n meme: dare!

Yesterday I read Havi Brooks’ e-book, Processing the Process (which was amazing and rocked my world!). Today I was inspired to try something different in lieu of morning pages: I wrote out a dialogue between (current) me and incoming me.

I decided to start by asking a question about an issue that’s been nagging at me for years.

(If I had strategically chosen a question, it wouldn’t have been this one. My conscious mind would have dismissed this one as being trivial, inconsequential, and . . . kind of ridiculous. So it’s a good thing I didn’t ask my conscious mind for its opinion.)

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ME: I have a lot of clothes. Some of them are consciously stressing me, but others are probably unconsciously stressing me too. What sorts of clothes will I not need to be you?

INCOMING ME: Anything we don’t feel ‘sovereign’ in. Anything that reminds us, “Last time I wore this was for the high school reunion where no one remembered me / the job interview I was so excited about . . . but I didn’t get the job, etc”.

Also, we’re not going to be skinny again. Clothes that remind us that other people “liked” us better when we were skinny . . . are not useful.

What do we feel good in now?

Everything else should go.

And if everything else really does go, then there will be room for creating new things. From “scratch”, as it were. Which, given how we have always wanted to be a garment designer, seems like a necessary step you’ve been avoiding.

 

ME: Maybe the rust-and-tangerine tank dress (that I first wore to a school reunion 13 years ago, while I was on crutches) also needs to go?

INCOMING ME: Yes. Also the wedding dress.

Anything you might have worn to impress (or hope to impress) other people, while playing a part.

This is going to be scary in some cases. This is exactly what the Fashion Freedom people said not to do. But in our heart of hearts, we’ve known all along that someday we would have to do this very thing. We avoided it, even as we longed to do it, but now? That day is here.

ME: Won’t I look freakish and weird if most of my clothes are things I made myself, when I don’t know what I’m doing?

INCOMING ME:

• How else do we learn, except by doing?
• How much more time you want to spend pretending you’re someone you’re not?
• Maybe homemade clothes will be a filter — like the green and purple hair you had in 2007 turned out to be — to find (fellow interesting creative) people to connect with.
• Sovereignty comes from being yourself.
• How can we get to avant-garde if we won’t let go of what’s familiar and tired?

ME: I’m scared, of all these changes. Of being “naked” to the world. Of all the risk.

INCOMING ME:

1. You can back away from the cliff.
2. You can roll down the cliff. (soft landing)
3. You can jump off the cliff.                               OR
4. You can leap into the air and fly.

Aren’t we more than ready for #4? Don’t we hunger to find out what’s possible when we no longer can expect anything familiar?

Think of us as a crab that’s been using a found shell as shelter/protection. One day, the crab leaves that shell on the beach. Eventually the crab grows its own shell . . . which is beautiful and amazing and unlike anyone else’s shell. And then that crab wonders, “why did I wait so long?”

warts and thorns

I helped a toad

cross the road.

No wait, that’s not quite it.

The toad had a plan

I gave it a hand –

I stood between it and cars.

Most went wide

as they passed beside.

 

Toad stopped at center line.

Next car stopped too,

watched me shoo. . .

eventually we arrived

at the other side.

 

Storm chased me home.

Did I help or hurt?

Mismatched by stride

I guess I caused stress

Should I have quit?

let it sit?

What did I owe that toad?

messy feelings by proxy

I wanted the title to be an anagram (which originally was “messy feels prx”), but I only allow myself to add 1 extra letter to make an anagram work, and that wouldn’t have been sufficient. Still, I found myself thinking about ‘messy’ and ‘proxy’ and ‘feels’  . . .  I don’t actually know what the title means, but it does resonate with what I wanted to write about, so I kept it.

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As seen on Twitter, Judith Weston:

As soon as you tell yourself that your feelings are wrong, you can’t do anything creative.

Two days ago, Spouse read the blog post I wrote that day, and came home thinking I was all bummed out. I wasn’t. More like bemused. Or maybe musing.

I’m in a different wyxzi than I was when I wrote it, and my current wyxzi feels that perhaps I was too harsh about certain aspects. There’s always a part of me that (helpfully) pipes up just after I’ve disclosed something particularly heartfelt, and suggests that perhaps my feelings were somewhat strident, or maybe even incendiary. Basically, part of me inflicts a tone argument on whichever other part wrote about my feelings.

I feel internal pressure to apologize for my feelings. Or to write a second post, backtracking.

Usually I manage to resist those impulses.

Blogging has given me a place to explore my own feelings at length . . . wherever they might take me. My feelings don’t all agree with each other; some are downright contradictory.

And yet, I’ve come to find that a good thing.

When I’m willing to go . . . anywhere. . . that my feelings lead me, I discover all sorts of things that I never would’ve guessed.

+++

Yesterday my volunteering place emailed me a training course evaluation form. Even though I knew I would want to write something substantial in the comment section — necessitating dictating / editing /revising, etc., and probably spilling over to a second sheet, I still went ahead with a pen and handwrote some of the shorter answers.

Question 10: Do you plan to lead at least 2 field trips this season? If not, why?

As I wrote my answer, I realized that the words I was using conveyed the exact opposite of a deeply held principle. One that guides a great many of my actions.

I walked around, thinking, reevaluating. I whited out my first answer; gave a different answer. Thought/felt further.

I emailed my contact (which I’d been planning to do even before I got the evaluation form). My first attempt to explain my reasoning, I realized, was full of platitudes. I kept revising until I surprised myself. My actual fears deep down underneath were much different than the surface fears camouflaging them.

I shared with my contact what my real fears were. We had a genuine conversation about them, in which she admitted she (still!) occasionally has similar fears.

None of that could have been possible if I hadn’t been willing to probe deeper.

I was willing to probe deeper because I’ve committed to honoring all of my feelings by expressing them the way they need/want to be expressed. (And refusing to apologize for them, or qualify them, or otherwise dismiss or dishonor them.)

It remains tough to do that when I express things that are unflattering, that (I fear) make me appear weak, “flaky”, Weird In A Bad Way.

But it’s still the right to do. And by living with my discomfort, I’m learning how to live a better way.

perils of volunteering 2

After 25 jobs and 8 volunteering experiences (over a span of 30 years), I’m only just now starting to figure out what conditions I need to thrive.

What I haven’t been able to figure out is how to obtain those conditions.

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I’m in limbo at my latest volunteering spot. I went through training for a specific kind of thing that I did honestly think I would like. Then I observed 3 seasoned leaders doing that very thing. And only at that stage did I realize that there are certain logistics I don’t think I’ll be able to manage. But also, and more troublingly, what I hoped to get out of the entire process? Isn’t available, at all.

Yesterday, I was at the volunteering place as a last-minute substitution for someone who had to cancel. Someone asked me why I hadn’t taken the last step, and I started answering, truthfully (about the logistical problem). She looked at me like I’d grown another head — like what I was saying was completely unintelligible.

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The things I need from a job or volunteering experience seem to be antithetical to what everyone else needs or wants.

I cannot be happy if:

• Everyone (but me) has, more or less, exactly the same background.

If there’s no real diversity of any sort, everyone bonds over how similar they are. And, inevitably, I stick out like the lone freak. I’ve been part of a few online groups that I fit into, but face to face, it’s never happened. Yesterday, I was at my volunteering place, and 2 people who had never met bonded over living in the same general neighborhood, and eventually figured out they know each other’s families. I’m from the next county over, and no one but Spouse knows any of my relatives (not that knowing my relatives would be any comfort). In Philadelphia last week, people bonded over being teachers, but I was there because I was a writer. The one connection I made was with someone who recounted part of her harrowing childhood. And other than that, she and I had almost nothing in common — which, to me, is interesting, because I didn’t know what to expect. When everyone else seems to be following a script, I’m bored out of my gourd.

• The job itself is well-defined, and its borders are ironclad.

My very best skill is cross pollinating, so I have to have opportunities to talk to people from all over, interact with ideas from everywhere, and then implement what seems like it could work.

• I’m required to do things exactly the way someone else has already done them.

I have to have “wiggle room” so I can create some kind of innovative approach to the problems the job aims to solve.

• I’m not allowed to fail.

True creativity and innovation requires trying a lot of things, and most things don’t work, so failure is inevitable. I actually learn more from failures than I do from successes, but in a culture where failure derails your career, no one really learns anything except fear.

• I’m not valued for my unique talents.

I guess other people are fine with being just another anonymous worker in an immense ant colony — maybe that’s how they fulfill needing to feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves — but I need to feel I’m doing something that no one else can do. If, instead, it becomes clear that I’m interchangeable, I will sink into despair. When I leave that job or volunteering opportunity — and it’s only a matter of time before I will leave it — my self-confidence will be crushed, and I may be suicidal. It will take me months, if not years, to recover my equilibrium.

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After 30+ situations where I haven’t been valued, I’m running out of hope that things can work for me. Maybe I can’t fit anywhere.

Instead of being terrified by that idea, what if it’s an opportunity?

If I consider what I need from a positive direction, my list looks like this:

• People of widely (wildly?)-diverse backgrounds {pluralism}
• Ambiguous responsibilities {liminal spaces}
• I define, and then pursue, only the design problems I want to work on
• Failure is encouraged
• I’m recognized and appreciated for being uniquely valuable

I think this list actually describes my life right now, with a few judicious additions. That is, I also need:

• an aesthetically pleasing environment
• frequent opportunities for movement and/or physical activity
• time and space to lie fallow in between periods of inspiration and attempts
• just enough resources that I have to get creative in making things work

Plus one thing I definitely don’t have right now (besides Spouse):

Friends who encourage me to do what I need to do (not what “normal” people would, or would feel like they should, do). Friends who are interesting because they are unpredictable — who have cool ideas that I never would’ve thought of. Friends whose own lives are sources of inspiration. Friends who evolve.

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I won’t be looking for new places to volunteer anytime soon.

I need to rethink a bunch of things.

 

 

Philadelphia: snapshots

muddy rivers, hidden sloughs, sparkling seas

National Train Day, but I’ll miss the festivities

towers billow and gallop across the Schuylkill River

dewy rambling afoot over U Penn campus

The Sun while wind and rain and balloons (blue and white)

“carving out our stories” ~

quilted world map as mural, 15 feet high

concentration began not with coffee but orange juice

31 women in the dark, straining to hear hushed words of Chimimanda Adichie

second-guessing my choices after lunch conversation goes awry

dream of a potter, Her living works

“possible connection between courage and rage”

Brave Robin and shy rabbit

ambiguous Egyptian hieroglyph — gazelle? butterfly? angel?

“Pollen, the holy water of Native Americans…”

Southwestern pottery — black lightning and stars on red clay

“Hausaland renowned for its textiles since the 14th century”

catalog of Mediterranean fish, grey and brown and rust tesserae

iridescent curlicued Roman glass

spicy, spicier, and spiciest sandwiches ahead of me at Subway

white young blind Baltimorean woman and her Californian mother, going to Peabody

African-American father and son invoke Antman to change altitudinous lightbulbs

sun sets into clouds over Delaware Bay

what’s my story?

When I meet new people, and we go around the room introducing ourselves by “the things we do” (which for most people are their jobs), and I say, “I’m a poet and a blogger”, people are slightly interested, until it becomes clear that I’m not “making a living at blogging”, or indeed, making any money at it. In fact, when I say I do it (simply) because I enjoy it, people look puzzled, sometimes pitying. They change the subject as quickly as possible.

Every time this happens, I’m confused, and then confounded.

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Despite feeling certain since circa 2005 that I wanted to be a writer, I guess I was waiting for opportunities to fall out of the sky. I didn’t actually do anything.

In 2007, I had an undemanding part-time job that I sort of enjoyed, but was also wondering how I could make it more interesting. Spouse suggested that my employer should have a blog, and I should write the blog posts. I liked the idea of a blog, with caveats. I definitely didn’t want my first experience with a blog to be for a job, for money. I wanted to find out what I wanted to say, on my own terms. But I still didn’t write.

After I got fired from my last job, in 2009, I finally started this blog.

Before I began, I might have guessed that writing mostly about one person’s ordinary life wouldn’t be engaging enough to sustain 4 years’ worth of material. Instead, I have found that I have lots of interesting ideas. And I have interesting things to say about them. And they generate new ideas, that often take me to uncharted places.

I have learned more about myself and about how to function (better) in the world through blogging than I’ve learned from anything else, by orders of magnitude.

Even though I don’t have words for the great big meta-project my life seems to be now, it’s way more challenging intellectually, way more engaging spiritually, and certainly way more aesthetically enjoyable than paid employment ever was.

I can also dimly perceive possibilities that were literally unthinkable before.

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Is there any way to convey any of this to other people who currently dismiss me because I don’t have a job? I don’t know. I haven’t had any luck so far, but trying a different approach couldn’t hurt.

rain and revelry

It’s been a cool and rainy spring here, with temperatures rarely as high as the 60s and 70s. It rained all day today, and was chilly. But I’m grateful we did not get snow, as did my brother in Minnesota.

I have a solution to the problem with photographic software, but I’m not entirely happy with it. So I haven’t been taking a lot of pictures lately, nor have I uploaded anything to Flickr in the last 10 days. Annoying.

The technical conversation I was looking forward to two weeks ago didn’t turn out the way I expected, but good things may yet come of it.

Some part of me wanted to stay in the poetry meetup group, so I posted a question about whether there was any ‘wiggle room’ with the prompt, since 2 gloomy prompts in a row were not working for me. No one responded for two days. So then I quit the group. (I certainly don’t miss the drive to Arbutus.)

But! Very excited about this Saturday, which is simultaneously (1) my first writer’s retreat, and (2) my first visit to Philadelphia! The retreat — Many Women, Many Stories — is co-sponsored by the Philadelphia Writing Project and the A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO).