The new story; the now story

3:29

I did not write an intentions blog post last year.  I remember exactly why.  I wrote down my intentions elsewhere, in my Ink & Volt exercises (and yes, last January I invoked Brad Feld and said, “I wish I could do what the cool VC guys do.”  I repeat myself.  It’s fine.  If I say it twice, I must mean it.)

I met my goals and lived up to my intentions beautifully last year, ahead of schedule. I looked back at my posts from January 2018 and they made me very sad.  I was crushing myself.  I was not at all a friend to myself.  I did some extraordinary and brave things and told myself I was stupid and heartless to do them.  No. I was right the first time.  Once I got some momentum going, living in truth was unstoppable, and I have lived in truth as best I could for 2018.  I look back at least year’s Ink & Volt lists, and the blog posts, and recall the conversations with friends and see how small and scared I was then.  I wonder if I will look back a year from now and see the same thing, next year when I am that safe giant.

Or maybe this will be a year for consolidation, for cementing all of that behavior change when it will get really challenging.  Maybe this will be the year that I say that it’s okay for me to have all the good stuff.  Because even as I’m typing and thinking about the move and how great it’s going to be and the rugs I want to buy, I have that old fear, that something bad is going to happen.  That it’s not going to be really great after all.  That it can’t really be great for me.

Here is the antidote: I note, record, and revel in how this has been truly the best year of my life.  This year, when I walked into many of nightmares and continued walking.  (Did I write that already? I think I did.  I must really mean it.)  This year I learned that I could do that, walk into the nightmare.  I learned that even a nightmare truth is better than pretty lies.  The solidity of knowing the worst is better than the wobble-board of fearing the worst.  And there were so many people holding my hand as I walked into and through the nightmare.  I never thought that would be the case, but they showed up.  This might have been the hardest year of my life, but I don’t think so– I’ll have better perspective later.  When I put aside the fear, I had more room for happiness and joy.  When I detached from a grading system that would always fail me, I felt more successful.  I made things possible that seemed impossible just weeks before.

So… Even if my new apartment is less congenial and commodious than I hope; even if my neighbors are loud; and the water pressure in the shower remains unworthy of the name; and the cable cord is strung along the ceiling rather than the floor and it vexes me every single day and I have to stay home and pay money to get it changed; even if I run through my savings and have to borrow more from my parents; even if I buy all the wrong rugs and lamps; even if my stuff won’t fit in my new apartment and I have to rent a storage space for my Pesach dishes and college memorabilia and suitcases.  Even if lose my job.  Even if friends break my heart by leaving me because I have left Daniel.  Even if I never find the love I hope for.  Even if all those things at once, the last year is indelible.  It happened.  I am the me that did that.  I am also the me that undermined herself for decades, see, consolidation, above.  But a strong counterstory is emerging.  “Is emerging” as if it were a gas or natural phenomenon.  No. I AM CREATING a strong counterstory.  I am living a strong counterstory.

My main intention in 2019 is Abundance.  I have elsewhere told myself it’s abundance, not excess, but I’m going to excise the negative from my intention. I know the difference between abundance and excess.  One makes me happy and the other makes me anxious, so I don’t have to wag my finger at myself and warn myself away from too much (I’ve overspent this past week, and I’m struggling a lot with that.)

4:04, with breaks

 

Safety

8:00, maybe?

I use the Ink and Volt planner for work.  My friend recommended it, and I wish I felt as comfortable as he does using a professional blogs for a range of musings.  Brad Feld does that, too.   I think if you are a successful venture capitalist, you have a lot of latitude.

Each December the Ink & Volt guru sends out four worksheets, one per week, that people can use to prepare for the coming year.  I don’t pay enough attention to week 1 (looking back on successes), although I should because this was among the best years of my life.  I don’t particularly like week 2, which asks you to think about relationships and imagine the movie of your life and your legacy.  That’s probably a sign I should think harder about it.  I am just finishing several days of week 3, culminating in the theme for the year.

My theme is abundance.  As I was thinking about abundance, I associated it with expansiveness (not surprising), but also about safety.  This year I want to be safe, and I haven’t felt safe in years and years and years.  I might not even know what it really means or feels like, and I suspect I will cry for days when I find out.  But I don’t want to play it safe.  And I’m trying to work out in my head how being safe and playing it safe are opposites.  If I’m truly safe, if there’s a true place or feeling of safety and security and deep okay-ness, then I can be pretty far out there.  I can take bigger risks because not everything is riding on that outcome. I feel I’m explaining the obvious to myself.

My career is not what I would have hoped or predicted.  I look back at my 30s and most of my 40s and I see aching underperformance compared to what I know I can do now.  I was playing it safe, I was playing scared (how can those two mean the same thing?).  I would like to say that it was because I didn’t feel truly safe in my life.  Was that me, or my circumstances?  Both.  I think I have rarely felt completely safe, and a lot of my anxiety and choices derive from that.  I haven’t felt like I deserved safety and certainly didn’t feel like I could turn to others and ask them to help me feel safer.

This goes back a long long long way, to my childhood.  There was some economic anxiety when I was in elementary school through middle school and into high school (wow, that’s kind of a long time).  My parents were lovely and kind and every material need was provided for, and there were piano lessons and gymnastics lessons and plenty of good stuff, even during the anxious times.  But… but… there was a gap, a slippage, maybe, where safety should have been.  Maybe I felt safe, but only just, or it was only temporary, or I was always aware that safe was taking a whole lot of work.  Yes, that’s it.  I was safe, but safe was taking a lot of work and unsafe was always right over my shoulder so I had to work harder and harder and harder.  There was no room for slippage, no ability to let down my guard.  There was no slack.  Never ever any slack.  This is not at all what my parents thought they were giving me, but it’s what they gave me.  Poor loves.  The feeling didn’t come from them per se, or it wasn’t personal between them and me.  It was how they themselves felt, moving through the world.  No slack was how life was, or how they thought it was.  So passing on that feeling was just part of socializing me, like table manners (my table manners are not robust, my feeling of precariousness is quite robust).

There was a feeling of near scarcity.  We had enough, now, but we might not have enough later.  The opposite of abundance.

So I came into adulthood this way, and carried it along, and probably misread situations and thought there was no slack when there really was.  And then got into situations in which there actually wasn’t a lot of slack when there should have been a whole lot, and in which I was absolutely not safe or cared for.  And that’s just on the professional side.  Or maybe I misread safety as boredom because I didn’t know how to create, because I couldn’t answer the question, “What do you want to do?”  And home was not safe for me, even as I devoted my considerable (even abundant) energy to making it wondrously safe for Milo and safe for Daniel, who didn’t want the kind of safety I offered because, I suspect, it made him feel vulnerable.  I’ll never know.  Life is just twisted up and sad that way.

So, I just want to be safe, and gigantic, and abundant and expansive.  A very safe giant.  A safe, cozy, risk-taking giant.  At first thinking about being safe, and not knowing what it might feel like, made me cry.  Then I got on this giant wave and I’m feeling better.  I like the idea of being that giant.  It makes everything seem funny and possible.  I can put it on  a t-shirt.  Or find a doll-sized giant (that would be a miniature giant, and aren’t words super fun that way?) on Etsy and make it my mascot.  What, exactly, would a giant doll– not a gigantic doll, but a giant in doll form–look like?  Someone on Etsy has thought this through.  (A quick search for “giant doll” reveals that the collective Etsy needs to do more thinking.)

If I can make it play, I can do it.  I always thought unsafe was adjacent, but maybe super-safe is even closer now because it’s inside of me.  Now.

8:35

Fun

7:52

When I started studying for the LSAT for the second time, in 2000, the first question I encountered on the logical reasoning section was about a bumble bee.  I bumbled (pun intended a little bit — it’s the bourbon typing) the question because I overthought it.  I imagined contingencies that the question refused to countenance.  I saw multiplicities, unintended consequences, and none of the answers was on my side.  Eventually I learned to simplify, to stay within the boundaries of the question, and I got a perfect score on the LSAT.  That was the last time I was perfect.

I’m also a disaster at personality assessments and magazine quizzes.  Do they mean always?  More often than not?  On Tuesdays when I’m not busy?  With beloved friends or strangers?  When I was young or now? But now I’m particularly anxious, so maybe they mean when I’m not anxious.  Except, aren’t I always anxious?  But how anxious?

This is my oblique approach to the question that I can’t answer: What do you do for fun? Variation: What is “play” for you?  Please ask me something else.  But, no, the authors of Designing Your Life won’t budge.  They want me to evaluate myself on play:

“activity that is done just for the pure sake of doing it.  It can include organized activity or productive endeavors, but only if they are done for fun and not merit…. Play is all about joy… Play is any activity that brings you joy when you do it.  When an activity is done to win, to advance, to achieve — even if it’s ‘fun’ to do so–it’s not play… The question here is what brings you job purely in the doing.”

Can I have another question, please?  The authors also ask me to evaluate myself on health, work, and love.  You’d think I’d stumble on love but in fact I’m rock solid.  I have lots more love in my life, or I recognize lots more love in my life, than I did a year ago. I’m also much clearer on what is and isn’t love.  I don’t have all the varieties of love I want, but I understand the question.  Work has a complicated answer, but again I understand the question.  Health, I’m also solid, even on mental and spiritual dimensions.  I’m lagging spiritually, as always, but I know what it means.

Fun.  Play.  What are those things?  I find fun and play in the other things I do.  I find joy in the instrumental things, like cooking to feed myself and walking to work and walking to synagogue with Milo.  And thank God, because I am not sure I do anything at all that is not instrumental.  I read.  I read Louise Penny and other mysteries, not just excellent improving books (although I AM very literary.  I just choose otherwise sometimes.  Often.  When I’m stressed I read mysteries.  I have read mysteries almost exclusively for the last three years. Or five. )  I deeply enjoy yoga, but there is an edge of advancement and improvement.  I try to go for slow, aimless walks, but I find myself speeding up, my heart pounding, taking the hills.  And that’s fun, but would I do it if it weren’t good for me?  Cooking, but I get sad when it turns out badly, so that’s clearly instrumental.  Blogging?  It’s not joy as much as it is unpicking tightly, wrongly woven stitches.  Sighing and starting again at the beginning.  I aim to knit.  It seems soothing.  Is soothing instrumental?  It doesn’t sound like joy.

And yet, I want to believe, ALL evidence to the contrary, that I am a fun person.  Cruel men have told me otherwise, when I decline to do what they want me to do: “You’re no fun.”  I have a lot of joy in my life, even more in the last year when what I thought was my life was falling apart all around me like a building imploding in a summer blockbuster.  Milo and I make each other laugh till we can’t speak, and we go on and on and on.

Is this a gendered question?  Can women in families ever detach from instrumentalism? I’m about to find out, aren’t I, as Milo chooses to spend most of his time in the only home he’s ever known, which is not where I will live.  Creating my new apartment is fun, and instrumental because a person needs tables and chairs and rugs.

I can see coming to understand this question.  The previous question that used to stump me, stop me cold, cause tears of frustration was, “What do you *want* to do?”  What I wanted to do was a good job.  What I wanted to do was please, appease, get an A, exceed the standard, be praised and therefore loved.  Wasn’t that enough?  What do you want me to do, oh questioner?  Tell me and turn me loose and we’ll both be happy.  I am better now at this question.  I know the answer more often than not, and I know when to ask it. It tugs at me when I pick up the improving book (Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach.  I don’t think I trust her after Visit From the Goon Squad.  She didn’t answer the essential question, “how did they get from A to B?” I could have forgiven her in the name of experimental fiction, but then she put it in the mouth of one of her characters, which seemed like a cruel wink.  She knew what she was doing and she knew it was mean.  I don’t like mean girls.  But Manhattan Beach is supposed to be straight up traditional narrative.  Still…. I also have Homegoing, which I really wanted to read when it first came out.  But it still seems improving-ish.  So I read the second Joe Ide IQ novel, which was less wonderful than the first.  And not very literary.  But that former professor of mine can go jump in a lake.  I read Hopscotch for his class, which was not fun at all.)  It reminds me, per Mara Glatzel (she’s quite good, and quite woo-woo), that I should eat before I unload the dishwasher, go to the bathroom before I finish the email, get some water even when I’m late to the meeting.

What will that even be like, not to pay the debt to my family in the form of laundry and dishes and housework before I leave the house to go to yoga on Sunday?

I texted this question to three beloved friends.  Two have responded and they don’t really know either.  So I’m leaning towards it being a gendered thing.

8:31

Again

9:00

Here, again.

Three times the impulse arose to write, and I pushed it down.  But I’m working on following my impulses and saying yes, rather than no, to myself.  Good Lord, saying no for so many years did not work out like I thought it would.  Renunciation didn’t lead to elevation or transcendence.  It left me vulnerable to a false god, who, I thought, said yes and yes and yes, that I could have all the things I thought were not for me.  It didn’t end well.  The yeses that mattered most were not forthcoming.

Here, again, but also somewhere entirely new.  A week from today the movers come and carry me into a new apartment.  I’m done with Daniel.  Well, no, not ever done.  As a practical matter, there are the endless details, the logistics of divorce and property division, and that will take at least a year.  And the fact of Milo means we are always joined in some way and on some occasions.  And it will take so so so long to expel him from my consciousness, to stop refracting my thoughts around his presence, to stop deferring to him.  I’m in it for the long haul.

This blog’s first name was The Rebuilding Year.  I took the term from sports: a rebuilding year was what you called a losing year with a young, inexperienced team, when you’d traded or wrecked or lost your great players.  I’m rebuilding again.  And it’s time to write it (like disaster), write my way into it and through it.  I write differently here than in my journal.  I’m curious to see what I have to say.

When I read what I wrote in May, it seems brittle and superficial.  My story-shaping was too tidy.  I worry I’ll do that again.  I want to write into my new life, and not about Daniel.  I wonder if that will be possible or interesting.  Well, many things in my life will be newly possible and immensely interesting.  That’s the point.  No one gets divorced to feel worse.

Tomorrow I will go to a museum.   Going to museums with Daniel was one of life’s great joys, but I went to museums before I met him, and I’ll keep going.  Small reclamations.  I can’t pick up where I left off, in 1994.  That was half my life ago.  But I can pick up on things, on themes, that were emerging.  And I can take what I thought he gave me and realize it was mine all along.  A flashback to a professor telling me I wasn’t very literary, for some reason.  (Meaning, the reason for the flashback eludes me.  I know why the professor said it.  He was wrong, but I know why he said it.)  I’m perfectly literary.  I am many things that people have said I am not, and vice versa.

“Blessed are you O Lord our God, King of the Universe, for you restored my soul to me in mercy.  Great is Your Faithfulness.”

I will restore myself to me in mercy.

9:22