My Hobbit Hole

I've become the Goldilocks of trashcans. Two weeks ago, I moved into my new home. It's a little cottage in Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. After years of being in and out of cities and in and out of storage units, finally settling down means everything must be perfect, including the garbage cans. It's strangely hard to find just the right trash receptacle - you want it to do its job and fit in its corner. But I don't want to buy something just to fill the space. I'm willing to wait for the right one. The right garbage can is important, you know.

When I first signed the lease and posted a picture on Facebook, Zach said, "I didn't know they were still selling real estate in heaven." Tracking down your own spot of heaven is a bit of a holy calling for most of us. My heaven apparently comes with skunks plotting on the deck and squirrels tap-dancing on the roof. The floor tilts a bit to the left. Spiders fall from the ceiling. Sun lights the deck in the afternoon. When I open the sliding glass doors, I can hear water rushing past rocks in the creek bed. My storage space rests under a treehouse. It's like camping, but with my own mattress and internet access. It doesn't have everything I was looking for - there's no laundry or bath tub - but I'm learning to accept gifts as they come, without being too persnickety about checking off every box I concocted while dreaming of what I want next. So far, I've learned that I own too many books and that it is possible to coexist peacefully with many-legged insects. I see animals loving my home as much as I do as a good sign, even as I lose any and all remorse over killing ants.*

* All god's creatures, my ass. Get out of my sink, ants.

I've always treated my apartments like way stations between me and whatever was next. For the first time, I want to build a home. A home with a trashcan that suits me perfectly, yellow rugs and mugs, a home with the few pieces of furniture I've collected and the books I love. I don't know what my future looks like. Any wisdom I've gained over the years falls smack into the "give up on knowing what's coming because life will surprise the hell out of you" category. I don't know if I'll be here for five months or five years. I do want to get married and have kids and, since I'm turning 36 in a few months, it would be nice if that was sooner rather than later. But I want to build my home as though I'll be here for years - choosing things carefully, creating a space for myself, the kind of space that nurtures who I am and who I want to be, and looks pretty doing it. If I do up and move again soon, it will still be time well spent. Because this is a way of taking care of myself, of reminding myself that I'm worth the effort, even if it is just me. Especially if it's just me.

Maybe this will be the last time I can create a home that's all my own. If you have a family, apparently you sometimes have to let them choose things and, I don't know, take their needs into account on occasion. So maybe this is the last time I get to enjoy being psycho perfectionist about trashcans and having everything precisely the way I want it. Maybe this is practice for building a beautiful, useful space for me and my family. Maybe this is creating the space that will nurture and support me for years to come. I just don't know. So I will build it and trust that things will work out exactly as they should.

For now, home is a hobbit hole surrounded by redwoods and tucked into the curve of a babbling creek. Maybe it will be mine for mere months, maybe for years. But now is all we ever know for sure. So I will love it and care for it until it's time to love and care for something else.

This Is For You

You are loved. The same way you love your favorite song or your favorite book or that pet you adored with such fierceness that his death sent a hot poker through your core. You are loved that way. You are loved the way you want to be loved, the way you dream of being loved. But the love held for you is purer, deeper, more transcendent. New eyes are required to understand the way you are already loved.

It is everything you want and it’s already sitting there. Waiting for you to find it. Everyone has a different path to this love. Some people get lost on that path and find themselves tangled in the thickets. Some people blast through like Jedis on a mission. Some people take it slowly, gently and pause to rest. That’s what the rocks are for. You can blast through them or climb over them or simply sit on them for awhile.

There is no wrong way to approach a rock.

There is no wrong way to deal with a block in your path. You can sit down beside it and scratch poems in the dust. You can climb over it. You build yourself a catapult and hurl your body around it. You can approach the blocks in your path any way you choose. Just know that those blocks are part of your path. They’re part of why you’re here. Those blocks are here to teach you something new about yourself, to show you some way to love deeper. Those blocks are here to help you. So rejoice when you find one, because you are about to become a purer version of yourself. You may get lost for awhile and that’s okay. You’ll find your way back. You will get where you’re going, whether it takes you ten minutes or ten days or ten years.

There is nothing you can do wrong here. Everything you want is waiting for you. Everything you want is waiting for you to choose it. This is most true when you’re lost in the thickets and the brambles are tearing your skin and you want nothing more than peace. Accepting that you’re in the brambles - for now - will give you that peace. And show you where to find the matches. Set fire to the brambles. Launch yourself into the dream you hold for yourself.

We know that it’s aggravating to hear that you have everything you need. Because you’ve been taught otherwise. Your whole life, you’ve been taught otherwise. But nobody else has the something you need. They can guide you to your own knowledge. They can help you find your way. They can show you their roadmap or their stash of dynamite for the blocks and the brambles. But you are always your own best source. You have your own answers. You just have to allow yourself to find them.

Talking To The Universe Like a Crazy Person

I really don't know how to talk about this in a way that doesn't sound insane. Or California fruity to the nth degree. Maybe it's that East Coast education, but I generally try to keep my severe Church of Hippie leanings under wraps. That said, there's this thing I do. I really don't know how to explain it, but if I'm going to write a blog post about it, I guess I have to try. When I have a question or more emotions than I know how to manage, I'll sit down at my computer. Sometimes my questions are profound, sometimes they have to do with my to-do list. Then I'll just start typing. When I read it back, it doesn't quite sound like it came from me. It's smarter and wiser and kinder, but has worse grammar and often misspells things. It feels like whatever this is has a better sense of the truth, a better understanding, more love, more wisdom, just more than I could possibly have with my limited senses and smallish, underused cerebellum. I remove myself and my brain from the process and just allow the information to flow through my fingers. Some of my favorite things have been written this way. I'm learning to tap into that and the more I practice, the easier it comes.

Sometimes when I start typing, this flow of information causes an emotional or physical reaction. There's an energy to it. My nose will tingle or tears will start running down my face. It's like all my senses get involved and something shifts energetically. It's not even so much about the words, it's more about the feeling.

When this happens, it really starts to feel like it's coming from somewhere other than me. I know how that sounds. Because, what - am I channeling spirits? Aliens? The universe? If you google this type of writing, it sounds desperately flaky at best and charlatan-infested at worst. The cited wikipedia example is a woman who translates Martian messages into French. Which, let's be real, would be amazing and I definitely want to see that.

But I'm learning to guide my life by what feels good - because we're all just making it up as we go, so why not go toward what feels good? I've tried following the things that make me feel bad and I never end up in a place I want to be. And this feels good. It feels powerful, it feels energetic, it feels useful, and it feels loving. So I ask my questions. Because sometimes that's all you can do: ask and trust that the answer that boomerangs back to you is the right one.

Recently, I started doing this writing for friends. Doing this on a bigger scale feels a little scary, a little vulnerable. But that's what I'm trying to play with right now. Opening up to who I really am and trusting that the people who need this and who think it makes some sort of sense will find it and everyone else will just click away to the next thing on this infinite internet of ours.

But still, I think I'd rather take my clothes off in public than say I type messages from the universe. SEE? THAT'S WEIRD.

Calling All Guinea Pigs

Want to help me find out if this is really a thing?

If you're game to be a guinea pig, email me with a question. (Click the "Send me a pandagram" box in the sidebar.) Or leave it in the comments. I would love to do this for you. I honestly don't know what I need or what works. So far I've done it just with people's names, but these are friends and I have some background knowledge of them. You can try sending me any burning questions you have. Or your first name and a little about your life and where you want some clarity. I'll sit down with whatever I get and see what comes. Obviously, I have zero training and am not a coach or a doctor or anyone with any respectable letters after her name. All I know is that what I've written has been useful for me and seems to be useful for the people I've done it for.

If you're willing to let me publish your question and answer here, let me know. (If you'd rather keep it private, that's okay too.)I'd love to do this once a week on the blog for awhile, just to see how it lands. Maybe I'll even give it a snappy name, although I am admittedly terrible at coming up with snappy names.

Have a question? Need some clarity? Let me know and I'll apply my weird voodoo to it and see what I come up with for you. It may or may not give you any answers, but it will probably make you feel better.

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.

Adventure Project #30: Busting Through Self-Spackled Walls

I started doing these videos and then I stopped doing them and then I started again and that's mostly the process of doing something new and intimidating. You start, you ride the high, the high drops to a plateau, the plateau feels flat because that's how plateaus work, and you wander off in search of higher ground. Or you invent drama to give yourself an excuse to wander off, which is what I did. Boy drama, specifically, because that's my favorite kind. You can excuse yourself for a lot of things when boy drama is happening. But you know what doesn't help the drama? Excusing yourself. Because that makes you less you. Because doing the things you love keeps your engagement with life at a steady burn and being engaged with life makes everything better, especially drama you invented because you wanted to give yourself some faux high ground. Or maybe you invent drama because you hit your upper limit of excitement and feel a subconscious yearning to drag yourself back down to a more understandable level.

When I find a foolproof formula for raising the excitement ceiling and squishing the drama, I'll let you know. For now, it seems to boil down to "do your shit and let yourself feel as good as you can as much of the time as possible."

So here I am, back to talking with my face about my process of doing scary things like becoming the person and the writer I want to be and, yes, that is scary. I'm also putting them here now, because that's a bit more commitment than just throwing them up on youtube and hoping nobody notices.

Sometimes I doubt the value of the writing I do here under the juggling panda and the face talking I do on youtube. Because my external notion of what's "valuable" doesn't always match up with what my insides tell me is worthwhile.

But I do believe there's value in sharing experiences. Because if you share, you and whoever's feeling reflected in that experience both get to feel less alone. Because emotions and the wrangling thereof aren't discussed nearly enough in our culture. Because if I feel it, someone else out there feels it too. Maybe that someone is you. I am not nearly the special feelings snowflake I thought I was. If I feel scared and lonely and joyful and overwhelmed and stuffed with love for things, you probably do as well. And the more we talk about who we want to be and what we love, the more connected we are. In the end, that's all any of us want: to feel love, to feel connected, to just plain feel.

 

Making Space For All The Feelings

You only have so much room in your brain and your heart and your body. When your body gets clogged with emotion like fear and anger, it seeps into your heart and your head, leaving less space for things you actually want. I spend a lot of my time clearing space. I cry at least three times a week. I do that free write thing where you sit down for ten or twenty minutes and keep your fingers typing constantly, so that whatever is choking your brain can be laid out on paper for you to delete or burn. If something is pressing on my throat or my chest, I determine what it is and what it's trying to tell me.

In my younger days, the manic pixie dust of the mantra made me scoff, but I'm learning how deeply valuable a good mantra can be for reframing situations and popping my brain out of its habitual negativity. Like when I catch myself worrying about some new relationship possibility and why he hasn't called, I've trained my brain to call up what I want instead, using a phrase that reminds me that he doesn't need to call, that's not where we are now, and all I need to do is hold a light, curious space for both of us to discover what this is. Usually, when I dissolve whatever is knotting up in my chest, he calls. Or I call and he picks right up and says he was just thinking about me.

Using whatever causes pain - often a thought your brain is convinced is the most deeply true thing in the universe but has no real truth in anyone's world but your own - as a trigger for investigation rather than a trigger to shut down can change your life.

Investigation allows you to instill new habits. New habits can shift the Pavlovian response of your brain so it tips toward positive thoughts rather than negative. In the end, your brain just isn't that smart. It's a tape recorder that only knows what has gone before. In order to expand and create and experience new things, you need to move out of your brain and into your body. Because your body registers emotion in a very physical way and that emotion is where change happens. When you dive into an emotion and feel it until it shifts and dissolves, space opens. When you track a negative thought and reprogram your brain to shift toward how you want to think about a situation rather than how you've thought about it in the past, space opens.

When you create that space, you get to decide how to fill it. Love and joy and progress need room. You can't try to paste good stuff on top of bad and hope it all works out okay. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the good stuff dissolves the bad. But keeping it good requires cleaning. Your emotional life needs just as much attention as your career and your relationships and your home. At first, this pissed me off - the last thing anyone needs is one more place to tend. But when you tend your emotions, everything else gets exponentially easier.

The more space I create, the less cynical and more creative I become. When I'm not so bogged down in fear, there's more room for wonder and awe. When I'm not constantly dodging how I feel, I have the space to notice that it truly is an amazing world, full of tilting giraffes and ballet dancers and people who strap wooden boards to their legs and go spinning off cliffs. Humans flying through the air on wings made by hands. Music that can touch the emotion you didn't know you had. Words strung together in just the right way. Actors who reflect feelings you recognize and offer them up from a different place, a place of story, so that maybe you can understand yourself in a new way.

Our favorite things - movies, music, books - often evoke our own emotion. Because they're a safe space where our feelings can be reflected back to us and maybe begin to heal.

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This post came from watching this video. My favorite part is at minute six where everyone starts dancing. My least favorite part is where the dude at 6:41 punches a stuffed giraffe. 

Anger's Pure Burn

For most of my life, whenever I was confronted with extreme emotion - especially the loud, yelling kind - I would shiver like a chihuahua and search desperately for the nearest exit. Not this time. There were some opinions this weekend about how I live my life and they were vehement. Maybe I shouldn't be proud of standing up, shouting straight in someone's face. But I am proud. I gave as good as I got and I didn't sit there and take what was thrown at me - something I did in different situations for a reasonable portion of my twenties. Taking someone else's story as fact, especially someone else's story about you, can be poisonous and that poison can eat away at your soul. I know, because I had to spend the first half of my thirties collecting pieces of myself from where I'd abandoned them, chewed up and forgotten. Obviously, someone else's opinions and stories won't bother you unless you see a nugget of truth in them. That's when other people's opinions - as infuriating as they can be - are valuable. They can shine a light on a part of you that needs attention and love.

What needs attention and love right now is me.

You can't ignore a child and expect them to flourish, you can't ignore your career and expect it to expand, you can't ignore a houseplant and expect it to be all perky and green. You can't ignore yourself - your real self, whatever that means to you - and expect to thrive.

I need to surrender my habit of allowing my worth to be determined by outside factors. I need to surrender the fear that makes that possible - the fear of not being enough, the fear of not doing enough, the fear of not doing it right. Because when I judge my value by based on what I've written, the zeros in my bank balance, how my family thinks of me, how men think of me, it detracts from me.

When I get caught in a loop like this, it's like I float out of my body. I go about my life. I look before I cross the street, I answer email, I do the dishes. But I'm not conscious of any of it. My brain is so far lost in what has happened or what might happen that I have no idea what is happening.

That's why I'm proud of myself for being angry. It took me a long time to learn how to be that present with my emotions or that willing to share them. I dropped right into what was happening and anger is was what I found. It felt pure, somehow. It was a pure emotion that burned through me and I allowed the fire to the surface, instead of letting it blacken my internal organs. Without even trying, I fought fair. I was mad, but I didn't hurl accusations or character denigrations. I just let how I was feeling in that moment fly.

Now when I think about how to let go of identifying myself through other people's stories, I start to worry. Worry about how I can change that, how I can do it right, how I can be right so I can get what I want. Doing exactly what I'm trying to move away from.

But if I drop into the present moment, things start to feel clear. It's a crisp, sunny day in San Francisco. I'm sitting in a cafe with a latte and a bagel. I can see the sun shine on dark blue and bright green and warm orange. I can take a deep breath, my fingers can type, I have legs that can run, and a brain that can think - and then accept when it's time to stop thinking. I have plenty of money for the moment and ideas on how to extend that moment into the more socially acceptable future. I have a home today, I'll have a different home on Saturday, and I have several good options for homes in the future. I have friends who love me and things to look forward to. I have so much and, when I focus on that, it's hard to remember why I was worried in the first place.


What Lies In the Beyond

In December, I was dating someone I really liked. The night we met, there was a ring around the moon. We gazed up at it, the water behind us, and it felt like that might mean something, something good. And it did. But not the way we thought it might. Instead of marking the beginning of an us, that ring marked the beginning of a me. A me who can walk away for the right reasons, something I'd never done before. I would swallow what I wanted in order to not be alone. Or give him what he wanted and push aside what was best for me because I thought that's what love meant. But the more you give yourself you, the less you can give up for another. So on New Year's Day, I walked away. As I drove home, it didn't necessarily feel good, but it felt right.

That ring around the moon did mark something special - but for me rather than for us. I want the us, but I won't take the us without it being right for the me.

Walking away is scary, because you don't know what lies beyond. So far, what I've found in the beyond has been better. But it doesn't matter, really. Because whatever I get - whether it's a me or it's an us - will be exactly what I need.

Freelance Writing: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It

One of the things I've been lucky enough to do in my life is flit around the globe like a wandering gnat, parking myself in Costa Rica or Amsterdam for long enough to learn that I probably shouldn't drive anywhere south of San Diego. When people ask how I do that, I reply, "Because my laptop is my office." Living in the digital age is sweet - and if you like to write and don't mind hustling, you can make a pretty good living from anywhere with internet access. (I love writing, I love traveling, I hate hustling. Two out of three isn't bad.)

But when Chris Guillebeau asked if I'd be interested in creating something on freelance writing for his series of unconventional guides, I said, "YES, PLEASE, ABSOLUTELY" - while feeling like a complete and utter fraud. Every single reason why I shouldn't be the one to write this guide filtered through my brain. Do I know every step of the process for living this life? Yes. Do I know how to talk to other people who have deeper insight into each piece of that process? Yes. Do I still have a brain that is ready and willing to give me a complete and seemingly accurate list of why I shouldn't be the one to do this? Yup.

Any time you push your boundaries, there will be growing pains. The key is to dig deep, understand what you bring to the table - and effing bring it. If you have the desire to be a freelance writer, you can do it. You aren't given the desire without also being given the aptitude. So if this is something you've ever wanted to try, I encourage you to start. Start today. Whether you use this guide we just spent six months creating or by pulling up the google search bar and getting lucky - just begin. Anywhere. Because if you want to do it, you can do it. Sure, you may feel like a bit of a fraud, especially at the beginning. We all feel like frauds sometimes. Even those of us who've been doing it for years. You just have to keep pushing.

If you ever have questions, feel free to email me. I may have an answer for you, I may not. But if writing is something you want to do with your life, I will share anything I've got with you. Writing can be a lonely road sometimes - and we should stick together. Because it's when you find your people that the road starts to get fun.

Since Everyone Else Is Talking About New Year's Resolutions, I'll Go Ahead and Talk About Sex

I like sex. Who doesn't? We're programmed to like sex so that the human race doesn't die out. On some level, sex is a matter of life and death and our bodies and emotions respond accordingly. To any of you who have ever felt crazy or been called crazy for something you said or did after sleeping with someone: it's hard to swim against the stream of thousands upon thousands of years of biology.

My ex and I had some pretty serious problems with sex. It just didn't work, to the point where I spent years thinking there was something wrong with me, years seeing doctors who had no idea what the problem was, and finally years in physical therapy.

Yes, Virginia, your vagina can go to therapy.

After we broke up, I spent the next five years trying to prove to every guy I liked that sex would work, assuming that, once it did, we could happily go about the business of building a life together. Because five years of conditioning led me to believe sex was the only obstacle to a good relationship and if I proved the sex is great as soon as possible, we were poised for happily-ever-after.

Wow. Yeah, you can go ahead and say it with me: WOW.

I was acting out a belief buried so deeply in my subconscious that I didn't even know it was there. Unfortunately for me, you know what doesn't work? Sleeping with people too soon. It sets the space for sex, rather than a relationship. It leaves women vulnerable because most of us attach during sex in a way men don't. It left me feeling emotionally unsafe with most of the people I was dating.

Every dating book in the world will tell you this, not that I read any of them. Now, I don't believe that's always the case. I think you can sleep with someone on a first date and go on to have an amazing relationship because you found your person. But it's the exception, not the rule.

I haven't found my exception yet. So it's time to play by the rules.

But it's also time to remember that I'm always safe. Safe in my work, safe with my friends, safe with my family, safe with myself. No man can give me safety, but I get to choose the man who wants to help me find it for myself.

Jealousy Is Just GPS You Were Born With

Sometimes the green-eyed monster I like to pretend I don't have explodes out of my chest cavity and takes hostages. Sometimes it forms a kick line, prancing behind me like unfortunately complected Rockettes in sparkling green tutus and high-kicking tap shoes that batter my head until I get the point. Note to self: The point is never that everyone else has what I want and WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT THEM AND SO TERRIBLE ABOUT ME THAT THEY GET WHAT THEY WANT AND I DON'T and boohoo for me, cue sad little pity party for one.

Nope. Never is that the point. No matter how much it feels like the point when I click to Facebook and see the professionally photographed stream of life events that I would like but that currently feel less attainable than a throne on the surface of Mars, with a crown of moon rock and AMBER: GLORIOUS QUEEN OF THE MARTIANS carved into the surface of the planet.

(I have not yet been made the Queen of the Martians. But you bet your ass I'll be updating Facebook when it happens.)

Jealousy can leach away your power, if you let it. Because jealousy means you're focused so intently on how someone else's path looks that you forget to pay attention to your own. Maybe it's easier to glance at the apparent ease of someone else's journey and make yours wrong because it feels harder than theirs looks. But your reaction is packed with useful information. Jealousy is a guidebook your intuition is thrusting into your hands. You just have to learn to read it.

(Unfortunately, you rarely remember this when the alligators of jealousy are sharpening their teeth on your femur.)

In my quest to be vulnerable - no, but really this time - I'm admitting to a few days last week when I was stewing in the jealousy. I was jealous of friends with husbands, friends with babies, friends with jobs that looked kinda fun, friends that had published books, friends that have more money now than I may ever have in my life, friends with an adorably perfect Christmas tree when mine was only half decorated because half done is plenty for today, thanks. Even the alligators wouldn't approach me because my nostrils were flaring so violently. Let's just say that my inner toddler had a lot of opinions about how very unfair the world was and how deeply deficient I must be to not have exactly what I want exactly now.

But after burning through my jealous and self-pity via two bouts of sobbing on the carpet (yes this embarrassing and yes it helps), seven rant-ridden emails, three pep talks of the it's-okay-to-have-these-feelings-even-though-it-doesn't-feel-okay genre, and one run in the freezing wind, I couldn't even remember what made me jealous in the first place. Because cycling through all that emotion gave me enough space to realize that I wasn't happy - not because other people have things I think I want - but because I wasn't living the way I really wanted to be living.

The object of jealousy can often be the cure. If I hadn't spent several days getting so upset about what it looked like other people had and I didn't, I wouldn't have realized how badly I needed to shift my own life - and that would have deprived me of all the relief when I did.

Jealousy is just a nudge that tells you when something in your life is out of alignment. When you click that piece into place, jealousy disintegrates. And the green eyed monster disappears behind the couch for a little interspecies canoodling with the alligator.

Starting Again

I've perfected the art of being partially vulnerable. Giving away just enough so that I look vulnerable, but not so much that I actually feel vulnerable. How delightfully manipulative. Way to be crafty, protection mechanisms.

Life is a process of continually cracking yourself open. When my dad died last year, all the roiling dread and pain distilled down into a nail that tapped into my skull and split my brittle self right down the middle. All my defenses shattered and my insides felt splayed out for the world. And the world stepped up. I never felt so loved as I did in that time when I was wrenched open.

The cracks are indeed what lets the light in. Way to be pertinent, cliche.

Since then, I haven't been able to rebuild myself into what I was before. I've tried patchwork, I've tried denial, I've tried being mean to myself as a motivational exercise. But the cracks of my father's death reached into my foundation, weakening it until my carefully stacked ego began to wobble. In its wobbling, my ego finally revealed its scaly underbelly.

My self-esteem is deeply invested in this facade I've crafted for myself, the one of an adventurous woman who writes for a living and travels and has complete freedom. I've honed it and perfected it and crucially self-identified with it. I'm only now realizing my desperate need to control how the world perceives me - and that I've clung to that facade at the expense of the life I actually want to live.

It's not entirely false. It was true. For awhile. But then it became not so true and I continued to grasp at it. Rather desperately, truth be told. Until I realized that it wasn't what I actually wanted.

Yes, I do want a lot of freedom. I do want to travel. I do want to write for a living.

But my ego's attachment to Being That Person was keeping me from actually being that person. Because I was putting so much of my self-worth into being that person that I was boxing myself into a space where I felt deeply uncomfortable. I was trying to do a lot of things that didn't feel right for me because it felt like I had to. I was focusing more on client work than creation, more on trying to wrench business sense into myself than on nurturing what I feel my real contribution is. The need to bolster the facade kept me from doing what I really want to do.

I want to write books. I want to write screenplays. I want to write blog posts that feel true and urgent and don't need any purpose beyond that.

But if I want to do it that way, I need to separate my money from my writing - at least for now. I need to go deeply into creation mode so that I can write the book about my experience with my father's death and the Pixar-esque screenplay that I've been seeing behind my eyes for years.

But this is a very specific choice. It means buying the time to write. The price may be working retail again. It may mean learning how to operate one of those truly intimidating silver espresso monsters and appearing at a job at 6 a.m. It may mean letting the credit card debt I don't want anyone to know I have continue to sit there. It means letting go of this carefully constructed view of myself so that I can grow into the writer I really want to be. The self I really want to be.

The thought of getting a non-writing job always terrified me. I always thought that meant I had failed. And if I failed at writing, I failed at life. No one wants to fail at life.

But the truth is, you can't fail at life. No matter what choice you make. And I am lucky that I can make this choice. I have no responsibilities to a partner, to a child, to a pet. I don't even have a flowering hibiscus to resent my decision to live differently so that I can create what I want to create.

I will do anything to buy myself this creative time. I will sweep floors, I will learn how to use a cash register (the last time I worked retail we used the abacus of the credit card reader - contraptions that used carbon paper and thunked back and forth). I will do anything that doesn't drain me emotionally or creatively and leaves me enough time in the week to write toward serious forward progress.

It means no travel, for now. It means no real healing of my sad finances, for now. Or maybe it doesn't mean that. I don't need to make this mean anything but that I'm willing to do whatever it takes to finish two projects that have been my last priority now that I'm realizing they should be my first.

There are so many people who can write novels and work a full time job or who can take on multiple clients and still find the time and energy to do their own projects. I have so much respect for those people. I thought for years that I had to be one of them. But I'm simply not. At least not right now. Accepting this and choosing to live smaller so that I can give my work the room and the support it needs feels right.

Building invisible walls between yourself and the world of other people's opinions doesn't protect you. Because what you feel like you're protecting yourself from doesn't actually exist. Are any of my friends not going to be my friends if I'm folding sweaters at the Gap or making coffee for internet millionaires born the year I started middle school? Of course not. Is anyone who reads this going to think less of me for making this choice? Doubtful.

All my carefully-constructed plexiglass shields did were barricade me from truly connecting. Because no one else can know me when I don't truly know myself. Telling you that I am not always who I wanted the world to think I was feels honest. And there is peace to be found in truth.

When you recognize the truth about where you are, people can meet you there. And you can start again.

Be a Space Mouse

My brother is mighty fond of rodents. He always had a pet rat or two when we were growing up. They're still his preferred pets, fed bananas and cocktail shrimp and let out of their cage so they can climb him like a jungle gym. He's convinced his rats laugh when he tickles them. You can't hear the rat laughter because it's supersonic (or something), but he assures me it's happening. Arbiter of all things rodent, he recently told me about mice that were taken up into space. Confronted with zero gravity, most of the mice clung to the bars of their cage in terror, lest they be sucked into the black hole of the unknown. But one mouse let go. I can't imagine what the mouse felt at that moment of release, but he found himself floating in the air, twisting and turning gently in the warm gravity-less currents. Peaceful. Supported. At ease.

If that isn't a great goddamn metaphor for letting go, I don't know what is.

When I find myself resisting life or being cranky about something I can't control (or not doing what I could be doing about things I can control), I see those terrified mice in my head, gripping their cage and sending up prayers to their tiny mouse god to give them the strength to hold on. Then I see the mouse who let go, calmly floating. Maybe turning somersaults or doing a backstroke. Because he learned that he didn't need to cling, he needed to relax.

That's when I remind myself to be the float-y mouse.

Part of our job as humans is to take our fear and transform it. It's easy to try to transfer instead of transform, to try to convince our mice compatriots to cling to the cage with us so that we don't feel so alone. It takes a lot of courage to be the mouse who lets go. Or maybe it wasn't courage. Maybe his tiny paws slipped and after a moment of pure fear, he realized that he was floating, that the worst thing that could happen was actually the best.

Pulling the Trigger

Here's the thing about triggers: We all have them. And when one gets pulled, things explode. You know how it goes. We all have that gun that's pointed toward overspending the budget or being stood up or anything that might make us feel unwanted, unloved, or otherwise vulnerable. One trigger gets pulled by your friend on Tuesday. You're fine. The same trigger gets pulled by a coworker on Wednesday. You hold strong. The same trigger gets pulled again by a bank teller on Thursday. Smugly calm. Very same trigger gets pulled by the person you're dating on Saturday and your head explodes all over the living room wall. Whoops.

I've been working on dismantling my triggers - around money, around relationships, around my distaste for authority. (See: parking tickets and court summons and other things that go bump in the night and then blame you for the broken glass and slap you with a fine.) The second I think I've done my job and that thing no longer bothers me and I feel all smug in my personal growth, the trigger gets pulled again and I lose it to the tune of tears and ranting.

Really, I just need to give in to the inevitable tears and ranting the first time a trigger gets pulled and save everyone some time. The universe seems to like tears a lot more than it likes smug. Or maybe it just feels sorry for tears and wants to take smug down a peg or two. Hard to say.

Either way, I've been trying to let myself feel whatever I want to feel as soon as it comes up. Because if the trigger gets pulled by the wrong person, I can make a real mess.

The Microcosm of Happily-Ever-After

After so many years of dating and all the weird and complicated that entails, all the sunk hearts and baffling situations, I'm learning not to look for the happily-ever-after. Instead, I'm starting to collect small, perfect moments. Imitating Benny and Joon in a diner after midnight. Touching someone's hand for the first time. Digging past the layer everyone sees to meet the tender person beneath. That indefinable swell of feeling in your chest because someone is exactly who they are. Saying the perfect thing at the perfect time so laughter makes tears. Eating a chocolate sundae in bed because he went out in the rain on his skateboard to fetch you something to make you feel better. Arms around waists, not forever but for now.

There's never any guarantee beyond the time and space you're in. So I'm taking my happily-ever-after moment by moment.

Because Even When Adults Get Christmas Lists They're Usually Painfully Unimaginative

1. Pet giraffe, with a selection of tasteful bow ties. 2. Fireplace

3. The ability to say precisely the right thing to 1) friends who have just had a baby 2) friends who are having a hard time 3) people who annoy me.

3 a. A three story tall fire-breathing dragon to toast people who annoy me. Bonus: Picking up my car in its talons to fly me through traffic jams.

4. Baby hedgehog

5. Cashmere knit hat

6. Mini pig

7. Tiny red sneakers for the mini pig

8. Jars for my brain. One for next to my computer - the lid will muffle judgment while I'm working. And one for next to my bed - so I can sleep free of its relentless anxiety production. Perhaps such jars are available on Etsy.

9. Tiny house on the Venice Canal. (What? This has got to be at least as possible as the pet giraffe.)

9 a. Backyard treehouse, accessible only by rope ladder and rhyming couplet password. Equipped with hot chocolate and firecrackers.

10. Baller editor for everything I ever write.

11. Vitamix

12. The ability to choose a thing and make it happen, rather than spinning endlessly on the world's possibilities.

13. A bacon breakfast sandwich.

---

Yes, I know it's not even Thanksgiving yet. FINE, CHRISTMAS. YOU WIN.

On Self-Sabotage and the Importance of Carrots

Instant gratification is the god of my idolatry. Because I am a human person and we human people enjoy getting things right now. The problem with wanting everything now is that life rarely works that way. So when you insist upon right now sometimes you don't get anything at all. Whoops.

Since worthwhile accomplishments often take time, sometimes a great deal of time, time in which you're not sure if your work is paying off, time spent in plateaus where you wonder if the thing you're doing is really the thing you should be doing, the best thing you could be doing until you're tempted to wander off and find something better and now years have passed and nothing is complete.

Often I get so focused on the what that I forget about the why. Sure, the things we do are important or intriguing - we wouldn't be doing them otherwise - but the things themselves aren't that important. What's important is how you feel while you do them. Because if you hate the habit of something, you either won't achieve the end goal or you'll hate your life as you do. For me, my projects are now officially less important than my emotional landscape as I'm doing them. Because I'm beginning to realize that a lot of what I do gets hung up on my feelings. Not because I have them, but because I don't value them. I want to get rid of them, I want to stuff them into a tidy cubby-hole where they won't distract me from my oh-so-important adult work. But I'm beginning to realize that my emotions are actually the key to being an adult, the key to doing the things I want to do in life.

In a rather obnoxious twist, I think that ignoring the goal and focusing on the feelings around it will help me actually reach that goal. I mean, it's just a theory, but productivity books don't seem to help me and maybe it's because I was focusing at the wrong problem.

When I ignore or berate my feelings, I ignore and berate myself. I am not my feelings, but my feelings are there for a reason. They want to be heard. I get that. I want to be heard too. We all want to be heard, we all want to be loved, and I think our feelings are a good indicator of how well you're loving or hearing yourself. You don't convince a donkey to haul you and your heavy cart over mountain ranges by whipping it with a tree branch. You dangle a carrot from that tree branch and hold it in front of the donkey's nose. And you damn well better be forthcoming with that carrot at the end of the day.

My emotions get a lot of whippings and not a lot of carrots. No wonder they're not terribly inclined to help me out.

When I stifle feelings because I don't have time for them or I'm on a deadline or I just don't want to deal, it has a real impact on me. An impact I'm only now beginning to appreciate. Life starts to get foggy. I lose my momentum, I lose drive, I lose focus, and I'm not sure why I'm doing any of the things I'm doing. Sometimes I stop all together and crawl into bed. And that's when shit gets bad. Humans are built to do. We get cranky if we go too long without making something, even if it's just making the bed. When it gets to that point, you push even one of my buttons and I go nuclear. Like a toddler denied her afternoon nap and cheese crackers.

But the beauty of the meltdown is that after I've sobbed on the carpet for three hours and taken the rest of the day off, the following day is the best day. I've released everything that's been stuck in my system and I feel light, clear, happy, motivated. I'm ready to do my workouts, eat my vegetables, attack my spreadsheets, and eat the frogs.

Where I've fallen down on the adventure project is in getting so focused on the what that I forget the why. The why was to notice my feelings around these things, rather than the results. Because I am deeply susceptible to measurable results (like my bank account) and deeply disturbed by feelings, I began ignoring the very thing I meant to track - and that's when it all started going off the rails.

But the beauty of free will is that you can always make a new choice. Look at where you are and, if it's not where you want to be, re-direct your carrot. And figure out how to track and release the emotional pressure before it blows sky-high. Or if it blows, despite your best efforts, remember that today's tears make tomorrow the best day.

Yep, still doing these. In case you have any desire to watch my face talk about stuff. 

Why I Run

Running isn't fun. But running makes my life better. It burns off anxiety and exhausts the brain hamsters so the self-criticism hammering my skull is replaced by soft snores. I sleep through the night and vegetables suddenly sound like a good idea. My brain is calmer, my day goes better. But knowing all this still isn't enough to blast through my inertia. I need goals, I need training plans, I need the threat of a looming race in order to lace on my running shoes in the morning. I won't roll out of bed on a Sunday morning to run nine miles because "it will make me feel good" but I will roll out of bed because trying to run a marathon without training might kill me.

A few months ago, I ran my first half marathon. My mom and brother met me at the finish line and, in a terrifying example of role reversal, my brother waved a mug of coffee from a lawn chair on a grassy knoll while my mom ran to meet me at the finish line. To be clear, my brother is a strapping 32-year-old former firefighter who runs marathons of his own and my mother is a 67-year-old woman with a habit of landing in the hospital after jogging to answer the phone. They did not divvy up the running/coffee drinking duties appropriately.

Mom's ill-advised hustle to meet me at the finish line happened because I ran a faster race than I anticipated. Because I am militant about adhering to training schedules. If I was this militant in every area of my life, I would be kicking unbelievable amounts of ass.

When things don't go well in other areas of my life, I am highly prone to giving up. But when my runs don't go well, I keep trudging. During my long run this weekend, my headphones kept popping out of my ears, my water bottle was misbehaving, my clothes kept shifting, and I had to stop and walk every mile and a half. But I finished. And I know that as long as I keep finishing, no matter how poorly the run in question has gone, I will be able to run a marathon in March.

My goal is do everything the way I do running. To not give up just because it gets hard. To not give up just because I have feelings about something. To realize that even if I'm not enjoying something in the moment, my life will be better because I finish. No more switching goals every two weeks, no more abruptly changing course. No more deciding it's not worth it and boarding a bus instead. Or sitting on the sidewalk for two hours poking at piles of dirt with a stick until I forget why I was outside in the first place.

One foot in front of the other on the path you set for yourself will take you where you want to go. Always.

Life on a Silver Platter

I wish I could hand you the secret to life on a platter so you could go forth and be a perfect human. A perfect, enlightened human who never suffers through worry or doubt or fear or pain because the allure of enlightenment is the end of suffering.

But we're all supposed to get lost in the maze, I think. You get lost in the maze so that you can find your way out.

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So that maybe the next time you get lost, it won't be so hard or so terrifying. Maybe you'll find your way out quicker. Maybe you'll be able to guide someone else through its twists and turns. Maybe you'll relearn that lesson that you've already had to learn 307 times because life lessons rarely stick.

Maybe that maze is life and maybe expecting life to be a wide, well-lit lane through a carefully-tended garden is to do life - and yourself - a disservice. Maybe there are no answers. So all you can do is find this answer in this moment and enjoy it for what it is. Maybe we should stop trying to peer our way through to next year or the next decade or death. Maybe it's just right now, because right now is all you ever get.

Right now is where all the good stuff is. Where the sky is blue and someone loves you and you have a cup of hot coffee next to your elbow.

How I Spend an Inordinate Amount of Time

Nothing makes me happier than sticking my earphones in my head and my ipod in my pocket and dancing around the house like a muppet on a pogo stick. After wondering what exactly my solo dance parties might look like to errant boyfriends or roommates who wander in on me, I harnessed the miracle of technology to find out. Because that's what technology is for. So here's a wildly amateur capture of a thing that makes me the happiest.

Welcome.