Putting Myself At the Top of The List

I remember the first time I heard the term "self-care." From a psychologist, naturally. I remember being flummoxed, thinking "Huh. Now what does that mean?"

I shudder to think how not care-ful I used to be (sometimes still can be) with myself. I was the high emperor of powering through, staying up all night, forgetting to eat until I was ready to collapse. I was my own slavedriver, poised above the sled yelling mush! mush! Faster into the night!

I see now some of what it was about. It was about saying yes to everybody so that they would love and approve of and be pleased with me. It was about asking for permission to be alive, to exist. It was about having no clue who I was. It was about the Cinderella thing, and the martyr thing, and a general lack of control and/or self-worth.

I remember that the psychologist wouldn't pin down for me exactly what taking care of oneself meant. As always, I was looking for someone else to give me the rules to follow. Eventually I figured out that it's tricky, because it means different things to different people, and even different things to the same person depending on the situation, the day, the hour.

This Year, Resolve Not To Improve So Much

I’ve practiced self-improvement as a full-contact sport for about as long as I’ve been sentient. Since early adolescence I’ve surrounded myself with to-do lists and schedules, workout regimes, goal-setting schemes. I've tabulated recipes of habits, activities, routines that I can add, subtract, and multiply so that I might finally be able to achieve that elusive condition of…what exactly?

Perfection? Completion? Nirvana?

              

The truth is, I am a junkie for achievements, accomplishments, and approval. Pirate Redbeard sometimes teases me about being a praiseaholic. And it’s kind of true. Because as long as it’s external approval that feeds that inner void, all I ever get is a temporary fix, only to crave more when the buzz wears off.

              

But 2011 has, in fact, provided me with some pretty big, wonderfully liberating paradigm shifts. Increasingly, I’ve been able to get off the approval-junkie treadmill. How, you ask?

The short answer is therapy. The slightly longer answer is:

            

1. Changing how I think about “enoughness.” My lust for gold stars is related to a pesky deep-seated belief I accidentally acquired that I am somehow not enough as I am. Only after pulling off this next impossible feat will I finally, at long last, be "enough”…except that it’s never enough. There’s always another mountain beyond the one I just climbed. So, it helps if I can:

2. Embrace continual change. This is one of those obvious-sounding ones that is easy to understand intellectually but way harder to actually live with. Sure, sure, the only constant is change, I’ve heard it a thousand times, got it, let’s move on…until I lose my wallet and suddenly it’s like “DEAR GOD WHY? WHY ME? ALL IS DARKNESS."

            

It helps (sort of) just to understand that as long as we’re living, there’s going to be new problems, new adventures, losses and gains, experiments of questionable utility, wrong turns, soaring victories and catastrophic failures. Maybe it’s possible with time to learn to approach these dignity, acceptance, and grace…

            

Oooooooor maybe not. Maybe for the rest of life every new bump in the road will be accompanied with a Greek chorus of wailing, teeth-gnashing, hair-rending, self-pity, and bleak, bleak despair.

And you know what? I’m OK with that. Because I’m all about:

3. Accepting imperfection. It’s cool! We humans are deeply flawed.That's like, the definition of human. Google wabi-sabi - imperfection has beauty! Besides, this whole idea of "being enough" is extremely relative. Next time I start to verbally abuse myself for not rushing to the chance to whistle while I work at a tedious and/or unpleasant task as cartoon birds land on my shoulders...maybe I can keep it in perspective by asking myself a few questions:

-Are you a serial murder?

-Have you kicked any puppies lately?

-Have you acted on any of the jealous rage fantasies?

-Are you a fugitive from the law?

-Are you, at this moment, flagrantly violating some deeply-held tenet of your personal moral code?

No? Great! 

Maybe, for now, that's enough. 

What about you, Gentle Reader? Where are you going to cut yourself some freakin' slack this year?

We Can Dance If We Want To

I promised someone that if she started writing again, I would too. She’s two to three posts ahead of me already, and yet I’ve found it hard to get started, and here’s why.

            It’s frightening to put yourself "out there". It’s scary to tell the truth about yourself and your life. Especially for those of us who are so invested in making it seem like we have it all together, we know what we’re doing, we have a plan, darnit. Especially for those of us who are allergic to rejection.

            Last night I watched Celebrity Rehab Revisited in which they played a clip of one of said celebrities. She was returning to ballet class after a long time away. The teacher told her that for anyone who is a dancer, it doesn’t matter how long they’ve been away, they can return to the barre at any time and they are home.

            This struck me as a beautiful way to talk about the way that we pursue creative things. This struggling addict/porn star/dancer/person, it was too late for her to become a star ballerina (the implants didn’t help either), but the teacher’s words reminded me that people dance for other reasons than to be a star. You dance because you like it. You dance because when you do, you feel at home.

            This is what it’s like for people who have been into writing, too… people such as myself. Although I learned a lot about writing by studying it as an academic subject, it also changed writing for me. What used to be a private, primal, personal act that I did for reasons that I didn't fully understand, became twisted up with grade point averages, approval, certificates of merit. It was about people liking you or not, approving or not, and that was maybe not good for me because what I found I loved even more than writing was the approval of others. The writing was the meat and potatoes, the approval and ass-kissing was the blow. It was easy to write because you wanted to be a star.

            But I think writing here on a small corner of the internet will be good for me. Since I’ve been gone I decided to go to grad school to become a school counselor. There were many reasons, but one was that I decided to stop fighting myself. For many years I was trying not to be what I already was. So, fine, so I'm sensitive, so I understand people's feelings, so I want to help people. So what? I thought it might be better if I were some other way. 

            Writing has been the same for me. I’ve been fighting that, too. It might be better not to write, instead to learn how to be a bookkeeper, a naturalist, a puppeteer. It might be better to fight against myself. Oddly enough, it was that scourge, standardized testing, that got me thinking differently about it.  I’ve always minimized what people have called my “gifts” -- that whole Marianne Williamson fear of adequacy thing -- but seeing that delicious high verbal score there in black and white, on the GRE report, which is ostensibly an objective measurement, it made me kind of go “Hmmmm”. No seriously, it seemed to say, this girl knows about words.  So why fight it? Why knock myself out trying to be above average at numbers when I'm already above average at words? Why force yourself to be a right-y if you’re just naturally a lefty?

            I worry that when I write I am too intense, too serious, too sincere, too sentimental. I know the style is to be hip and sarcastic, full of irony and bite, frenetic with cultural references. And yet I also know from all my studies that you can’t write for other people. Other people only confuse things, taking turns telling you either that you are too clever or too dumb to live. They offer you big, snowy-white piles of praise and a razor. They promise you that you’re going to be a big, big star.

            You can’t write for them, and you can’t write to prove to yourself how desperately clever you are. Your best audience, your ideal reader, is one of your oldest friends: what writers who write about writing often call “the page.” It is your best, most honest critic, because it never says anything at all. It will silently accept anything you say. It gives you infinite room to keep going. Even if everyone else laughs in your face it’s still there, silent as ever. It doesn’t matter if you’ll never make it to Lincoln Center, because you’ve already made it home.