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Do you live in your body? (I don’t.)

Here’s an item from the list of things you might not know about me: I exist in a state of near-constant physical pain. Some days this pain is worse than others and during the past couple of weeks it’s been particularly bad. But fear not! This post is not going to be a long-winded elaboration of my discomfort — instead, I want to talk about our relationship to our bodies (or at least, my relationship to my body!)

Because here’s what I know about pain: when it gets bad enough it forces me literally, viscerally back into my body. When the pain is bad enough I find I can’t do anything except feel how much I hurt. Pain can force me directly into the present moment.

But when the pain is not so bad, when it is only a little tingling and twinging and soreness, that is when I find I exist outside of my body entirely. When the pain is not so bad, I retreat into the fortress of my mind and busy myself with thinking, with anything really, anything to keep my mind occupied so that I don’t have to feel the discomfort in my body.

This is easy to do because we live in a culture that idolizes the intelligence and value of the mind. We measure our worth not in the ableness of our bodies but in the cleverness of our thoughts — and so my physical pain does not threaten my self worth on the days when it is only a small discomfort. It does not call into question my utility.

And so I divorce myself from my body whenever I can and get on with the business of being human.

But there’s a part of me that wonders if perhaps this course of action is not so wise as it would seem. If you wander around in more woo-woo spiritual circles (as I have done in the past few years) you’ll encounter the idea that symptoms in the body can be messages pointing to where we are out of alignment in our lives.

I do not really believe in this theory. I have a very rational explanation for my pain involving too many hours spent at the computer compounded by bad posture and ergonomics leading to muscle imbalance, tension, and nerve pain.

And yet when I think whether this very rational story might carry a message, I am tempted to conclude that it does. Perhaps my pain carries a message about not caring for myself, about not standing up for and defending my needs, about not asking for help, about keeping my pain and my secrets tucked away safe and hidden where no one can find them and judge me wanting.

Because on the days when the pain is so bad that I can hardly bear to think or sit still, I inevitably pick myself up and get out of bed and go to work (easy, because lying in bed is the most uncomfortable thing I ask my body to do). At work I hurt too much to really think, but I try anyways because I am at work and at work I am supposed to be working. But there is very little that is easy about my job and when I am not at my best I find the work is sometimes too hard. I find myself stuck between bullying myself into working even when I’m aching or feeling guilty for idling away the hours when I hurt too much to think.

Our culture teaches us to value the mind and to set aside the needs of the body. Our entire medical culture is built around this principle — which is why, when I discuss my pain with my doctor, she suggests a low dose muscle relaxant instead of offering to refer me to physical therapy. We treat our bodies like disposable vessels, rented rooms that provide the comfort and safety of the mind.

But our bodies are more than that and we often don’t do enough to give them their due. So, no, I’m really not sure that our bodies hold messages for us about the things in our life that we’re trying to ignore. But I do know that it’s hubris to think that the mind can function when the body is unwell, and as such, we could all do more to take better care of our instrument.

I’d love for this to be a conversation, not a monologue! How do you care for your body? Do you believe your body carries whispers from a deeper, wiser part of you? Let me know in the comments below!

 

I come back (a writer’s manifesto)

I come back to my words.

Over and over again, I come back to the smooth glide of pen on paper or the rhythmic caress of fingers against the keys of my keyboard, worn smooth and soft with use.

I come back to my writing because it brings me back into myself, back into the person I have always been, but who I sometimes forget myself to be.

I come back because the words bloom in my chest like petals unfurling in the flustered warmth of my unsteady heartbeat.

I come back to my writing because when I was a girl I used to take my journal and sit under a tree and when my pen touches paper today I can sometimes still feel the rasp of tree bark pricking into the skin of my back.

I come back because my words feel sun-soaked and luscious as they reverberate in my head and their warmth tingles as the thoughts race each other down my arms toward where a miracle of biology transmutes the stuff of dreams into ink, slowly drying on paper.

I come back to my writing because writing was always the thing I did for me. It was the way I chased away the ghosts on lonely October nights and the way I passed my lunch breaks in high school. My writing was the way I busied myself in my efforts to feel less alone.

I come back because the words guide me ever closer to that hopeful and dreaming person I once knew myself to be.

I come back to my writing because every time I put pen to paper — it pushes me a little bit farther back into me.

Heimat and homesickness

In German there is a word, Heimat, which rather famously doesn’t have any direct translation into English. Most commonly the word is translated as “home” or “homeland”, words which are respectively, too small and too large to encompass the feeling of Heimat.

Heimat is more than a home and less than a homeland. It is the spaces that made you, the places that live tenderly inside your heart, it is not one place but many places — places that somehow add up to something whole.

When I first learned the word Heimat in a German class during college it seemed to me a revelation. A word that I had been looking for ever since I had left my home and flown across the country to go to school at MIT. It was a word I hadn’t known I’d need until I had moved away from home and found myself unable to explain the way I missed my home: not so much with sadness, but almost viscerally — as though the rocks and trees themselves were a part of me that I’d left, planted in soft soil some 3,000 miles away.

I still feel that way. Even after living in Boston for almost seven years, the city has never felt like home. My Heimat is still a piece of Northern California roughly described by the boundaries of Humboldt County, a place that is indelibly etched on the ventricles of my heart.

I mention this because the weather in Boston has been remarkably reminiscent of home this past week and I’ve been feeling more than a little homesick (heimwehkrank) as I listened to the rain pouring down outside my bedroom window and remembered so many nights spent similarly as a child in my bed at home.

This week I thought I’d share a little something I wrote about it:

It’s raining in Boston — a grey, cold rain that reminds of Christmas in California even though today is the first day of June. The sound of the rain dances in my soul and I feel blessed and washed clean of the weariness and heartbreaks that have gathered in me since the moment I first boarded a plane, almost seven years ago now, and flew away from the rocky beaches and tall trees I call home.

I boarded that plane with my heart in my throat but with a miracle stretching out before me — an unfolding of possible futures that had felt limitless.

As I flew across the country and away from childhood, as I descended into adulthood, I felt at once impossibly small and still larger than life, tucked away in the confines of my seat.

Now, seven years later, I no longer feel the same swell of possibility that floated in me as my heart caught in my throat. Seven years later and I feel bone-weary and over-wrought in a way that leaves me wondering, more days than not, whether it is still possible to keep on going when I feel so very tired.

And the miracle is that I do.

Day after day. Year after year.

Each morning I march off into the dawn like the “good” girl I’ve always aspired to be.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I can feel in me an exhausted yearning for tall trees and rocky beaches. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I miss my home some days the way one might miss a lost tooth — as though there is a palpable emptiness inside me that I remain unable to fill.

I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I long to go home. Someday.

On some not-so-distant future morning.

But not this morning. Because on this morning the rains have come to wash my weariness clean and I can almost imagine that the swish of cars driving by on soggy streets is the sound of spruce trees — swaying in the wind.

 

Now it’s your turn! What does Heimat mean to you?

 

No one wants to read your victim story

Do you want to tell a hero story or a victim story?
You get to choose.

I’ve been writing a lot of memoir lately. Partly, this is because writing memoir seems to be an important piece of my journey to tackle my decades long habit of hiding and my soul-crushing fear of being seen. Partly, it’s because memoir fascinates me.

When I set out to tackle the genre of memoir, the first thing I found myself confronted with is the flimsiness of the truth. After all, truth is what separates memoir from fiction.

Or is it? Memory is tricky and truth may be unknowable. Do I really remember the time I explained how lightning works to my mom at age four? Or have I just heard the story so many times I’ve reconstructed the memory based on the details of the story?

As memoirists our job is twofold. On the one hand, we vow to tell the truth as best we know it. On the other hand, memoir is not so much about the simple facts, the truths of our lives — memoir is about how we come to make sense of those facts, those truths. And because of this, every memoirist is faced with a choice:

What kind of story do you want your memoir to tell?

I’ve been participating in Anna Kunnecke’s Queen Sweep program for the past few weeks, and she has participants start by “sweeping” their stories. She encourages participants to move “from victim to hero” in the story of their own lives. She invites us to reconsider the way we talk to ourselves about our lives, to make the shift from “poor-put-upon me” to “kicking-ass-and-taking-names me”.

For me, the shift looks something like this:

A girl grew up. She did all the things she was supposed to do and just about killed herself bending over backwards to achieve success. In the end, it won her nothing except crippling exhaustion, a deadened heart, and a desk job she came to loathe more and more every day.

Sad, whiny victim-me is full of pouting and sad-faces. But what about hero-me? How does she see my life?

A girl grew up. She had a series of wonderful opportunities/adventures which led her to one of the best colleges in the country. There she got to study the mysteries of the universe alongside some of the smartest people in the world. After she graduated, she landed a job in her field that paid better than she’d dared to dream — and when it turned out she still wasn’t happy, she took matters into her own hands and set off on an adventure to redefine her purpose and reconnect with joy.

So, here’s the real question — whose story would you rather read? Because if I could only buy one of these stories, I’d pick the brave story of hero-me over the whiny, self-absorbed story of victim-me in a heartbeat.

It occurs to me to wonder whether this is all writing memoir is — the opportunity to meet your victim story on the page and discover the ways in which it’s actually the story of a hero.

Right now, I’m thinking the answer is yes — but feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments below!

And I want to make something else very clear — victim-story, hero-story — they’re not about whether or not you were a victim. They’re about how you choose to respond in the aftermath of your victimhood. No one escapes life without some bad things happening, and some people encounter more than their share of unpleasantness. These generally aren’t things we have control over. What we get to decide is how do we want to respond to the unpleasantness in our life? By choosing the hero-story over the victim-story we have the opportunity to re-empower ourselves and make courageous choices in the face of our circumstances.

I don’t know for sure, but I think that shifting your perspective about your life from victim to hero might just be the kind of powerful magic that has the potential to change everything.

So, which story do you choose?

Let me know in the comments below! And if you’re interested in reading something more on this topic I highly recommend this article by Anna Kunnecke.

And, if you’re feeling victim-y about something that’s happening in your life I invite you to ask yourself this: What action could I take in this situation that would make me feel like a badass?

And then go do that — because you deserve to be (and feel) awesome! (Example here.)

 

Are you saying No enough?

Saying NOWhen I graduated from college, five years and two degrees later, I entered the workforce. A temporary summer internship obtained through my Master’s thesis advisor turned into a full-time position and more than a year and half later I’ve found myself inexplicably and unexpectedly a cog in the nation’s corporate wheel. And while I’ve come to really like not being in school, it has honestly been the biggest adjustment I’ve ever had to make. Much bigger and harder than the adjustment required after leaving home and moving from California to Boston to attend college in the first place.

While moving across the country and starting college is often portrayed as the defining transition of a young life, what I’ve learned in retrospect is that school is still school. College was not so different from high school except that my parents were no longer a daily presence in my life — and the math was harder. In college your every move is scripted and choreographed, your every moment booked. Sure, you defined the context of your motions in picking your major and deciding which (if any) extra-curricular clubs or sports you will participate in. But after those few decision are made each semester, the next three months unfold largely beyond your own control. Assignments are due not when you decide to finally finish them, but rather when your professors decided they should be due.

College was an exercise in discovering how much Yes I could handle.

Yes, I can study for this test in 12 hours. Yes, I can write this essay in 7. Yes, I can write three sections of my thesis (amounting to some 40 pages) in less than a day. Yes, I will do these things even if I must drink so much tea that I make myself sick.

And, yes, today I still don’t think I have any regrets. College was a time of learning my boundaries, of measuring the length of my ability to stretch beyond the limits of my expectations.

But when I graduated I had to learn how to start saying No.

It was a tricky lesson because I had un-learned how to sit still and I had un-learned how to manage my time and I had learned how to fill my few free moments with hollow comforts (yes, I will watch that latest episode of White Collar now).

I needed to re-learn how to excise the habits from my life that were no longer serving me. I needed to re-learn how to say No to all the things that I had spent that last five years so happily saying Yes to. I needed to re-learn what it could mean to have free time.

I’d spent 5 years of my life being too-busy for the things that really mattered to me: for writing, for taking walks, for exercising, for cooking really good food. And because I was too-busy for the important things, the only things I felt I had time for were the really unimportant things: time for TV, and for surfing the internet, and an infinite array of other possible ways to kill 3 minutes here and 14 minutes there. Each of these activities helping to ease the resentment of having yet another assignment that I didn’t really want to do by providing the illusion of freedom.

I suffered from learned busyness.

The way out meant learning some hard lessons in saying No. And perhaps the worst thing was that I didn’t have to learn to say No to other people. It wasn’t like my life had become a dizzying array of commitments from which I desperately needed to disengage. Instead, I had fashioned a cage of my own making: a web of behaviors that helped me to forget how bored and alone and tired and empty I felt.

And learning to say No to myself, to break the chains of the time-wasting, soul-sucking habits I had so gleefully acquired during the years in which those same habits had felt like giddy misbehavior was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

In the past year I’ve finally managed to turn things around

I’ve given up a lot: I’ve said goodbye to pretty much every TV show I used to follow religiously, I’ve cancelled my Netflix account, I’ve drastically pared down the number of blogs in my RSS feed, and I’ve even starting doing my cooking all at once on Sundays to free up hours on weeknights.

These new-found hours were difficult to manage at first: I traded TV for online learning through EdX and then for online teleclasses, but with each trade I’ve moved one step closer to spending those hours on the things that really matter to me.

So that I can say today that I don’t think there’s all that much that’s still in need of pruning.

Today, I can say with absolute honesty that I’ve written each of the last six nights and I that fully intend to make that number seven.

I don’t remember the last time I managed that.

Now, I’d love to hear from you! Are there places in your life where you should be saying No more? Is saying too much Yes impacting your ability to achieve your dreams? Let me know in the comments below.