What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
Wormholes in memory.
Note: I am on my emergency vacation.
This is a piece I wrote a few months ago and never did anything with. Waiting for the right window, I guess. Maybe it’s today.
Sometimes I think there are wormholes in memory.
Back doors.
The other day I had a flash of déjà vu so intense, so disorienting that it tilted everything out of balance.
And in that imperceptible moment of in-between, something began pulling out bits of memory and reassembling them into present time.
Memories from all five senses flowing seamlessly together, replicating a certain place and a certain time exactly.
The situation.
Most mundane trigger ever.
I was bringing up laundry from the basement.
My brother and my gentleman friend were brewing beer in the kitchen.
The experience.
One minute I was walking up the stairs. The next I was back — completely — at my job at the homebrew store.
Fifteen years ago? Ten years ago? I’d worked there at a couple of different points, so I couldn’t even orient myself in time. All I know is I was back.
I was back.
But I don’t mean to say that it took me back. Or that it reminded me of there.
I was there. Then. Not partly here and partly there. Not partly now and partly then.
Only there. Only then.
Falling into memory.
It’s hard to say where memory begins and ends.
Something about the sensation of coming up that dark staircase into the heady aroma of hoppy alchemy.
Something about the angle of the climb. And the strains of music from radio soft in the background.
The flickering light on the dark basement stairs. The smells of malt and grains and hops. The weight and heft of the load in my hands. The flash of unexpected sunlight as I came through the door.
Until standing in the doorway, blinking in that sunlight, I stood confused. Temporarily paralyzed. I was in my kitchen but it made no sense. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting.
Everything was the same. And everything was completely different.
And that was when I realized that I’d actually stepped back into memory. And not just back into memory but into a very specific memory.
Because what I had been expecting to find in place of the kitchen was an entirely different day.
An old, faded day that no longer exists. A pretty day. Conjured up again by a precise and accidental melding of scent, sound and sensation. Exactly that. An old, faded day.
But what does memory know, really?
It was all right there. And at the same time, it was — it is — a little hazy and more than a bit dusty.
I’m rounding the last stairs and coming through the door. And G. is there. But why? To pick me up from work?
Looking a bit bashful — but again, why? — and holding something.
And there I am too, tired and achy and happy with flecks of crystal malt dust on my face, smelling of hops. Smiling.
He has something to tell me. Or show me. I can’t remember. Music. Someone begins to speak.
And then there I was in my kitchen again. Blinking. Taken completely aback by the complete now-ness of right now.
Returning.
Here I am. And most of the time I’m pretty sure it’s where I’m supposed to be.
So I start talking myself down, into the moment that is right now. The important one.
I say, very clearly: “I want to be here now. I’m ready to be here. Now. Present time. Here. I. Am.”
[Ed. Also I might have done some hardcore wacky energy protection things because I’m that way.]
And then I begin sorting everything out, as if I were a soap opera character with a complicated case of amnesia:
“My love, this is your kitchen.
This is Hoppy House.
It’s where you live.
That man in the skull-and-crossbones apron is your gentleman friend. You love everything about him.
You do not work in a homebrew store. You run a company. Your business partner is a duck.
And G. is not here. He’s married and has a sweet little boy and you are that sweet little boy’s far-away auntie person who sends gifts.
Everything is exactly as it should be. Everything you need is inside of you. You are safe and loved and you are right here. Right now. Here. Now.”
Returning again.
I like to trust (or imagine that one day I will be able to trust) that every memory has purpose.
That it heals something. Releases something. Reminds you of some quality or experience that is important or necessary in that moment. Sometimes it even tells you what you are tripping over. Or what you used to be tripping over.
It returns you to yourself.
And at the same time, memory can take you out of yourself and away from yourself. It can lead you into walled gardens where the only thing that grows is hurt and regret.
Sometimes returning from the memory is as important as the memory.
I don’t have anything smart to add to this. I’m just thinking about memories. And about doors. And about different ways to return things.
Or to return to things.
Or to return to myself through things. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.
Working for yourself: the REAL pros and cons
Note: I’m on my emergency vacation. Hooray for emergency vacation! So anything posted this week might not make sense. There. That’s my disclaimer. Carry on.
Right. Yesterday when I was ranting incoherently making my point that one of the hidden benefits of being self-employed is that no one can force you to move to Denver, I hinted that none of the drawbacks are what you think they are either.
So today I want to talk about that. And about what actually happens when you start your own business.
Which varies, depending on how seriously you take the pamphlets of doom.
Beware the pamphlets of doom!
Doom! Doom!
I mean, they were probably written by very kind, well-meaning parental sorts of people who are just worried about you. But they kind of end up sounding like my monster.
They tell you about how hard it is to run your own business and how most of them fail and how you’re doomed (doomed!) without a certain kind of plan and blah blah etcetera.
Then when you’re a. completely panicked and b. have no money and c. are searching for help in the middle of the night, you go online and find the exact same depressing stuff about the supposed pros and cons of being self-employed.
Let’s talk about this.
The supposed cons of being self-employed.
The two biggest things everyone seems to worry about happening to you are:
1. Oh no, you don’t have anyone to make you do the work, so you’ll probably just sit around in your underwear all day, staring at the wall and picking lint from your belly button.
… and …
2. You’ll get lonely not having anyone to talk to at the water cooler. Because talking to people at a water cooler is one of the stupendous joys of being alive and is also the only thing that keeps human beings from slowly going crazy.
Let’s talk about #1: not doing any actual work ever.
Okay. I know exactly one person this has ever happened to.
And it doesn’t even count, because she was so destroyed from years in corporate hell that after she quit her job, she needed some serious “having my emotional breakdown now, if you don’t mind” time.
Every other entrepreneur I know has the exact opposite problem. We’re all insane workaholics.
Not that we don’t procrastinate or mess around online or whatever, because we do. But mostly we just. can’t. stop.
In fact, for the first few years, we don’t ever stop working because, you know, no one tells us to.
I cannot remember who said this incredibly brilliant thing, but it’s something along the lines of:
“My boss is a jerk. And crazy. And treats me bad. Yes, I’m self-employed.”
Exactly.
If the hundreds of people that I know are any indication of anything, it is far more likely that your problems will be related to over-work rather than the slackerism everyone warns you about.
Let’s talk about thing #2: isolation.
Okay, this one might be a real thing. It does happen to some people. Then they get on Twitter and everything works out just fine.
And anyway, turns out you do end up meeting plenty of people in real life.
But here’s the thing. I’ve been running my own business for nearly four years and have not once wished I had someone to talk to at a water cooler.
Hello, introvert here. Sensitive freaking flower.
For me, not seeing people and not talking to people is like, the highlight of my life.
As disastrous past experience has shown, I cannot work in an office. I would shrivel up and die for any number of reasons. But one of them would be having to be in a room with other people that I did not choose to share this space with.
Also, meetings. I do not like them. Also small talk. I do not like it.
No, isolation has not been a problem for me. And anyway, I have the blog. I have Twitter. I have a gazillion internet friends, with whom I don’t have to actually share space and energy.
And this isn’t just me. I also know plenty of especially talk-ey connect-ey extroverts, and they also seem to be doing okay. So I think we can stop worrying about this and move on to the things you really should be thinking about.
Okay, here it is. This is what sucks about working for yourself.
Well, you already know what it is. Because I told you.
No one tells you to stop.
Add to that the fact that you have the most relentless boss in the world. And that if you try to delegate and outsource, you end up spending a lot of time managing.
And that you have to learn how to do stuff you don’t like. Like the dreaded “M” word.
(Though you know what? No one tells you the good part which is that all that “marketing” stuff is just a means, not an end.)
But really the main hard is Not Stopping — especially when combined with self-doubt. And, more often than not, one fuels the other.
Your stucknesses (guilt and fear and various internal blocks and monsters) push push push you to keep working. Until you’re exhausted. And then your exhaustion feeds the stucknesses.
Lovely.
The good news. There’s good news, right?
You learn.
About three years ago my gentleman friend and I instituted a strict no-working after dinner policy. Which we have been known to break occasionally for “work emergencies”, but we’re pretty clear on what counts as an emergency and what doesn’t.
Then we started our hour of yoga before dinner thing, which makes us stop working even earlier.
We also have cleaning the house every Friday morning. And we’re getting a lot better about weekends. We’ll do some writing, but not work-work (whatever that means at the moment).
Not to say that this always works because hi, I’m on emergency vacation. But my own personal emergency right now is more about my own internal stuff in reaction to external circumstances than it is about said circumstances.
You learn — and you keep trying.
You try to be a bit more conscious and aware of taking that time to actively not-do.
You try to be a little more patient with yourself when it’s not working. And not treat yourself in a way that no one else would ever put up with.
Because if one of the great joys of self-employment is no one gets to treat you like crap and not appreciate you anymore … then it kind of sucks if you become that person who treats you like crap and doesn’t appreciate you.
You might as well be appreciated. Because the rest of us need you.
And … now I’m going to try and follow my own advice for once and take a nap.
postscript.
I just want to point out how incredibly lucky it is that there is so much more good information about self-employment available online than when I started.
Seriously, this situation has improved tremendously since I was that person freaking out in the middle of the night, thanks to genius people like Itty Biz and Sonia Simone and Chris Guillebeau who are out there making sure you get actually helpful help.
Self-employment with hummus.
Note: I am on my emergency vacation where I get to either a. fall apart completely while looking at beautiful scenery or b. not fall apart completely but still look at beautiful scenery.
So anything posted this week might not make sense. There. That’s my disclaimer. Carry on.
So you may recall that we (that’s me, my gentleman friend, my brother and my duck) are all torn up about our favorite neighbors moving to Denver.
I need to tell you why they’re leaving.
And how I took it (uh, not very well) because there’s a Useful Lesson or two in all of this about self-employment and stuff.
Okay. Here’s why they’re leaving. They’re leaving because one of them lost his job (ugh), but can keep it (yay) — kind of — if he transfers to a different position in the company. Which happens to be in Denver.
Reactions. Various.
Because I am a terrible person, my first reaction was purely selfish.
It was actually more of a stream of consciousness rant than an actual reaction, but this is more or less what the inside of my head sounded like:
“What?! You can’t move to Denver! We love you! We’ve never had neighbors we even remotely liked before this and now we have neighbors who are actual friends that we spend time with! Like, for fun!
Do you have any idea what we’ve put up with? We lived next door to a total thuggery with parole officers banging on the doors.
And the “we play mariachi music at full volume with the windows open for days on end when we aren’t even there” couple.
And what about the LA douchebags who weren’t even from LA and their late-night parties and their drumset? The DRUMSET! Noooo! Don’t goooooooo! We need you!”
But then because I am actually a lovely person, my second reaction was completely empathic and I listened to them talk about how miserable and scared they feel right now and sat with them in their misery and the scary.
Then because I don’t know anyone who has a “real” job, my third reaction was indignant. Like, they can do that to you? How? Who do they think they are?
And then because I am a business person, my fourth reaction was “Wow, when they give you those crappy lists at the SBA of the various supposed pros and cons of being an entrepreneur, they never mention this!”
When you own your own business, no one can fire you.
For me, the number one reason to be self-employed (okay, aside from all the reasons that I can’t function in an actual “job”) has always been that the whole “I can go anywhere and be anywhere” thing.
My gentleman friend and I are both self-employed. We both need nothing more than a laptop and an internet connection to earn a living. My duck doesn’t really care where we are.
So if I ever want to move back to Berlin (and I kind of do), I can. We both speak German and even though my duck hates the winter, it’s still do-able.
If I ever want to move back to Tel Aviv (and I don’t really but I think about it a lot), also not a problem. It might take a bit of convincing the gentleman friend but it’s really all about the food.
(There will be jachnun. There will be shakshuka. There will be decent hummus for goodness sake. Honestly? He doesn’t stand a chance.)
And no one can make you move.
While I was busy thinking about jachnun, the real point never occurred to me: the great thing about self-employment is that no one can make you leave.
I’d been so obsessed with the freedom of being able to pick up and go that I hadn’t even considered the freedom of being able to stay as long as you want.
And that is a big freaking deal too.
If I want to make Portland my home for good, no one can stop me.
Job security? I make my own job security.
All of my clients and students and internet-friends who have “real” jobs but hate them are always telling me about how frightened they are of giving up job security.
And yeah, I get the scary. It is scary. Absolutely. I started this thing with nothing and it was completely terrifying.
And at the same time, I don’t think it’s really about job security. I don’t think it can be about job security.
Because when I look at myself and my other friends who are self-employed, we know that we’re not giving up job security.
We’re creating it.
Security is about skills, coping abilities and your relationship with yourself.
You know what? I could lose The Fluent Self tomorrow and start a whole new thing. Not that this is a likely scenario. Obviously. Things are going great.
But if — tfu tfu tfu — something happened and it wasn’t feasible any more, my pirate ship is flexible. If the world suddenly no longer needed my tree-hugging working on your stuff work, I could regroup. I have the skills and knowledge to do that.
Plus I have a duck.
That’s why the most important things you can do — whether you’re an entrepreneur or you’re working for the man — are:
1. Learn about biggification and how it works
2. Work on destuckifying, so your stuff doesn’t get in the way.
Because then security is something that lives inside of you. It’s something you can access when you need it. You are your own anchor.
And no one can ship you off to Denver and make your neighbors cry.
This post reminded me how ridiculously wrong everyone at the Small Business Association was about what the “pros and cons” of working for yourself are. Let’s talk about that tomorrow because I have opinions!
Friday Check-in #43: “Off to points either north or south” edition
Because it’s Friday AGAIN. And because traditions are important. In which I cover the good stuff and the hard stuff in my week, trying for the non-preachy, non-annoying side of self-reflection.
And you get to join in if you feel like it.
Gah.
This week was considerably less like dirt than last week.
But man, I have the tired.
Transitions. And so on. Let’s do the week.
The hard stuff
Those damn dogs.
Between the little yappy one that belongs to neighbor #1 and the giant bark-ey one that belongs to neighbor #2, I’m about to lose my …. temper? Mind? Patience?
Choose one and let me know.
Noise-sensitive + barking + HSP = headaches, nightmarish bad moods and complete inability to think.
I adore dogs. I really, really do. But I can’t take it.
Really anti-social.
Not that I’m ever “social”, per se.
(Oh, understatement. It is the highest form of humor. You can read my post on networking to find out just how badly I need to avoid my fellow human beings).
But this week I just couldn’t even fake it. I avoided my friends. And when I saw them, I wasn’t exactly a joy to be around.
Just really needing a lot of isolation at the moment. More, please.
I am completely and utterly exhausted.
Remember when I said — kind of half-jokingly but not really — that I thought I had vacation deficit?
Well, it’s caught up with me.
Because this week I finally got to the point where I was just not having fun anymore. The point where I had to stop and say okay sweetie, take the mental health week before it takes you.
The point where I could see myself getting wiped out with burnout flu.
The point where if one more person asked me a question, I was going to run away.
The point where … aargh. Okay.
I sat down with my assistant and my calendar, and — with increasing despair on my part, we tried to figure out what would need to happen for me to take a week off. And the earliest we could fit in an entire week was January.
Or right now. Like, tomorrow. Actually, it was not at all easy to cram into the schedule, but it was a choice between make-it-almost-work now or nothing.
Hahahahahahahaha.
I guess that’s as good a segue as anything into the good stuff. Shall we?
The good stuff
I have the best people working for me ever.
So my assistant (you know, the watchstander/bosun) decided to put me on emergency vacation.
She actually put “go on emergency vacation!” at the very top of my to-do list.
And then did all the necessary research and whatnot. And found a quiet place to send me and my gentleman friend away to so that I can at least fall apart somewhere pretty and pastoral.
Apparently I’m not allowed to do anything but rest and read. I bargained with her to be able to still write posts (because that’s my therapy) but the rest is mostly off limits.
Good foods and lovely people.
We went to the Farmers Market (hooray) and ran into Dana and Sarah.
We had dinner with Chris which was absolutely lovely. And his wife made an entire — and completely delicious — sugar-free meal just for me.
My gentleman friend made homemade pasta. And homemade pesto! With hazelnuts! Have I mentioned that I love him?
And Ez made pupusas.
It was the week of yum.
And … STUISMS of the week.
Stu is my paranoid McCarthy-ist voice-to-text software who delights in torturing me misunderstanding me. I can’t stand him.
The gems from this week, including Stu’s acetyl Freudian slips.
Oh, and this week? Instead of “acetyl”, he said asphalt. Even better.
- “tinnitus is to vault” instead of tonight is Shavuot
- “expenses” instead of blintzes
- “wiki guide on that” instead of we geek out on that
- “mayday I would have given it the Czech’s box” instead of maybe I would have given it the chance
- “boner ability” instead of vulnerability
- “making stuff hatpin” instead of making stuff happen
- “who Ray” instead of hooray
- “allied defense” instead of live events
- “creative fizzing” instead of creativity thing
- “you don’t have to be a good idiom” instead of you don’t have to be good at it
- “asian number fun” instead of observation number one
- “I said to my theory-loving gentleman friends” instead of I said to my dear loving gentleman friend
(Love the plural, Stu. Gentleman friends. What are you trying to say? Because really, you could just come out and say it.)
And, my absolute favorite if such a thing is even possible:
- “having a mosque aim wind sheer year and not people get out is quite a plus” instead of having a moth fly into your ear and not be able to get out is quite unpleasant.
Also: His second guess for moth was Hamas and his third guess was en masse. I’m starting to think that Stu doesn’t just hate commies. I think he hates everyone.
That’s it for me …
And yes yes yes, of course you can join in my Friday ritual right here in the comments bit if you feel like it.
Yeah? Anything hard and/or good happen in your week?
And, as always, have a glorrrrrrrrrrrrious weekend. And a happy week to come.
Cheese. Communication. Stars. More Cheese.
So I was going to write something to answer all the people who wonder out loud (well, in email form, mostly) why it is that I require all clients and Kitchen Table-ers to read
Nonviolent Communication.
And to sleep with it under their pillows own their own copy.
But I wasn’t planning on writing about it just yet.
Until I realized that tonight is Shavuot. And this is exactly the right time.
It’s all about the Moment. And the cheesecake.
Shavuot is a big deal for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it’s the cheesecake holiday.*
* And even if you are me and you don’t eat cake, it’s still the yogurt and cottage cheese and blintzes holiday. Yum.
Also, there is the Tikkun Leil Shavuot which involves studying all night — and having deep, complicated discussions until the sun comes up. We kind of geek out on that stuff.
And then — I mean, really, as if cheese + nerdy scholarly fabulousness were not enough — there is a Moment.
Well, there is a tradition that there is a moment. And that’s enough for me. According to tradition, at midnight on the eve of Shavuot, the skies open. Just for this moment. And you are right there.
And it is because of this Moment that I make everyone I know read this (decidedly non-religious) text.
Midnight was approaching.
I was in a park in Berlin. The late night study group at the synagogue had been decidedly uninspired and we had run away.
Jonathan was a friend of a friend. Visiting from Canada. Armed with books. We studied and talked and debated until six in the morning.
Moving from café to café as closing time approached. (Yes, it was a somewhat secular interpretation of the holiday, but our intentions were pure).
But for midnight — for the Moment — we had to be right there. Under the stars.
And what I got from that Moment was the knowledge that all the tools I needed to heal myself and my stucknesses were coming to me.
That it was time to be more watchful because maybe I was already tripping over them.
And then I received the tool I needed the most.
As we walked and walked down Prenzlauer Allee in search of the next café, we talked about books. The kind that change lives.
And he made me promise to track down Nonviolent Communication.
He described how he and his Belgian girlfriend use the method not just as a practice but as a matter of course. How when a misunderstanding or an argument breaks out, they turn to the method and it brings them back to each other.
I promised.
And I kept my promise.
And then I resisted the tool I needed the most.
I cannot even tell you how much I would have despised this book had I been introduced to it in any other way.
Luckily, I’d already been warned about the awful, awful poetry.
Yes, it is the dairy holiday, but that doesn’t mean I like cheese in my books. Seriously. If Jonathan had not guaranteed that this book would change my life, I probably would’ve tossed it out the window.
Also, it had something that suspiciously looked like “I feel” sentences. I hate that stuff.
Feelings? FEELINGS? It reminded me of that unpleasant (and extremely unsuccessful) couples therapy session with my husband in Israel.
Pompous old manTherapist: Let’s diagram some sentences!Me (in my head): My husband cries himself to sleep every night and you want me to diagram sentences?
He gets up in the middle of the night and goes to his mother’s. What sentences? He blames me for his depression and every day he gets more controlling about what I’m allowed to say and do so that he won’t get more depressed, but you know what’s really important?
Sentences. What’s wrong with you?!
It doesn’t matter that I was wrong.
So of course now I realize that yes, our communication was shot to hell, and that learning how to speak compassionately could have helped us.
But because the person trying to teach the whole compassion thing wasn’t practicing it on us in that moment, we weren’t able to get it.
It wasn’t the right time. It wasn’t the right approach. Not the right doorway.
What I wanted for my husband was for him to receive from therapy what I had: the ability to take personal responsibility for stuff in your life not being exactly the way you want it to be.
What my husband wanted for me was for me to be an entirely different person.
The message that “communication could help us get along” was irrelevant. Now, if I could have understood that communication would help me to finally feel heard and acknowledged and safe, maybe I would have given it a chance. Maybe.
Anyway, I read the book. And it did change my life.
It cleared up the smog.
NVC got me through the trials and tribulations of living with an obsessive-compulsive drag king diva performance artist who hated me (no, not my husband — this was a roommate. I know).
It made everything better. More bearable, somehow. And it helped me get better at communicating with myself. I’d never be able to talk to walls or negotiate with monsters without it.
When I met my gentleman friend, and it seemed like he might end up being my gentleman friend, I tried to scare him off.
I told him that the only way I would be willing to consider getting involved was if he agreed to practice NVC with me.
The next thing I knew, he was immersed in the book.
When one of us is feeling tense, the other one pulls us back to the practice. No matter how upset I am, NVC helps me realize that what’s actually going on.
That his hurt and worried stuff has set off my hurt and worried stuff. And it brings us back to each other.
It brings us back to ourselves.
Consider yourself warned.
It has unbelievably cheesy poetry that will hurt your brain to read. Skip those parts.
You’ll start to wish everyone you knew had access to these tools.
You’ll be kinder to yourself. You’ll be more patient with others. You’ll find yourself drawn to a more mindful way of doing things, but not out of obligation or responsibility or anything.
More because it’s just a natural extension of what you’re doing already.
If you use Nonviolent Communication to change your language (and Dance of Shiva to change your brain), leading a grounded, intentional, relatively happy life gets way, way easier. I truly believe that. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times.
Anyway, that’s the long story version of why I have crazy prerequisites for working with me and taking my courses.
It’s not because I’m mean. It’s because my sincere wish for you is for you to be able to feel heard, acknowledged and safe whenever you need to. For you to have that kind of connection with yourself and the world around you.
And because sometimes a little cheese is appropriate. And because I want you to have a Moment under the stars too.