Spiritual Echolocation

I am not the best judge of my progress or my abilities. But, even though I can’t rightly see myself, I’m beginning to notice that I am hearing it from others.

And this in itself feels like progress: At least I’m hearing it.

There was a time when I described compliments as one of those bug zapper lamps people hang on their porch. The bugs merely get within range of the lamp and they get zapped dead. Same with compliments for me: Anything positive that was said would get deflected before it even got close to touching me. None of that here, pew! pew!

I'd said that you can’t receive a compliment if there’s no complementary place within you to receive it. If there’s nowhere it fits within your own understanding of yourself, then there’s no way that it can be accepted. There’s no ring of truth, because you don’t believe it yourself.

Time passed, and I’ve become more able to receive positive feedback about certain things, because I have begun to hone and cultivate the place within me that is receptive, the place within me that believes you because I believe it myself.

That said, there’s room for growth.

This week, I’ve had several experiences where I’ve been told about my progress and abilities, and even though I can’t quite feel this, I’m beginning to recognize that I believe them, I believe others are seeing this, even if I'm not myself.

Hence, spiritual echolocation. I can’t see it myself, but I believe in the feedback I’m receiving – so there must be something to it.

I know that feeding off external validation is not the way to walk about the world, but what it’s doing for me is giving me hope that one day I can see it. There is an existence of a cave wall. Others are telling me so. If that is truth, there is hope that I will see it, too.

On Friday night, after the first act of our opening night of To Kill a Mockingbird, the director came backstage. He was beaming. He was so glad and proud of the work I was doing on-stage.

I was dubious. But I thought Wednesday’s preview night went much better; it felt better.

He told me he was the only rightly judge of my performance, and Friday night, I was better.

Whether I felt it or not.

On Saturday morning, I went for my semi-regular voice lesson. And at the end of a phrase I’d sung, my teacher applauded and cheered – he even gave me a high five.

“Did you hear that?” he asked, delighted.

No, I didn’t. I can’t hear myself.

The noise and buffer between what is and what I perceive is loud and thick.

“We’re going to have to record you more then,” he said. “You have to get used to hearing yourself.”

This morning, I was on the phone with my mentor, and I reported these incidents to her, as I begin to parse out these places where I’m being told one thing, but I’m hearing and sensing another.

She, too, had told me that I’m farther along than I can feel. And she gave me a metaphor (because we all know I love those!):

She told me I am a tree creating deep, deep roots. A solid foundation. And you can’t always see that growth above ground, but it’s happening.

We were talking (again) about my questioning of where and who I am this lifetime and where I’m going. And she said, some people have really gorgeous foliage, and weak roots.

We’re doing the work now -- early, some might say -- that others come to in mid and later life. Creating a root system, carving out the rot, cleaning the wounds.

Like a field of asparagus, you don’t see its heroic work until one morning you turn, and the whole field has sprouted green, fully formed, like Athena.

I am not used to hearing or seeing myself clearly. I’m not adequately armed with the ability to track my own progress. And thank god for other people, then!

But I do feel the promise and the hope of their reflection. I am beginning to hear what they’re saying instead of zapping it, because I'm beginning to uncover the place within me that believes it myself.

I’m starting to open to a truth that’s been, and is, hard for me to swallow:

I am worthy. 

a short note, just to let you know I’m not dead.

the end.

just kidding.

I have to leave to go meet up with some folks at 9am I haven’t seen in a very long time. I had my dailey method shift yesterday at 530am, so I didn’t write, and sunday mornings are my check-in with my mentor, and usually lead to more emotion than can settle enough to show up here – which is good. so, tuesday, it is!

i just wanted to reflect on something that occurred to me as I sat in meditation this morning, back into another one of those deepak/oprah 21-day meditation challenges: I am living the schedule I wanted.

sure, it’s not perfect! but I’d wanted my days divided into thirds: mornings in private work, working on art, or music, or writing; afternoons working in the community somehow – how I didn’t know; and the evenings spent in performance.

and here I sit today, my morning spent in meditation, a little writing. this afternoon, I’ll head over to the synagogue to teach 4th grade. and this evening, I’ll have rehearsal (well, we’re off tonight, but you get the point!).

without intending to, I’ve come to the structure of the day I’ve always wanted or thought i wanted. the one I didn’t think I could achieve until I was 50, and had more going for me.

but, today, even though it doesn’t look perfect, even though I am only earning about a third of my needed income through teaching two days a week… this is what it will feel like. this is what it does feel like:

awesome. fulfilling. purposeful. open. creative. engaged. important. 

thanks, universe, for this taste of what it will and what it is like. i was right when i discovered that’s the day i want for myself. now, help me achieve it sustainably. thanks. 

B’reishit: In the Beginning…

This week in the Jewish calendar, having unscrolled and read the whole Torah throughout the year, we come again to rewrap it all the way back to the beginning to read the very first word: B’reishit, “In the beginning.”

We’ve come to the end of something, and we wind it back to the beginning to start again.

I can’t think of a more appropriate coincidence and parallel for my own life.

Yesterday afternoon, Addams Family The Musical closed to a full house, once again. We said our final jokes, we emphasized things a little more. We cried at that one “Happy/Sad” song that reminds us that most things in life are a little of both. And when the final bows were over and the final patrons thanked, we came back to the dressing room for the last time, finally and pleasingly and thank god-ingly taking off our sweat-soaked costumes. The last time getting someone to help me un-pin the dress, the last time taking off the long and elaborate and hot wig, the last time returning my mic pack to the sound designer.

And when this was all done, and most of the makeup had been removed from our faces…

We began tearing down the set. The set that only a handful of weeks ago we’d built, and painted, and staged, and seen evolve right before our eyes. The same stage that only a few weeks before that, we’d all stood on for auditions in the remnants of the set from the previous show.

And now, here we were, making this, our set “the remnants of a previous show.”

Because To Kill a Mockingbird opens in 4 weeks.

I asked some of the old-timers if they got a little wistful breaking down something that was like another character in the show, if it was sad to have put it all up, just to take it all down? And each of them said, No. It’s part of the gig. They’re used to it. To the turn-over, to the letting go.

I’m not, yet! It was happy/sad for sure. It will be strange tonight to come to the theater for Mockingbird rehearsal and see the bones of our Addams set on the stage, picked clean of the character we’d built. And yet, if this isn’t a great lesson in the constant ebb and flow, creation and destruction, then I don’t know what is.

In the beginning, we were tentative and perhaps shy, getting used to one another’s personalities, contributions, moods.

In the beginning, we created something out of nothing, out of a few words and notes on a page, sitting in a small room with a piano, laughing a little, tense a little.

In the beginning, we didn’t know about the tech problems or the extra rehearsals. We didn’t know the petty arguments we’d have, or the number of times we’d have to control rolling our eyes.

In the beginning, we didn’t know the kind of joy and laughter we’d create on-stage or back-stage. We didn’t know the relationships we’d form, and the singular role each member of the cast and crew would take. We didn’t know that we’d come to love each other.

And now that we’ve unscrolled to the end, and we’re about to bring it all back to the beginning again, I am sure that we have learned something, something critical to the nature of life and love and joy and experience, that we didn’t know we would and that will carry us forward as we start once more with new words and notes and castmates.

In the beginning, we were strangers. We’ll never be that way again. 

T’shuvah

(In my vague and limited Jewish knowledge) T’shuvah refers to the time in the Jewish calendar between Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—and Yom Kippur—when our names are sealed in the “Book of Life” by G-d for the next year.

T’shuvah literally means to return, but most interpretations take it to mean a time of repentance. A time of atoning for our “sins,” and to acknowledge where we’ve “missed the mark” of our own moral target.

I’m not one for “sins,” or for “atoning,” or for asking forgiveness from a spiritual entity. In my own spiritual practice, there is a habit of taking note of where we’ve been wrong and amending that behavior, whether through direct conversation with someone we’ve harmed or through choosing to act differently in the future.

But, the idea of asking a “higher power” to forgive me for anything at all has never sat well with me. I simply don’t think that anything that has the power to create life and death and change and love would need my asking. I believe that whatever “G-d” is, “it” is much too loving or non-personified to ever require me to ask it to forgive my behavior.

As I said, I still think the process of taking stock of my behavior and righting my own wrongs is very important to my emotional wellbeing and my personal relationships. But on the spiritual plane, G-d would never need me to ask for forgiveness. There’s nothing to forgive – there’s only love, acceptance, and a desire for me to be my best self.

That said, I have been reflecting that this week of t’shuvah has certainly been one of returning. I feel that my actions are those of a woman returning to herself and her values; returning to my true nature, and returning to ideas and hopes that were feared or abandoned.

I am in a musical. I’ve returned to that dream of acting and singing, despite the fears and self-judgments it still brings up in me.

I have officially announced this week that I am moving on from my office job. Again, a return to my true desires, my internal compass. I have stopped hitting the Snooze button on my instincts and drives.

No matter what comes of it, disaster or “success,” I am trying something brand new for me. And that is certainly a return to curiosity, innocence, hope, and creation.

I told my coworker that I boycott Yom Kippur these days. The fasting and the communal atoning of sins. I shun this day and its activities because the idea is that by atoning for our sins, we will be “inscribed in the Book of Life” for another year.

According to the Jewish calendar, in 2012 the evening closing Yom Kippur was the moment of my Leukemia diagnosis. I spent the day of Yom Kippur in an ER. And closed the chapter of that day with cancer. I was 30 years old.

I have done a lot of work around turning that diagnosis into the seeds of a new life. But I will never deny that I have a few wheelbarrows full of anger and grief that still need … sorting or composting or alleviation. Or simply time to feel them, and then to let them go, perhaps, if that’s what happens.

But for me, the idea that on one of the most holy days of the Jewish year, on the day when a person is either granted another year of life or is not, I cannot hold the tragedy of being told half my blood was cancer on that same day. 

And, I imagine, my feelings toward all of this will transform, lessen, or evolve. But, for now, I boycott Yom Kippur.

I have used this week of T’shuvah to take stock of where I am desirous to return to and acknowledge and rejoice in the truth of my soul, and to note where I already am. I have used this week to affirm that life can be new and different and fulfilling.

I will never need the forgiveness of an entity that is either made of benevolence or simply is the indifferent force of Life itself.

My week of T’shuvah is and has returned me to a place of excitement and possibility. I don’t need a communal atonement to reward me for how exceptional that is. 

That said. Shanah Tovah u'Metukah -- May you have a good (tovah) and sweet (metukah) year, friends. And may we write our own Books of Life. 

Baking a Life Worth Living.

“It was the fantasy made so real that I teared up a few times, wanted to pinch myself, and thought over and over and over, how is it that I am here?

How did this happen?

And I can trace the arc of it and still be amazed to be this woman[…]”

This is a quote from my friend Carmen’s blog today, or last night actually, the woman who began inspiring me to write a blog at all, and then a blog-a-day (or, almost a day. Self-care [aka sleep!] comes first during this month, sorry avid readers!).

Our paths have been divergent but so parallel over these few years, I once proposed we co-share a book based on our blogs: Her adventures in Paris, having moved there for her 40th birthday, and her triumphs and struggles there; My adventures in Cancer-land happening at the same time, as I turned 31, and the strangely similar triumphs and struggles.

Today, was no different: She was visiting New York City for the first time. I am in a musical for the first time as an adult.

Her words make me reflect and become present once again with the amaze-ball nature of where my life and energies currently are.

But, I also was very keen when I first found out I was cast about the words I used. I made sure to not say, “I can’t believe it.”

Sure, I couldn’t believe it! But, I wasn’t going to say that. I believe in the Law of Attraction-style woo-woo stuff, and in my readings on it, when you say things like, “I can’t believe this is happening to me” or “This is impossible!” or “This can’t be happening” – even though they’re amazing things – it’s my belief that the “Universe” hears that, that you hear that, and if that’s really your belief, then they can fade or change to support your belief that these amazing things aren’t actually happening.

Who knows? I don’t. But I’d rather be on the safer side of things!

So, when I told my mom, I said simply, "I’m so excited. I'm so grateful."

I do have to stop saying, "I’m so nervous." SURE, I am nervous. I had another voice lesson yesterday, and it’s helping me feel more comfortable in the lower register of my voice, but I won’t yet say I'm confident. It still feels like straining and yelling. But I’m getting more used to that discomfort…which I guess is another way of saying, “Getting comfortable”!

I am astonished by and pleased with the woman I am and have become. And I also know the places where I strive to grow and build and commit, and lay foundations for an even more “me” life.

I know progress is slow. My voice teacher said that it’s about first finding a place to build the house, before you even begin to think about what it looks like or furnishing it. You have to find the firm ground to stand on before you can build anything on it.

And, I’m doing that, slowly.

It’s strange sometimes to be the age I’m at. About to be 33 next month, and feeling so much older than some, and so much younger than others. Explaining to the 11-year old Pugsley what a revelation the cordless phone was when I was a teen. Even my new co-worker, age 22, fresh out of college, and so bristling with energy.

And then, there’s most of my friends, who are older than me, who hear me talk about the brevity of life and how there’s so much more I want to do, and give me the “You’re so young, you have so much time” face.

I get the feeling that this is the center (or the beginning of the center) of adulthood. When you know you’re not a child, really learning the world and who/how you want to be in it; and neither are you a middle-aged person, knowing that you are pretty well set in your personhood for the rest of your days.

It’s a period of final gelling that I feel. (Though I know learning and growing and changing is a lifelong process.)

But I sort of feel like all the ingredients have been gathered, have been mixed, and we’re waiting to see if what I’ve assembled is a sourdough or cupcake batter.

I do hope it’s cupcakes.

I am the woman who knows she eats 90 eggs a month (yes, really). Who knows she buys only Ultra Soft toilet paper, but the super eco-friendly paper towels. Who knows how to pay her bills on time, and knows she still won’t do her dishes until pressed by her own revulsion!

The woman I am looks for the hope, even in the desperate times. She relies on friendships built during the “ingredient assemblage” time, and knows they are in fact ingredients of this current and future life.

The woman I am struggles with self-doubt, and celebrates her moments of self-encouragement. Falls short of ideals, and laughs about it when she can, and shares about it when she can't.

“How did this happen? How am I here?”

I don’t have to pinch myself. I don’t think this is a dream. I do have to remind myself it’s a nuanced, challenging, changing, and ultimately precious reality. 

And the woman I am looks eagerly forward to licking the icing. 

Doctor of Philosophy

If you have read my blog for any period of time, you may be aware by now that I seem to have a knack for interpreting the human species and their actions. I observe, report, make conclusions, and sometimes adjust my own behavior to meet the findings of what “healthy” or “happy” people seem to be doing.

Philosophically speaking, in all my deep-cover research on human behavior, I may well have earned myself a doctorate in human behavior.

However for every inner tube of polymer, there is a flat of pavement, and it is where the rubber meets the road that I become hesitant.

It is all well and good to observe, predict, and theorize, to take note of actions of others and even of myself as a predictor and indicator of action’s next steps. However, there is also the parable about the monk who spent 20 years in a cave becoming enlightened, and upon emerging decked the first guy he had a disagreement with.

It is only in practice that we actually learn. (Though, I do submit that research and reflection help.)

When my mom came to visit a few weeks ago, we began to discuss my romantic life. (Unworried, as she said she was, that I would have any trouble when I was finally ready. She's not the "where are my grandchildren" type, she said.) I told her a little about my extra layer of protection around my castle wall metaphor. I told her that my work currently is about coming to trust myself and my boundaries enough to let people close enough to know me.

I told her my doubts about feeling capable of a) letting those guards down, and b) evaluating approachers in a level-headed way. I told her that I am scared to learn to trust myself, because I’m scared that I can’t.

She responded with a story of her own. She’d taken issue, herself, with the word “trust.” The airy and elusive nature of that word. And she’s replaced it with the word, “rely.”

Several years ago, she signed up to be a part of a tour group that would travel to Scotland to see the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her friend asked her if she was nervous to go by herself, with no-one she knew? My mom replied, No. She knew that she could rely on her own effusive and collegial personality, and that she’d make friends.

She didn’t say that she could trust herself to do this; she said that she knew she could rely on herself. That she had her own back, basically.

And she invited me to think about it this way instead: Can I rely on myself? Do I have my own back?

… Well, judging by a very long history of self-abandoning actions, it’s hard to answer that with a complete affirmative. But, when pressed, I know that it is true—that it is true now: I am here for myself, even when things are hard… and even when things are great.

My own pattern of looking the other way, of procrastinating, of dismissing myself has begun to lessen. If I look at it honestly.

And so, can I rely on myself? Well, I think I can.

And, here’s the rubber/road test: If I do think I can rely on myself, support myself, be compassionate and encouraging and honest with myself… Then… it means I’m going to have to allow the sentries around my castle to stand down, and let my natural boundaries do their job.

I’m going to have to trust myself (word disparity aside) and take actions that are indicative of a woman who trusts herself, inviting in those who are supportive but also challenge me to be my best self, and inviting to leave those who are not.

I’m going to have to have my back.

And I’m going to have to let go of the reigns. My reigns have become most like bonds, and not the fun kind.

I am scared to try this new way of being out “in the field.” But I am also scared to continue limiting my connections with people. (And again, if you’ve read me for any length of time, you know that, mostly, I’m addressing the case of chronic single-hood I’ve managed to carry for as long as I’ve been of dating age. Chronic single-hood is most like being Typhoid Mary. You feel fine, but no one wants to be near you.)

I know that I can’t (and don't want to) go on the way I have. I’m too young to be a spinster, and too old to be a bachelorette.

In the observational reality of modern relationships, I may be deft at cataloguing and quantifying. But my absence of field research also means that all of my assumptions about my own viability, accessibility, and health are purely theoretical. 

parental advice

Brene Brown talks a lot in her book Daring Greatly about parenting, about how to “dare greatly” in parenting, which often means allowing yourself to feel, with all uncertainty and unpredictability, the full extent of your love. She talks about the split-second after noticing her full love for her children the flood of constricting and panicking thoughts about loss and impermanence and a terrible desire to control. To allow herself to notice and accept her love so deeply, she’s also acutely aware of how tenuous life is, and how she cannot protect her offspring from the world.

In the moment of greatest love is the moment of greatest vulnerability.

She talks about trying to withstand and stand in that moment of love as long as possible without giving in to the fear of the things we cannot control.

The kinds of thoughts that enter immediately after hearing, “You got the role.” God, I hope I don’t fuck it up. Or after “I love you.” Don't betray me. Or “You’re a great friend.” Am I doing enough?

Moments of connection are severed by fear when we insulate back inside ourselves around the thought: How can I control this?

We can’t.

In every effort we put forth to expand ourselves, we risk.

In every effort we make to control, we risk those relationships that have brought us joy, including the one with ourselves. See: I’ve gained some muscle working out, I better make sure I get to the gym even more. I hiked for an hour this week, I really should do that three times a week. I loved that novel I read, I should really be reading something “worthwhile.”

Brown has written that we siphon off the top layer of risk and innovation and spontaneity when we attach our interpretation of our efforts to how they’ll be received – I believe this includes the efforts and risks we make that are private, like those above: How are they received by ourselves?

Are the efforts we put toward joy, spontaneity, pushing our own envelope supported internally, or hampered by voices of not good enough?

Sometimes both. Sometimes it depends on the minute of the day.

I can experience the duplicity of knowing my acting is up to par for this show, but my singing is not.

What I cannot hold is the self-derision that follows that awareness.

As always, action is the antidote to anxiety and worry. Voice lessons, music drills. Learning, learning learning.

This is a challenge. A challenge to show up authentically, even if I don’t like or approve of what that sounds like at the moment. There is vulnerability in showing up, but if, as happens frequently, I step on my own efforts and try to hide the greatest risks, I won’t learn, I won’t grow, nor will I have any fun.

There’s a self-reparenting that is happening for me right now. A re-training. In fact, several days this week, as I’ve sat up out of bed, voices already chiding me for being sick and not being able to sing, for not being as good as the others actors – I’ve literally had to stop myself and insert a new voice, saying aloud – Yes, Moll, I know, and you’re working on it. You’re doing the best you know how right now, and you are enough.

There is risk in allowing myself the "lenience" of self-approval. There is the risk of abandoning control and constriction and self-flagellation. There is the risk that things won’t turn out “how I want,” how I want things to be, how I want myself to be – Can’t you be better at something you’ve never done before, the voice chides incessantly.

But I want a different reality. A different parenting. I want to be able to look at myself and my efforts fully, with the full ache of unknowing and the full pride of risk-taking.

I want to begin modeling this completely uncertain, vulnerable, pulsating, spark-of-life parental love for myself, because I have hope that one day I'll need to employ it with children of my own.

And you can’t give to others what you can’t give yourself. 

Slings and Arrows

Hamlet questions whether it is better to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” or to “take arms against a sea of troubles” and end them (with suicide).

Outrageous fortune. Could be good, could be "bad," but we have to show up to find out.

In Louise Hay’s book on the relationship between emotions and body symptoms, the throat is listed as the “avenue of expression.” Troubles with the throat are interpreted as a fear of expressing oneself and stifled creativity.

I’ve felt it coming on this week, and today, my throat is officially red and sore. Color me not surprised.

As I’ve been mentioning this week, the idea of being loud, louder, more full, more powerful has been a hard one for me to grapple with. And so, this morning, tender in my throat, I went into meditation to “ask” what’s going on here, and how I can help.

Forgive me if this gets too “woo-woo” for you, but…

It was like Fantastic Voyage – I “went” inside my throat, to my tonsils, to my vocal cords, and inside there on both sides, at each tonsil, someone, a girl, a child choking them, shushing them. Telling them to Be Quiet!

I went and asked her what she was really trying to accomplish here, what is the objective, why be quiet?

Because then you’ll be safe, she railed. I’m trying to keep you safe.

I told her that I already am, that I am safe without this strangling. I put my arms around her, and told her she was safe, and in real life I began to tear up a little. With relief, with grief, with acknowledgment of pain long suffered and finally being addressed and hopefully cleared – in time.

With a mother with chronic migraines and a father apt to turn rageful, I learned very early that to be quiet, unseen, simple, need-less, and self-sufficient was to be safe. I aroused negative emotions in others when I expressed the needs a child might have, and so I learned to deny them.

This hasn’t worked out too well as I’ve grown up, and at another deeper level, I’m again being called to address the fallacy of these childhood interpretations. Someone not able to care for my needs is not the same as “my needs are too much.”

The important change here is to allow myself to understand, feel, acknowledge, and melt into the present, into the changes that I have made around and within myself to establish a life that is safe, loving, encouraging and open.

It is hard to remember these things in my throat.

I remember them in my head, but it is going to take time for the little girl who strangles and shushes me to understand, like most children, that something has changed.

It is safe to be heard. It is safe to speak up for myself. It is safe to be creative.

I have a host of supporters, internal and external, who tell me that indeed, Yes, it is better to suffer the slings and arrows than to shut down. That it is better to show up and be seen and find out what outrageous fortune has to offer than to escape.

I am safe, I am heard.

These are not mutually exclusive. 

TURN IT UP!

In my race toward the middle, I have forgotten something: To Have Fun.

I was at my first vocal rehearsal on Sunday, and I did what I had done at my audition: When I got scared of a note (even one I can sing), I pulled back.

I’m reminded of Brene Brown saying that, If we base our performance, our work, our art, our selves, on the reception of others, we will invariably slice off and withhold the most potent layer of our performance, work, art, self. We cannot give our full selves, our full gift, if we are concerned with how we look about it.

To quote another source: You can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.

Did you run out of breath, the music director asked me? No, I just got embarrassed and dropped the note. 

My new voice teacher has told me that she thinks Morticia is from the Bronx – not for the accent, mind you, but for the attitude. Imagine a large Bronxian woman yelling down the street at some paisan – Morticia is like that. The vocal coach told me to speak like I think everyone else is deaf.

Despite dropping out of the “Queen of the Amazons” play, where I was being called to “Be a Royal,” to act how a queen might act, and I was curious and a little scared to see what that would be like, I am again being asked to do the same.

To own my voice.

Be loud. Be big. Be powerful.

The music director said, There is nothing sweet about Morticia.

This isn’t about sounding sweet or beautiful; it’s about sounding powerful.

Honestly, two plays in a row where I’m cast as a powerful woman? I think the Universe is giving me a huge opportunity and challenge here. And as I said to a friend yesterday, I’m going to have to rise to it.

In the middle of all this, however, in the middle of trying to stay on note and memorize the phrasing and the breathing and the rests – I can begin to forget why I came here in the first place.

This is not about perfection; it’s about fun. This is supposed to be FUN! Come on, man? "Addams Family The Musical"? If that’s not supposed to be fun, I don’t know what is.

Now, I get that I have a responsibility to myself, to the cast, to the audience to rehearse, to get as proficient as I can. But I also have a responsibility to be light and fun about it – it will come through if I’m terrified, or scared to belt a note, or worried what you’re thinking of me. Worried that I’m being too much, too big, too loud.

Fears I have shackled around myself for a lifetime, I’m being specifically ordered to discard. Now.

Be more, Molly. Be bigger, be louder.

And, too, within that challenge and order, I am being called to remember to hold this lightly. That this is meant to be so the most fun that I’ve ever had.

The bigger I get, the more fun I should remember to have. It’s the antidote to self-sabotage. And a supporter of humility.

This isn’t really about me. Sure, it’s about me and my challenge to grow and let go, but it’s also about what can come through me. And when I close my voice, drop the note, don’t support myself by not breathing, there is no chance for me to be a channel of joy and fun.

I said it only two days ago: I need to root my safety within myself, and stop worrying about what others might think – especially that they’ll tell me to turn it down. They are literally, actually, verbally telling me to turn it up!

Rise, Miss Molly, to the challenge. This is one of those moments when you have a choice, when you can see the options clearly marked and have the chance to change: Small or Big, Mol? – You wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think you could do it. 

Open Sesame!

I’m still a little giddy from last night’s show with my band. Our debut and farewell show! (Though, there are rumors we may have a “reunion show” on Halloween.)

But a friend said something to me after the show that’s been sticking with me. She said that I am so much more open and confident now, that I’ve changed so much in the last year.

This same friend sat with me in ERs, cared for my cat while I was in chemo, and allowed me to bawl on her couch when things seemed so hard.

We’ve known each other only for maybe 4 years, but a lot has certainly happened since then, and she said she feels like she’s seen me blossom. And that, especially with everything that I’ve been through, how heartening it is to see that I’ve become and am becoming more open, and more engaged.

She referenced a quote she’d read in a book about women’s aging, that women come to a crossroads in their lives where they choose: become more open, or become more rigid, and therefore bitter. I told her, I don’t think that’s just women!!

But, what struck me about her initial comment was that it echoed something I’d thought to myself only a few days earlier.

I was in my car, and made some kind of comment aloud to myself, and laughed about it. And I had a flashback to when I was in junior or senior year of high school, and this one frenemy commented that I’d become much more relaxed and funny in the last little while.

Which may have had something to do with the fact that I started drinking and smoking pot… but… She was right. I wasn’t as exacting or perfectionist as I had been.

I sort of took that “easy-going” train off the rails a few years later... But I remember feeling then that she was right, that I felt less … not “square,” but serious, I suppose. (I was a very serious teen!, like most emo children.)

And as I sat in my car laughing to and at myself the other day, I had a similar self-awareness: I’ve become and am becoming more easy-going. (In some ways! In others, you have to untangle my brain with a tweezer and a magnifying glass!)

To have that same sentiment reflected back to me only days later by my friend was heartening, affirming, and... sentimental.

She said that as she watched me play, she found herself getting teary, thinking about everything I've gone through, and what I’ve made of it. And then she had to check herself, because you don’t cry at a rock show! 

The same understanding about rigidity or openness I heard on an audio CD about “Exceptional Patients” from Dr. Bernie Siegel. He said that after cancer, people tend to go one of two ways: become scared of everything, because death is just around the corner, or (finally) throw caution to the wind, because you’ve literally faced one of the worst things that can ever happen to you. You’ve stared death in the face: Will you now shrink at all risks, or will you say, Tah, this is cake?

Well, we all know, I don’t think it’s “cake” to say “Tah” to fear, but we all know that I’ve been doing it anyway. Because, really, there isn’t anything greater to lose. There isn’t any harder challenge. (Now, yes, there are other challenges that people face that I cannot imagine, child loss being one that’s top of mind lately.)

I find no glory in shutting down. I’ve lived most of my life in a state of “flight” and paralysis. I will never call it a gift, but I do recognize with appreciation and awe that, following visceral horror, I have become a woman more willing to be open, free, funny, and present than I’ve ever been. 

Pushing the RelationShip off the Edge of the Earth

As I recently found out in “Well, Shoot…” there are things that I claim that I want but if they did actually happen, I’m not sure I could show up for them.

It’s embarrassing to be here again.

It just makes me feel really old and really weary.

And I’ll start with the perfect example that I’m sure I’ve told here before:

When I was in college, I was having a fling with a guy. It was purely physical, no “date nights,” no philosophical conversations; whenever both of us were into it, we’d contact the other. Easy peasy.

Then, one night, lying in bed after our activities, he told me he wanted to take me out to dinner. I was aghast, “Why?!” Because I want to get to know you, he replied, as if it were the most obvious and natural thing in the world.

And after that night, I never called him again.

Perhaps to most people it is the most obvious and natural thing in the world to want to get to know the person you’re being physically intimate with. But my years of practicing it otherwise have hardened me to the kind of softness real connection requires.

(I feel really vulnerable writing about this today, I have to say.)

See, there would be no problem if I only wanted to “hit it & quit it.” But I don’t. I would like a connection, I would like a relationship. I would like to be vulnerable and intimate with another person and have them be that way with me.

But when the glimpse of that possibility arises, I bolt. Too much, too scary, I can’t, I don’t know how, is followed by the justifications, You only want sex anyway, why don’t you just hit it & quit it? Stop trying to pretend you want to get to know me.

It’s very easy for me to throw up the barriers, and to put between us one of those cardboard cut-outs of myself: Here is my reasonable facsimile. Have fun.

No, really, just have FUN! Enough with the getting to know me bullshit. Light’s out, Nobody home.

And the trouble today is that I’m really tired of this M.O. And, yet, I’m really terrified to be any way else – the way else being “real.”

So, again, I come to a place where what I say I want (a relationship) in the light of that possibility I say fuck no.

I can lick the wounds of old hurts for many more years to come. I can point to those people to whom I’ve been real and vulnerable and been eviscerated. I can pile up the evidence to say, See, this and this and here is why I can’t show up fully anymore, I’ve been hurt.

But who hasn’t?

To tangent, once again:

There are several situations lately, where I’ve gotten to show up fully, stand in my truth, and not let fear drive me or hide me.

I was offered a job that would pay me minimum wage, but would be in a profession and a capacity that would be a dream. After much thought, writing, and reaching out for help, I turned the job down. I’m able to show up for myself, I don’t have to abandon my truth.

I declined the invitation to my father’s wedding, despite the already rolling-in fall-out. After much thought, writing, and reaching out for help, I was able to show up for myself and not abandon my truth.

I was offered the lead in a play that I didn’t want to be in. And, once again, after much thought, writing, and reaching out for help, I was able to turn it down, show up for myself and not abandon my truth.

What each of these are evidence of is that I am creating boundaries for myself, and a value for myself. I am able to weigh and measure how I feel in a situation, and parse out if it feels right for me. I don’t have to make snap judgments of yes or no, of people pleasing, or underselling, or hiding.

I've been scared to be vulnerable because I'm scared I can't show up for myself, or protect myself when I need to. I've been scared to be vulnerable because I think it lays me open to being attacked. 

But, what I have done in just the last fucking month is to back myself up. I have let myself be open to what was true for me, and be honest (enough) with those I had to create boundaries with.

Isn’t it possible then, that the same practice, the same muscles could be exercised in relationships? Isn’t it possible that I can show up with my truth, with all of me, even though, YES IT’S THE HARDER THING, but it’s the most rewarding of all?

I’m having a tough time at the moment accepting that I’m going to have to change my M.O. Not serving me well, surely, but familiar as all get out.

As a friend once sardonically said, “Everybody look at me, but please avert your eyes.”

Oh, you want to look at me. Oh, I find that I want to look back.

Well, Shoot. 

Aesop was a Scientist.

Chances are, like me, you’ve heard a hundred versions Aesop's fable, "The Oak and the Reed," wherein we're taught to bend like a reed in a storm, instead of remaining stalwart as an oak which will be blown over.

The moral is to remain flexible in the face of challenge or adversity, instead of becoming rigid and unmoving. To move with the times, to let things shift around you without trying to control them or how they’re affecting you. To be at ease with how things are, because when the storm does pass, if you’ve remained reed-like, you’ll stand up into the sunlight again.

Yes, we’ve all heard this, and again if you’re like me, you vacillate between these flora’s coping mechanisms, flexible to rigid and back again. Sometimes within the same hour.

However, one story I didn’t know was one I heard on the little audio book I’m listening to now: The Biodome Moral.

(Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with the Pauly Shore movie, but it’s valuable nonetheless.)

Scientists in the 80s, the book reports, created a perfect replica of Earth and Earth’s atmosphere within a dome. They then sent 8 scientists into the dome to live there for 2 years. Among their findings was what happened to the trees.

Inside the dome, there was no wind and no storms. The scientists assumed that without the challenges of storms to damage the trees, they would grow taller and stronger and faster than those outside the dome.

Indeed, the trees grew faster and taller. But not stronger.

The trees were weak, and easily uprooted. The scientists discovered that the trees needed the challenge of the storms, of withstanding the storms, in order to become strong and healthy. By eliminating all adversity from their lives, they became big and tall, sure, but they also became hollow and weak.

Remind us of any other species?

I am not an advocate for adversity. I bristle vehemently when told that adversity is "a blessing," as I’m occasionally told about my cancer.

Which, by the way – never tell someone that. If they want to say that to you, great; listen, nod, be compassionate. But never be the one to tell them that it makes them stronger, never tell them that there will be a gift from it, or that it is itself a gift. All these things may be true, but fuck you, healthy person, for telling me to look on the bright side of leaking out my ass for a month. Even though you mean it authentically, lovingly, and truthfully.

I happen to know these things are true. I write here that they are; that having had that adversity has impelled and propelled me to engage in my life and in activities that I’d procrastinated on; necessitated my creating new relationships and boundaries that I’d been too scared to create before. Having had and survived cancer has irrevocably changed the rest of my life and given miles of perspective to every other storm I may encounter.

But if you haven’t noticed, sometimes we get tired of encountering storms, and I’d really prefer for you to not steal my lemons to make your own lemonade. -- And I still wouldn't call it a blessing. An opportunity, I'd concede. But I'm sure no one ever said: Bless me, father, with life-threatening illness. 

... I guess I still have some letters of complaint to write to the Universe's customer service department.

So,

The absence of storms makes us weaker. But, the preponderance of storms makes us exhausted.

To continue in fable-speak then, I suppose it’s appropriate to quote Goldilocks on the merits of balance and the middle way. To endeavor to create, withstand, be free from and grow from challenges that are not too big, not too small, but “Just Right.”

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.

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.

LiveStrong.

Yesterday, I was given the cosmic and delightful (sarcasm) opportunity to put that day’s blog message into action: I was asked if I was coming out to spend time with folks. … But I really had to go home and watch Netflix, you know. Not that I have anything I’m particularly watching at the moment, not that you can put that on my tombstone (“Excellent t.v. watcher, Achiever of many episodes”). But the alternative was to spend an hour with people. Blech.

But, health won out. (Damned health.) I went, I smiled, I listened, I shared, I had conversations with people. Netflix won’t really converse with me. It’s selfish that way.

I got the chance to hear what was going on with a friend and offer some suggestions, and she got to hear me share what’s going on with me and offered me some help, too.

Again, Netflix is really loathe to help me out. The bastard.

I also got to notice that I’ve gained a few readers in the past week who’ve gotten to read things about me that some of my closest friends don’t know about, and that … well, that’s okay. It’s what this, the blog, is here for. Not to “connect” with people in a complete way, but to offer something. To offer a catharsis, a container, a mirror into their own experience. To hear someone say – or read someone write – about what have been issues or concerns or triumphs in your own life is to get to feel you’re/we’re not alone. Our experience as humans is not isolated; we’re not as different as we think we are when trapped alone in our heads.

I’m grateful for that, for this opportunity. And I know it can be intense. For anyone who’s joined us this week, it’s not always so dark. But, it is likely always as honest. Don’t worry, I don’t tell you everything. You don’t in fact get the all of me by reading me, and we both know that. But it’s a good thread between us. And I get to feel cathartized, too. Not that this is therapy or anything, but that I’m putting my voice out there in a way that feels relatively safe, but also authentic.

On voice, I emailed an old voice teacher yesterday to ask if she still gives private lessons. I was in her voice class when I was at Mills, and earlier in the week, I got the message from Theater Bay Area that applications for the General Auditions for the South Bay are open. And, you have to note on the application if you think you might sing. You don’t have to sing if you check that box, but you have to indicate if you might so they can group you with the other singers in that day.

I applied to the Generals last year, and didn’t get in. But I have real headshots this time, and two more credits, and possibly a third that I can add before I send off my resume. I certainly have enough gumption and the substance to try this time, especially if I had even less to my name last year!

I was talking yesterday with a friend about singing. About how I know the voice is there, but I hide it all the time. Even when I was in the band, I hid it. I didn’t sing to the best and fullest of my ability, and I also don’t even know what the limits of my ability are. I want to sing. I’ve always said it. Or thought it, so most of you didn’t know anyway.

It’s secret. Private. It’s tender, is what it is. It's the most tender dream I have, honestly. And I think that’s what makes it the most protected and least acknowledged one. For me, singing has no place to hide, and it’s an outpouring of your soul – or it can be. As I know well, it can not be that very easily, and no one would know the difference but me. They’ll just think that’s what I’ve got.

It’s like when I work at 80% most of the time at my job. They don’t know. They just think that’s what I have to offer, but the reality is that I hold back, in that case because I’m resentful, entitled and begrudging. But I digress!

Or I don’t. It’s the same side of the coin of not participating in life fully, of not offering myself fully. They’re different angles toward that, but they’re both about self-protection and -preservation.

Tender shoots of hope always need a little more room and space and care. For me, they’ve needed to be hidden so as not to be trampled by the onslaught of life. But by keeping this thing small, myself small, by harboring it and mentally reinforcing it as a tender and sensitive and fragile thing, it will always remain that way.

A redwood starts out the same way, you know. As tender as a sprig. But if you take the cage off of the plant, allow it air and sunshine and nourishment. Soon it won’t be a small and tender, fragile thing anymore. Soon it will be able to weather the strokes of life. By letting what I’ve carried as a secret and a calling out of its confinement … I can allow it to become what it’s always needed to be: Strong. 

No Soup For You.

It’s astonishing, the lengths I’ll go to deprive myself.

The thick pattern of deprivation, living small, quietly, unobtrusively, knocks on the door of all my actions and insists on being allowed in.

Luckily, my latest personal recipe is: Me + G-d + Friends + Action.

I was on the phone with a friend the other day discussing the fact that I needed a spending plan for my upcoming trip to Seattle and Boston this Saturday. I told her that I’d already “found” $235 in my usual monthly spending plan, which means whittling funds from other line items, like entertainment, personal care, household purchases--line items that fluctuate anyway, so I consider them “fundgable” when they’re really not. (I’ve learned.)

This isn’t to say that my spending plan is a monthly set of 10 Commandments, chiseled in stone and fatal when not adhered to. It’s an ideal, a goal, a guideline, and the actuals that I tally at the end of each month tell me the story as it happened, instead of how I thought it would. Usually they’re pretty close these days.

However, when my friend and I were speaking about my trip, and we calculated aloud bus fare, BART fare, coffee&food at 4 airports in 10 days, groceries, eating out, incidentals, tchotckes, gas money… well, we figured it out to about $400, a number I’m supposed to double check before I leave.

Immediately, I begin mentally looking at those fundgable categories, which I’ve already cut thick slices from this month to support the trip. And I start to get panicked and fearful about the trip and how much I can spend, and try to pre-manipulate how I can spend less than I actually know I’ll need.

This, friends, is the compulsion. How can I whittle down my needs, how can I deny what is actually true about my needs, hide them, dismiss them, and discard them, so that I can live in a way that I misguidedly think will support me?

Luckily, I was on the phone with my friend as we spoke all this out, and I admitted to her that I have nearly a grand in my vacation savings account… but, I told her like a child revealing they’ve stolen a Snickers, I’m "supposed to" be saving it for my hypothetical trip to Paris with my mom next Summer.

I don’t want to give up my Snickers. I don’t want to break part of it off to eat now, because I believe I just need to save it for later, or there will never be enough.

This is preposterous. And where voices that don’t live inside my own head are so valuable.

She didn’t even have to say anything, as I admitted my vacation savings money could easily provide the additional $200 that I’ll actually need for this trip. I just talked myself through it, admitting it, accepting it, saying that I see the fallacy and the deprivation in that kind of save it ALL for some unknown date and live in fear right now thinking. And I told her I would move that money over this week, so that I could use it in today, for the intended purpose: vacation.

It’s not actually called “Paris Vacation with Mom” savings account: It’s just called Vacation. And if this isn’t the time to use those funds, when I need them, when I’m plotting to slice myself and my funds even thinner than they already are this month, then I haven’t learned a thing.

Yesterday, I did move that money. It felt illicit, illegal almost. I felt nervous and anxious and excited and proud to know that I was supporting a vision for myself without putting myself in deprivation.

The ridiculous part is that I will easily replenish that money in the vacation account over the next few months. “Vacation savings” is a line item in my spending plan every single month. It’s not like I’ll never get to go on a vacation again because I’m using this money now.

But my addiction to deprivation and fear continues to knock on my door and insist entry into my life and my decisions. So, luckily, today I have an antidote: Me + G-d + Friends + Action. 

Witchy Woman

I’ve been back to reading through that Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life book before bed. Just reading through some of the affirmations, saying some of them out loud.

I’ve also begun more consistently reading my Tarot cards, pulling one daily.

And, it should come as no surprise to you that I have variously: burned sage, taken a bath in a blend of “protection” salts, participated in a sweat lodge, buried letters to G-d, dissolved some in the ocean, carried rose quartz in my jacket pocket, and burned a blend of incense powder mixed for me by a man in a dress.

When I was in college, I took a class on Witchcraft in Literature. I don’t remember much from it, except what the classroom looked like, and probably that most of the classmates were women. I know it’s not gender specific, but I feel like in the teenage years, many women (or those that I’ve come into contact with) delve in the occult for a little while. I mean, with the proliferation of movies at the time we grew up that embellished witchcraft as both hot and powerful, like The Craft, Teen Witch, Practical Magic, and Hocus Pocus (for a humorous bent!). Plus, the 80’s show, Out of This World, where the main teenage girl could freeze time (though, she was half-alien, not a witch), or Sabrina the Teenage Witch (a far worse show).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both the movie and the t.v. show) can also be seen as a teenage girl “coming into her power,” the development and surge that happens in the teens. And I think there’s something about the occult that offers girls a channel for that energy; something that offers safe guidelines and something a little special and weird and creepy and, perhaps, powerful.

I’m not saying I believe in witchcraft; I’m saying I believe that we all want to believe that we have the power to change ourselves and our circumstances, whether that’s through spells or prayers or good karma or electro-shock therapy.

And I want to believe that I can divine some information about the world and myself through things like shamanic journeys, meditation circles, and, yes, Tarot cards.

Recently, I’ve been pulling this one card consistently. The 8 of swords depicts a woman bound with ropes, blindfolded, and surrounded by a barricade of swords. In the distance, there is a castle on a hill. At least in my book of interpretations, the meaning of this card is restriction, hopelessness, accepting inaction. The last paragraph of the description says, however, the ropes are not that tight around the woman; she could ostensibly wriggle free out of them, knock over the swords, and head home. She, the figure, waits for someone to save her, instead of acting to save herself.

The words “accepting inaction” have been echoing for me these few days and weeks.

I met, post-cancer, with a therapist who works with PTSD. I described to her the vision/metaphor I currently have of myself:

There is a birdcage. I (forgive me) am the bird. The door to the cage is open. Has been open for some time. I walk out of the cage into the freedom, but the freedom is too big, too unknown, too scary, and so I walk back into the cage.

I know I am not alone in describing self-made prisons. I know I am not alone in cleaving myself to the devil I know rather than the devil I don’t. I know I’m not alone in fearing that there’s a devil at all out there in the wide scary world. (Not like THE Devil. Pretty sure I don’t believe in that!)

But I have become restless in this self-made prison. In the looking at things that interest me, and backing away. In the participating in things I love for a little while, and quitting. In exploring what kind of work I want to do, and procrastinating indefinitely.

And, I do know that countering fears with affirmations is one of the only tools I have in my belt right now to help me wriggle out of those self-made, and self-maintained, bonds; to bend a crowbar behind myself and shove/encourage me back out of the cage, where, underneath all the doubt, I know it is not only safe, but inviting, enlivening, and waiting for me to play/lead/inhabit.

So, if I have to meditate to a drum that "mimics an alpha state" for 20 minutes, tack the Sh’ma AND a cross to my wall, or pull a card from a deck to help me feel like I have support and protection as I try, so very falteringly, to enter this wide scary world, so be it.