Un-Resolutions

In 2021, I stopped making resolutions and started doing something different.

Each year, I spend some time in the last week of the year and I choose three guiding phrases, three things I plan to use to keep myself on track in my own growth and evolution. Then, whenever I'm confronted with a choice, I consider those mantras and ask myself which choice keeps me closer to that path. 

My 2024 phrases were Learn for Leadership, Improve Your Space, and Cultivate Community. Throughout the year, I've found them leading me back to empathy, simplicity, connection, and authenticity, and while my growth hasn't been particularly linear, I'm pretty happy with the direction of my overall personal evolution. For 2025, I'm keeping one of the three: Learn for Leadership. It's not only helped me choose my reading and educational materials, but it's been an incentive to dive more deeply into learning *people*, becoming more curious and understanding of them, and it continues to be an incredibly useful lens for the world. For the other two, I'm taking the lessons I've learned and contemplating where I want the next stage of my personal journey to lead. 

One thing I've definitely been working with and through recently is the understanding of my own impact in the world. I'm learning that I have far more capacity to effect change, and far more power, than I realized, and I'm also learning that even my most well-intentioned missteps still carry a weight that can hurt others, no matter how much I may try to avoid it. For that reason, I'm choosing Own Your Impact as the second of my guiding phrases for the year, to help me confront my own responsibility to act, and my own accountability for my actions.

The third phrase has been really hard to select, to the point that I seriously considered moving forward with only two this year rather than set myself a guiding mantra I don't really mean. Amusingly enough, *that* thought is what led me to a clearer choice. I've spent a lot of my life choosing my end goals by the paths available to me in the space where I was, but right now I find myself looking at some clear end goals I'd like to achieve, and diverse paths I could take to reach them. I can't take all the paths, though; I have to figure out the best way to move forward from where I am and reach where I want to get, and spend my time and energy judiciously. To that end, the third guiding phrase I'm selecting is Define Your Journey, both to help me remember that I need to consciously choose my own path on my own terms, and to remind me that I can't do all the things, I have to do the things that make sense for my goals.

This year is also a departure for me, in that for the first years each set of mantras evolved from the previous almost directly, so that Always Be Learning has changed a little each year to reach Learn for Leadership, and Claim Your Space has grown into Improve Your Space, and Build Connection has transformed into Cultivate Community. This likely means that Learn For Leadership may become a persistent life mantra for me, but it doesn't mean that owning and improving my space or cultivating community goes away; it more likely means that doing so has become integrated into my approach to the world well enough that I can bring in more active considerations as I move forward.

I made this change in 2021 because I have a long history of setting resolutions with the absolute best of intentions, and getting partway through the year only to find myself thrown off by unexpected challenges. I got to the end of 2020, and I looked at my aspirations from the beginning of that year: travel more, spend more time doing things with friends, accomplish new ideas and programs at work. What I actually did that year was survive, completely overhaul my job, build out my online support network, and spend a lot of time gardening. I thought "How, in the world as it is right now, can I possibly even consider resolving to improve myself? Why fucking bother?" Instead, I asked myself what would have helped me weather 2020 better, and I realized that having these kinds of guideposts was better for me, in a complex and uncertain world.

Should you do this? Maybe. I think that more people will probably be helped by sitting down to think about the principles they want guiding them than coming up with very specific habits or practices they want to adopt. Several times in the last several years, life has thrown plot twists and curveballs that forced me to reconsider my goals, and each time I've found that process made much easier and less demoralizing by being able to take those changes and approach them with my guiding principles in hand, reframing instead of discarding. Even if my goalposts change, I'm still playing by my own rules.

One thing I can say: if the thought of doing this scares you or feels daunting, if sitting down to consider your own guiding ethos feels incredibly intimidating, and if setting intentions at this level seems like something you're absolutely not capable of doing, you should almost certainly do it.

I love you all.

Holding, Together

When the sun sets on solstice night, we hurl our faith into the darkness, vowing to hold fast until the return of the light.

Ancient European people staring up to the cosmos didn't understand a round and tilted world spinning around a central star, turning and returning.  They just knew that the world operated on a predictable pattern: the days get very short and the nights very long, and then the light comes back and the days slowly begin to lengthen and brighten in an annual cycle.

Winter cold and darkness kill.  Food stores stretch thin, fire and heat hold the line against freezing, and inclement weather can limit the ability to resupply and find help.  Predators starved of easy game get bolder as they get hungrier, and creep towards human settlements they'd otherwise avoid.  A dark winter night, and what you have to survive it, forces you to confront all the decisions you made in your times of plenty.  The coming of sun and spring feel like a benediction and a validation of your ability to survive.

We built elaborate rituals around this annual balance between the light and the dark. Some people assigned identity to the cycle, with Oak and Holly kings rising and falling.  Some laid the year out as a wheel, and hung practices and social conventions upon it.  We created celebrations of family and community because human connection drastically increases the chances of surviving the darkness.

Many cultures developed elaborate rules and practices around hospitality; the expectation that a kind stranger would take you in if you found yourself unsheltered was as critical as the expectation that the stranger you took in wouldn't slaughter your family in their beds.

And the darkness became a time for rest and domestic comfort, for rebuilding and repairing to prepare for the coming seasons. My Germanic ancestors sat by the winter fire telling stories as they made or mended tools they would need for the year's hunt and harvest.

As the understanding of astronomy and geography increased and ancient people began to understand the reasons for the cycle, the rituals persisted.  I am a modern, science-loving pagan, and I know why the sun comes back.  I do not doubt its return.

Yet every year, I sit in the winter solstice morning sunshine and give thanks that it has.

Why?  Because I too need the reminder, more often these days, that the dark times pass and the light comes again.  That there is time for rest and mending.  That even though we don't all survive every dark time, our chances of it grow if we hold faith and connection, and share with one another -- be it food, shelter, or story.

We are in a time of remarkable loss, uncertainty, and grief.  It has become very easy to feel helpless in the face of the world as it is, because that world appears to be spinning out of control along multiple axes. It is very hard right now to believe this long night will end.

It's all right to be afraid.  It's all right if your faith is shaken. It's all right if you're struggling to believe in a brighter day.  That fear we feel is as old as humanity.

So are the tools we use to oppose the fear: community, hope, shared stories, time for rest and mending, and faith -- be it in gods, ourselves, or one another.  Our celebrations are as old as our fears, for good reason.

As this Yule sun beams down after the longest night, let it inspire you to hold fast, my beloveds, and love one another, and we will carry as many through as we can, together.

Samhain

On Samhain night, we honor what is lost, we touch grief and memory together, and we settle in for the dark winter of rest and contemplation.

The last year has been one long and exquisitely difficult arc of grief for so many of us.  We're mourning lost moments, lost connections, and lost loved ones, all scattered before the wind of a history none of us would have chosen to live.

Our lives and our communities have changed, and some of the change is good.  Not all changes are bad or hard, and in times when everything is uncertain it can be hard to hold to the joyful transitions amidst the flood of upheaval.  I thought long and hard tonight about what to honor as this year draws to a close, and I'm choosing to honor and release the parts of myself that my own recent history has destroyed, or simply made vestigial; in so choosing I'm clearing the deadfall to make way for who I'm becoming.

I release the part of me that desperately wanted your acceptance and approval, who wanted so much to be part of an inner circle that I never stopped to ask whether you were worthy of my respect.

I release the part of me that needed to be liked more than I needed to be understood.

I release the part of me that allowed others to define their priorities as my own.

I release the part of me deliberately made palatable lest those with small capacity find it too complex, or choke on what I have to offer.

I release the part of me that waited, anxious, to be invited to the place I deserved to stand.

I release the part of me that believed I ever had anything to prove.

Here I stand within my circle, cloaked and hooded and ready to take my place.

I cast back the hood of self-doubt, so that my crown of self-awareness may be seen, gleaming above clear eyes.

I step out of the boots I wear, surrendering structure to stand grounded upon bare earth.

I peel away my gloves, so that all I touch now touches me, and we change each other.

I release the clasp at my throat, made up of the will and wants of others laid over my own needs and priorities.

Freed, the heavy cloak of expectations slides from my shoulders and pools around my bare feet.

And so I am ready to step forward, in a radiant gown woven of my own dreams, adorned with my love for friends and family and my chosen service to the larger world, and stand at the center of my circle shining dark and brilliant both.

I have been a queen of winter longer than I have acknowledged it; the dark of the year is mine to carry and to walk.  In the long contemplations of the year just past, I have embraced my role in the liminal space, holding just inside the darkness to show the way, walking the paths of grief as a guide but not softening the pain.  It's not mine to ease; my work is to show you that you can be the person who is strong enough to carry your pain, not to shoulder the burden for you when you think it's too much.  This makes me harder to know, sometimes, than I could be, and it's in those times that I need to remember what I chose to release to reach the center of the circle, and why.  It's also worth reminding myself that those who belong in my circle will always find a way there, and that what I would need to give up to BE easy to know is too important to lose.

I love you all.

Tapped Out

 Let's take a moment to talk about empathy, positive pressure, compassion fatigue, and burnout.

I am what is generally known as The Strong Friend.  I am a lot of people's first call in crisis, and last call before giving up.  I tend to maintain my own boundaries and capacities in a way that means I frequently have a small reserve of energy or space, and the ability to step back and hold calm in chaos.  I compartmentalize well, think fast, and work through problems to find the simplest solution easily.

For the most part, this is a structure I can maintain, exactly because I have boundaries like a motherfucker.  I don't give what I can't afford to lose, only pull from my own reserves and surplus.  That's a lesson I learned the hard way years ago when I found I'd given up what I *needed* to people who wouldn't sacrifice what they only *wanted* to replenish it.  I make it practice, in the darkest times, to set aside a portion of my reserves to be available to others in need, to hold flame so others' lights don't go out entirely.

So when the pandemic began, I found myself in a better place, emotionally, than a lot of the people around me.  I've dealt with isolation, I've dealt with sustained stress, I've been at war with my own mind since I was 11 years old.  I also have a good, stable job that allows me to work from home, a partner who helps and supports me, and generally steady resources on several fronts.  Consequently, I had the ability to be a space for support for others who had a harder time adjusting.  I reached out and offered support to people who were in a worse place than I was:  emotional, professional, financial, whatever was needed to help out.  I always assumed that support was a temporary offering until we all adjusted to the pressures of living under a pandemic.

But as a year went on, I found that "Let me hold space for you while you adjust to this state of trauma" became "Let me maintain a positive pressure for you, supporting you indefinitely while you continue to try and approximate your non-pandemic emotional state at all costs."  The adjustment I expected never came; people simply adapted to my support as a constant state of affairs, incorporated the belief that they'd always be able to rely on me into their plans.  They built their systems around the expectation that I would hold that positive pressure, that I'd always give just a little more than I asked.

Not familiar with the concept of positive pressure?  Systems that operate on flow and supply work because they maintain positive pressure: the ability of what's going into the system to stay slightly ahead of what's flowing out of the system.  As long as that pressure is maintained, even if the system has leaks, everyone's structural integrity stays the same and contaminants can't flow back *into* the system.  The positive pressure is essential to maintaining the health of the entire system, and it's surprisingly easy to maintain.  You just make sure the tiniest bit more goes in than out.

Here in Austin, we all had a bit of time two and a half months ago to understand the concept of systems under positive pressure when the big freeze killed our water treatment plant.  As pipes burst across the city and pumps shut down, the flow of water OUT of the system exceeded the water treatment plant's ability to put water INTO the system, and the whole thing depressurized and collapsed.  The reason it took so many days for some of us to get water back wasn't that the water plant couldn't produce the water.  It was that the whole system, having depressurized, had to fill its reservoirs to maintain that positive pressure so that it wouldn't collapse again and it would be able to provide stable, consistent water delivery.

And that, my loves, is exactly what happened to me.  For the last seven months, I've been solving an incredibly stressful, highly-pressured series of nested problems at work.  I have...not received the support I needed from my leadership.  I have, at the same time, been a source for emotional support, financial support, personal growth for others.  I stepped into justice movements to be a voice for support and allyship.  I gave, and I gave, and I gave, always from what I could technically spare.  

But the funny thing about giving what you can spare is that over the short term it just means you go without 'extra' for a little bit.  Over the long term, it means your 'extra' bypasses the chance to build your reserves, so you store up only what you think you might actually need in an emergency.  You think "I have enough in my reserves to weather the average crisis, I have enough to spare." So you keep sharing, and giving away, and you tell yourself that you're not HURTING yourself, you're just not hoarding, and hoarding is wrong, right?  My life is filled with people standing in perfect moral purity and condemning even the suggestion of hoarding anything someone else might need. The guilt and the shame over 'hoarding' my own energy have been so insidious that I've had to take drastic steps to counteract them; if you've been a voice yelling about how no one cares enough or talks enough about what you think they should, then congratulations, I have almost certainly 'snoozed' you for a month on social media at least once recently.

In December, I noticed the first warning sign:  compassion fatigue.  I stopped having the energy to turn to every single moment of pain I witnessed with an open heart and a desire to do active work to ease that pain.  I struggled with anger at people who continued to need my support for situations they had had power to fix and hadn't.  I talked about it, and heard "oh, yeah, we all feel like that."

I can't adequately explain how damaging "Oh, yeah, we all feel like that, it's totally OK that you're not OK," has been to me.  When I say "I'm not OK," to someone, and their answer is "Yeah, that's normal, it's fine that you feel that way, you of all people should know bad it's been, let me tell you about the hard time I am having," I don't hear solidarity.  I hear "Yeah, no one gives a flip that you're drowning, no  one's got time for you.  Suck it up, your crisis is not special."  I hear "Just lean into being not OK, just settle into that feeling and embrace it," which feeds my Traitor Brain.  Couple that with getting tired of being asked to provide detailed instructions clearly explaining how to support me in simple, easy-to-manage steps, and I just stopped asking most people for help.  If I have to spend three hours of emotional labor navigating you through the process of being there for me in a way that asks as little as possible of you (but still makes you feel good for doing it), I'll just spend that three hours doing that labor for myself instead.

So, February came.  I finished my first 100 hours of overtime, including a full month of back-to-back-to-back 60-90 hour weeks.  I limped, bitter and demoralized and weeping, to what I thought was a two-week space before my next deadline.  Instead, thanks to a massive weather disaster and a utility system collapse I found myself without a source of water for 100 hours, while almost no one I knew, no one I'd been supporting and tending and building up for a year, thought to ask "Do you need help?"  Not only was my 'positive pressure' system in the real world failing as my faucets stayed dry, it became brutally apparent that the emotional system I'd been so assiduously pressurizing for a year was only under pressure as long as I was putting INTO it, not when I needed to take OUT OF it.  

It's best exemplified by the fact that everyone I work with was given the time off and told to rest and take care of themselves because my employer was closed due to the weather, but my ability to check the departmental email and voicemail for a day or two turned into me being asked if I 'minded' taking them on for over a week, because I was going to be online anyway managing all the tasks for that next deadline and it just 'made sense' not to ask another person to give up their time off.  And that 'ask' wasn't even unreasonable, as I was the only one with consistent power and internet; it just meant that others had a break while I still had a responsibility.

I cratered, hard, and all my reserves and reservoirs emptied so that I could survive.  I still had two full months of the work project to manage, with every single day requiring me to put my full self into it to serve a goal I dearly love and believe in.  For the last 8 weeks, I've been maintaining baseline system functionality, meeting minimums while every single thing I could designate as noncritical fell to the wayside:  laundry, housework, friendships, creative time, sleep.  Had my partner not been an amazing human being, I would not have eaten on approximately 20% of the days in March and April.  I am currently carrying over 200 hours of comp time earned since mid-January, and almost 200 hours of unused vacation time (related:  I will be working four-day weeks until September).  Rest assured that "I worked 60 hours in a week where my leadership 'took some mental health time' and worked 30 while still communicating unmet expectations to me," will figure into my employee evaluation conversations this year.  So will "This was a make-or-break year, I made it, and it broke me."  Last week in the home stretch, my Sunday through Saturday daily hours were 12, 11, 18, 15, 16, 18, and 8, in order.

I hit something approximating my goal and have reached a time of rest and recovery, but the end result of all of this is that I'm deeply burned out.  The energy reserves I might otherwise have to offer support, or do the work, or push energy into that whole system, are now being entirely diverted to repressurizing my own system, filling my own holding tanks to keep me from collapsing and failing. I am, first, filling my reserves entirely before allowing the overflow to support others.  This will continue for some time.

If you've been relying on me this last year, and found me less available these last two months, you should expect that to continue a while as I equalize.  If this means the system suffers because I give less, so be it.  Others can either choose to make up the shortfall themselves, or learn to live with a lower-pressure system.

Also, if you are a person I only hear from when there's an 'ask' attached, a need, you may find me limiting my availability to you at all.  One thing I've become aware of is that I get a lot of messages that lead with a problem, not a hello, and the senders fade back into silence once I've provided support, solutions, or advice.  We all go through rough patches, but I'm going to ask you, if you're reaching out to ask me for my energy, to scroll up in that chat window and decide whether our relationship is based in shared positive pressure, or you just keep turning on the tap.

I do love you all, but I am so very very very tired.

Just Another Crappy Year

For the last several years, I've seen an end-of-year refrain that goes "Oh, it will all be better next year, it will be so good when this utterly shitty year is over."

Somehow, amazingly, the turning calendar doesn't change everything, and here we are at another December slogging through 'ugh, just one more month until this shitty year is over'.  Come midnight on the 31st, we can all embrace the common practice, all take a shot of something, hug or kiss a person if we're with one, and craft a bunch of resolutions based around life changes we feel obligated but not necessarily inspired to make.

What if we did a different thing instead?  What if we took This Shitty Year as a clarifier and a crucible, and stepped forward into 2021 NOT with the ruins of 2020 lying in bitter flames behind us, but grounded in what we've learned from it?  What if instead of resolving to be better, thinner, healthier, wealthier, timelier, cleaner, cheerier, better-rested, better-read, more responsible, exercising and exceptionally productive teetotalers, we resolved to build something for ourselves in the spaces we've been tending fallow?  To that end, I have some suggestions for the next four weeks, and for some resolutions to end them with.

First, three "do nots":

1.  Do not resolve to do anything that makes you less or erases you.

2.  Do not accept any resolution rooted in the idea that you are more flawed or less worthy than anyone else.

3.  Do not make resolutions based solely in other people's expectations of you.

Now, three "do's""

1.  Do resolve to lean into something you're passionate about.

2.  Do resolve to face your own toxic habits and understand them.

3.  Do resolve to improve the practical, actual quality of your own life.

To help clarify the above, three points of contemplation:

1.  In this dark time, what has saved you?  What did you turn to in despair, in hope, in times when you felt disconnected and alone?  How can you direct energy back to that?

2.  If you could have prepared yourself and your life to better weather this pandemic and this year, what would you have done?  What structures, supports, and habits would you have put into place to have ready when the world shut down, and for the limbo following?  What can you build today to support you tomorrow?

3.  What has ceased to be a priority for you this year?  When you had to focus on what really mattered, what did you let fall by the wayside, what stopped being important to you?  Where can you reclaim your energy and your focus?

You have four weeks, one turning cycle of the lunar face to decide how you'll frame the coming year in your head, your heart, and your habits.  A time of waning, a time of darkness, a time of waxing, and a time of fullness.  Use them.

It has been about nine months since the world collapsed inward on itself, since the doors closed and the video chat windows opened.  For nine months, we have waited, and watched, tended and struggled, grieved and hoped and feared and wished.  For nine months we have fought, and we have debated, and we have educated and we have learned.  We've lived a life where risk and privilege came to stark contrast in multiple spaces of our lives.  We cast our eyes outward, forward, upward and onward, planning for what we'll do when the masks can come off, but in order to take those steps and be ready, we have to look inward, to see what's been growing, and let something beautiful be born from it.

I love you all.

Balanced

 Just before the vernal equinox this year, I left my office, and aside from a few trips to tidy up and retrieve lost items, I never went back.

I have, for all intents and purposes, been in a quarantine holding pattern for the entirety of what we in the Northern Hemisphere call the 'light half' of the year.  Because I live somewhere the sun is not a friend so much as an ever-present scorching eye in the sky, the light half of the year is when I rest, recover, and rebuild my energy.  So, the fact that I haven't really been out and about, that most of my activity has been furtive neighborhood walks in my pajamas after midnight, isn't as much of a departure as it might otherwise be.

Six months in, my office is a complicated arrangement of laptops and monitors in a room I set up primarily to support my own creative pursuits with the side benefit of 'maybe working from home one day a week most weeks'.  I'm in here eight hours a day most weekdays, plus the evenings and weekends for those creative pursuits.  My co-workers, with whom I shared a small office full of laughter and conversation, are five rectangular windows containing talking heads I see when the shared calendar allows us to schedule a meeting.

My family is a collection of text messages and phone calls, quick updates 'to check in' and pass on birthday greetings or noteworthy events.

My friends are another set of talking heads in rectangular windows -- and a long scrolling social media window into their gardens, home bakeries, home offices, ad hoc educational support centers, bird feeders, and pets' lives.

And their rage.  Oh, their rage and their fear and their politics and their hopelessness and their anxieties and their crushing, constant, overwhelming despair that this may not ever be allowed to get better.  That we will die without hugging someone we love that one last time.  That we'll survive this, only to emerge into a decimated social landscape, with some fraction of our population gone or forever changed by it.

I find myself increasingly frustrated with the holding pattern.  So many people, torn between "keep everything as close to normal as you can," and "Just collapse whenever it becomes too much," seesaw back and forth between self-care and self-sabotage without ever stopping to sit with the moment we are all in.  In one day, the same person might say to the world, "Everything we know is dead or dying and cannot be saved," and "Hold faith in a bright new future we can build together," and "Everyone who doesn't think like me is a stupid hateful asshole who should die in a fire," and in the moment of speaking each of these things every word is true.  They're not even mutually exclusive, if you can accept that it's possible to love the world and those around you and to hope for a brighter day coming even while you feel helpless, impotent rage at the people who don't.

We're self-soothing with hope, which is not necessarily a bad thing unless that hope has paralysed you because it cannot possibly yet be realised.

In the aftertimes, we'll have a feast together, laughter echoing across raised glasses.

In the aftertimes, we'll gather whenever and wherever we like, without that nagging worry that maybe WE are the asymptomatic carrier bringing plague with the potato salad.

In the aftertimes we'll never again take for granted the ability to populate our lives and our houses with loved ones.

In the aftertimes, we'll travel, oh how far we'll travel, even if we have never been more than forty miles from home, we'll get on a plane and see another continent just because we want to.

In the aftertimes we'll smile at one another and know it.

But here, standing in the space of the equinox, standing in the balance between the halcyon beforetimes and the shimmering aftertimes, in this timeless place that has stretched out as the world moved halfway through its orbit, what am I waiting for?

As night hangs equal to day, as we begin the time of year when we shine the brightest against the long winter, what will I do in the meantime?

How Much Do We Need That Office, Anyway?

Yesterday Travis County announced that after the pandemic has passed, they hope to continue having a substantial portion of their employees (about 3000) working at home, because apparently productivity has gone UP.  The City of Austin and the Austin Chamber of Commerce are reportedly looking at similar plans. 

I'm seeing from friends that companies across the city are looking at the data, and that the combination of 'employees are not less productive working from home' and 'offices are kind of expensive' is starting to percolate through a lot of people's heads.  We're mostly still a month or two from going back to work in many cases, but by that time I think 'work' may look a lot different than it did in February.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

We're all stressed and distracted and scared and half of everybody is doing double duty as teachers, yet the Travis County employees are still getting more done working remotely.  I am also getting more done on the projects that require deep attention.  We told our bosses, all along, when asking for telework options, that it wouldn't negatively affect job performance.  It's nice to have this data, because all the times a previous employer explained to me that the company wouldn't support telework because 'some people, not me of course, think you wouldn't get your work done' can now be dismissed entirely as bunk.  Instead, we can say "the benefits of telework are so significant that *even under these conditions* it was an improvement for a lot of people."

If you're working right now in a thrown-together emergency home office space carved out of a kitchen table or a family room, start thinking practically about what you need to make your home office work for you as a permanent part of your home.  It needs some way to be separated from your living space, so you can 'leave the office and come home' at some point during your day.  A laptop you can close, a curtain you can pull, just something to draw a barrier between you and your workplace.  If your office permanently transitions part time or full time to telework, be ready with a list of what you need to do your work:  faster internet, office supplies, filing boxes, upgraded laptop, second monitor, collaborative software, membership at a co-working space, second phone so you're not using your personal phone for company calls.  Requests made in transition will be more likely to be approved, especially if you can document how working around them for the pandemic has been difficult.

We can change how we treat collaborative work and team environments.  I don't want to work at home 100%, because I genuinely get a lot out of sharing space with my team, but teleworking one day a week so that I could use the team space for team things and my own space for more intricate or difficult projects would be a huge blessing.  After months of running our businesses entirely in email and Zoom, we have a chance to reset the 'this meeting should have been an email' trope.  As we start looking at what 'coming back to work' looks like, let's really take this chance to stop and consider "How can I prioritize differently to make the time when I'm in the same room as my co-workers valuable and useful?"

One of the things I've been doing since working from home is taking short (15-30 minutes) breaks to work on creative or house projects (like writing this post!).  When I was working in the office all day every day, I didn't always have access to my photos, or my writing, or my garden, to go reset my brain when my focus got fuzzy.  It was also generally frowned on to work on 'my stuff' on 'company time'.  It turns out that being able to step out, immerse in a different set of brain-skills, and then step back in works as well as the experts have been telling us all this time.

This is a good time to really look at work-life balance and see how you manage those boundaries.  One of the reasons, for example, that I've resisted getting my work email added to my phone at my job is that at the last job, work emails would come to me 24/7, and there were a lot of weekends where I saw something come in late Friday evening and spent the weekend thinking about it, or interrupted my weekend to address it.  Every day now, when I am done with work, I shut the work laptop and even though I'm frequently tempted to go in and check on something, I leave it until it's 'time to work' again.  The struggle to just go do a little more because the office is just 'right there' was really hard at the beginning, but I'm getting better at it.

Finally, a citywide shift to increased telework will almost certainly make life better for everyone, even the folks who have to go into the office.  Austin's traffic is legendary.  From before 7am to after 7pm, there's perhaps a 2 hour window between 1:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon where the traffic isn't that bad.  But if, say, as little as 25% of the people on the road were suddenly not on the road, it would transform our traffic patterns.  Think about Columbus Day or President's Day, when the government offices and banks are closed but most of the offices are still open.  If the traffic looked like that every day, we'd all get back 6-10 hours of time a week (depending on how long we normally sit in traffic), and experience a substantial improvement in air quality.

It's not that I'm trying to 'silver lining' the pandemic.  This is a massive global crisis that will severely damage our economy, our health, and our lives.  But it's also a space for us to step outside of a lot of the patterns we've had ripped out from under us, and ask ourselves "Is this particular pattern so valuable to me that it's worth working to reestablish?"

Staying Alive

There is a scene from Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne in which the women of Arbonne (and one of Garsenc) await the invasion of an army bent on destroying them all, that resonates with me right now.

Some of the women sit and work on needlepoint, while Signe de Barbentain gives rein to her anxiety, pacing and venting and worrying.  Finally she turns on Rosala, one of the women who has been calmly smiling at her embroidery, and demands to know, "how can you be so calm?  How can you possibly SIT there like that, knowing what's coming, what's happening?"  Rosala stops and holds up the ruined, worthless needlepoint she has been stitching with shaking hands.  She wasn't doing the work because she was calm, she was calm because she was doing the work.

I have struggled with depression and my own mental health for thirty-five years, since I was in middle school.  My particular manifestation of it is to engage in increasingly self-destructive behaviours until I trigger a life crisis and everything crashes.  I've talked about my struggles openly for about the last fifteen years, and it's helped, but the thing I've learned about that is that what helps me is the part where I talk about the things I am doing to keep from dying.

Almost everyone I know is dealing with some combination of depression, anxiety, fear, and isolation right now, and we're all coping or not coping in different ways.  I am seeing an interesting trend, though.  As a coping mechanism, "Today I rolled myself in a blanket, ate an entire pie, and lay on the floor for three hours," gets replies of "That's great!  Do what you need to do!  Your choices are valid!" but people who say "Today I made a list and I did the things and then I checked them off and looked at the check-marks to reassure myself that I will be OK," get bare shrugs and "Well, I'm glad this is going so well for you.  SOME of us are actually struggling." 

Every day of my shelter-in-place I make a list, and this is why:

Today I will get up at a reasonable hour, because if I do not do that consistently, I will begin to sleep longer and longer until my morning meets the night and I just stop getting up.

Today I will shower or at least wash my face, and I will brush my teeth and my hair and use deodorant and moisturizer, because I deserve to be clean and cared for, and because if I don't do it today I may not do it again until I become so disgusted with myself I just stand in the shower and cry.

Today I will drink water and eat food, because Traitor Brain says I don't deserve to have them and I will spite that bitch.

Today I will get at least a little exercise, because if I stop moving I may not start again.

Today I will go outside to feel the sun (or the moon) and the wind, because if I don't keep touching the world I'll let myself shut it out entirely and convince myself it doesn't need me in it.

Today I will set myself a bedtime and obey it, because left to my own devices I'll just stay up indefinitely and destroy my ability to rest and recover.

Today I will accomplish some small task to improve my space, my life, my health, or my relationships with others, because every improvement is another spiderweb-tie I use to bind myself into this world.

Today I will tend or at least visit my garden, because I do not "ruin the life of every living thing I touch."

Today I will talk to my partner or my friends about how I am feeling and where I am emotionally, and ask for support if I need it.

If today is a workday, today I will accomplish one concrete thing that finishes a task, plans for the future, or improves my workflow.

If today is not a workday, I will not do work just because I'm bored, and I will deliberately do things I know relax and recharge me.

This week I will spend one hour of time doing something creative, because if I increase the sum total of beauty, it muffles the voices that tell me I add nothing to the world.

This week I will dedicate one block of at least two hours to a long-term improvement project, because I would like Future Badger to have the same feeling Present Badger gets when she looks at the things Past Badger has done, and doing nice things for Future Badger helps me stick around to become her.

When I start to feel the water closing over my head, I will look at the lists of ticky-marks and I say "See, Self, you're doing the things.  You're all right.  You're in the world and you matter to it."

When my chest gets tight and painful and the voices rise, I will go and stand in my pantry, and look at the physical manifestations of my skills, my resources, and my upbringing, and repeat to myself, "You have what you need, and you are enough to get through this."

This is my list.  It doesn't have to be anyone else's list, and the things on it are the specific areas where my own history tells me I'm vulnerable to my own brain.  I've got no shade for people who are coping by being pie-eating blanket-rolls, because the important thing is just to figure out what you need to survive and DO THAT.

So while it may LOOK like I've 'got my shit together', the reality is that I'm just stitching away as hard as I can on this messy tapestry and holding on to the fact that the work I'm doing, the project I'm completing, isn't a fresh loaf of bread or a tidy office or a new creative accomplishment.  It's something that matters more than any of those:  myself, whole and living, walking out of my house at the end of this crisis.

Now is Not the Time

Driving along to work one day last week, I caught a broadcast of our city officials talking about the COVID-19 response and what they'd like people to do: stay home, practice good sanitation and distancing, and stop panic-buying.  One caller wanted to know: we've been hearing for years about the long-term dangers of the overuse of antibacterial products and hand sanitizers.  Should we really be using them this much?

The response was:  now is not the time to worry about overusing hand sanitizer.

At first I was annoyed, because if you let people do a thing in an emergency, then pretty soon every Tuesday is an emergency.  But what lies behind that is this:  you must do the things you do for the long-term health of the planet and the species when you can, all the time, because there may come times when you have to set them aside.  This is one of those times.

There's a lot of reason to avoid overusing that little bottle of sanitizer you keep in your purse.  On a regular basis, especially if you buy the fancy kind with the special antibacterial label, you can contribute to a dangerous buildup of resistant organisms.

There's a lot of reason to go to the store yourself instead of having the groceries delivered, and to make fewer trips for larger purchases.  It's more expensive to get things delivered, and a twice-weekly grocery store habit contributes to the use of fossil fuels.

There's a lot of reason to choose social interactions over isolation.  In the long term, it makes you feel connected and builds relationships to rely on.

Myself, I spent a little time last week worrying about the amount of water that goes down the drain while I wash my hands for 20 full seconds several extra times a day.  As someone who's turned off the tap to brush her teeth since she was in elementary school, that amount 'wasted' really started to weigh on me.

For every responsible, reasonable choice, there is a very good explanation for why we should do it all the time, but the best possible explanation is this:  sometimes we have to stop doing it for a while.  Sometimes we have to let that water run.  Sometimes we have to spend what's in the savings account.  Sometimes we have to pull an all-nighter to get an important task done.

If you've been practicing those conservation-minded habits all along, then you have reserves for times like these.  If you usually carry your own straw and cutlery, you don't worry about three weeks of single-use disposables.  If you've been diligently setting your HVAC to minimize usage when you leave the house, you don't need to worry about a couple of weeks of not changing it because no one is leaving the house.  If you get enough sleep and exercise, and eat healthy foods, you will be more physically able to withstand the lack of them.

This is not a matter of "Well, don't you feel like shit for not 'doing better' all along?"  No guilt, no shame, no judgment here.  This will end and we can 'do better' then.  It does, however, bring two points to mind.

The first is that if you're stressing or feeling guilty because once shit hit the fan all the things you believe in and your personal ethics seem to have become malleable and all your healthy habits start shifting: don't.  This is an extraordinary situation, and for extraordinary situations we have much shorter-term priorities.  Anything you're doing right now that decreases the likelihood of you catching and especially spreading COVID-19 is the correct priority, as is anything you're doing to make sure that others have the resources and support they need (without endangering them).  When things begin to return to normal, we will have the luxury of more choices.

The second is this:  the stress, panic, fear, and scarcity that many people are experiencing in ways they had not before, that is some people's daily reality outside a pandemic.  Some people never have the option of doing the conservation-minded thing because their priorities are always shortened to immediate survival for themselves and their families.  Some people can never save for a rainy day because it rains every day for them.  Remember, moving forward, how it felt to not know what your world would look like next week, and retain some of this empathy.  Remember how much you learned to appreciate what your children's teachers do, and how important the truck driver and the shelf stocker are, and that medical professionals (not just doctors, but every single person down including cafeteria workers and janitors) literally risk their lives and the lives of their families to fight for other people.

We can come through this having given way to fear and selfishness and blame, or we can come through it having gained an understanding of the importance of community support, a respect for the work and needs of others, and a willingness to look at our own lives to see where we can build our own resilience.

It's Time to Get Serious About Proactive Self-Care

The concept of self-care is pretty appealing, to be honest: the idea that to be the best and happiest and healthiest person possible, you should stop and take care of your own basic needs.

Frequently derided as "Today I did 'self-care' and lit a bunch of candles while I drank wine in the bubble bath!" it's more properly understood to include things like "I made a doctor's appointment for my ongoing health concern," or "I cleaned my bathroom!"

It's important to ask yourself, though:  Is my approach towards self-care about building a long-term healthy and sustainable lifestyle or is it a coping mechanism I use to put off making real change?

I used to take a LOT of 'mental health days'.  I'd wake up just too demoralized and stressed to go to work, and call in sick.  I wasn't lying; I was legitimately dealing with exhaustion and depression that meant I was not fit to do my job that day.

The mental health days themselves were a way of staving off burnout.  After crashing and burning at a couple of truly terrible jobs, I'd given myself permission to just...not go sometimes.  It was a huge step for me.  After a couple of years of this, I learned that taking regular scheduled breaks, in the form of vacations or even just the occasional day off, decreased the number of unscheduled mental health days I was taking, and I thought for a long time that meant I had a handle on the problem of having a frustrating and unfulfilling job.

Eventually, though, a friend asked, "What if you didn't spend roughly a third of your life on something that it exhausts you emotionally to do, to the point that you have to build in escapes from it to keep it from destroying you?"

That question jump-started something in my head, and not just related to employment.  What if, I asked myself, I started trying to build a life where self-care wasn't about staving off crises, it was about getting better all the time?

Fundamentally, when most people talk about it, they frame their self-care as *reactive*:  "I finally tackled the dishes that have been building up because I was too exhausted to wash them for two weeks." "I canceled all my plans and stayed in tonight because I've been overscheduled for a year now."  "I wrote a budget because I keep running out of money for bills."  Something has happened, something is wrong, and even if you're acting before the complete crisis happens, maybe you're acting because you know that if you don't take action on a rising problem the crisis will trigger.  We do self-care because we are treating some element of ourselves as inherently broken and in need of deliberate remedy.

We run a script in our heads where our natural inclinations are at odds with the lives we are living, and harmful to the lives we want to have, and build in self-care to cover the differences between who we are and the space we're trying to hold in the world.  It becomes an act of self-preservation, what we do to realign our lives with where they 'should be' when the gears start to slip.

What if, instead, we looked for places for *proactive* self-care?  What if we looked for ways to try and bring our lives into alignment with our natural inclinations?  What if we looked for ways to make our self-care acts of self-evolution or self-healing instead?

Now, when I find myself triggered to create reactive space for self-care, some part of that process includes questions:

1. Why was this necessary?
2. Is there a pattern I can change to make this unnecessary in the future?
3. Is there something about my LIFE I can change to make this unnecessary in the future?
4. How can I honor who I really am and what I really want here?

I will always give myself permission to do what I need to do for my own mental and physical health, but I also hold myself accountable for what creates that need.   I'm a complex person with a lot of flaws and assets, and I need to be real with myself about it.  I'm never going to get rid of Traitor Brain, because that bitch is part of how my psyche is wired, but I can own up to that by building a life where she has less power. 

Immediate change isn't accessible to everyone, and I would never suggest that it is.  Even accessible change can take months or years and require support from friends and family.  I myself often struggle with some changes I should make.  But if you keep finding yourself needing to react to forestall crisis by actively shifting your focus to yourself, don't you owe it to yourself to find out why you don't build enough proactive focus on your own needs *into your existing life* in the first place?

The easiest way to find out if your self-care is reactive or proactive is to look for the 'because'.  Is your 'because' about catching up to some part of your life that's not well-structured for you, or is your 'because' about habits and patterns that will make your life as a whole better?

Here's the hard truth a lot of people don't want to face:  reactive self-care will always eventually fail you: it never solves the problem.  You will just keep putting band-aid after band-aid on to mitigate the bleeding, but not heal the wound.  Someday you won't get the fix in time, and you'll spin out into crisis and then probably beat yourself up for a failure you set up in the first place.

Reactive self- care feels great and healthy in the short term, and it can REALLY help you feel like you've got your shit together if your traditional MO has been more 'go until you crash and burn', but if you want to keep your shit together for the long term you've eventually got to face up to essential truths about who you are, what you want, what you need, and your responsibility to yourself.

You can even light some candles, pour some wine, and think about it in the bubble bath if you want.

Is Productivity Culture the New Prosperity Gospel?

Most people are familiar, in some way, with the notion of Prosperity Gospel:  Success is a marker of personal worthiness, and people of good character experience good fortune.  If you're poor, it must mean you're a bad person.  It's surfaced in various incarnations throughout Western Civilization, from the divine right of kings all the way down to the televangelist in his private jet preaching that the unfortunate need only find the way to faith and all else will fall into place.

In the last ten years, I've seen a demonstrated pushback against this idea, mostly from people who found themselves in poverty or misfortune through the immorality or unethical behaviour of others, not their own.  The idea that success comes to those who deserve it is incompatible with a belief in institutionalized oppression, because if it turns out that the system is unfair, then those who profit by it can't be assured of their own superiority.

So, it's all good now that we're rejecting it, right?  Not quite.

I came of age in the dotcom years, watching friends sacrifice sleep and food and private lives to chase the dream.  I remember the days of "I sleep at the office, and I haven't had a day off in ten weeks," watching brilliant young people grind themselves to pieces in pursuit of that moment when the work would become the 'win' of a massive IPO or the sale of an original idea brought to fruition.  For too many of my generation, even when that success came, the emptiness left when the work was gone meant just diving into another massive project, another opportunity to prove that we could work harder and longer than anyone else.  Not for us our parents' 30 years of marking middle management time to a gold watch; we were building new industries and new worlds.  I knew over a dozen denizens of the C-suite by the time I was 25.

Then the crashes.  Cascading through multiple industries, taking our jobs and our homes and our futures and everything we'd burned our hearts to prove we deserved.  Gen X left rudderless as the first decade of a century came to an end, faith lost in a future where we could work hard enough to someday not work.  Friends said, "I gave ten full years to this, I was Employee #5 of hundreds, and now I'm redundant and released in the merger I never even heard was coming.  I've been a barista for 18 months and glad to have it."

At the same time, Millennials were coming into the workforce, with even less faith in stability because no one had ever even pretended they could earn it.  They graduated to "We hire through a contract agency; work hard enough for the next eight months and we offer the top 3 contractors full time and benefits," and "we're offering an internship, we can't afford to pay you but we provide free food and laundry and showers."

And here, at the close of the second decade of the new millennium, we find ourselves in the age of the Grind and the Side Hustle.  How many jobs do you have?  Barely half of my friends have only one job.  They deliver things, they make things and sell them, they drive rideshares, they take on writing or editing or drawing freelance projects.  The parents have another full time job, of course: raising the next generation for jobs we don't even have names for yet, and most of that is still being done by women.

What's arisen in this landscape is the idea that time that produces nothing is anathema.  Audiobooks are a great example of this;  when 'no one has time to read', the ability to combine a book with another activity means that no time is wasted on either pursuit.  Cleaning your house is also reading a book, driving to work is reading a book, you can even read a book while you knit scarves for everyone you know for holiday gifts, saving money by handmaking AND saving time by multitasking AND saving time and money for Future You who will not have to shop for gifts.  Every second spent, at least doubled in value!

If you can layer your activities effectively enough, we tell one another, you're just adding SO MANY hours to your day.  I'm as guilty as anyone, scrolling through my phone while I watch a movie or television show at home, catching up on my social connections or my plans while entertaining my mind with a thing that apparently doesn't deserve my total focus any more than my social connections or plans do.

Where did this idea come from, that we owe it to...someone to engineer our hours to be more productive but never deserve the leisure generated by the efficiency?  Who does this profit, this belief of ours that time spent in repose is wasted, that every minute spent should be evaluated in the context of value added, that even a day of rest must be reframed as a self-care day that helps us maintain our productivity in order to be justified?

Not us.

So what to do?  How, like Maxine Waters, do we reclaim our time?  I had an interesting idea put into my head by an 'Extreme Productivity' (yeah, I know) videocast a couple of weeks ago, that you could look at 'productivity' as putting more hours in your day to accomplish the maximum number of things, or you could look at it as accomplishing the necessary tasks more quickly to create more time for your own interests or relaxation.  That if you looked at what you were *choosing to accomplish* and prioritised it accurately, the goal was to find ways to complete those things more quickly and efficiently, instead of just continuing to add tasks to the day.  That once you finished the to-do list, the thing to do was not pull out a larger, more comprehensive to-do list of things you do when you have 'spare time'.  The thing to do was ask yourself, "What would I like to do now?" to celebrate your accomplishment.

On reflection, I begin to understand that I've been on this course for several years now, since I wrote this piece about unscheduling and the glorification of busy, this idea that perhaps what I needed to do was figure out how to live my life in such a way that I didn't have to constantly battle the Google Calendar for control.  This whole reframing of productivity not as 'accomplishing more by focusing less' but as 'understanding what I need to do and setting boundaries about how I spend my time'.

As ever, when I talk about how I manage my time and my productivity, there's an element of privilege in it, that I don't HAVE to work three or four jobs to keep body and soul together.  I know that.  But I also know that if you're in that position, as I have been, and you're not thinking about how you're going to get out of it, that's not helpful either.  Everything that takes my time right now, I have a long-term plan for giving less time to, so I can have more time for me.  That feels glorious, and it's the very best self-care.

In the meantime, I'm looking at how I balance my focus and my time to actually BE productive and efficient.  For starters, while writing this, I did nothing else.  Not a single thing.  Didn't look at my phone, didn't talk to anyone, didn't watch an episode of TV.  And...it was hard.  The desire to add an activity is strong.  But I feel like I'm better for it, for starting and finishing a thing without leaving six browser tabs open in its wake.

I'm continuing to ask myself:  What is getting my focus, and who is that productivity benefiting?

And now I'm asking you, Dear Reader:  What is getting your focus, and who is your productivity benefiting?

Midwinter

In the northern hemisphere, today marks the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year.

My life is awash in messages about enduring through the darkness, about faith in the light, about getting through the bad and believing the good will come again.  These are all good messages, especially at this juncture of American history.  If we don't believe this particular long night will end, we might not keep going.

I've been contemplating another approach to the solstice this year.  On that shortest day, when the least light is given to me, I'm going to cram a full day into it -- not necessarily the activities, but the joy and the living of it.  I'm eating delicious food and reveling in it.  I'm loving my friends and family a full day's worth in these short bright hours.  I began my work day with focused productivity and accomplishment, and met three concrete deadline goals by 10 am.

Headlong, heedless, I embrace this day as if the setting sun were my own ending.

That setting sun will find me on the road, hurtling towards loved ones as the light dies and the long darkness falls across the land.

Into that darkness, I am cast with a choice.  I can hold the light, clinging to it and willing its return.  Some years I do this, because I need that lifeline to get myself to the next moment.  Hope and faith as acts of resilience are essential to humanity.

This year, though, I release the light and let myself fall into that night.  Stronger and more deeply rooted than I've been in years past, I believe that I will fall through that darkness and out through the other side of it.  The light will be there.

As the slow beats of my own heart echo through me, I can embrace my own darknesses. 

A span of heartbeats for my fears, which I respect as my careful guardians and meet with courage.

A span of heartbeats for my grief, which I consider as the touch of love upon my life, and meet with compassion.

A span of heartbeats for my anger, which I tend carefully as a righteous fire to light a path to justice.

A beat for my anxiety, a beat for my worry, a beat for my temper, a long flurry of beats for my pride followed by a matching cadence for self-doubt.

With my heart resounding in my ears, I dive down into that silence, that peace.  I am the falcon diving, the falling star, the razored edge of the descending blade.  And there, at the center of the darkness, I find the stillness, the silence, the space between my own breath and body, and I hold there.

One moment, and a heartbeat.

Two, and a heartbeat.

Three, stretching out into timelessness, the darkness all and eternal around me.

As the distance between the last heartbeat and the next one expands, I wait and I gather myself.  I gather the peace at the center of all, to hold when chaos spins around me.  I gather the silence of midnight, to give myself time to reflect when wisdom is needed.  I gather the tiniest kernel of the essence of nothing, as a powerful tool of banishment in the coming year.

Outside of light, outside of time, outside of life itself, I honor the parts of me that have always been hardest for me to love, and I embrace them, rushing back into myself to meet my own beating heart.

And the fall continues, but now I tumble towards where the light will be, towards the future, towards the spring.  Still in darkness, I hit solid earth, meeting it with both feet.  I stand, and take one last moment to thank the night, before I turn to face the coming day.

Blessed solstice, my darlings.  I love you all.

Eviction Plus Three Hundred Sixty-Five

One year.

One year since I took my first-ever sincere pregnancy test to be sure the uterus about to be removed contained no life but my own.

One year since a one-hour surgery stretched to three while my family and friends waited, trying not to think something had gone wrong.

One year since one of the most difficult hysterectomies my gynecologist says she's performed.

One year since the last time a stranger's blood kept me alive.

One year since I woke up, confused and disoriented, unable to feel anything between bellybutton and upper thighs, to the news that the difficult surgery had been a success but I'd lost so very much blood that I needed oxygen for a little while more, and to rest while the local they'd used on top of the general wore off.

One year since I tried to explain to the nurse that losing so very much blood was a thing I just did on a regular basis, but probably just hurled garbled syllables at her.

It was a mess in there, I'm told.  Endometrioma, asymptomatic endometriosis, massive fibroids, something called 'spongy uterus' and an ovary so deeply grafted into it that there was no hope of saving it.  My fallopian tubes were nowhere to be found; there's no way to tell if the uterus ate them or they were simply never there.  My reproductive organs, at their end, were a collection of womanhood gone rogue.  One lone half-ovary lingers, spiking my life with cravings and mood swings that no longer act as harbingers of, well, anything.

They couldn't stop the bleeding for a long time during the surgery, the doctor told me frankly when she came to see me.  I told her not to worry, I'd never been able to stop it either.

But it's stopped now, and the change is extraordinary.

A little over three years ago I staggered, crying, towards the top of the Panoramic Trail in Muir Woods, where my then-boyfriend was hoping to propose.  I was defeated long before we reached the top, moving a hundred, two hundred feet at a time before I had to hold a tree to stand.  He chose a more accessible location for his proposal, and I accepted, because (among many other reasons) what better metaphor for married life can there be than kindly and patiently holding your beloved's hand while she tries to overcome her own malfunctions and fight her way to the top of the trail?

Three months later I was in the emergency room, with doctors explaining that my iron level was life-threatening and probably had been for months.  I'd known I was anemic, but not how deep that particular crisis had become.  I fought my way through supplements, infusions, transfusions, hormones, exercises, and every other suggestion made to me, until finally the only thing left was "Stop losing blood, for good."

So what's life like now?

I still wake up tired a lot of days, because my sleep habits have never been great, but it's "Man I stayed up too late again," not "I'm not sure I can move my legs today."  I can actually, if I don't set an alarm, sleep long enough in a single night to wake up refreshed.  I come home from work and sometimes I just...do housework or work on a project because I feel like it, not because I'm racing a deadline and out of time.

I started back to the gym eleven months ago with gentle treadmill walks, and added in light weight training a few weeks later.  I miss sometimes because I'm busy, but I don't skip workouts any more because I'm too exhausted to do them, and I've steadily put on muscle.  I can walk on the treadmill at a three-mile pace, or run on the elliptical, for thirty solid minutes without stopping.

My husband and I just got back from a trip to Ireland, where we walked over fifty miles in two weeks, including a grueling trek through the London Underground with all our luggage, hefting our fully loaded suitcases up and down the steps with one hand at times.  One of the highlights of that trip was the day I took off solo hiking, only to end up slightly lost in a Galway sheep pasture, falling and badly injuring my knee.  I could still walk, but a year before an injury of any severity would have been perfect reason to head back to the B&B and declare myself done for the day, or maybe the week.  Instead, I hiked another three miles that day and more the two days following.

But it's the little things, the small changes most people don't understand, that really stick with me.  Today I'm wearing a pale lacy peach dress and a white sweater.  I never would have dared before; my pre-hysterectomy wardrobe is a cavalcade of long, full, dark skirts chosen because they wouldn't show blood as badly, and dark or patterned tops that I wouldn't stain with bloody hands by accident.  I pack extra tie-dye in the space in my camping gear that used to be reserved for a massive supply of cloth and disposable backup pads.  We planned our recent vacation around when we wanted to travel, not when I hoped to have the best chance not to be navigating airplane bathrooms on a half-hourly basis and trying to explain to flight attendants that their choices were let me up out of my seat or clean up the blood themselves.  An entire complicating factor has simply just been...taken out of my calculations.

My body no longer sets the conditions on me that it once did; gone is the constant awareness of the possibility that a miscalculation or delay will ruin both outfit and afternoon.  Getting distracted while working on a project just means I'm stiff from sitting too long, not a dismayed realisation that I've missed one too many warnings from my body that catastrophic bleeding is imminent.  I no longer have to plan to carve out six to eight days off work each year to receive iron infusions and see doctors, or an extra three to five sick days for pure exhaustion.  I've found new confidence at work, to talk about projects I want to take on and challenges I want to seek out.

What strikes me the most is how the haze has lifted, and continued to lift.  I have no idea how far down I was into chronic exhaustion after years of constant anemia, but about three weeks ago I found a new level of energy:  having done all the things I *needed* to do, and all the things on my dedicated to-do list, I created a new long-term project for myself, and sat down to give several hours of time and intellectual labor to it.

As to that Panorama Trail that kicked my ass three years ago, we revisited Muir Woods last fall, and I'll simply say that a picture speaks a thousand words.

Here I Am, Walking on the Moon

Some days I feel like KUTX does particularly well at mining my nostalgia musically, hitting songs that resonate with specific times for me but might not connect for other people.  Today they've managed to call up the last half of 1989 for me, when I was navigating high school and struggling with my whole concept of identity, while trying to resolve feelings about my parents' divorce.

I was already thinking about it because of Mity Myhr's presentation about 1989 at last night's Dionysium, but then a couple of songs I listened to a lot that year popped up in the musical rotation:  Lyle Lovett's "Here I Am," for which I memorised the spoken part because I loved how the words fit together, and "Walking on the Moon," which was included in my mild obsession with the Police (I have no idea how my long-suffering mother endured the constant repetition of the Synchronicity album I'd appropriated from my older sister, especially when the first track started to skip and you kind of couldn't tell it was repeating...).

So here I am thinking about what it was like to BE a Smart Girl in the late 80s, especially an extroverted one.  The desire to dim your shine so you can get along and be liked is a powerful counter to the drive to excel.  That was the year I really discovered how few men in this world actually like women who are smarter or stronger than they are (and how many others are lying about it), and it started a 20-year-long fight with myself to accept "it's better to be alone than to cut off pieces of yourself to be loved."  That's when I started to have enough awareness to see the boys getting praised and called on for knowing the answers I was 'showing off' by having.  That was the year I decided a weight I'll never see again was 'obese' and really dove into that cycle of food-shaming and body-hatred that governed my 20s and early 30s.  That's the first time I can really remember being aware of all the different directions in which the world demanded I become less.

One thing I really remember about that year was how rarely I talked about the things that I loved.  In fact, several of the high school friends with whom I've reconnected are probably thinking to themselves, "I never knew she was low-key obsessed with the Police..."  None of my friends really did, because by then they'd broken up but it hadn't been long enough for them to be retro so no one else I knew was into them; I was afraid if I said, "Oh hey this thing that no one else is doing is really cool to me!" everyone would think I was weird and liked stupid things.  Enjoying them was just a thing I did on my own.

How does this tie into being an Extroverted Smart Girl?  I built my arguments like brick houses because speaking an unpopular idea opened me up to criticism and unless I could support that idea, the criticism quickly became personal.  Every point defensible, every position at least touching on if not anchored in objective fact.  I got  used to having to defend my positions in science classes with ridiculous amounts of backup because my hypotheses themselves held no value.  Even now, if you ask me what I think, you'll likely get an answer on the tip of an evidentiary iceberg.  I also got used to gauging, in a room, whether anyone wanted or needed to hear the opinion I held, and if I decided that answer was no I just opted out of voicing one.

Years later, when I started learning about different forms of intimacy, I realised that the one that's hardest for me is a specific kind of intellectual intimacy: the ability to express completely subjective opinion.  The idea of sharing my online playlists, or my reading list, or making my Netflix queue public, horrifies me.  What if I tell people what I'm reading and they think it's stupid and pedestrian?  What if I tell you the band I like, that no one else likes, and everyone else thinks they objectively suck?  How can I defend "I just like this song because it makes me feel happy," to my musically adept friends who will recognise that the beats are lame and the lyrics are trite?  What if I'm the last person I know to find out this artist who creates beautiful things is also a terrible anti-Semite?

There's an irony in this, because I'm a huge advocate for letting people enjoy the shit they like without judging them for it, and for the ability to appreciate the artistic merits of problematic stuff.  If you like a band I think is complete shit, I'll tell you they're not my cup of tea but I'm glad you enjoy them.  I'll advocate against enjoying *actively harmful media* but not shitty media.  I've got ten thousand words on why "Fifty Shades of Grey" is dangerous and promotes abuse, but if it was just badly written I'd shrug and say "Everyone enjoys different things.  Some people juggle geese."

Also, I legitimately don't *have* a lot of strong subjective opinions.  A surprising amount of how I feel about various media is "Well, it seems nice enough."  Maybe 10% of what's out there falls into either "I love that" or "I think that's terrible" territory.  The rest is reasonably pleasant and generally unremarkable.

And yet still, when I start to talk or post about something I love, I'll stop to think of the people whose opinions I particularly respect on the matter, and worry that loving a thing they think is low quality will make them think I am low quality.  For a long time, this was reinforced by the kinds of geeks I hung out with, the sort who trash one another's appreciations and play hateful one-upmanship games about who's got more cred because they like the more authentic or more complex or more...whatever...thing.  For years I avoided admitting I'm really not interested in anime because every single discussion of anime devolved into one person railing against why some series or other is complete and utter garbage before I could voice any thoughts at all.  I'm sure there's several dozen people out there under the mistaken impression that I agree with their vehement anime-related opinions because I did not have the expected opposition reaction of screaming at them and attempting to strangle them during the discussion of those opinions.

I've changed to a different sort of geek, the kind that offers reasoned and intelligent criticism and supports people finding things that they love, and it's made a real difference.  "That's not really for me," is no longer met with a wall of self-righteous advocacy, so much as "Yeah, it's not everyone's cup of tea but I really enjoy it and it's been meaningful to me."

Maybe I'll still never be comfortable voicing subjective opinions, and maybe that's OK.  For what it's worth, though, I still totally love The Police and will turn them up very very loud if they are on the radio, and probably sing.

You've been warned.

Embracing the Breakdown

Several weeks ago, I woke up one morning and I couldn't get out of bed.  It wasn't that I didn't want to, that I was tired or comfortable, it was that I could not physically summon the ability to move.  When I thought about how hard it was going to be to walk to the shower ten feet away, I wanted to cry.

This isn't the first time it's happened.  I'm a busy person.  Much of my life revolves around service to others; I pretty consistently take on responsibilities and projects that push me to that point of exhaustion where I've been running at a sleep and energy deficit for several weeks, until I take a long weekend and just hermit/crash when it's convenient.  Generally, when I wake up too exhausted to move, my response is, "I have to get up, because people are depending on me."  So I do.  I summon the will and I *force* myself through it.  I drop things physically and intellectually, I'm short-tempered, I'm barely effective at all the things I need to do, but dammit I got up and did the thing.  I've spent years moving from crisis to crisis like that, always reacting, rarely acting, never planning.  I'm Good In A Crisis; it's a fundamental part of my identity.

Over the last couple of years, though, I've been doing a lot of work on self-care and healthy life patterns, trying to build sustainable habits.  My ability to 'power through' is a good trait, but it's not a lifestyle.  I'm also Good When There Is No Crisis and I'm not using that skill set enough.  So this time, I said, "I can't get up.  People are depending on me.  They're depending on me to be whole and healthy.  They're depending on me to be here in 10 years to help with their kids.  They're depending on me to do things *later* that I can't do if I don't rest *now*."  So I called in sick and stayed home, even though it screwed up some plans.  I slept another 6 hours.  I ate some good food.  And then I took serious stock of where my energy was going; that was pretty hard to look at.

On a sort of autopilot, I'd set up my weekdays as: wake up at 7:30 already late and tired, struggle out of bed, get to work late, stay at work long after hours sometimes working but sometimes just fucking around online, maybe work out and maybe don't, eat dinner around 10pm, get to bed around 2 or maybe 3, repeat.  My weekends were either exhausted collapsing, frenetic social activity, or projects to help friends.  I'd been putting off "get some real relaxation and have some real fun," so far into the future that I couldn't actually see when it would happen.  I'd barely gotten to spend significant time with the friends who feed my soul, and only managed to do so by 'stealing' time and energy from other commitments.

I was still, in some ways, recovering from major surgery.  I'd gotten past the actual physical recovery, but in trying to catch back up on organising the house and doing my workouts and finishing my projects, I'd been running about double.  I also put, for a variety of reasons, a tremendous amount of emotional labor in over the winter, without really honoring the degree to which it had taxed me.  I had started to have severe muscle weakness and facial tics, and had gotten dizzy a couple of times, all from a combination of stress and depleted resources.

Understand, no part of this was unfamiliar territory.  I've been running through various iterations of "Power through until it's convenient to collapse, no matter what you have to burn," for probably the last 20 years, doubly so since the anemia added in a new variable.  I just finally hit a point where that practice became incompatible with my changing attitudes on self-care and sustainable habits.

This also shouldn't sound like unfamiliar territory to most of my friends, who also power through more than not, who overbook and overcommit and make it all come together through the power of coffee and sarcasm, and who run the razor's edge of holding it all together.  Birds of a feather and all that, you know?

At first, I started to look at how I needed to change in the nebulous 'soon' and not at immediate change.  Part of my assessment, though, was an understanding that I had to stop pushing through the now to get to when it would be convenient because I wasn't making lasting change.  So, I set myself solid goals:  minimum calorie and protein consumption, minimum nightly and average sleep requirements, hard limits on when I leave work, a defined bedtime, a specific limit on new projects and physical activities.  None of these is a particularly revolutionary goal: they're the things healthy people do.  And I set one other:  if this isn't better in a couple of weeks of rest and self-care, it's doctor time.

Overall, I did pretty well.  I still missed a couple of bedtimes and had a couple of unnecessary late nights at work, and I have a seriously hard time cramming as much protein as the fitness tracker says I need into my diet, but the limits I'd established set a much more reasonable pace where I didn't feel like I always had to catch up.  I'm feeling much steadier and more balanced.  My planning ahead has stopped entirely revolving around what I HAVE to do, and started including what I WANT to do.  I'm comfortable making a note of it to mention to the doc when I see him next time, instead of actively scheduling a visit.

More importantly, though, by allowing the breakdown even when it wasn't convenient, I hope to break the pattern of 'push past exhaustion, crash, run to catch everything I dropped when I crashed, start the push toward exhaustion again'.  I'm not changing who I am:  I'm going to take on responsibilities.  I'm going to take on projects.  I have a loving tribe of friends who rely on me, and I rely on them.  I will continue to be Good In A Crisis because I don't really know how else to be.  All of this is important to me, and none of it is anything I actually want to give up.

What I *am* changing is the habit of letting non-emergencies pull from my reserves.  There have been too many times in my life when the only thing keeping me from crashing was the sheer number of people I'd let down if I did, and far too many times when the refusal to let anyone down in the short term meant letting everyone down in the long term.  I've had just enough situations in the last few years where having just a little reserve made the difference, and it's finally sinking through my head that I either need to give up the part of my psyche that serves and supports others, or put in actual work to build the reserves that will let me do it without cannibalizing my own health.

International Women's Day

I've been watching as the International Day of Women posts go by, and it's been wonderful to see so many messages of inspiration and solidarity.  I love all the support for women!

It's a good day to remember ALL the women.

Remember women in poverty, especially those struggling to lift their children out of it.  Advocate for the safety nets they need.

Remember women living in abusive relationships, and look for ways to help them get out.

Remember women of color, because they face additional barriers to success and justice.  Ensure that their voices are heard as well as your own and fight against racism.

Remember trans women, because they're in terrible danger just for being their true selves.  Welcome them without question into women's spaces, and fight for their safety.

Remember disabled women, because their perceived weakness makes them targets.  Demand accessibility, especially in feminist spaces.

Remember women in prison; they're much more likely to be raped or otherwise abused.  Fight for reform to our justice system.

Remember women in forced marriage and prostitution, especially the young girls taken from their families.  Support laws and organisations that help them.

Remember undocumented and refugee women.  They're often desperately fleeing terrible conditions, but their status leaves them vulnerable where they should find safety.  Seek meaningful, compassionate immigration reform.

There are as many ways to value and support women as there are to BE a woman, and we can't afford to leave anyone behind it hope they'll 'catch up' if we forge on ahead without them.  So much of the work for women has been done by those who receive the least support, and for far too long we've failed to center *all women* and talk about issues beyond equal pay and reproductive choice.

Demand intersectionality.   Demand inclusion.  Demand opportunity for all women.  Demand justice.  And if anyone tells you the feminist movement can't support that, demand a new feminist movement.

New Year's Resolutions

Every year, I wade through the resolution posts and blogs, watching people far and near set goals to improve their lives.  Everyone has things about themselves they want to change, me included.

This time of year doesn't sit that well with me, though.  Everyone is busily rejecting their weight, their habits, their indolence, their smoking, and any number of other things about themselves.  There's a massive industry dedicated to helping you cut away the parts of yourself you don't want.

I'm not just talking about the weight loss industry, though it profits the most from this time of year.  We're decluttering, downsizing, streamlining.  We pick out something we don't like about ourselves, like financial irresponsibility or a habit we haven't previously been able to kick, and we build a huge plan to defeat it.  We declare enemies (sugar is the devil, laziness is weakness, Netflix is a trap), and gird up for battle.

Few people seem to remember, when they're declaring enemies, to declare allies as well.  I want to be stronger, sleep better, and spend more time doing the things that are important to me.  My love of working out is an ally; if I indulge it I'll hit the first two of those.  If I get stronger, I can hike more, and take more pictures, and create beautiful things.  If I get more sleep, I have more energy during the day to get necessary tasks out of the way early and go do things I want to do.  My tribe is an ally.  They support me and love me and reach out to spend time with me, creating fun and wonderful experiences.  They encourage me to grow, cheer my victories, and commiserate with my losses and failures.  They love and value me, keeping me grounded in an understanding of and appreciation for the person I am right now.

Right out of the gate, a lot of people fail because the plan relies on them already being the person they're trying to become.  They want to be the sort of person who gets daily exercise, so they exercise every day until they strain a hamstring and then never go back to the gym once it heals.  They want to be the sort of person who contributes enough to their 401K to retire early, so they double their payroll contribution on the assumption that they can cut down on expenditures, and put off new shoes or car repairs until they're emergencies that end up costing more.  Then, when the big plan fails to pay off because they weren't ready to start living it 100% of the time, they get demoralized and give up altogether.

You're not the person you want to grow up to be yet.  You're the person you are, and that person has an entire gorgeous rich life that has formed you.  Everything about you is an evolution, a culmination of generations of lives that came before you and years (if not decades) of decisions you've made for yourself and your life.  You're a whole complex being right now, and setting goals for that person as if they were a stranger is never going to work.  To be effective, a goal is a map from where you are to where you want to be, but maps are no good if they only list a destination and no other points of reference.

If you've embarked on a new plan or a new goal this year, let me ask you:  what are you keeping?  What is it you love about yourself, that fits in with the person you are right now and the life you want to have?  Have you also resolved, in addition to all your changes, to keep your empathy and your good sense or your optimism and your self-care habits?  When you took stock of your life, to decide where change needed to happen, did you mark out, as immutable boundaries, what you're preserving in yourself because it has value?

For those who make resolutions each year, I hope that you'll stop and lay out, for each thing you've resolved to change, something about yourself that you love enough to preserve.  I hope you'll look at your allies and how you can help yourself reinforce your goals and dreams.  I hope you'll be able to embrace the person you are now as valuable and worthy instead of regarding yourself as just an ingredient in some finished product.

Because I have a sad secret:  if you can't love anything about yourself now, you won't be able to love the new you either.  Life's not a set of Cinderella shoes you'll be able to fit if you just cut off the right bits and pieces of who you are.  It's a long messy process of hurling yourself towards death and hoping to find enough joy and beauty on the way that you're not wasting the trip.

I love you all.

Uniforming My Ally

I have been some form of 'overweight' for my entire adult life.  For the first couple of decades out of high school, I agonised about my body, how to make it thinner, how to make it prettier, how to squish and scrape and starve it into acceptability.

As a Fat Girl, I convinced myself I deserved only frumpy, uninteresting, practical clothes.  I fooled myself that I wanted a 'classical, practical style' when what I really meant was "I don't feel comfortable wearing clothes that attract attention."  For years, my 'look' was a pair of sturdy jeans or cargo shorts, a solid-color tee for work and a funny tee for play.  Dresses were reserved, conservative.  Long skirts, dark colors, to the point that at least one set of co-workers assumed I was Pentecostal based on my style of dress.  My one concession to color and vibrancy was a collection of tie-dye dresses bought at festivals, all long and full-skirted.

I envied those other Fat Girls who wore the pretty dresses, who always looked nice and put together, who rocked the bright colors and the feminine lines.  I told myself, "Well, when I get thinner, when I look better, when I reach the goal, I can dress like I mean it, too."  I also envied them their comfort with their bodies, their ability to adorn and joyfully decorate something all social pressure pushed them to hide behind a sweatshirt or baggy pants.  A smaller voice whispered, "If I ever stop resenting my body, maybe I'll dress nice BEFORE I get thin."

Clothes shopping in America as a woman of my size is an exercise in demoralization and disappointment.  You see something lovely and fun, you envision having it, and you find out that in no universe does it exist in your size.  The brick-and-mortar stores that do carry things in your size are reinforcing the frumpy theme, or presenting you with 'fashion' garments in a style three years expired and a pattern ripped from the finest hotel wallpaper.  Online shopping's made it both better and worse, because now a dedicated shopper can struggle through ten times as many disappointments to find the few pearls and hope that the reviews are correct about 'size runs true'.  There are shops that offer better sizing and options, but they can be both hard to find and expensive, and the ability to Google search opens up a huge range of opportunities to find that for some people 8 is still a 'plus size'.

I spent a lot of time not wanting to risk that 'runs true' should have said 'runs small', and convincing myself that jeans and solid color tees and long full black skirts were a perfectly respectable style, until a friend introduced me to a site that takes your measurements and sends you a custom dress, and offers dozens of styles, colors, patterns, and fabrics.

This recommendation fell on exceedingly fertile ground.  Some five years ago, I wrote about my body as my ally, about embracing and loving myself with my own best interests as my highest priority, and I've been trying to live that since.  I've discarded the idea that my body needs to be a specific weight for me to be healthy and happy, and shifted my body goals to functional things I want to be able to do.

The health trials of my last couple of years, and the attendant weight gains and shifts, have really taxed that resolve.  Random abdominal expansion due to fibroids, plus exhaustion due to anemia and energy loss, have left me struggling to reach a space of peace with how I look and feel.  I was down to wearing broomstick skirts I bought at festivals, and a collection of black t-shirts, because so few of my clothes still fit and buying more was emotionally devastating.

But, you see, at my core I love all things that speak of luxury and the personal touch.  I couldn't pass up a dress made just for me, my own dress chosen and sewn as if I had a private seamstress.  Just one, I thought, a nice pretty dress for my wedding, that's an occasion that deserves a dress just for you, right?

So my then-fiance took my measurements for me, and I chose my dress and sent off my numbers and prepared myself for disappointment.  When it arrived, I put on my dress nervously, to find that it fit perfectly and it was so pretty and so comfortable.  The deep V neckline, though, mandated a new bra.  Off I went to the Fancy Bra Store, where they fit you and help you choose, because it's my wedding, right?  I deserve a special bra for my wedding!

It's easy to shout down the demons that tell you that you don't deserve to have nice or special things, when it's only for one occasion.  Shut up, Traitor Brain, I'm the BRIDE you know and the BRIDE can have nice things.  Not me, but this alter ego I get to wear for one day.  And sometimes you can use an alter ego as cover to sneak into an entirely new way of managing some part of your life.

Once I had tried it, I was hooked.  I culled out all my sad, battered, frumpy clothes.  Armed with a set of my measurements, I slowly began to replace my work wardrobe with clothes that not only fit and flattered, but *expressed*.  I looked at things and I thought, "I would look pretty in that," and if they fit into the budget and could be made in my numbers, I bought them regardless of whether they were flashy or brightly colored or Fat Girl Appropriate.

I replaced all my too-small bras with correctly-sized models, dropping band sizes and increasing cups to find that life is way better when you're not crushing your boobs into your armpits.  Over the course of the last year and a half, as budget has allowed, I've cut the amount of clothing my wardrobe in half, but every piece fits, looks good, and is comfortable.  I've cut my shoe collection by more than half, but replaced many of them with cute, whimsical flats.

Don't get me wrong.  I still have my funny tees and my cargo shorts and my carefully-amassed collection of Converse.  I'll never give up comfortable blue jeans, or oversized hoodies.  I'm not getting rid of who I am, just letting out the part I've been hiding behind this layer of fat all my life.

Somewhere along the way, I became one of the Stylish Fat Girls I've always envied.  I have a manicure with flowers on it, glasses chosen because they accentuate both the color of my eyes and the highlights in my hair, lots of socks with cheerful profanity, a variety of comfortable and interesting shoes, and a small collection of clothes that make me look and feel put-together and in control of my appearance.

When I started reframing my body as my ally, I began to try and consider the way I treat myself as "Would I treat my beloved friend this way?"  I am not indulging myself, I am outfitting my beloved friend.  I am putting a uniform on my ally, so we can keep fighting together.

The other day at the gym, two women about my size stopped me to compliment my dress.  I showed them the pockets and told them where I got it, and one of the women said, "Oh, I've been meaning to try them, but I wasn't sure...I thought I should wait until I lost some weight."  I saw in her eyes the reflection of my own struggles with 'deserve' and 'maybe someday', and I said, "No, really, do it now.  If you can afford it, do it.  Don't wait.  This has completely changed my relationship with my body and how I look at myself.  It's so worth it."

(I've left out the names of the sites I shop at, because this isn't an advertisement for them.  It's an advertisement for the idea that you should come to terms with your body as it is, and understand its shape and its needs, and adorn it joyfully no matter its size.)