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.

Complicated Thoughts on a Day Without a Woman

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and like most things involving women, it was complicated and experienced differently by a lot of different people.

Over the last several weeks, plans for a 'day without women' were floated around the internet, with a lot of women talking about how we should opt out for a day.  Don't work, don't do unpaid labor at home, don't buy things, just remove our contributions from the common pool.  A strike, essentially, from being women in the world.

Oh, if only we could.

Most of the criticisms of the 'day without women' idea were valid and based entirely in why we need one and may never get one.  It was a thing that only women lucky enough to be able to afford a day off could participate in.  Women for whom a day without work means an irreplaceable budget shortfall can't afford to strike.  Women who are sole caregivers for their children, or for their parents, cannot take a day away.  Women in "women's professions", especially teaching and nursing, have to face the fact that the people who suffer from their strike day are vulnerable children and patients, not corporations or the public at large.  I saw a number of women explaining that if they took a day off, their already-outnumbered voices would be silent for a day, leaving the decisions and opinions in the hands of their male co-workers.  Women said, "I provide care for others' children, mostly women.  If I don't work, they can't work."  Too many women who could afford to take a day off said, "Well, no one does my work if I'm not here so if I take the day off, I'll just have twice as much work tomorrow."

I took yesterday off.  I slept late and did exactly as I wanted, which included a couple of house projects I've been trying to get to but haven't because I'm often exhausted from work and other obligations.  It was excellent.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about what I was doing and why I should or should not do it.  The day actually hit a minor guilt-bubble around the time I was drinking my coffee in bed, because how can self-indulgence be a radical act?

It is, you know.  Though it's not just women, women (especially women of color) represent the greatest portion of the demographic for whom the words 'day off' are a faraway vision of unimaginable ease and luxury.  Too many of us are working paycheck to paycheck and balancing a lioness's share of unpaid household labor.

Everyone deserves a living wage for a full day's work, and that includes women.  If you're working 40 hours a week and you cannot afford to feed, house, and clothe yourself without taking on roommates or extra work, then you're being exploited.  If you're working 40 hours a week and can't even afford rent on a space large enough for your family, you're being exploited.  If you're working 40 hours a week and can't afford to save for emergencies *or* retirement, you're being exploited.  If you're working two 25-hour-a-week jobs because neither employer wants to give you full-time benefits, you're being doubly exploited.  Mark my words, every company that treats its employees this way receives government subsidies twice over, first as tax cuts and corporate welfare, and second by having tax dollars supplement their employees' abysmal wages with public assistance to meet a basic standard of living.

If you can't trust your male co-workers or managers to speak for women or consider their input as valuable if you're not physically there to hold them accountable, you're doing additional and likely unpaid labor to have a workplace that treats people fairly.

Systems, like modern nursing, that are arranged with such spare staffing coverage that every minute of every worker's day is essential to keeping the machine from failing increase burnout, which decreases employee longevity and destroys institutional knowledge.  It shortens the lives of those who work under those conditions, and damages their physical and emotional health in the long term.  If a shift that 'begins' at 3 and 'ends' at midnight requires you to be there at 2 and leave at 1230 in order to exchange critical information, AND work through your 'lunch' to finish required documentation, you're working an extra 10+ hours each week, unacknowledged.

Teachers, who are predominantly women, work hundreds of hours of invisible labor a year, from spending time over the summer designing and creating room decorations to supervising extracurricular activities to hours upon hours of grading.  "It must be nice to only work till 4," they say to the woman struggling out to the parking lot at the end of a ten-hour day, with twenty-six term papers to read and grade over the weekend.

Some of this is why I stayed home.  I am, as the articles point out, privileged in that I can do that.  My job isn't endangered by a day off; my boss was slightly inconvenienced that a thing he wanted to know didn't materialize immediately upon asking it and he had to wait until today.  Rather than dismissing things because "Only privileged women can do them" I think we need to say "Hey, this thing that's only accessible to privileged women, I think they all need to do it because they can, and to acknowledge that being able to do that should be available to all."  When a protest is only available to those of privilege, one of the best uses of privilege is to do it while pointing out its universal inaccessibility.

That's not the only reason I stayed home, though.  One of the most defining characteristics of modern womanhood is the idea that any time taken for oneself and one's own priorities is time 'stolen' from what we owe the rest of the world.  Mothers make memes about hiding in the pantry to eat a candy bar and get a few minutes' quiet.  We glamorize the idea of being 'so busy' that a cup of tea or a glass of wine in one's own living room is an unspeakable decadence.  There's an entire culture based around the conflict between feeling obligated to social engagements but being so exhausted you have to cancel them and beg forgiveness from friends for 'letting them down' by staying in for a night.

We're supposed to 'have it all' by which 'having it all' means putting the job, and the family, and the partner, and the social expectations of activism or volunteering all ahead of the simple act of enjoying time doing the things that feed us emotionally.  Women who put themselves and their own priorities ahead of any of those things are seen as somehow indulgent and rebellious.

There's a backlash against the self-care movement to tell women, "Stop claiming your pedicure or leaving a dish in the sink is 'self-care' because it's not, it's just being selfish and lazy and pretending that doing what you want is emotionally necessary."

Pretending that doing what you want is emotionally necessary.

So many of the arguments regarding women's rights boil down to whether or not women should have the same freedom to do as we want that men have.  The same opportunities to attend colleges or be hired for jobs or paid fairly.  The same ability to set our own boundaries.  The right to do as we want with our bodies and our health care.

When you trivialize the idea that doing what you want is emotionally necessary, you undermine the entire idea of women's autonomy.  You undermine our identity as complete, independent, self-actualized beings.  So what if you think my pedicure is trivial?  It's an hour of time doing what I want, at the end of which I feel physically and emotionally refreshed.  So what if you think I should go home and do the dishes instead of staying at work to finish a project I'm really interested in?  I will spend my time to my own best advantage.

Ultimately, it becomes a revolutionary act to do as we wish without validation or justification.  It is pure rebellion to spend my time entirely on my terms regardless of what the world thinks I should do with it.  Whether it's a full day I can take as a 'Floating Holiday' thanks to my employer's inclusive policies, or just a half-hour lunch break on which I refuse to work 'off the clock' and instead read a book or take a walk, unashamedly claiming the autonomy of spent time is a basic human right.

And if there's a better day for me to embrace that rebellion than International Women's Day, I don't know what it is.

Blessed Yule

Winter Solstice (Yule) is one of my favorite holidays.  It wasn't always, tucked into the overwhelming press of events that is Family Christmas and Year's End and everything else.  I used to just let it slip by unobserved, perhaps giving a nod to the first day of winter as I rushed to finish shopping and crafting and all my other obligations.

Over the last ten years, though, I've not only embraced my own darkness, but begun to speak openly about my struggles with depression, loneliness, and insecurity.  In doing so, I've come to understand the meaning and the beauty of the Longest Night: the chance to rest in unabashed faith that the light will come again.

Non-pagans, especially my atheist friends, ask me how I observe the longest night.  When I tell them, "I stand in darkness and believe the sun will rise," they painstakingly explain to me that of COURSE the sun will rise, don't I understand science, that the earth is spinning and this is entirely what's wrong with religion and why people of faith are stupid, assigning metaphysical meaning to basic astronomical events.

This is, of course, ridiculous and completely misses the point.

Of course I know how science works; I'm not stupid.  I'm an educated woman of faith in the 21st Century, with a background in science and a curious mind.  It'd be ludicrous to suggest that I genuinely believed, on a practical level, that the sun was going to go away last night and never come back if it wasn't properly called, if no one held vigil to welcome its return.

And say what you will about the ignorance of history, the ancients approached the solstices with a scientific curiosity.  They observed the changes in the length of days, in a culture where the balance between light and dark and the shifting seasons of the year, laying the framework for sowing and harvest, meant the difference between survival and starvation in the long, dark winter.  They were watching to see that the days became shorter to a point, and then *something* happened, and the days began to lengthen.  Without astronomical tools and study, you're not going to develop a working model of how planets move around the Sun, but lifetimes of observed phenomena will make you feel pretty secure that at some point, the cycle will shift, and you start building massive structures to act as accurate calendars.

So why celebrate the Longest Night with vigils and celebrations, with statements of faith, with a joyful welcome of the sun's return, if we know it's just how the world works?  Human psychology.

Through the month of December, especially in Northern climes, it can begin to feel like the darkness will just keep swallowing the year, that one day the sun *will* set and never rise again.  Anxiety sets in, depression and hopelessness.  The food of winter is hearty but bland and unvarying.  You begin to wonder, "Will I be eating turnips in the darkness forever?  Is this all there is and ever will be?"

And then the leaders of faith, the people who guide your tribe with wisdom, say to you:  Trust us, the light will return.  The wheel of the year will continue spinning, time keeps moving forward.  Someday, yes, there will be an ending of everything, but that day is not today.  Today is the day our calculations tell us that we can stand in the rising sun, welcome it back, and rest in the faith that from this moment, the darkness loses hold and begins receding.  The bitter cold of winter will remain, but this moment, here, this is the turning point of light.  We no longer travel into winter, because now we are moving towards the spring.

The world will keep on spinning.  The light will come again.  Though there will someday be an end, that end is not today.

Into every life the dark seasons come.  At some point, almost every living human has had a night they weren't sure would end in sunrise.  Almost everyone has, at one time or another, wondered if they were staring into the beginning of a permanent, inescapable darkness: it will never get better, there will never be beauty and bounty again, I will never again stand in the sunlight and feel warmth on my face.  I will forever be here, eating turnips in the darkness.

The people who survive the dark seasons usually do so by putting faith in the fact that the world keeps spinning, time keeps inexorably moving forward, and that the cycles of light and dark will turn, as they always have, to return to sunshine and the summer days.  This must get better, we tell ourselves.  The world will return to balance, the cycle of the year will proceed, and if we can just hold faith through the Longest Night, the sun will return, and hope with it.

Not everyone makes it.  Every Yule, in the safety of the risen sun, I take a moment to think of those who held on as long as they could in darkness, but whose grasp failed before the light came.  I have, at various points in my life, been angry at them, been broken-hearted at losing them, felt guilty for failing them, and almost been one of them.  But now, when I think of them, I feed my own fire, building it up in hopes that if there's someone whose grip is weakening, they might be reminded of the sun by the light of my burning.

I love you all, and Blessed Yule.

Deciding Which End of the Electronic Leash To Be On

I have recently acquired a shiny new tablet.  One of the interesting things is that once I connected it to my Google account, it began to port over the games and apps I had downloaded.  I started adding or deleting things to customize the different devices.  The tablet, for example, is much better for netflix and several of the games I like.  I find that even though the screen is smaller, the phone works much better for chat and messaging.

I've been making choices about it based on the different roles I want each device to play, and it's been interesting to evaluate my changing relationship with technology.  Today was a pretty significant choice:  I am not going to set up my work email access from my tablet.

This goes to a deeper set of decisions I'm making about it, congruent with the fact that I got it in part to help me sort and manage my pictures (I may not be able to get tablet lightroom, but I *can* review and sort the pics so I know which ones go in the 'processing' folder and which ones go in the "I will probably never do anything with this" folder) and keep some books and movies on for downtime.  Eventually there may be podcasts, and I've already loaded a substantial chunk of my music onto it.  But I'm finding myself being very mindful of what I put on it, as far as 'productivity' goes.  Maybe I don't want to use it to increase my productivity further.

One of the defining characteristics of Gen X, more so than those who came before or after us, is that we wrestle with the changing role of technology in our lives, as it moves (for some) from servant to master.  When I graduated high school in 1991, computer literacy was a rarity.  Five years after high school, as I was looking to enter the professional workforce, suddenly computer literacy was a basic requirement.  Every desk at every job, every classroom, every home now had a computer, and life began to be increasingly affected by your ability to navigate your relationship with it.  The more you could integrate technology to 'work smarter' and get more done and be more accessible, the more likely it was you'd succeed.

Several of my first temp jobs used dialup e-mail accounts, so that you had to remember, once an hour or so, to sign on and check the company e-mail.  There was rarely any, but you had to check it anyway.  If you forgot you could still blame 'server problems' for a two-day delay and no one questioned it.  Today I can receive work e-mails minutes after they're sent pretty much anywhere, anytime, and my employer operates on that premise.

I have made the transition, as an adult, from having to seek out communication and connection to having to seek out opportunities to disconnect.  I have adapted to the world as it is, and I tend to appreciate the benefits of that connection.  But as I hear things like "I sent you a text and you didn't reply right away," or "I know you got my e-mail on your phone, why didn't you answer?" I start to wonder if I'll be among the last generation to feel that an individual has the right to set the speed of communication and response.

Lately my phone's been a source of mild anxiety for me.  If I want to play a game or check a website, it perkily lets me know that I have a voice mail, and an e-mail, and a couple of text messages, and a new update to download, and and and...

Its effectiveness lies in it maintaining that constant pipeline so that I can know, at a glance, what the world needs me to know.  The problem has been that I can't *give* that glance without getting the whole fire hose.

Enter the tablet.  It is purely for leisure, for doing things that feed me socially, personally, culturally, and intellectually.  I am deliberately choosing to use it in a wholly selfish manner.  The phone is a tool for communication, connectivity, awareness.  It shouts for my attention and points things out to me.  I'm considering uninstalling all the games and timewasters from it, so that it can be purely for staying in touch with the world. The laptop and desktop computers are for work, for things that require my words most of all, because 90 wpm on a keyboard is far preferable to 30 wpm on a tablet, and because that allows me to say "Now I will sit down, and I will work."

I'm really looking forward to the division of leisure and productivity.  With the tablet, there are no conversations I tell myself I need to be following, no messages I'm chiding myself for not having the time to respond to, no notifications that People Need Me To Tell Them Things, no work I probably ought to be doing.  I can enjoy connectivity on my terms, with the whole array of available knowledge laid out before me, or simply a mindless color-matching game to clear my head.

Over the next few years, I'm going to be closely watching my relationship with technology, as connectivity and access increase, to make sure that I don't blur too many lines between work and play, between my time and others' time, between what I want to do and what I feel obligated to do.   I expect this to be a large part of the social battlefield, the fight between whether technology gives the world the ability to control you, or gives you the ability to control the world.  I will remain firmly upon the side of "My time is mine and you can't use an electronic leash to demand my focus unless I choose to give it to you."

Now I Am Prime Again

A year ago today, I was returning from riding roller coasters with my best friend, musing on what it really means to be an adult.  The entire notion that because of the hard work and effort I'd put into building a career and a community and structures and relationships, my fortieth birthday literally meant turning a profit riding roller coasters because it cost me less than a day's wages to do so, has colored my year.

The last ten years, more than anything, have been spent building.  Building communities, building trust, building relationships.  Growing into my own identity as a priestess, as a counselor, as a friend, as a woman.

The hardest lesson in these ten years is that though my choices have far-reaching effects, my power stops at the ends of my arms.  If it's not within my control, then it's a variable beyond my influence.

It's hard to watch someone you love struggle through unhappiness, unable to help him figure out the key, that it has to start in your heart and move outwards, because no amount of pressure will drive it in to your core.  I see people I love moving towards what look like painful life lessons, and I can only point and call out, "Mind that first step, there."  Sometimes I can't even do that, because they're so well-shielded against anything that will crack the facade of bitterly determined vengeful happiness they're forging.

It's hard to watch communities tear at themselves, and be unable to stop them because patterns of hate lie like railroad tracks, driving people inexorably towards conflict.  To hope desperately that common sense will prevail, as reason shatters upon the rocks.

It's hard to see people grinding themselves to nothing in the name of justice, compassion, and mercy, because there is so much work and it will never be done in our lifetimes but we cannot stop trying.  To watch hearts break as hope fails, and to work to gather the pieces and begin to build with what can be salvaged.

That little voice that tells me to take up arms and rise against the windmills that plague others has been a guiding force of my life, and it's only really been this year that I see:  It drives me to their battles to avoid acknowledging my own.

I can't say what's triggered this self-knowledge, this realisation that I must, in the next ten years, begin to get a real handle on the lessons I can use with my own two hands to keep my own life at the center of my priorities, but it's been a strong and powerful month.

A while ago, I began the process of reclaiming my life, of pulling back into control and learning to focus my energies on what feeds me in some way.  And this process of building a life outside of meeting the needs of others has been ongoing for about three years now.  But I see now that the realisations I thought were answers were only the beginning of a thousand more questions.

The first question I am asking, the one it is hardest to face, is "What can I build that serves me alone, that does not benefit me as a side effect of serving someone else?"

On Being Alone In Your Head

Here's a question:  when's the last time you were alone in your brain?

Here's another one:  was it a comfortable experience?

When I say 'alone in your brain' I mean really, truly alone.  Not only no other people, but no internet or phone.  No book or movie or music to distract you.  No input except looking at what's there, hearing the ambient noise.  No goal-ended project to focus on.  Just you, and your brain.

Since I've been dealing with severe anemia, I have not been able to safely hike alone.  I've noticed that I miss the time with my brain.  This isn't about 'too many people'.  It's that the distractions never go away unless I deliberately leave them.  The phone is there, with its little games.  The internet beckons me with blogs and facebook and chat.  Even offline, I'm surrounded by books, and radio stations playing catchy music.  There's *manufactured content* everywhere for me to consume and I live in a world of active distraction, and unless I make a conscious effort, I'm never fully alone.

A lot of people ask me, "What's wrong with manufactured content?"  They say, "I get inspiration all the time from things I read or hear on the radio or see on TV."  And I agree that there's nothing wrong with it; it's just other people's brains.  And when you're listening to other people's brains, working on other people's deadlines, you don't have much incentive to stop and listen to the voices in your own head.

You get a clarity, left to face those voices.  You come to understand more about what you want and where you're going and who you are.  You also have to face the big life truths out there in the brain-black, ask the big questions:  Am I happy?  Am I a good person?  How can I be a better person?  How can I navigate the experiences of my life without compromising who I need to be and what I want to become?  If you establish a regular relationship with them, you develop a dialogue and an understanding, and you can really work through some serious growth.  Intuition is based in being able to hear and respect those voices.  So is inspiration.  They represent your subconscious collating information you didn't even know you'd taken in and pulling together your *own* conclusions from it.

Meditation helps, but it's hard to meditate long enough to really achieve the flow and stillness of your own mind.  Driving long distances without the radio is good, but not terribly environmentally sound.  Even when I work out, I'm listening to an audiobook or watching the TV above the elliptical.  I get a few minutes in the shower each morning, but I'm usually going over my day in my head and making lists.  Most of the people I know only spend quality time with their brains at one time: when they're trying to fall asleep.  I've been in that position lately, and I'm starting to notice that I'm having a little more trouble dropping off at night.

I suppose it makes a certain sense.  Is it any wonder that your mind, shouted down all day with television and conversation and books and blogs and work, takes that moment when you're not quite tired enough to fall asleep, grabs you by the face, and drags you off to hear all the things it wants to say?  You're a captive audience.  And when I'm trying to fall asleep, I'm still not in a place where I can engage my brain constructively.  I'm still trying to shut it down with my *own* worries and anxieties: If you do not let me go to sleep, brain, I will not wake up in time tomorrow and I will be late and groggy for work and the whole day will go badly.

I'm feeling much stronger now, and should be able to start heading back out for regular solo hikes.  I'm looking forward to finding out what my brain's been doing without me this summer.