Where Money and Emotion Tango

So many of our human issues are tied up in money. Both on a global scale and on a deeply personal one. Money in and of itself is a neutral force. But money easily absorbs whatever emotions we want to plaster on top of it. Money represents so much to us - love, power, success, freedom. Any one of us can have any one of these things without money, but we throw money up as a barrier to what we want. I know I sure do.

My tendency to under earn throughout my adult life has affected my self-esteem and my belief in my talent and my success. At times, to an unreasonable degree. Lots of people slam face first into this particular brick wall - especially artists.

When tying my self-worth up in my belief that lack of money equals lack of talent, I also had to admit that I never really invested in myself or in the kind of writing I truly want to do. Sure, you don't necessarily need money to do this, but you do need energy. To be fair, much of my work over the past five years was to get me to the point where I felt like I could invest in myself this way. I've been blogging for almost ten years. I wrote stories I cared about. I used words to preserve pieces of myself and my history. I did my best to adjust my lifestyle so that my energy was solid and my sensitivities managed. When I hit rock bottom, I did what I could to lurch upward. When I hit rock bottom again, I flailed and then I found help in the upward lurch. Some writers need writing to find themselves, some writers need to find themselves before they can truly write. I needed both. Not that we are ever found, of course, that's kind of a dumb phrase. We're always here, but maybe we're buried. Or we've slipped away from ourselves, our intuition, our deep knowing of who we are and what we're here to do.

I spent a lot of my thirties hunting for myself, digging through the layers until I found my center. Then I lost my center, found it,  lost it, then I found it again. So it goes with center-finding. Balance is never rock solid, it's always at the mercy of the wind. Until you realize that the wind can't blow you any farther than you choose to go.

But one of the things I still struggle with is money. Lucky for me, now I can struggle with money while actually having some. When my dad died, he left $40,000 buried in the woods (true story) and a piece of property that we decided to sell. Buried treasure doesn't last long when you have hospital bills and mortuaries to pay, but the property sale helped me get to the place where I always believed I should be at this age. Namely, solvent.

Some of me felt guilty that it took a parent dying to get me there. Sometimes it felt like blood money, but most of me didn't feel that bad about that. I was perfectly willing to look at it as a paycheck for dealing with the pain, anguish, stress, grief, and crazy details of death more or less gracefully. (Mostly less.) What I felt guilty about was that the money made so much of a difference to me. Shouldn't I have gotten there on my own? Shouldn't I have figured out money by my mid-30s? Shouldn't I have been more frugal? A parent's death shouldn't be a get-out-of-debt-free card. Maybe yes, maybe no. But spiritual counter-arguments of the "we all have our own paths and timelines" persuasion fall on deaf ears when you're eager to feel terrible about yourself.

Money guilt, even though I'm not in the same dire $257-away-from-being-flat-broke straits as I once was, still rears its goblin head to stick out its tongue at me. Especially when I choose not to earn it.

A few months ago, I did a scary thing. When my last two big freelance contracts ended at almost precisely the same time, rather than engage in my usual six stages of coping - panic, worry, panic again, get over it, write things that excite me for awhile, hunt for a new client, find a new client - I opted to skip the panic part.

Instead, I decided to buy myself two months to write what I wanted to write, to work on projects that fed me rather than drained me, to both invest deeply in work I want to do and take the adult's version of summer vacation. Three days after I made the decision, I finished my book of animal stories. Vindication! My choice was the right one! Tainted by only the smallest amount of guilt. Yes, part of the deal of buying myself two months of writing was that I wasn't allowed to feel bad about it, but the gremlins devour good intentions like candy corn. Then a few weeks later, my channeled blog was born. Now I'm creating some stuff for writers who want to learn how to use their intuition to make the whole process of writing easier and more fun and hopefully more likely to wow the world with their mad genius. (Do you know any writers who'd be into this? Send 'em my way! Are you a writer who'd be into this?) It's fun and I love it and now I get to love rather than dread sitting down to work.

But now I'm at the end of my two months. I deeply want to keep investing in my own work and I do have the means to do it, but the Real Adults Make Money (Preferably Lots of Money) belief is tough to elude. So are the gremlins of "this is self-indulgent" and "who are you to think you can make money doing what you actually want to do?" and the "lucky you, you certainly couldn't do this if you had a family to take care of!" All I can do is confront them head on and decide what's truly important to me. While doing my best to untangle my own issues around money and trust in myself and my abilities.

My issues with money are mostly just my issues with myself - where I don't trust myself, where I don't trust my work, where I don't trust the world. But trust is a muscle. All you can do is lean on it and hope it grows stronger.

Better Than Here

Death cracks you open. Watching someone you love take that final journey leaves you flattened and groundless. We don’t know what’s next for them. We can’t follow. We can’t understand how it feels to face the end of your life or the mental, emotional, and physical territory that comes with it. I don’t believe that those who die are lost. I don't believe that we're purely biological lights that flicker out when bodies give up. I believe we have an essence. A soul, if you will, that soldiers on after our body gives up. But it's a very human thing to want proof and science still doesn't know quite what to make of death. So each of us has to choose what we believe - and then, more importantly, choose what to do with that belief.

Sitting in the car with my father and talking about god is one of my earliest memories. I told him I didn't believe in any religion that taught us to fear god, because I didn't think god worked that way. His reply didn't survive my precarious and sieve-like memory bank, but I remember feeling like he was proud of me.

He's also proud of me for this - deep, life-long commitment to Calvin and Hobbes, his favorite comic. 

The idea of god as a judgmental white-bearded dude in the sky never seemed quite right. One night when I was young, seven or eight maybe, I decided that god was made of people - the best parts of people, what we are at our purest and most loving. I saw each person as a bright pinprick of light, like a star. I remember deciding that we’re our own individual sparks here in this body, in this life. But when we die, our light gathers and joins that of everyone else in a much larger light, bright and vast. God as a separate entity doesn’t exist, because we are all god.

I’m not sure where this came from - maybe I absorbed this idea from the metaphysical books that lined the shelves of our living room when I was growing up, maybe it was a burst of intuition that came through before my brain and ego began to shut me down, maybe I invented it because it seemed like a nice idea. But I remember feeling comforted by the idea of a great light to return to as I lived my relatively average but not exempt from pain life.

But when your father is dying, all you can do is feed him ice cream when he asks for it and play John Coltrane you’re not sure he can hear and then send him off into the deep unknown and trust that whatever comes next is better than where he was.

Dreams Deferred

When someone dies, they leave behind a lot of stuff. Emotional stuff, yes, but also a shed full of thirty-year-old gardening magazines. To the best of my knowledge, the only time my father ever tried to grow anything was when he bought and planted a rosebush. His definition of gardening was building an electric fence around his flowers to keep the deer from chewing on them. An electric fence seems like overkill, but given that he peered out his front window one night and found a mountain lion on his porch gnawing on a deer haunch, maybe it was warranted.

At least the lion avoided the roses.

Dad lived up in the Santa Cruz mountains, miles down a dirt road, on ten acres of land that includes redwoods and a stream. Not bad, if you like that kind of thing. I remember lying in a hammock strung between two redwoods and reading Calvin & Hobbes in the sun. I would go stone hopping along the creek, followed by one of Dad's more adventurous cats.

Going through his stuff after he died, I began to fully understand some of our shared character traits. Dad had tons of educational materials he bought and never opened. So do I. He thought about writing a novel for years - we talked about it and he had copious and carefully organized plot notes. As far as I can tell, he died before he wrote the first chapter.

It's a form of resistance. You take the first step and then you drag your feet on taking the second step - sometimes for years. But what I've learned since is that you can always make a new choice. Just because Dad didn't ever start his novel doesn't mean I won't ever finish mine. Just because he never cracked open his audio courses on world religions doesn't mean I have to go to my grave having never finished reading my copy of Die Empty. It's easy to get lost in the comforting warmth of familial bonds, but his choices do not have to be mine. His struggles don't have to dictate my eagerness to build and create and learn.

Dad loved fantasy and science fiction. Sick to death of endless recitations of Goodnight Moon, he read me The Hobbit when I was three years old. I'd sit on the couch next to him with my sippy cup and security blanket and absorb tales of trolls and wizards and rings of power. He had vast bookshelves of the stuff and spent years upon years developing ideas for his own series without ever putting a word to paper.

He left behind a lot of stuff. My question is, what did he take with him?

Stephenie Meyer says her Twilight series came to her in a dream, and she transcribed her world of glittering vampires and adolescent fantasy onto paper and sold millions upon millions of copies. I like to think that will happen to Dad in his next life. That he'll wake up one morning and the plot line he spent years upon years developing in this life will burst into his brain fully formed, and all he'll have to do is copy it down. So maybe the work of this life won't be lost.

If you want to extrapolate wild theories based on a belief in reincarnation and soul memory, this could explain people like Mozart. You spend years, decades, lifetimes learning the rules, practicing the notes, playing the scales. Maybe you spend three deeply aggravating lifetimes being on of those people who tries and tries and never quite make it - and then you get born Adele and win Grammies and Oscars in your early 20s, after making the whole world shake with your music. I don't know. But I like to think that's possible and that my dad will get to see his work in print, even if the author plate holds a different name and picture.

Isn't that a nice thought? That even if you die without fulfilling a dream, all your work of this life could pay off in the next. Maybe nothing is wasted. So if you love something, do it. If you're bad at it, who cares? Even if you haven't the slightest hint of talent, practice as hard as you can. Maybe it will pay off two hundred years from now when you look completely different and have a license for a flying car. Maybe I should keep singing in the shower. Just because I sound like a choking alley cat doesn't mean that a few rounds from now I won't be Taylor Swift.

I like to think that maybe my dad will be born into another body in ten, twenty, fifty years and he'll want to be a writer, and that plot and world that he spent decades of this life developing and dreaming and researching will come to him, fully formed, like it was coming from another time or place. Maybe he won't understand it but he'll trust it and run with it. And the book he wanted to write in this life will be written in his next.

Fork in the Road

My dad’s sister got a reading from a psychic in San Francisco a few months after he died. Because that’s what we do in my family.

Dad showed up, as a spirit or a ghost or whatever you get to be after you're dead, and the psychic said he was wearing jogging shorts. As far as I know, my father never owned a pair of jogging shorts in his life. He was fond of joking that running was the worst way to be healthy. “Sure you live longer,” he’d say, “but you have to spend all that extra time jogging.” Now that I spend a lot of time circling trails, I wonder how much longer he would have lived, and how much more peaceful he would have felt, if he had been a runner.

As she told me this, writing off dad's curious post-death jogging shorts as psychic dissonance, I remembered a thought I had months before he passed away. Dad lived in Swall Meadows, right next to Inyo National Park. After spending the day in the care center with him, I would run in the shadows of the sunset-tipped mountains. This thought came to me in the middle of one of my afternoon runs, feeling weirdly like a vision - an idea I’m really not comfortable with, minus Peyote and a Native American chieftain or two. So I wrote it off as the product of mild heat stroke and my new and strange obsession with running. At the time, Dad had already started to talk about dying, but we wouldn’t accept it for months yet. But as I was running through the desert, I saw two paths for my father.

One, the widest and bleakest, the path he eventually chose, was of him spiralling down into the worst the human experience can offer - a broken body and a mind that can’t heal because both are so separated from their own processes and emotions that they can’t find their way back.

The second path, much fainter, showed my father running. Conquering what ailed him until he was healthy enough to become one of those sun-leathered old dudes pounding the pavement in running shoes with wet bandanas tied around their grizzled heads.

Knowing now how badly off he was by the time he fell, I don’t know if that was possible. Maybe what I was seeing was a path that had forked off many years previous and was no longer an option. Maybe it was a path he could have chosen. I don’t know. But I saw him running. I saw him healthy. I saw him beating back the demons with sweat and salt and endless miles of asphalt.

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I'm writing a book about my father's death. I'll be sharing pieces of the Dead Dad Book as I work on it, because writing here and on Twitter led me to this book in the first place.

Shifting Years

Last year, I traveled thousands of miles to realize that it doesn't really matter where you are - your capacity for happiness doesn't change, whether you're on a beach in Central America or in the house where you grew up. I watched the wind of my first hurricane whip past the second floor of my friend's house on Staten Island, bending towering trees in half, like they were genuflecting to the eye of the storm. I had my first panic attack in the parking lot of a hospital. I handed out thousands of dollars in cash. I went soaring over the jungles of Costa Rica. I got kissed on a bridge in Amsterdam. I watched both my parents become incapacitated and unable to communicate. One recovered, one didn't. I learned that seven almonds buy you a lot of attention from a squirrel. I lay by the side of the highway next to the Intensive Care Unit, tears running from the corners of my eyes and into the grass.

Driving away.

"Driving away."

Driving away from the hospital after saying goodbye.

Last year, I watched New York marathon runners jogging from the Staten Island ferry to Rockaway beach with supplies on their backs. I learned that when the power is out for a week, it's not the electricity you miss, it's the heat. I roamed the streets of Manhattan the way I did in college, music pouring through my headphones to create a soundtrack to a city that seemed to expand and contract around me, as my own feelings ebbed and flowed. It was hard to be so far away from my family during that month as my dad was failing and my mom had a concussion from hitting her head on the kitchen floor, but it patched over the gaping hole I felt had been kicked in my chest. Taking that time allowed me be who I needed to be during the last week we spent with my dad. There's still some guilt there, but I'm learning to trust in my own instincts, to know that I can balance my own needs with those of my loved ones.

At the same moment.

"At the same moment."

On the Staten Island ferry.

Last year, the furrow between my brows - the one that appears when I'm confused or in pain - became permanent. The ridges smooth out when I relax, but they're always visible now, something that would have horrified my younger self and occasionally still does. That furrow is the physical legacy of my 35th year and my father's death.

Other things are less visible.

Last year, I learned to sit on my hands when what I really want to do is yell and scream and react. I learned to be kinder to people who lash out, because it stems from their own pain and they're only really hurting themselves. You're allowed to feel your feelings, but when you use them as a whiplash to sting others in a desperate bid to make yourself feel better 1) it doesn't work and 2) now everyone's mad at you. I learned that being kind to yourself means making healthy choices and other people don't have to like those choices. I learned that the journey toward death - even when it's painful and hard and you begin to think that no hell devised by even the fiercest of religions could be as bad as this - can be full of grace. Even joy. Certainly love.

If I could grow wings, I would.

"If I could grow wings, I would."

The world is a beautiful place, and I saw more of it. Autumn leaves on Staten Island, canals in Holland, fireflies in Central America. I met and reconnected with amazing people. It was a year of adventure and stuck-ness and great change. It was a year where I further cemented my faith in myself and in the world around me. It was a year where the roots in my heart grew and extended down through my legs and my feet and into the center of the world. I feel like you can't face death with a loved one without your roots both growing deeper and also disconnecting you from what you previously knew. But where you feel untethered, there are always people to catch you, to be the rubber bumper as your heavy ball hurtles toward the pins. People - friends, hospital workers, folks on Twitter - helped guide my family and me as we picked and spun our way down the lane from my father's accident to his death.

The second half of 2012 was tough for me. But there was a lot of grace and magic in it too. I'm learning not to be frightened by the tough stuff. Because it opens the door to so many good things. Love. Relief. Growth. Change. Pattern busting. Sinking fully into each good moment - the ones with bikes and color and grace - because they're worth so much more when what surrounds them is hard. Parties glow with brighter light, tea with friends takes on new weight, and the words that flow through your headphones and into your brain assume fresh meaning. But I got what I needed from 2012. I think the best you can hope for from a year is to love yourself and the world better than you did when it started.

Sidewalk in front of my old apartment in San Francisco.

"Sidewalk in front of my old apartment in San Francisco."

I couldn't have possibly imagined what 2012 held for me back in January. So I'm letting go of the need to know what this coming year will hold. I want to find an easier forward motion because I tend to go full-throttle and then slam the brakes on myself, which makes for a rather lurching existence. I want more stability and creation and giving. I want to be a better person, a better friend, a better daughter and sister.

Beyond that, who knows? Some things will be good, some bad, some painful, some joyful. But whatever it holds, there will be love and there will be grace and there will be discovery. Before my father died, my brother grabbed his shoulder and said, “I’m excited for you, dad. You’re about to go on an adventure.”

I think that's what 2013 holds for all of us. So I'm excited. We're about to go on an adventure.