Poetry Thursday: Glass houses

I wonder about the people
who used to bother me
when I was younger
and where they all went
since I got old.

The rotating hotties
in public displays of affection
who turned my stomach.

The cheaters at Monopoly
who roused my righteous indignation.

That solipsist who
took TWO parking spots
to protect his goddamn Porsche.

What happened to them, anyway,
those stupid, stupid girls
who set us back 50 years
as they prowled the mall on Saturday
in full drag makeup
dressed like Prostitute Barbie?
When were they replaced
by these sad young ladies
who try so hard it breaks my heart?

Where did they go,
the noxious sycophants
and outrageous blowhards
and double-dippers
and holy rollers?

Who sent all these enraging idjits packing
and let in all these glorious clowns?

I should write them a thank-you note
and I will
just as soon as I've finished
cursing out
this delusional wreck
of an unsolicited advice-giver
and this able-bodied old man
who is clearly only handicapped
by his sense of entitlement.

Just as soon
as I'm done...

xxx
c

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

No more!

I've been giving little talks for long enough that a part of me insists I should have some kind of system down.

One that not only has me starting earlier and working more methodically, but that provides some sort of framework and steps for proceeding; some kind of handy-dandy, E-Z-1-2-3!â„¢ process for getting talks out of my head and onto paper before they come back out of my  head.

Alas, there is no system yet. While I marvel at my friend Cliff Atkinson's excellent "Hollywood screenplay" framework for content creation (which I'm currently re-reading about in his wonderful book, Beyond Bullet Points, for inspiration), using bits and pieces of it as well as Nancy Duarte's and Garr Reynolds' brainstorming techniques from slide:ology and Presentation Zen, respectively, something obstinate in me refuses to budge from my old, familiar pace 'n' blather method. Sorry about that, neighbors; sorrier than you know.

However, one massively helpful thing I have begun doing is admitting that this spazzy and backwards way of working is, for better or worse, currently my default way. Out loud. Or rather, out loud on my calendar. At some point last year, in a fit of pique, no doubt, I added an all-day event to my gCal "work pods" calendar titled "NO MORE!" In caps, so I couldn't miss it. In burnt orange, just in case.

Now, when I have something big coming up, like my very first TEDx talk, up in Tacoma, this Saturday, I stick a bunch of burnt-orange "NO MORE!" jellybeans on the days leading up to it. Instantly, those days are shut off, devoted solely to whatever is already on there or whatever big thing I have coming up. I have even learned to stick the burnt-orange "NO MORE!" jellybeans on the other side of the big event, for recovery time.

Because sometimes, the best way to keep going is knowing when to stop...

xxx
c

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

Hey! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Poetry Thursday: Magic

I used to wish
I could blink my way
to happiness
like Samantha on Bewitched

making things appear
or disappear
at will,
myself included.

Okay, I still do.

Standing in line
after ever-lovin' line
at LAX,
I transport myself
in my thoughts
to my destination

instantaneously
without baggage
or more than the moment
it takes to twitch my nose.

If I am lucky
something shows up
to remind me
of how much magic
there is in airports
themselves:
the terrazzo underfoot
the screens, both silent and blaring
the overpriced water in plastic
the baggage carousels
the light through the glass
the air, cooled or heated
the thousands of stories being carried
from one point of the globe
to another,

almost instantaneously
to someone who considered herself lucky
to secure a berth
on a boat
bound for land
she had not even seen on a map.

If I am lucky.

And these days,
I almost always am...

xxx
c

Image by U-g-g-B-o-y-(-Photograph-World-Sense-) via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

What's under all that crap?

I'm curious: now that you're four months or so into the process of slowing down and doing less , washing the metaphorical dishes in your psychic kitchen sink, if you will, and clearing off the piles of metaphorical papers on your psychic desk top, if you will , what are you uncovering?

, Dan Owen, in the comments to post on Monday, April 12

I have been thinking about Dan Owen's question in the comments of Monday's post since shortly after he wrote it, and finding answers, or ideas serving as leads to them, everywhere I turn, ever since.

Okay, to be completely honest, I've been thinking about these things on and off for much, much longer, but in my usual perverse way, having someone else pose the question spurs me on to actually structuring my thoughts and putting them down in some kind of semi-orderly fashion.

So, with all of this excavation, this decluttering, this clearing away of physical crap and mental distractions like, oh, the pursuit of livelihood, what am I finding underneath? Thus far, the answers seem to be "the usual" and "more layers", which is to say, "the usual."

The usual, Part 1: Fear, love and the tender heart that threads them together

Here's a good-times truism, and I'm only being half-facetious: when one finds oneself getting angry, outraged, incensed, self-righteous, smug, or any other feeling that is not either fear or love, there's probably fear rooted just underneath.

To make things even more delightful, unless the fear is of being eaten by a bear or some other immediate threat to survival, it's probably attached to some need for love. When I act like a jackass, deliberately withholding love, even though (or worse, because) I know someone wants it, it's about fear.

And "love" doesn't always present in the moment as a grace-taxing apology for a major transgression or showing up at a friend's house at 6am with your truck to move their piano cross-town; it can be as simple, and excruciatingly difficult, as an acknowledgment of success. The Chief Atheist (rightly) used to accuse me of throwing compliments around like manhole covers, and he was right: in my world, achievement was a zero-sum game; ergo your success diminished mine; ergo to me, offering praise felt like cutting off a non-returnable piece of my arm and handing it over knowing that if you did anything with it at all, you'd glance at it ever so briefly before tossing it mindlessly over your shoulder for rats to gnaw on. Or something like that. It took years of working with my first-shrink-slash-astrologer to even make a dent in my fucked-up scarcity mindset, and realistically, it's something I'll likely struggle with for years to come.

However. My hating it doesn't make it go away any faster. To the contrary, my hating it makes it even less likely that I'll be able to overcome it and move into the happy space where my friend Bonnie truly does reside¹, a place where "Any time I see someone succeed I am happy, for it affirms my belief that I live in a world where success is possible." Nobody gets to the happy place by blowing past the bullshit that stands in-between; the only way to it is through it, and brother, there are days when in-between might as well be a three-mile, naked wade through a razor-lined vat of gelatinous battery acid.

Most days, though, the walk is uneventful, the pain points are easily overlooked and the scrutiny easily avoided. This is where you actually can score big payback if you, I believe the expression is "double-down" on the observations.

The usual, Part 2: How many layers of protective coating can one person have, anyway?

Why am I craving this second cup of coffee? Am I really wanting more caffeine in deliciously bitter delivery form, or do I want a do-over on my first cup, a reboot of the day?

Now I want a cookie. Or do I? Am I hungry for this taste, this size, this shape, this texture, this many calories of energy? Or am I hungry for some not-doing? For, specifically, some not-doing of this? Or maybe for a reminder that yes, I can treat myself and treat myself well. (These are SCD-legal cookies; it's a whole other discussion when the thing I want is an "illegal".)

How is it I've found myself back on the Twitter home page/in the Facebook stream/checking email again? Again? Again? What am I looking for? What am I avoiding? Where do these two things overlap?

Of course, sometimes checking email is just checking email and a cookie is just a delicious treat. The trick, and yeah, the pain, is in the awareness. It was not The Goody-Good Times staring down my Best Year Yet failures from 2009 and realizing that they were almost identical to my failures from 2008; of all the things I hate (and because I lack the enlightenment to view them with dispassionate interest and/or compassion, I hate many), I probably hate wasted potential the most. Drives me batty.

On the other hand, there they are. Clues! Instructions, even! On what to do next, or at least, what you might want to take a look at.

So for me, Dan Owen (and anyone else who's interested), under that addiction to coffee, to the Internet, to Comfort TV, to certain controlled substances, is fear: of what happens when, if, when I finally do write a book and it's my turn to be judged by everyone and (probably) found wanting. Of giving my best and my all to what it is I have said I want for so long now and not having it work out, whatever that means. Of money turning me into a lonely  ogress, as I have seen it do to so many of my loved ones before me. Of not being enough, definitely. Of not being loveable, most likely.

In other words, same-old same-old.

But each time around the mountain I have a slightly different view of it, and feeling towards it. In my oh-so-slowly-dawning awareness, I feel the beginning of what might be the promise of eventual compassion and detachment, not bullshit, human, take-my-ball-and-go-home detachment, but a release of attachment to outcome and with it, the potential of opening my heart to love on a more steady basis. Or, um, on a basis. Yeah, that.

It is crap. But come on, it's pretty hilarious crap, isn't it?

xxx
c

¹I swear, it took me years to believe it, but it is true. Which is not to say Bonnie doesn't have her own issues; she'd be the first person to admit that she does. But man, are they not this, and boy, while I wouldn't trade, I really, really hope to experience this state of being some day before I die.

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

Make the bed, clean the sink

My father did not start out a tidy type, and I am my father's daughter: most of my life has been a battle between me and stuff, me and dirt, me and disorder.

Oh, I could (and did) endlessly re-label and sort the files in the canary-yellow file cabinet I requested and received for my 13th birthday. That's not real order, I now realize: that's low-level OCD masquerading as order. A disorder, manifesting as order. Because while I worked and re-worked taxonomies in my head, on paper, then on the file tabs themselves (this long, long before I knew what "taxonomy" was), I was not preparing myself for work or for thought or for anything; I was soothing myself as best I could in a time (pre-teen) and space (my maternal grandparents', a.k.a. "Gloomy Manor", a.k.a. House-o'-Alcoholics and the Enablers Who Keep Them Going) that were very anxiety-provoking for me. (My sister and I also indulged in the sitcom-perfect passive-aggression of singing rousing choruses from "If Mama Was Married" while we did the dishes together, but that's another nugget of tragicomedy gold for another day.)

These days, I have all but abandoned my poor, poor file folders. Oh, they're there, and they're (reasonably) neatly labeled, but there are so few, it doesn't take long to find what I'm looking for even with only medium-good filing habits. I spend more time keeping the IKEA desktop they support clean and cleared of clutter, because that does seem to help me get my work done. The fewer things I have lying around me in stacks and piles and other smoldering and/or moldering piles, the easier it is to write, to think, and most importantly, to keep my spirits up. I am of little use to myself or anyone else when they are otherwise.

This is why I have added "clean dishes" as my last household task before heading for bed, the bed that is always made 10 or 12 or 16 hours before: it lifts my spirits at the beginning of the day to see a clean, fresh sink just as much as it soothes me at the end of one to slip into a made bed. I feel cared for, I feel safe, I feel hopeful. My friend Gretchen Rubin says this is the #1 change her readers tell her they've made which has had a significant impact on their happiness, and I can see why. It's do-ably small, but has a magically high ROI. Maybe it's because, as she implies, it instantly creates a look of order. A bed is a rather large thing, after all. But I also think there is something about starting out the day with a small bit of control that is a big part of the benefit. And so, to cap it, for the past several weeks, I've been playing around with finishing off the day as Dan Owen does, by making sure the kitchen is ready to go first thing in the morning.

The result? I feel so much better on days that begin with a clean sink that it's now a regular part of my routine. No matter how tired I am, I clean the dishes. And because I've had to do it a few times when I'm very, very tired, I've also gotten a bit better about clean-as-you-go maintenance.

I am very aware that without awareness, this lovely, Fly-Lady habit could morph into another manifestation of OCD. My sister and I also joke about how, in the last decade or so of our father's life, you could not leave your iced tea on the end table while you went to the other room for a magazine, for fear it would be "cleaned up" while you walked there and back. If it's possible, he decluttered too much; in the end, he had no tolerance for any personal artifacts, save a photo or two that, if I'm honest, were probably mostly there for showin', not blowin', as the saying goes.

On the other hand, I have no doubt he held us in his heart, which is where these things really matter. And that is what I try to remember matters to me: what and whom I hold in my heart, and which habits and actions go the furthest towards keeping them secure there.

Making the bed and cleaning the sink are my signals to myself that I am still fortunate enough to be able to exercise some control over my destiny. They are actions that show respect for the space I'm lucky enough to inhabit and the time I have been given to work on what I want. They mark the beginning and end of a day lived the way I want to live: deliberately, thoughtfully, with enough order and support that creativity can flourish. I do not make the bed to bounce quarters off of nor shine the sink to see my face reflected within: I attend to structure, to the vessels, and trust that whatever it is that keeps floating ideas my way will keep up its own good work. We each of us have our part to play.

I am grateful I can make the bed; I am happy I can wash the dishes.

God, or whomever, or whatever, can take care of the drying...

xxx

c

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

Poetry Thursday: Walking alone

There are things
that you alone
must do
and that you must do
alone
regardless of how the rest
of the world
is humming along

Resting
in the middle of commotion
running
while the world is asleep
leaving
when life is comfortable
staying
when the fleeing looks good

You may be wistful
or anguished
going to bed
while the party rages

You may be odd man up late
tending to your baby ideas
on long, cold nights
before they hatch

But how much worse
will you feel
when the thing in your heart
lies buried
under a thousand perfectly good reasons
why you couldn't help it now.

No time is right
No time is wrong
Each minute, each hour, each day
extends itself wordlessly
for you to do with it
what you will.

What
will you do?

What
will we do
if you don't?

The life you write for yourself
is yours alone
but the lives you touch
are everywhere,
on into eternity.

xxx
c

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

Poetry Thursday: If only

It's so sad, isn't it?

The way he eats/
she drinks/
they sit around and shoot up sitcoms
all day long?

What a waste of life.

Can't they see
how much better off they'd be
swimming laps/
eating seaweed/
doing hot yoga/
loving Jesus?

Can't they hear
what all of that Guitar Hero
is doing to their arteries?

Don't they know
the only "off" valve
is meditation/
marathon running/
mopping floors/
making sweet, sweet love
tied to the bedposts
under the moonlight?

How does someone end up
like that, anyway,
in the suburbs/
on Skid Row/
all alone
cut off
from everything?

If only
they would listen to me.

If only
they could learn
to help themselves.

If only
they knew
that anything was possible
that they are the agents of change
that love starts with each one of us.

If only they knew
what life could be.
What a world
we could live in...

xxx
c

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

A ridiculously earnest reflection on psychotherapy

Of all the events in my month, there are few I look forward to more than Shrink Day.

Finances and time conspire to keep me from going more than once monthly these days, but in a way, that's a good thing. It forces me to think very carefully about what's really important, and to differentiate what I need help with from what just needs attention. As I run through the never-ending list of Ways to Improve on Colleen, many potential shrink-agenda items fall off when I rehearse them as questions in my head; when you've been seeing the same person on and off for over eight years, it's really a pretty short hop from What the %@# should I do? to What Would Leslie Say?, and even to an answer.

Mostly, what I find myself doing these days in shrinkage is calibrating my barometer (which is a great thing to do when you're not busy mixing your measuring metaphors). It's not that my upbringing was Dickensian or anything, but there was a little brain-scrambling that happened around self-worth and how one goes about acquiring it, as well as how much giving and ceding is appropriate. One of the reasons I ended up in the hospital 7+ years ago is because I have two default settings: "off" and "full-bore." Learning that it's okay to say "no", not to mention training myself in the how of it, has been a long, boring, painful series of fail/fail/fail/inch-ahead/fail/fail.

Strangely and possibly non-coincidentally, the problem has become much easier to deal with since I gave it a snarky name, my "Lack of Entitlement Issues", and learned to joke about it. It is surely not everyone's cup of tea, but a long time ago, I pledged my allegiance to the almighty and far-reaching healing powers of humor. The Youngster and I coined a saying while we were together: "The Joke is King!; All hail the Joke!" This didn't mean that being funny gave you carte blanche to be a dick; it just meant (to us, anyway) that painful truths were more easily escorted from one of us to the other on the gentle, hilarious wings of humor. (Although as I recall, each of us was occasionally a dick when we were sure the joke was very, VERY funny.)

I bring up shrinkage because while I take for granted its awesomeness, I realize that for some, there is still a stigma attached and for many more, there is fear around it, fear that is not entirely unfounded. As I am fond of saying, you can't cherry-pick change. While its settings are definitely not "off" and "full-bore," chances are very good that if you make a move in one department, stuff will start moving in others. For some people, this is unacceptable, and I get that. It was unacceptable for me until I was so desperate, I was willing to risk having nothing to rid myself of even part of what I was carrying around.

On the other hand, I can assure you, well, a layperson's assurance, that you will not essentially change. On my initial visit to Leslie's predecessor, the shrink-slash-astrologer whose office I found myself in during the darkest days of my 20s, I laid down what I considered the law: she could muck around in there and fix the broken parts, but under NO circumstances was she to change my sense of humor or any other part of the modus operandi that got me through my hateful days in the fiery pits of advertising. When she was done laughing at me, YOU WISH, CRAZY COPYWRITER GIRL!, she explained that she didn't think any of us really changed, essentially; we just got better and better at understanding our parts, so that we could recognize and do an end run around them faster and faster.

Some 20-odd years later, I can attest to the truth of this. More than anything, what therapy has done is give me back the hope and optimism and childlike curiosity I had when I was 10, back before I consciously started compartmentalizing and conforming and adapting to deal with the crap life started throwing down.¹ I have gotten better at calling myself on my own b.s.: not perfect, not even close, but better. Enough so that I've been able to unstick myself from stuck spots because I can actually see that I'm not moving. Enough so that while I am still afraid to try new things and make a fool of myself and fail and all of the other things most of us mere mortals are afraid of, I can still (eventually) (usually) bring myself to do it.

Besides, change will happen, regardless; it's Nature's default setting. So why not have a hand in it, and the kind of life you dream of?

xxx
c

¹I understand there's probably a bunch of stuff I did to adapt before then, and we've dealt with a few by using EMDR, but fortunately, I really did have a pretty normal and easy childhood as childhoods go, with enough of the basic building blocks for non-insanity that I'm mainly dealing with garden-variety, talk-therapy-treatable neuroses.

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

The power of tiny pieces

When I was very, very sick, my body served as its own governor.

I could not push myself further than I should, because I'd be overcome by a sleepiness that would stop me in my tracks. There were times before I learned this that I literally had to lie down right where I stood to rest a bit and gain enough strength to get myself into bed. And this, in an apartment with less than 800 square feet of livable space.

Now that my body is stronger, my mind has gone back to playing tricks on it. Do this thing instead of that other, it will say. We can get to that ugly bit later. Depending on the bigness or ugliness of the thing my mind senses it's up against, I can end up squeezing myself into timeframes that are ridiculously taxing, both because they are so condensed and because they were mostly avoidable.

Last Thursday, for example, I'd committed to performing a new story at the Porchlight series: eight minutes, memorized. But an eight-minute story is a long story, and memorizing it takes even longer. I knew I should have gotten started writing it weeks ago, but I didn't. And didn't, and didn't. The "why" is simple: fear. Nothing more, nothing less. I had plenty of time; I frittered away large chunks of it on nonsense and worry, worry and nonsense.

Most of the worry was about not being good enough. That's old hat, and not particularly interesting. The nonsense, however, is where the gold lies.

In the nonsense, there were the following gems:

• You have an outline; the story will write itself. NONSENSE. Nothing writes itself. Nothing. Not one thing. An outline may or may not speed up the process, and is certainly a fine thing to have. But in terms of story, it represents nothing more nor less than some thought devoted to the story, which might translate to some work completed.
• You've memorized longer stuff before, 8 minutes will take no time! NONSENSE. It takes as long to memorize something as it takes. There's no mathematical formula, and no guarantees. The only guarantee, in fact, is that a poorly-written piece will take longer to memorize than a well-written one.
• You can quit! NONSENSE. I mean, of course I can opt out. People do; people did that night. It always happens. But I know I am not just telling these stories as a lark. I'm writing and telling them as training for telling bigger stories, i.e., going pro. And pros don't flake. Not if they want to be hired more than once.

I ended up writing and memorizing the entire story on Thursday, the day of the gig. The entire day of the gig, which is a luxury I have now, on sabbatical, that I will not always have. And I was still a nervous wreck, because I didn't have the story in my bones, so I wasn't much able to enjoy the experience, either.

On the opposite end of the planning spectrum, there's the newsletter I've been editing for BLANKSPACES, a co-working space here in Los Angeles. In the five months since I took over responsibility for the project, this is the first one that's gone smoothly, actually enjoyably. Why? Because I worked on it incrementally, rather than waiting for the last minute. I broke down the process into a kind of system, worked that system, and came out the other end with a product delivered on time, in good shape and without anguish. (I can't wait to tell my friend (and client, and mentor), Sam.)

I've read 25 books out of the 52 I'd planned for the year, just by reading 40pp per day. From an investment of 15 minutes or so a day, my apartment has gone from a depressing, cluttered and filthy wreck to something that looks like it might be ready to move out of on less than a year's notice. My half-hour of daily Nei Kung practice has wrought changes in my body that continue to astonish me. Why I persisted in thinking that stories (or blog posts) would magically write themselves even when, especially when I was exhausted from working crazy-sporadically rather than slow-and-steadily is beyond me.

The solution is not. Seek the smallest move forward. If there's a hard out, put it in the calendar on the far end and the Smallest Move Forward on the near one. Stick the other small moves in between. Arrive at destination rested, refreshed, and excited about the next challenge ahead.

Right?

xxx
c

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

Poetry Thursday: Door #3

Change is a bitch
who plays by rules
she makes up
as you go along

Change is a roller coaster
with no tracks

an amphibious flight plan

a troll with a prince
inside a troll
inside a prince

a dream
where a roomful of maiden aunts
and former professors
stand guard
before the invisible elevator
that will surely take you
to Heaven
(with stops at
Ladies' Lingerie
and summer camp)
just as soon
as you come up with a quarter

then scatter
with the sound
of your clock-radio,
leaving you nothing
but bewildered
and eight hours older.

How did you get there from here?

One foot
in front of the other
and a boat that arrives
just in time
or a missed connection
that doesn't
but results in the ride
of your life.

Maybe it will make sense in the end
or maybe you fix your resolve
and open your heart
and pack a lunch
and go
anyway.

xxx
c

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

Do wrenching things actually get easier?

An old analog relationship washed up on my digital shores a few weeks back in the form of an old college professor reconnecting via email.

We'd exchanged letters just once, shortly after I made an abrupt decision to leave upstate New York earlier than I'd planned and strike out for New York and whatever came next. My own memory of that time is hazy, it was, after all, over 25 years ago, but if you'd asked me how things were in that space between leaving one place (college, or at least, the town that it was based in) and finding another (my first job-job, and hence, to me, my next potential identity), I would have summarized it as "Hot. Dull? Mostly hot." (It was, after all, New York City in summer, and the boroughs, and a tumble-down, non-air-conditioned portion of one, at that.)

What a shock, then, to read this letter from my former self, this barely-22-year-old girl who had so much and so little going on at the same time. How had I forgotten how lonely I was, and how scared? And over what? Not having a job for a whole three weeks? Some mishegoss with Citibank? Having to tough it out in a sublet with a friend's sister that had been pre-arranged before my friend, Dave, drove me from my door in Ithaca to my (temporary) door in Park Slope?

I was scared, though; it's all there in the letter, between the bravado, heavily shaded in purple. I was, and am, scared to leave one place for another, one perceived harbor for another, with all that scary water in between. I was scared of not succeeding and even more so of "succeeding", there's a hilarious line in there about my fear of "the pursuit of money becom(ing) the be-all, end-all of my existence." As if. (Or even better, "You wish." I'm just grateful that my smarter, capitalist friend, Vic, explained the Magic of Compound Interest while I was still young enough to benefit somewhat.)

Mostly, though, it was clear that what I was scared of was not fulfilling my potential. I was scared that my writing would deteriorate, or deteriorate further, a re-read of old college essays (yes, I keep them) had proven that my discipline and clarity of thought were already on the decline. Who knows if it that was true? I leave it to my biographers to sort out.

What is clear, clearer now than ever, is that The Resistor, that rat bastard, that cocksucking-boulder-heaver who didn't have the goddamn courtesy to make himself known until a few years ago, has been shadowing me my entire life, and it's unlikely he'll decide to knock off anytime soon. With such an investment? Pfft. Fugeddaboutit. He knows from compound interest, too.

So I will write, I will doubt what I write, and I will continue to write anyway.

I will wish for the next scary thing to appear, and it will, and I will put it in my calendar, prepare as best I can, and show up on the date I'm supposed to with my teeth brushed, my nametag on and my hand outstretched.

I cannot begin to guess what forms change will take, only that it will likely be, as I explained to young Mr. Guillebeau down in Austin, more than I'd bargained for. You prepare by accepting it may be difficult, and you will likely make mistakes, and you will likely learn from them if you survive. (Which, in many cases, is also likely.)

In the meantime, shore up your resources. Preparing for me has been a long, slow, as in "20+ years' worth of slow", process of reading, studying, stretching, discarding. I hadn't realized how big a role the discarding was playing until I stopped: regular upkeep is as much about learning to let go of what no longer serves as it is seeking out what will.

For some, old papers don't make the cut. They're not illuminating beyond the realization of how in the dark we once were; they're artifacts that can be released. (For more on helpful processes of discernment where artifacts are concerned, visit my friend and clutter-busting mentor, Brooks Palmer.)

For me, for now, there are still answers in those papers. Being able to visit my long-ago brain helps me to gain perspective on the journey to date, which provides some direction on the journey ongoing.

As does The Resistor. Because whenever he shows up, I know I'm headed in the right direction...

xxx
c

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

Hungry, angry, lonely, tired

Most acronyms make me cringe a little, but from the first time I heard it, I loved the 12-step acronym used to help keep adherents, well, adhering: H.A.L.T.

Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired. As in, when you're struck by an urge to use (or drink, or use, or what-have-you that you shouldn't), STOP (or, you know, HALT!) and see if maybe you aren't one of those four things.¹ I am not sure if the next step in the protocol is to do what one can to edge one's way out of whatever state one is in, or to call one's sponsor, or both. Or neither. The main thing one is supposed to do is a not-doing; however you accomplish that I'm guessing is fine and dandy, provided you're not breaking any laws or hearts in the process.

I'm not in the Program, but that doesn't mean I can't fall into some bad, bad habits when my level of awareness dips, or my basic needs are left unmet. Food was and is the easiest fix; between the abundance of good-for-you snacks readily available when I'm being good and the abundance of horrible-but-delicious fast foods available when I'm not, it's almost impossible to get hungry anymore. Anger is less of an issue than an effect when hungry or tired kicks in; loneliness is even less of an issue, as it's almost impossible for me to get enough time alone anymore, and rare that I feel lonely when I do.

Tiredness is my thing. Tiredness is probably every workaholic's thing, because there is always, always, always more one can be doing, and almost never anyone to order you to sleep. Not that you'd obey, anyway.

This past trip to Austin got me thinking deeply about the need for rest. When else do you dream of water but when you're in the desert? Even with the Nei Kung to bolster me (I was worlds better off this year, all things being equal, thanks to Nei Kung), I could feel myself slipping further and further into the Dark Place as I got more and more tired. Or rather, I was keenly aware of the additional effort it took to keep myself up, to stay buoyant and lively, to prevent my brain from racing to the judge-y, lowest-common-denominator, knee-jerk awfulness it will when I am tired.

For a while, I even toyed with the idea of changing Goal #1 for the year, to get back on SCD 100%, to "Get 8 hours of sleep per night." When I am deeply rested, not only am I at my gracious, nimble-thinking best: I actually like doing all the other good-for-you stuff like eating well, exercising and giving traffic nimrods the benefit of the doubt. (Believe me, in L.A., where 3/4^ths of the population drives like crap and the other 1/4 is loaded for bear, it's a highly salubrious act.)

Then it occurred to me that I can fold that goal rather neatly into the SCD goal, thereby gaining two bangs for my buck. In addition to helping me create a strong foundation for resisting tempting treats like, oh, everything, increasing my nightly sleep load from six hours to seven hours to eight hours is a much cleaner metric than "avoid bread more often" or "try not to hit the drive-thru window for 99¢ tacos at Jack in the Box."

More on this as I sort it out, but for this week, my goal is "lights out by 11pm." For now, anyway. If you've successfully adjusted your own sleeping/waking hours to include more of the former, I would love to hear how you did it, and what the payoff has been.

Oh, and for the record, this entry was set to post automatically just after midnight, a full hour after Me-of-the-Future (who will be known as Me-of-the-Past by the time you read this) went to sleep...

xxx
c

¹Or some combination, I suppose. These four things, they mix and match very well.)

UPDATE: Just read a great piece by publisher Michael Hyatt about the sources of work creep (as it cuts into sleep/rest time).

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

Poetry Thursday: The loud quiet of here and now

I have emptied
my shelves of books
my closets, of clothes
my lists, of good intentions
not just to make room
for whatever comes next
but to see
what is here right now:

the light
the dark
the rich
the worn
the choices upon choices
suddenly on display
when their numbers dwindle
and they no longer have each other
to hide behind.

Boy,
is it ever there,
all that here:
more room
than I dreamed of
when I was drowning
in the lack of it
more quiet
than I could fill
if I sang for a thousand years.

But if for a moment
I can set down
these last, sad items,
my misspent past,
my pre-soiled future,

A hairline crack
lets the real light come pouring in,
enough so that even a blind old bat like me
can see that I am only really scared
when I am there
and that every single breath
is a free ride back to here

xxx
c

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

Finding your circle of awesome (a lesson from SXSW)

Weird, one-off disclaimer: Apologies if this gets nerdier in places than our regular program. I'm still processing the events and information of the past week, and via sleep-deprived filters. Which means that given my own standards, I probably should wait to post about it here, but given my iffy memory, I thought it best to strike while things were still relatively vivid in my mind.

Rumor has it that last year, attendance at SXSWi, that's the Interactive (or "nerd") portion of the Austin-based South by Southwest festival, increased by 40%.

And that this year, it increased by 40% again, making it bigger than either the Film or Music portions of SXSW, both of which have been around far longer.

Even if the numbers aren't quite as staggering, it hardly matters: the reality was more so. On this, my fourth trip to SXSWi in five years (I skipped what would have been Year #2), there were more people here/there/everywhere than even last year, which was crazy-packed. And I'm not even talking about parties, which, save one quickly-corrected exception, I've learned to avoid altogether in favor of the mix of planned meetups and small, impromptu gatherings of friends (usually with a ratio of one old friend to two new, to keep expanding The Circle of Awesome).

At (impromptu) drinks on Sunday night¹, a couple of old-timers were telling tales of South-bys past, specifically, of the first particular South-by they passed in the hallways, rather than the sessions.²

It's no news that some of the best stuff that goes down at any conference is of the decidedly unofficial variety; that's the whole reason behind BarCamp and its fancier forebear, Foo Camp. But hearing it confirmed by two now-established pillars of the design community made me wonder why other longtime members of Camp We Were Here First are so angry about the growth of the conference in recent years. Didn't they first find each other in the sessions of the conference in the halls, and move it to the halls themselves? And weren't we all here now, together: a bunch of old- and medium-timers, who met the same, weird way, through a crazy-quilt of Internet sites, social media hubs and real-life hallways, fueled by a mix of intention and openness?

Why the fuck is everyone so goddamn angry?

Of course, it's not everyone; it's not even all the oldsters. It may be just a vocal minority who's ticked off, amplified by the echo chamber of the social web. It may even be me drawn to some icky-but-human, lowest-common-denominator gossip. I get dark when I get tired.

But I'd have to have been far denser than I am not to detect the noticeably rising tide of hatred toward newcomers, who were being labeled either clueless tech n00bs or opportunist douchebags (or both), but were definitely charged with interfering with the "real" reason for the conference.

Okay. So what is the real reason for a conference? Education for all? High-level exchanges with peers? As someone wisely suggested³ on a recent post lamenting the dumbing-down and up-sizing of SXSWi, if you want to make it more about the focused exchange of knowledge and less about lazy, liteâ„¢ and/or dig-me sessions (not to mention booth babes, sponsored parties and other corporo-effluvia) move that shit to Rochester, NY in the middle of winter: you can enjoy all the high-level conversation you want, unmolested.

I had a rather different experience with content at SXSW 2010: I attended more panels this year than I had in the previous two put together, including one excellent core conversation on interviewing best practices. And in case it's not obvious from the context I've tried to establish here (hey, I'm fuzzy!), there would have been no conversation on interviewing best practices had SXSW not grown in size to include the bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, and yes, mainstream journalists who are now drawn to South-by.

(And speaking of mainstream journalism, thank God-or-whom/whatever that the tent is big enough now to include them. I, for one, would like to see journalism survive into the next century, and that's not going to happen unless people on the other side of the tech divide, the "right" side, the one that's been coming to South-by since the beginning, the NEW side, extends a hand and helps them over.)

I get that change is hard. I get that everyone's default reaction to it, mine included, tends to be fear (sometimes expressed as anger or sorrow). But everything was new sometime, just as everyone knew nothing and no one at one point. Are you still only friends with the people you knew when you were seven? Do you still watch only The Brady Bunch and/or Matlock? If so, please, please work on expanding your own Circle of Awesome, wherever you choose to start your search. Even if you start with Netflix.

My own Circle of Awesome has grown to include all kinds of people: the ones who have been there a long time and the ones who showed up for the first time this year; the freaks and the other freaks who are scared of those freaks and the freaks who don't even realize they're freaks. People who eat meat and people who won't even eat their vegetables cooked. People whose eye for design dazzles mine and people whose use modal windows makes my heart sieze up.

It's less a circle than it is a busy, constantly growing series of circles that overlaps like a Venn diagram with a z-axis. Yours might look different. Yours must look different. You might have to look harder to find Your People in some places than others. You might decide that some places are best avoided altogether (especially when you're running low on tolerance and/or capacity).

Does this take time and energy to manage? You betcha. Do my worlds sometimes collide in a way that is nervous-making and even uncomfortable? Uh, yes. Yes, they do.

But I've been surprised and delighted at how my life grows richer the more I expand my definitions of what works for me to include the generically excellent, love, tolerance, humor, playfulness, and leave behind the old cues I used to rely on: what "looks" right, what sounds familiar, etc. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to find the good in everyone, much less that I'll bring us all together in one room to sing "Kumbaya," but that probably has more to do with me and my insecurities than them not being able to find their own areas of overlap.

It is a process of looking for the positive rather than the negative, and of moving, not stopping.

Except to rest, of course. Which is a process I will be heavily involved with over the next 48 hours...

xxx
c

¹Okay, technically Monday morning. What? It's South-by, Jake...

²That's a term old-timers use, by the way, "South-by." So now you can pretend to be an old-timer. Until they change the secret handshake again.

³Alas, I cannot find it now, but I'm fairly sure it's embedded in the lively comments section of this post by long-timer Jolie O'Dell. I'll add here that if I'd been groped in public (or private, without my permission), it would have colored my perceptions, too. I have a healthy fear of crowds that stems from a Who-concert-like experience with a line for the city bus during my high school years that has me steer clear of any situation where crowds are likely to gather.

Terrifying yourself on a regular basis (a lesson from SXSW)

Each of the four years I've been coming to SXSW, I've learned a little something different.

The first time, it was about the value of coming to a conference, period. The next time, about learning to take the time I needed, regardless of the enticing hoopla happening around me (and also about not skipping a year, if you can avoid it). Last year, my Stuart Smalley year, apparently, it was about being myself, no matter how uncool I suspected that was (something that an intervening year has only confirmed).

This year, it was about terrifying myself. Not pushing my boundaries, not stretching just to or slightly beyond the limits of my comfort zone, but hurtling myself in harm's way and seeing what happens next. Specifically, pushing my way onto the most terrifying panel I could imagine: a two-minute, on-the-spot presentation improvised to 10 slides I had never seen before in my life and which had been prepared with the intent of maximizing audience laughter and enjoyment, not of making my job easier. A tradition sometimes known as "PowerPointâ„¢ Karaoke," and which a friend here dubbed "business improv." (Which sounds like the world's most horrible anything, but hey, I'm biased.)

Anyway. It was the opposite of rolling off a log (which I gather is easy, if not exactly fun), yet I managed to enjoy it. Especially the part when it was over. Okay, I exaggerate, as is my wont and prerogative. But really, now that I have made a fool of myself in front of 600 people, I can move on to  bigger and scarier challenges: making a fool of myself in front of 1,200 people! Or on national television!

Terrifying yourself is like building up muscle, as it has been told to me that muscles are built: you push things hard enough so that you are uncomfortable and the muscle tears a little; scar tissue builds up; the muscle gets bigger; you get stronger! Lather, rinse, repeat. (The act of terrifying yourself, of course, not that last action you used to do it.)

Also, if at all possible, I suggest the diving-in-straightaway-and-getting-it-over-with timing strategy. Gretchen Rubin (who ripped it up on the book stage) and I were both congratulating ourselves on having our respective moments of terror over with on Friday, so we were left free to enjoy the rest of our SXSW weekends.

Oh, and speaking of rest, one final note: there must be blissful (if brief) periods of rest in between the daredevil acts of muscle-building. Rest that includes things like hanging out with friends, taking in other people's feats of derring-do, and permission to write short blog posts.

See? You really can learn something at SXSW...

xxx

c

Photo ©2010 Jeffrey Zeldman via Flickr.

Poetry Thursday: South to True North

Up early,
aloft,
pre-caffeinated,
I do what I must
to put myself in places
of discomfort.

Why?

Do I long
to thread my way through
throngs of strangers
in recycled air,
heart beating too fast,
nerves flaying at the mere thought
of all that proximity?

Hell, no.

What do you do,
all you happy people,
but remind me of how alone
I really am?
How cut off
in my own skin
and awkward
and remote?

I don't feel this
at home
at my desk
by the same sunny window
with the same cup of coffee
at the same hour of each new day--

Such lengths
I go to,
trying to make time stop
and the world a little safer.

But the world,
for all my efforts,
remains dangerous
and wonderful,
horrifying
and exquisite,
a place where dreams are dashed on rocks
as easily as they are born out of thin air.

Besides, shit changes
every second,
whether you notice
or not.

So I board a plane
and walk into a new place
and thrust out my hand
and open my heart
over and over
again.

What choice do I have,
a soul alone,
split off from the source
and stuck in a tiny body
with an obnoxious brain?

You are my rocky path
and my salvation, both.

Here I come.

xxx
c

Skipping, shipping and opening up

I had big plans for this weekend, mostly because I had even bigger plans for this week: Taxes! South by Southwest! My first experience performing (hopefully) at The Moth!

I was cat-sitting for L.A. Jan while she went off for a restorative weekend in the Desert, so I figured I'd get plenty done. I had nothing scheduled except an afternoon date with my sister. I'd be far from the distractions of home, so I'd be far more able to apply nose to grindstone and work work work. Get all those posts written and scheduled for my away time. Get my newsletter ready to go. Get my Moth piece written and rehearsed, my Porchlight piece started, maybe next month's Networker column written.

Oh, and because there's a washer and dryer on the premises, I didn't even have to skip Laundry Day.

By Friday evening at 6, I was wiped out. I had half-heartedly wrassled with Jan's wifi settings and when that failed, booted up her peecee laptop and half-started three blog posts. Nothing. So I did the unthinkable: I shut down the computer, threw in a load of whites, watched cable TV for two hours, and went to bed early.

I woke up the next morning refreshed and ready to have at it, only I didn't. I did my Nei Kung and my reading. I picked up some coffee and some flowers at TJ's. I did another couple of loads of laundry (I know, you'd think I had small children or something) and returned a few Very Important Emails. No writing. Nothing. The well was still dry. So I climbed in my car and drove to my neighborhood to do a few errands: check the mail, pick up a framed piece at the store, use up a Groupon that was set to expire.

My sister wasn't in much of a conquer-the-world mood, either, rain and Oscar traffic will do that to a gal. So we bailed and continued on our respective putter-y weekend ways. I went home for a bit, thinking now that maybe the familiar setting would jumpstart things. I know, I know. But it seemed reasonable enough in the moment. Instead, I tidied up a bit, closed a few more email loops, and headed out to pick up some comforting old-school "Chinese" takeout¹ for the evening. Which I spooned into myself between watching Chinatown and programming Jan's virgin remote. One hot bath (with graphic novel!) and some Saturday Night Fever later, and I called it a night. Or a weekend, for all practical purposes.

I had two interesting conversations about the weekend once I got back home. One was with L.A. Jan, who had a similarly fraught experience on her relaxing spa getaway, a generous birthday gift from a friend. She was shocked to find out how painful it was to get a massage, how out of touch with her body, not to mention relaxing, she'd gotten. It was a wakeup call, she said; that was the true gift (because hey, it's hard to look at having horrific bodily reactions plus pain as a gift without some serious reframing.)

The other was with my new friend, Dave Seah, with whom I'm conducting the Google Wave with Daveâ„¢ experiment. He had an away weekend, too; he also was rather dreading being away from work for so long. But his weekend turned out to be delightfully restorative, filled with lively and engaging activities, illuminating conversations with friends, good food and plenty of chill time. His tone in the Wave was more alert and excited, more clear and focused, yet also stripped of any of the despair and/or mania that sometimes possesses us when we're wailing over what we shall do, o, what shall we do? For the first time he seemed to be approaching shipping (in the Seth Godin sense of the word, from Linchpin) from a truly relaxed and realistic perspective: keep it simple, address the fears one by one, do it anyway. Not easy, maybe, but simple and direct, which is a start.

I have "shipping" plans for actual product this year, at least two books, plus a few other possible ideas. But I have also started "shipping" on my talking goals, and here's how: by saying "yes."

Yes, I'll read a story at your event (even though no, I don't have anything written for it yet.) And thanks, Brenda.

Yes, I'll read one at yours, too, even if it means I need to sit down and come up with an idea and an outline by the end of the day. Twice. (And thanks, Bill and Josh.)

Yes, I'll stand up in front of a group of people at SXSW and do Death by PowerPoint Karaoke (aka "Battledecks"), even though I have no idea what I'm doing nor any way to prepare for it, either one of which thoughts is terrifying on its own but together, are positively stultifying. (And thanks, Mike.)

There will never be a right time to stop. There will never be a right time to go. There's no rule book, here, or if there is, I haven't seen nor heard of it. The only rules are these: terrify yourself only as much as you have to, comfort yourself only as much as you need to. Or, as Dave said at the very beginning of what turned into the Wave experiment, "Do not hurry; do not wait."

I must give myself rest, enough to gain the energy to move forward. I must push myself forward, not give into the idea that I need endless rest.

Open and close. Rest and work. Yin and yang. The Chinese, as my white, working-class-Mass.-born instructor likes to say (only with less swearing) had this shit all figured out centuries ago.

Also? Stay on top of your laundry. Just sayin'...

xxx
c

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

¹By the way, is it just Mister, or do all cats go berserk for hot-and-sour soup?)

Poetry Thursday: Road to nowhere

I have never won
one of those coveted
golden bodies
I envisioned myself holding
back in my girlish days.

But I know this lady
who has held several.

And as far
as I know,
she does not sit down
and polish them
afterward,
but gets up
and gets up
and gets up
and does the next thing
after the thing
that came before it.

For most,
the first thing
is to want a thing.

The next,
to allow yourself
to want it,
followed by
taking actual steps
toward living it.

And after that,
way, way after that,
most likely,
you discover that there is no "there",
just the way
that you are going.

I know

I will hold the want
I have in my heart
as I walk
toward the vision
my heart is holding.

But mostly
I will walk
and I will walk
and I will walk,
stopping
only briefly
to say "hello"
and wish my fellow travelers
safe journey
on the way.

xxx
c

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

Anatomy of a breakthrough, Part 2

This is the second installment of a two-part post about a recent writerly performance (or perform-y writingness). You can read the first installment here.

At some point in your travels, when you've traveled long enough, you're able to recognize what maybe you couldn't in the moment as turning points.

That night in the Westwood movie house some 25 years ago, eating contraband falafel, watching some movie I've long since forgotten, that was one of those events. That morning on a Santa Monica stage was another. Certainly, the afternoon in a West Hollywood hospital bed was another, and one that actually announced itself as such at the time.

It will be time's call whether my experience last Thursday evening proves a turning point or not. In the moment, though, or here and there during the series of moments that made up last Thursday evening, I noted a number of things that were for me, as I hinted earlier, extraordinary.

Me, talking to people

I don't know when I crossed over from faking it till I made it to actually making it, but somewhere, somehow over the past four or five years, my introverted self hit critical mass with playing extrovert.

If I was a betting woman, I'd put money on my two-year stint with Toastmasters; then again, something in me wanted to speak more than something else feared walking into a roomful of strangers, so there were probably a number of factors operating to get me over the hump and into a once-weekly meetup with a never-ending stream of new people: years of having to sell overpriced commercial productions to underwhelmed business school graduates with nothing more than charm, pantomime and a few key frames of marker art had to have helped. Moving from a class of 40 girls I'd known since I was six years old to a brand new public high school, with boys, and during the ugliest years of my life, that probably helped build up some callouses, too.

And then there were three years of hard-core business networking as I worked furiously to build up my tiny design and consulting brand. I didn't turn out to be much of a designer (the jury's still out on the consulting), but boyoboyoboy, did I log some hours walking up to complete strangers and saying "Hi!"

I am still exhausted after too much time with groups of people, and still require borderline-antisocial amounts of private time, period, but not only can I get out and about by myself, I actually do enjoy it, once the fear has passed.

Me, telling a plain, old story-story

You will laugh (I hope), but I never thought much of myself as a writer. I wanted to be good enough to think of myself as a writer; I hoped that if I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote (and wrote and, well, you get the idea), I'd eventually become good enough at it to win the jobs that would allow me to say, out loud, "I'm a writer" when the inevitable question arose as to my vocation. Now I'm starting to see that in the same way as it goes for actors, the first step is tilling and fertilizing adequate headspace so that one can self-identify as such, after which work, and several dozen-to-hundreds of cycles of submission/rejection, the pro stuff just falls into place eventually.

Again, you will laugh (I hope), but I had ideas of stories in my head that I couldn't get out. Probably because I thought of them as "pieces" and separate from me. Anytime I wrote something, even as I wrote it, I'd compare it to that ideal (unwritten, of course) in my head, and of course, I found it wanting, and of course, I either stopped dead or somehow sabotaged myself.

The exceptions were humdrum things like letters, journal entries, proposals, evaluations. You know, non-arty writing. And doing vast quantities of non-arty writing is probably what helped me log enough hours to see some results. At a certain point if you do anything enough times with enough focused attention, you get better at it; it's almost impossible not to. I didn't get good enough at short stories or poetry or plays because I never worked through the horrible stage, but between all the pedestrian writing I did as a civilian and the insane quantities of time I spent on the blerg, here, I became good enough to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end.

Oh, and once you give up the idea that you will ever be an artiste or that a soapbox is a reasonable place from which to deliver your two cents and just roll with being a Smurf, it gets a lot easier to tell stories that work.

Me, asking for stuff

I'm really at the beginning of this asking-for-stuff trajectory. My modus operandi up until now has been to drop more and increasingly larger hints, working ever harder to be content with even less as I simultaneously hope for a miracle. For me, even acknowledging there's such a thing as an ask and that it can not only save time and sanity but actual relationships is a huge gain.

And really, I will probably always prefer being asked to having to ask. I accept that it's my wiring, like "introvert" and/or my years of training as an ACoA rearing one or the other (or both) of their wearisome heads.

But when my new friend Bill and his wife started talking about the Moth, I drew them out, asking questions and advice, accepting such help and guidance as was offered. While I will not be the one battering down the gates anytime soon, I am becoming bold enough to raise my hand to request a day pass.

xxx
c

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

Anatomy of a breakthrough

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqR4ErGhYuQ&w=480&h=295]

I had an extraordinary experience last Thursday night, and enough time to process it since that I feel like it warrants some dissection here on the digital word slab (which may be my new pet name for communicatrix-dot-com) this morning.

The backstory of the event

A few weeks ago, via Facebook, my friend Brenda Varda invited me to read something at the 2.0, spoken-word gathering  of her project for writers and writing, w o r d s p a c e. (And yes, it's spelled out with the spaces, get it? Word space.)

The invitation asked for my best "extreme" 5 - 10 minutes of current material; there would be snacks and drinks, the public would be invited, and the list of other invitees was made public, so we could get a handle on the shape "extreme" might take, or at least what the rest of the lineup might be like. She later followed up with a request for a short bio and our putting the word (no pun intended) out to our own networks. Specifically, we were asked to bring one to three people: she wanted a full house, but Son of Semele's space (okay, this time I'm punning a little bit on purpose), the venue, was on the small side.

We were given the theme of "breaking the wordspace" to either write around or choose our material from; we were told that accompanying music was a possibility (among other things I am envious of her for, like her amazing hair and killer mid-Century modern house in the hills of Silver Lake, Brenda is an accomplished composer and musician).

Where I was coming from

One of my goals this year is "Do three Ignite-type presentations." That's my shorthand for:

1. Planned (thought out, plotted carefully, well-rehearsed)
2. Important (to me, personally, and in the scheme of things)
3. Fun (because life is too fucking short)

Last fall's experience presenting at Ignite: Portland was huge for me. Not just because I presented to the biggest honkin' crowd I had yet, 600 fine and enthusiastic people, bless every last loudly appreciative one of 'em, but because for the first time since I started thinking about speaking as a means of sharing information, I was talking about something I deeply cared about. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy to share what I know about branding and marketing, and grateful for the opportunities it gives me to practice skills while relaying information that's useful to people. To say it's where my heart lies, though, would itself be a lie.

So I've been casting about for ways of moving closer toward my goal of being, essentially, a motivational speaker, if not an outright preacher without a church. There: I've said it. I've pantsed myself. It's out, it's done, I'm exposed, we can move on.

Okay, perhaps a little more on that stink-bomb I just dropped...

The formula for my future

If you've hung around at all, you know that I'm a big one for condensed shorthands, not as a means of skipping steps, but as a way of staying focused. I have problems with focus, or perhaps, I have a central challenge of remaining focused when I've been blessed with a interests like water contained in a brain like mesh. So I come up with formulas to help me stay on track: The Formula for articulating your brand in terms of your end user; the formula for Right Use of social media (which, as I always point out when deliver it in a talk, also works beautifully for marketing and life in general).

I still can't articulate what it is that I want to be when I grow up clearly and succinctly in childlike terms, but if I can't have the laser-like focus that "ballerina," "fireman," or even "C-Suite creative executive in a new media company" might give me, I can come closer with a direction and a formula:

• Direction: I want to write and talk.
• Formula: 70 - 90% writing, 30 - 10% talking.

Note that the direction doesn't specify the type of writing, and that I've used "talk" rather than "speak." That's intentional: I'm thinking of "talking" as incorporating more than just speaking, which (to me) means a stage, possibly a mic, and definitely a crowd. "Talking" may mean audio and video performance of some kind; it may even mean teaching of some kind, although it would have to be a very special set of circumstances for me to go that route, since (good) teaching requires a level of interaction that would send me and my poor little introverted self running for the hills where our cave of privacy is dug into.

What happened in and around w o r d s p a c e

The above provides both the context for my decision to participate and a jumping-off place for the nutty amount of sturm und drang, synapse-firing, syntheses and lessons that came out of the experience.

But in the grand tradition of jumping-off places, I'm going to hold the rest of it until later. Because the scale of my goals in certain areas this year requires that I learn to exercise some restraint in others. Tune in Wednesday for Part 2, and in the meantime, enjoy the clip, above...

xxx
c

• Sign up for the w o r d s p a c e mailing list
• Join the w o r d s p a c e fan page on Facebook
• Connect with me on Facebook to be alerted to future Colleen talkings

Video shot by my good friend, former client and fellow Cornell alum, Larry Greenfield. Sorry for the overexposure; one of these days, I'll learn to find my light.