Make Your Dissent Sustainable

I’m feeling overwhelmed these days. At a time when my energy and focus is needed most, I am scattered more than ever.

And I’m an expert at self-management! I’ve had over 15 years of practice as a sole-practitioner, a soul-proprietor, an indy, writer, coach and SeeChange president (wink-wink). I am my own boss. I don’t take orders from the man. Every day it’s up to me to set the agenda, construct my day as I see fit, balancing my creative, business and social interests.

But right now, beneath this darkening sky of oppression, I am unsure, thrown-off my game. My vision is blurry.

I awaken each morning and wonder where to turn, how to focus my energy. I am lured right onto social media to check-up on the latest Trumpian drama and trauma, to post and comment and scream at my screen. I refuse to be in the dark. I’ve committed to get out of my liberal arm-chair and into action.  

I’ve marched, I’ve protested, I’ve sent emails, made phone calls, written letters to the editor and gotten on the TV news. While I live in Taxation-without-Representation DC, I’m finding ways to be heard. I co-organized and facilitated What NOW? An Evening of Drinks, Dialogue & Dissent event. Now we have a Facebook page with 150 members sharing, supporting, being dissent. (Please join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/whatnowdc/) I’ve taken non-violent direct action (NVDA) training and I’m committed to getting arrested this year!

Okay, I’m not like some friends who have turned activist PRO overnight!  Who have made this fight for freedom and justice their full-time job. These people are amazing and admirable and I honor and thank them.

But I am doing something.  It may not be enough, it’s never going to be enough. 

And herein lay the problem.

Even as I’m being pulled out of my work routine (and for good reason), devoting some time and effort to the cause, I’m ridiculing myself. 

One of the tricks of the time-energy-management trade I’ve employed for years is My Morning Pages. I’ve been a devout journeler for years, since high-school.  And more recently, in adulthood, I’ve been further encouraged by Julia Cameron (of The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write fame) to practice a daily routine of pouring it out on the page - first thing, first thoughts, each morning – and sometimes at night just before light’s out. 

It’s my way to get centered. It’s like having a status meeting with myself each day – accomplishments, challenges, next steps.

My morning pages include memories that pop-up as I’m brushing my teeth or washing the dishes that can lead to whole chunks or chapters of my memoir-in-progress.

I muse on ideas for my SeeChange clients, a new workshop for creatives, and the importance of finding your incubator within.

My journal pages can degenerate into to-do lists, and that is fine, as long as the writing doesn’t start there.

The idea is to let my brain run free, uninhibited, like a child tearing through a field or finger-painting with reckless abandon.  Unsensored. 

But guess what? 

I’ve been skipping my life-saving writing ritual of late. I’ve been drawn directly into email and social media to get my fix of what’s going down under this new, scary regime.

I have to know – I sometimes participate in actions – sharing posts – commenting, encouraging, raging, emailing or calling officials to get my voice heard. But more often than not I’m simply trying to keep up with what’s going down.

It’s fine, it’s okay, I try not to make myself wrong for it.  I’m buoyed by the blossoming, burgeoning activism among my friends and fellow-citizens. It IS the silver lining.

But the truth is, by 10 or 11 am, after forcing myself off the internet, I’m left scattered, discombobulated, unclear where I’m headed for the day. And worse:  adrenaline-infused and angry.

My creative juices have been sapped.  Sometimes I get up and grab something to eat to fill the directional void and hope I get some clarity as I stand over the counter cutting bananas into my hot cereal.

Like this morning. It’s a gray day.  I’ve just read an article called Trial Balloon for a Coup. Don’t click here if you don’t want to be distracted and so very upset. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5#.5dbwrwf8d

I know, I KNOW, this getting scared and pissed-off is just what they want. Their aim is to wear us down. I know it and I still let it happen.  Because the other side of it is also true:  We need the information to spur us into action.

But right after reading the article and sharing it around, I took a pause. I shutdown Firefox and turned my phone on airplane mode. I opened my AMP 2017 Journal file and paged-down to the bottom and typed: February 1, 2017 at the top.  Then I got writing.  

I wrote all over the place about this feeling of confusion. In the stillness, it got quiet enough to hear my thoughts. Ah-ha, I’m not making the space. Gradually, I could feel my weight settling into the chair, my body getting grounded.  I resisted the vague urge to get up, make another cup of tea or check the heat or grab a snack out of the pantry. 

I wrote this.

This is about sustainability.  How do we participate in this newly blossoming democracy, develop these new activist muscles, effectively?  How do last not just days or weeks but persist for months and years, maybe the rest of our lives?

The Buddhists call it Right Effort.  Not too much, not too little, just right. 

Shoot, I faced this in the Peace Corps, in pueblito Mexico, where the needs were so great, the unknowns so huge, the game of community development so new, the language and culture barrier so high…and most daunting of all, the expectations of myself out of whack.

I survived (and eventually thrived), though: I stood up for the women, learned the language, had some kind of impact. And they had an impact on me.

How do I find that here, now, the space and grace for sustainability? 

First by taking this pause in the regularly-scheduled programming to recognize:  I’m flailing around.  Then by writing this piece admitting to it.  Then by sharing these ideas and inviting input. 

Are others going through this too?

The Heart of Memoir

I had the good fortune, last week, to attend a book talk by my memoir hero, Mary Karr. Her first memoir, The Liars’ Club, opened my eyes, back in the 90s, to what’s possible with the form, joy and pain in the unvarnished truth, through the eyes of a child.

I began to devour memoirs back then (Nabokov, McCourt, Welty, Woolf and Wolfe), developing a quiet aspiration to tell my own story someday.

The other night, at Busboy & Poets, amidst a packed house, I devoured the author’s nuggets of wisdom on the craft, a few of them harder than others to swallow, washing them down with sips of mojito.

Mary Karr & Busboys & Poets

First and foremost, she told us, find your voice as a memoirist, the most interesting version of yourself. And yes, she clarified, it’s made-up.

I haven’t found that voice for Mexico yet, though I have heard it in fragments here and there.
Write (even the people you hate) with as much love as you can, said Karr.

For me that means the corrupt mayor, Don Bruno, the paternalistic Peace Corps bosses, the machismo engineers, the gossipy, dismissive Consejo. The whole cast of characters with love?

She also said: From the second you choose one event over another you’re shaping the past’s meaning. It’s a hell of a lot of responsibility.

She went on to say that sometimes you have to write a ton to get past the pages that don’t belong, like I did the first 100 pages of my Mexico book. But that’s nothing. Karr told us she had to lop-off 1200 pages of her memoir, Lit, before it set right. The DELete key is my most important tool.
 
During the Q&A, I forced myself to raise my hand. I stood-up and posed a question into the microphone. I had a million, but the one that won out was about my challenges writing and completing the story of my Peace Corps Service. ‘I got back in 2013,’ I told her. ‘Do I need more distance from the events?’ Here was my chance for some answers. (I mentioned, incidentally, that I had my Kickstarter backers – like an agent collective – waiting for the finished product.)

‘Oh, that’s tough,’ she acknowledged, and graciously thanked me for my service. Then she answered my question with a question:

‘Is there some way in which you were meant to change through the experience and didn’t OR some way you changed and aren’t ready to claim? Explore that.’

‘Yeah, do I have to?’ I grumbled under my breath, feeling my face turn red hot, and sat back down like a kid who’d gotten the answer (or in this case the question) wrong.

Okay, I admit, there’s stickiness there, like dried soda pop on the kitchen floor, and I keep stepping in it. I’m the President of SeeChange, for godsakes. I should have known better, done better, if not in changing Mexico, at least in changing my self.

What pops to mind is an infamous line of my mother’s, worn in to grooves of my record so it keeps repeating: ‘I have great things in mind for my daughter and I don’t want you fucking them up.’ Back then the you was a man. Now it’s universal, anyone (including me) that might get in my way.

Then I think of my wise and concerned friend, J, who tried coaching me through a rough patch in my service when the local board of sustainability to which I was assigned turned on me and the Peace Corps threatened to throw me out. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ J posed over Skype at about my six-month mark in Mexico, ‘that this experience could be doing you more harm than good?’

No, no, no, he didn’t get it. My friend was in development, yes, but a policy wonk, a diplomat, jet-setting around the world to negotiate treaties and wine and dine with the powers that be. On the ground work was a different ball game. He just didn’t get it.

But in the end, had he been right? I had (hidden) aspirations to change the world, at least a small corner of it. I had stuck it out, two years and three months. But what had I accomplished? Returning home to DC, I was back in the same old place, maybe I’d even gone a few giant steps backwards.

I don’t want to tell that tale, a story of disillusionment. But it’s there. Ways I hoped to change and didn’t. Ways I changed and don’t want to see. Can I face them? Can I handle the truth with tenderness? Can I see beyond the parternalismo and machismo and corruption, and my own getting in the way, to recognize that I did do some good, maybe even some ‘great things’?

F. Scott Fitzgerald says the definition of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing truths simultaneously. When I’m there, I’ll be ready to write. Or perhaps I write to get there.

Mary Karr's new book is called The Art of Memoir and can be found on Amazon or her website http://www.marykarr.com/books.php.

Change it Up

Beneath the thick canopy of late summer foliage I could hear my panting breath, feel my shoes smacking the pavement, my limbs heavy and stiff as tree trunks. ‘Never have been a morning person,’ I thought, wishing I could stop dead in my tracks and walk. The park was virtually empty. I seemed the only crazy soul out in the mid-August heat in Washington.

But the pain didn’t stop my mind from thinking, planning, ruminating, running in circles way faster than my legs could go. ‘Could I really just stop writing Mexico?’

‘Just 21 days,’ said my yoga/journalist friend Marilyn over lunch the day before. She’d planted a seed – or maybe it was a bomb. She knew I’d been toiling over my direction. I drew an image in my notebook, me at the trail head with several paths emanating outward and I was stuck there, frozen in indecision. Which story to focus on, which way to go?

‘Change things up,’ she suggested. ‘Whatever you’re doing now, drop it and do something else.’
The Mexico book had been weighing on me. ‘I’ve made promises to my backers. But I can't find my rhythm.’

‘Twenty-one days won’t kill you, the world won’t end. But it’s long enough to see where your energy is.’

At the ranger station, my half-way point, I doubled over to catch some breath. My energy was low. ‘Usually not this tired at two miles,’ my comparing mind hissed. I compared myself to myself most harshly.

Resting my hands on my slimy knees, I watched the sweat cascade to the ground.

'Change it up.' I had listened and broken my routine, hitting the trail in the morning rather than my more usual and comfortable evening hour. That was the trouble.

Suddenly a cardinal darted across my vision and into the brush. I could feel myself smile at the dazzling flash of red amidst all that green. Suddenly the creek, which had been running alongside me since the start, was audible, rushing raucously across the rocks, the thrilling sound of movement, even if relatively sluggish this late in the season.

Suddenly I was in my body, feeling the rise and fall of my back with my breath. I stood up, wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and got a notion. ‘I’m going in,’ I heard myself say. Fifteen years running this same 4-mile Rock Creek course several days a week, and I’d never, ever stopped to cool my feet. Always going someplace, on my way. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Can't have that.

I started my legs back up, plodding across the bridge and u-turning onto the left bank toward home. ‘Don’t be silly,’ the saner me puffed, ascending the hill, pebbles crunching beneath my feet. ‘Just keep going, get home, things to do.’ That was Leo the lion, my rising sign, powerful but oftentimes a stick in the mud. My Pisces, the fish, by contrast, was more fluid, spontaneous, even playful.

As I coasted down, hopping horse dung, my steps lighter now across the bridle path, I found myself eyeing the creek for an access point: not too sunny or muddy a spot and watch-out for the poison ivy. The Fish was calling the shots now, drawing me toward the water. As I inched down the sandy back I could hear Leo (or was it my Mom) warning me: don’t you get those shoes wet.

I found a foothold on some protruding roots and, bending over, maintaining my balance, untied and slipped off my sweaty shoes and socks, one then the other, and perched them on a dry fallen limb. Stepping in I could feel the cool of the water around my calves, the soft slime of the river bed on my soles. A tiny gasp of ahhh seeped out of me as I stood inside the creek feeling its currents pushing against my skin. It was a whole new perspective, down low, watching the water flow south toward its destination, over and around boulders, logs, anything in its way.

I ran my fingers along the surface of the water, tiny salamanders darting around my toes, and rinsed my legs of the grit. A lone monarch butterfly fluttered by searching for a place to light.

Then an image of a phrase appeared across my screen of my quieted mind: ‘We had to unhitch our trailer from his.’

I climbed up the bank, repeating the phase. ‘…unhitch our trailer from Dad’s…if I could only convince Mom.’

Ever since my mother died two summers ago, images like this from my past had been popping up, especially when I ran. Moving my body set my mind free, though sometimes there are things you don’t want to see.

’21 days, it’s not gonna kill you.’

Back on the bank I found a log to perch upon. I brushed my feet of the icky dirt and leaves, pulled my socks on, one then the other, then my shoes. Tugging at the laces, I make a perfect loop around my thumb and for a brief moment there I was a kid again, what it was like when you felt a sense of quiet satisfaction over the smallest thing. A soft breeze wafted through the trees. The cicadas’ song crescendoed and diminuendoed beneath the canopy.

Hopping off the log, gazing down and my feet, I could feel the solid ground beneath me. It was time to take-off again, the muse was urging me. She’d been tugging on my skirt, tapping me on the shoulder, begging me to pay attention to her for the longest time. Now with this seed in my pocket, I felt the urgency too.

Descending out of the woods, feet slipping on the loose rock, I was eager to arrive, to sit on the front stoop, sweat dripping onto my legal pad, and let the truth come pouring out.

                                                                       ~~~

After the night in the family room on Friars, for the first time in my life standing up to Dad, it was a strange and unjust domino effect that led the cops back to me, and I was the guilty one. I was the one paying for the sins of the father. And it was just the beginning.

But I'd been surprised at how small my father seemed when I squared shoulders to face him, my fists clenched, ready to fight. ‘Fight me, not her,’ I yelled, standing taller than my shrimpy five feet. ‘I was the one who broke the door, I’m the guilty one,’ I set the record straight. And I watched him lean away from me.

It was just like that bully dog Cesar who constantly chased me down Wilmette, once up a tree, then jumped for my dangling legs and bit into my calf.

‘Son of a bitch.’ Blood was dripping down my leg and my sweaty hold was slipping, and eventually I had no choice but to drop to the ground and face him.

‘Cesar go home,’ I screamed and the voice came from a place deep inside me. It was ferocious. The little mutt backed down, simpering as he crossed Wilmette with his tail between his legs.

Our father had terrorized us for long enough. My mom lie whimpering on the floor of the family room. And for the first time, and for just a fleeting moment, I saw him for who he was: a weak man who could not, would never change. And in that moment I knew I was done with him.

We had to unhook our trailer from his and be free to go down our own road. He was only weighing the family down, holding us back from our lives, whatever they were going to be. I could see that so clearly. Why didn’t my mom?

Trapped by Commitment

Finally, after 17 straight days of rain, the sun has broken through. I feel the pull to go into my garden and dig in the wet dirt, plant my roses and arugula, while the window of opportunity is open. But what I really have on my agenda is to write – write through and finish Shadow and Light.

And I’m going to. I feel the breeze blow through the open window and catch the slant of morning rays through the trees. Mottled light dances on the hostas. My lady slipper orchid basks in a patch of sun that brightens the corner of the dining room. Isn’t it enough notice?

But a bigger question dogs me this morning, my lens pulled back to wide angle: What are you up to, Annie?  What really matters in this world? 

On the cushion for a brief, fidgety moment, it occurs to me:  I’m fluttering around, like I’ve throughout my life, the quintessential floater, from flower to flower. I get confused. I’m not sending a clear message to the universe about what I want.  So it’s confused too.

I do this to hedge my bets.  Of course I do.  It was a habit learned so early, or ingrained in my genetic code, or both.  And in all that brilliant coping…I end up with nothing. Or what feels like nothing. Though I know that’s what the Dark Force calls it to keep me running scared.

It doesn’t help that one of the things I’ve chosen to do with my life is one of the hardest, most unrewarding endeavors in the world:  This writing. No wonder I chose it.  The rejection is endless and the moments of triumph so rare, it adds more fuel to my fire that I’m worthless. And the Dark Force grins with sinister glee.

I feel trapped in the commitment I made to myself to write this Mexico book.  There’s no way I’m giving up!

Didn’t this happen in the Peace Corp too?  Didn’t this happen in my marriage? Didn’t this happen in my adolescence? Imprisoned in my parents’ drama, I’d do anything to escape, and yet was compelled to stay, protect, fix the un-fixable. Confined by my own commitment, I would not let the bastards take me down. So I persevered. And when it didn’t work out how I’d envisioned, again and again, I got the point where I couldn't trust my own commitment.  

Do something.  Help yourself.  Recognize this. You’re caught in a double-bind. You can’t WIN this game, sucker!

It’s almost comical. I can feel a tiny bubble of laughter rise out of my throat.  Ha ha ha. That giddy acknowledgement leads to a question: What matters?  The meditation practice matters, because it allows me to step back, not be the situation but the observer and, for a brief moment, laugh at it. That, and the writing, will save my lonely life, if the writing, ironically, doesn’t kill me.

Does anyone else feel this way?  Or only the childless mothers out there whose commitment to their own freedom has left them with way too much time to ponder?

Back to birthing the book, pushing through the pain. I’m long overdue. 

But first I take a moment to gaze at my happy lady slipper.

Merry Christmas Muse ~ Naughty & Nice

It’s a soggy, warm one, a climate change Christmas in Washington, gray and misty and oh so quiet. No racing cars on Park Road today, no noisy neighbors or clamoring renovation projects; only the sound of a few birds tweeting and crows cawing.

If I pretended, I could convince myself I was in a cabin in the woods, a perfect place to write. Santa’s gift to me is this peace. 

I have a goal, dear supporters, to get this Mexico manuscript sample to you by the end of the year. Just around the corner, eek!

I’ve had a few distractions, but good ones. Your encouragement has fueled a writing habit that’s branched into other territory. I’ve re-discovered a book I started writing back in 1998, and I’ve taken some spare time to breathe new life into it. I’ve been playing with short-form too, some opinion pieces and personal essays, submitting them to publications and inviting the rejections, which often come in the form of silence. But this is part of the writing game I’m playing, down on the field, getting banged around. And I’ve never been happier.

As Steven Pressfield (http://www.stevenpressfield.com), author of The War of Art, says, when you beat Resistance and do The Work, even the blemishes on your face clear-up. (Or did I say that?)

To get to The Work each day, I warm-up with a little free-writing. I got zinging one morning in Ptwon about a holiday event I’d attended the night before.Then, that evening at the public library, after I’d shut-down and packed-up to go home, I discovered a gathering in the periodical room. A monthly meeting of the Writer’s Voice Café, folks were sharing stories of their holidays. I had no holiday stories, so I sat in the back and listened, until they’d run out of readers. I signed their register and slipped out. But half-way down the block I remembered: I did have something.

I ran back, and they welcomed me eagerly, someone to fill the dead air. They helped me plugged-in my computer so I could read from my screen, and they adjusted the goose-neck microphone so I could reach.

Here is what I shared (for adults only), this version a little prettied-up for submission.

Naughty and Nice: The Cup of Generosity Runneth Over in Provincetown

On a recent off-season sojourn in Provincetown, a fingertip of land at the end of the hand at the end of the arm of Cape Cod, after weeks of solitary writing, I happened upon The Kook, a gathering of the townies at Grotto Bar. Underground, with special guests Penny Champayne and Whitney Houston (aka Qya Cristal), sprightly elves danced, baring cheeky cheeks, the club mix thumped, and Santa’s Helpers offered-up tits-for-tots shooters between bountiful bosoms.

I felt like a voyeur on the fringe, DC product that I am, sipping my Dark and Stormy, too timid to dive in to the marshmallow folds. I saw that it took some skill, a team effort, the receiver bending on one knee as the titty teapot tipped forward. Good to the last drop, and sugary sweet, one imbiber reported. All for a good cause.

That’s what kept me out past my bedtime, gave me the excuse to partake in the first place: the cause. Sure, you say. No, honestly, I insist. Though I didn’t realize exactly what I was getting myself into when I got there, that the entire contents of my wallet would be empty by the time I left.

In a place know for the first Pilgrims’ landing, lighthouses and lobster, and fun in the sun with the queens, queers and bears, I saw another side of Ptown. It was the workers in the house, after their shifts, waiters and bartenders, performers and artists, dropping fivers in the collection trough for a pink tit shot, funding Santa wishes taped to the wall, ice skates for 10-year-old Vicky and a Star Wars Lego set for 8-year-old Dan. These children of working class families live in a place where locals have been priced right out of their own market. Amidst a sea of posh seaside DINK retiree cottages, so called ‘tiny houses’ selling for a mil, there’s just one low income housing project; and the waiting list is reportedly a mile long.

The event organizers, a gay couple in this for the 17th ‘straight’ year, were vibrant at the helm. Scott Martino played the potty-mouthed elfin MC; and his partner, a drag performer out of costume in blue jeans and Hawaiian shirt, sang twisted Christmas tunes, thanking Ptown for supporting him through his career, and matching the contents of the collection trough after each round. Their generosity and resourcefulness was like something out of the Peace Corps play book: 'Do what you can with what got where you are.'

These people were doing plenty. As a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Mexico 2010-12), I know how hard it can be to rally the community. As an out-of-towner, I was delighted to participate, stuffing my bills in the till, and a big one after Streisand’s lip-sync of jah-jah-jah-jah-jingle bells. 

Oh what fun! Generosity is alive and well in Provincetown. And those lucky kids will have presents under the tree this Christmas.