Life has been a little tumultuous lately, largely of my own devising.

For example, earlier this year I quit—or at least, quit long enough to take a big-girl step back.

I started saying “no”—a lot. And started saying “yes” to things that didn’t always make sense. On the surface. To “normal” people. I’m making mistakes right and left and being both punished (depending on how you define “punished”) and rewarded (ditto) right and left. It has been, to put it mildly, a confusing time.

Frequently, in the back of my head, I hear my sister relaying a snippet from our father when she expressed the need to take a vacation: From what? he said.

Because she didn’t have a Job-job, like him. Because she wasn’t pulling down massive dollars-per-year, like him. Because the ethos in our family has always been As long as there’s more to be done, you will do it until there is no more “you” left.

Some things don’t make sense while you’re in the thick of them. And getting distance is a luxury that’s rarely supported. I’ve worked hard to surround myself with hard-working people who also appreciate the value of real leisure, the ROI on hanging with friends, the importance of enjoying every moment—or, at the very least, as many as possible.

I’m still not very good at it; I’m new at it. It feels really, really weird to be in flow with my actual life—different…harder…different than being In The Moment as an actor, although that was good training.

One note at this juncture: Dad didn’t mean to be mean when he asked that question that cut through my sister like a hot knife through butter; he was doing what he knew to be right, by rote. Holy shit, is that a tough one to remember, to fully accept. But there it is. He did the best he could with the thinking he’d done. At some point, I think he’d decided he’d done enough thinking. (There’s a whole book in that alone. Someday, I hope to be a good enough writer to write it.)

Here’s what I’ve learned: it takes more will, more strength, more doubling back and rethinking and re-plotting to effect meaningful, personal change than you can possibly imagine going in. Perhaps some people are better wired for it; perhaps there’s something to this whole reincarnation thing and some of those among us have a bit of a leg up, personal-evolution-wise. No one here is gonna know until it doesn’t matter anymore.

By definition, most of our personal growth is self-generated. But there’s no shame in asking for help. Just today, I asked it out loud, again: Why can’t I get anything done? Why am I stuck? What the $%@(^! is wrong with me?

And my friend, who is 10-odd years down the road, didn’t bat an eye. Talked about it like I was showing her a mysterious carpet stain I needed help identifying the right cleaner for, or a piece of writing that was a little ganky and needed some tweaking.

“A lot of times,” she said, “I find I resist things the hardest when it’s becoming most obvious that they’re really going to happen.”

It was as if she opened a mysterious steam valve I didn’t know existed, or tapped some chi point an acupuncturist might, or just plain old threw a light on in a slightly darkened corner of a room. All was well again—for a while—and the conundrum put back into perspective: as some Thing in my care to observe, and process, and deal with.

As I learned long, long ago in advertising, watching my friends’ hotshit careers suddenly go down in flames with sudden downturns in the economy, there is no real safety; it’s just an illusion. Just like there is no stasis: just periods where change is so incremental as to seem non-existent.

I am change and you are change and this, right now, is change.

This. Right now.

Learning to drift and steer simultaneously, that’s both the trick and the lesson…

xxx
c

Image by CowGummy via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: change, life, personal growth.

My friend, Mary Ellen, and I go way back to my advertising days; she was one of the first people I met when I moved back to Chicago from New York, and I still make fun of how relentlessly and Midwesternly cheerful she was when she poked her head into my office for the first time to invite me to lunch.

She is still way too nice to remind me of what a dark and twisted troll I was, but 20 or so years later, she’s simmered down, I’ve cheered up and we’ve met in a new middle ground. Our semi-/annual conversations have become important to both of us because we serve as touchstones for one another, showing how we’ve changed and where we might still need to. And, since Mary Ellen forsook advertising for psychotherapy instead of something idiotic like acting, it’s basically like I get a 90-minute session free, or for the price of a phone call, which, since I switched to Vonage, is almost free. Ha, ha, Mary Ellen—I win!

Anyway, after the brief-but-requisite foray into the piteous state of national affairs, we launched into the more important topic of boys boys boys. Specifically, what we were doing with ours and how it all was going. (Mary Ellen and her husband have been together 15* years, during which timeI’ve divorced one guy and slagged around with a bunch of others, so there’s always lots of touchstoning action there.)

I’m happy to report that things are tip-top back in Illinois; I’m guessing that by the way I natter on like a schoolgirl about The BF, everyone reading this knows things are hunky-dory here in sunny California. But it was not ever thus. Which got us to talking about two things: whether mileage logged**, solo or in tandem, is responsible for things going more smoothly or whether there really is a more-right-for-you type than those hilariously inappropriate jackasses you couldn’t get enough of as a girl of 30 winters.

Here we sharply diverged, with Mary Ellen taking the highly uncharacteristic “life is short, life is shit/soon it will be over” viewpoint (i.e., there is no one type of person more right for us and relationships are, at their best, “a crucible—or cauldron, depending on the day” for personal development) and me staking out the cute boy – debilitating mental illness = reasonable shot at happiness position.

However, we both agreed on one thing: time do make the difference, both in knowing what is and is not tenable and speeding up the loosening of one’s monkey-like grip on the latter. This is why I’m happy to be a craggy old crone of 44 rather than the juicy scoop of 20-something I once was. Also, I have excellent genes.

Mary Ellen even supplied the poem of the day: a lovely offering by one Portia Nelson, whom you may know better as Sister Berthe in the film version of The Sound of Music (or, for you 70’s hipsters, the Law Office Receptionist in the only version Can’t Stop the Music). I’m being glib, but I’m actually rather moved by Portia’s story, having read up on her via her lovingly crafted website and read her poem, “Autobiography in Five (Short) Chapters” on the INS (yes, the INS) website. I guess self-actualization is a hot topic of discussion among potential immigrants to the U.S.

The poem is contained in There’s A Hole In My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery, and is, apparently, quite as famous as any Von Trapp in its own right. The book (and contents) are copyrighted, so I can’t but excerpt a bit here, but it resonated deeply with me, and I must needs share a stanza here—the one I got stuck in for a good 15 years:

2.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.

But it isn’t my fault.

Yeah, right.

On the one hand, where else could you be from ages 18 - 40?

On the other hand, let’s hear it for 44.

xxx
c

*Mary Ellen says it’s actually closer to 11, but my position is if you make it past 10 years together in this fakakta world, you might as well call it 20.

**Intelligent, aware and awake mileage, that is. Just making it to age 170 is no guarantee that you will be any smarter than the average 12-year-old, and probably less smart if that 12-year-old has learned things like “don’t stick your hand in there unless you’re sure that thing is unplugged”.

Photo by novon, used under a Creative Commons License

TOPICS: aging, communicatrix, Feminism, life, personal growth, relationships, self-development.

Like most of you, the communicatrix has an agenda. Don’t know what yours are, but mine is to share certain hard-won truths. Well, really, a bunch of petty, not-so-hard-won truths—best thinking-man’s hoochie site, kick-ass theater, worst phone ever—and one Big Fat Mama Truth—the Truth, if you will.

I have some tools in my communicatrix arsenal already—relentless enthusiasm, reasonable facility with language, considerable experience shilling…er…communicating my message to others—but I’m still not really conversant. I still can’t talk to anyone and have it land.

No, really—that’s huge. That’s everything, really. Imagine the possibilities: speak to a n y o n e…and have it land. I guess it would be easy if you had a really, really good weapon in your arsenal, like a burning bush or thunderbolts or some other groovy, god-like accessory, but I don’t. I don’t even have Vocal Amplitude. (Seriously. Tiny ribcage = no vocal amplitude.)

The secret for mere mortals, I think, is listening. Simple, right? Easy? Um…no.

Really listening requires a detachment from ego I’m generally reluctant to muster. I don’t think I’m alone, here, either, based on the number of conversations I’ve had where I actually catch overtalking happening in mid-sentence. Not the end-of-sentence, I-had-that-idea-too overtalking: full-on, hands-over-ears, I CAN’T HEAR YOU LALALALALALA!!! overtalking.

And this sometimes happens with really good friends who really care about me, not just garden-variety buggers in sales calls and ad agency pitch meetings (ad agencies are notorious hotbeds of overtalking, trust me).

I won’t even get into the red vs. blue histrionics that have been flying fast & furious from both sides of late except to say that they’re largely a catalyst for me getting off my bony ass and fixing my own nasty little listening problem.

My new-favorite pundit, Evelyn Rodriguez, who’s all about the critical importance (and true power) of real communication, has written a couple of great posts recently about what happens when we stop listening and the magic that can happen when we start. She posits a really wise theory on the root of it all:

Being unheard, unappreciated and unlistened to is intimately linked with unwantedness. The isolation is overpowering. We can move away from the separation by remaining open-ended rather than closed meme-attractors ourselves.

Every relationship advice source worth its salt says that if you’re looking for something in others, first find that thing in yourself. (Hell, even Dorothy figured out that if you’re looking for happiness, check the backyard before you go running off on some poppy-induced, yellow-brick road to nowhere.)

More than anything in the world right now, I want to be heard. So I’m gonna start listening.

Anyone with me?

xxx
c

TOPICS: change, communicating, communication, communicatrix, personal growth, self-development.