Goats on Hills & Other Dreams

One day, I want to be the eccentric woman on the hill with a menagerie. I've already scouted out the hill - there's a perfect one right near my hobbit cottage, marked by a sign urging dog owners to keep hold of their pets so they don't terrify the goats. I want a hill with goats and giraffes maybe a water park for a baby porpoise and a few adventurous hippos. I almost started my menagerie on Sunday morning when we were walking through the town square for coffee. A man had four puppies on a leash and he was parked in a spot where people would stop to play with the dogs, which we promptly did. I know myself well enough to give puppies a wide berth but the manfriend was playing with them before I could coax him to a safer spot, one far away from puppies who need homes. Inevitably, one of the puppies crawled over to me and started to lick my hand until I was about thirty seconds from breaking my lease and smuggling a dog into my house. I might have even done it, if housing wasn't so desperately hard to find in the Bay Area.

We hadn't made it out of the town square before I started crying because I wanted a puppy. Not just a puppy, that puppy. We had to spend the rest of the day comforting me with discussion about how puppies pee on favorite rugs and chew on hot pink ballet flats.

Yesterday, I started crying in a diner when I saw an empty baby carrier sitting on the ground.

One could chalk this up to hormones - and I usually do - but it feels like a symptom of something bigger.

My life is very quiet. I have a lot of time and space alone. I know that friends with pets and kids and jobs would kill for the life I lead, or at least they would for a week or so, before they started missing their children and pets. But at some point, a few years in, the quiet begins to echo. It's not emptiness precisely, but it is solitary. And I don't believe we're meant to be solitary creatures.

I've had people tell me not to wait too long before having children - but it's not a question of waiting. It's a question of timing. I've been knocking myself out, believing that I have complete control over what happens in my life and when. But the more I abandon the idea of control and just allow things to happen as they will, the easier everything gets.

But I will continue to dream of a time when there are kids and animals tumbling over hills. Even if the giraffe remains a bit of a stretch.

Confessions of a Sugar Beast

I'm a hormonal, sugar-fueled mess this week. I find these labels empowering. Because they give me reasons and solutions for the way I feel. You're cranky, hungry, tired, and head-achey because being a female is terrible sometimes. To feel better, wait.

You're cranky, hungry, tired and head-achey because you've been eating a lot of things that you know are bad for you. To feel better, stop eating sugar.

Unfortunately, the blithe "stop eating sugar" mandate is tough sell right now.

Sugar is my achilles heel. My mouth loves it, my body hates it. If I eat sugar, I feel tired and cranky and my brain goes foggy and my skin breaks out and I have cravings for a week.

In the past, simply acknowledging the cycle and recognizing how much worse my life is when I'm eating sugar has been enough to pop me out of the dreaded cycle.

Making good food choices is an experiential process. Quitting certain foods to lose weight or because it's healthier isn't enough of an incentive for me, because the concepts are too vague. Vague does not hold up well when confronted with butterscotch pudding on a sunny patio. But experimenting with alterations - over the past five years, I've experimented with raw, vegan, and no sugar - for long enough to learn how I feel and how my life shifts without those things provides amazing incentives. Like, stop eating that thing and life gets 100% better and you know this to be a fact. Now, that's an incentive.

When I'm off sugar, I don't have food cravings, I sleep well, my energy is high, creative work feels easy, my moods are cheerful, my skin is clear and my jeans fit.

But sugar is in everything. It’s in your curry chicken when you go out for Indian food, it’s in bread you buy at the grocery store, it’s in basically any food that comes in a box or from a restaurant. It also craftily hides under innocuously healthy sounding names, like honey and brown rice syrup. Alcohol reacts in your body the same way sugar does. So do potatoes.

Sugar is also in pancakes and oh my stars, how I love pancakes. Green juice is so terribly uninspiring when what you really want is a stack of buttery blueberry pancakes.

But pancakes make me feel terrible and green juice makes me feel like I’m flying through the sky on a friendly dragon.

I’ve been dabbling in sugar again, because I've been going out to eat a lot more often than in past years and I'm in a relationship now so my exercise routine is all thrown off and also the demon of over-confidence started to whisper in my ear about how "sugar doesn't affect you that much!" and "you're fine!" and "mmm, buttercream-frosted cupcakes!" 

I’ve given up sugar four or five times now. Sometimes it lasts for a year, sometimes it lasts for six months, last week it lasted for about three days. Usually, I have to hit some point of pain - like watching the sugar cycle of crankiness and depression roller coaster me up and down for awhile until I decide it’s absolutely 100% not worth it. Then everything clicks in and abandoning sugar feels easy for green juice feels easy. But I just haven't hit that point yet. And I'm a little mad at myself because I need that point.

Willpower isn't really a thing for me. I have no interest in torturing myself, even for the sake of health or feeling better. Self-control and discipline have never made me jump for joy. So I wait until eating sugar is actually a more painful prospect than not eating sugar and everything gets easy.

Why Crying Is The Best Thing Ever and We Should All Do More of It

Who's been crying a lot lately? ME TOO.

After years of desperately wishing I had been born with an instruction manual because I really don't understand how I operate and am prone to pulling the wrong levers, I'm finally noticing how deeply my emotions can help or inhibit me.

If I observe and express them - usually by sobbing like my heart's about to shatter like glass on concrete - they help me.

If I ignore them or decide I don't have time for them right now because I have to watch TV or because whatever's on my to-do list is infinitely more pressing, they inhibit me.

When I let myself carry around unexpressed emotion, it totally blocks me up. To the point where I can't function. Getting client work done is like pushing a two-story house up a cliff using only my thumbs and writing anything creative is impossible. My brain spends all its energy coughing up all the reasons my relationships don't work and why everything is terrible and why that won't ever change.

But when I let myself cry - sob, really, in the most dramatic fashion possible - in an hour or so, everything feels better.

My therapist told me I needed to cry more and I thought that was silly. "I cry the perfect amount," I thought. But then I'd go for a week or two without giving much attention to my emotional state and everything would begin to pile on top of me like layers of fog and dust and rubbish until my entire life felt like a toxic waste site. Crying is like washing away the acres of sludge with a convenient tsunami that leaves everything clear and ready for whatever's next.

I feel like someone just handed me that instruction manual. 437 pages on How Amber Works, complete with diagrams. Now every time I feel incapable of getting anything done, it's not because I'm lazy or unmotivated or undisciplined or in the wrong career or a complete waste of space. It just means that I need to go outside and stick my bare feet in the grass and cry for awhile. Or go make a list of everything I'm feeling sad and angry about. The signs have been pointing me in this direction for a long time, I was just too caught up in telling myself I was a bad human to see what was really going on.

Crying is incredibly freeing. It releases whatever has piled up on top of you and wipes your outlook on life clean. Crying makes you happier, smarter, more productive, and less prone to guilt trips. Crying takes the mess your three-year-old inner self has made on the etch-a-sketch of your life and shakes it clear.

I think we should all spend some time crying today. Maybe even every day.

On Fear and Its Uncanny Effect on Your Solar Plexus

Fear is the emotional equivalent of termites. Find a tiny sliver of fear stashed away somewhere and suddenly your house is full of it. When I talk to people who fear things I used to fear - spiders, economic collapse, glitter eyeshadow - I start to get worried. Fear breeds quickly and discussions of Terrible Things That Should Make Any Sensible Person Very Scared kick up my dread of being sucked back into that sticky black mire. Like being sent back to stormy Kansas after tromping through the Emerald City. I'd prefer to avoid tornadoes, thank you.

Fear itself doesn't scare me much - it's mostly visceral. It feels like a blow to the solar plexus that shortens the breath. So if you just remember to breathe, it will pass.

Oddly enough, that's also what excitement feels like.

Maybe it's possible that fear is really excitement. Maybe it's possible to rewrite fear as opportunity. I have to look at what I fear and what that fear is calling me toward. More action? Less action? Rather than just breathing through the fear, rather than just surviving it, transform it. What wonderful things are waiting beyond the sticky black mire?

When I look at today's episode of fear, I realize that I fear not following my own self-knowledge. I fear letting other people's beliefs sway me. I fear that the world will prove to be as grim as all the news outlets are yelling it is. But if I allow myself to trust my response and my knowledge and my choices, then I can start to see the opportunities. Opportunities to let go of old stories that came from a father who would rather bury his money in the woods than trust it to a bank. Opportunities to allow myself the space to do what's right for me, opportunities to recognize that there is no right or wrong, there's only what feels right in the moment. Opportunities to follow what makes me feel good and inspired, because feeling good and inspired is the only way I can hope to affect the world for the better.

When I do this, the weight in my solar plexus starts to resemble a bird - a bird with strong wings that can pull me up out of the tornado.

Making Myself a Wizard Hat Out of Felt and Rhetorical Questions

Crushing, soul-grinding doubt seems to be the legacy of humanity. We doubt our worth, our contribution, our ability to meet the standards that society or we ourselves have set. I spend a reasonable chunk of every day convinced that I’m not doing enough, feeling enough, living enough, earning enough, being enough. Why on earth would I do that? Why on earth would I pour so much of my finite energy into a sticky black pit of doubt?

Why isn’t it enough to be breathing every day? Why isn’t it enough to wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I help today?” Or wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I have fun today?” Why do most of our early morning thoughts begin with, “How can I survive today?”

My tiny-fist-shaken-at-the-sky rhetorical questions crop up whenever I find myself in the unconscious loop of work and budgets and doing all the things I don't particularly want to do in hopes of one day being able to do what I really want to do. I have a bad habit of feeling like a victim of my own life rather than its creator. But work and budgets and doing things you don't particularly want to do right this very minute aren't bad. Sometimes work and budgets and things you don't want to do right this very minute really are a good idea. It's not so important what you do, as long as you're being conscious

I don't believe we're here to eke out whatever small life we can manage. I prefer to think of us as wizards of our environment, whisking what we most want out of the ether the way Dumbledore presents hundreds of thirsty adolescents with jugs of pumpkin juice. We're here to make what we want to make and do what brings us joy and spend as much time as we can in the midst of things that light us up - whether that's music or writing or knitting or running through dewy grass or eating that expensive granola that you feel bad for buying. (STOP FEELING BAD FOR BUYING THE GRANOLA YOU ACTUALLY ENJOY.)

Creation beats sacrifice. Joy beats doubt. Picking up a stick on your morning walk to wave like a found magic wand while pretending to be Dumbledore and yelling, "I shall conjure up time for more writing and plane trips to visit friends and also better breakfast cereal!" beats just about everything.