Month: December 2018

The days between Christmas and New Years feels like they reside in a place outside of time. According to a tweet I saw this week, they used to do exactly that. Calendars used to end on Christmas and the new one wouldn’t begin until January 1. I’ve no idea if that factoid is accurate, but it amuses me to think it so. Days outside of time is how this week feels.

But then today is New Years Eve, and that feels fixed. Tied inextricably to the beginning of next year. My family celebrated by going out into the sub-freezing garage and loading my car full of donation items. The garage does not look much cleaner yet, but it is a step closer to where it needs to be. We have plans for the house which involve using garage space to stain cabinets. A few closets and cupboards were also emptied out and sorted. That was where I discovered this stash of birthday candles.

For a long time I saved candles from year to year, particularly the big number ones. When the kids were little, that made sense. They haven’t been little for quite a while now. Yet these candles lingered in our lives taking up space in a cupboard because we never thought to get rid of them. Their purpose is done, we can move on.

Another thing I have been working on in this timeless space between the years is finishing up family photo books. I’ve reached the point where the only one left to do is 2018. This is the first time I’ve been caught up on those since 2012. As I began sorting photos for 2018, I find myself thinking “That was this year?” As I see news-in-review online, I think the same thing. Somehow 2018 feels like it was far longer than a single year. At the same time I see a photo and think “wait that was last January?” Some events feel much closer in time than they actually are, while others feel much longer ago. Perhaps there was a watershed (or several) somewhere in the middle of 2018 and everything before it feels “long ago” and everything since feels “recent.” Only I can’t identify a single event or time span with a large shift in it. Rather the whole year has been a constant and steady shift-of-course for multiple people in our family. We are not now who we were when this year began.

I know that I am not. For the first time in several years, I am not afraid of the year to come. I’m not feeling worn or weary. It is a good feeling, as is the clean emptiness of the closets and cupboards and the progress on changing the garage. Every little thing helps us move forward, and “excited to move forward” is a good feeling for New Years Eve.

One of the things I have been doing in the past couple of weeks is to occasionally pause and note how much better this December feels than last December did. Last December I was in a swirl of familial transition, very prone to getting pulled off balance, and not at all sure what the next steps should be. This year, almost none of that. Or rather, all of it to lesser degrees because transition and uncertainty are givens for any living thing, but I am not falling into pits of fear and tears. I can credit much of it to the fact that all four of my kids have found their own ways to balance. And I learned how to not be right next to them the moment they wobbled so that they had a chance to learn how to balance without leaning on me.

My goal for this year as I stated in this post was to build a life with less fear in it, to learn how to live, breathe, be less afraid. As I move through this December I can finally see some of that work coming to fruition. I still have more work to do. I just finished reading Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection and I’m embarking on reading The Gaslight Effect by Robin Stern which already has me rethinking my instinctive reactions in certain social situations. The work of not being afraid will continue, but in 2019 I will take it a step further. I will learn to be courageous.

If failing to write words is fear, then it is courage to write the words anyway and allow them to be read. And judged. Not knowing if the words will be inspiring or boring, useful or disappointing. It is this kind of courage I need to cultivate in the next year of my life. Quiet courage that does the work without looking like courage at all.

This is a snippet from a newsletter I sent out a few weeks ago. It was the first newsletter I’ve sent in years. I chose to format most of it like a letter from a friend rather than an Author Update. My effort was answered within twelve hours by an email from my newsletter service that I had a very high unsubscribe rate. So I’ll reconfigure and take steps to filter so that only the people who want that sort of newsy letter actually get it. This is the quiet courage I want to cultivate. The kind that gets negative feedback on a creative effort then gets up and tries again.

The need for this sort of courage became obvious to me when (in November) I was hit with a series of blows to my professional confidence. No one who delivered those hits intended me harm nor did they realize they’d caused it. Which was actually part of the harm. I was insignificant enough that they didn’t even realize they’d hit me. I had to step back and recognize that the only reason that these events registered as harm at all was because I was looking to external sources for validation on my creative efforts. Such an easy trap to fall into.

I had to decide whether to crawl into a hole and hide until it didn’t hurt anymore, or to get up and keep moving trusting that eventually it wouldn’t hurt anymore. I suspect that the amount of time it hurt would have been the same no matter which path I picked. Healing takes the time it takes, and we can rarely speed it up, though we can definitely slow it down. I did some hiding and some moving. And I rearranged my days a bit, using the holiday season as a reason to shed some tasks that I had been holding over my own head.

All of which is how I came to be a few days before Christmas and thinking the sorts of thoughts I usually think about between Christmas and the new year. I don’t mind the thoughts coming early. It is nice that I’ve been able to create enough space for them to exist. Yet another way that this December is so much better than last year.

Sometimes we review beloved entertainment from our childhoods and cringe at the terribleness of it. Other times old entertainment hits the sweet spot of being cheesily bad without being cringe worthy. Tonight I took over our big TV to watch the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. I giggled all the way through, part out of nostalgia and part because of the ridiculousness of what was on the screen. It helps that we recently watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 so I was primed to riff on old movies. This meant I could watch a scene, remember how I felt about it as a kid, see how I felt about it now, and imagine what sort of jokes would liven the scene up even more. Like the moment where soldiers very seriously announce that they’ve looked everywhere, they rode all the way around the lake, while the “lake” is in the foreground of the shot very obviously being a small pond. Or when the stygian witches make a big deal about how Perseus’s red cloak is now imbued with magic… only he’s never worn a red cloak at any point in the movie this far. It makes its first appearance two scenes later.

I imprinted on this movie a bit when I was 10 and 11. It was the source material for games of pretend at recess. When it came on TV, my family recorded it on video cassette, so I was able to re-watch it. It turns out I still have most of the lines memorized, not to the point that I could recite them, but I always knew what would be said next with what inflection and tone of voice.

No one watched it with me. Howard is five years older than I am. This means that the movie showed up when he was past the developmental sweet spot. Or something. His memory of the film is being disappointed in it. So he didn’t really want to sit through the whole thing, but he wandered past occasionally and I’d fill him in on whatever ridiculous thing was on the screen. I was pleased to be able to note that this movie had 10 speaking parts for women and 8 for men, which surprised me to notice and may explain some of why I found it compelling. The women-as-goddesses matched the men-as-gods in petty squabbling, as is appropriate for Greek gods. The heroine is a damsel-in-distress some, but there are also moments when she took control. And her most damsel-in-distress moment is one that she deliberately walks into in a noble attempt to save her people from destruction. I can see why I liked her and wanted to be like her. I can also see the unconscious societal biases that are stamped all over the film: women are valued for beauty, love at first sight, ugly = evil. I absorbed all of that too. As we all do from entertainment we love, particularly at early ages. There were some things I had to unlearn later. Also a common life experience.

Analysis aside, I’m just glad that I got to spend this evening being happy while watching a compelling munged-together hodge podge of story lifted from Greek myth and presented with only the vaguest attempts at any sort of historical accuracy.

The young dancers moved awkwardly on the stage, their motions tentative and lacking in confidence. Unlike elementary school performances where the dancers move freely and joyfully whether or not they’re in time with the beat, these teenagers were the embodiment of self consciousness. I could see it in every motion. The arm which should extend out two more inches to really hit the mark. The hip motion which ought to move further from center of balance. The foot that needs to plant more firmly. The beginning dancers on the stage moved cautiously, more focused on matching motions to beats than on making the motions flow. It was a stark contrast to other numbers with more experienced dancers. Yet they were beautiful. All of them. The confident and self-conscious alike. They had the courage to get on the stage and show what they had learned, whether or not it was perfect. My favorites were the ones who smiled as they performed, they felt the joy of motion and music, which was far more compelling than perfection of steps.

As I watched this high school dance performance I considered what happens to children that moves us from the unselfconsciousness of childhood and into teenage years where our every action and word becomes constrained inside a box of “what will people think.” Even those teens who deliberately disrupt the norms are still reacting to the norm by defining themselves as outside of it. Then some of us, but not all, manage to break free and be who we are without reference to others, just as some of the dancers on the stage had learned to extend to the very edges of their bodies and even to project themselves so that they seemed larger than their forms could contain. For a dancer the only way to achieve this confidence of motion is practice. They must learn their bodies, their center, their edges. They must train mind and body to work in harmony. So it seems that the way to achieve confidence of self is also practice.

How does one practice self? For a writer this question might be more familiarly framed as “what is my voice?” And the same answer applies to both voice and self. You find voice by writing many things, and self by attempting many things. Over time you discover which of these things feel natural to you and which don’t. “Attempting many things” does not mean an endless round of activities. Some people do find themselves in sky diving, hiking, running, dancing, but finding our self is both smaller and larger than the activities we do. It is imitating a friends sense of humor or their accent, either consciously or unconsciously. It is wearing different styles of clothing. It is seeing how various interactions make us feel. In hundreds of tiny ways we experiment with self daily. Practicing, learning, getting better at it. And hopefully we reach a time in our lives where we have a solid sense of who we are. Then we are able to live to the edge of our skin and make our choices confidence of motion.

But if we are not there yet, we must remember that there is also beauty and courage in the beginning dancer. The one who is willing to get on stage without being perfect. The one who will be a better dancer tomorrow because they experience the stage today. Be kind to your self whatever stage you are at, because you’re beautiful.