10 minute blog:

(I know they say, Only speak if you can improve on the silence, but I felt I wanted to give you something this morning. Time is short due to doing my due diligence. And making up tongue twisters, apparently.)

Yesterday evening, I went to pluck one of the remaining lemons from the tree in the backyard of our building. In it, I found a robin’s nest with three sightless, flat and feathered chicks in it. Maws up and open.

I’ve been watching robins on the roof next door to me with worms in their mouths for a few days now, as I sit here at this kitchen table, writing, typing, breathing. But I never imagined there was life happening right there! The ingenuity of the nest-making was astounding, leaves harvested long ago, now time-reduced to a lattice outline.

It’s the noticing. The small moments when the chocolate vegan mousse cake you doubted, actually tastes like gilded decadence. When you decide to send a “hugs” text to your immediate family, just because it felt like a good idea this morning. When you go back through old pocket calendars, and read all the quotes and notes you’ve collected, including this rancorous gem from a rancorous man: “I’ve gotten to the point where patience is a waste of time.” – or this one, “I have a hard time taking my sanity temperature.”

For reasons hilarious and unknown to me, I seem to find myself in my second band with folks who are at least 10 years older than me. I love this. There’s little of the peacock chest puffing, and more of the genuine delight in participating in something fun, something that maybe we all wish we did when we were in high school, but didn’t. At least, I feel that way. And grateful that I get to do it now, when I’m less likely to vomit vodka tonics on myself.

Instead, I get to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon holding a bass in a basement with friends, and come home and feel inspired to take out my own guitar, and find out what I have to say anyway. 

On Leave.

The thing about being a good little soldier is that eventually you suffer battle fatigue.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had doctors appointments up the wazoo because of a liver enzyme test that came back extremely elevated. Granted, it’s the first time they’d ever run this test since I finished chemo last Spring, but don’t try and tell them that.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten panicky emails from my doctor to stop drinking alcohol immediately (check), to get another test immediately (check), and asking if I’ve had my hepatitis vaccines when I was a kid (check).

Being the good little soldier I am, and using the wisdom of not pushing the panic button, I’ve done pretty well these past two weeks, doing what I’m told, following up diligently, and trying to follow the new all-organic diet suggested to me by my naturopath.

This is all well and good not to panic when panic isn’t prudent. But yesterday I came to see, while reduced to a ball of tears in front of a friend, that there is a third option between panicking and “soldiering on.” There’s acknowledgment of my fear.

I told my coworker the other day that I just feel weary – that trying not to freak out is exhausting; that trying to maintain an emotional equilibrium is hard work.

And underneath that even façade, which also has a thick vein of veracity, is fear. They can co-exist, but I have to acknowledge that they both do.

It is activating to have to go through all these tests. It is not my favorite thing to google "autoimmune hepatitis" (which, we learned, I don't have). It is even less my favorite thing to contemplate that the reason for this trouble in the first place is a result of something doctors did to me – despite the rational fact that they had to. I had Leukemia. The cure is chemotherapy. Chemotherapy causes havoc.

I am not freaking out, but I am concerned. And I am “activated.” It’s hard not to be – I’ve had legitimate reasons to freak out in the past – but even then, if you were a reader when I was going through that, you saw that the times I freaked out were few and far between – and then, they weren’t panics or freak outs, they were the falling-armor acknowledgments of a real threat to my security and joy.

I was a good soldier then too, but it was also very important to break down sometimes with someone trustworthy. To acknowledge both sides: Bravery and Vulnerability.

Which are coexistant. The first does not preclude the second. And I'm pretty sure the second enhances the first.

It was not as if I had some grand easy epiphany about allowing all of my emotions to be valid. I sat yesterday with a group of folks, and by the end of our time together, I was leaking silent tears. I didn’t anticipate to do that, but we create a sacred space together, a place where it was safe to allow something I didn’t know was happening arise. And because of that, a friend was able to see my pain, and sit with me while I let the soldier take a rest, and let the scared and weary and angry woman take a spin for a while.

I felt better after I acknowledged all that was going on. And coming to realize in conversation with her that I’d been forcing my experience into two categories: Panic and Perseverance. Acknowledging fear does not equate panicking, is what I learned. And it was important, so important, for me to let some of the rest of my emotions out, besides good humor, diligence, and perseverance.

Because I believe that without letting some of that pressure out, without allowing that vulnerability to arise, our capacity for soldiering is greatly hindered.

What happens is burn-out, instead.

When I only allow validity to one side of my experience, I am hampering my ability to move forward.

I don’t have to be a crying mess about having to seek out only organic meat and my fear of the cost and the inconvenience, and wondering if I’ll have to now be like those people in food addiction programs who have to carry around heavy-ass glass containers of their own food to restaurants because they can’t eat anything else and become a burden to myself and my social life…

but sometimes, at least once(!), I do have to admit that these are thoughts and emotions that are happening, too.

I’ve never really been a fan of the Buddhist term, “The Middle Way,” but fan or not, I seem to be learning all about it.

Phone a Friend.

I was invited back for a second interview. And I politely declined.

If there’s anything I learned from my awkward dating experience recently, it’s that saying yes to something you’re sure you don’t want is lying and wasting both people’s time.

Therefore, when I was passed up for the job I'd applied for in this organization and my resume got handed from one branch to another, I did my due diligence: I showed up, made a good impression, and knew that this newly offered position was not a fit. But I got the callback anyway.

So on Wednesday, when I got the "want to see you again" email, I called my mom. Not always the paragon of rational decisions, but someone who here I felt could be, I told my mom about the parallel metaphor between my career and my lackluster first date. And it’s strange and uncomfortable follow-up.

A friend earlier that morning suggested I just go to the second interview. “You never know.” But, see, I think you do. When you’ve given a fair and first chance at something a worthy go, I think at that point you get to say whether you’re interested to go further.

As a mentor once told me, A first date is just an interview for the second.

We do get the chance to say no at some point, yes?

I felt so, and I just needed a little corroboration. Not always a co-signer of my machinations, either, mom was the right call. She listened, and then she asked what advantages this job could have over my current one. They were few.

One, I told her, was suggested by my friend earlier that morning: You could meet a nice Jewish guy.

After hearing this very short list, she replied, “First of all, you are [insert some really nice and positive characteristics, like, smart, beautiful, brave and wonderful] and you don’t need to take a job you don’t want to meet a hypothetical guy.”

Or something like that.

It was really the only enticing reason of the bunch I gave to her. If the job I’d actually applied for in the first place was still available, I’d still be interested in that, and I do know it’s still open. But this offered job would be a lateral move, adding a 3 hour commute for what I imagine is similar pay and responsibilities that don’t really align with my values or my career goals.

So… she said it sounded like I already knew what I wanted to do. But what I could do was be honest about my goals, tell them that I was still interested in the first job, be very flattering and kind about their organization and say if other opportunities came up there, I’d be interested to have that conversation.

Unfortunately, in the dating world, it’s not as easy or accepted to say, "Hey, I’m not interested in you, but if you have any friends you think’d be good for me, let me know!"

But, Romance and Finance don’t always overlap.

In the end, that’s what I did. Called the woman who’d interviewed me for the second position, got her voicemail, and told her exactly what my mom coached me in saying.

What my mom really did was help me to feel comfortable owning my truth.

This is not always easy. And sometimes I need someone outside of my own limiting self-beliefs and self-sabotage to coax me and just sort of shuffle me along on the path I know I want to follow.

In the pre-school in the building where I work, some of the students have a cute ritual when their parents drop them off in the morning: Push on the Tush.

It is exactly how it sounds. Having been deposited in their classroom, feeling safe in their surroundings, the child is ready for their parent to leave, and wants to have a ritual for that separation. So, the parent stands in the doorway, and the kid gives him a push on the tush. And out the parent goes.

For me, that’s what my mom did. Having come to a conclusion, but needing a little encouragement, I reached out to a person I knew could hold and support me, and then give me a little push. 

The Facebooks.

Yesterday, I saw another of those articles posted by a friend on Facebook about the rose-colored facade that Facebook allows us to put out to the world. About how we only see photos of grand trips and lattes with foam hearts drawn in them and that uber cute one of you and your partner looking so darn happy.

This article and those I’ve seen like it tell one side of the truth, but not all of it.

I didn’t comment on my friend’s article, as his friends were aggro-commenting about Falsebook and how pissed it makes them that we don't see the "whole" picture of others' lives. I didn’t want the agida of the notifications if I put my thoughts there, so, I’ll “post” my comment here:

Facebook saves my life.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer in an ER and led right upstairs to start intensive chemo treatment, there was no packing of stuff, no notifying loved ones or having some hippie prayer circle. I called my mom, and then I called one of my best friends and asked her to do the major task of letting Facebook know, because that is – whatever feelings we all may have about modernity, technology, and disconnection – where my friends “are.”

Because she did that for me, my friends knew where to find me, and what to bring me, and how to get in touch with me.

A few weekends ago, an acquaintance – someone I’ve met only a few times, someone I could say “hi” to “in real life” but wouldn’t call “in real life,” aka a Facebook friend – put up a call to go to a local lake for a lazy Sunday afternoon. I had no plans that day, I’d never been to that lake, and I took a chance at spending time with someone I barely knew by letting her know, via the Facebooks, that I would love to go with her.

We did, and I made other new (Facebook) friends. I had a wonderful and, for me, an adventurous afternoon.

When I got frustrated with my job search recently, I threw my resume up on my “wall,” and two people have given me actual live leads for work, and two have contacted me to offer me help on my resume. I’ve looked at this thing so many times, I see only dot matrix anymore.

When I couldn’t stand that I don’t know if I’ll get to go camping this summer once rehearsals start, I let the Facebooks know I wanted to go, and now will be going into the wilderness with "real" friends, having a respite from this social network thing that brought this trip to fruition in the first place.

I get to see that my college roommates aren’t dead, what state they live in, how many kids they have. I get to see friends from my high school musical days launching and thriving in their artistic careers. I get to read the witticisms, intrigues, and slush that my friends post, and I get to feel that I know they’re safe.

I have learned about friends’ weddings, deaths, job changes, moves, births, divorces, successes, struggles, and banalities. And they get to learn about mine.

I won’t say Facebook is a benevolent entity, wanting us to all feel connected in a disconnect era. I won’t say that this is the “best” way of keeping in touch with people you’ve lost contact with, or moved a few zip codes from. But it does work.

I can also see it from the side of the aggro-commenters, lambasting the system for creating a culture of constant "less than."

I can admit that just the other day, I Facestalked a crush’s ex, and felt the creeping compare/despair that I see so many of those Facebook “expose” articles lament. But, what I did as I felt that gnaw of “not as pretty, funky, cool, yoga-y, artistic, traveled, fun, witty” creep up was not to skewer Facebook for allowing her to present an awesome and curated face to the world. What I did was LEAVE HER PAGE.

For the love, peoples. It’s certainly not that I don’t also fall prey to that depraved inclination and curiosity. I’ve Facestalked ex’s new girlfriends (or wives), and I’ve Facestalked crushes exes. I've kept tabs on who's "talking" to who and leaving little digital roses on one another's doorstep. But, what I’ve learned to do by now is to remember that a Facebook wall is NOT the whole story, but EVEN IF IT IS, it’s NOMB (none of my business).

Other people are allowed to have happy lives, curated, sappy, enviable. And the choice I get to make is whether I want to engage with envy, not with Facebook. 

Men at Work.

  2/17/09: G-d Jar Projects:

  - My band

  - my mural

  - the play or musical I will be in

  - the songs I write

  - the essays and poems

  - the bass I play

  - the vacation I take to Hawaii

  - the sketches I make

  - the painting I do

  - the creative job I am making

At the time I wrote this list, none of these were true or in my life. Today, of this task list I wanted “God” to complete, all except two have come to fruition.

It would be a year from putting this list in my “g-d box” when I would apply to graduate school for creative writing in poetry. It would be two years from then when I would take my first oil painting class at that college and start writing my daily blog.

It would be 4 years from putting this list in the jar when my friend would become a flight attendant, and ask me if I wanted to escape winter and my chemo treatments and go to Hawaii for cheap.

A few months from there, a year ago, I would finally accept the invitation to be a part of the band my friend had been asking me to join for years, and actually use the bass I’d bought for $5 when I was 19. And not long from then, I would begin auditioning and taking acting classes, and eventually be cast in a play.

The only items on this list that haven’t come to fruition yet are the mural and the creative job.

The mural seems less important than it did 5 years ago, though it would still be very cool to do.

The creative job “I am making” (whatever that means!) is still in flux, in process.

Astonishing, isn’t it, that things I had no idea how they would come to pass have all come to pass? I could never have imagined when I wrote that list that I would actually be in a band, or be able to go to Hawaii. Those were the gifts and “rewards” of successful, other people. But, some part of me has always believed that I can be one, or they wouldn’t have been in the box.

I love looking at this list. It is so concrete. I can check each off with a stroke of joy and elation: I painted! I wrote! I acted! I vacationed! WHOOP! Look at me, enjoying a life (in spite of my self).

We all know what I’m going to say: If everything else on the list has come to pass except the last one, then there must be hope that even that can come to pass as well.

I am not sure I’m exactly an optimist, but I am a believer in the efficacy of asking for help, not doing it alone, but doing it. Eventually.

Because, I should mention that going to school has saddled me with nearly $90,000 in student loan debt and sent me into a recovery program around my relationship to money and scarcity. I should mention that my airline friend offered me the trip to Hawaii because I needed a break from cancer. And that I only finally reached back out to my friend with the band as I was sitting alone and bald in my apartment, listening to a CD, and busted out crying because I wanted to be a part of something like that – because I didn’t want to be taken from the chance to have that in my life.

It’s not as if this list got checked off according to the “easy way,” is my point. It took a lot of work, help, reaching out, despair, action, pleading, and god damned willing it to be.

I would not have chosen this route to getting these items checked off, and yet, here I sit elated that so many of them have been. They say that it’s the journey not the destination, but these journeys sucked. The routes to getting here, to crossing off these accomplishments that have brought me joy, were really horrible, scary, and painful.

It’s a strange dichotomy to sit with: The immense gratitude for being where I am, and the questioning of the benevolence and efficacy of the path that brought me here.

So I guess what I sit with now is whether I want the road to crossing off the last item on this list – “my creative job” – to be as arduous as the roads before it. It is true that sometimes we don’t have a choice, and choices are made for us, but I feel today that I do have a choice on whether I want to struggle toward this final goal, whatever the circumstances, or if I want to acquiesce toward it. Maybe not even “acquiesce,” but move with joy. I mean I have a whole list of accomplishments to buoy this part of my journey, right? 

Maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to be so hard. 

Tossed.

On a shelf high in my closet sits a box. This morning, I took it down, dumped it over on my bed and picked through the pieces of paper I’d written and thrown in since it was given to me as a one-year sobriety present.

Someone mentioned recently the idea of dumping out their “God box” every once in a while, to see what “god” may have already taken care of, and to see what we’re still holding onto, even as it’s been "surrendered" to the box.

It’s sweet and astonishing to me, all the things that tortured me so hard, I found them listed on multiple post-its, torn pieces of paper, even a square of toilet paper.

The ones that I got to separate from “still actively seeking hope/help” included a lot of men’s/boy’s names that haven’t gotten a rise out of me for years. I had to wrack my memory at one of them, and then got to see the number of times others' names had been tossed in there in the hope for resolution and divine intervention, and indeed, they've become completely old news. Today, those got tossed to the resolved pile.

In that pile, I also tossed, Food issues and Smoking. Issues that I haven’t had to box with for years, so much so that I am surprised to remember them, and to notice they caused me such pain (well, smoking was a bitch to quit – and I never doubt that one will always lead to more).

The ones that remain in the box, that I am throwing back in there, are varied.

One reads:

      Jesse Morris will live.

      And he will find recovery.

      And he will be beautiful.

      Amen.

Jesse Morris did not live. But I believe him to still be beautiful.

I also have the memorial service booklet from Aaron Brown’s funeral following his heroin overdose.

I have the necklace my father gave me when I was sick with cancer. A photo of my mom holding my brother, age 2. A photo of the ex whose innocence we shared.

And the torn shreds of a fortune cookie I didn’t understand why I’d ripped and torn in there until I pieced it back together: “As long as your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.” – I can easily see why I would bristle at such a fortune!

Finally, what will stay in the box, rethrown in, and recommitted to allowing them to be “taken care of,” are those issues which have remained “issues” to this very day.

The best illustration of these being an actual illustration:

Home, Love, Health, Security, Happiness.

(Or at least I think that’s happiness, and not Pirates.)

There are a bevy of papers with some amalgam of these on it. Some verbose pleas to a higher power, others simply a heart drawn on a post-it.

It is cleansing and reaffirming to dump and sort this box, this box that over the years I’ve begged over for things to change, hurled words in there like grenades, or exhausted, dropped them in tear-stained.

There are ones that I don’t know if “resolution” is possible, like those untimely deaths of beautiful people. And they will stay in the box.

There are ones where I still can’t see what resolution will look like at all, as with my dad, my career, and “my life,” as I wrote it again and again. They will stay there, too. 

But, luckily, there must be hope from a sorting such as this, because the pile of “resolved” issues is nearly half. Those torturous achings that caused me to toss names and circumstances in that have simply fallen out of mind, out of importance, into the fate and design of my past...

These ones that make me smile now for the girl who wrote them, and for the wisdom of time that solved them: They give me hope for the others. 

Stay to Play.

I'm at my new Monday morning desk-trade shift at my gym (unlimited classes in exchange for checking people in.... at 5:30am), so I don't know how extemporaneous I feel while techno music blares in the background, and my pulse finds center again... so perhaps this'll just be an "update-y" kinda blog:

The play I've been cast in (Queen of the Amazons...!) begins rehearsals at the end of July, to perform over weekends around Labor Day. I haven't actually opened my script since our first table reading... but I continue to take it places with me, in a good intention to read it.

In the meantime, I went to play bass yesterday with a friend and his friend -- it was super fun. My poor un-practiced fingertips are a little swollen, but ... man, just to be back in the loud, the beat, the fun. It was so much fun. (Did I mention it was fun?!) We're looking at playing a date in October, and are meeting up again next Sunday. I feel... like myself, having this in my life again; being a bassist again.

My dad didn't actually receive the Father's Day card I sent, since he's moved back up to New Jersey from Florida for the summer. I still haven't returned his return voicemail, but now that I got the card back in the mail, "unable to forward," I suppose I should find out what their "Summer" address is. And also endeavor to keep my bile and perhaps envy to a minimum.

In an exasperated flurry, last week, I sent my photos to some modeling agencies in SF, and heard back from one they'd like to see me this week. ... Then I looked them up on Yelp -- and if there are worse reviews on that website, I haven't seen them! So I'm going to gauge whether that'll be worth my time to meet with them, just for the experience, if not for the professional service of them.

I'm also in conversation with two professional leads for actual work, one I'm meeting this week, another I hope to. Both are in the "helping/teaching" professions. And I haven't quit my job yet -- YAY!!

That's honestly been the biggest success of this whole time, for me. I am unhappy, but I'm not cut-n-running. Which is my M.O.  -- In jobs and in relationships.

Granted, in both, I tend to get into them without much thought as to whether I want to be in them, get through the "honeymoon phase," look around and say, Uh... is this really where I want to be? And that is when the cutting and running happens.

It's not that leaving is not the appropriate move, but in jobs at least, doing so without a safety net is a recipe for desperation, low-self esteem, and the tendency to get into the same situation.

So, this "sitting on my hands" that I've been able to do (with the *enormous* help of friends) has been a really new thing. And, like a cigarette craving, it seems to be waning.

The more I stay in this place of active looking and active staying, ... I don't feel my throat constricting every single minute as I have in these past few weeks. That feeling of crawling out of my skin, of needing to do SOMEthing ANYthing to make this feeling stop.

The "some"thing I'm doing right now is not running. That's been my only move before. A one-trick pony: Uncomfortable? Run!

Instead, I've been asking for major help from friends in helping me not to do that. And during that time, I've discovered ... been forced to discover ... other modes of action. For example, actively seeking work, finally sending out my photos to agencies, and just showing up for the rest of my life anyway.

Even though I'm unhappy, I don't have to be unhappy.

There's this picture I drew once in response to an exercise in a self-help book last year. It's called "Creating a Life Worth Living" (and now sits in my Kindle, unread past Chapter 2!). But it asked us to draw a picture of how we see our life being a year from then.

In it, I drew several things, including the back of a curly-haired head facing a computer, a phone looming large near it. The only thing you see is the computer. Me staring at it.

It's the most depressing image!

So, what would I like to change about the image, the prompt asked me? Well, I'd like that experience to fade. To fade in importance. To not be so activated and aggrieved by it.

The longer that I "sit on my [active] hands," the less running seems like the right option for me. I like having a job while I look for other work, while I "figure out" my life. I like not feeling panicked about how I'm going to pay my rent.

But mostly what happens when I quit a job is that I cut back all the things that are fun in my life.

I can't be a volunteer usher, because I don't have a job. I can't come play bass with you, because I need to be sending out my resume. I can't laugh, because I'm in scarcity.

Staying in a place that is not ideal is not ideal, of course, but I feel like I'm developing alternative ways of dealing with that, ways that include having fun, even as it's hard.

Mystery Man.

There is a conceit that we can only have in our lives that which we can imagine. As the saying goes, "If you dream it, you can do it."

But, what if you can’t dream it? What if your ability to dream is hampered, and you can only see the smallest of your dreams, the tiny parts of a big picture?

Because there’s also the phrase, "Beyond your wildest dreams." So if something is beyond what we can conceive for ourselves, then the entire point is that we can’t dream it. Right?

Yes, we’re getting a little metaphysical this morning.

Because, maybe a year ago, a friend sent me a link to the Oprah and Deepak free 21-day meditation challenge. I’d seen others “sharing” it on Facebook, and I thought, what the hell.

Since then, I’ve done these “challenges” on and off, and I also continue to receive little “gift” meditations in my email here and there, like I did yesterday. So, yesterday, I sat with one, and today, I searched back through my email to find a different one to do, and I clicked on the one entitled, “Intentional Me.”

We are asked to envision one of our dreams, in vivid Technicolor, fleshing it out. I’ve written here before about this one I have of me in a white kitchen, I’m like 50, there’s an art/music studio detached in the back. It’s an open floor plan kind of place, that you can see the kitchen from the living room.

What happened for me this morning was that I added an 11-year old boy to the picture. After yesterday’s birthday party for a friend’s 11-year old, I felt that desire. (In fact, I've been feeling more clearly a desire to spawn my own offspring, which surprises me as much as it worries me.) But, – I love boys that age. They’re feisty, but still sort of willing to listen to authority. They’re not too pubescent to be very unsure of themselves and therefore super defensive. They’re funny, sarcastic, and full of energy. I love spending time with kids that age. In fact, I’d taught kids that age a few years ago at Sunday school.

So, into my vision of my “dream” for myself, now there’s a boy, a son, perhaps, perhopes.

And then I tried to envision the partner, because I do want that. My partner, my husband, my beloved (gag). And I have a really hard time doing this. It was like a person flickering in my vision: sort of there, sort of not. I begin to remember my Dad and my parents and how so very awkward their own interactions were. So forced and strange.

I can’t keep a solid image of a man in the kitchen to help me as I chop some vegetable at the center island. I can’t believe in a vision of a partner for myself. Even in a daydream.

So, I have to wonder: Can I hold an intention for myself that I can’t really see?

Or is there work to be done to allow myself to have that kind of love and joy even in the confines of my brain?

Which I suppose, the answer is Yes.

I have very few models of happy married life, but I have two that I thought hard about this morning, trying to see if I had any at all. There was the family I babysat for down the block growing up. A married couple who were symphony musicians, and their three sons. They seemed happy. Who knows, but to me they arise as a model for familial contentment.

I mean, even last year, when I went with my brother to visit our old house in New Jersey, there was the dad, older and grayer, but with the same winning smile and generous spirit, installing a flower box via a jerry-rigged pulley system with his youngest son. Who was about to go off to college that Fall. I remember taking care of him when he was 6-weeks old.

But here they were. I heard about the other two, and this one, about to go to school for musical theater in Texas. It was pleasant, this whole scene. It felt nice and right, and they live in a small house on a tree-shaded block in one of the most pleasant areas of the state.

The wife wasn’t there, because she was in New York, playing with the Philharmonic. But his eyes told me they were happy, they were satisfied with how their life was turning out. This was their vision.

The second couple are my mom’s friends from my growing up. They’re sort of like my second parents in some ways, and we’ve become closer the older I’ve become. Their life hasn’t been easy, but it has been happy on the whole. And they love one another like … well, like we all hope to be loved.

So, I suppose I do have models for what I want for myself. And it will be about remembering them fiercely in the face of “I don’t know,” and “Not for me,” and "How can I?" that come up. In the face of scarcity and fear and deprivation, I am going to have to be diligent about calling on these models for hope and health and change.

Because I have some vegetables to chop, a partner to laugh with, and a son to make faces at. 

"Push the Button, Max!"

In the 1965 hilarious film, The Great Race, Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) chases our hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) around the globe. Whenever Professor Fate attempts to unleash a hidden gem of an engine booster or booby trap, he yells to his sidekick, PUSH THE BUTTON, MAX! – which Max does, to uproarious and hijinxed disastrous results.

It would have been a Leslie Nielsen film if it were done in 80s.

What sparked this memory this morning is how often there’s a voice inside me egging me on to push the panic button. Come on, Max, this is a great idea! Let’s pull all ripcords, let the chips fall where they may! Damn the consequences, HOO-RAH!

Yesterday, I got an email from Kaiser to follow-up on some routine bloodwork I get done every few months now, just to keep tabs on my post-Leukemia cells. Apparently, my liver enzymes were elevated. Like, Wonkavator-through-the-factory's-glass-ceiling elevated.

My doctor wrote me that I had to come in for follow-up labs right away, that if I drank alcohol I should stop immediately, and that she was informing my oncologist, Dr. Li (which humorously autocorrected to “Dr. Lithium”).

Professor Fate wanted Max to push the button so bad. It’s bad news, it’s tragic, it’s cancer, it’s death, it’s imminent! PUSH THE BUTTON!

But… here’s the thing I’ve learned about pushing that button, from the movie, and from my own life experience: It rarely does anything productive.

So, I texted my coworker and my boss that I would be in late, that I was going to Kaiser, and then I called my naturopath/chiropractor/nutritionist in SF and made an appointment with him for that morning, too.

Because, this is how The Great Leslie would approach it: Pause, Assess, Reframe, Choose Love.

Well, maybe he wouldn't use those terms, but he would pause, at least, and assess before leaping out of the hot air balloon.

I arrive at Kaiser, and walk down the hallway. I’m toodling to myself, softly singing/humming tunelessly, just making notes up to distract my thought-life. I realize I’m practicing something called self-soothing, a practice I read about for babies learning to fall asleep on their own.

Instead of fully freaking out, I’m using a positive biofeedback technique to calm my pulse, my panic. And, it works, a little.

After they take 7 vials of my blood, I drive into the city to see my chiro. The man I credit for saving my ovaries from nuclear annihilation during chemo, with his supplements, nutritional advice, and amazingly accurate diagnoses of what’s going on in my body.

I tell him that my Kaiser doctor said it had nothing to do with having poured chemo into my body for 6 months, since that was finished last March. It couldn’t possibly be related.

Assholes.

No: Idiots.

Of course my liver and kidneys are still bouncing back, shmucks. I “love” the way Western medicine brains work: There is no immediate cause of this that we can see, so it must be something new and traumatic and deadly.

How about a patient history, assh— Sorry, Idiots.

It’s like telling someone who broke their ankle a year and a half ago that that has no bearing on why they’re now experiencing pain in their hips. … You guys did learn the whole, “The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone” song in medical school, right?

Anyway, my annoyance with Western medicine aside, I went to the doctor I trust, after having done what the Western folks wanted me to do.

We did some muscle testing, which is like the coolest thing ever. He handed me a small vial filled with clear liquid marked GMO corn. Told me to hold my other arm out and try to resist his pushing it down. My arm fell like an anvil. It weakens my system.

He held out one labeled organic corn? My arm stayed straight as a compass.

We did this several times: Pasteurized milk? Down. Raw milk? Up. Non-organic eggs? Down. Organic eggs? Up.

What I should offer at this point is that I have been eating a ton of crap these past few weeks. Whatever cookies, candy, cupcakes have been lain out at work, I’ve eaten – because I’m stressed. And sooner or later, my ban against refined sugar and dairy yields, and I go to town.

I’ve also been busy so I haven’t been cooking at home, and have therefore been eating take-out foods, which, although aren’t the worst foods I could choose, are surely not all made with my liver in mind.

So, I’ve been tired, stressed out (as you’ve read), and eating crap to boost me back up.

Yeah, apparently my overworked and Hirojima’d organs need some TenderLovingCare.

(Heh. ... Organs... lovin'... heh...)

Pushing the panic button does nothing for me except exacerbate an already very sensitive system. I don’t like hearing that I really have to stop eating the cupcakes at work, and not use half&half at Peet’s. Or, since it's not organic, I can't drink Peet's at all. I don’t like knowing that because of something I didn’t ask for I now have to work extra hard to fix its effects.

But, What I like less is driving to Kaiser on a Friday morning, thinking about the children I won’t be able to have. The life I won’t be able to “figure out.” The X-Men movie I won’t be able to see.

Look, Death and I have a pretty intimate relationship. We’ve fought an epic battle, and He’s waiting and watching in the corner, seeing if my hubris will bring me down. If, like in Million Dollar Baby, I will let my guard down and He’ll have the chance to (spoiler alert).

What I got to see from yesterday’s panic/not panic "opportunity" was that I still am pretty keen on this Life thing. That I can’t quit my job without health insurance. That I stress out about things I don't need to. And that I’ve accomplished a whole lot in the year and a half since I was diagnosed, things I want to continue to do: play music, make art, be with friends, travel.

I don’t need to push the panic button to “wake me up” – Life has a way of pushing it for me. Of pushing the button on the side of my cosmic cell phone to illuminate the time and remind me to stop freaking out in my head and get into my life.

So, today, I’m going to hum tunelessly as I get dressed, cook organic eggs, do (some) dishes, and head to an 11-year old’s birthday party to shoot mini-marshmallows at my friends. Because that’s the text Life is sending me today. 

But don't worry, I won't eat any. ;)

"Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face." Scott Pilgrim Vol 4

As those of you who follow (or haven’t yet hidden) my Facebook know by now, I’m actively looking for work. I have been, but some dam broke this week, and I’ve pulled out more of the stops – those stops tend to look like “fear of looking bad, desperate, needy.” However, SURPRISE! I feel those things, so I guess if I look that way, then I’m just looking honest, huh?

I’ve been reading back into some of Brene Brown’s work lately. I have her book The Gifts of Imperfection, and have been reading through the Amazon previews of her other two books, most especially, Daring Greatly, because it’s got her own biographical story at the beginning that includes the following exchange: 

      Therapist: What does it [vulnerability] feel like?

      Brene Brown: Like I'm coming out of my skin. Like I need to fix whatever's happening and make it better.

      Th: And if you can't?

      BB: Then I feel like punching someone in the face.

Nonetheless, what she goes on to discuss is the virulent necessity to be vulnerable in order to achieve anything of worth, mainly love, connection, and compassion.

People have commented to me often that what I write here is “so honest.” Which I guess is another way of saying I allow myself to be vulnerable here. Partly I do this because this is a protected forum. There are many layers to getting here: You have to be my Facebook friend (or somehow have the link), and then you have to click on it.

Well, two layers then!

So, this is a bit of a more private club than public. And I suppose that I feel brave enough to share this all with those of you who have leaped those two “massive” hurdles toward connection with me. If you’re this interested, or amused, then why shouldn’t you get to see some of me? Which this blog always is: some of me. – It’s honest, but it’s not my diary, nor my therapist. (Aren't you grateful!)

I suppose that mostly what I feel about sharing here, and why I feel it's "safe" vulnerability, is that you’ve probably felt this way, too. I have heard that feedback many times from people from wildly different arenas of my life and backgrounds and circumstances.

We all feel the same way at times. Have felt that way, or simply “get” what it feels like to do so.

In short, we are an empathetic and compassionate community just by my writing and your reading. We create connection, however zero’d and one’d it is, in this exchange of ideas.

I suppose I write all this today to say-- No, to remind myself that I have great capacity for courage, authenticity and vulnerability. I don’t mind telling you about the depths because you’ve been there, and can relate. I don’t mind sharing my journey into and out of the chaos of my brain, because, surprise, you all have brains, too!

In this time when things for me feel uncertain and uncharted, this blog is a constant and a place for me where I know that I can do and be well. Even when I’m vomiting on this page, and raging into and at it, I know you’re here, smiling, waiting for me to pull through. Or nodding and saying, Me too.

And. (Point):

If I have the balls to be as vulnerable and honest as I am here behind these hurdles, then there is a significantly greater chance that I can own my authenticity out in the "real" world.

Which I’m pretty sure is what all this mind-fucking job/meaning of life search is about, anyway. 

"We Need Back-up!"

I have no back-up, she said.

My friend with two kids, impending divorce, move, life, told me a few weeks ago. Trying to figure out if she could go back east for a family reunion and see her great-aunt probably for the last time. To figure out if she should bring her kids, even though she couldn’t afford it. Trying to figure out who would take care of them if she went, because “he” wasn’t available.

She felt alone, lost, and hopeless.

When I was leaving, she picked up her phone to check a text. The kids’ other grandmother would be happy to come up and stay with them, it read. No problem.

Her eyes went wide. She laughed. I laughed. We laughed about the energy we put into feeling terrible about things. 

A few days ago, I saw her again. She was telling some of our friends how she’d found a house in the town she wanted to be in because of its school system for her son. I hadn’t heard this part yet. Only how pained she’d been in the looking, months and months of looking. Fearing, wondering.

She regaled us with how she went online on Wednesday, saw the house on Thursday, and on Friday, signed the lease.

She told us how there was another house that she really wanted for $800 more a month. The kind of dream house she “really” saw herself living in.

But guess how much the tuition will be for her girl at the school she wanted to be in? $800 a month.

The litany of things that lined up were astonishing. Each little piece of it having fallen firmly into miraculous and perfect place. Each need met, better than anticipated. And “right on time.”

My friend was ecstatic and a bit winded with all the resolutions that worked out in her favor. Eventually.

I said that it was like the “Universe” was tittering with a present hidden behind its back. “Oooh… Look how upset she is that she has nothing, that nothing’s coming out right – She’s gonna be SO BOMBED when I show her what I have for her!! What I’ve had for her this whole time -- Ha! It’s gonna be AWESOME!”

And it’s true. It’s not that these things just came about “miraculously.” It’s that she had been reaching out for help, grasping at any straws, and finally, some of those straws bore fruit (to mix metaphors).

Desperate and despairing though she was, really distraught at feeling abandoned by the Universe, lost in this HUGE transition in her life, she was asking for help. She was taking action.

And that’s what produced the miracles… to my mind, at least.

I report this whole story, I think, for obvious reasons.

I am currently grasping at so many straws, I could line the Augean stables.

I am reaching out to places I haven’t before, and listening when people have things to say. (Even if I’ve heard their advice or platitudes before and are silently telling them to shut it.)

I am feeling so lost and desperate and hopeless and wondering and flailing and floundering. In short, I am feeling just as she was.

I know that we humans are meaning-making animals. We, or at least I, want to make sense of everything, even the things that don’t. So, I know that I want to make meaning out of her story, make it into a tale of heroic action and divine desperate patience.

I want to make this story Job. Because if it is, then in the end I get a flock of sheep, too. 

* Epilogue

Look. I know this sounds like a lot of self-obsessed, self-centered bullshit. I know this isn't Rwanda, or even East Oakland. I know that no matter what happens, I'll likely have clean water to drink.

I suppose, having always been a late bloomer, I just am getting an advanced jump on the whole mid-life crisis thing.

I think the argument with authenticity is an important one to have. I think the screamings of a soul that feels trapped is an important one to answer. I get that that looks like a lot of navel-gazing sometimes, and I get the pain all that staring causes in my neck.

But I just want to say that I see both sides, here. I see that I have it immensely "better" than a hundred million people around me. I get that my life is infinitely better than it was 10 years ago.

But, I also have the capacity to listen to myself at a level that I have never been keen enough to hear before.

Last night, someone recommended I read the chapter on Withdrawal in a 12-step book. I did. This "not quitting my job without having another one lined up" thing IS withdrawal for me. It's causing me pain. It's causing me to act out. It's causing me to have conversations and intrigue with inappropriate people, and to eat enough cupcakes to stock a shop.

I'm in pain, and it comes out here. This is my place. I feel badly about putting it up so that you have to read daily about it. But, you don't have to read. And I don't have to feel.

And yet. Here we both are. Xo.m

Not Knot.

Last night, I listened to a woman share her intense pain and entanglement with her past. In listening to her, I realized something crucial for myself: I don’t actually feel that way anymore.

Despite the trailing tendrils and my habitual gnawing back at it, my past and I are actually not so enmeshed anymore – at least, as I listened to her, not nearly as much as we were. No. That’s not accurate. We’re just not. It’s there. I poke at it, like a plate of live octopus bits, still wriggling on the plate, long after everyone’d finished jamming them into hot sauce and tried to chew and swallow before they attached to the inside of your gullet. (Uh… See: My years living in South Korea for reference!)

But, I poke at it, and if I do, it’ll squirm. But for the most part, my past isn’t a thing crawling toward and suffocating me anymore.

Listening to this woman, hearing her say that she can’t seem to get under her past, I realized very clearly that I have. Again, it’s there, but it’s not a shackle around my ankle anymore; it’s just some dust I can kick off my shoe.

(Apparently, this'll be a metaphor-heavy blog!)

I have liked to think that my past is something I’m still slogging through, carrying around behind me like a behemoth, its hot putrid breath at my neck asking me how it feels, whether I am able to ignore it now, How ‘bout now, Now?

I’ve liked to think that my past is still a quicksand pit I’m wading through, slow as molasses, fetid and shoes lost.

But, something about having this woman’s story as comparison (not better or worse, simply different), I got to see into a mirror that I haven’t been able to hold up for myself.

I am not there anymore. I am under my past. I’ve excavated, charted, spelunked and had more than one canary die down there with me.

But, in the end, in the now, we’re kind of done there. There’s a cave we’ve dug down into, we’ve opened the land around it, we’ve cared and cleansed and ameliorated the land. We’ve begun to forget that it was a horrid, dark, and dismal place, now in the open space that we’ve created from it, and we’ve used that dank soil to plant new things. Exposed to the sun, it’s something new, now.

(I do like me my extended metaphors!)

(Though, actually, I’ve done this exact work in visualization meditation over many years, opening the cave of my pain and my past, exploring, mourning, and later watching flowers begin to sprout where there was only hurt. I’ve done this work of opening my past and my pain up. It’s finished, or as finished as it can be.)

So, I got to see something yesterday that I haven’t been able to see yet: The truth.

As I listened with compassion to this woman tell us, tearful and anguished, that she is so knotted with her past she can’t see her way out, I wrote in my notebook:

            My past is really not that knotted anymore.

                        Actually.

1 + 1 = Forgiveness?

Because he was an electrical engineer and adept with numbers, it was always my father I went to with math homework.

This near-nightly escapade always took the same tired route: My dad trying to explain to me a concept that was assumed, understood, and so ingrained for him by now that he couldn’t explain it properly, and his getting frustrated when I couldn’t understand what for him was plain and evident.

I would get frustrated at his impatience, and the fact that I had to do this homework so I had to sit with him. And eventually, we’d become locked in a battle of wills so contentious, we’d end up screaming at each other. We call this 4th grade.

My brother told me a little more than a year ago, when I was going through chemo treatment and my dad was unable to show up for me, that what I was asking my dad to do (show up emotionally) was like asking a crippled person to walk: It’s impossible. It’s unfair, and it’s presumptive.

The same assumption that my dad had about teaching me math concepts, the ease and obviousness and facility he had with numbers, I have about emotional matters. I simply assume that because this is something so damned simple and easy for me, even when it’s painful, that everyone should be able to do this.

I am making the exact same mistake he did with me: I am shaming someone for something they are not able to do.

So, when I contemplate following up my dad’s return voicemail from Father’s Day, I have found that I want to do what I always want to do: Hash it out. EXPLAIN to him what is so obvious to me: I needed you to show up for me, and you didn’t. In fact, you blamed me for not being attentive to your needs. And you threw in my face every time I’ve failed in my life as if that would manipulate me into realizing, once again, you’re the savior and I’m the fuck-up.

I want to tell him this, of course, in a gentle, loving way, because then, of course, he’ll be able to hear it and understand it.

If I explain it really  s l o w l y  as if to a child, my dad can’t possibly not understand that his behavior across the years has been abominable at many times, and that I don’t like to be in touch with him because of it. That I don’t trust him because of it.

However. I’m simply expecting what he expected of me back then: Comprehension.

No Comprende, Mamasita. He don’t get it. He won’t get it. And you can sit with as many graphing calculators and pie charts of his behavior and your feelings of hurt and betrayal as you choose. You can even make a PowerPoint presentation about how his increased anger and violence was inversely proportionate to your trust of him.

However. I’d be wasting my breath. And do people even use Powerpoint anymore?

I still remember concepts my dad taught me about math. I used the one to figure out a percentage this morning. Somewhere between the yelling and the tears and the slammed books and doors, I did learn something. But what was the price of that education?

My dad was not a teacher. And my dad is not an empathetic person. It just is. Just as a paraplegic, my asking him to do what he is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually unable to do is unfair of me. My expectations on him won’t make him walk.

I hate relearning this lesson. It too ends in tears most times. But, today, I do have a choice between struggling to opening his mind, or to simply let him be a cripple and relate to him as such. Because it seems like the person who needs to learn something is not my dad (someone I have no control over). The person who needs to learn empathy here, soy yo. 

Not the Buddha.

Yesterday was Father's Day. As evidenced by the insane photobombing bonanza that was Facebook yesterday. (Yes, I'm modifying the meaning of photo-bomb in this context.)

I was unsurprised to notice an amalgam of feelings arise as I scrolled down, and down... and down, through the newsfeed. Yes. Everyone has a dad. Yes. I get it. Yes. I even have my own. Do I have to see yours, too?

In the end. I posted my own photo of myself with my dad. I must be about 5 years old, climbing over the guard rail into the brush. We're probably on vacation in Cape Cod, the ocean visible in the background. He's looking out through binoculars, the front fender of his red 1970 Cutlass in the corner of the image. The majority of the photos I have of us together when I'm little are from the Brownies/Girl Scouts Father/Daughter dances -- staged photos on cubes of packed hay. I'm sitting on my dad's lap, looking highly uncomfortable.

This annual awkwardness was the closest my dad and I ever got, and the call to look normal at it was a difficult one to answer.

But, still. Yesterday, I too wanted to feel a shred of familial nostalgia, true or un. I wanted to add to our communal photobook my own pixelated, sugar-coated memory.

In the afternoon, I attended a seminar being hosted at my work. I was on hand as a staff member but got to participate too. The subject under discussion was "Having Difficult Conversations." ... It was the most requested topic, and the least attended. We all want to know how to do this, but we're also hesitant to do so.

With about a dozen other folks, I was asked to turn to my neighbor and share "the story" of a conversation I'd been avoiding having. It was about 3pm on Father's Day, and I'd already mailed my dad a generic, but nice enough card. I'd emailed him yesterday with that photo attached. And the conversation I was anxious to have or not have was whether or not to also call him.

Had I done my due diligence as a daughter? Was a card and an email enough?

One of the questions asked of us was: What is their side of the story?

I thought about this, wrote about it. Thought about my dad wondering what he'd done to be punished with silence. Thought about him getting angry with me for disappointing him again. Thought about him contemplating his martrydom, that all he'd done was love me, and I can't show up for him.

But. True or not, these are only what I think he's thinking.

In reality, what he's probably thinking is that he loves me and misses me and would like to hear from me.

Period.

Because as time and experience have proved, he has little ability to contemplate much below the surface.

Once the workshop was over, I'd concluded that I'd probably done enough. That I didn't need to call him, to subject myself to being open to attack or discomfort, as previous conversations have only proved to be. That's what the story is, too: If I call, I open myself up to disappointment. Again.

But, once I arrived to my friend's house for dinner, I'd had a few more minutes to think, and as I parked, what occurred to me was a phrase a friend told me long ago: "The Buddha says hello first."

I thought as I put it into reverse, What kind of person do I want to be in this world?

Surely, I don't want to be someone who allows themselves to be whipped over and over, but I forget that I'm also someone these days who when I see that coming or happening, I have the esteem and wherewithall to stop them or to end the conversation.

I want to be the kind of person who sends love, even to those who are unable to receive it. Not as "The Giving Tree" would do, but with conscious decision. I know I'm taking a risk reaching out to you, but I care ... not really about you, sorry, but about how I feel -- and how I feel is that I want to send you a ... not an olive branch, but perhaps just a message of peace, not truce.

In the end, I just wanted to act toward my father how I would want him to behave toward me, with awareness, with boundaries, and with empathy toward us both.

So, I called. And mercifully, I got his voicemail. I left one, short and sweet. Which he reciprocated while I was out to dinner and left me one.

He just wants to know what's going on in my life. He has lost this right. He has proved himself untrustworthy to know more than the most sweeping generalizations about my life. And I will have to decide once again if this is a conversation I want to have.

The Buddha may say hello first, but how many times do you say hello to someone you don't trust?

Broken Algorithms

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Someone asks you out. You’re pretty sure it’s not a match, but "you never know" and you have nothing better to do, so you say sure. The date is uneventful, confirms that you’re not a match, and ends with a nice awkward hug, and one of those vague promises to meet up again soon.

Perhaps there are follow-up texts, that you politely reply to, but are vague and friendly. Perhaps there are then more follow-up texts that you begin to ignore in an attempt to give a hint as to your lack of interest and intention. And, finally, perhaps there’s the passive-aggressive texts you begin to receive that a) reconfirm this wasn’t a match, and b) lead you to hide them from your newsfeed!

What’s wrong with this picture? – as the back of the Highlights magazine asked you to spot.

Well, first and foremost is the fact that you abandoned your own good judgment, values, and integrity by agreeing to go out in the first place. “Pretty sure it’s not a match” is usually good enough. Enough of these situations have proved that your gut is usually correct.

This self-abandonment is the seed of the whole problem. It’s not the dude; it’s not his persistence; it’s not his disappointment masked as passive-aggression. – It’s you.

I’ve finished reading the history of online dating/how-to memoir entitled Data, A Love Story: How I Cracked the Online Dating Code to Meet My Match. In it, the author describes that the problem with online dating is not the sites; it’s us. It’s us answering questions as our aspirational self, instead of as we are. It’s us, chatting with people we only have vague interest in. It’s us, abandoning our integrity in order to have crappy connections with people.

I’ve been thinking about this process in relation to my job search. I’ve realized that I do the same thing in dating that I do in job searching: I lie. I let jobs that hold little to no interest for me get a bulk of my attention, and then when I get the interview, I find that, indeed, I’m not interested, but in order to be “nice” or liked or wanted or hired, I will feign that interest. I will more often than not land that job, and then I will become resentful that I have it. This suitor that I didn’t want, I’m now trying to delete from my Facebook, or in this case, my LinkedIn.

Again, what’s broken here is not these jobs – it’s my willingness to abandon my values. It’s my willingness to say to myself, Something is better than nothing; what else have you got to do? It’s my willingness to waste my time and theirs, so that I can put off and deny what it is I really want.

My willingness to waste my own time … my threshold for the pain that causes is astronomically high.

But because I have a belief that this is easier than the pain of making truer statements, of sticking close to my integrity, my intentions, my values, and my wants, I choose the rockier path every time.

Because the alternative is to stick with myself. To be the friend I want to be to myself. To be my own cheerleader and ally, and to let myself know that I’m here to support myself on the unknown path of self-esteem.

I said on the phone to a friend two weeks ago: "I’m having trouble mustering the low self-esteem required to apply for jobs I don’t want." Ha!

I think we call that progress; insight; growth. (Although, I am still finding myself browsing those job descriptions.)

I have to muster a whole silo filled with negative beliefs in order to go toward jobs I don’t want. These include: I don’t know what I want, so I don’t deserve anything better. I will only abandon myself eventually, so I may as well do it now. There’re no happy endings in this world, so what makes you think you deserve one.

To name a few.

And I have to bombard and drown myself in these beliefs (false beliefs) in order to “muster the low self-esteem” necessary to undersell myself.

The same, I’m sure, is true for me in the dating world.

So, again, what is the solution, here?

I know that it’s to not abandon myself, to continue working on my self-esteem, to wipe away the corroded mirror I use to judge myself so that I can get a clearer view, one that reflects esteem, joy, confidence, and courage. One that reflects someone fun, engaged, lively, warm, and worthy. I know that the work is to trust that if I walk away from that silo of low self-esteem, I will be led toward a healthier source of sustenance.

And that trust... That is the hard part. That tiny sapling of faith that I will have to hold onto as the storm of negativity swirls around me, raging only harder the longer I resist. I will have to hold on to that sapling, until it becomes a redwood, until the storm recedes into memory. I will have to have faith that if I hold on long enough to my self-worth and my self-esteem, the clouds will give way to the sun. 

Here's hoping. 

Band Aid.

You know, it was right around a year ago last June that I stood up with a group of 4 other people and played bass with a band in front of actual people in an actual venue. – I’d started playing in May.

This month, I’m being invited to do so again.

I’ve picked up my bass literally once in the last 6 months, since our final show on New Year’s Eve, or the final show I played with them before I left the band to pursue theater.

This switch, this focus of my energies in one creative direction (one that I’ve always wanted to pursue, but never let myself try or admit or commit to) has turned out pretty darn well in these last few months: I got real headshots, auditioned about a dozen times, performed in one play, one staged reading, and am preparing as the lead in a play at the end of the summer.

These are all great things.

But I miss the band.

I miss the immediate gratification of playing with people. I miss the noise, the movement, the sound, the collaboration. I miss the laughter.

Theater is performance; being a musician is a performance; but there’s a difference. The former is literally more staged. It’s not like I have acres of experience in either, and maybe I simply fell in with a great group of people for my first band – which I did. But whatever the formula is for happiness, I felt that when I played.

A friend once asked me what it was like to play with the band. What it felt like. And I took her question with me to band practice that week, and noticed how I felt as we fiddled and fixed and went over and over and moved into a rhythm, and went totally off the reservation with funny lyrics and made-up progressions: I was smiling. I was bouncing on the balls of my bare feet – the only way I could practice – and I noticed that I felt content, engaged, in the moment, fun, funny, “on.” That’s what “happy” felt like.

Next Sunday, I’ll get to practice with a new group of folks, a friend and his friend, to prepare for a potential show in July, before my theater rehearsal gets going. I’m feeling nervous and jittery – wanting to get the music charts NOW so I can practice, be perfect, be better – because if you haven’t followed along, I’ve only been playing a year, and not that consistently at that!

I want to build my calluses back up. I want to remember where C is on the fret board. I want to bounce on the carpet in my bare feet.

I love this theater stuff, … but I love the band better.

(P.S. I’m just reminded to reflect that it was only a little while ago that I wrote here that I wanted to “band” again … and here it is. Word.)

The Runaways

I sent out a mass text on Wednesday to several women I know who’d understand. I asked them to help me not quit my job that day; that for me quitting without a safety net is equivalent to drinking; that I was at the end of my rope.

I got several texts back, including from a woman I am only acquainted with but who I admire, and she offered that if I called her, we could pray together. Sure, what else have I got?

When I called, I imagined we’d just say some rote prayer that is common around, but instead, she launched into a several-minute long prayer personal to and about me. In it she said, to me and to the ether, that this job is just a recreation of my childhood trauma and neglect, and to help me see that and heal that. She said many other loving things, but this is the part that has been sending shock-waves through me the last few days.

I’ve “gotten” that my relationships in the world tend to be mirrors or recreations of older, historical relationships. It’s been clear that my acceptance and pursuit of jobs that make me want to cry with frustration over the hemorrhaging of my time is a pattern of low self-worth and despair.

However, there was and is a new level of understanding – an “aha” moment if you will (not gag) – as I listened to my friend’s prayer. How is my job a recreation of my home life growing up?

Well, at home, I was a runaway.

When I was little, I only did it twice. I got as far as our public library, with a small backpack filled with maybe an apple and a sweatshirt. But at 7 or 8 years old, I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a place to go, there was no where to go. And so I defeatedly walked back home, and slipped into my house, where no one noticed I’d been gone anyway, just like the time before.

In my home, my gifts were not encouraged or noticed; there was an unstable force that expected perfection, meekness, and to be obeyed; and finally, all of my most basic needs were met. I was fed, clothed, and housed -- anything else was bonus, not to be asked for and not to be expected.

(It wasn’t prison life, I know; but this is the interpretation and internalization of a small person with a brain that analyzes and makes judgment.)

So. How have my work environments been a reflection, a recreation of this initial home environment?

Perfectly. Perfectly parallel:

Basic needs met. Check.

Gifts not seen or utilized. Check.

Perfection and meekness expected. Check.

Unstable authoritarian. Check.

And finally,

Somewhere I run away from. Check. Check, the whole of my life, check.

I have held 6 jobs in the past 8 years.

Each year and a half or so, I become so frustrated with the confines of my environment and the yearnings of my soul, that I quit. I quit without a safety net. I quit with nowhere to go.

And so I do what I did when I was young: I go back home. I find another underearning, underbeing, dissatisfying, deadening, useless position that also meets my very basic needs and has a few coworkers to be my allies.

I keep this job until I end up crying in my car for an hour (See: this Tuesday). And then I quit again.

Rinse. Repeat.

So, today, I am attempting with every fucking fiber of my being not to quit. Not to start the cycle again without a plan – without someplace to go. Without someplace to go that is “right,” that is safe, that is not running from the frying pan into the fire.

For me, to quit a job without a safety net – meaning, another job or enough savings to carry me through to another job – is tantamount to drinking. And as a sober alcoholic, that’s a pretty serious parallel. It is deadly for me to do this again: I eventually begin to think about driving into oncoming traffic. It is insane for me to do this again and expect that in any way it would be different than before.

So, what is my solution?

I have tried every mode of visioning, job window-shopping, informational interviewing, praying, meditating, and begging known to me to try to “conjure” or land on or decide or realize or discover what the job, the career, for my life should be. And I have landed on nothing. I am absolutely blocked in this area of dreaming.

A therapist once told me that I don’t let myself dream.

And this is true. Why dream, when it’ll be taken away or I’ll fuck it up anyway, which amounts to the same thing?

I had a moment last night when I heard someone say that “we” are the kind of people who try to get away with doing the least work.

I thought about that. Why is that? Because I completely identify with that.

I leaned to my friend on the left, who identifies with that way of being, and asked, Well, what about workaholics?

I leaned to my friend on the right, who is a workaholic and would no more do the least amount of work necessary than eat sand, and asked her about it.

Later, in talking with her, I’ve come to see that although the routes are very opposite, the motivation and the fear is the same for both “underearners/under-be-ers” and for workaholics: Things are not going to work out; I'm not going to be okay.

For the set that does the minimum, the fear (for me at least) is that whatever it is is not going to work out anyway, so why try? Why give the world the satisfaction of seeing me put effort in, if it’s only going to turn to shit?

For the workaholic set, the fear is that unless I have my hand in everything, it’s not going to work out. I must make sure that I’m doing everything possible, or it will turn to shit.

In both these scenarios, the fear is that the result will not be favorable to us. On the one hand, why try to make it work – on the other hand, make it.

In both cases, there is a lack of faith in the positive outcome of things, or in an outcome that is unfavorable but doesn’t demoralize and crush us into smitherines. Because, for me, that’s the final stage of the fear – I will be so demoralized, I will be annihilated.

But aren't I there anyway?

So, again, what is the solution here?

It seems to me, that I needed a safe place to go when I was running away. And although I cannot conjure or envision for myself a job or career that I want, I do think that I can try to envision for myself a safe home.

Though, even in my home life now, I’ve recreated what it was like when I was a kid: My own small room that was safe, filled with things I’ve made and pretty things, a place I could hide, be myself, and a place where I was mostly alone.

What is a real safe place, not like this isolation? Where would I want to run away to?

I believe that as I try to answer this question, to envision what an ideal safe home looks like, I will begin to have movement on the job front. I will begin to create that environment I crave in the external world. And though that might not mean a lightning bolt in terms of a career choice, it may help to make whatever my next transition is one that I don’t have to run away from.