A New Perspective

Once, I called my Dad from New York.  It was the middle of December, and I’d been living in the city for three months. “Dad,” I said.  “I woke up this morning feeling so bummed, and I don’t know why.”

“Mmm,” he said.  “SAD.”

“I know.” I nodded into the phone, and stuck my lower lip out further, as if he could see it.  “It is sad.  And I felt stupid cuz it was for no reason, but I thought I could call you because you’re my dad, so you have to care.”

“Well,” my dad said.  “That’s debatable, but I was talking about SAD.  Seasonal Affective Disorder.”

It was my first winter outside of California or Arizona; that is, it was my first winter.  I spent awhile half listening to my father explain Seasonal Affective Disorder, and then awhile Googling it.  Like most ailments I look up online, I had most of the symptoms:  oversleeping?  I never woke up before my alarm.  Social withdrawal?  Who in their right mind would brave the gusting wind and snow to meet up with friends?  Weight gain? Well, wasn’t that just my body’s way of trying to stay warm for winter?

Because it made me feel better to say that I had something, I bought a blue light lamp that sat on my desk.  Supposedly, this was supposed to mimic sun, making my poor, confused brain think I wasn’t spending much of my year in a climate mostly uninhabitable to humans, breathing in the breath of a thousand coworkers, only going outside during the pitch dark mornings and evenings during my commute.  Did my brain think I was on a sunny beach in the Caribbean?  I’m not sure.  Did having the bright blue light shining in my eyes make me feel like I was doing something to help myself?  Let’s go with yes, although not enough for me to forget it at the office when, that summer, I left the company.

Fast forward to the next winter.  This time, I was in London, at a latitude---God forbid---even further north than New York.  In London, I’d peek out my window and find that night had fallen at 3 pm.  In London, the snow was pretty the first day and freezing and slippery for the following forty-eight.  When people asked me if I was enjoying London, I would tell them that the grey cloud layer that lay over the city like a reverse blanket was making it awfully hard to go out and explore. I’m sure I’d like London, I’d say, if I felt like I could see it.

Within the past few weeks, though, something magical has happened.  Tentatively, the sun began showing its face, finally casting away the clouds to blatantly, brightly hog the bright blue sky.  People began spilling out of their houses to fill park benches; pubs began dragging heavy wooden tables onto sidewalks and streets and roofs and alleyways---anywhere, really, which qualifies as outside.  I went to the grocery store the other day and found it closed when I arrived.  “Sorry,” the manager mouthed, pointing to the sign he’d just hung in the window.  “We close at eight.”  Eight?  I looked at the time on my phone, then up at the perfectly sunny day, then down at my phone again.  Even the sun loves London in the summer, it seems; it refuses to pack it in and call it a night.

A new London began to emerge, and with it, a new me.  I was suddenly energized in the morning.  I was eager to strap on my shoes and wander down canals, discovering the new parks that pop up in every corner of this city.  I sat at outdoor cafes and laughed as my hair became dusted with a snow shower of falling flowers from a nearby cherry tree.  I watched the sun set from the top of Primrose hill, and looked past the green grass to the shining city below me, lit amber as the sun slid beyond the horizon at near nine at night, and I thought: so this is London.

SAD?  I don’t know about that.  But suddenly, I’m finding it much easier to be happy.

Everything is Beautiful

I suppose I should start at the beginning. You want to hear the birth story, right? Whether I used drugs or did it au naturale? Was there water involved? A midwife or doctor? (Birth has become so politicized). Well, I’m not going to do that. You can imagine the details and I’ll just skip to the ending---I brought home a healthy baby boy on March 5^th, one week before my toddler turned three. We named him Dash Oliver. No, we didn’t have any underlying reason. I gave my husband the parameters: one syllable, kind of vaguely preppy sounding? And he came up with Dash all on his own.

I should tell you that everything is so, so very different with this one. Everything I thought I knew before doesn’t matter. I should tell you that for the first time, it is easy. Perhaps even enjoyable? I wake up and his rounded baby cheeks greet me. He is a sweet bedfellow, all smiles and coos. I want to dress him in only white, pure and clean. I am reminded that you don’t need all the accouterments that are marketed to new moms. Just some diapers and a boob. Did I mention that I am breastfeeding this time around? Don’t worry, I won’t judge you if you didn’t, or can’t, or even don’t want to. I’ve been there. But this time, with this baby, I am breastfeeding, and co-sleeping too. It has been going well, mostly enjoyable, but mostly it just . . . is. People ask how the nursing is going, and I squint my eyes and tilt my head, “Well, I guess?” He’s eating and gaining weight and I am only slightly less exhausted than I was with bottles. I am reminded how children choose their own parenting philosophies. At the hospital, while I was trying to decide whether to breastfeed this time, the nurses kept mentioning how “he just loves the boob” and “this little guy decided he wanted to be breastfed!” I liked that. I liked that for once they didn’t make it about me, the mom. My first rarely snuggled and had a terrible latch from the beginning, and this one? Completely different in every way. Will it be like this the rest of their lives? This marveling at how genes could combine in such different varieties?

I want to grasp these early days and hold them tight. Every day he grows bigger and smiles more. My heart bursts. I tell my husband, “Did Charley smile this much? I don’t think he did.” He says he did. But I think perhaps it was the postpartum depression fogging my brain. I can’t remember any smiles because I wasn’t smiling. But this time, this time I have that new mother glow of happiness. I overflow with joy. There is none of that angry, resentful feeling I carried for so long with Charley and I am glad. Is this what those mothers at the library were feeling when I used to bring Charley after crying all morning? Those moms with the sappy grins on their faces that I just couldn’t understand. It’s as if the depression left a scar on my soul, deep and jagged, and Dash allows it to heal. Every day is better than the last. I’m not sure I will be able to say that forever. But every day is bittersweet as well since I know this will be my last. Who knows, I might just be the next controversial extended breastfeeding mom! Life is beautiful and so unexpected.

I am thrilled and honored to be writing in this space again all about motherhood and identity. Two kids is an adventure and the journey is life-altering.

Lilacs and The Things We Lose.

After everyone left town following my mother’s funeral, one of the things left behind was a mix cd that held all of her favorite songs. It's maybe the truest part of her that I have left, since she never wrote anything or found a way to say, "this is who I was." It's a different kind of hurt, as I've grown older, to lose a person---not just the figure of my mother.  I wish I knew how she was funny or how she was sad; if there were things she lost that she never stopped missing. Mother’s day comes every year when the lilacs are blooming. They were her favorite spring flower. My childhood friends would bring her bunches of them on the days my mother drove us to school. Wrapped in wet paper towels, the lilac's woody stems would be nestled into the cup holder. She planted a lilac tree out in our back garden too, in the corner, at the meeting of the fence lines. In May, the Oregon rain would cling to the clusters of clover shaped flowers. The leaves folding, the branches bent under the wealth of it.

The second song on her cd is "Our House" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. "I'll light the fire," it begins, "you put the flowers in the vase, that you bought yesterday." Most of the verses are about simple blessings like that, about rest and light and illuminated windows. But, it's the last line that gets me every time: "life use to be so hard / now everything is easy because of you."

Those words help me understand the life that I remember with her and the home my parents made together. They both wanted to build a place better than the one they'd known. So, they painted the walls white and covered them with wainscoting. No unkind words were ever spoken. She turned on the table lamps to keep out the dark and set lilacs on the dining room table. And on the first warm day of Spring, she would open the French doors, put on her reeboks and windex the windows. From the living room, she'd play that song onto the patio. Even the neighbors could hear it coming from our house.

May.

Just the word makes me anxious, or rather, I should say anxious-excited. May.

I can’t remember May without a major life transition. In May of 2009, I said a tearful airport goodbye as I moved to Honduras. The same situation repeated itself in May of 2010, although with different people and a different country. In May of 2011, I took my first cross-country solo road trip. Although terrified of spending 2,000 miles alone with just an atlas, I found a sense of peace-in-transition accompanied by Country Roads and Wagon Wheel. I arrived in Boston, stored my belongings, and moved to Peru for the summer. In May of 2007, I left my college campus and transitioned into the working world. In May of 2006, I moved to France for the summer. The list goes on and on, but always, there is May 2005, when I transitioned to being fatherless.

Here we are again---nearing the middle of May.

May 2013. The giant pink flowers blossoming across campus signal the period of transition, the beginning of summer. Like each May before it, this May will also be full of goodbyes and life transitions. May 19^th will mark the last time I will transition from school to the next step. Even as a child, May required a transition from school to endless summer days. Although at that age---the longer days meant more time for make-believe worlds to unfold between the trees and gardens in my family’s backyard. Perhaps this feeling of a sense of freedom from childhood should be re-kindled, as this summer appears to expand in a timeless manner.

In-transition.

I cherish the space that opens up when we are in transition. With one foot in the life I had been living and one foot in the next life, nostalgia mixes with excitement and hope in a way that makes me feel alive. Moments feel more colorful, last minutes with friends more meaningful, decisions to jump on a plane to who-knows-where more daring, and even, our communities seem more forgiving---allowing us to leave, grow, and love them from a distance. In the past my “in transition” times have included one backpack, adventure, and plane tickets. However, this May is different.

As I take one step out of my current life and community, I am not sure where I will be taking the next step. This May requires a new comfort with a lack of a plan, an attempt at finding comfort in standing still. It is a new type of transition, changing life phases without changing location, quite yet. How do you lean into a transition without physically packing all your belongings? Or knowing what you will be moving next?  I hope the endless summer days will allow the space for this period of “in-transition” to settle and for quiet moments to unfold in which some of the bigger questions can be answered.

In celebration.

May 20^th is the yearly marker of the passing of my father and the years of healing that have taken place since then. This year will mark eight years since he died, and in some ways, eight years of feeling like I am in-transition. Hopefully this year’s transition, though standing still, will allow for a new, peaceful form of celebration.

Mother-in-law May I

Dear Sibyl,

My husband and I met our senior year of college and got married a few years later. We've now been together for almost a decade and I still feel lucky that we happened to meet and that circumstances allowed us to grow as people and build a life together. Our families, both immediate and extended, are an important part of our lives. We hang out with our siblings often and we're happy that our two-year-old daughter can experience the joys of a close family.

Here's the problem: From the earliest days of our relationship, my husband's mother wasn't warm or welcoming to me. Maybe it's her personality; maybe it's that my husband is the oldest of 5 and she didn't have experience with how to treat potential new members of the family; maybe it's that she and I just didn't click because we're incredibly different people with very different approaches to the world. At this point, I'm obviously part of the family, so I don't think she realizes that my perspective is colored by how she treated me for the first few years of our relationship, basically until we were married.

In many important ways my mother-in-law is a generous person who certainly has the best of intentions. I recognize that and I want to focus on it, especially since my daughter adores her. Unfortunately, when we're together for extended periods of time, like family trips, I find myself getting increasingly annoyed and frustrated. We're always going to do things differently. She's always going to correct me. She's always going to insist that she's right about everything. I can't change that, so I just need to accept her and not let all these little things bother me. Any tips?

Thank you,

Throw Grandma From the Train?

Dear Throw Grandma From the Train,

Recently, I went to a panel discussion of faith leaders who are seeking non-violent resolution of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank.  The theme that kept coming up was forgiveness.  I rose my hand, and asked my burning question, the one I keep returning to in my life, “How do you love people that are hard to love?”  The answer I got was to try to find the humanity in that person, to separate their actions from who they are, someone worthy of love and in need of care.

I think that is what you've been trying to do with your mother-in-law.  You've been trying to see the bigger picture, be the bigger person, just enlarge everything until it all doesn't bother you anymore.  But it's not the big things that get us, with those people that are hard to love.  It's the little, petty, constant shit that wears on us until we just can't take it anymore.

I actually don’t think the key here is accepting your mother-in-law.  It sounds like some of the things she does to you are simply unacceptable.  It is not okay for her to just decide not to like her daughter-in-law, and to correct everything you’re doing in your home.  It’s okay for you to be really frustrated when she does those things to you.

But you’re right that you need to let go of them, after you feel your feelings around them.  Another thing I heard at this discussion is that holding onto resentment is like eating poison, and expecting the other person to die.

So my advice to you is: stop trying to accept your mother-in-law.  Put all of those acceptance efforts towards yourself.

Accept the way you love your husband.  Accept it so much that it can never be questioned, never be swayed even the tiniest bit by your mother-in-law.  Let it live in the swing of your hips and in your thoughts when the two of you are apart.  Love the shit out of the way you love your husband.

Accept the way you run your household.  Accept your habits, even the ones you secretly think are gross.  Accept your home just as it is.  Accept your choices for food and work and daily routine.  Meditate on your imperfections, embracing all the very things about you that she criticizes.

Accept your parenting.  Celebrate your relationship with your daughter.  Let your acceptance for how you are raising your child ooze out of you to the point that your mother-in-law’s comments about it are deflected, as if your love for your daughter is suit of armor, gleaming and true.

I say all of this as a person who has gone toe-to-toe with her own mother-in-law several times over 13 years.  Early on, I realized this woman was never going to understand me.  But she didn’t have to, because her son did.  I realized this woman was never going to agree with me about most of the choices I made.  But she didn’t have to, because I wasn’t asking her permission or even her opinion.  I brazenly made mistakes, apologized when necessary, kept my distance when I needed to, or called her every week when I felt the desire.  I know for a fact that she doesn’t accept me as I am.  But I am certain that she respects me, and even loves me.  And the reason for that is that she knows I’m not waiting for her approval, and I love her even without it.

So, you have to be your own existential detective.  What are you insecure about?  Is your mother-in-law putting her finger in some open wounds?  Then do more work in those areas, until you can shine out your acceptance of yourself so boldly that she’s blinded by it.

And for the rest, for the hurts she’s inflicted on you in the past, and the ones that she’s sure to incur in the future, forgiveness is the only sane option.  Not just acceptance, but deep, life-altering forgiveness, that does indeed bring your mother-in-law’s humanity to the fore so her actions lose their sting.

The way to love people that are hard to love, like so many mother-in-laws, might just be to love yourself harder.

Love,

Sibyl

Submit your own quandary to Sibyl here.

To be born over and over again

By Joy Netanya Thompson Remember the song “It’s Raining Men”? Well, I’ve never experienced such a phenomenon, but for the past year it’s definitely been raining babies around here. It’s like the windows of heaven have been opened and new little souls are falling into my life everywhere I look. I no longer have a newsfeed on Facebook; it’s now a baby feed.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m 28, and most of my friends are my age and into their early thirties. It’s “time”—whatever that means. Since my husband Robert and I married a year ago, we’ve always laughed off the “so when are you having kids?” question with “oh, ten years or so” kind of answers. But the deluge of babies in my life are having an “everybody’s doing it” (literally—HA!) peer pressure about them, and I’m second-guessing the loose timeline we’ve created.

But the truth is, I am terrified of having a baby. I’m scared of losing the life Robert and I share, of losing freedom and fun and, yes, my halfway decent figure. I pop birth control pills with the determination and discipline of a soldier—no babies on my watch. All the while in the back of my mind I hear a little tap-tap-tap, the secret code the Holy Spirit uses to let me know fear is driving my actions. This isn’t the first time—it’s my MO to draw up the blueprints for my perfect life and present the plans to God, asking him to bless them.

My reluctance to experience one of the most life-changing events possible is not surprising—I’ve never liked change. In the past, though, God has had a way of preparing me for change long in advance so I’m not a total basket case when it arrives. Back in my post-college traveling days, marriage was a totally unappealing idea to me. I wondered if perhaps I would turn out to be a single missionary after all. But I knew that deep down, one day, I wanted to be married. The preparing of my heart came so slowly and gradually that the first time I actually admitted out loud I wanted to find someone and get married, it still surprised me.

I can’t say I’ve gotten the hang of marriage yet, but I do like the feeling of getting the hang of something, be it a job or a new city or a life stage. The very nature of life, however, never allows you to stay in that place for long—knowing what’s best and most effective, how to avoid mistakes and conflict. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, one character says, “To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.” And this, truly, is what I am resistant toward. I am resistant toward those hundred, those thousand deaths that make up a true, growing life, keeping us from stagnation and decay. The death of dependence as I walked into adulthood and learned to pay my own bills and manage my own affairs. The death of childhood friendships as we diverged into different life phases—marriage, children, singleness—and could not keep our ties tight enough. The death of dreams, of relationships, of innocence, of longtime habits and sins, of ideals and ignorance. We all die these deaths.

And yet if we have lived long enough to be marked by death, we know by now the great mystery that death brings life; all births require a kind of death. To live is to die a hundred deaths, but you might as well say to live is to be born over and over again. It is the approach to that birth that we fear and resist and see as death. But the pain of letting go of my girlish dependence made way for the birth of the woman Joy. One day, this fear and pain of giving up my independence will make way for myself to be born again as a mother—just as the literal pain I endure will bring forth my own baby. Frederick Buechner, speaking of Mary giving birth to Jesus as a metaphor for all of us, says we have every reason to be afraid of giving birth. “It is by all accounts a painful, bloody process at best…the wrenching and tearing of it; the risk that we will die in giving birth; more than the risk, the certainty, that if there is going to be a birth, there is first going to have to be a kind of death. One way or another, every new life born out of our old life . . . looks a little like raw beefsteak before it’s through. If we are not afraid of it, then we do not know what it involves.” 

And so for me, the labor pains have begun once again. It will be a long labor as I work through my fear and dread of becoming a mother, though I have no idea what that will look like. Perhaps a child from my own flesh, perhaps an adopted baby from somewhere and someone else. But the birthing process, and the first terrified and joyful weeks, will be raw, because that is an essential quality of new life. And I must labor again when I agonize over my children’s taking flight from our nest, and I must be reborn as another woman, another Joy, and learn to give birth to other ideas, relationships, and dreams. Oh God, let me never resist the deaths and the births that make up my life.

Finding My Story Again

By Shelley Abreu Last year, as my daughter’s official recovery period from a bone marrow transplant drew to a close, I stopped writing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my creative withdrawal happened during the same month she stopped all of her medication.

For the previous two years, we followed a treatment protocol designed to cure her of cancer. This medical plan of attack was my armor. Even when things went wrong there was always a back-up plan. In fact, when the worst happened and her cancer relapsed during treatment, the doctors simply drafted a new protocol. Of course, it wasn’t really simple. She would need a risky stem cell transplant. It was done with a lot of deliberation, care and thought. But I felt like a warrior. No matter what the test, I had marching orders.

Whenever I felt like I was slipping into a worm hole of grief, I merely had to focus on what was next---what action would move us one step closer to her cure. I knew it was dangerous. Her protocol didn’t guarantee us anything. Still, I felt protected by the task of executing each phase of her plan. There was always something on the horizon to focus on. And with my writing, there was always something positive to report. Yes, I could write about my fear and worries, but there was always tangible hope.

This past October, after ten months of post-transplant isolation, my daughter took her last dose of cancer related medicine. It was a day of celebration. I hung a banner, and we made a special dinner. I felt elated.

Then there was nothing left to do. Suddenly, the worm hole widened its mouth---jaw chomping like a wild beast. What now, it taunted?

When I sat to write, I found myself reflecting on the past or contemplating the future. But I couldn’t bear either. I was done reliving everything we had endured. And the future carried the burden of “what-if.” All we could do was wait and see and pray that the cancer didn’t return. The battle part of the story was over. And all our friends and family were declaring victory.

“You must feel so happy,” or “you must be so relieved it’s over,” people would say. It felt like they wanted me to write the final chapter. Of course, I felt those things in part. But I’m not ready to wave the flag. I keep asking myself when will that happen? When will I feel like we’ve won? Cancer will snarl at me for the rest of my life. Sometimes I feel like I’m crouching behind a rock in a flat open field waiting for the enemy to return.

What was the point of writing anymore? Why did the story still matter if I couldn’t sum it up with positive inspiration? How many ways could I write about the endless tunnel of fear that loomed around each corner of my mind. I guess the act of not writing was my new protection, my new armor, my way of not facing the unknown.

The next few months, I began to feel depressed. Disconnected from life. Strangely, even though my daughter was doing better than ever, I felt half alive. I see now by denying by fear, and my story, I was holing up in my own emotional bunker.

Last month, our family took a spur of the moment trip to the Caribbean. It was our first vacation that required a plane ride in three years. The night before our departure, I nervously threw flip-flops and bathing suits into our luggage. I was excited but also scared. It felt perilous. We had spent the last year living safely in our home, tucked away from people and their potentially life-threatening germs. Now we were free.

When we made it to our destination, I watched my kids splash around in the pool, my daughter full of life and energy. I felt the worm hole contracting just a little bit. The warm wind hushed the snarling sound in my mind. I realized it wasn’t time to just wait and see. It was time to start living again.

When we returned home, and the kids were back in school, I opened my laptop and started to write. Why? Because I realize my story does matter.

I might not always have a happy feel-good chapter to write. But who does, really? Life isn’t about outcomes. It’s about the experience of it: the beautiful, the absurd, and the horrific. Stories teach us about living, and therefore the act of writing does too. Writing helps us shed our protective armor. It makes us vulnerable. And it leads us back to ourselves---when we are lost, we find in our words the story that connects us to the fullness of our life.

Recalibrating

I am completely fascinated by the relationships I’ve witnessed between drivers and their GPS systems. I used to assume that a GPS was simply a disembodied robo-voice that warns you when it’s time to make a turn. Apparently for some, however, a GPS is more like a bossy friend—someone you talk to, argue with, and refer to by name in casual conversation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve interrupted a discussion to ask, “Who’s Karen?” only to have everyone present refer me to the contraption on the dashboard. Go figure. In case you haven’t guessed, I am a relatively new driver and do not yet own one of these curious devices, so my methods for finding my way from Point A to Point B tend to be rather unconventional. For instance, it would not be out of the ordinary for me to call up my sister in Pennsylvania and ask her where I am as I repeatedly circle the same block somewhere in metro Atlanta. Although I’m sure you might consider this method to be entirely ineffective, it happens to be very calming. After a few minutes on the phone with a familiar voice, I have regained my hope and confidence and am much better equipped to face the task of figuring out where I am in relation to where I want to be. It works (almost) every time.

Earlier this week, I had to make a drive of about fifty miles to a place I’d never been. I was determined to complete this journey without A) phoning a friend, or B) taking ten hours to do it. I decided to bolster my chances of success by setting up two foolproof navigational systems.

By this, I mean that I taped a series of Post-It notes to the dashboard with instructions for both legs of the journey. I also set up the Google Maps app on my phone with its rather unpredictable voice guidance. I am proud to say that I made it to my destination without a hitch. The return trip, however, was another story altogether.

Only a few minutes in, I noticed my surroundings had nothing to do with anything on any of my Post-It notes. As soon as I realized I was lost, I silenced the Beyoncé album that had been keeping me company and pulled into a deserted church parking lot. I took a few deep breaths and considered my options. I could try to retrace my path and start over, in hopes of getting back on track with my notes. Or, I could start from where I was already and try to find a different route altogether.

Before I knew it, an ironic voice with an Australian accent popped into my head and sighed, “Recalibrating...”

I chose the latter option, and in the end, discovered a simpler route home than I’d originally planned.

When I finished graduate school and moved here nearly a year ago, I kept wishing I had a compass for my life. If only I knew which direction I was headed, I thought, it would be much easier to plan my course. Lately, though, I’ve been wishing more for a work/life GPS (and a real one too, for that matter). Rather than a fixed point on the horizon that I’m working toward, I wish for a guiding voice to argue with about my journey, a system that recalibrates for wrong turns, and even the option to change my destination altogether.

It seems, as I discovered on my recent journey, that my internal GPS is already built in, complete with a colorful Australian accent. All I have to do is turn down the radio, from time to time, and listen.

Do My Friends Even Like Me?

Dear Sibyl,

I seem to have a penchant for attracting friends who are very ambivalent about me.  Or friendship.  I am not sure, but they are so difficult to be friends with, because they pursue me mightily, but then reschedule our date several times, and say any number of passive aggressive things to me when we finally do get together.  

In between hangouts, I get a lot of "I miss you so much, I really want to invest in our friendship more, you are so amazing" from them.  It's really confusing, and if this were a love relationship, I would obviously just break up with them.  Since it is a friendship, I am so uncomfortable telling them the truth—which is that they are sending me wildly mixed messages and at this point the friendship is not worth all the work it requires.  How do I deal with this friendly mind-fuck?

With Thanks,

Baffled Buddy

Dear BB,

Ambivalence is one of the hardest emotions to hold for another person.  When folks are straight up angry, sad, or in love, even when it's difficult to relate, you can just let them express themselves and move on.  But ambivalence, especially when it is directed at you, leaves a confusing sheen on every interaction, which can linger throughout a relationship.  It is easier when the person knows they are ambivalent, but awareness is rare.  Instead, you get something akin to manipulation, as the person is trying to get you to help them sort through their ambivalence with your reaction.

My advice is to get out of there.  Since it sounds like many of your friends are acting this way, that may leave you a little lonely, but being alone is better than being beset by conflicting emotions that belong to other people.  And here's the thing about ambivalence—whoever is feeling it absolutely has to work it out on their own.  No one can take them by the hand and solve their problem.  So it's best to just leave them to it.

You also seem to be wondering, "Why does this keep happening to me?"  Well, consider the fact that you could be a polarizing person, someone who provokes strong reactions in people.  If that is the case, if you are a bold figure who people either love or love to hate, then folks with ambivalence issues are naturally drawn to you, because they intuit you will help them work through their conflicting feelings just by being yourself.  In fact, by confronting them, drawing their consciousness to their own ambivalence, you would be affixing a target right to your chest for all of their wavering arrows.

Don't fall for it.  Not only is it pretty much impossible for you to solve this problem for them, but your self-worth could get all tied up in confusing relationships.  So, put up kind but firm boundaries with these friends, and don't let flattery sway you.  If they are colleagues, simply see them at work, and enjoy the time you have with them there, but politely rebuff their invitations.  Tell them you are busy, and it is true—you are busy being fabulous, trying to attract new friendships, ones in which you can truly be yourself, rather than some kind of magnet they can attach to or repel themselves from.

Love,

Sibyl

Submit your own quandary to Sibyl here.

New Habits

I’m not very good at forming new habits.  Certainly not good ones.  I talk game and make plans: Eating Better, Waking up Earlier, Writing More, etc. But then I hit snooze, let the spinach go bad, and my notebooks lay empty. That last step of summoning up will power and pushing myself to do the thing, create the habit, that’s where I fall flat. I figured I was just bad at it.  I lack will power.  Some people can pick up languages with ease, some can see patterns in chaos, some people have will power, and some of us don’t.  But then I started a new book.  Maybe you’ve heard of it: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  Within in 50 pages I was reconsidering my assumptions.  Perhaps I could learn to create habits and perhaps I just needed to start with one.  Just one habit.

It seems like a simple idea, obvious even, to choose one habit. But as we all know, sometimes it’s the most obvious ideas that elude us. I couldn’t think of a habit I wanted to form without thinking of five. The five would lead to five more and so on until I was overwhelmed and threw the whole metaphorical list out of the metaphorical window.

This time, I’m doing things differently.  Instead of looking at a laundry list of new habits I should create, I decided to choose one thing; one action I wanted to make into a habit.  I ran through my options and put off the decision until a co-worker told me about Mindful in May.

I’ve been toying with meditation sporadically for about six months.  I believe strongly that moving from occasional to daily meditations will have profound positive effects for me---physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, etc. But as with the rest of my list, I had yet to make the jump from ‘want to’ to ‘done’.  By participating in Mindful in May I will not only (hopefully) develop a habit I’m keen to lock down, but I can also (hopefully) begin to train my psyche to form new positive habits.  Just like an athlete has to practice to throw a ball just right, I will exercise my brain and try to create new muscle memories and patterns of behavior.  At least that’s the plan.

Meet the Local: Lisbon, Portugal

Meet the Local is a series designed to uncover the differences (and similarities) in how we think and live in different parts of the world.  Over the upcoming months, I’ll ask locals from places all over the world the same set of getting-to-know-you questions.  This week, we meet Jose, a former teacher who is making a new living in tourism after being laid off during the economic crisis.  

What do you like about the place you live?

I don’t really know how to explain…I just feel like it’s here, where I belong.  I lived in Spain for a few months, I lived in Romania for a few months, but I always feel the need to come back home.  I feel I have my family here, and I have everything here.  I really feel at home here.

What don’t you like so much?

The politicians.  Because they do all of this to our country.  The economic situation of Portugal, I think it’s their fault.  Because we work, we do all of the things we have to do, and they ruin everything.  I think this is very common in Europe, the politics are each time less credible, so the people don’t really trust anymore in politicians.  In Portugal, 40% of people don’t vote.  So the people who do vote don’t really represent anything, and the politicians can do whatever they want, because the people don’t care.

What do you normally eat for breakfast?

Three slices of bread with butter and chorizo.  Coffee with milk.

What do you do for a living?  How important is your job to your sense of self?

I was a teacher, teaching sports.  I really like to work with children.  It was nice, I was doing something different than other people, because I used to work in summer camps too so I was taking the way of teaching in summer camps inside the school.  So I was not teaching sports, I was teaching games, and I was trying to teach values with those games.  First I would read the story, then I would do a game, and then I would relate the game with the story and real life.  I went to a small village to teach, but I was not from there, so when the crisis started, the people who don’t have friends are the first to leave.  So they asked me to leave.  Now, I do tourism, I run a walking tour company.  I really like it, because I can stay in Lisbon where I like to live.  I meet a lot of people, so even though my friends are leaving to get jobs in other countries, I can make new friends.  Of course, it’s not the same thing, but it’s okay.

What do you do for fun?

I go out at night, I go to the cinema.  I like to climb, but I don’t climb anymore, since I started the tours.  Because most of my friends that climb, they do normal jobs so we don’t have the same schedule.  I also like to run with my father, my father and I run together.  And travel.

How often do you see your family?  Tell me what you did the last time you saw them.

I live with my father.  I see my mother one or two times a week, just to talk with her.  I see my sister when I see my mother – they don’t live together, but she’s always there.  My grandmother also lives with us.

What’s your biggest dream for your life?

Right now, I don’t have many dreams.  I just want to make sure the situation doesn’t get worse, or at least the tours keep running as they are now so I can at least have a stable life.  Some of my friends, they are really bad in their lives.  They were married and have children but are living back at home with their parents, or they have moved to other countries and don’t really like their jobs or the conditions that they live in and I don’t want that to happen to me.   So I don’t have a dream, I just don’t want to have a nightmare. But if I had a dream, I would want a small house with a small garden where I could sit in the plants.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?  Why?

Here.  When I was younger I always wanted a house with wheels---a mobile home---so I could travel, but I think if I had that now, I would always come here.

What are you most proud of?

Now, it’s the tours.  When I came on and my friend was running them, they were almost dead.  Nobody would trust them---if you asked someone about our tours, people would say, “don’t go!  It’s terrible!”  And now we’re the sixth most popular thing to do in Lisbon on TripAdvisor, and I’m really proud of that.

How happy would you say you are?  Why?

From 0 – 10, I would be a 6.  I think everything is going well in my life, but I would like to have more friends, and a girlfriend.  My friends left---but the girlfriend, well, I’m a bit shy.

Check out previous answers from a local in Sarajevo, and a local in London.  Want to participate in Meet the Local or know someone who does?  Email liz@thingsthatmakeus.com for more details.

Be Boundless.

In college I took an art class and the first thing we did was tape off a square in the center of the paper. This was the space where we would draw the vase sitting on a stool in front of the classroom. We drew on a bright white sheet with a rough matte surface, textured like an eggshell. I began at the center, of course, and carefully created a scale small enough to contain everything in front of me.  To my delight, the finished product floated smack-dab in the middle of the paper. Nothing even neared the edge.

Despite my tangled mess of hair, things of the wild variety don’t come easily for me. My creativity comes from working with boundaries—like the finite rectangle in a frame of film. I no longer feel the need to stay inside the lines, but I like limits and indelible endings. They make the space seem full.

I guess “seem” is the imperative word there, since for the most part it’s only an illusion. Boundaries have a way of creating things, because they hint at what’s beyond them.

I once saw a Pollock in a museum; it took up the better part of a wall. The painting wasn’t framed, so you could see the sides of canvas and the staples that stretched it across. The color ran clear off the edges and I imagined onto the floor. The paint I could see felt like merely a piece—a swatch of some colossal and untamed outpouring.

We learn early on how to give just enough—to burn, but just a little, and be done. It’s smart to save a part of yourself, because what if this only gets harder?

But, there is no restraint in the month of May, no tenuous half-ways or kind-ofs. Every inch of the cherry trees is impossibly pink. The blossoms quiver with their unbearable lightness.  After months of cold, the doors fly open again and a hive’s worth of bees begin buzzing. Ask them how much to give of your heart! They’ll answer the way that you’re fearing.

It sounds like paint hitting a canvas. Give everything. Give everything. Give everything.

What Happens in the Margins

For those of us who are planners, it can take a lot of restraint not to plan our days and lives down to the very second, so that nothing is (theoretically) left to chance. Of course, planning helps us make sense of where we’re headed and how we’d like to get there. It can help us tackle our to-do lists and meet our goals. Planning can make it easier to collaborate with others and can give us the sense that we’ve got some handle on the chaos of life.

But as Erin Loechner and Sarah J. Bray have explained so well, over-planning can sometimes be the death of creativity, motivation, and inspiration.

When Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir in verse first appeared in 2011, I loved it immediately just for its title, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, which is itself a quotation from Thoreau. The timing of its publication felt particularly serendipitous to me, as I encountered it while trying to emerge from what had felt like a very long hibernation.

A brief glance at my calendar from September 2010 is enough to make my present self hyperventillate. Every single day of that month is planned down to fifteen-minute increments, with a few hours sometimes allotted for sleep. My calendars for the following six months, however, are mysteriously blank.

It shouldn’t have been so hard to realize that my life was bursting at the seams. Unfortunately, I was too busy to take the time to notice (or care), and it took a crisis to slow me down. In fact, a simple, quiet illness brought me to a full stop.

My memories of those next few months are dim, but I can call up most vividly the grief I felt as all the things (good and wonderful things, mostly—just too many of them) I had planned so well were pried from my sleepy hands by fate and loved ones.

For much of the time that I spent flat on my back, I thought I would mark my recovery by the moment my life (and my calendar) returned to what it had been. I thought I would know for sure that I was really well again when the pages of my life were filled to the edges. That moment never came, and it was not because I didn’t get well (I surely did). It was because I fell in love, in those months of quiet emptiness, with the margins.

While I was still mourning the bright and busy calendar that had been wiped clean, the things I had crowded out of the disappearing margins of my life began to trickle back in. After years of wishing for more hours in the day, I knew what it felt like to have more time than I could ever need. All of a sudden, there was space for curiosity and wonder and reflection. A few deep and heartfelt friendships finally had room to grow. In the midst of all that quiet, I began to hear the sound of my own voice again and to really listen. I also learned to receive help and love, even when I had very little to offer in return.

For all those months, I worried constantly about the fact that I couldn’t doing anything “productive.” Instead, I was mostly lying still while my body repaired itself and the quiet worked its strange magic on me. By the time I felt like myself again, I was a different self altogether—one who knows the joy of fullness and hard work and the equal value of guarding and loving and noticing what happens in the margins.

An Adopted Dad

By Cindy WaiteRead the first piece in Cindy's series here. 

I never planned out my wedding. I didn’t imagine the decorations, or the finger foods, or even my dress. I told my family, defiantly, that I’d wear jeans and a sweatshirt on my wedding day because, “Ew, dresses.” I made the sour milk face you’re envisioning. Then I did back flips on my mom’s bed, made mud cakes in the backyard, and fell asleep reading, a flashlight hidden under my covers. I was maybe a strange child.

I always said I wanted a chocolate cake on my wedding day.

“No, honey, that’s what the groom has. The bride’s cake is white,” My mom impatiently told me, again. I made my sour milk face so contorted I might have passed out from disgust.

I can see her now, my Mom, at our scratched wooden kitchen table, the plastic covering pulling over the edge, the kitchen garbage pail at her feet, a Russet potato in one hand and a peeler in the other. She would have looked up at me without missing a beat with the potato.

“Why can’t I have a chocolate cake, too? Who said only boys can have them? I’m going to have a chocolate cake.”

It made all the women around me laugh whenever I said things about my chocolate cake and jeans wedding, so untraditional was I, so my cake grew in brown, sugary divinity each time the conversation arose.

“It’ll be a BIG chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, covered in M&Ms, with chocolate sprinkles on top of that.”

Then I bested myself, “It’ll be a three layer chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, covered in M&Ms and sprinkles on top.”

I didn’t spend my young years daydreaming about my nuptials, but I did spend a lot of time wondering who would walk me down the aisle.

I call Rob, my mom’s best friend, “Adopted Dad.” He spoils me. He got me my first perfume, “Romance” by Ralph Lauren, for my birthday because I smelled it in a magazine and liked it. I liked the name as much as the scent.

I’m moderately more graceful than a baby giraffe, only slightly lighter on my feet than Shrek. I smelled Ralph Lauren’s newest scent when I peeled back the bulky page in Seventeen, and I saw myself transform from my not-quite-or-at-all-grown-into-myself body to a romantic heroine starring in my own meet-cute love story. I’d be sophisticated. I’d be urbane, a word so sophisticated, saying it put me in a new class.

Adopted Dad is divorced. He’ll be happily remarried in a few years, when I’m 17 or 18. He’ll stop being Adopted Dad then, but I’ll hold on to the title for keepsakes. Divorced Dad can be a Dad to me; he has room and time in his life to adopt me into it.

Adopted Dad lets me drive. He’s okay with me behind the wheel, guiding me from the passenger seat. He doesn’t grip the door handle and dashboard until his knuckles turn white---that’s Mom’s job, and she should get a pay raise she’s so excellent at it.

I’m driving out to Six Flags with Adopted Dad and his 10-year-old son, my babysitting charge. Adopted Dad took the day off, and he handed me the keys. I didn’t know my palms could produce sweat so fast, but those keys felt like they were dipped in oil they were so slippery. I drove through Newnan straight on to 85 North, headed for Atlanta.

I’m on the interstate, driving through Spaghetti Junction---six, eight, fifteen lanes twisted like noodles, my heart racing with nerves in the snaking, speeding traffic. This is my opportunity to prove my maturity.

I’m 16, but I swear it’s more like 20-something because that’s what everyone says. I’ve grown up in single parent years---that’s 1.5 for every 1 normal kid year. I sort of get how dogs feel, passing everyone by.

Rob tells me, “It’s okay to speed,” as matter-of-factly as though he’d said, “There are cars on the road right now.” I stare at him out of the corner of my eye, my peripheral vision stretched as I also try to keep both eyes straight ahead, my hands at 10:00 and 2:00 and my heart from fluttering straight out of my chest onto the console.

“If you have the money to pay for a ticket, then you can take your chances exceeding the speed limit,” he continues. “You can choose to break the rules if you know the consequences and accept them.”

I feel immensely loved in this moment.

This is real dad advice. This is a life lesson that seems absurd on the surface---one a Mom would yell about, eyes bulging out of her head, demanding to know what on earth he was thinking telling a 16-year-old something so irresponsible. But Dad would know that he has a smart daughter, one with a head on her shoulders that got it, that gets him, that will be a more responsible driver and person because now she’s empowered with choice and the weight of responsibility.

I’m choking up because he said this and I’m imagining that scene, and a car cuts in front of me, and my reflexes jerk the wheel enough for us all to notice, but Adopted Dad doesn’t critique. And I’m calming down now because I can do this.

Men bonded with Chris mostly, growing up. What’s a boy without a dad? They went fishing and hunting, and he learned to tie knots and change a car tire, all while I played beneath the towering oak tree in the front yard. Men lent me a lap to crawl on when I was little and reassuring, big hugs as I aged. Men taught Chris and comforted me.

But Rob took me on busy Atlanta interstates and taught me to trust my gut. He taught me the tools of the Dad trade---lecturing me on too much time spent online talking to boys and wondering if I’d like to learn how to change a tire, after all.

I still wear Ralph Lauren’s Romance. I still think of Adopted Dad when I spritz it, pushing my shoulders back and my head high and entering the mist as any urbane woman might do.

I put Adopted Dad in the “maybe” column to walk me down the aisle.

A Fatherless Girl

By Cyndi Waite

My mom runs her hand softly along my cheek, like moms do with their babies. Maybe I asked the question, "Who is my dad?" or "Where is my dad?" or maybe she preempts it. She strokes my cheek again and smiles at me.

“My beautiful girl," I imagine her saying it in the wonder-filled way she still says it today. "My beautiful girl, your daddy was a good man, but he is very sick."

This refrain is so palpable and entwined in my childhood, I know the words like a nursery rhyme whose repetition tattooed it on my memory. But there’s not a nursery rhyme for my story.

I was born in Hollywood, a fact that fills me with undue glee. I was a kid who had "a lot of personality," a euphemism for having been histrionic. I wanted to be an actress, a screenwriter, but always, I dreamed of being a Los Angeles Resident.

Because what I leave out is the "Florida" part. I'm from Hollywood, Florida, home of the Cuban and land of the retirees. It’s a far cry from the iconic “Hollywood” sign and yet, it’s true, I’m from Hollywood.

We lived in an apartment building. I can see the outline of it, and I wonder if that's my earliest memory shining through or if I've re-created a memory from pictures. It had a giant, humongous, can't-see-the-end-of-it-can't-touch-the-bottom-of-it pool. We lived there until I was three.

Mom has always been a fish, happiest near the water and stressed, searching for air away from it. Mom's angry? Let's run her a bath. Mom has to get away from work? Let's pack a bag of towels and ham sandwiches and find the nearest lake. Water is Mom's Valium.

Mom's love of the water seeped into Chris and me in the womb; pregnancy didn't keep her from floating weekends away. We came out with our arms failing in freestyle. Outside her belly, we split our time the way she had done while we were in it: between the pool and the beach. I learned to walk in the sand.

***

Mom and Chris hold my hand as we walk to the water, waves lapping my feet and calves and thighs and stomach. I’m pink and round---a perfect Gerber baby, squealing with delight at the touch of the cool south Atlantic waters (that are somehow, someway perfect, while northern Atlantic beaches are drab, the water the color of the gray sand. It’s a mystery I’ve never solved).

Chris, four years older than me, maybe six or seven, swims his way away from Mom and me. He probably travels three feet, but I swear it’s 10 feet---half a football field, even. Mom holds me over her head, and teases me, “I’m going to do it! I’m going to throw you!” and her threats aren’t threats at all but promises. And she tosses me through the air, and I’m soaring what feels like stories above the water shimmering below, and I land, laughing, in my brother’s open arms. They throw me like a football, calling plays, “Go left!” I was a precursor to my brother’s glory days on the football field, a human ball. I wonder if that’s where he learned a perfect spiral.

***

We move from Hollywood that same year, when I’m three. I still suck on a pacifier, a fact that embarrasses and endears me now---a childhood in tact, still so innocent it maybe seemed stalled, in slow motion, behind. Precocious and clever, my brother knows my sun rises and shines with him. Where he goes, I go. What he does, I try to do. Sometimes he uses his powers for good, and sometimes he uses them for evil. The line is always blurry.

We pack up the family Chevy S-10 and move to Georgia.

We say goodbye to our family and friends, and Mom says it’s time for an adventure. She drives stick shift in the small three-seater pickup truck. My legs swing around it; it's hard for her to switch gears sometimes, and I talk nonstop, except when I'm sucking on my pacifier.

She got lost, often, on that long drive. I asked a dozen times if we were lost, and she always said, “We’re not lost, we’re finding a new way," just like she says today. Sometimes I ask her when we're standing still to hear those guiding words.

Hours into the drive, Chris pipes up. “I dare you to throw your pacifier out the window.”

I eye him cautiously; at three, going on four, I’m already stubborn and incapable of turning down a challenge.

“I double-dog dare you. I bet you won’t do it.” The taunts keep coming.

I pull my pacifier out of my mouth, and he rolls down the window, and Mom intervenes.

“If you throw it out the window, I won’t get you another one,” she warns.

Chris smirks. “I triple-dog dare you.”

I can’t take it anymore, and I throw it out, watch the wind whip it, bounce it off the side of the truck and fall onto the hot asphalt. It’s gone. It’s really gone.

I start to cry.

“I love you, but I told you if you threw it out, I wouldn’t get you another one,” Mom reminds me.

Chris looks at me, pride in his eyes. “You’re a big kid now.”

I cry all night, furious and unable to sleep. Mom doesn’t buy me a new pacifier.

The next morning, I’m calm and grown up when we pull into Carl’s driveway.

A Taxonomy of Fear

In my early years of ballet training, I developed a fear of falling. We would rehearse for months and months in anticipation of just a handful of performances, and as opening night approached, my fear grew stronger. There were many underlying reasons for my fear, and I could categorize them into neat little groups. There were the fears related to suffering—the worry that a fall would result in physical injuries, or at least, if it happened on stage, a great deal of shame. There were the fears related to failure and the sense that a fall was a sign of some shortcoming in my training, ability, or commitment. Above all, there was a gripping fear of the unknown. What would it feel like to fall, mid-flight, and what would happen afterwards?

Another dancer assured me that I had nothing to worry about and that my anxieties would disappear after my first fall. Of course, her confidence in the inevitability of falling terrified me even more, but in the end, she was right.

Eventually, my fear ballooned to the point where I would stand in the wings crushing rosin repeatedly with my shoes. I became certain that every floor was as slick as ice and that I would do best to ensure that my feet were practically glued to the floor. Of course, this was entirely counterproductive.

After one such rosin-crushing session, I rushed onto the stage with my fellow snowflakes for the frenzy that is the snow scene in the Nutcracker. We were running at top speed in cocentric circles, and before I knew it, I had landed flat on my face in a sea of tulle, dry ice, and fake snow.

Fortunately, my fears about falling onstage were proven wrong in an instant. It didn’t hurt (at least not until the adrenaline wore off), and no one seemed to notice. What happened next was simply that I popped back up immediately and kept running before I even had time to realize what had happened.

Sometimes we have the opportunity to face our fears, by will or by accident. We can climb mountains, hold snakes, speak to packed auditoriums, and pick ourselves up when we fall. These are opportunities for empowerment and for realizing our own potential. In other cases, however, we hope very much that our greatest fears will never play out in reality.

In the wake of public trauma and personal turning points, it seems appropriate to take inventory of our fears, to line them up in broad daylight and see them for what they really are.

Not all fears have the same weight or character. Some are rational, some irrational. Some are universal; others derive from individual experience. Sometimes we are most afraid of what we don’t know, and sometimes we are afraid of what we know too well.

Fear is a perfectly natural part of the human condition. I’ve had to remind myself of this whenever I’ve worried that my own fears were ridiculous or when I have allowed those fears to get in the way of joy. By bringing our fears to light and acknowledging them as a part of our shared experience, we may find opportunity for connection and give ourselves permission to live abundantly.

XXXIII. Savoie

I am the youngest one in the French language program in Chambéry, but was immediately placed in the highest level of classes upon my arrival. After the first month, the lessons begin to repeat themselves. My attention wanes.

In February another young student arrives, a Swiss boy named Laurent. We get along in class and while having coffee from the instant machine in the center’s common space, and after a couple weeks he asks me to have a drink with him in town.

My solitude, especially with my experience running, has made me suspicious of all men. I don’t know what Laurent wants from me, if he thinks I’m pretty or not, and I don’t trust him for it. We go to a bar and I cover myself up, wearing clothes that show none of my skin or even a hint of shape.

Laurent is easy to talk to about music, travel, food, and he walks me home after we have a few drinks. Instead of letting him kiss me---as I now know he wants to, and I wouldn’t mind either---I thank him for the drink, tell him I’ll see him in class, and shut the gate firmly behind me.

I have a bad habit, I realize as I walk slowly up the stairs to my dark apartment, of deciding how things will go before they happen. And these self-fulfilling prophecies aren’t getting me anywhere.

Upon Seeing Emily Dickinson’s House, My First Day in Amherst.

I imagine Emily in the window, her white dress fading a little.  She is protected by the walls of her familiar room. She is dwelling in the possible, as she put it.  The floors are washed with a sunlight that doesn’t let on to the deceiving cold of spring’s first days or the searing heat of summer. There is comfort in this unknowing place, there in hope in hesitation.

And, then I image her descending the stairs, and walking out onto the lawn. I see her steps shaking dew from the morning grass, and the goose bumps rising-up on her ankles.  In that moment, we are both staring back at the house, where she imagined this place so differently.

Emily Dickinson is survived by more than one-thousand poems and a collection of pressed flowers in a vault at Harvard. It felt important for me to see her home, as I was now alone in Amherst too. I, like her, know the feathered thing- the gentle joy of a chosen uncertainty.  The real magic of this fickle world is in the nearly-real, the perhaps, the "could be".

Two Weeks

Two weeks ago, tucked under my covers and cursing the still-too-cold-April, attempting to sleep after a tough discussion, I felt crushed and thought “I’ve had enough of feeling like this” as I stared at the ceiling. I turned over and managed to count backwards until I fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning, the “I’ve had enough" feeling persisted, along with a desire for change. Before I climbed out of bed, I committed myself to making space for more positive thinking and dreaming. Moment by moment, day by day, I decided to commit myself to beginning a process. A process that I had put off (unintentionally), with a variety excuses such as well “this is a time of transition (i.e. in two months you don’t know where you will be living, what you will be doing, or how you will be getting by), of course it is hard” or “your life isn’t exactly as you had imagined it, of course you feel this way.” But two weeks ago, I decided enough with the platitudes, I’m striving for great, not just getting by, and I’m not waiting to start. Two weeks isn’t enough time to show consistency or deep change worthy of earnest reflection.

However, making a public commitment to a process of loving yourself fiercely and re-writing an openly positive narrative takes brave words, quiet trusting moments, and the accountability of self and friends.

Quieting the voices

Long discussions with friends [and, just about everyone I meet] have left me certain that I am not the only one who battles internal voices. Much of the time, these voices urge me forward, empowering me, nudging me to take a risk---but every once in a while, they catch me off-guard and fill my heart and mind with self-doubt. On the suggestion of a friend, who recommended a new practice, I am spending a few minutes a day in front of the mirror. The goal is to repeat the phrase “I love you” to myself, until the self-judgment fades and my softer, self-caring side emerges. While it appears obvious, being accountable for loving yourself, actively, shifts your frame of reference to a more whole, more loving version of yourself. As Brene Brown says, this is where the “whole hearted” begin from.

The pesky surprise voices of doubt are now meeting some resistance.

Training and un-training muscles

Some of the cycles of thinking I fall into [or rather, allow myself to fall into], I have developed and practiced over years. Their less than blissful cycles interrupt my day. As one of my favorite blogs wisely notes, “years and years of training were required in order for your mind to reach its current level. This is your work. And just as it was trained, it can also be untrained.” As I try to re-formulate my brain around positive thinking, I feel resistance from old patterns of thinking. I feel that I am attempting to change the channel before an old show, one of self-doubt that I have seen before, plays a re-run in my mind. What does it take to break these and reconfigure the cycle? What if instead of thinking through the same pattern of thoughts, ending at the point I began, I vary the questions: What is the worst thing that can happen? I try to get underneath what is really going on.

However, some of the thought patterns are old habits, in some way comforting. They need to be thrown out the window into the beautiful spring air. Each time I break a cycle, I celebrate being one step closer to the person I want to be. Each minor win is a victory.

New Dreams

How do we dream new dreams? How do we know what to aim for? And, then how do we build the path there? Now, facing the end of my formal education, I am realizing that I don’t have set dreams for the next step or even the steps beyond that. Where I sit today was, in essence, the end of the “dream plan.” I don’t take it for granted that I have accomplished some of the goals I set for myself. Yet, this wonderful life must be bigger than that, there must be more I want. Of course, there are hazy visions of things I’d like to do and the person I want to become, but I want to continue to strive for understanding and visualizing that person and that place.

I want to put a stake in the ground and fight. One step at a time and the active decision to be happy, made at every second of every day.

Easter Eggs

This year, Brian had an idea to make Easter baskets for our parents, which was really fun and made me feel all right about Easter, which has never been my favorite holiday. I am working on a story about the two of us shopping for Easter basket materials. I am going to make the illustrations out of cut paper, but I also needed to figure out how to do the text. I decided to try hand writing it.

I didn’t like the way that the black ink looked because the contrast between its light and dark parts seemed too harsh. I got some grey ink and also a new brush at the art supply store. Funny visit to the art supply store. Everyone in the paper department was really grumpy, and downstairs, the woman checking me out told me how moths ate her paintbrushes so she has to keep them in the fridge (she was really sweet and sassy and seemed so old school NYC like an Annie Potts character in an 80s movie) and then I am pretty sure one of the employees pooped on the floor. Pretty sure.

Clean desk and new art supplies! The brush is wrapped in brown paper. She was so careful with it.

Also got some new paper for an animation I am going to make, a video for a friend’s band. I never let myself buy fancy paper because it feels like cheating but I decided this time it’s ok, this video can have a little more of a collage feel to it. The two white papers are going to be snow.

The writing isn’t perfect but I think it will work, and I like the grey ink. When I showed Brian this and said, “What do you think?” he said, “It looks like Apu from the Simpsons.”

 Tracing eggs.

Egg outline. (I don’t know where that weird owl came from.)

Eggs in progress.

A pretty nice egg.

 I really like this egg.

The first egg I made. I rejected it for being insufficiently egg-like.

I tried to make a replacement but I didn’t like that one either.

So I decided the original egg would do. (Practicing egg-ceptance.)

More to come in the future!