Apologies and Alaska

Jack came over the other night for dinner as we were expecting the Boy to call. (He didn't.) When Jack arrived, he was a little chastened.

"I just heard an interview with Eve Ensler on NPR about apologies on the way over," he said. Finally, NPR is back to regular programming instead of constant chatter and dread about nightmare politics and the pandemic. Jack would often arrive for our phone calls with the Boy super anxious and/or pissed because he was listened to NPR on the drive to the condo. I recommended to Jack that he get his news from Trevor Noah. It is the same bad news but at least it is funny. 

I digress.

"She explained that since the #metoo movement, none of the men accused of bad behavior has offered a sincere, legitimate apology," he said. (I'm like "Duh.") "I finally see what you mean when you say that I've haven't truly apologized for my bad behavior."

Right. We then watched Eve's Ted talk on apologies. Ironically, this was presented at a Ted conference for women when her speech addresses men, but whatever. The point is that there are four parts to an apology.

1. Specifically say what you did. None of the "mistakes were made" bullshit.
2. Offer an explanation of why you behaved this way. This is not to be confused with making excuses.
3. Have empathy for how the other person felt about your behavior. Understand their pain.
4. Make amends. Change your behavior. Don't do it again.

Is it just Americans--specifically American men--that do not know how to apologize? I have a friend from India who once explained to me that apologies are not hard: Admit what you did, say you are sorry, don't do it again. Apologies are easy to explain, harder to do. Maybe this is a cultural blindspot Americans have. My friend Anderson is from India and he gave me the best apology I've ever gotten in my whole life. He cut me off in a meeting and the next day apologized because he wanted to clear the air. The best thing about this whole apology was that I didn't register that he had cut me off. I didn't bother me at the time, but it had bothered him. He explained what he did (cut me off) and why he did it (he feared I was going to go rogue in the meeting), and then we discussed why. It was great.

Why apologize? Several reasons. It clears the air. It keeps emotional space between two people clean and tidy. Apologies prevent piles of shit from building up. It makes apologizee feel safe and heard, and the apologizer gets a clear conscience, which is freeing.

I am going to limit my expectations on this apology as an apology that deep and profound won't be easy. Twelve Step program are big on making amends, but there is a lot of introspection done first. 

In other news, my blog post yesterday inspired me to think about my own future. I've decided when the pandemic is over, I am going to Alaska.

By myself.

This is a big deal. I've never been to Alaska and I am terrified of bears. Terrified. Alaska is full of bears. It probably has more bears than people. (I have no idea. I made that up.) I hate the bear exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo because it looks like the bears could crawl over the wall. Jack and I went camping in the Smoky Mountains years ago and I freaked out because the campground doubled as a bear habitat. We ditched the tent and stayed in a motel because I couldn't sleep knowing bears were around, tramping around at night trying to steal my food.

Maybe I'll quit my job and move to Alaska and open a muffin and scone shop. Who knows? Maybe my life will turn into one of those crazy Netflix romance/melodrama like Virgin River (which I have not seen but saw the trailer) about bucolic life in a small mountain town. Here is what my life could be like: "Woman leaves her tech job and big city doctor husband behind as she seeks to find herself in the Last Frontier. The handsome bush pilot drops her in Alakanuk, a town of 677 people on the Yukon River. There she meets a kind and sensitive recovering Wall Street banker who is specializing in making artisanal moose jerky. When she discovers his stash of MAGA hats and his Sarah Palin fetish, she hightails is back to her progressive enclave in Seattle where she becomes a vegan."

Maybe I should focus on site-seeing and my inner journey instead of imagining my life as a Netflix series. I need to do some research. Maybe I can go in the spring and see the Northern Lights. Maybe I can go in the summer and see the Midnight Sun. Maybe I could go salmon fishing on a river with guide who can scare away the bears.

In the meantime, I can ask my friend Cara if I can borrow her cabin on the Olympic Peninsula for a weekend. That could work, too.

Puzzles & Pandemic Paralysis

As you know, I have a thing for jigsaw puzzles. I love them to the point that I am almost addicted. I don't know why always need a puzzle in progress on my coffee table. I find it troubling. This weekend, I started a puzzle on Wednesday afternoon when I wasn't feeling well. I finished it Friday. I crushed it. It was nuts that I could do a puzzle that hard in that short of time. I am spending way too much time doing puzzles to be that good at them. 

One of my new puzzles from Kickstarter came with a sticker:

This is the last thing I need--an equivalent to a gold star for doing puzzles.

Why I am so troubled by my fantastic puzzling abilities? I wonder what else could I be doing with my precious life/time besides re-arranging little pieces of cardboard or wood to make a picture? I could be reading or exercising or making something cool. I could be practicing piano. Running errands. 

I ask myself what else I would want to do instead of puzzles, not just what could I do. 

• I want to walk around Green Lake with friends.
• I want to bike to Ballard for lunch and then shop. 
• I want to visit my dad in Ohio. 
• I had wanted to spend the week in Montana hanging out with the Boy.
• I want to travel, far or near. I don't care.
• I would want to take a week off to help the Boy look at colleges. 
• I want to go to the gym and get some exercise. 
• I want to go dancing, then sleep in. 
• I want to go to brunch. 
• I want to have a party.
• I want to go to a party.

All of this is part of the pandemic, and I am so tired of it. The easiest thing to do is to slide into a jigsaw puzzle to pass the time when I am not working, cooking, balancing the checkbook or doing laundry.

Jack and I were talking this weekend about the uncertainty of the future. He is thinking about his future a lot and is anxious because he doesn't know what it holds. I, on the other hand, can't even imagine my future.

Why?

Is that normal? With the Boy in treatment, I have been learning about mindfulness and how to live in the moment. Does that mean I don't look to my future?

I wonder if I am having pandemic paralysis, where I am having a hard time imagining my true and beautiful future because I am stuck alone. Maybe I am having a hard time seeing my future because I don't know what the rest of the world will look like in the spring.

Instead, I can think about myself and my own inner growth, but this is challenging to do day in and day out. I need a break, and puzzles give me that time to rest. Maybe puzzles are giving me a chance to hibernate.

Nevertheless, I need something to look forward to. I am going to buy myself a poster of all of the National Parks. My goal to visit all of them in the next five years, pandemic pending.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Quarantine and Fire

I used to love jigsaw puzzles. I found them relaxing and enjoyable. Now, a majority of my spare time is spent doing jigsaw puzzles. Like, all of the time. I always have a jigsaw puzzle on my coffee table. I pick at it when I am talking on the phone or before I go to bed. I could call it mediative, but it doesn't full qualify for mediation. Mediation fully qualifies for mediation.

I love pizza, but if that was all I ever ate, I'd go crazy. Likewise, jigsaw puzzles. Yet, I can't stop doing jigsaw puzzles. As soon as I finish one, I dig up another box and I start working again. I have about a dozen Liberty jigsaw puzzles and I've done each of them twice since March.

Jigsaw puzzles are a fun way to pass time, but at the end of the day, all I've done is completed a jigsaw puzzle that goes back in the box. I haven't created anything new. I've solved a puzzle someone else created for me to solve, and that was it. Not that everything I do has to be productive, but damn I've spent at least a month of time since the pandemic doing jigsaw puzzles. At some point, it becomes hell.

Almost everyone I know is finding the quarantine for the pandemic tedious. Why are we finding it tedious? Who are these magical unicorns who are not finding it tedious? What is the secret to enjoying the quarantine, thriving in it?

It is embracing the boredom? Will the boredom and isolation push us to find new things to do, to test and experiment with our imaginations?

Who isn't bored?

Pandemic Response Teams

• Covid-testing firefighters who spend their days poking sticks up people's noses until they cry. (The people with the stick up their nose cry, not the firefighters.)
• Scientists working on vaccines
• Health care workers
• Logistical engineers who are figuring out how to deliver frozen vaccines across the county
• Amazon delivery people
• Undertakers

Creative People who Work Alone

• Jigsaw puzzle designers
• Novelists
• Composers

Feel free to add other jobs to the list. But what about the rest of us?

My former manager, Lance, made an awesome desk in his spare time. It is exceptionally cool. (I'd share his blog post about his creative process, but then you'd know who the real Lance is.)

So, did Lance get so bored that he built a desk to cure his boredom, or is he the type of person who never gets bored and always have an idea or forty floating around in his head that he wants to do? Both?

Boredom can inspire us to do something cool, create something fun, whether is a desk, a quilt, a novel, a video called How to be at Home (very cool, from Canada) or whatever.

I, on the other hand, have spent my spare time during the quarantine doing jigsaw puzzles, which feels like an epic waste of time. Perhaps I am looking at this wrong: if I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, it is a waste of time? Do I need to be productive all of the time? I know life is precious, blah, blah, blah, but maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself for...relaxing.

That is it. I shouldn't be so hard on myself for relaxing. If jigsaw puzzles are keeping me sane, then why not do them? Maybe I went a little overboard. I can pull back, but I need to be more patient and gentle with myself

Now, I have a new hobby: fire. I am starting to feel like Abraham Lincoln. He spent lots of time by the fire, as did most people who lived before 1925. Maybe I can read by the fire, knock down one of the many stacks of books I have around the apartment.

College, Ghost Variations and a Thousand Possibilities

The Boy got his first acceptance to college yesterday.

OMG what a miracle.

If you had asked me in the spring of 2019 where I saw myself in a year and a half, it would not have been getting a text from my son in Montana saying "Give me a call. Good news."

I knew what the text meant when I saw it. The first school he applied to has rolling admissions and he was waiting. We knew the envelope--thick or thin--would in the mail arrive this week. When I saw the message, I didn't respond for a minute or two. I was just grateful and happy--happy for him, happy for me. Some kids get into college easily. Some fret that their 3.98 GPA isn't good enough for whatever top school they want. Here is my son who laid in bed for six months, not doing anything, finally wanting to go to college. Not just wanting--actually doing the required work to qualify and apply.

And so it goes. My friend Anderson said it was due to all of the hard work, energy and money everyone had put in--me, the Boy, Jack--to get the Boy on a path to recovery. Still, I give the Boy a majority of the credit. To Anderson's point, Jack and I worked hard to give the Boy an environment in which to heal, but he needed to do the work to get better, to take ownership of his life. And he did.

Today, I am going to bask in gratitude. This is a major milestone, an epic accomplishment.

Last night before I went to bed, I re-watched the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Rep 2 online. When I woke up this morning (at 4:00 a.m. because I couldn't sleep), I thought about one of the dances, Ghost Variation. It is a new work, choreographed during the pandemic. The nineteen century composer wrote the piece of music before he died, believing that other deceased composers were speaking to him from their graves. This morning I thought about a few of my own ghosts who not nearly so charming or inspirational. Maybe they weren't exactly ghosts, but they haunted me nonetheless.

When I graduation from my masters program, I met one of my colleague's mom. Julie's father was a doctor and Julie's mom was nuts. At the ceremony, Julie's mom came up to me and said "I know you are married to a doctor. Good luck." She looked me in the eye, as if she could see my future, and that being married to a doctor is no slice of pie.

About ten years ago, I was sitting in the cafeteria one evening at my kids' elementary school for a NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Family-to-Family meeting where people would discuss the challenges of having a loved one with a major mental illness. I was there to discuss my brother and his battle with schizophrenia. I mentioned I was a mom, and my husband was a doctor. A woman in her mid-sixties with blonde hair looked at me intensely and said, "I was married to a doctor. I am now divorced and living in Section 8 housing with my mentally ill son."

The words of both women haunted me. Haunted isn't strong enough. Their words scared the crap out of me. I feared what they said would come true for me, that I would end up in a difficult marriage, divorced with a crazy child, living in public housing. I fought this vision. There was no way I was going to let my kid end up mentally ill if I could help it. If they did, I'd fight like crazy to get them the help they needed, but they weren't going to drag me down in the dregs with them. I saw my parents deeply struggle with my brother, but they did not implode with him.

I feared those women I had never before met were telling me my future, that they could see things that I could not.

This morning I woke up with a different realization. When those women saw me, they did not see my future. Instead, when they saw me, they saw their past. I was who they used to be: innocent, hopeful, naive. They failed to see my strength, my inner power that I didn't know I had until I was tested.

About a month or two ago, I went to a sha(wo)man. I had been meditating a lot, and I had few "clarities" that would occur at random times when I was not doing much of anything: looking at a calendar, hopping in the shower. I would almost call these visions, where I would get a snapshot of my future in a sentence that uninvitedly would enter my mind. My little clarities came in quiet moments when I wasn't expecting them, and I took them in as dispassionately as if I were reading the mail. Was I seeing my future? I called the shaman to see if she could help me figure these out, see what they meant, and most importantly to find out: was I crazy?

"There are a thousand possibilities for your life, your future," she said. "You tapped into three." Her words brought me a lot of comfort, and made sense. There isn't just one, predetermined future for me, or for the Boy. 

There are a thousand possibilities, and this made me feel better. First, I am not crazy. These little epiphanies are showing me possible paths, possible choices, not a concrete road to a future that will happen. I can be open to these ideas, but not held hostage to them, either.

The difference between my own epiphanies and the evil eye from the other women is that these epiphanies are coming from my heart. The evil eye was coming from theirs.

How does this relate to the Boy going to college? His life, too, has a thousand possibilities. I need to honor his path and his possibilities. Sure, I am happy to put in him a place that knocks down some barriers and blockers to having choices, that lessens the fog, so he can see his future.

Untamed Again

"I am not sure I want to be in this relationship," Jack said earlier this week. He was mildly happy when he said this. He wasn't angry or bitter or pissed off.

My reaction? I was elated. Why? 

His comment was honest.

It wasn't some bullshit deep fried and covered in hot sauce trying to pass off as the truth. In the past year and a half, I'd ask him why he loved me and he said it was because I read the New York Times. 

For fuck sake. Really? After dating a bunch of guys who thought they were smarter than me because they were guys, I wanted to be loved and respected for my mind. I got what I wanted. (see "unamused" emoji: 😒)

Jack's uncertainty was honest because frankly our relationship sucks. To be fair, Jack and I have become more civil to each other over the past few months, but there was a time where we could not be in the same room alone for two hours without screaming at each other or me crying in frustration.

Two weeks ago, I had bought Jack a copy of Untamed by Glennon Doyle. The story is about Glennon's recovery from herself. She is an alcoholic who became sober when she was pregnant with her firstborn. Years later, she is recovering being a woman who fit society's expectations of her, not her expectations of herself. She found herself through her Knowing, as she calls it. It isn't her brain or thinking. This is what she finds deep inside herself when she becomes very quiet. I love this concept.

I didn't want to lend Jack my marked up copy of Untamed because I didn't want him to get pissed off when he read my notes in the margins. He needed a clean copy without my editorializing.

He started reading it this week.

"When I read it, I thought I was reading it to understand you," he said. "Instead, I am finding it applies to me. What do I want?"

Hallelujah praise the lord thank jesus.

This might be a massive sign of my recovery from being co-dependent. I want Jack to want what he wants, not to want what I want. In order to have a conversation about a relationship, both people need to know what they want, otherwise both people will end up being miserable. While it is possible to be in a relationship with someone who doesn't know what they want, it is often lonely.

In the meantime, I have learned a lot about myself this week. 

• I learned that everyone has their own Higher Power, and it isn't me. I grew up believing there was "One true God." Now I believe there are 7.8 billion gods. What might be right for Jack or the Boy or Claire Adele will be different than what is right for me.

• I learned that I am afraid of conflict and standing up for myself. I fear that if I stand-up for myself, that the person I stand up to won't like me anymore. I had this realization at work this week. I had to tell my manager that he needed a data analyst on the project he was working on, but he said "Nope, I'm good." Argh. I was pissed off not because I felt left out but because when he briefly looped me in, I could see mistakes in their process, mistakes that would not have been made had an analyst been involved from the start. I made my point and then let it be. Still, I fear pissing him off for telling him I thought he was making a mistake. I suppose I'll find out the rest of the story this week. Maybe he will be pissed out. Maybe it isn't about me. He has his Higher Power and I have mine. Of course, my craziness on fearing being abandoned has nothing to do with the situation at work. It has to do with my previous conditioning.

• I heard a great saying this week: "We need to engage in our emotions with out shutting down, lashing out or falling into addiction." Wow. I might not have fallen into addiction, but I very often shut down or when I feel really desperate, I lash out. Likewise, this person said they wanted to be in a relationship with someone who could do the same. Amen to that.

Boundaries & Nope

This past year, I realized that I have been miserable at keeping boundaries. Absolutely, completely miserable. I have always had a hard time saying no.

Today I set some boundaries with someone who is very hard on me, but I did it anyway and I didn't feel bad. I set some boundaries with myself. I said no.

Boundary #1: The Queen's Gambit

Last night, I was watching The Queen's Gambit on Netflix about a young woman who is a chess grandmaster and a drug addict. The show came recommended from a few friends so I thought I'd give it a try. Claire-Adele played competitive chess in elementary school and she was decent. She has a pennant in her room that said "Chess Club" from Archie McPhee's. I think the flag was intended to be ironic, but Claire-Adele took it literally, which is fine. She is a literal kind of girl. Anyhow, I thought the show would be interesting since I know a little bit about chess. 

The first episode was about the girl's childhood in an orphanage after her mentally ill mother committed suicide. 

Nope. I am done. The Boy goes to therapeutic boarding school and this hits a little too close to home. Sure, brilliant people can have drug addictions and can be functional, but that is the exception, not the rule. I am going to skip the rest of the episodes.

And why do they have to portray a genius woman as a nut? Can't we have a series about a sane genius woman?

Boundary #2: Gardenscapes

I succumbed to a pop up ad on my phone and downloaded this this game. It looked cute and I thought I'd try it. "Spend hours watching Austin live his life!" is an actual quote from the home-screen of this game. Instead, it should read "Watch a little animated butler live his life while you waste hours of yours." Instead of me playing the game, the game played me. I spent three days trying to defeat level 87 without giving the app company my credit card to buy a booster pack. I've had this game on my phone for a week. Today, I was mentally spinning and I couldn't figure out why. The game helped me avoid feeling my feelings and left me in a funk.

Do I need this in my life, a game that sucks away my time, attention and positive energy?

Nope.

I deleted the game from my phone this afternoon. After dinner, I vacuumed my apartment instead of trying to beat level 92. I placed my mental health hygiene above this game.

Boundary #3: Bad Soup

I made my favorite vegetable soup Sunday and it didn't turn out like it usually does. It smelled and tasted like turnips, which is odd because the other 23 times I made the soup I couldn't taste the turnips at all. I never knew turnips had a flavor. I thought they were just a bland root vegetable used to add heft soups and stews. My soup was gross, which is too bad because the advantage of making soup means I get lunch and dinner for a week. Do I need to finish this batch of soup which I hate?

Nope.

Boundary #4: The Puzzle

In June, I ordered three puzzles from Kickstarter. They came in the mail today. I already had another puzzle on the coffee table that was about 75% done. 

Do I need to finish the first puzzle before I start one of the new ones?

Nope.

I took the first puzzle and put it back in the box and opened one of the new ones.

_____

Where on earth did I get this crazy ideas in my head that I have to finish a puzzle, eat all of the soup, watch the whole series, play the whole game? I understand the principle of "start what you finish." That can be a satisfying thing to do and useful when it comes to my job, but does that mean I have to finish everything I start? 

Nope.

I am the leader of my life. I get to choose.

Anxiety & Hope

First, the good news. I was in a therapy session last week and I told my therapist Marcos that I was feeling dull at times, that my mind was blank. I wasn't complaining--it was more of an observation. My mind isn't racing all of the time like it used to.

"That is peace, Lauren," he said. "You just aren't feeling spun up or agitated." Another friend said I've changed. "You used to have a 'frenetic' energy." (To be fair, I am not like this all of the time. I am much more frenetic in my personal life than at work or when I am part of a group.)

This week, I was re-reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle. A French intellectual once said that you can't truly understand a book unless you've read it twice. (Someone* on Medium said the same thing. Here ya go.)

The first time I read Untamed, I was scanning the landscape. It was like I was going on a drive and didn't know where Glennon was taking me. I am thinking of the few times I drove between Seattle and Montana. The first time I drove between St. Regis and Kalispell was in the dark and snow. The second time, I was driving home in the morning and I was blown away by the beauty. The next times, I relished my favorite part of the trip.

Likewise, this book. The first time I read it, I was reading in the dark. The second time I am like "Oh yeah, I get it." The short version is Glennon didn't know who she was. As a daughter and a wife and a mother, she lived for everyone else except herself. When you live for everyone else, your life can become really distorted and messed up.

I can relate. For the past eighteen months since the Boy has been away, I am trying to come out of the rabbit hole and figure out how to live my life for myself and not other people. When I stop living my life for other people, I am hoping that I will become a more decent human and be better able to connect with others.

"Anxiety is feeling terrified about my lack of control over anything, and obsessing is my antidote," wrote Glennon. 

I underlined this line twice so when I flip through the book I can find it right away.

This was me in the spring, summer and fall of 2019. I spent a lot of time obsessing about things people I could not control. I was a mess and a wreck. When my friends would ask, "Why don't you do something about it?" I couldn't because I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do. I was stuck. Really, really, really stuck.

I've been stuck before in my life, but this was different. I was so far in a rut that I knew I needed to get out of the living hell that was my own mind. Being stuck was good because it drove me to change instead of staying in the same old, same old. 

I realize this now, but I didn't realize it then.

My main problem was that my inner compass was broken. I didn't know what I wanted or where to go. I was lost inside my soul. Instead of asking myself for directions, I'd ask my friends. I was looking for other people for insight and explanation: What does this mean? What does that mean?

Even though some of my friends are exceptionally wise, they didn't know where I wanted to go because I didn't know. I wanted someone on the outside to tell me what to do on the inside, which does not work. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I am beginning to figure out what I need and want. More importantly, I am beginning to understand that everyone else also has this choice, too. They have their higher power, their own inner compass and I have mine. I cannot confuse the two. I wanted so many people in my life to want what I wanted, and world doesn't work that way.

I was talking with some friends yesterday when one of them defined hope. "Hope does not equal certainty. Hope is confidence in the possibility," she said. 

I used to want certainty, even if I didn't know it at the time. Now when I get anxious, agitated, amped up or whatever, I need to start reaching for hope instead of obsessing. Once I let go of wanting a certain outcome, I can let go of my worry and replace it with faith.

 

* I googled the person who wrote this post, mainly because I wanted to see if the writer was male or female. It turns out this guy was one of the suitors on Indian Matchmaker on Netflix.

Permanence & the Sweet Spot

More than two years ago, I was in London for a week for a mother-daughter bonding trip before Claire-Adele left for college. I had a wonderful time. Even though I was about to "lose" my daughter as she was going to dash off to the East Coast, it was otherwise a sweet spot in my life. Claire-Adele was successfully launched and thrilled about college, and the Boy would get his chance to be the only child.

After the trip to London, the Boy's anxiety and depression reached a crisis level and my marriage imploded.

How much did I cling to permanence, hoping to keep that sweet spot forever in my life? A good friend is going through a divorce. She used to live in a lovely home, and now she is in a less lovely apartment. Relationships, homes, jobs--they all change. 

I was poking around online and I came across a graph like this, probably from a Marketing 101 class.

It got me thinking about my life in general, and how when things are going well in a relationship or job, I long to stay in the sweet spot forever.

That doesn't happen. In fact, my life like looks more like this, lots of lines crossing each other all over the place:

I am learning how to navigate these waves, riding along like a surfer, taking in the ups and downs.