Checking in (Part 2)

 Here's the problem with the checking in exercise: 

I don't even have to do anything about what I learn when I check in. I don't have to change or fix anything. There's a good chance there's not even anything to fix. I can just be feeling what I'm feeling.

I wrote that last week like it's a good thing(?), and today it doesn't feel good at all. Because I woke up, took a couple of deep breaths, and started crying. Today, I'm feeling many of the feelings in a much feel-ier way than is comfortable for me. 

In the famous words of Chris Evans's nephew, "I don't wike it..." [Scroll down for video.]

I learned at a very young age not to let the sun go down on my anger. Moreover, I learned that even feeling angry--or sad, or fearful, or disgusted, or generally bad--wasn't good. Which is really weird because I learned this as part of a Christian tradition, and Jesus himself exhibits all the above-mentioned "negative" emotions in the Gospels. I guess the religion of my childhood took from the sacred texts of Star Wars as much the sacred texts of our faith.

I was also taught that the secret to true J.O.Y. was putting Jesus first, then Others, and then Yourself. Yourself always came last. (Seriously, I made a J.O.Y. wall hanging at camp one summer that stayed on the wall of my room until I graduated high school.) And as a good girl / oldest daughter / evangelical / people-pleaser / Honors student / well-raised Southerner / Enneagram 3, I knew I always had to be joyful--or at least keep up the appearance of being joyful--so that no one could ever accuse me of not putting Jesus first.*

Ummm... Did you know there were
this many feelings? Because I didn't.

This means I allowed myself only two of the seven colors on the feelings wheel--happy (orange) and surprised (green). Actually, it's more like 1 ½ if you don't think you should acknowledge the confused, disillusioned, and dismayed side of green, which I didn't. If anything from the wrong 5 ½ colors started to creep into my mind, heart, or gut, I denied it. Just stuffed those suckers way on down, and instead busied myself with deeds, actions, and achievements that could prove how good I was, how strong, and how on the right side of right. 

I leaned hard on the busy-ness--my crutch to help distract from (at best) and suppress (at worst) the feelings I didn't want because I didn't think I should have them. And that busy-ness, that productivity, eventually came to define me and my sense of worth.

This may have something to do with why I bawled my eyes out watching Inside Out 2. (Five stars highly recommend)

So, yeah, even after a lot of unlearning (and a lot of meditating on what it means to "Be still"), I'm still more comfortable doing rather than feeling. I like keeping my brain occupied with others' voices so that there's less obligation (or even opportunity) to listen to my own. Which is why the checking in exercise is sometimes problematic and always necessary. The urgency of the assignment lies in the fact that, after five decades of this kind of behavior, my crutches just aren't doing it for me anymore. I think I've leaned on them so heavily that they are starting to break.

I will admit to being lucky in that my crutches are socially acceptable and don't get me labeled as having a problem, even though I use them in the same way that any "functioning" addict uses their crutches of choice:

• work
• travel and travel planning**
• my daily regimen of online NYT games (Wordle, Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, Crossword--in that order every day except for Sundays when I do the Crossword first, on paper, and in ink) 
• audiobooks and podcasts
• self-help books about how to be better at feeling my feelings
• Instagram, including feeds about how to be better at feeling my feelings
• Netflix, Hulu, PrimeVideo, Max, AppleTV+, Disney+, and "Friends" re-runs on Nick@Night

And sometimes, for good measure, 1-2 glasses of wine "to unwind" [nay! to numb!] at the end of the day.

The goal in acknowledging these choices is to move toward [oops! almost wrote "to achieve"!] emotional sobriety--to learn to live with, regulate, and free myself from the least comfy feelings, not just today but over the long haul, without misusing these or more damaging crutches.

So here I am, audiobook paused, checking in instead of scrolling Instagram, still sniffling and super squeamish about how I feel. Per the wheel, I'm a little in the blues, a little in the pinks, a little in the purples, and definitely on the wrong side of the greens. [Cue Kermit.]

I will admit, however, that a couple of other things are happening. First, as I name the feelings, I find a couple of oranges mixed in with the other colors. Alongside my feelings of isolation from living in a city where I don't know a lot of people lives thankfulness and love for the five friends who will shortly be traveling here to spend a weekend with me. Alongside worry about the Thespian finding his way in college lives a sense of awe that he's attending his dream school. 

Second, I am giving myself tacit permission to have these feelings, which is the key to taking from them what I need and letting the rest go. [Cue Elsa.]

Maybe Yoda was right all along, as long as we read him through more of a Buddhist and less of a Southern Baptist lens. It's not the having but the holding onto that puts us on the path to the dark side. We cannot banish emotions without first being conscious of them, and that requires a calm mind.

To that I'll add my own: Being busy will only block things out for so long. And sometimes there has to be crying in baseball.***

“Remember, Sadness, wherever I go, you go too.” -Joy

*At this point, I would like to apologize to everyone in my world to whom I proselytized positivity. You never asked for Pollyanna as a friend or family member, and I'm sorry I showed up as her. If you want to give me a chance to show up better and are going through something hard, I promise to shut up and sit with you in it while you share. No matter what you are feeling.

**Note that when travel includes visits to or time with friends--especially the truth-telling types of friends mentioned in Checking in (Part 1)--then there may be a chance of some de-stuffing of the feelings. For example, last year I spent a weekend in the mountains of Colorado with Margaret (she of the "sweet pea" in my previous post) and Heather. It was two weeks before my birthday, and they surprised me by baking cupcakes. When they pulled them out of the oven and started to sing, I promptly burst into unstoppable tears. Not because I was sad about the birthday but because I was overwhelmed with gratitude for these women who have supported me along the roughest parts of my road. Apparently that kind of crying is a good thing(?). Yet another reason why I love my realest friends.

***If you don't know this about me yet, I love movie references and have no qualms about mixing and matching them.

Checking in

 I love catching up with Justine.

It doesn't happen that often--not nearly often enough--as she lives in Brooklyn and works in finance for an international arts organization, and I live in St. Louis and work in communications for an international professional services organization. We both have two children in varying stages of late teenagerdom / early adulthood, dogs, husbands who were also college classmates, siblings, nieces, and mostly non-overlapping friend groups. But when we do have an opportunity to talk, I relish every minute. 

The first funny hat that
I ever saw Justine wear

Justine and I have known each other since we were 18 and assigned to live together in a first-year quad at our alma mater. We found out after moving in that, by square footage, ours was the smallest quad in our residential college. She was a polyglot from Toronto with one of the best senses of humor I had ever encountered. I was a debutante from South Carolina with evangelical tendencies. She befriended me anyway. We bonded over Strange Brew and convinced a classmate from Dallas that she had gone to high school every day on a dog sled, which was difficult because dogs are color blind and could not tell whether the traffic lights were red or green. She taught me about the Barenaked Ladies, and I taught her about grits. Her first experience tasting them went something like this:

"It doesn't really taste like anything."
"Crumble some bacon in it and try again."
"Oh, OK. Now it tastes like... bacon."

I think it's her honesty that I appreciate the most. 

Justine knew me before I learned I could give myself permission to be someone other than who I was taught to be my parents, teachers, church, geography, and gender norms. More than thirty years later, while my sense of self has changed, my appreciation for our friendship has not. This morning she called to chat about some volunteer work for our upcoming college reunion. The obligatory part of the conversation took about 10 minutes, and then we stayed on the phone for another 45, during which we both began multiple sentences with phrases like "I wouldn't tell a lot of people this..." and "Just between you and me..." She is a person I trust completely with the whole truth of me. Or at least as much of it as I know thus far.

Now when we get together,
we wear lots of orange
and new funny hats

I have been fortunate in my life to have several friends, like Justine, to whom I can turn when I need to exhale, lower all my defenses, or not put on any kind of show. These friendships are sealed in moments of authenticity. We've let each other vent, cry, and ask taboo questions. We've sat in silence and doubled over in laughter. We've held each others' hair and rubbed each others' backs--both when drunk and when painfully sober. We've watched relationships come and go. We've moved around the country and around the world. We've struggled through kids, from non-sleeping, puking infants to non-sleeping, puking young adults. We've burned brightly and burned out. 

Thanks to these friends, I have found relief from always feeling like I have to keep up appearances, read the room, meet or exceed others' expectations, and derive my sense of worth from (a very American, capitalist understanding of) productivity and achievement. While I feel obligated to show much of the world how many items I can check off my to-do list, these friends show incredible patience, support, and love as I continue to figure out what's on my to-be list.

I recently started a practice, recommended by my therapist, of trying to check in with myself in the same way that I would check in with my friends or they would check in with me. This means that at certain moments during the day--yes, I set an alarm--I pause, take a few deep breaths, and ask, "How are you feeling?" Feeling, in this sense, could mean physical (shallow breathing, tight shoulders, butterflies) or emotional (nervous, tired, content). My friend Margaret even encouraged me to take it a step further by putting a hand over my heart and adding a term of endearment: "How are you feeling today, sweet pea?"

The goal is to get into the habit of actually noticing and acknowledging when there is a change in how I am feeling without the alarm. I guess this is why they call it a practice. 

Checking in is not a new, difficult, or even particularly deep idea, but it is radical for someone like me who prefers to stay busy, let her thoughts dominate her choices, and--to co-opt a phrase from another southern debutante--feel about that tomorrow. And here's the kicker... I don't even have to do anything about what I learn when I check in. I don't have to change or fix anything. There's a good chance there's not even anything to fix. I can just be feeling what I'm feeling. It's a moment to discern what I'm tasting and accept it--the bare naked, inside out, true grits of me. No bacon required.

Inertia

 I have a complicated relationship with St. Louis.

The city is nice enough. A great parks system. Museums. A top tier university. Decent food. A better-than-expected performing arts scene. Fun sports and faithful fans. Oddly loyal high school graduates. 

And an enormous inferiority complex. Which is weird since people from here who leave always seem to want to move back. I have now lived here for four years, and every time I tell someone we moved from Denver, the response is exactly the same.

"Why?"

C'mon, St. Louisans. Don't you know I need you to affirm my life choices?

I will say that my son's academic and extra-curricular experiences in our St. Louis County school district were probably better than they would have been at his Denver school. The parents and teachers here were warm and welcoming, and we'll forever be a grateful Greyhound family for the way our local high school helped guide his class through the later months of the COVID-19 pandemic in a safe, emotionally supportive, and college preparatory way. (See? Oddly loyal high school graduates. Very St. Louisan.)

And still... I cannot help but notice the number of families who choose private school (Jon Hamm's and others') over public. And the stark, disturbing difference in resources between St. Louis City and St. Louis County public school. Not to mention the philosophical and political variance among the 23 County school districts when it comes to things like masking, book bans, and bathrooms. Ideas about what it means to keep children safe change as you move further away from the city limits.

There's a lot of complexity and violence in St. Louis's racial, economic, and cultural history that endures and impacts the city as it exists today. I wish I could say that since arriving here I've worked hard to make a positive difference in my community, but the fact is that my contributions have been minimal: a STL (Save Trans Lives) yard sign, donations to local organizations that help immigrant families transition or help women upskill and find employment, and several strongly worded emails to Jay Ashcroft and Josh Hawley in defense of public libraries, LGBTQ+ healthcare, and women's bodily autonomy.

Unfortunately, since arriving here in August 2020, I've mostly found myself succumbing to the law of inertia.

If I can get my body into motion, it tends to stay in motion. Last fall, I celebrated a somewhat significant birthday by traveling all over the country with / to see friends and family. I was away from St. Louis for 11 out of 14 weekends between mid-August and Thanksgiving, and the 3 weekends I spent in town were taken up by a local music festival, hosting out-of-town friends, and suffering through my first Covid diagnosis. When I'm not in St. Louis, I find myself energized, engaged, and fully enjoying life's busy-ness.

When I'm home, I often find myself exhausted, enervated, and uninterested in much beyond work, family, dog, and Netflix. There are days when I wake up in St. Louis and find it hard to get out of bed. 

This happened today. After weeks of continuous travel to move both kids onto their respective out-of-state college campuses and then grab some beach time over Labor Day, I slept in my bed in St. Louis for the first time in nearly a month. And when my alarm went off at 6am, as it always does, I made the decision (and I do recognize that it was a decision, albeit a passive one) to stay in bed. I forwent any chance of a morning walk, a shower, starting my suitcase laundry, or reviewing work emails to help set the day's priorities. Instead, I chose multiple snooze buttons and scrolling Instagram for longer than I care to admit.

It's hard to say whether my location is giving causation or correlation.

#thebestpartofwakingup

Maybe it's not St. Louis per se. It could just as easily be part of my post-Covid reality, perimenopause, or the culmination of two decades of really intense parenting. It could be that I, as a body, am so desperate for rest that I tend to remain at rest until acted on by an outside force... like the dog needing breakfast, being 5 minutes out from my first Zoom of the day, or my saintly husband making coffee and delivering a mugful into my hands. I will go vertical for coffee.

My dream is to be compelled to change my state by the action of an internal force, to be motivated by what I want for me and who I want to be in my community.

I just need to stop / start moving enough to figure out what (and where) that is.

On the third day, it got unapologetically political

 It happened again.

Yesterday, a 14-year-old boy with an AR-15-style rifle opened fire inside Apalachee High School in Winder, GA, north of Atlanta. He killed two students, Mason Schererhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie. 

Mason Schererhorn's parents will never get this text from their son:

The Washington Post reports that more than 382,000 students have been impacted by gun violence at school since Columbine. 

25 years

416 shootings

382,000 kids

The youngest of those kids -- the Sandy Hook survivors -- saw the deadliest of school shootings in 2012. The shooter was in their first grade classroom. This year they graduated high school.

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Twenty children from Sandy Hook didn't live to finish high school. Neither did Mason Schererhorn and Christian Angulo. Nor any of the children who lost their lives due to gun violence between 1999 and today. They will never do what my son and his classmates did yesterday and stroll a college club fair during the second week of classes, signing up for activities and organizations that will help them create fun memories and meaningful experiences, like visiting elementary schools to teach and tutor kids. 

Elementary schools that could be the site of a future shooting. Just like his college campus could be. Just like my daughter's college campus could be. Just like an elementary school five miles from my daughter's campus was less than 18 months ago.

WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. F*<%?

I have a lot of thoughts and very few coherent words. What on earth can I write that hasn't already been said or written? How can any of us justify not working for -- not screaming and shouting and busting our asses and donating and voting for -- evidence-based solutions to gun violence that will save lives?

• Background checks on on all firearms sales and mandatory waiting periods -- Those tin cans you claim to have fun shooting in your backyard will still be there in 48-72 hours
• Laws that ban guns from schools, campuses, and other sensitive areas; permits and strong standards for carrying concealed weapons in public; mandatory owner education and secure storage -- I'm a First Amendment absolutist, and even I believe in content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. Get on board, Second Amendment disciples
• Gun dealer reform, no immunity for gun manufacturers, broad gun trace data requirements and accessibility, silencer regulation, and prohibitions on automatic weapons/bump stocks/rapid-fire devices/high capacity magazines/downloadable guns -- Big tobacco. Purdue Pharma. Asbestos. Silicone implants. GM's exploding gas tanks. Manufacturers, distributors, and dealers with irresponsible, negligent, and most of all reckless practices should be held accountable

Some people call this common-sense gun control. I'm not convinced Americans have much in common in the way we sense these tragedies.

Some people say that guns don't kill people -- people kill people. Yes. But the person holding the gun and pulling the trigger is the LAST in a long line of those who bear responsiblity. I cannot claim to understand what could possibly motivate the shooter. I fully understand what motivates the rest. Greed. Power. Belief in their own superiority. An uncanny ability to value their own comfort, pride, and satisfaction over the lives and safety of others.

That's pretty much all I have this morning. Grief. Tears. Anger. And, for now, my children.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE ACTION OR DONATE TO EVERYTOWN FOR GUN SAFETY / MOMS DEMAND ACTION

Let's talk about SLEEP, baby

 The Good Place. Euphoria. We Were the Lucky Ones. The Bear. 

If we were playing NYT Connections, you might click on these four tiles and assume the thread binding them together is "Titles of TV Shows." In the game of my life -- and I know I'm not alone in this -- these words and phrases mean something completely different:

Bed. Sleep. Life before perimenopause. Me in the mornings before coffee.

It used to drive Nick crazy that my head could hit the pillow and within minutes I'd be out. It used to terrify me when our children were small and cribbed that I would sleep through a call in the night or, worse yet, the house catching on fire. Although I never lost sleep over it.

I will often still fall asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow -- after I've taken 480mg of magnesium, 100mg of progesterone, 60mg of Qulipta, 365mg of Omega 7s, and two Gaia "Sleep Thru" capsules, finished all my daily NYT games (IYKYK), taken off my glasses, put one over-ear Beat earphone in my non-sleeping-side left ear, turned off the lamp, lay on my back and breathed through a Headspace Sleepcast, then turned onto my right side with a podcast on 30-minute "sleep." After that, I'm usually out for at least a couple of hours.

Until my bladder, my sweat glands, or my brain decides otherwise.

@momsbehavingbadly

None of this is unique to me. Women have written about it, memed about it, blogged about it, cried about it... But something happened this morning that was slightly different.

When I woke up, the clock didn't start with a 1, 2, 3, or 4.

The clock showed 5:59. 5:59!

And I wasn't thinking about all the work I didn't get done yesterday, or the really hard conversation I need to have with my parents this afternoon, or the fact that they are going to leave me with four storage units full of antiques they cannot bear to part with and WHAT. THE. F*<% am I going to do with those?, or whether my son received the package that was supposed to have been delivered yesterday, or even knows how to get packages delivered to the mail room at his college, or what time I need to leave on Friday to arrive at my daughter's campus for the Family Weekend events, or whether I need to do laundry between now and then, or where is my rain slicker in case it pours on us at the football game like it did two years ago, or whether the boundaries I've set in my life are appropriate or selfish, or why I was raised to think that doing anything to protect myself actually is selfish, or about the time I told Beth T. in 8th grade that I didn't want to be her friend anymore and then saw her 20 years later at the Soda Shoppe and still didn't have the guts to apologize in person... 

I am so sorry, Beth. You were absolutely right -- you had done nothing but try to be my friend, and it was a really bitchy thing to say.

Nope, I wasn't thinking about any of that. Instead I was thinking about coming back to this very page to write something. And because being here was the only thing I did differently last night -- that, and watch the first two episodes of FX's "English Teacher" (So far, no notes. Highly recommend.) -- I'm assuming that correlation = causation and that writing this stupid blog is good for my stupid mental health.

Because instead of lying in bed angry about not sleeping (or the myriad other things in the world that really get my blood boiling), I got up, took 2 multivitamins and a probiotic, 300mg of Wellbutrin, 100mg of CoQ10, and 15mg of L-Methylfolate, made coffee, and... well... the rest, as they say, is (browser) history.

Screw you, Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Do you have to be right all the damn time? Just kidding. I love you both so much. Don't ever stop writing or researching or singing.