Starting and Running Away

[This blog is actually an amalgam of, like, six different blogs that were all dead ends until I pulled everything together into this one.  So, as the Morrissey sang, stop me if you've heard this one before.]

In a conversation with some friends, you get a beautiful idea. It's like a flash of light in your brain. You're so excited that you start taking notes on napkins and scribble little chunks of thoughts everywhere. You can see the whole project, and you know you're the perfect person to do it.

The next day, you still feel pretty good about it. You get started. You know that you can do it. After a few days, you start moving into the middle. It's not as easy as you thought, and you don't know how to ask for help. Your confidence is waning. Your inner editor starts picking at you, telling you that it's not good enough and you don't know what you're doing and you never were the right person for this anyway. You may even get a whallop of, "You're not the right person for anything; who do you think you are?"

This is the tough part. You've got a choice now. This is the crossroads.

To your right, you see abandoned projects scattered on both sides of the road. The path is level, and after a while, you can coast. It doesn't take anything to walk this way, and it's familiar ground.

To your left, the road looks impassible. Steep, rocky, ankle-crunching gravel. Weeds, trees, brush blocking the way. You can't see anything but obstacles, and there's no way you'll make it past those bushes.

Easy decision, right? The clear road looks way cooler. You don't have to work for anything, you just coast along and do what you think is best ---- throw it all over your shoulder and do what you've always done:  give up. You don't even have to make an effort.

But here's the thing: You're only seeing the first hundred feet of these paths. It's just like driving at night:  you only get to see as far as your headlights can reach, but you can travel forever that way. You just have to keep going.

When I first started this blog, I knew I could do it. But I didn't know how.  I enlisted some friends to support me and help out. I posted my first post and hoped I could keep rolling under my own momentum.

Then I ran away like the blog was on fire. It could have been, and I would not have noticed. I was terrified of telling the truth and being who I am in a public forum. Every time I thought about the blog, my heart started pounding. I felt like a fraud. I knew that if I told the truth about my life, the world would explode.

You may have a different blockade. You may feel worthless. You may think that you have nothing to contribute to the world. You may not know what you want to do with your life, or you may have too many things that you want to do. But everyone, every single person, has a core challenge that they can undertake during their time here. You can avoid it your whole life if you want; that's your choice. But if you face it, you can fix it. It just takes time, and effort.

I could look back on those long dead blogs and think, wow, what a waste of time and effort and energy.  But I know now what they were:  a good testing ground so I could get my bearings, and become accustomed to the idea of having my words out in the world.  I wrote a lot of interesting things on those blogs, and focused on different subjects I enjoy.  I've combined those all together for this particular blog, and it's been a really interesting process.  Those practice runs were really helpful.  Did I know what was happening at the time?  Hell no!  Did I think leaving them alone for years at a time was going to be helpful?  No, I thought I was a loser who didn't know what the hell she was doing.  So, maybe next time I'll decide to avoid berating myself about things that I don't understand yet, and instead accept that we don't always know where projects are leading.

This post is a case in point.  It starts out about one thing and ends about another.  Ye Gods.  But I'll leave it be.  When I picture the path of abandoned projects I mentioned above, I always see a weird hill with random dead air conditioners and dishwashers sitting under trees with piles of junk everywhere.  I guess you can get a lot of good parts and build some cool stuff from dead machines.  Maybe that's what I'm doing, building some robots.  And watching bad movies.  Yeah.

In Praise of Imperfection

I'd like to take this moment to thank my imperfections for making me who I am today.  I invite you to do the same.  If you had no imperfections, would you even recognize yourself walking down the street?  If you could do everything perfectly, wouldn't you need to live in your own little bubble of fairy tale perfectionlandia?  If nothing else, the government would probably keep you in a lab studied by Doctors of Perfectness.  (And we've all seen *those* movies and Netflix series.  They never end well.  (Unless burning down a government complex and walking into Rolling Stone's office with an orange and an awesome story = a good ending.  But I digress.))

We are all imperfect.  Everyone struggles with different lessons and challenges.  

Now stop rolling your eyes; I mean it!  Even the person you've watched from afar - the one with all the qualities you admire and more grace and charisma than you can shake a stick at, that person who seems to have it all together - even they have imperfections, things that in their own mind make them completely unacceptable.  You don't see them, but they exist, bugging the heck out of that seemingly perfect person.  (I enjoyed the billboard that showed a handsome model with the caption, "Somewhere someone is tired of putting up with his crap."  Exactly!)

In school, homework was easy for me - 100% without breaking out the brain cells.  My reading level was at least six grades above my class, consistently, which kept me way ahead of everyone else.  Then I transferred to a bigger school, and suddenly it wasn't as easy.  And I had no idea how to study!  All those big britches expectations had set me up for a fall.  I could have faked my way through, but instead I started watching other kids and seeing what they did.  I intuitively knew that this wasn't something I could skip without disastrous consequences later.  If I hadn't admitted to myself that I didn't know what to do, I wouldn't have opened the door to learning how to study.  

And admitting what you don't know is so tough, yet so important.

You can act like you know everything.  You can even believe it yourself.  But sooner or later you'll need help.  And if you've been bragging to yourself about how you know everything, it's a long hard fall.  It's not the fall that kills you, either; it's the sudden stop at the end.  And if you've never been wrong in your life, that stop will blow your world apart.  

If, however, you've admitted to yourself that you don't know everything, that there are things you can learn in this life, you've taken one step.  That step will save you marathons later on, and it's worth doing just to learn how to ask for help.

A friend of mine reminded me of something important about admitting your imperfections the other day.  I was complaining about something I'm not good at.  "So you're not good at that," she said.  "So find someone who is.  Ask them for help.  Just think, if you were good at that, your future helper wouldn't be able to help you, and their life would be smaller for that missed opportunity."  

As a consummate helper, this struck home.  If I can reframe my weaknesses as "Opportunities for Elseone's Growth," then I'm helping them as much as being helped *by* them.  This gives that inner perfectionist of mine something to chew on, something that will take a long time to wear down before she starts screaming at me again.  

In some circles, that inner perfectionist is called "the gorram tapes".  We all seem to have that inner voice, the one that tells you exactly what you did wrong, and why you should have done it differently, and remembers each of your horrible nicknames in middle school.  This voice has no end.  For some, years of exposure to this voice wears them down to the smallest, saddest version of themselves.  Others learn coping techniques - disagreeing with the voice, dismissing it, or putting it on a raft in the ocean and waving politely (or with one specific finger) as it drifts away or gets swallowed by a shark.  Sometimes I stick a picture of my five-year-old pigtailed self in between me and that voice.  Then I say, "You want to yell at me?  Then you're yelling at her.  And if you yell at her, I'll take you OUT."  Shuts the voice up, every time.

As I write this, I'm struggling myself.  I cannot figure out where I thought I was going with this.  I can't see why anyone will want to read it, or why I thought my idea was any good, blah blah blah.  But I know whatever this post's imperfections, it's the first one in a series.  I will get better.  I will learn from my experiences and ask for help from others who are more skilled than I.  I will put that voice on a raft and tell it to take a hike.  I will face the challenges instead of letting them push me down.  

Maybe next time I'll play Firestarter while I write and cheer Charlie on while she burns up the bad guys.  Sweet!

Fear, a Many Splendored Thing

Let's talk about Fear. Fear is one of the toughest nuts to crack. A friend of mine is fearless. She is like a bulldozer. Piss her off and she will run you down. She does not fear much.

But what she does fear terrifies her. Scratch the surface of anyone who doesn't seem to fear anything and you will find it, somewhere in the depths, the overriding fear that eats into their soul.

When I was growing up, I was afraid a lot. I lived so closely with fear that I didn't even know it was there. I have always been a highly sensitive person (there's a website for us and everything!). I have intensive emotional radar, crowds of people overwhelm me and I even have atypical, highly sensitive pain receptors. In my younger years, I was practically a raw nerve.

So where do you think I grew up? My dad was an alcoholic with PTSD from the Vietnam war, and my mom was a narcissist concerned about making our family look "normal" at any price. It was like putting a burn victim in a dodgeball game.  Niiiiice.

Growing up, I learned to tread carefully, to hide my feelings, to present only the homogenized, prettied-up version of myself (and definitely wear lip gloss). I learned that if I wanted to earn my parents' love, I needed to be someone else. My feelings were ignored or laughed at. I had very few places I could be myself, and even then, I internalized my mom's skepticism and questioned everything I perceived. I didn't know what the truth was, and I certainly didn't know who I was. I had every reason to hide from everything.

Fear was a friend in those days. I always knew when to disappear upstairs, when to hide from the yelling, and when to bury my nose in a book. But growing up like that made me extra careful, extra hidden.

Fear serves a purpose. It helps us survive until we can be free, until we can walk away from danger on our own two feet. Fear helps us win in the end. But what happens when you're free? Do you automatically get the key to your own cage and fly away into happily ever WTF? Unfortunately, no. Our fears stay in place, even though we have moved on. It's our job to dismantle them, piece by piece.

When I moved out, I began choosing very interesting cages for myself. Everything I perceived was still filtered through my upbringing, but I slowly began to learn about who I was, what I felt, and what made me feel safe. Even my crappiest relationship taught me how to stand up for myself, how to face my fears and push through to survival, finding a sanctuary and building my nest elsewhere.

Since I started this blog, I have been facing fear after fear. There's a particular dilemma I face every day, when I'm looking at my life and what I want to accomplish. It's two swords pointing at me, and I'm right in the middle. One is Impossible Perfectionism and the other is Self-Sabotage.

When I was growing up, if I got six gold stars and one silver star, the silver star was frowned upon, discussed, lectured about. I developed serious perfectionistic issues, and still fight with every letter I type, the urge to change it before I even type it. I want to be perfect with every! keystroke!

So one of my coping mechanisms has always been self-sabotage. In sixth grade, we were assigned a 1 - 2 page report on the subject of our choice. We spent weeks learning about outlines and index cards and research and blah blah blah. I read or talked with friends during every study period. The night before the report, I read a couple of books and whipped up a one page report on the piranha, with a picture I traced from the encyclopedia. Got an A+.

All through college, I used this model. If I waited until the last possible minute to write a paper, then I would be happy with whatever I got, because of my time constraints. I couldn't be held to my impossible standard of perfection. I could be happy with any grade, because at least I turned something in.

So, either Impossible Perfectionism or Self-Sabotage. Current Day Me says no thanks. I'm using this blog for many things, but an unforeseen side effect happens to be a sidestep out of the path of the swords. Yes, I will have goals and I will achieve them, but I will not go for perfection. I will not allow my fear of not being good enough to rickroll me into not writing at all.

Pushing through these fears is a stutter step movement at best, sometimes pulling me back to where I started. But for once, it really is about the journey.  I'm learning the steps to a dance that will carry me through any struggle in life. I get to learn about what will work for me in any situation, when I decide to Stop Being Afraid, Right Now.

Fear is a gift. Fear tells you when you're getting close to solving your problems. It doesn't seem like that at the time, as your heart races and you sweat buckets and your head explodes and you cry for hours. But getting past those physical and emotional reactions to actually face and do the thing you fear will free you in a way you never knew possible.

What would it be like to walk through your fear and be free? We're all finding out, one step at a time.