After my post the other day about feeling conflicted about the recent success of one of my former high school classmates, I wanted to demonstrate that I’m not all sour grapes about other people’s success.
Last week, an article by one of my junior high school friends appeared in the L.A. Times. In eighth grade, on a trip to state finals with our writing team, this friend informed me of the possibility of shaving one’s legs in the shower, thereby revolutionizing my hair removal practices. For a school project, we once made eerie clay-headed puppets and a cardboard cutout of a sort-of Cadillac, which we painted hot pink. We had the puppets perform a sort-of music video to The Troggs’ “Wild Thing.” (The point of the school project is long since lost to me.)
And although I’ve not used her shaving lessons in nearly a decade and still retain a minor phobia of puppets, I feel nothing but just plain grapes to see her byline in the L.A. Times, and I wouldn’t hesitate to read a book she wrote, once she publishes one. Unless maybe if it were a self-help book, in which case I’d have to re-think everything.
The other day I found out that I graduated high school with a woman who is now a famous mommy-blogger with a recent New York Times Best Seller.
I felt a bit conflicted when I heard about this. And by “conflicted” I mean “in a bit of a crisis.”
My clearest memory of this particular classmate is from our tenth-grade biology class. We were studying genetics. The teacher had the whole class stand up and then she read off recessive traits. If we didn’t have the trait, we sat down, and if we had it, we stayed standing. As the teacher called out traits, I kept standing. Soon I realized that it was only me and one of the popular girls left standing. She looked around the room and saw me. I gave her a meek little smile and she gave that popular-girl half-smile, half-sneer thing that made it clear she was not happy about being in this recessive club with me.
I hoped that the next trait would force one of us to sit down. I even considered sitting down whether I had the next trait or not, but as it turned out, I got to sit down without being forced to lie. My ring finger is longer than my index finger and apparently hers are the same length. Or at least I think that’s the difference between us; it’s been more than twenty years, and my diaries from that time are in Ohio in the rafters of my mom’s garage so I can’t sift through the teenage angst to find that one detail. Regardless, I felt relieved to take my seat.
And now she’s famous and my friends (who’ve never met her) are quoting her and sharing links from her on Facebook.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d been assured by parents, fellow outcasts, and teen movies that the kids who were popular in high school would be relegated to obscurity afterward while the nerds would inherit the Earth. I’d comforted myself with this thought for years, thinking that maybe its effects for me were diluted because I wasn’t even a very successful nerd; I only got 1320 on my SATs, attended Renaissance Festivals but didn’t dress up, and although I joined Model UN, I never could figure out the point. But now, it seems, it wasn’t true at all.
Hoping for compassion, I told my husband the high school biology story.
“Wow, so that’s why our kids look so much like me!” he exclaimed.
“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Because you’re so recessive. My genes are dominant. That’s why our kids look like me and not like you.”
“Have I met you?” I thought but didn’t say.
Then I had a fun time with another friend of mine doing the “sour grapes” thing.
“You don’t want to be on the New York Times Best Seller list,” she assured me. “It’s just a popularity contest. I mean, look how often John Grisham is on it.” And then we laughed, and that helped for a little while.
Then I made the mistake of mentioning the situation to my minister. I said I was having some trouble knowing what to do with this new information.
“You just feel happy for her,” she directed. Of course. What did I expect? She’s my minister. She’s professionally obligated to see the good in everyone.
And none of it helps because that’s exactly the problem: I know I should just feel happy for her. I feel ashamed that I’m not. I mean, I do feel happy for her, but not “just” happy. I keep thinking about that tenth-grade sneer and about how her blog—while occasionally very funny—just isn’t my cup of tea, and how her book—although I’ve not read it—appears to be just the type of feel-good overly optimistic rah-rah self-help book that I read only when I want to feel awful about myself.
And she keeps showing up, probably because she’s got great publicity people who can reach into my no-tv, no-mainstream-media life and still make me aware of her stardom or semi-stardom or whatever.
And just like in high school, half of me wants to hate her and half of me wants to be her.
But.
Then I tell myself, “You know? Really, this isn’t about you at all. What’s the harm in feeling happy for her? Sure, it’s luck of the draw. Sure, it’s a popularity contest. But she’s also got a compelling story, and she tells it in a way that resonates with a lot of people. So, good for her.”
Next year, it will be twenty years since we graduated high school. People can change, and based on her story, she was going through quite a bit of her own crap when we knew each other. Maybe after all these years she’d not be scandalized to know she shares all but one recessive trait with me. Or maybe I’m grown-up enough not to care if she is.
Maybe that’s the real problem. Maybe part of me really is trapped back in tenth grade, feeling doomed to obscurity and belittled on the basis of things outside my control, always comparing unfavorably to the people around me, wanting to opt out of the popularity contest at the same time that I secretly want to win at it.
Although it’s not even this particular popularity contest I want to win at. I don’t want to write a best-selling self-help book. I don’t want to be a mommy-blogger guru. I’d like to publish a book, but the party I want to be invited to is the one with Lionel Shriver and Marilynne Robinson and Jennifer Egan. So, no need for jealousy, right?
It’s been a few days now since I started writing this post. I’ve talked it through with a few more people and mulled it over while just living my life, and I realize that this is actually a unique opportunity for me. It’s given me a chance to revisit that unpleasant popular girl/unpopular girl dynamic from when I was fifteen and to react to it differently. Looking at it as a chance to see how I’ve grown over the past two-plus decades and reframe that old hurt, I really appreciate this opportunity. It threw me for a loop at first, but now that the dust is settling, I think I have more perspective. Despite what my minister says, I don’t think I need to feel anything in particular about the success of someone else, I just need to accept it as reality and move on. We each get what we get. If I’m happy for her, great, but the key is to not feel unhappy about myself.
The real test, however, will be how I feel if I see her at our 20th reunion next year. But then, I doubt she’ll be the only test at that reunion. There’s a reason I’ve been avoiding my reunions for 20 years. But, maybe it’s time to jump in. Chances are, it won’t be as scary as I expect.
In my worldview, there is a force (one could call it “God”) pulling us towards love, compassion, and connection. In each moment each of us has the choice to either follow that pull or move away from it. The choices before us in each moment are dictated by every individual moment that came before. If we—or those around us—make a series of choices against that pull, our next moment may contain choices that seem barely loving at best.
For the vast majority of us, the decisions that came in the moments before do not lead us to walk into a school—or a mall or a movie theater or a political speech—and face the choice of whether to use the firearms we’ve brought with us or not, but even that moment of decision is the product of an infinite number of moments that came before.
What happened at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday was tragic. It was incomprehensible. It was abhorrent to all feelings of love and human compassion. But was it evil? Is mental illness evil? Is owning a gun evil? Is suicide evil? Is killing another person evil? Is suicide or killing another person evil if it stops more people from dying, or in that moment could it be the most loving choice in the end of a series of very, very unloving choices? If something could be evil in one instance and loving in another, does it serve a purpose to label something either?
It seems to me, to call the murders evil is to dismiss them as something that just happened without hundreds of thousands of prior causes. To call Adam Lanza evil is to distance ourselves from him as a fellow human being and ignore the reality that a whole series of moments led him to that school Friday morning. We’re good, he’s evil, and there’s the division. It’s simple, but it doesn’t seem to explain things for me.
Trouble is, I can’t explain it without “evil,” either.
How do I say, “These are my people,” and mean not only the children who fell or the teachers who protected their classes when they heard the gunshots or the parents who approached the firehouse hoping that their children would be among those walking out, scared but whole? How do I say, “These are my people,” and mean Adam Lanza, too?
I don’t believe in evil. But I don’t know how to explain this.
I think I’ve corrected some erroneous assumptions I’d made about vulnerability:
1) Not all discomfort is a sign of vulnerability.
2) Discomfort itself is not necessarily a sign that I’m on the right path, but sitting with the discomfort before making a change can help me figure out what change to make.
It’s like if my shoes are too tight. I can choose to sit with the discomfort of the shoes, but that won’t likely lead to future growth (except maybe corns). The discomfort is just a sign that something’s off with the fit of my shoes.
More difficult to tell are those situations that are emotionally uncomfortable. I “retired” from providing mother-to-mother breastfeeding support about a year ago because I got to the point where I would get a call or lead a meeting and end up feeling like I had fallen far short of how I wanted to act in those situations. At the time, I attributed this to social anxiety or some personal failing, but yesterday showed me that this might not be true, or at least might not be the whole story. Continue reading →
I’ve written about my realization that feeling a sense of scarcity and like the world owes me something is a choice and that I can choose to feel differently. I’ve written about how much better showing compassion feels than feeling annoyed does. Now I come to the third thought that’s been percolating since my grocery store trip the other day:
I mentioned in yesterday’s post a recent trip to the grocery store, but I only told the middle of the story. Here’s how it began:
So, we’d managed to make it to the checkout line with only a few more items than were on the list and with me still on speaking terms with both of my children. I pushed my cart up to the conveyor belt as best I could and began unloading groceries. My son was enthusiastic about helping that day but is too short to reach into the cart with his three-year-old arms, so I would hand him an item and he would put it up on the belt while I rushed to put up five more items before he toddled back to the cart for something else.
I had just handed him a box of instant oatmeal and turned back to grab a few more things when I heard the man in the next line over say, “Oh, no,” in a grave voice. I turned to see my son sprawled on the floor holding his ear, the man bent over him saying, “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.” Continue reading →
At the grocery store the other day, I was struggling to hold a crying three-year-old with one arm while using the other to put my groceries on the conveyor belt when I noticed that there was a man standing there impatient that I was holding up the line (and partially blocking the way to the adjacent line between my body and my child’s body and my cart). I felt irritated that he didn’t even ask me outright to move, much less offer to speed things up by helping me with those last few items. He just stood there with obvious impatience. In my annoyance, I imagined that the man saw me as just a stranger holding up the line because she can’t handle the kids she probably shouldn’t have had in the first place.
As I tucked the blankets around my daughter tonight, I asked, ”Honey, are you going to sleep with that hat on?”
She had pulled a stocking cap down over her ears.
“Yes,” she answered. “It’s like I’m camping on the Appalachian Trail. Is it okay if I wear my gloves, too?”
I paused. She was gazing up at me, waiting for my answer.
“Yes, you may wear your gloves,” I said. Then I gave her a kiss and turned out the light.
As I left the room, she asked me to turn on the ceiling fan. So it would be more like camping in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
I really hope she can sustain this level of enthusiasm for the next 10 years or so. Or at least long enough that we can save on heating costs this winter.
There’s this sense that I’ve missed my chance to do something grand, something a little bit crazy. Sure, I gave birth to my son in my dining room and that was amazing and transformative, but it was just a few hours. (Well, it was 27 hours, but who’s counting?) I want more of that kind of thing, but without adding children to my family. I want the challenge and the reward, I want the intangible benefits of testing myself nearly to breaking and coming through the other side changed.
Shenandoah National Park, June 1994
From the moment I heard about the Appalachian Trail when I was 13 years old, I wanted to hike it. I hiked bits and pieces in Shenandoah National Forest as a teenager. I went on one very memorable day-hike with some friends at the end of our senior year of high school. We hiked the Stony Man Trail in Skyland where it converged with the AT. I think we hiked maybe 5 miles and took salad as our trail food. The views were incredible.
A year or so later, I hiked the same section with my future husband. From the ledge, we watched a thunderstorm rolling in. On the next ledge up the trail, the storm engulfed us. My husband loved it. He stood there with his arms outstretched as the lightning flashed around him. When I finally got him to stop trying to be the highest point in a thunderstorm, we ran down the mountain, the backs of our necks and our bare legs pelted by hail most of the way.
Long Trail/AT, Gifford Woods State Forest, Vermont, September 2012
This weekend, my husband, the kids, and I hiked a wee tiny section of the Appalachian Trail as it ran through Gifford Woods State Forest in Vermont. We—the grownups, the 7-year-old, and the 3-year-old—hiked a steep, rocky, one-mile section out and back from the park visitors center.
I spent our return hike calculating distances and paces, trying to figure out a way, however unrealistic, that the kids and I could thru-hike (or at least section hike) the AT now.
Last night I watched the movie, Trek: a Journey on the Appalachian Trail, which is about a group of hikers who completed their thru-hike in October 2001. The film gave a more in-depth look at the hiking life than any other AT movie I’ve seen, including an exploration of the emotional aspects of the hike. There was a lot of discussion about how the hike and the hiker’s perception of it shifted as they got farther along on the trail and farther from the off-trail life back home.
The film included the “how did you get on the trail?” stories of several hikers. Many of them boiled down to, “If not now, when?” One hiker, a man with the trail name “Sheriff,” talked about how he’d thought for years about hiking the AT. Then one night he had a dream. In it, a guy pulled up next to him in a pickup truck loaded with camping gear.
“Going camping?” Sheriff asked. The man answered that no, he was going to hike the Appalachian Trail.
“I’ve always thought about doing that,” said Sheriff.
“Well, why don’t you come along?” the man asked.
And when he woke up, Sheriff started planning his trip.
I worry that I’ve been handed opportunities to do something bold multiple times in my life, and I’ve let them pass by unheeded.
I was at loose ends after college, and that may well have been a good time to go hiking, but I was deeply in debt with student loans and the credit card I’d used to buy food my last year of college. I compromised and worked at a conference resort south of Lake Tahoe for a season, which was awesome, but I was 20 and too self-conscious to allow myself to embrace the experience.
I picked up a backpacking book in a used book store in Asheville, North Carolina, in the late 90’s. The Backpacking Woman, it was called, by Lynn Thomas. It was written before the availability of tech fabrics and chances are the 20-year-old advice was fairly outdated, but it made long-distance hiking seem doable and fanned the AT flame in me. My husband was in grad school at the time, and I said, “Hey! When you’re done with grad school and have a post-doc lined up, we should take some extra time and hike the AT!” But when the time came, he was nervous about taking the time off and I let that be my excuse to give in to my own fears and doubts, and we made a bee-line from North Carolina to California, only stopping to sleep (and accidentally find a beer fest in Salt Lake City).
When my husband got laid off last year, I saw another opportunity to do something bold. With two young children in tow, I wasn’t really thinking that the AT would be a reasonable option, but the idea of selling everything and living in an RV took hold. (I’ve had an infatuation with RVs ever since kindergarten when the neighbors across the street bought a behemoth motor home and we neighborhood kids got to tour through it.) I thought it was the perfect solution. We knew we would have to move anyway. We could sell our stuff, sell our house, downsize into an RV and stretch the severance package even longer than we could in Salt Lake City. We’d be ready to move anywhere the right job presented itself, and in the meantime, we could travel the country. We could drive to Alaska if we wanted to, so long as the gas money held out and we were near enough to an airport that my husband could fly to interviews.
But we didn’t do that either.
And now here I am in the suburbs of Boston with a mortgage on a split-level home that’s bigger than I need or want in a neighborhood a sidewalk-less 2.5 miles from an inconsequential downtown that’s just barely walkable during the best weather (and just about impassable during the winter), watching movies about Appalachian Trail thru-hikers or dreaming of living in an RV with no fixed address.
This weekend, I listened to an interview with Tom Hayden, founder of Students for a Democratic Society, on the “To the Best of Our Knowledge.” He talked about how it was easier to be a radical and an activist in the 60’s than it is today because it was easier to step out of and back into the mainstream.
I could drop out of the university and nothing would happen. I could go to jail in Mississippi, nothing would happen. I could return, pay my hundred bucks and get back in. This is a treadmill that today’s students are on that we didn’t face. We thought our life, you know, the future, was a treadmill, the grey flannel suit and all that, but nothing compared to the pressure on this generation of students.
The treadmill image resonates with me, but I feel more like I’m caged. The door is open, but the cage offers protection and security, and that keeps me inside. I reassure myself that once the kids are older, I’ll step out of the cage. Once we retire. Once…I don’t even know what. But with all of the opportunities that I’ve already let pass me by, with all of the times when leaving the cage would have been relatively easy, will I really be ready to jump even when those future chances present themselves?
I know it’s not the right time for me to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail (Is there ever a “best” time to hike 2,168 miles?). My kids are great hikers, but they couldn’t carry much gear. The best we could do would be some short backpacking trips and even that would be a stretch, and it would be too great a sacrifice to be away from them for 5-6 months so I could do the trail without them.
But I want to do something big. I want to do something meaningful and life-expanding, and I want to do it now while I’m still young enough to have more adventures afterward and so I can be an inspiration to my children when they’re young and before my knees give out.
I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, it’s big. It’s something that would cause people to say to me, “Man, you are totally crazy for doing that.” I want it to be something scary but exciting, something that I know is right in my heart, but that I still question. Like homeschooling or homebirth, but bigger.
Maybe it would suffice to give myself and the kids a long-term training plan for a thru-hike, get us all in shape for a long-distance hike by taking day hikes of increasing length until we’re ready to move on to backpacking trips. With enough experience and conditioning, we might be ready to thru-hike before I turn fifty.
Or maybe I can talk my husband into the lightweight-travel-trailer lifestyle after all. It would help if I could tackle one of my other deferred “bold plans” and become a working, money-earning writer.
That is, if I can avoid being paralyzed by fear for long enough to accomplish any of these things.
Maybe I should just listen to the messages the college radio station has been trying to send me:
I was going to start a Big, Hairy, Audacious Plan on October 1st. It was going to be awesome. It was going to last more than a year and by the end I was going to be fitter, healthier, better rested. I’d know how to play the piano, would speak Spanish fluently, would be submitting stories and essays for publication on a regular basis, and would have read and comprehended at least one dozen literary classics.
But then reality sunk in.
At first I mistook reality for my husband being a naysayer for questioning my plan.* I called him that and many other things and then I went to bed. Even though I have not been sleeping well at all (~5 hours a night, interrupted by my three-year-old), I could not go to sleep. I lay there for an hour trying to fake my way to sleep until I finally got up and made my jittery, anxious self go to the kitchen and journal while I ate a snack.
It was during this time that I realized that I was just totally fried. The insomnia, the digestive symptoms, the eczema, the weight fluctuations, the anxiety—all of it was related. And none of it would be solved by my Big, Hairy, Audacious Plan.
So I devised another plan. A Little Audacious Plan. A Gentle Audacious Plan.
It goes like this:
1) Deactivate my personal Facebook profile. Yes, I know it was less than six months ago that I reactivated it with my cleverly devised pseudonym and all of that. I had very good reasons for doing so, but over these months I realized that, although it’s not the only cause of my being fried, my interactions on Facebook certainly weren’t fostering calm and a sense of wellbeing. On the contrary, they were making me anxious. They were making me irritable. They were making me want to move to the frozen north of Canada and live in a travel trailer with nothing but caribou and lichen and permafrost to keep me company. I lamented the fact that I would not be able to grow a beard in this scenario. Instead, I deactivated my Facebook account in a fit of insomnia. Also a rash decision, but perhaps not as rash as Option A. (My Imperfect Happiness Facebook Page remains intact, as does my @imperfecthappy Twitter account.)
2) Meditate. Like a lot of meditation. Formal meditation twice a day and informal (reminding myself to take a deep breath or, if necessary/possible, lying on the floor with my eyes shut for a few breaths at least once an hour).
3) Practice Gentle Yoga. At least thirty minutes a day of the slow-moving, breath-led variety as part of my bedtime routine. This isn’t for physical fitness; it’s for activation of my parasympathetic nervous system.
4) Write. Since I was seven, I’ve been told that I was a “great writer.” Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more bogged down by the contradiction between being told that I was a “great writer” and struggling with that very activity. If I’m a great writer, why is it so difficult? If I’m a great writer, why didn’t I get more than a polite rejection letter for that short story I submitted in 2004? Why did I get rejected for that incredibly competitive writing fellowship with the famous author’s name attached to it? Why didn’t I get into the renowned MFA program? Why didn’t I win higher than fifth place in that writing competition in seventh grade? I could reason through only one very painful conclusion: I am not a great writer. After several years of mourning, I finally decided that even if I wasn’t a great writer, I still wanted to be a writer. I don’t have to be great to have fun. So, that’s what I’ll be trying to do with Brenda Miller and Holly Hughes’s The Pen and the Bell. With a different focus area in each chapter, this book leads the reader through exercises designed to access the shared benefits of both writing and contemplative practice. I’ll focus on one chapter a month, writing every day using the exercises outlined at the end of each chapter. With any luck, this will help me to rediscover the joy and fun that writing used to hold.
There are some other nitty-gritty guidelines I plan to practice around internet usage, media consumption, fostering compassion, and building relationships, but these are the high points. I’ll plan to check in weekly and let you know how I’m doing.
The formal writing practice will begin October 1st. For items 1 through 3, I’m not waiting until October 1st; I’m starting right now.
*I still think my husband was being a naysayer, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong.
