One Cobble at a Time

I am 48 years old today. Thus I join the increasing ranks of people who have celebrated birthdays while under pandemic restrictions. I’m a late-comer to this particular life experience. By late March everyone will be in the club. As usual in my house, pandemic changes everything and not very much. We’ve always been pretty low-key with birthdays. They tend to be immediate household with a few gifts and some tasty food. Since we’ve been doing meal-prep kits as part of our groceries, I allowed myself to pick only recipes that appealed to me rather than weighing other people’s preferences. So I’ve got three birthday meals. The thing that is truly broken is that Howard generally likes to sneak out and purchase gifts and foods for me either the day before or the day of my birthday. Unfortunately he’s the one who we’re most trying to keep away from Covid exposures, so he can’t go shopping. Pre-planned online shopping simply doesn’t click in his brain the same way.

I keep staring at my age number and wondering how I feel about it. I can feel the years in my body and see them on my face. I have no desire to hide my accumulating years or attempt to turn back the clock. Not even on the days when I feel dismayed about the softening accumulation on my body. Forty-eight is a highly divisible number, which invites retrospection. Half my life ago I had just graduated from college and was chasing a toddler while thinking about having a second child. I’d had my first surgery for tumor removal and thought that adventure was behind me. We were living in our first house and trying to make a record production company work. A third of my life ago we were five years into Schlock Mercenary, six months into trying to make it be full time work, and about to make the decision to print the books ourselves. I was six years past my second surgery and radiation therapy, but hadn’t yet faced the emotional baggage of it all. We lived in the house we have now and had our four children. That half-my-life-ago 24 year old had no idea who she would become. That third-of-my-life-ago 32 year old had started walking the pathways which led to me.

The retrospection is interesting, but turning and looking forward is more so. If me of 24 years ago had no idea who she would become, how far will I go in the next 24 years? I feel strong and confident in ways that I didn’t feel even two years ago. For the first time in eight years no one in my house is in crisis or on the brink of crisis. I’ve learned how to claim space and set boundaries. I’m excited to see what I can become and create in the years to come. I have my plans for this year, now I just need to take small daily steps toward them.

Today it feels like the new year has finally begun. Yesterday we shook off the last traces of obligation to 2020, and now I am free to move forward into making this year different. Much of this feeling comes from the presidential inauguration yesterday. I have a sense of profound relief that Trump has been rendered irrelevant instead of being a hazard that I had to keep track of. The first moves of the incoming administration have been focused on increasing access (the white house website is available in Spanish again,) setting expectations for behavior (telling the attorney general’s office they work for the people, not the president. Telling staff that they’re expected to be polite and respectful or be fired,) and setting plans into motion to manage vaccine administration for the ongoing pandemic. For the first time in four years, I am pleased with the direction my government is aiming. I expect that I will not always be pleased in the four years that are coming. To paraphrase a quote I saw on twitter: I am looking forward to being frustrated and disappointed by my government instead of being horrified and mortified by it.

Yet the shift in governance isn’t the only source for my new year feeling. My youngest son passed his final GED exam. None of my kids are in school anymore. Instead of finishing up this final necessary thing, we can look forward to what we want to come next. Unfortunately for him, the very next thing is getting his wisdom teeth removed. But after that, he can look around at options and decide what he wants his life to be. We have a list of short term projects: learning some video editing so that he can be a better-paid skilled assistant for our family business, learning about computer components so that he can build a new machine for himself, continuing driving practice to get his license. Medium term might include getting a out-of-the-house job once warm weather and vaccinations reduce pandemic risks. Long term, no one knows. That’s all fuzzy with too many variables to decipher. We don’t need to try to bring it into focus for now.

It is really nice to see my two youngest starting to grow and plan their lives. I don’t think it is a coincidence that most of the growth started happening in early November, right after the election demonstrated that maybe the world wasn’t completely doomed. I’m excited that they’re in an emotional state where I can start teaching them real-world assistant skills that could translate to jobs where their mom is not their employer. Because I can teach them these skills, more things become possible for me. I’m able to teach classes and host online social events because I know I’ll have help.

A third thing that is making the year feel new, is that I gave the final approval to print on the Big Dumb Objects book project. This book has been something of an albatross for almost two years. We had to scrap and re-do the bonus story twice. The Kickstarter for it was delayed by the massive expenses and disruption of our 2019 plumbing disaster and related home renovations. Then fulfilling the Kickstarter was disrupted by Howard’s health crashing and the pandemic. Slowly we managed to find our footing. Now the book is done. The next time we have to think about it will be when the shipments of books arrive and I need to mail several thousand packages. That is familiar work for which I’ll have two skilled assistants.

I taught a class and it worked. I finished a draft for a personally impactful essay. I’ve got a short story in process. I’ve got a research projects to find agents who rep middle grade and picture books. I’ve got plans for building community and connecting with other creatives. I’ve set myself some creative goals. I’ve even told myself firmly that I need to settle into these new obligations before saying yes to any other things I decide I want to do.

The year feels new, and that means it is time to get to work.

Early in my daughter’s senior year of high school she came home excitedly telling me about a group of friends who were planning a road trip to Disneyland after graduation. She was wondering if I would let her go. I pointed out to her that she was due to turn 18 in a couple of months, and that meant she could make her own decisions about things like road trips. If she could pay for it, she could give herself permission to go. “I can do that?” she asked, amazed. For a dozen reasons the trip did not actually happen, but I still remember that moment, seeing my daughter have a dawning realization of adulthood. That she could just give herself permission to do things and then do them.

Which is where I find myself today. I taught a class online to a group of fifteen people. It wasn’t part of a conference or other event. I just wanted to teach, so I set it up, solved the tech hurdles, announced my plan, and made it happen. Inside me there is a much younger version of me who is amazed that I just went ahead and did the thing, who has spent the last eight months asking “are you sure we can do this?” But I did do it, and people bought tickets. Then they came and asked good questions, shared interesting resources, and smiled or nodded as I taught. I gave myself permission to be an expert and people showed up and treated me like one.

I’m so glad I found the courage to make this thing happen, even though it felt scary. Even though my anxiety was a resisting force at every step. I got to teach a class today and I’m very glad it all worked. I feel energized and exhausted. I feel like I put something useful into the world and helped people along their own creative path. I feel like I made a good thing happen with only my own decision and determination. Now I’m going to go collapse and do something comfortable. Next week is soon enough to do another brave thing.

Most of the “letter” portions of my newsletter are focused on creativity or what is going on in my life. This one was different, because the past week was different. If you’re interested in subscribing to my monthly newsletter, you can do that here.

Dear Readers,

At the beginning of a new year I would like to be focused on my excitement for the projects I have planned, the classes I get to teach, ways I plan to move forward. I do talk about those things down in the Projects in Process section of this newsletter, but here in the letter itself my focus must be different this month. The recent riot at the US capitol building has reminded me of my responsibilities as a citizen. I join those who are calling for accountability for all the people whose words helped spark the riot and the people who physically did the damage.

Note that I say accountability rather than justice or punishment. I am choosing my words carefully in this letter so that they can carry my meaning precisely. I have been doing a lot of listening to friends who are prison abolitionists. I’m not fully on board with having no prisons at all, but they make some powerful points about accountability and restorative justice compared to simple justice/punishment models. Simply locking up a perpetrator may prevent imagined further harm, but it does not take steps to heal the damage which has already been done. My country needs accountability, restoration, and healing right now. Achieving that is far more complicated than merely imprisoning some people, though it definitely begins with taking power away from people who used their power to induce others to cause harm, and to prevent those who physically caused harm from doing more.

Power. This is a word and concept I have been considering a lot, particularly in the months since George Floyd’s death and my conscious commitment to anti-racism. It is so easy to feel powerless against national-scale events: pandemics, insurrection. On some level that is true. I am such a small pebble in the flowing river of my country. There is no way for me to change the course of the whole river, however when I focus my attention on the entire river, I miss seeing how much power I actually have. My pebble is tiny, but my learning about privilege has shown me that I do have some power over every molecule of water that I touch as it flows past. I can position myself to shelter those who need space to grow safe from heavy current. I can boost people and shore them up. I have a lot of power to influence the world that directly surrounds me and the people to whom I’m connected by social networks both online and in real life.

Learning to recognize my power comes slowly and counter-intuitively for me. I’m mired in social norms that teach women to stay behind the scenes, keep everything running, but don’t seek attention. Yet behind-the-scenes people who keep things running have enormous power. They are the ones who maintain status quo, or choose to disrupt it. This is where accountability comes in. On a national scale we have to look at the people whose decisions supported and empowered people who then decided to breach the capitol building to try to change the outcome of an election. What decisions gave that movement space to grow? This question must be asked of elected officials, tech companies, judges, and private citizens. With a follow up question of: what are you going to do differently going forward to prevent this from happening again?

The thing about accountability is that it has to apply to all levels of power, even my tiny pebble level. We may all be pebbles, but we all participated in the sequence of events that let up to the deaths of five people and the riot at the capitol building. We are all accountable for the things we say, the memes we share, the “jokes” we let pass unchallenged, the times we didn’t speak up because we didn’t want to upset anyone. We must each examine how we move through the world and ask ourselves if our small daily choices are really consistent with who we want to be. If we want to be healers, we must put in the work to heal. If we want to be anti-racist we must make ourselves and others uncomfortable by pointing out systems that keep us all mired in racism. If we want to be inclusive, we must actively look to see who is missing from our spaces and do the work to invite them in and empower them. Accountability work is hard and it never ends. We will have periods in our lives where we need to rest from pushing ourselves to be better, but after we rest we must pick up and work at it again. Particularly those who inhabit positions of privilege, which is almost all of us in one way or another. (Most people also inhabit places of disadvantage simultaneously with their priviledge. The one doesn’t cancel out the other, nor does it negate our responsibility to be accountable for our power. But that is an additional essay.)

As I watch the aftermath of the riots unfold, I have to remind myself that no amount of doomscrolling will give me a control rod on national-level events. However holding myself accountable does give me power. I must seriously consider how I affect the things and people I can touch. In my case, I’m going to stay politically engaged and communicate with my elected officials about my opinions. I will continue my personal anti-racism education. I will be more willing to speak my thoughts about the world at large, even when (or perhaps especially when) I think those thoughts will bring criticism. I will work on speaking up against the small incidents because challenging bad behavior on a micro-level is actually a kindness to everyone. It allows people to correct their bad behavior without there needing to be An Incident. Incidents create hurt and defensiveness which leads people to entrench in bad behavior. I’m more likely to choose the “pull person aside and discuss behavior” route than the “public confrontation” route, but I also need to be willing to deploy public confrontation if it is called for. I’m sure as I go forward I will find additional ways I can be better as I move through the world. And on that thought I want to borrow the words of Maya Angelou:

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

I hope whether you’re a US resident contemplating the current mess, or a resident elsewhere seeing it from afar, you use this opportunity to recognize the power you do have to make the world a better place, and that you choose to use that power wisely.

All the best,

Sandra

I wish I could say I was surprised by the rioting and insurrection in my nation’s capitol yesterday. But I am not. Everything that happened was consistent with behavior I’ve seen from individuals and groups over the past several years. I feel many things today. Surprised is not one of them. I feel empathy and frustration for those who are shocked/surprised. It is hard to have your worldview shaken, but also, weren’t you paying attention? Or listening to people who have been predicting outcomes like this since 2016? Then I have to turn consideration toward myself and my own actions. Was there more that I should have done that would have helped others see this coming? I’m such a small pebble in this social flow, I doubt I could have changed the course of the river. Also, we would then be in the pandemic problem. A disaster averted leaves a sizable portion of population disbelieving that there was any reason to be concerned at all.

Today I’m still a tiny pebble. I’ve got friends online who are predicting that things are going to get worse before it gets better. I hope not. I want this to be the moment that the vast majority of conservatives wakes up and shakes off all the trappings of Trumpism. I want conservatives to lead the charge in removing Trump from power. I’m happy to see that Facebook has decided that Trump doesn’t get to speak on their platform until after inauguration day, and maybe not ever. Take away the man’s microphone. Take away his legitimacy. Yes that creates a new set of problems as those who support him will find ways to congeal and will likely learn how to organize and be more effective. We could end up with an ongoing domestic terrorist problem. That is better than another full coup attempt.

I’m not sure what true accountability looks like for yesterday’s actions and for all the choices that led up to yesterday’s events. But accountability needs to go deeper than simple punishment. It needs to last longer and be more transformative. Each of us needs to search our hearts and decide what accountability we have to democracy, community, to our neighbors. I was not in Washington DC yesterday and committed no crimes, but I can still be a better and more vocal citizen to help build a society that I want to live in.

It can be as simple as paying attention to the words we use to describe yesterday’s events. Some news sources are talking about a protest of patriots gone awry. Others are using words like mob, riot, insurrection, and violence. In order to make people accountable, we need to use the hard words. The precise words. An insurrection is a violent uprising against an authority or government. Breaching the capitol building was an insurrection. A riot is a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd. That word applies too. The fact that the body count was so low doesn’t change the application of those words.

Use the hard words. Confront the hard things. And somehow do those in a compassionate and educational way. This is my challenge for myself.

I’m planning some on launching some new projects this year, and I’m excited about them.

I’m teaching online classes. The first is only ten days away when I teach Structuring Life to Support Creativity. I’ve already got 7 people signed up, which is almost half of the seats in the class. I am excited to engage with fellow creative people and help them find ways forward in their lives. I’ve scheduled a second class for February, Creativity vs. Social Media which will explore how to protect our creative selves from the corrosive aspects of social media, while still being able to leverage it as a necessary promotional tool, as well as a tool for connecting with others. Once I’ve got the first class complete, I’ll consider what I’m teaching in March. My hope is to teach one class per month, I’ve already got a list of presentations I’ve given before, and ideas for things that I haven’t previously taught as well.

I’m developing my crochet skills. I’ve had basic level skills since I was taught by my mom at around age 5 or 6. However I never followed up that basic knowledge with any further learning. It is nice to have an area of focus and study that is very kinesthetic rather than word-based. Yes, I’m reading a book to learn the skills, but the practice is in the hands. I hope that I can make something wearable by the end of the year, a cardigan probably. I like wearing cardigans.

I’m producing the next two Schlock books. To be honest, I’d love to put out the last four Schlock books this year, but I’m focusing my attention on two for now. The idea is to run a Kickstarter featuring these books in either March or April. But I want all the bonus stories and cover work done before the Kickstarter launches, so those dates may push later. There are large portions of this work that is not in my control. I have to wait on Howard. So having the other projects is critical for me to not feel helpless in my life.

I want to write between 12-20 short stories. I’d like to be posting one story per month to my Patreon, and then spreading the word about that so that I gain patrons (and therefore readers and income.) I also want to send some of the stories out to other publications where they can have a broader readership and hopefully entice people to come to my Patreon for more stories. I’ve got a specific publication in mind that I want to have three submissions for by March when they open doors (and allow 3 submissions per writer.) I think this effort will stretch my mind in good ways.

I plan to progress on renovating our kitchen. We can start the process of taking out a wall this week. Then there are many pause points for us to consider how to proceed or for us to pause until we locate the necessary funding to pay for the next step.

I want to polish up a picture book and send it into the world seeking an agent for me. I realized that I’m currently sitting on three nearly-complete picture book drafts. I’d like to run another picture book Kickstarter, but the maximum number of books I’d put into that Kickstarter would be two. This leaves the third book kicking up its heels and waiting for years. It might as well spend its wait time in the To Read pile for agents. Because I’d love to have a hybrid aspect to my writing career to compliment the self publishing and teaching. In the mean time, I’m squirreling away funds to pay for art for the other two picture books because I need to pre-pay for art before running the Kickstarter.

I’m absolutely certain that the year will hold more projects than the ones I’ve listed here. New projects always show up and sometimes existing projects need to be set aside. Yet it is nice to feel the new year / new project energy for now.