Poetry Thursday: Finding your voice

This post is #4 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

You begin by following the ones who went before.

Step by step you walk,
straining to find the right set of footprints,
for the trails lead everywhere,
everywhere.
Up mountains, through thickets,
into caves and crevasses,
clearly the work of those crazy, spelunking limericists,
marveling at the wonders the giants have left in their wake,
carved into trees
chipped into stones
blooming in rows
or artfully planted
to look random.

The maps, they never seem to work quite right.

Is this the lake? Was I supposed to turn there?
This road seems so much narrower
than the one in the picture,
than the one in the song,
than the one in my head.

I must be lost, you think.
I will wander this land for all eternity,
traveling in circles,
looping back on myself,
around and around.

I will never get There.

And then one day,
the light slants down at a particular angle
which you both notice
and do not
and the air feels familiar
but completely different
and there are no other footsteps but yours
and you are walking—no, you are walking,
blazing a trail for the next intrepid soul,
scattering your own seeds
and songs
and fairy messages
along the way.

xxx
c

Image inside the frame by Nikki McClure, one of a series of pieces from her beautiful yearly calendars. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011. After that, no dice, Bryce.

Award, schmaward

This post is #3 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Believe it or not, I was sort of a nerd back in the day.

Not the very smartest nerd, of course. Just the almost-smartest nerd from a fairly shallow pool, and one whom the nuns felt would be the best all-around candidate for some award that some nice alumna had decided to gift the school with.

I'm not being coy about the name of the award; I truly do not remember it. While it seemed like the high point of my eight-grade year, my culminating season of a pretty winning eight (soon to be followed by a near-disastrous four, especially socially), I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that award, or what it purported to reward me for. I don't even remember if there was money involved, and I almost always remember money.

Here's what I do remember from my eighth-grade year at Sacred Heart Elementary School on Sheridan Road in Chicago, IL: Frances Kent.

Mrs. Kent was my eighth-grade English teacher, and the first teacher I remember who specifically, carefully, and generously urged me on to write. Perhaps she saw some promise there. Perhaps she felt herself to be something of a kindred spirit. In hindsight, it's clear that she was a Second Wave Hot Ladynerd, what with her fabulous legs kicking out from under her knee-length pleated skirts, and her freckled nose, and her little round nerd spectacles.

Whatever it was that made her forgo what was surely a better-paying job in pretty much any other field where writing and smarts were required, I'm eternally grateful to her for her service, and her name is forever engraved upon my heart as surely as her hand is visible in my work. As my friend Daniel says, "...without women writers, I wouldn't exist."

xxx c

The love you take

This post is #1 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Almost four years ago to the day, I went to a lunch that changed my life.

The organizer, Bob McBarton, had been after me (gently) to attend one of his literary "salons" for some time. Every time I read the email announcements, I was tempted: he brought in some really fantastic people to talk books, politics, and culture, around a pretty sweet table.¹

But when I'd look at the accompanying attendee list, always lengthy Word attachments, to accommodate the weight of the bios, I'd chicken out. Never mind the guest speakers, even the attendees were luminaries in their various fields, each of them hugely accomplished, and in "real" endeavors, not this b.s. futzing around I'd done in advertising and acting and my silly little blog. They'd published books (multiple books, in some cases) tried significant cases, produced award-winning films, run cities. One of them had overcome physical obstacles that made my Crohn's onset look like a paper cut, and gone on to succeed in multiple high-profile positions in multiple incredibly tough-to-crack industries.

Finally, though, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went. I wound up seated between the mayor of a nearby town and a couple of nice, unassuming ladies in the general vicinity of my age. Of course, I was way too uninformed to talk about the homeless problem with hizzoner, so I turned my attention to the women, Keren Taylor and Allison Deegen, the executive and associate directors, respectively, of a local nonprofit called WriteGirl. They'd spent the better part of the past six years helping hundreds of teenage girls not only get through high school and into college, but become confident, well-read, joyous communicators.

I was talking about changing the world through writing; they were doing it.

One girl at a time.

* * * * *

There's a little test I use when I'm coming up with something, an essay, a song, a poem, a talk, and trying to get at a Truly True Truth: if it makes me either (1), laugh out loud; or (2), burst into tears, it's a keeper. Because as you well know if you've ever lived through a highly emotional time, an illness, a death, a natural disaster, a knock-down-drag-out with your honey, laughter and tears sit so close to each other, they might as well be making out in the balcony.

I have cried at every WriteGirl workshop I've been to. I've also rarely laughed so joyously as I have there, nor felt more hope for humanity. These are amazing girls, all of them. They vary in their levels of introversion and extraversion, boldness and shyness, just like the rest of us, but each of them has been 100% present and committed at every workshop I've been to. They throw themselves into the exercises, even when the exercises challenge them or feel a little weird at first. They show up, week after week, to work with their mentors in between the monthly group workshops. They engage, they ask questions, they play, and they write. Oh, boy do they write, and how. You want to laugh and cry, brother, you get yourself to a WriteGirl meeting.²

No less amazing are the women who volunteer their time to mentor the girls, to organize the workshops, to corral the bazillion details that go into running an organization like this. Need I tell you that money is always, always tight? It is. What Keren and her team manage to do on the money they receive is matched only by the astounding calm with which they manage the constant doubt of where the next buck is coming from.

For once, I want these wonderful women not to worry: I want them to know that $50,000 is coming, and in 50 days, and from you. From us.

* * * * *

Did you know that everyone and his brother's band is doing a Kickstarter-type campaign these days? It's true, look it up.

Well, I'm throwing my hat into the ring. And possibly what's directly beneath it.³

For my 50th birthday, I want to raise $50,000 for WriteGirl. In 50 days. So let's get cracking.

There's an IndieGoGo page you should go to right now. You'll see various giveaways for various contribution levels.

Some of it is new and fun and exceptionally affordable. I had a number of designer and artist friends whip up some custom desktop wallpapers. There are MP3s! Of some of your favorite songs, and some of mine, all from women artists!

Some of it is stuff you cannot get anywhere else. Most pointedly, I do not do any copywriting anymore, but for a price, you can hire me to write your bio. Or your own silly-but-effective anthem, or your own poem that will make you cry. (Or one of the girls will, your choice!)

Or, if you're really loaded and looking for a way to relieve yourself of $50,000 in a hurry, I will dedicate my first book to you. (Which would also mean I'd feel obligated to finally put one out there, so if you're one of the people who've been patiently waiting and you have a friend with 50,000 spare dollars, hit 'em up.)

You can also donate without taking a "gimme," if you're so inclined. Or buy something as a gift for someone else, their own personalized-by-me Field Notes book, for example. An anniversary or birthday song. A love poem. It would be very much in the whole giving-is-getting spirit of things.

Which brings me to my last point: this is not for me, but it is entirely for me.

* * * * *

This whole project has been a combination of long-term thinking and short-term scramble.

Amazingly, so far, things have been falling into place, but that's the angels' work, not mine. Because while I was not too scared to envision myself bald, or even to envision raising what is, and there's no other way to put this, a fuckton of money in an insanely short time, I was too scared until recently to ask for help.

When I finally did, the most amazing thing of all happened: people said "yes." My friend Mike Monteiro said, Yes, I'll make another run of the "Old" t-shirts for you, and we'll give all the money to the girls. (link coming soon!) My friend-turned-client Jean MacDonald said, Yes, you can give away copies of TextExpander, how many do you want? Jim Coudal said, Yes you can have a bunch of Field Notes, and by the way, you might want to customize them, and here's what we use.

My friends Lisa and Heather said, Yes, we'll make a video, and you can stay at our place while we shoot. My friend Jennifer offered up her house for the party, her HOUSE.

My friends Jason & Jodi and Peleg and Judy and Adam immediately pledged financial support, and in amounts that took my breath away. My friend Tim offered up his team to build the website and then, when I waited too long and missed my window, my other friend Gabriel stepped in to save me. Every friend I've approached, Danielle and Dyana, Alice and Eden, Pace & Kyeli, Michelle and Jill, Josh and Donna, plus dozens more I'm forgetting now and hundreds more who signed up for the early notification list said, Yes, we'll help you, and yes, we'll get that money for these girls.

As I've said about myself before, I'm a pretty loquacious motherfucker, but when it comes to describing how this outpouring of love and support have affected me, I am at a loss for actual words.⁴ They're inadequate, or at least, they are in this form and in this moment when I am, to put it mildly, somewhat knackered.

That I have such friends and in such quantities is remarkable. What is left now is for me to rise to the occasion, to try being just as remarkable.

For the next 50 days, I will be blogging and emailing and tweeting and calling. I will lay aside my fear of asking and ask. Oh, boy, will I ask!

And at the end of this road, whether I fail or succeed at raising every cent of this money, and don't kid yourself, failure is always an option, if I have given it my all, I will receive my gift: to have given my all in pursuit of something greater than me.

But DAMN, I want the money for those girls, too. So let's get crackin', shall we?

xxx c

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¹Hey, food counts. Just sayin'.

²Of course, if you're actually a brother, you'll have to take my word for it. It's a dude-free zone, except for a few actors who volunteer to play the male roles in the presentation at the end of the screenwriting workshop.

³That's right: if we raise the whole $50K, I'm shaving my head at the culminating shindig. BALD, BABY. To the skin.

⁴Laughing and incoherent blubbering, however, I have been doing quite a bit. I can barely open up my email these days without bursting into tears of joy. This is a mighty fine thing, although it draws stares in coffee shops.

Why you're all invited to my birthday party

Since reaching my majority, birthdays have been fraught for me.

It's not so much because I've feared the rolling-over of the odometer to this or that number, but because I don't know what to do with birthdays. And something tells me they need to be noted somehow, if only to maintain a loose grip on time.¹

Now it's easy enough to default to a special dinner out, or to coerce some friends into sponsoring one in. Even a big trip isn't hard to wrangle, especially for the "zero" years. For my 36th, a rather theatrical friend even treated me to a novel celebration that included a one-on-one sharing of journal-style entries on my life, with a ritualistic ingestion of wine-soaked strawberries to punctuate each year.²

For my 43rd birthday, though, I finally took a real risk and threw myself a real party. I'd hosted one for my 38th, but it was strictly a small-potatoes, have-a-few-friends-up-to-the-new-pad sort of deal, the sort of affair where if only you, your boyfriend, and a few losers with nothing else to do of a Saturday night turn up, you can totally play it off as intentional.

This time, I went way out, for me, for then, on a limb. I approached some friends who owned a restaurant about taking it over for the night. I wore contacts and makeup and a, for me, even still, cute outfit. I bought a basket of disposable cameras³ for group documentation. Most critically, I invited my friends, all my friends, from all my various interests, rather than just the jocks or the burnouts or the West Siders or the East Siders or the nerds or the theater nerds or the other theater nerds. (I jest, but only slightly, the narcissism of minor differences is never so pronounced as it is when you get groups of performers together.) I invited guys I'd dated whom I was now friends with. In fact, I think the only people I didn't invite were two guys who'd dumped me, and I still invited our mutual friends.

There were reasons for this rather dramatic change of affairs, this freaky, new-found bravery.

You see, in 2001, just two days before my last Big Round Number Birthday, the world blew up.⁴ A year later, on my 41st birthday, I was hospitalized with my Crohn's onset: I got a colonoscopy and the nurses got my cake. Not exactly sweet times at the disco. (Although that bloody epiphany is still my all-time greatest birthday gift to date.) And the following year, I spent my birthday in Florida watching my 70-year-old father dying. Neither of which things, for the record, is any fun. At all.

Which is why, in 2003, 50 or so of my closest friends who'd never laid eyes on each other before found ourselves at an Argentinean restaurant in a Hollywood strip mall, eating SCD-legal food and drinking SCD-legal adult beverages at my "Breaking the Birthday Hex" party.

I was never so nervous before, never so happy during, never so gratified after any birthday thing I'd done, ever.

Not because my friends finally met in a gigantic DIY celebration of kumbaya spirit: after some perfunctory politenesses, people pretty much drifted off to whatever groups they self-selected for and I pretty much bounced from table to table for the balance of the evening. I was happy during and gratified after because I was nervous before, because in throwing this particular party in this particular way, I did something I was afraid of. It was absolutely the scariest and most wonderful gift I'd ever given myself.

From my perspective eight years further down the road, the Breaking the Birthday Hex celebration marked a huge step forward for me when it came to owning my life and integrating it into my life's work. My bloody epiphany may have woken me up and the autobiographical play (with music!) that I'd co-written, produced and performed earlier that year certainly gave me a huge surge of confidence, but this was mine, all mine. It was a decision I made, not one that was thrust upon me, and it was my name alone on the marquee. Friends contributed, of course, there would have been no party were it not for my restaurant-owning friends. But it would have been Colleen's Dud Party, not Colleen's Restaurant-Owning Friends' Débâcle, had things gone south.

I came out of that birthday feeling more like myself than I had since I was 10, and stronger than I had, ever. I think it's no coincidence that less than a month later, I took my first of what has turned out to be many solo road trips, or that less than two months later, I launched communicatrix-dot-com. I'd finally started to live out loud.

But never REALLY loud. Since Breaking the Birthday Hex, I've plugged away at things assiduously, but quietly, as quietly as one can plug, anyway, when one's plugging-away takes place principally via the internet. I have put my time and energies into building a body of work, this blog, then this newsletter, this column, this speaking (so called)-career.

Along the way, I've met a lot of people. A lot of very different people. Yes, we're all special snowflakes, but like snowflakes, we cluster. You will not find much overlap between the attendees at a typical Toastmasters meeting (if there's even one of those) and the people whose work populated the leaderboard of Dean Allen's late, lamented Favrd. Nor will you find many, if any, of either of those two clusters hanging out at a Biznik meetup or talking shop on kernspiracy or hanging out on the actor boards. If there even still are actor boards in 2011.

For my birthday this year, I need everyone at the same metaphorical table, or at least in the same metaphorical Argentinean restaurant. I am as nervous about doing that as I am that my Big Scary Birthday thing will be a whopping and highly public flop. Which you'll understand when you see what it is, next Monday. You'll either be all "Wow! That is big and scary and I'M IN!" or you won't. And if you're not, make no mistake: it will flop. Highly and publicly.

Make no mistake: I want to succeed. Both because it will be awesome for a whole lot of people if I can pull this off and because I am one of the most competitive motherfuckers on the planet.

But even if it flops, I will have tried. No one will die. (Well, not because of this, anyway.) It's almost guaranteed that a handful of people, young girls, whom I might argue are some of the most important people, period, will be better off. All of these are good things. Especially the part about people not dying. Almost always good when that doesn't happen.

So hold a good thought for me. Really, less a thought for me in particular than for anyone out there beholding the Scary while doing it anyway. I don't care who it is or how easy it looks from the outside, IT AIN'T. Even if you're looking up. Maybe especially then. The landmarks become familiar as you circle the mountain upward but the air gets thinner and the path, narrower. That can be hard on older bones.

Did I mention I'm turning 50?

xxx c

¹This goes double for someone living as I do: childless, in endlessly sunny Southern California. With neither height notches on the doorframe nor seasons to mark it, one runs the risk of discovering that time is not, in fact, infinite juuuust as it's about to run out. I've witnessed a few of those deathbed wakeup calls, brother, and they ain't pretty.

²It was not at all unpleasant; it was also not at all something I'd even think about trying past age 35. And even then, make sure you have cab fare home.

³Kids, ask your grandparents.

⁴By sheer chance, I'd had to reschedule my 40th birthday to take place a month earlier: a madcap, Manhattan weekend with my then-boyfriend and my dad. It was a lovely trip and celebration. For obvious reasons, the actual day was rather grim.

Let it be wild. Let it be weeds.

Oh honey, you don't need anything tidy - that's for dang sure. Let it be wild. Let it be weeds. Time to paste some tears to the bathroom floor. and Time to burn some stuff. Make some ashes and roll in them.

, "Let it be Weeds," by akka b.

For my 13th birthday, I asked for, and received, one of my favorite gifts ever: a canary-yellow, two-drawer, metal filing cabinet.

I am a lady who likes order. Control, some might say. (They'd be right.)

But you cannot control everything. I may take stabs at doing so, I may play at it, but if there are two things I learned during my bloody epiphany, they are that (1) no one can control anything, and (2) this is a good thing, as generally, human beings do not dream big enough.

This bit of wisdom, received within hours of my 41st birthday, was almost as good as the filing cabinet.

Almost.

* * * * *

I spent most of last week alternately hiding and putting myself front-and-center. And of course, most of what I was hiding from was having to put myself front-and-center.

It is not so much that I dislike being front-and-center as it is that I quake at the thought of doing it imperfectly. Which, well, you know.

But now it is time, or almost time, to announce that Big Scary Thing I've only alluded to up until now. It will mean putting myself front-and-center, nay, hanging my ass out in the breeze, as I have never done before. It will mean committing to a degree of work that's daunting even to someone who enjoys work. It will definitely mean doing things a whole lot less than perfectly, and ceding wide swaths of control.

It will also mean asking for help, far, far more than I've asked for already. Which is where (hopefully) you come in.

* * * * *

On September 13, 2011, I will be 50 years old. To mark the occasion, I am planning rather a Big Thing. Not a party, exactly, nor a trip, and certainly not a present in the traditional sense. For now, best to leave it at "Big Thing." Or, as I've already said, a "Big Scary Thing." A thing so big, I cannot get my arms around it.

Will it be a fun thing? I think so! Fun and scary are not mutually exclusive, and if you don't believe that, you haven't fallen in love lately. Or ridden in the front seat of the front car on Space Mountain. Or spoken before a crowd, or asked to pet a passerby's dog (did you know that sometimes they say "no!"?), or put it all on black.

So. If you'd like to get in on this probably fun (for everyone), definitely scary (for me) thing before I announce it to the world, sign up here. I could use the moral support, if nothing else, and really, I'm not asking for anything yet. The only thing I'm asking for now is that you not divulge anything before it goes live. In two weeks from today.

Two weeks. From today.

I think I just made myself sick.

xxx c

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

On becoming a reliable conduit

Once upon a time in a dingy Hollywood studio far, far away, I took my very first acting class.¹

I was there because it had been suggested to me by my improv teacher that while my writing was passable, my ability to convey actual human emotion onstage was somewhere between "painful to behold" and "chair", and that if I wanted a chance at surviving the increasingly brutal cuts up the ladder, I should hie my civilian ass to an acting school now.

I wanted that chance, all right, and a whole lot more. Things I wouldn't admit out loud: to be rich, for example, and famous, and the envy of anyone I'd ever envied. But also things I couldn't articulate yet because it would be years until I understood them: to tell the Truth, to serve with meaning, to live. I'd wanted all of these things, the ignoble and the good, so very much and for so very long that when I stepped up to work on my very first exercise in this new acting class, I was like a human funnel for raw, super-concentrated desire. It was, by all accounts afterward, electrically exciting to watch.

The next week, I got up in class to do the same exercise again and I sucked. Hard.

And continued to suck, over and over, week after week. Well, that's not completely true: occasionally, something...magical happened, and I did not suck. On certain of these rare occasions (and, significantly, when I was either exhausted, well-coached, or both), I could move emotion as well as the most skilled members of the class. The difference was that, unlike them, I had zero control over this ability; it would either be there or it wouldn't. The experience was not unlike showing up every week for a bus that might take you on a champagne-and-donut-filled ride to Disneyland, or that might drive you to the wrong side of town, strip you down to your underwear, dump you by the side of the road and make you find your way home. At night. In December.

Finally, after about a year, I became reliably good at the exercises. Never brilliant, like that first day, not once, ever again, but good enough that people didn't shrink from being assigned me as a scene partner. One of them even suggested it might be time to move to another class, a more advanced class at a different studio.

I checked it out, enrolled, and promptly reverted to sucking. Immediately, this time, without even the whispery hope of a first, great at-bat to see me through the humiliating 18-month slog to the next plateau.

* * * * *

Here is the mission statement I came up years ago, sometime after my bloody epiphany but before I started dating things so I could place them later:²

To be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love.

I've since been taken to task by my more focused friends (i.e., all of them) for establishing an overarching goal of the mushier variety, my goal does not stand up well to the heat and pressure of daily life, nor does it offer many clues as to what "done" looks like. (If you spy any, let 'er rip.) It's even difficult to hold opportunities and projects up against a "goal" like that to see if they're a good match. Or rather, too many things end up being a good match, and I miss out on the kind of focused intent required to build empires.

Then again, I'm coming around to the idea that empires are a lot like boats, vacation homes, and fancy cameras: it's nicer to have friends who have them than to deal with the upkeep yourself.

* * * * *

There is a wonderful novel I read last fall that haunts me still. It's called All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, and if the horrible title doesn't put you off of reading it, maybe this will: it's about the life trajectories of two students of a masters program in poetry. (I know, right?)

Maybe after I've read it a few more times, I will be able to write a real review that does it justice. For now, the salient point is this: the author uses these two intertwining stories, one of a graduate who achieves early acclaim and concomitant financial rewards, the other of his friend who does neither, to paint as fine a picture as I've ever seen about choices, consequences, and the day-to-day costs of "success" (deliberately left in quotes). This is a chief gift of art, its ability to bypass logic and pierce the heart of the viewer, or reader, with truth through the use of meticulously crafted obliqueness. Great art may be the ultimate in teaching a man to fish: when someone connects the dots themselves, the resulting pattern truly belongs to them.

Communicating on this level, like any kind of deliberate transfer of emotion, requires off-the-charts levels of mastery. In order to do it well and consistently, provisions must be made. By the artist. At what sometimes look like extraordinary costs.

Don't kid yourself, though: there's a cost to everything. It's only the currency that varies, and the payment plan.

xxx c

P.S. Looking for links to old posts I could not find did turn up this and this (from 2008!) on the rather annoyingly sloggy slog this kind of work can be. Then again, I also found this (from 2005!) and this, which provide some actual, concrete steps one can take to ease the pain of conduit-refinery. The blog giveth, and the blog taketh away.

¹I'd actually taken some acting classes as a kid, and even one in college. But this was the first one I'd taken where I wasn't, you'll pardon the pun, just playing around. I really and truly wanted to be an actor. Stakes change the game.

²I worry sometimes that this portends a future for myself fluttering with yellow sticky notes placed on everything, like that man who mistook his wife for a beret or just a garden-variety Alhzeimer's victim. Given how much I fear winding up with a faulty mind in an unbroken body, you'd think I'd be better about floating it in warm baths of alcohol, caffeine and sugar. Let us just say that my capacity for tricking myself has grown right alongside my other abilities.

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

Love, communist style

Several years ago, during the dawn of the Social Media Age, I ran into someone I knew ever-so slightly from the blogging circuit at one of the nerd conferences people on blogging circuits tend to run into each other at. A kind of a celebrity-hero of early Web 2.0, albeit an accessible one.

Many of us were new to the internets back then, but I was also a neophyte in the ways of networking. As I got out from behind my keyboard, along with the introverts, freaks and social misfits I'd been expecting, I also discovered these odd hybrids: pseudo-nerds, or nerd-friendlies, who in their previous, pre-Internet lives had picked up the interpersonal skills I'd somehow managed to avoid acquiring in over 40 years as a human being. These people were upbeat and genial and welcoming, and I always sank gratefully into their company. They knew what to say and what to do; they were able to move through the world with at least outward confidence while putting other people at ease.

So of course I paid attention to the things they did and said, absorbing and parsing constantly: What things did they inquire about? What things did they offer up? How did they introduce mutual acquaintances? Or new topics? Or sustain a conversation? Or exit one?

It was exhausting, but useful.

I began engaging people this way myself, with...unusual results. My heartbeat would speed up. I'd feel dizzy, like the world got wobbly or a haze suddenly descended. It was a little unnerving, sure, but I wrote it off as inexperience, change is hard!, and resolved to try, try again.

Which is where I was at when I finally met my kind-of celebrity/hero: nervous, but trying. Awkward, but trying. I screwed my courage to the sticking point and said "hello." Clearly not one for small talk, he generously put up with my wobbly attempts at it. Until finally, when I had wandered so far of the res of my own groundedness that the room was practically spinning around me, I asked the question that was so foreign to me just the thought of saying it could trigger an out-of-body experience:

"So, (Celebrity-Hero of Web 2.0), tell me: What can I do to help you?"

Whereupon he sighed, rolled his eyes, and said, "Seriously? 'What can I do to help you?' Seriously? This isn't you. What are you doing?"

I froze. And then two things happened.

First, I wanted to disappear. Because I was humiliated and angry and humiliated. This produces in me an urge to make everything go away, starting with myself.

Second, I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and kiss him. Because he was right, and I was free. I never had to ask that stupid fucking question again as long as I lived.

* * * * *

Before the rock-hurling and/or tribal shunning commences, let me make myself very clear: helping is a good thing. I am pro-helping. I help people; you help people; Celebrity-Hero of Web 2.0 helped (and probably still helps) people. We'd better all be helping each other, or every last one of us is doomed.

There's also nothing wrong with asking what you can do to help someone, if that is what it takes for you to really help someone. Asking is a marvelous way to gather useful intelligence with which to shape your loving and generous impulses. I mean, who hasn't gotten a crappy graduation gift from Uncle Fritz, right? Or attended a pot luck with four desserts and no casserole?

Where it gets tricky is when the helping is "helping": asking how you can help as your secret judo way of soliciting it for yourself, or asking when you have zero intention of following through. This is the kind of "helping" that gives helping a bad name, and unfortunately, it's as rampant as hollow, meaningless inquiries into the state of one's health.

Additionally, let me say that the first two people I heard ask me this question meant it. 100%. Short of my asking for a pony or other unrealistic deliverable, they would have agreed and come through (and possibly never asked for anything else, ever.) Both of them are people who are much in the world, who have exceptionally large hearts and energy to match. They are hardy. They are robust. If they have hidden agendas, they're being served with scraps from the main table. It works for them.

I, on the other hand, don't work that way. And by that I mean I seem to shrivel up with too much giving, the same way I do if I have too much social interaction. I have to be judicious in my offers of help if I want to make good on them, which I do, if only because violating Agreement #1 makes me feel so rotten. So I am careful about how I offer help, and to whom, and when. It is not as much as some people would like, and it is even less than that on Twitter.

Do I wish I could do more? Oh, yes.

I also wish that I could be 5'9", eat anything, and sing like Ella Fitzgerald. I don't think those are going to happen anytime soon, either.

* * * * *

People love to make a great noise about the importance of hewing to your path. There is a fair amount of literature out there on the noble struggle involved. But rarely do we get into the gruesome details of how doing your own thing will make you feel on a day-to-day basis.

Like crazy, for starters. Alone and crazy. Mean and crazy. Selfish and crazy. Stupid and crazy. Wrong and crazy.¹

Part of the reason you feel these things is because people will intimate that you are these things, if they don't say it outright. Most of the time they do this because it makes them feel less crazy, less alone, less mean and selfish and stupid and wrong and fallibly human. On a good day, I can get down with this and even approach something I suspect might be what compassion feels like. On an average day, I rise to the bait, real or implied, and beat myself up. (On a bad day, I attack...and then beat myself up.)

The other part of the reason is the always-on, 24/7, city-that-never-sleeps effect of the Internet. That thing that brought you together with fellow travelers whose existence you only dreamed of before Usenet or AOL.com or whatever point you plugged into the matrix can also make you feel very alienated from the rest of the world. Here, someone is always up, always happy, always shipping. It's a dangerous place for comparing insides (yours) to outsides (theirs) and subsequent mimicry. It gets loud up in this bee-yotch.

* * * * *

Right now, I am liking this definition of help: love, externalized. Love in motion, love in action. One reason I like it is that it takes help out of the land of tit-for-tat transactions. I grew up with both plenty of love and plenty of help, possibly more than my fair share, but trust me, a strict accounting was kept at all times.

Today, I am having fun, actual FUN, noticing how help flows out and shows up. As free guest rooms and rides to the airport. As secretly-picked-up tabs and comped coffees. As database advice and emotional support, as quiet letters and cheery introductions, as tomatoes and tips, as labor and hilarious jokes. Maybe someone with a very, very high up view could make sense of this strange economy, but down here, it starts to look like magic.

Am I done forever with mutual backscratching? Probably not. I wouldn't even say there's not a place for it, again, my view is myopic and low to the ground.

But I am increasingly in love with the idea of love flowing from each of us according to our abilities, and to each of us according to our needs. This is the kind of help I want to give and to get: love, communist style.

I think it can happen in business. I think it can happen on Facebook. I think it could make for an amazing world to live in, if can let each other let each other.

If I can let myself be myself.

xxx c

This piece was inspired in part by an incredibly helpful and well-written little book by Bindu Wiles about how to write for the Internet. Yes, really. As I read it, I kept saying "Yup" and "Yup" and finally, "Well, I guess now I don't have to write an incredibly helpful book about writing for the Internet; Bindu already done did it." And it's yours for the price of an email address. See? Helpful.

¹And I'm not talking about the big things you might be called "crazy" for, like leaving a marriage that isn't working, or quitting a good job to go out on your own, or sailing across the ocean on a sandwich bag. Do something that's big enough and people will at least applaud your audacity while they call you crazy. As with most things, the devil is in the details. Boring, stupid, unseen, important daily details.

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

The danger of 10% evil

Many years ago, I was in the world's worst acting class.

Its badness was made possible by its goodness. Much like a relationship where you're slowly gaslighted into madness until a gigantic Acme mallet (or Joseph Cotten) shows up to snap you out of it, about 90% of what went down was fine, excellent, even.

Which is precisely why the remaining 10% was so dangerous: plenty of inert matter to make the poison go down smoothly.

* * * * *

Do you think about money often? I think about it quite a bit, just before I shove the thoughts from my head in a holy panic.

My lifelong attitude toward money mimics my childhood attitude toward adulthood: Lots of power; too much scary. RUN! The thing is, of course, you really can't avoid either. Or at some point, you just realize that avoiding them is more exhausting than giving in. And when you do finally settle into one or the other (or both) a bit, when you start handling your money with respect or learning to delay gratification in favor of prudence and responsibility, you see that it's not really dollars or years that you're scared of; they're just dollars and years.

You're scared of that part of you that you think is incompetent. Or vain. Or maybe flat-out evil, you devil, you.

You're scared that the small, not-so-good part of you will override the big, pretty-okay part of you and ruin everything. That you will be left alone, reviled and ridiculed for the incompetent/vain/flat-out-evil devil you are. That you will die.

It doesn't matter that it won't, you won't, and you probably won't for a long, long time. That 10% of you puts on a really convincing show.

* * * * *

One thing I learned in that horrible-wonderful acting class was that a well-drawn character wants something more than anything else, and over the course of a well-played scene, will use every trick in her personal playbook to get it. (We call the wants "intentions" and the tricks used to get it "tactics." Now you can impress your actor friends with your inside knowledge.)

Here's the conundrum, the strongest want is nothing without an equally strong obstacle in the way of that want: Al Pacino thwarting Robert DeNiro in Heat; the survivors racing against the water in The Poseidon Adventure; Ray Milland battling himself in The Lost Weekend. It can exist without or within, but if you take away the immovable object, the unstoppable force whizzes frictionless through nothingness, fizzling out somewhere far, far past our interest in watching it. The tension between the two is what fuels the creativity of the characters and heightens the suspense.

More tension, better show.

No tension, no show.

* * * * *

I'm working on a huge (HUGE) project for my upcoming birthday this September. It's the kind of project that could be astonishing and life-changing and crazy, crazy fun if it comes together, not just for me, but potentially for a lot of other people, you included. And if it falls apart, of course, it is one of those things that will make me, and only me, look stupid. The flavor of fail I am more afraid of than anything.

Here's the hilarious (and predictable) part: as the deadline for each part of the project has approached, I've balked. You're coming off of a five-month Crohn's flare. You need to focus on your business. You'll have to call in every favor you have and rack up debt in the favor bank, to boot. The scale is ridiculous. The time frame is insane. You're insane, even if you pull it off, there's no assurance it will make any kind of difference.

All of these things are true. Mean to say, but no less true for it.

But what is also true is that so far, all the drama has come from me, myself and I playing out a three-person scene; the universe has been an extraordinarily compliant scene partner.

So it's 90% good that I'm 10% evil. Otherwise this sucker might never get liftoff.

* * * * *

I don't know how you discern between regular shadow and the toxic kind in the moment. These sorts of calculations almost always benefit from some time and/or distance. Seth wrote an excellent book about knowing when to stop (and when to plow through) that I should probably re-read. Byron Katie came up with those four questions that do a pretty good job of rooting out untruths.

If you put a gun to my head, I'd say the danger of 10% evil crosses over from frisson to "Warning, Will Robinson!" when you feel yourself starting to disappear. The point of danger, this kind of danger, is to make you stronger. There were people in that horrible acting class who were well served by it. I was one of them for a while, and then I wasn't, and then I left.

But I don't think you should wish away evil any more than you should wish away time. Instead, wish for the alertness to stay on your toes. Wish for help from the muse finding creative ways to slay your dragons. Wish for courage. Wish for vision.

Then get that show on the road.

xxx c

Image by downhilldom1984 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

What taking care of yourself looks like in real time

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but when I was a girl, I had a brilliant notion: what if I could have all of the sicknesses of my lifetime at once, rather than having them parceled out here and there, when they were least expected and seldom welcome?

Or, because I quickly figured out my genius solution would probably kill you (after a few mind-blowing days of unspeakable agony), what if we could at least choose when we'd have them, rescheduling broken bones and burst appendixes from rare or inconvenient times (holidays, big presentations, nice weather in Chicago) to dull stretches where nothing is going on, anyway?

Like most things that seem like a great idea until you see them played out on an episode of Twilight Zone, I eventually figured out the flaw in Plan B as well: there is never, ever a time when it's good to be sick; there are only times when it's less awful than other times.

* * * * *

Staying healthy has both hard and "soft" costs attached to it, just like getting sick does. But because we don't notice health nearly as much as we do the lack thereof, it's hard to get people to pay upfront. Nothing new here. And of course, this refusal to deal with something until it's in tatters or on fire, demanding our attention, is not limited to our physical well-being. How many people do you know who have harnessed the Magic of Compound Interest by maintaining a fully-funded 401-K from the time they entered the workforce? Or, closer still to home, who have never run out of toilet paper? I mean, really, toilet paper! If there's one thing that's easier to make sure you have handy, I don't know what it is. And yet,

Well, let's leave this train of thought while the disembarking is good, shall we?

* * * * *

It is very, very easy for me to tell myself I will pay myself Thursday for a hamburger today, and gladly. To stay up late working or, even more stupidly, watching Jackie Brown for the 57th time. It is easy to say I should go to a particular event, that one of my promises to myself was to keep my promises, and that breaking them will cause me as much or more stress as keeping them. It is easy to not exercise, to drive rather than walk, to eat poorly rather than well. It is as easy to say "yes" as it is hard to say "no", and the consequences of a flippant choice are so far down the road that surely, we reason, a conveniently-timed meteor or other bit of TBD pixie dust will save us between now and then.

For me it is easiest of all to work, and to work poorly, honoring neither the time it takes to do work well, nor the extracurricular effort that goes into maintaining the infrastructure upon which the work relies. Forget what's theoretically possible; being ill these past five months has forced me to examine what is honestly possible, and desirable, and tenable.

While I've (mercifully) always been a woman of narrow interests, this go-round of illness has forced me to narrow them to a point I would not have believed possible.¹ These days, I work and I take care of myself, and that's about it. Sometimes I marvel at all of the purely social activities I hear other people talking about (on Twitter and Facebook, since I rarely go out). To me a weekend is just a calmer, quieter couple of days where the phone stops ringing, the emails at least slow down, and I feel less of a pang shutting down operations to get some rest. And I'm fine with that, there will be other times with a different mix of activities, just like there were before.²

For writers, at least, good work, like contentment, comes from boring, well-ordered lives.³ The more mental and physical clutter I removed from my life, the more room was left to do my work.

But the clearing also makes more obvious the crufty tangles that are left. Money murkiness. Patchy systems. Sludgy workflows.

So part of taking care of myself has been crazy stuff you'd think had nothing to do with taking care of yourself, all of it having to do with imposing structure. For example, my return to the uniform: establishing one look and investing in multiples to reduce stress around dressing and traveling. Dividing my week into sectors for reading, writing, and talking. I can't speak for the BDSM crowd, but in my little pedestrian, decidedly non-kinky way, I've found constraints very freeing, so much so that I continue to implement new systems as I tweak the old ones, testing for friction all the time.

The biggest recent shift in my self-care has been a rededication to GTD. Although really, what I'm doing has a whole lot less to do with any particular system for organizing one's stuff and a whole lot more with slowing things down to get clear. Which is, I think, what the best systems are: clearly thought out. Eight years after discovering David Allen's book, I'm finally getting that the crux of the system is the questioning: What's the next action? Where does this go? What does "done" look like? And that the questions themselves must be asked every single time, slowly and painstakingly before swiftly and organically. Organization doesn't come from occasional actions any more than health comes from popping an occasional vitamin. Truly taking care of myself means living in truth all of the time, not just when it is convenient.

I don't know yet what "well" looks like. It may end up not looking at all like robust good health I've been dreaming of since my Crohn's onset, health that lets me spend my energy as cavalierly as I did in my 20s and 30s.

But as I finally (knock wood, throw salt over shoulder, stab a leprechaun) pull out of this flare, I have a better idea of what putting "well" first looks like for me. It is as predictable as a uniform and as strictly run as the Catholic elementary school I wore mine to for eight years. It trades the highs of coffee for the gentle buzz of tea. It favors dollars placed toward proper food and time invested in preparing it. It goes to bed early. It enjoys fellow travelers. It dislikes drama. It spends a surprising amount of time in the bathtub and on foot.

It's my boring-ass new life, and it is awesome.

xxx c

¹When I was in recovery from my Crohn's onset, back in 2002-03, my illness was so profoundly far-reaching that convalescence was the sole item on the menu. This particular almost-flare is more like having a flu that's constantly teetering between a plain old cold and walking pneumonia that'll put you down for months, or descend quickly into some unknowable, unnamable worse. Gray areas are the hardest to navigate on your own, health-wise. At least, they are for workaholics.

²Okay, I don't solely work and rest. Over the past several months, I've lunched and dined with friends two handfuls of times, seen at least one movie in an actual movie theater, attended a party for at last a half-hour, and been to hear live music, a comedy show and a play. The play, which is running through May 29, I highly recommend (and I recommend very few plays). If you live in Los Angeles and like your theater well-done and funny, it's a must-go.

³ This gets into semantic jockeying, but for our purposes, that other contentment-plus stuff I find comes more from peak experiences. That poor, poor word "happiness" has been so batted about that I wonder what it means anymore. I tend to think my friend Gretchen, who for my money is the smartest, most accessible writer on the topic of happiness today, really writes about contentment. But it's not her fault the filthy hordes came in and mucked up a perfectly good word.

Finding a way to not start

For a long time, I've been aware of the most obvious form of addiction in my family: alcoholism.

First of all, because Mom drank. A lot. And so did Mom's dad and some of Mom's brothers. A lot. Once it spirals out of the societally-determined safe zone, alcohol addiction gets obvious fast, what with all the clanging empties and lack of employment and whatnot.¹

It took me much longer to spot the other, less obvious manifestations of the addictive temperament in my gene pool, Dad's workaholism, for instance, or my maternal grandmother's massive sugar jones, or everyone's need to have the television on as loud as possible as often as possible, especially when someone else was in the room. Hey, those aren't problems, they're part of being American!

I will pause for the briefest of moments to say I'm going nowhere near any discussions of the root causes of addiction, of whether addiction is a disease or symptom (although I suspect the answer to that is "yes"), or of where addiction and compulsion overlap. I am not a mental-healthcare professional nor have I done any scholarly boning up on addiction and its underlying/concomitant behavioral disorders.

What I can say, and with the rock-solid confidence that only years of experience and obsessive (haha) self-observation can bring, is that the triggers that set my own self-destructive behaviors in motion are manifold and insidious.

* * * * *

The purpose of drinking too much or working too much, like all self-destructive behaviors, is to create distance between you and something else: Distance between you and your feelings, usually the painful ones. Distance between you and another person, usually one whom getting close to would involve the stirring up of painful feelings. Distance between you and the truth, which, as time and the behavior goes on, becomes about how much distance between you and your feelings or you and your loved ones your addictive/compulsive behavior has created.

Most of these buffer reasons for addictions are pretty well-established. Freud was hip to them, for crying out loud. You do something bad because somewhere in your brain, you think it's keeping you from something worse.

Your first order of business in changing this stuff seems to be sussing out the "why": I work too much because no matter how well I did, I was told I could do better if only I worked harder. That I should do this was left unspoken, but hung thickly in the air at all times. So I work too much because it puts distance between me and the fear that I am not enough, and that I am unlovable as I am.²

Okay. I get why I work too much. What I didn't get, because I couldn't make it fit, is why I couldn't get to the work of working too much. I mean, seriously, if I love work so freakin' much, why am I screwing around in Facebook? Why am I checking my email for the 57th time, hoping against hope that it holds some horrific fire that must be put out NOW? (Or, barring that, a really, really important and necessary special offer that must be acted upon immediately?)

And then, like a bolt from the blue, I got smacked upside the head by Captain Obvious: my incessant fiddling, my noodling, my (say it with me, now) P-R-O-C-R-A-S-T-I-N-A-T-I-N-G is there to put distance between me and starting, so that I don't have to fail by finishing.

Given my fondness for the work of Seth and Uncle Steve, not to mention my up-close-and-personal experience with the Resistor and all those years of shrinkage, that this lightbulb moment comes so late in the game is more than a little humiliating.

On the other hand, I'm a shoo-in for Dumbass of the Year award. And I do like me some award-garnering.

Lest we end this section on a sour-ish note of self-flagellation (more distancing!), I will add that like all discoveries of a disastrous or humiliating nature, if I can really and truly turn them into lessons learned, I win.

And I really, really like winning. Obviously.

* * * * *

So. How does one turn a discovery into a lesson really and truly learned?

On a recent episode of my new-favorite podcast-slash-obsession, the host, Marc Maron, who quit drinking 15 years ago, describes the process of his getting sober.³ For a long while, it sounds like he had a waking-up to how drinking (and for him, drug use) was really taking away much more than it was giving. Once he really and truly got that, he said, he had to find a way of not starting, which sound like what the Program was for him. AA is all about not starting, not taking that first drink. If you don't have the first one, you can't have all the subsequent ones, which are what get you into trouble.

Not-starting looks like not-doing, but really, it's doing other things. Taking other actions. Probably small, simple actions (although we're not going to be foolish enough to bait the Resistor by calling them "easy"). And probably many actions, over a long period of time. There may be the occasional grand, cinematic gesture, like throwing a half-full pack of cigarettes into the trash just like that. But the real work begins with the not-starting later: not fishing the pack out again four hours later when you get back from dinner really wanting a cigarette. Not buying a fresh pack the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

And my own experience of becoming a person who didn't smoke after having been one who did, and like a chimney, and for 12 years, was that while the story of throwing away that half-pack was great, it was the actions I took that got the job done. The stupid mantra. The mass quantities of cherry Halls Mentho-Lyptus cough drops. Inventing errands. Making myself go places where smoking was not allowed (much harder to do back in 1980s-era Chicago). Keeping my hands and mouth and brain busy with something, anything else.

I do these things so I do not do that thing. I choose these actions so I do not lapse into that one.

* * * * *

Fortunately, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about this shit. On the blog alone, I've got over six years of obsessive self-analysis. Then there are the volumes of journaling and morning pages, the now-hundreds of hours in the Google Wave with Dave (I'm kind of glad I can't see those stats), the countless discussions with friends and fellow travelers, the aforementioned years of shrinkage. Plus, in case you hadn't noticed, I read. A lot. (Obsession: it has its upside, too!)

Between all of the talking and all of the thinking and all of the reading, I've learned a good deal about the nature of what I want to stop, i.e. both "work" that gets in the way of Work and too much work, period. At almost-50 years old, I think it's safe to say that I will be addressing their root causes, fear, mishegoss, until they scatter my ashes at sea. But I'll also say that at almost-50, it is beyond time to put on my Big-Girl Pants and do some of the tedious, outside-in work of taking actions, if for no other reason than the idea of not being able to do my Work or to work or even to "work", if it comes to that, is anathema and time and gravity are conspiring against me. Those cocksuckers.

The actions?

Well, I have a long list. I may get to itemization in future posts. Or I may just dive into action and leave you hanging. To spend any longer on this post would be a starting, not a not-starting, if you catch my drift.

For now, I will leave you with my vaguely-defined commitment to (a) establishing actions that support Work and (b) establishing additional actions to ensure not slipping into "work" and overwork. These include, but are not limited to, such incredibly mundane and tedious actions as brushing my teeth, logging time, and processing emails according to a specific protocol. In other words, a lot of things I either do or should be doing regularly.

I will also leave you with this excellent post by Ramit Sethi on barriers which I wish I'd read five years ago. Or that maybe I did read five years ago and was too dense to get. Whatever. It's excellent, and pertinent to this discussion.

And, finally, I will leave you with this exhortation: try to be nice to yourself. At least as nice to yourself as you'd treat someone you were indifferent about, preferably nicer. Not in an indulgent way. Just nice.

It's not going to fix everything. But it's a start.

xxx c

¹It's also terrifying enough to serve as a deterrent: I drink, but I scrutinize my intake ruthlessly, one might even say with an obsession that borders on the ironic, for fear of ending up like the family drunks.

²I would assume I also work too much because it puts distance between me and the fear of dying, probably because I always say I'm not afraid of dying, and the lady doth protest too much/etc.

³More on this soon enough, much more, but if you like your introspection served up with a healthy dose of wit, heart and savoir faire (and don't mind swearing), do yourself a favor and subscribe to the WTF podcast. Insanely good, obsessively so, even.

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

What it takes to hew to you (Part 2)

This piece builds on this one, which you may or may not want to read as well.

Once upon a time, when I was very much like I am today, only with a lot more income and a lot less happiness, I found myself shopping in a store that sold nothing but sexy ladies' underwear.

Now, if you know me in even the most passing of ways, you know this is a very unusual thing, and if you've known me in the Biblical sense, you're probably re-reading the above sentence to make sure it says what you think it said. For I am no more a lady of lingerie than I am a lady of pedicures, blender drinks or fancy jewelry. Not that I judge! To each her own, and more power to her. But I buy my panties plain, on the cheap and under duress. Any top/bottom color coordination happens strictly by accident, luck of the drawer, if you will, and most of it looks better off than on. Which, to my mind, anyway, is the main point of underwear vis-à-vis your vis-à-vis-type situations.

True to form, I was there at this sexy lingerie store under duress as well. My boss at the time, a chic and lovely woman whom I'm sure had no end of matching drawers in her own drawers, had extracted from me a promise: that while I was in Los Angeles on my next production gig, I would go to this particular lingerie store and buy myself some high-end undergarment of the completely superfluous variety. It had to be expensive, in other words, and it had to be sexy.

Half of the store was dripping with lace and the rest of it vibrated with the various colors of the rainbow. Promises or no promises, there were some depths to which I would not stoop, which pretty much left Sheer, Black and Clingy. I found some one-piece something or other that looked okay, sexy, even, I guess, given the right lighting and enough liquor. It cost $75 (I still remember!), it itched (the better, I supposed, for wishing oneself out of it) and served no actual, foundational purpose.

I tried it on at least fifty times, and wore it exactly three. Each time I felt not only stupid for having wasted $75 on a shitty piece of nylon but whatever the opposite of sexy is. And itchy. Off it went to Goodwill.

I am sure it made a terrific addition to some girl's Slutty Olympic Swimmer costume that Halloween.

* * * * *

I was having coffee with The Chief Atheist while back, one of those occasional treats I look forward to with a genuine pleasure I would not have believed possible ten years ago when we were fresh out of the marriage. He is a sincere, smart and forthright fellow; also, he is hilarious. And for my part, I am fairly pleasant to be around now that I'm not a miserable wannabe stewing in her own hot soup of envy and denial.

At some point during the conversation, we were talking about the shapes our day-to-day lives had taken now that we were no longer together, and now that I was (finally) living alone. His, as always, is filled with lots of laughter and activity, always well-populated with friends, colleagues, or loved ones. Mine, by contrast, is filled mostly with quiet and work, punctuated by spikes of peopled activity, and dotted lightly with extremely low-key relaxation amongst one or two close friends. Excepting perhaps the financial freedom to have it all more so, neither one of us could be happier with the way things had turned out.

We had just about wrapped up the topic when he paused, smiled just a bit and said, "I never really got it while we were together, but I finally realized it recently: you weren't kidding; you really did need more time alone than most people."

He's right, I really do.

* * * * *

The good news about the Internet is that it makes it really easy to get ideas; the bad news is that it makes it really easy to think you should be applying them to yourself, now!

The always-on, always-up nature of the Internet is great when you're feeling low and need to get you some hot baby penguin action. It's not so great when you're feeling unmoored and adrift, in an in-between phase, unsure of what the next shore will look like, much less how to get there. This accounts for a lot of the business bipolar disorder you see on the web: constant overhauling of business models, flip-flopping of pricing, re-branding of websites, and of course, rampant copycatting of UI elements, visual identity and even language.

I'm not talking about evolution or emulation. Things can and should change, and we all learn by adopting and mimicking the styles of those we admire, all of us, even the geniuses (and if you don't believe me, go rent the Scorsese documentary on Dylan. It'll blow your mind.)

But if you're doing things because you see other people doing them, beware. If you're using things because so-and-so is, beware.¹ Not only do you have no idea of why they've chosen do x, y, or z, you can't even be sure it's working for them. Or that it will for much longer. To borrow Seth Godin's astute summing-up of the futility of emulation in this era of constant and rapid-fire change, "if you're looking for a map...you've totally missed the point." He was talking about business models, but it works for positioning, for identity, for personal trajectory as well. Today's opportunity lies in uniqueness and novelty, in innovation and personal touch, and the quickest way to quash that is to lose the thread of yourself in the tangle of other people's business.

Does this mean you should not surround yourself with people you admire? Read good things? Take in with an eye toward what works, what draws you in and delights you? Of course not. If anything, I would do more of it, and more broadly. As with food, so with brain food: the healthiest diets seem to be the most varied (provided you're not just varying which drive-thru window you pull up to).

A good exercise for making sure you're hewing to you is to be able to point to any element of your life and say why you chose it and why you love it. A sofa. A fragrance. A logo. An entrée. A cellphone. A lover. A project. A pair of jeans. A business partnership. A morning spent on Facebook. An evening spent with American Idol.

Even a blog post.

I wrote this one because I get challenged a lot for my business and marketing decisions, or the lack thereof.² I can point to much of what looks crazy to the outside world and tell you why I do it my way. But there's a distressing amount that I cannot explain with anything better than I don't want to be like them. Or I hate that thing, over there. Or just I don't wanna! You can't make me!

Which, for a person who not only is into the whole self-actualization thing but who also hires herself out to help people sort out what's working and what's not, is not only hypocritical, but more than a little nutty.

On the other hand, who among us isn't a work in progress?

* * * * *

Are you a philistine for not personally sweating each individual detail of your life? Hell, no. Neither am I, and I'll wager I have a helluva lot more free time to muse about these things than you.

Could you benefit by thoughtful ongoing review of particular elements of your life, your work, your outward face, your inner workings? I cannot see how you couldn't. The unexamined life, and all that.

If you don't know who you are, start there. If you've got a pretty good handle on that, pick one aspect of your life (or your business, or your marketing) and start doing an inventory to see if things jibe.

Is this me or is this something I'm defaulting to? Is this something I want, or something I think someone else wants of me? Is this an outdated me, and am I okay with changing it?

It is not a speedy process; when you rush it, you end up with things like a $5000 website you hate in three months and want to completely change. Or a $75 onesie for whores.

Do not look to the left or the right. Look at yourself.

Chances are, that's what that other guy you admire so much did...

xxx c

¹And of course, if you're using things you dislike because you think you should, or you think it will get you there faster, just stop right now.

²A lack of a decision is always a decision. Think of it as passive-aggression against yourself, and see if that doesn't move you to get off the dime and do something about something.

Image by k david clark via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Taking my own medicine

It has been happening for some time now, probably since I shuttered my design business, definitely since I quit acting, but the polite and puzzled apologies that "I don't know exactly what it is that you do" have escalated to a point where I can no longer shrug, laugh or otherwise play them off.

"I write and I talk" is true, but coy. It's good for keeping myself clear on my priorities, but is far from useful to anyone else.

"I do marketing consulting for solopreneurs and very small businesses" is true, but leaves out a lot. Like me, for instance. I mean, please, do I look like a marketing consultant? (For that matter, do I write like a marketing consultant?) By which I really mean, "Do I do anything that looks like a descriptor you'd find in a drop-down list titled 'Employment', wedged between 'Manufacturing' and 'Media'?" I do not. At least, I hope not.

My attempts at self-description have been many, but ultimately disappointing.

First, because not being able to succinctly describe what it is that I do is embarrassing, to say the least, a whole lot of "physician, heal thyself" going on there.

Also, it's ungracious. It's confusing, which wastes everyone's time, ungracious! (Worse, it makes some people feel stupid, like they're missing something, and that's beyond ungracious, it's so mean as to be unacceptable.)

Finally, it makes me a lot less money. Because as any graduate of Marketing 101 knows, given you can deliver the goods (the "All Things Being Equal" Rule), to be easily categorized is to be easily recalled, recommended and other good things that begin with "r". Like "rich," which seems like it would be delightful, if only for the possibilities it promises regarding the equitable (i.e., by me) redistribution of wealth. Although to be able to fill up the car without feeling faint, visit the doctor as necessary, and at least occasionally buy the good tea wouldn't hurt, either.

* * * * *

What has sustained me throughout my feeble, murky swipes at self-promotion has been this: the great reward of doing at least some of what I love every day; and the equally great (and incredibly humbling) reward of being appreciated for it. Getting hired despite my laughable inadequacies around making myself hirable is the most tangible, not to mention remarkable, form of appreciation, but the support of readers throughout these six-plus years I've been slinging hash on the interwebs has been no less important.*

If you take nothing else from this post, that would be a good thing to take: You must in some small way always provide your own source of joy through some kind of work, whether it's things or ideas or self-improvement or self-understanding. And if you do it with all your might, chances are good the universe will throw a bone your way.

* * * * *

Here's how I have talked about myself that might serve as a starting point for wrestling this bear to the ground:

• I help creative people sell themselves effectively in the postmodern marketplace. (on Biznik)
• I provide creatively-minded people with the tools, ideas and practices they need to share their awesomeness with the world. (on my current "hire me" page)
• I help entrepreneurs get clear on their core truth and assist them in finding the best ways possible for putting it out there. (on LinkedIn)
• Better living through content strategy.** (on Facebook)

Each falls short in its own, special way. The LinkedIn one falls so far short that if it were a person, he would have cracked its chin open on the curb and been rushed to urgent care for stitches.

But they are the truth, if a little lackluster and faint of voice. They can't touch my mission statement*** for awesomeness and other things that get me up in the morning, but they are a place to begin.

* * * * *

I will eventually, as the Brits say, get this sorted. In the meantime, I'm going to do something radical (for me): not worry about it. Nope. I'm going to go about fixing things, here and there, tweakity-tweak, again, just as I advise certain clients to do. This is an iterative process, getting clear on who we are. And, given the current and projected future rate of change, will probably continue to be so. Over the past week, I've added:

• clearer "contact me" info (because really, I was kind of a jackass about making people hunt it down)
• social sharing buttons on each post (because really, "ditto" for making it harder for people to share my work)
• dedicated "consulting" and "speaking" buttons in the top navigation (because what? I want to make it HARDER for people to hire me?)

It's scary, and it's fun. And it's good for me, because this is the kind of stuff I help other people do, and the more I understand exactly where, how and why it's scary, and come up with ways of handling it so it's fun, simple and sustainable, the better off we'll all be.

xxx c

P.S. If you're reading this in email, I'd love for you to click through and take a look at that top navigation. And if something looks hinky to you, or is in any way confusing, to let me know in the comments or privately, via email.

P.P.S. If it isn't obvious, this is one of the most excruciatingly painful posts I've ever written. I wasn't kidding about that embarrassment factor, above. On the other hand, for some of us, excruciating pain is the only thing that will move us off the dime. So here's hoping!

*It is one of the chief reasons I encourage writers to blog, the other being a weird kind of accountability it creates. And this doesn't even get into that other "hot" reason, the author platform.

**I didn't realize that this was a "thing" until about a year ago, when my friends at Mule Design assigned it to me in a bio for that year's BattleDecks. The Mules are nothing if not articulate, and I find much to emulate in the way they move through the world. They've been particularly astute over the last several months about intentionally raising their profile, executing each move with style and grace, and, in a way that deeply satisfies me, reinforcing the truth of The Three Behaviors. Which is good, because they're all over my presentation. Anyway, since discovering this magical thing of "content strategy," I've been devouring books and other, uh, content on the topic. As it turns out, much of what I do could be summed up fairly well as being content strategy. Expect more on this topic, including a series of book reviews, in the coming months.

***"To be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love." Everyone should have a mission statement, just not one of those icky, '80s-corporate, b.s.-style ones.

Photo of me and my beloved client, Susan Carr, Education Director supreme of the ASMP, at SB3 Chicago, by my other beloved client, Judy Herrmann, who introduced us. This is how it works, people!

Poetry Thursday: Of service

Virgo is the sign of service visualized as a maiden in a flowing robe, hair up or down, bearing grain.

Not a lion, not a bull not a ram. Not a hottie hoisting a vat of water to his massive shoulder with his studly arms.

Not a sharpshooter, a skilled, sought-after professional, never mind the hairy knees and hooves, not a pair of enigmatic twins or Escher-y fishes not even a goat or a crab or an inanimate fucking object of weights and measures:

Oh, no. A lone shiksa who has never met the high, hard one fondling a shaft of wheat, that's my lot.

I hated being a Virgo like I hated being not old enough or tall enough or smart or pretty or funny or fast enough to be anything but altogether unexceptional.

I hated my sign that started with "V" and ended with nobody getting laid like I hated the black watch plaid I wore every day for eight years that made me look just like everyone else, only somehow, never as cool as the girls with the good signs, the Leos, the Taurans, the goddamn Capricorns, all of whom most assuredly were relieved of their virginity before they were 19 and had to beg someone.

Do you know who serves?

Broom-pushers and burger-flippers; stockboys and bus drivers. Practicing alcoholics spinning condo-closeout arrows on the corner or hawking Caesar salad specials in a chicken suit. Cashiers, counting out other people's money, and actors, when they can't get work as actors, and overeducated foreign nationals and undereducated dropouts all clinging to their last shred of dignity doing jobs too low even to be beneath them.

People with no other choice choose service, don't they?

Yes. They do. They do. And the luckiest of them, I see now, embrace it.

They stoop to wash the dusty feet of strangers, to set the broken arms of girls who slide off the monkey bars, to pour themselves onto the page again and again so that this time, that someone whose heart has barely a hairline crack running across it can finally start feeling the light pour in.

They bend and contort themselves to make pastafazool and music. They bear with patience the slow, slow uptake of mathematics in adolescent crania and self-knowledge in the shattered heart. They give and give and give of their time and their talent, and their sweat and their soul sometimes for little, but never, never for nothing.

Finally, decades later, but not too late, I see that what is truly true: that to love is to serve. And so now, as then, I choose to serve because I cannot choose otherwise.

I must live in service of that which I've been given: my broom, my brain, my pen, my heart. I must push them to and fro to and fro to and fro every day of every week that they are in my custody.

I must live to serve, because now I finally see what is truly true: that I must serve to truly live.

xxx c

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

The 24-hour writer (or, "It's not you, it's You of the Past")

Warning: while this essay is really about writing, it contains highly descriptive talk, and quite a bit of it, about poop. If you're very sensitive to poop-talk, you may want to skip it. Plenty of other stuff for you to read on the interwebs!

Back when I was first diagnosed with Crohn's disease and trying to figure out this crazy new way my body was functioning (or not), I kept several diaries.

The first was a diary-diary, where I'd blather about what was happening in my brain and my heart because of all the upheaval in my gut. This is the diary that kept me sane, along with a few very carefully chosen friends who were good at dealing with illness and could either look at me without draining of color or talk to me like this was just something I was going through, not something I was destined to be.

Within this diary, I also kept a kind of secondary diary-slash-visualization-map of my gut healing, drawing my poor, broken colon every day with all of its current inhabitants: the Asacol, prednisone, Cipro, and mercaptopurine; the "bad" bugs that had taken up camp and brought me to my knees; and the "good" bugs that I was now sending in via massive infusions of SCD-legal yogurt. I added callouts and anthropomorphized the bugs with little faces and talk bubbles, using a lot of gentle encouragement to usher them out, with plenty of "Thanks for the help, we'll take it from here!" reassurances from the new troops.

But in addition to all of this fairly squishy emotional stuff, I also kept a ridiculously comprehensive third diary of input and output. By which I mean I wrote down everything that went into my body and everything, including the quality and consistency, that came out. We called them "food logs" in SCD parlance, but let's face it: they were poop journals, filled with page after page of Mr. Hankeys and the stuff that made them.

I kept this diary daily for well over a year, refining and finessing it as I went along. As I became sensitive to things that might impact my intestinal health, I'd add them: my menstrual cycle, my sleep (both quantity and quality), my external stressors. After a while, it became ridiculously obvious what worked and what didn't, what I needed to do more of and what, or whom, I needed to do my best to avoid.  Toward the end of the first year, my father's Crohn's took a severe turn for the worse, and his organs began shutting down. The day I got the call, almost immediately, I started bloating and cramping. And sure enough, the next morning I was gifted with an enormous explosion of diarrhea lurking behind the perfectly normal poop that had formed in the chute before the bad news.

The good news, however, was that I'd determined what bad news, or too much broccoli, or too few hours of sleep, would bring.

* * * * *

I have a friend who is a sort of Program maven, by which I mean she has spent a lot of time figuring out how 12-step thingamajiggies work, and the patterns they tend to follow. And one of the central tenets of all Programs is bringing your full attention to that which, up until now, you have not. You start with the obvious thing, your drinking, your beating yourself up over someone else's drinking, your sexual fixations, your spending, and you note it. All of it. She told me that in Debtors' Anonymous one of the mandates is that you keep a diary noting every penny that goes in and out of your life. Every penny, no rounding!

What it does is bring awareness to the actions you likely had been sleepwalking through before: picking up "just" a pack of gum at checkout, sticking a couple of quarters in the parking meter, blowing a month's rent on the third race at Santa Anita.¹ As an experiment in untangling my own clutter around money, I test-drove an index-card hack my friend Alison came up with, for two weeks, I noted every expenditure or bit of income, and any emotions that bubbled up around it. It was illuminating and not a little alarming, seeing all the anxieties secretly embedded in each transaction. Were I to do it long-term (like the Debtors' Anonymous tool) and add a lot of surrounding detail (like my poop diary), I'm guessing I'd start to see some pretty helpful causal connections.

* * * * *

Writing is physical. There's an emotional component, certainly, and maybe even a mystical one. When I get cranking, it certainly feels like I'm channeling something that's not exactly me.

But physically, it's your ass in the chair and your hands at the keyboard (or on the pen, you freak, you). Even the rogue, fairy-dust stuff is fueled by whatever keeps your brain floating in a happy mix of water and salts. And none of those things work as well, your ass's ability to stay put, your hands' ability to move, your gray mass's ability to process, unless a whole series of things have happened before. Things like eating and drinking the right things in the right quantities. Things like exercise and rest and full-on rest, a.k.a. adequate sleep. And high-quality sleep: sleep begun and ended at the right times, uninterrupted, if possible. I have written enough and long enough that I can power through a crappy body day, but it all goes much, much more easily if, for at least 24 hours before I sit down to write, I have been living right. Because writing takes literal, physical energy.

If it didn't, Laura Hillenbrand would have 14 amazing books written by now and I'd feel even worse about my inability to produce a single one.

* * * * *

It's easy to mock the body optimizing movement: Tim Ferriss has done some pretty extreme and even borderline creepy things in the name of getting the most out of his original-issue equipment. What's more, he's done it in such a way that it would be equally easy to chalk it up to hubris, a need for attention, a desire to cheat death, a lust for winning. But that would be me (or you, or anyone else) judging: even if he was completely forthcoming and totally forthright about his reasons, it's still him articulating them, and there's still some part of the spectrum we're all unable to be completely honest about because we can't access it: we have a blind spot, we don't know what we don't know, and because we're constantly evolving, we can't know everything about ourselves. (Although with time and practice, we can get a lot better at guesstimating.)

But I'm starting to get it now, on a deeply personal level. While I don't fear death, I live in abject terror of a long, slow, decline. I am wild at the idea of not being able to get all the music out before certain music-making parts of me shut down. What a cruel joke, that I finally start to "get" it, and another "it" is taken away. So I stay in and soak in a hot bath when I might rather go out. I forsake my beloved espresso for weak black tea, and slowly work in green instead of even that, though it always and forever will taste to me like drinking a wet lawn. I note the days when the writing comes well, and what I have and have not ingested/done/experienced in the hours leading up to this.

I am not just a writer when I sit down to write: I am a writer three hours before, in my last REM cycle. I am a writer 10 hours before, when I forgo another half-hour of BBC porn on my laptop for a (fiction, non-self-improving) book to wind down with. I am a writer 14 hours before, when I make my worker-bee self stop for the day.² I am a writer 18 hours before, when I elect to do my stupid Nei Kung instead of answering another 10 emails; I am a writer 20 hours before, when I stop myself from eating a Medjool date, yes, that's what it's come to, and have some yogurt with applesauce instead. (No one can say I don't know how to live it up, baby!)

The gift of operating a writing business from a rapidly decaying, overused-and-abused bag of aging parts is that I see with far more clarity what works and what gums up the works.

To be a better writer today, I had to start yesterday.

Fortunately, to be a better writer tomorrow, I can start today.

xxx c

¹Hey, I don't judge, I'm the lady who spent the better part of a year divesting herself of (mostly, for nothing) what it took dozens of years and thousands of dollars to mindlessly acquire. And when Brooks helped me bring my awareness to the tangle of emotions I had caught up in my clutter, he did it the same way: we looked at each item, one at a time, and asked whether I still needed it or could let it go.

²If you're doing the math as we go, I usually start writing at 9am, which means I'm still stopping my work day late, at 7pm. Worker Bee is working on it, okay?

On not falling for Postcard Living

There's a moment in The Jerk that's definitely not the funniest from that excellent Steve Martin film, but that's stuck with me the longest.

Navin Johnson, the lovable, Candide-like fool played by Martin, sits across from his beloved Marie in what is for him the scenario of his dreams: through a combination of optimism, hard work and being in the right place at the right time enough times in a row, he has recreated down to the tiny bamboo umbrella a cheesy print ad showing a mustachioed man in robe and ascot, self-actualized and potent via the rum drink in his hand. It's an ad that has driven and haunted him since he first saw it, so much so that he carried it with him like a treasure map, projecting himself into that ad, using it to propel him forward toward his dreams of fulfillment.

Shortly thereafter, of course, everything goes to hell in a handbasket, and in the process Navin learns the meaning of true happiness: love, friendship, and hootenannies on the front porch with your family of awesome musicians. (For the record, not far off from my ideal.)

There are better moments and there are funnier moments, but that moment wormed its way under my skin over 30 years ago and stayed there. Because I walk around with a collection of folded-up, idealized images of life tucked into my back pocket at all times.

* * *

I dislike ads. Or I guess I should say, I distrust them.

I distrust them because I have watched stylists fuss over too much Jell-O and too many English muffins. I distrust them because my father assured me that all shampoo was the same even as he sat there on the fold-out couch of his Divorced Dad Apartment, plotting the treasure maps that told America differently. I distrust them because I saw what the real mothers of the children whose Fake TV Mom I played looked like, and they all looked 10 years older than my child-free self, even when they were 10 years younger. I distrust them because at the height of my own adhole glory, I knew exactly how hard I could push up against a parity claim so the FTC wouldn't push back, and how to bedazzle it so the public filled in the gaps for me.

This is not to say that I was impervious to their charms. Quite the contrary, ads could make me laugh and cry and feel as much, maybe more than they could your average non-ad-dynasty, non-copywriting, non-acting schmuck who hadn't stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the man behind the curtain at the craft service table.

This, more than anything, may be why I distrust them so.

* * *

Do you get depressed looking at Facebook sometimes? I do. And there's officially and scientifically a reason for this: we're looking at a curated stream of happy moments and pretty pictures, for the most part, which makes us feel worse about our own sad sack state of affairs.¹ I get so depressed looking at Facebook sometimes that I have to stop looking at Facebook sometimes. There's a fairly direct correlation between my enjoyment of Facebook and my health, for instance: much like my sex drive, I know when I'm getting worse because the desire falls away, and I know when I'm getting better because it returns.

In other words, I'm no better than anyone else; I, too, tend to share the good and crawl away into the radio silence of my cave for the bad. Which is odd in one way, because I certainly have no problem talking about flailing here, and I've never had an issue with showing how ridiculous I look. Even then, though, I'm conscious of the curation, of the action of choosing the most hilariously unflattering shot, or phrasing the pain in a particular way. And I know that people who don't blog have a hard time believing this but trust me: no one who is blogging is sharing everything. Even the oversharers. It's impossible, for a variety of reasons, starting with time and ending with the observation of a thought changing the thought. (Although some people really do push the envelope, bless 'em.)

We see what we see, and that's all we see. We don't see the Photoshopping, unless it's obvious. We don't see the restrictive foundation garments, the crying quietly into pillows or glasses of Chardonnay, the cranky, low-blood-sugar moments with loved ones, the sad lapses when too much traffic intersects with too little sleep, the worry and self-doubt in the wee, non-posting hours of the morning. Most of life is mundane and most of life is work, and most of Facebook is not. Which, you know, is probably a good thing both for Facebook and us. But the imbalance is a little, a LOT more in Facebook's favor than it is ours, is all I'm sayin'.

* * *

My last art director used to have a phrase for those pretty, impractical things that ended up crowding out the utilitarian inhabitants of her closets: running-on-the-beach dresses. This was back in the early '90s, the apex of the J.Petermann/J.Crew/Victoria's Secret era, and a big, big time for gauzy, billowy, running-on-the-beach dresses. Because the early '90s were, of course, the true 1980s, one of the most bullshit-laden decades I've lived through. I mean, any era that serves up Pretty Woman, a hooker twist on the Pygmalion story, as a feel-good romp with shopping montages is one sick fucking era.

This is what we see, though, on Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it: rack after rack of carefully selected, highly styled, running-on-the-beach dresses. And we think, "Damn! How are these ladies prancing about on these beaches all day long in these dresses? When does the work happen? How do the dishes get done? Is there sleep on Planet Awesome, or do they power through with pixie dust? Loser! Loser! Loser!

I am here to tell you that there is no such thing as postcard living: that outside of the beautiful framed shot, there is every manner of squalid something-or-other. That what is within that postcard frame is only a version of the truth, from a moment in time.

It takes me four to six hours to write a blog post like this, this! a little nothing of a blog post! I am thin largely because I have a debilitating chronic illness that interferes with digestion and absorption. If I am full of energy and warmth when we meet at an event or a conference, it is because I am genuinely happy to see you, but it is also because I have spent days resting up before (and will likely follow it up with days more on the other end).

* * *

More than any other type of email, I get email that says "I had no idea anyone else felt that way."

For now, for always, for that day I finally hang up my spurs and buy my own billowy dress to hang in my own seaside shack, everyone feels that way. Everyone feels good/bad/ugly/hopeless/mighty/sad/small/indifferent.

And it always takes longer than you think it will (except when it doesn't).

And there is always a backstory (even if its a boring one).

And an ad is rarely the truth.

And the truth is always the only way out of wherever you are...

xxx c

¹I do have several friends who provide a valuable service as Debbie Downers, posting about their ill moods, misfortunes, and Armaggedon. I pause here to thank you. Bring on those horsemen!

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