course correction

My friends, I've been a bad, bad blogger, and I apologize, and I thank those of you who have prodded me, virtually and actually, to get back at it. I have two reasons for my disappearance (other than sheer procrastination). The first is a doozy: I've been working! Yes, working — me, the supposedly free-spirited, on-the-road, devil-may-care, ne'er-do-well slacker dropout. All of a sudden, I have a ton of work, thanks to a couple of projects that are big enough and long-term enough for me to go ahead and set up my very own LLC (which I’m hoping stands for Lucky Little Company). You can't believe the paperwork and filing fees and legal advice and accountants involved in setting up even a one-person consultancy (one might think that in this economic climate, the powers-that-be would be encouraging those of us trying to leave the rolls of the unemployed, but one would be wrong; in fact, Connecticut just literally doubled all of its business-related fees), but I think I’m through the thick of it, and my projects seem to be under control, so I can pay some long-overdue attention to my blog.

My current work situation has quite a few strange characteristics. First and most astonishing: everyone (I mean everyone) I work with is smart, and I like them all. Now that's a brand-new experience for me, and one that I don't take lightly, believe me, after my dealings with some of the less-than-bright, deeply unlikeable types who lurk in every workplace. Another new one for me is that very little of the work requires me to be in an office, or to be somewhere at a certain time, or to tiptoe around the various landmines of office life.

I love the flexibility and freedom that I have, and how much more sense it all makes, from a pure productivity standpoint. I can be that prototypical freelancer, working in my PJs, setting my own hours, taking a break when I need to rather than watching the clock. If I’m tired, I don’t have to struggle to keep my eyes open until 5 and then stagger home and collapse. If I hit a wall, I can take a nap or go for a walk, and then return to my desk in a more productive state of mind. And I don’t crave solitude the way that I did after a day of dysfunctional office dynamics, when I sometimes felt I was just counting the minutes until I could retreat to my beloved apartment and shut the door on the world. Now, a lot of the work is solitary, so I don't feel the need to retreat during my non-work hours. Plus I have that nice feeling of ownership: these are my projects, my clients, my company, my headaches. What a difference all that makes.






















However. When I originally conceived this post, it was going to be purely about the joys of work, how I feel motivated and reinvigorated, how I find it so odd that people say, “Don’t work too hard” when clearly I’m enjoying working hard, how I’m just soaking up the positive feedback, how helpful it's been for my confidence and sense of possibility (and my bank account). I like the collaboration, the learning, and the fact that I don't have to feel guilty about having zilch interest in finding a full-time job.

However. My blog now appears to act as a conscience for me, and as I thought through the post and what I wanted to say, I had to acknowledge the nagging voice in my head, the same one that I ignored for years but that finally drove me to extricate myself from my unhappy and stressful situation last spring. It’s the voice that reminds me that I want something more from my life — something that remains rather vague, but that isn’t going to just happen on its own.

In some ways (and this is Reason Number Two for my blogging delinquency), I think my mini-break from the blog over the past few weeks was a break from seriously paying attention to my life — to its content, its direction, and its potential - so that I could hunker down and focus on the (paying) work on hand, so that my big question of the day could simply be, "What do I need to get done today?" Now I'm again trying to look at my life in a more comprehensive way, and I've been thinking about what I've learned and how I've felt over the past couple of months. I have a few "key takeaways," as we say in the consulting game: (1) I do want a home of my own once again, and I want it to be nice; (2) freelancing is a good setup for me right now, with the benefits (income with relative independence) far, far outweighing the demerits (like, say, expensive and crappy health insurance, and lots of deadlines, and responsibility); (3) setting up my own company is an incredible and rewarding feeling; and (4) — and this is the most important — I need something bigger, some larger project or purpose, something creative and ambitious and soul-fulfilling. (I have a couple of thoughts about what this something could be, but I don't feel quite ready to share.)

So right now, I need to make sure I don't get pulled back into a life that isn't ultimately fulfilling for me. And there are so many ways that I can get sucked back in: I have a meeting with a successful, high-paid woman with a lot of responsibility and a swish office and think, “I should do this!”; or I pay a visit to a friend with an enviable apartment in the Village; or I think longingly of all my stuff, now stashed in some mysterious storage unit in the Bronx, and how lovely it would be to set up house again, and maybe I should check out the real estate listings, and oh I could have a cat again.... But I’m terrified of ending up where I was a year and a half ago, freaking out at the stack of bills, working too much, feeling like I’m permanently stuck, generally just fretting.

To be honest, over the past two months I’ve questioned the purpose of my blog. I loved it initially, when I was just back from my Paris interlude and really thinking through my "vision quest" and looking at the big questions of my life. It helped me stay in my uncomfortable in-between stage (in between jobs, homes, routines) rather than jumping into something that would have initially felt more secure, but wouldn't be right in the long run. But recently I'd been wondering if the blog had run its course, if there was anything I could say that would mean anything to anyone but me. However, I realize now that the purpose of the blog is to keep me on my toes, that it's a way for me to push myself to keep questioning what I'm doing and where I'm going, and to keep tabs on my journey. It’s all about me, in other words, but I do truly hope that at least some of it is of interest and help to you, since without you, I wouldn’t have figured any of this out.

adult supervision

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
- Samuel Johnson

Wow, I've been a bad blogger this month. There are some good reasons for this, which I'll cover in another post, but for now, I'll just apologize (sorry!) and get on with it.

I fear this post is going to be a personal one, folks, and a bit terrifying for someone of my retiring disposition. But as much as I'm tempted to just skip it and instead tell you about my lunch at the fab Mexican place in Port Chester today (tacos! amazingly fresh tortillas! and horchata!), I think I need to tackle this.

... Okay, so about 10 minutes have gone by since I wrote those few sentences. I'm feeling kind of self-conscious and exposed. Let's just write it all out, audience be damned, and then see what we've got.

This post is about what the pop psych people call "intimacy issues"; if this topic gives you the shakes or an overwhelming sense of ennui, please feel free to click elsewhere.

To follow up on crybaby: I'm not being such a waterworks any more (though those sappy commercials that feature lovely young people being sweet and attentive to charming and grateful old people always, always get me). In fact, the situation that sparked crybaby has turned out to be what I, if I were prone to these types of phrases, might call a teaching moment.

I haven't had much success with romantic relationships in my life, and I've fouled up a fair share of friendships, too. It's a cliché, I know, but when someone gets close to me - or more to the point, when I get close to someone - all sorts of "Danger, Will Robinson!" flashing lights and waving robot arms start up, and I put on the brakes so hard that I typically pull a Rockford and end up zooming in the opposite direction. (How you like those metaphors?)

Why, you ask? Well, that's the $64,000 question. (Actually, I haven't hit the $64,000 mark on this one yet, but if I continue with the steady stream of checks to my therapist, it could happen.) It's mostly to do with trust, which is a tough one for me, and the lack thereof, and a lifelong sense that all it takes is one little mistake on my part (or one moment where I slip and show you my real self), and I'm off your list. So instead of sticking around in a relationship and trying to make sure I don't make any mistakes, which is of course impossible, I head for the door myself. Or I perversely create a minefield of self-fulfilling prophecies - finding all sorts of ways to test this poor man, hold him up to impossible standards, criticize him when he fails, until he is at his wit's end and declares, "This isn't working!" Which of course, I knew all along.

Nothing gets my defenses up like the feeling that I'm being rejected, and it's a feeling that can be triggered all too easily, by a prick to the ego, a broken date, a disappointment, a frustration that he couldn't read my mind and know exactly what I needed, even when I was saying that I didn't want it. It's crazy-making, for me, for him, for anyone who gets sucked into my insane parallel universe. At moments like this, I can go from sweetness and affection to utter rage and scorn in no time flat. The interior monologue goes something like this: "I can't believe he did that. This is ridiculous - this person is not for me, this is all wrong, why are we bothering when we can't even get along, enough already, done."

Sadly, once it starts up, the interior monologue is tough to shut down. It gathers momentum, drowning out all vestiges of rational thought, precluding honest conversation and openness. The moment - and the relationship - becomes completely about my being in control: I'm the one who sees all the problems, and who never relents or opens up or shares anything that might weaken my position of power. When I look back at times like this, it's as if I had been possessed by a demon, and my own feelings and judgments and self were utterly erased.

You wouldn't believe how difficult it is for me to try to break these patterns. For instance, when I'm being just a nightmare to someone, cold and critical and distant, and I manage to recognize that I'm doing this and that it's not the ideal course of events, I'll tell myself that I need to start a conversation about what's going on with me, get it out in the open. So there I am, in my head, trying to encourage myself to open up and stop punishing and perhaps even apologize, and it feels terrifying, as if I'm giving away the farm. It's like the crazy girl in the movies who ends up crumpled on the floor, screaming and crying and scuttling herself into a corner, where she huddles and screams some more, terrified that the nice man in the white jacket is going to take away her blankie, or whatever. That's what's living in my head, refusing to budge an inch, refusing to calm down, refusing to listen. Sometimes I can talk her down, sometimes not.

Later, when the crazy blankie girl has gone away for a rest, it feels nigh impossible to acknowledge my behavior, and to apologize. Remember how the Fonz just couldn't bring himself to say he was sorry? He'd stammer and stutter and look as if he was trying to cough up a hairball, but he just could not apologize - in his world, it was impossible that he was ever wrong. I can relate. Trying to explain myself, to account for and apologize for my bad behavior, can feel impossible, as if there is a physical impediment to speaking, a physical inability to bring forth the words.

Oy. What a mess, right?

Happily, I do feel that I'm making progress in my quest to become a better person. Now that I'm more aware of these mechanisms, I'm trying to dismantle them. I'll spare you the therapy-speak, for the most part, not because I don't believe in it, but because it just don't travel well, do it? I'll just say this: My monologue is more of an interior dialogue these days, as I try to talk myself down from this tautly strung state, down to something more human and less frightened and more willing to be open and present. It is so incredibly difficult to try out unfamiliar behavior such as this - it would be so much more comfortable to stick with the behavior I know so well. But that hasn't exactly worked for me in the past.

In the intro to Psychotherapy Without the Self, his book that attempts to reconcile psychotherapy with Buddhism, Mark Epstein writes the following:

In particular, the British analyst D. W. Winnicott moved therapy from a focus on unacceptable instincts and urges to a focus on the unintelligible aspects of emotional experience. 'We are poor indeed if we are only sane,' he remarked once in a famous footnote. [Love that! -Ed.] Winnicott had the idea that the opposite of integration (the state of an apparently cohesive self) is not disintegration but something he termed unintegration. Here he was moving away from Freud and toward the Buddha. He compared unintegration to what it is like for a child to surrender himself in play, knowing that his mother is in the next room providing what he called 'good-enough ego coverage.' He also compared it to a lover's consciousness 'after intercourse,' when the urges are relaxed and the mind and heart are open, and to an artist's mind when unburdened in the studio. He saw the state of unintegration as the foundation of creativity and wrote volumes about the consequences of failing to tap into it. When a child has to manage an intrusive or ignoring parental environment, Winnicott suggested, he or she is forced to develop a 'false' or 'caretaker' self, centered in the thinking mind, in order to survive. This false self (which can paradoxically seem 'really real') is created at the expense of unintegration, and the capacities for spontaneity, subjectivity, and authenticity are all compromised as a result. Winnicott, in his own way, seemed to be describing something akin to how the Buddhist unconscious could be covered over by early experience.

This whole passage is incredibly powerful to me - to the point where I don't think I feel ready to write about how I believe these concepts relate to me - but perhaps most powerful is the parens about the "false" self, "which can paradoxically seem 'really real'." It's fascinating to me how right the crazy blankie girl can sound, and also fascinating to begin to recognize how I can have a different opinion and perspective and approach from hers, that I can try to figure out why she's so upset, and try to calm her down, and try to get her out of the driver's seat. Revelatory, my friends. It feels kind of like growing up - and about time.

Fabulous "madwoman" button from www.cafepress.com.

crybaby

You know when you're in one of those moods where everything makes you cry? Maybe you're a little tired, or maybe you're weak from the flu, or maybe your heart suffered a blow and you've been crying anyway, so why not cry some more when, say, the winner of the Open falls to the court and starts sobbing after match point? Or when Beyoncé proves herself to be a class act above and beyond what anyone ever expected at an MTV event? Or when a ridiculously corny song comes on the radio and just seems to exactly and unbearably sum up your experience? (My classic example of this is when I was on vacation in Hawaii with Thom and Alex, right after Thom had suffered a devastating breakup. The three of us are sitting at a picnic table, eating shave ice, when a Gloria Estefan song comes over the loudspeaker. The first verse isn't even over, and Thom is already up and hurrying away, clearly sobbing. Alex and I look at each other and say, simultaneously, "Gloria Estefan? Really?" That was the clue that led us to realize what bad shape Thom was in. As Amanda says in Private Lives, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.")

For me, today's waterworks instigator was coming across this passage from The Little Prince, a book that, like The Velveteen Rabbit, can make me cry even when there's not a copy within a mile; all I have to do is picture the fox, asking the Prince to tame him... or the poor rabbit, ashamed that he has no hind legs like the real rabbits... oh oh oh!

A-nee-way, here's the passage:

And he confided further, "In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her."

There are many ways in which this quote from The Little Prince does not at all parallel my situation (for instance, I am not a rose), but when one is weepy, a shortage of parallels is no hurdle to complete identification with another's sadness, especially if this sadness is in one of the great tear-jerker books of all time.

If you're a reasonably good between-the-lines reader, perhaps you can make a rough guess as to the source of my current weepy state. Yes, dear reader, I have a bit of a heartache. I may driven someone away with my "silly pretensions," and I may have lost a chance at what could have been a good thing.

This would normally be the part of the essay where I would try to come up with some wanderings on this subject, accompanied by some interesting and insightful gleanings, perhaps a bit of profundity on the nature of love and loss, along with maybe a funny line or anecdote, and then wrap everything up in a brilliantly deft maneuver that would pack an emotional wallop (note that I said "try to come up with"). Nothing is presenting itself at the moment.

It's tough to think up something original to say about romantic disappointment. After all, it's been covered, oh, here and there, over the years, with various heroines pitching themselves in front of trains or off of towers, a double suicide in iambic pentameter, a hero running through the desert to try to get help for his beloved, who he left in a cave after the plane crash, but then the British soldiers thought he was a spy and dragged him off in chains, and then he jumped off the train and commandeered a plane to get back to the cave, but it was too late... {*sob*}

So, really, what is there left to say about heartache? Basically, it hurts like mad, you try to get through the worst of it as best you can, you try to take something from it that will help you on your journey, and hopefully, you don't let it scar too badly. Because apparently, we need to keep trying, for reasons the Little Prince's fox can express much more eloquently than I:

"My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . ."

roses, sailboats, and the meaning of life

I recently had a mini health scare. It was just some wonky test results that turned out to be nothing, but it did give me a few days of unease. I'm not a hypochondriac and typically don't borrow trouble (i.e., I'm not fretting about swine flu or Lyme disease; my fears these days tend to veer toward getting clipped by a driving-while-texting nut job who's crossing the double yellow into my lane), but there are a couple of diagnoses that I have a particular fear of, and this was one of them. So when the lab called to tell me I had to come back in for more tests, I immediately tapped into a reservoir of otherwise carefully tamped-down panic and burst into tears on the phone with the poor technician, who tried to talk me down while I gasped about "I knew it, I knew it - I've been afraid this would happen."

For my second round of poking and prodding, I went to the big-deal fancy lab, where they can run tests from here to next Tuesday, guaranteeing that they can find something wrong with you, as my mother puts it. While I was sitting in the waiting area (which was rather spa-like: we were all in robes, listening to New Age music that had lots of chimes and wind noises, sipping ice water and waiting for our names to be called), I could hear the doctor down the hall as he delivered test results to each patient in the various exam rooms. He had a tendency to shout out things like "Everything looks good!" in a big joyful voice as soon as he got the door open, as if certain the patient wouldn't be able to stand the suspense for even the two or three seconds it would take for him to get in the room and shut the door behind him. I imagined he only did this early-warning approach when the news was good and figured that if he came into my exam room quietly and carefully shut the door before saying anything, I'd know I was in deep trouble.



My name was called, I went into an exam room, the tests were done, and then I sat nervously, listening to the doctor's oddly enthusiastic voice as he made his rounds, waiting for my turn. I was pretty sure that, once I got the news, I'd be an emotional wreck again, either because of the terror induced by an imminent death sentence, or thanks to utter relief at a stay of execution, but the doctor managed to pre-empt any display of emotion on my part.

He did his big entrance, booming out, "First of all, you're fine! Completely and absolutely fine!" Then he zoomed right up to me, hand outstretched. "Second of all, do you remember me?"

I was so dazed, I couldn't put two and two together. "I know you?" I said, trying to remember another time when I'd faced a life-threatening disease that brought me into contact with this particular genre of doctor.

"From college!" he boomed again. "Chris [last name withheld]!"

My god, I thought. Chris. Of course. Didn't we sort of date when I was a freshman?

"I saw you sitting in the waiting area and thought, 'Could that be Siobhan?'" he said jovially, clearly ready to kick around some memories and laugh over this bizarre coincidence. Then he must have registered the utter confusion on my face and settled down to give me a bit more detail on the test results, acting the part of a responsible and comforting doctor. Once he got that out of the way, he went straight back to old times, and then asked what I'd been up to in the past 20 years. I couldn't think of one thing, especially when faced with a walking, talking success story: a doctor in a ritzy hospital in Connecticut, married to a lovely classmate, if I recall, with a few bouncing babies to boot. It was all too surreal to me; the scene I'd imagined as a prelude to a Dark Victory story line instead turned out to be part Hail Fellow Well Met, part "Oh my god I'm a failure" freak-out (as if I need any more of those). So much for my big Bette Davis moment - though of course, ultimately I was extremely relieved.



Meanwhile, that very same week, a good friend had a terrifying and completely unexpected heart attack, out of the clear blue sky. He's young, exercises a lot, eats well, doesn't smoke, has a happy and fulfilling life - and yet, he had a very close call and is looking at a long recovery period. It's given him pause, as they say - given many of us pause, in fact. There's a lot of "You never know" being said, especially since he was so healthy up to this point. It reminds me of an old New Yorker cartoon, where a very self-satisfied man is strutting down the sidewalk, thinking proudly, "Less cholesterol! Regular checkups! No nicotine! No alcohol! Low sodium! Moderate exercise! No sugar!", unaware that a giant safe is about to drop on his head.

I bring up these two incidents because, after all, the heart of my blog is about trying to live life in the fullest and truest way that I can, and there's nothing like a close look at mortality to make a girl take a step back for some perspective. In the typical narrative, a brush with death (or even the thought of a brush with death) makes one toss out the junky parts of one's life and stop deferring the dream. However, I've already done a lot of the items on this particular list: quit the dead-end and depressing job (check), travel to wonderful places (check), spend more time with friends and family (check and check), buy a sports car (check! just this month! love it! want to drive across the country!), stop and smell the roses (and listen to the birds, and watch the sunset, and so forth - check), and not let the days just zip by (trying, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not).

It brings to mind a rather odd play I saw a few years back, an absurd (in a good way) monologue by Will Eno called Thom Pain (based on nothing). The character, who viciously skewers everything in sight, at one point says, "What if you only had one day to live? What would you do? That's easy. You'd be brave and true and reckless. You would love life and people with wild and new abandon. If you only had a day. What if you had forty years? What would you do? If you're like me, and - no offense - you probably are, you wouldn't do anything."



It's true, isn't it? We all think we'd scrap our boring old lives and go out and have mad adventures - jump out of planes or gobble down caviar at the Ritz or climb Machu Picchu at dawn or move to Paris or some such - if we knew our time on this planet was limited. But it is limited, isn't it? From the get-go? And yet here we all sit, not swimming with dolphins or blowing it all on red in Vegas.

This could be because we're all cowards, but actually, I think there's another, simpler, less dramatic reason: There's plenty of enjoyment to be had in the day-to-day. I've learned over the past year that I don't need to pack each hour with Experiences and Accomplishments, that there's a lot to be said for reading and hanging out and, even, drifting a bit. So I'm not sure how important the bucket list is, as long as your days bring more happiness than not. (Though you might take a bit of advice from Thom Pain and "love life and people with wild and new abandon" - but in a calm, sustainable way.)

For instance: Ted Kennedy. Here's someone who did get the tap on the shoulder letting him know that his time was almost up, and what did he do? Apparently, he went sailing a lot. Of course, he had a few other things on his plate (like, oh, I don't know, trying to create a system where all his fellow Americans would have decent, affordable health care - you know, little to-do items to cross off the list), but still, he made it a priority to continue with this simple pastime that he loved, something he'd done all his life, in the same waters he'd always known (in, may I point out, a truly gorgeous sailboat). He didn't feel the need to go out in search of new and bigger and more exotic adventures. He knew he had a certain amount of time left, and he just went on doing what had always made him happy.











{Antique botanical prints of "General Jacqueminot" rose, "Baroness Rothschild" rose, "Safrano" tea rose, and "Monthly" rose available from Lyons Ltd; bottom: Ted Kennedy's Mya}

6 days in NM: day 6

We had a split decision on the merits of the last supper in New Mexico (dinner at Antonio's in Taos), and since mine was the nay vote, and it's my blog, I'm going to draw a tactful curtain over what I felt was a sub-par meal.

So my final thoughts on New Mexico aren't on the food (!!), but instead on the landscape. Coming from New England, I'm always amazed at the sheer vastness, and the palette, and the quality of the light in the West - and those mountains.

We got up early on Tuesday morning, while it was still pitch black, and drove the two hours to Albuquerque to catch our flight home. The drive was so lovely, with the light gradually emerging, a pink glow spreading over all the desert, and dense pillows of fog trapped along the base of the mountains. Despite my deep and absolute loathing of having to get up before dawn, I must admit that it was worth it.

The day before, we drove outside of Taos a little ways, and caught some beautiful vistas as the light came in under the clouds (the first and only cloudy day!). Hope you like.

6 days in NM: day 5 - Chimayo

On the drive to Taos, we stopped at Chimayo to see the shrine and the sacred dirt, which was being avidly scooped up by believers.



The church itself is lovely - very rustic and rough. Nearby is a spot with the stations of the cross arranged to create a sort of mini-pilgrimage, and each has been decorated by visitors with handmade crosses, strings of Christmas lights, icons, and prayers.



Along one wall of the compound were some newer mosaics. I know it's sacrilegious, but this particular one looked so much like the South Park Jesus that I had to document it.

6 days in NM: days 5+6 - a referendum

Apparently, the state motto of New Mexico is Crescit Eundo, or "Grow As It Grows."

Bor-ing. I have a much better suggestion: "Smothered in Green Chile."

It seems as if pretty much every restaurant serving New Mexican food uses the word "smothered" on the menu when it comes to chile. This translates into a platter of some astonishingly delicious food which looks a mess and tastes like heaven.



For instance, in addition to the Los Potrillos breakfast described earlier, there was lunch on Sunday at JoAnn's in Espanola, across the way from the Rock Christian Fellowship. I had pork tamales (my goodness, I love tamales) with rice and beans and a blanket of green chile, along with sopaipillas that didn't quite match up to The Pantry's.

Then, dinner last night at Joseph's Table here in Taos, where it was too dark to document my beet, goat cheese and pinon salad, or my buffalo cheeseburger with green chile, both of which were wonderful. (By the by, I believe that was my first buffalo meal, though I may have tasted it during my foodie mag days back in the '90s.)



And then there was breakfast today, at Taos Diner, a restaurant to which I give a big stamp of approval: scrambled eggs with chorizo, positively smothered in green chile, served with potatoes and fresh flour tortilla. If I lived in Taos, I would eat here - a lot.



And there's a convenient pawn shop next door, in case you're in desperate need of green chile but are short on cash.



I'll be starting an online petition regarding the new state motto. Keep your eyes peeled.