get out, I'm even more aware and appreciative of the fine weather we enjoy in Los Angeles. And slowed down thusly, when I am home I'm even more grateful for the serene snugness of my little apartment and its, no, really, insanely luxurious appointments.

I've written long ago and at length about illness being a useful, if painful, way to slow things down. I've spoken more recently (and far more briefly) about rotten things being a gateway to big love. But I still need reminding; maybe I always will need reminding. Slow is not a factory-default setting.

And so I move too fast and I curse before I remember to say "Thank you!" and slow down for a bit.

But I do slow down for a bit. Which is what we call a start.

Oh, and for the duration? Posting will be light...

xxx c

¹As the primary site was her cervix, there was also some kind of radioactive tampon she got to wear. Get your pap, ladies!

²Mom died just 18 months after diagnosis, but far, far past what the doctors had initially predicted for someone with Stage 4 cervical cancer that had metastasized to her lungs. She even went into full remission for a time, fooling us into thinking she'd be around for a good, long time. Alas, the cancer came back fast and aggressively, and in her weakened state, a state not at all enhanced by her alcohol intake, except from a relaxation point of view, I can't see how she could have fought it off. Watch the drinking, ladies!

³Western medicine is finally coming around to embrace the theory Dr. Sidney Valentine Haas and Elaine Gottschall put forth a heckuva lot earlier: that the source of the irritation that causes Crohn's is bacterial: a crazy, unchecked proliferation of "bad" bacteria that the guts of Crohn's and ulcerative colitis patients can't handle, which irritates the intestinal wall and triggers the immune response (your body attacking itself).

⁴I was very fortunate, I realize, to be returned to a state of wellness. I get that this is not the case with all illnesses, and I'm the last one to point the manifesting finger. You know, that creepy part of new-agey-ness that wonders, in the most inappropriately passive-aggressive, outrageously fake-compassionate way, what you did to bring this illness into your life. Uuuuuuuup yours, you "Namaste!" motherfucker. (One of these days, I really do need to write up that essay on the "Namaste!" Motherfuckers. I have far more contempt for them than I do other fringe groups one could name on the other end of the socio-political spectrum because seriously, they should know better.

⁵And I really, really liked smoking, so you know I must have really, really hated the idea of this bronchitis thing happening again.

Derailment, deconstructed

1. Launch writing program to begin rewriting work for the day.

2. Work on rewrite for 10 minutes. Hit snag, and decide I need grounding exercise writing buddy created for me last week when I hit previous rewriting snag.

3. Open email client to track down writing buddy's note, because I appear to have willfully refused to keep the usual three or four redundant copies handy, and email is the only place I know I can find a copy.

4. Note new email in inbox!

5. Read first new email. It contains a simple request for information, accompanied by a factual error. Rather than fulfilling request (which could be dispatched in roughly 15 seconds), I fixate on factual error, moving swiftly from assessment of my history with correspondent (contentious, fraught) to speculative analysis of his intent (passive-aggression? none?) to my own response (judgmental, assumptive). Briefly reflect on the subject of mirrors. Succumb to mounting moral indignation over misguided accusation of imprecision, and begin hashing out a reply.

6. Catch myself acting like horse's ass and save email to "drafts" folder. Win!

7. Read next email. It is an autoresponse from a company whose product I downloaded for trial yesterday during a promotion. Robo-mail notes that I have not replied, and extends grace period of an additional 24 hours, but at what looks like a reduced percentage off. Simultaneously pulled toward the deal and suspicious that it is less of a deal than offered yesterday. Consider going through "Trash" folder, then realize I emptied it last night in obsessive-compulsion-fueled panic attack." This series of thoughts apparently creates just enough distance to remind me that I passed on deal yesterday because I'd realized I had zero immediate/projected use for the product. Determine that these needs have likely not changed overnight. Delete email.

8. Open last new email, which contains references to a "branding expert." Briefly wonder why sender of email does not consider me a "branding expert." Tar-pit balloon of mixed gases (anxiety, hurt, anger) bubbles to surface. As it swells, I consider clicking on outbound link to view further information on "branding expert." Miraculously, it pops, covering me with filthy shame, but allowing the clearheaded realization that I have no extra time, ever, to view videos of any "branding expert." Wipe shame from battered psyche. Delete email.

9. Close email client. Win!

10. Find myself staring at browser window previously hidden by document and mail client windows. It contains Amazon affiliate income information. Wonder why Amazon affiliate income is so low. Wonder where I have failed to provide sufficient value for hot clickthru action. Wonder whether, if I do empty my affiliate income stash to buy that Kindle 3G I've been wanting, I will ever earn enough affiliate income to fill Kindle 3G with books. Wonder where my privileged life has gone off the rails that I am spending perfectly good (re)writing time wondering about jerkoff assclown B.S. like Amazon affiliate income and overpriced digital reading devices. Remember that I am supposed to be (re)writing right now.

11. Minimize browser window and maximize document window. Stare at rewrite. Realize I have forgotten to retrieve my writing buddy's notes.

12. Decide to transcribe rabbit-hole behavior, because unpacking things and examining them is only way I have ever learned how to change patterns. Recall Beverly Sills quote I am forever spouting off to others. Sigh inwardly.

13. Decide to post rabbit-hole experience to the blog, after rewriting it.

14. Finish rewriting original rewriting chore, sans writing-buddy notes. Note that the Earth appears to be turning on axis.

15. Post to blog. Wonder if post should have been rewritten further.

xxx
c

Image by Smath. via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.