My commitment to Sex and The City endured longer than my marriage.
So when my imaginary boyfriend, Jay-Z (did you see him on Oprah? He giggles. The Hova giggles. Mad love, baby) raps,
Only time we don’t speak is during “Sex and the City”
She gets Carrie fever, but soon as the show is over
She’s right back to being my soldier
I think, now that’s a wise man.
That was how it when down in my house, too. My love, I’m here for you, any time, except Saturdays at nine. Then you must fuck right off. Quietly.
I’m not married any more. I went to Sex and The City 2.
I’m going to straight up admit it: I did not love the first movie.
And the second one was worse.
Here’s what I LOVE about the series: the female archetypes, the friendship, the social relevance, the working through the same romantic and career conundrums that the rest of us non-Laboutin wearers do, too.
(oh, those red soles. One day, baby, one day)
I relate to every single character.
Sometimes I’m Carrie: eternal romantic; writing and making a career at writing through my confusion at how what I think ought to happen and real life don’t line up; fascinated by all things men; shoes.
(The Facebook quiz: Which Sex and the City Character are You? confirms that I am Carrie.)
Sometimes I’m Miranda (one of my guy friends says I’m Miranda): fiercely ambitious and fragile. (In the first seasons of SATC, Patricia Field dressed her in colours that look like “a bruise”.)
Sometimes I’m Samantha: a lot of the time, I’m Samantha. But then I go all Charlotte and cry about it the next day. Or, like Carrie, I write about it the next day.
(Often, I do both.)
Sometimes I’m Charlotte: oh yeah, I’m Charlotte. She named her dog Elizabeth Taylor. She wears pin-up, vintage style clothes. She believes in the fairy tale. She wants to be married and have babies. I am Charlotte.
So that’s the appeal. I know all of these characters, intimately. I see them in my friends. I see them in myself.
Sex and the City is a window into The Lives of Women.
The series just makes it sexier. The four characters – female archetypes, I argue – do all the same things “ordinary” women do, they just do it in New York (sigh), in terrific and sometimes terrifying clothing (sigh), in much better clubs and restaurants with way better looking people (sigh), and with way more witty banter (orgasm).
So, LOVE.
But the most compelling parts of the series – the friendship, the social relevance – are dialled down in the movie, while the fashion and the glamour and the Not Your Life, Sucka are amped way up.
And then there’s the caricatured exotic locale and Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte in burqas.
I hate that stuff.
But.
One scene made the whole movie worthwhile.
Miranda and Charlotte are having a martini or six. Miranda tells Charlotte – and I’m paraphrasing wildly – “we’re 6,700 miles from home. We’re both mothers. You can tell me the things you’re don’t think you can say.”
Miranda starts.
“As much as I love Brady…and I do…being a mother is not enough. I miss my job.”
And Charlotte lets it out. All she ever wanted was to have children, and now that she has them, she loves them, and they drive her crazy. The baby cries All. The. Time. Sometimes she puts her in another room and walks away, and what kind of mother is that?
There’s more. Lots more. Lots more real. More confessions, more martinis, more tears, more life.
Because that’s the truth about being a parent: it is a joy and a nightmare, a privilege and a burden, a divine calling and a life sentence. Ambivalence, thy name is mother.
There’s more.
Charlotte sobs, “And I have full-time help! How do other women do it?”
Miranda says, grimly, “I have no fucking idea. Here’s to them.”
And they drink.
And those are my girls, saluting their girls. Us. All of us.
What if that thing that’s holding you back, that thing you think you need to to do in order to get what you want -
what if you don’t have to do it?
I’m serious. Don’t do it. Don’t leap that hurdle. Don’t knock down that wall. Go around it. It’s the long way around, sure, but it still gets you there.
I travelled that road called Avoiding Scary Things. I don’t know if it is the road more or less travelled – and this advice and this path is most certainly counter-intuitive – but it got me where I needed to go.
Just over a year ago, I started a business. I didn’t tell myself or anyone else it was a business and it didn’t make a cent for more than seven months.
But it was still a business.
But starting a business scared me. I’m great at writing; but I’m not so great at braving rejection.
(Ditto for sex ‘n love.)
(I digress.)
Knocking on doors? Asking for business? Making sales? Closing the deals?
I would rather die.
And so I was, quietly, for a long time.
I wanted to write for a living but I didn’t want to go out and get that writing business.
And so I did nothing. Because that thing that scared me was undo-able.
And then I decided to lead with my strengths. I did the thing everyone tells you NOT to do:
I believed that if I built it, they would come.
So I wrote it, and they did.
Sometimes you don’t have to knock on doors. Sometimes you go through windows.
Or screens.
——————————- Catherine Caine inspired me to write this essay.
I’m not sure how helpful I was to Catherine, but two significant things came out of that interview for me:
1. I realized that, in fact, my website WAS – and is – how I manage fear.
I fear being irrelevant and unheard…and so I blog.
I fear rejection and ‘asking’ for business…and so I blog.
My blog is my live-action business card, therapists’ couch, and way of fumbling towards a craft and legacy.
2. After our interview, Catherine and I chatted personally. Really personally. Naked pictures might have been exchanged. (That’s a lie: this was not a symmetrical “exchange”. Catherine showed me hers, I did not show her mine. So unfair. I’m sorry, honey. I owe ya.) And at the time of our call, I was in the writhing, anguished throes of my “How to Get Un-Stuck” series, and Catherine asked me what was scaring me.
I told her: I need to create products, but I don’t want to write another boring e-book. I keep starting e-books answering questions people ask me, but my heart isn’t in the e-book. I want to give and connect more directly and intimately.
Catherine said, “What you have to offer…maybe it doesn’t have to be an e-book. It could be a course, a webinar, consulting…there are other ways. You can do the thing you want to do without making it into a pdf.”
Let’s mash up reality and assume that Dorothy wrote The Wizard of Oz and it is a memoir told through the lens of pharmaceuticals and it is to be published next year.
Dorothy has written a great book: part trippy fantasy, part freudian/jungian/wonky archetypical therapy, part love letter to friendship, and a prefeminist, feminist, post-feminist meditation on the nature and power of femininity wrapped in a trendy, little-dog-carrying, hot-shoe-wearing package.
It is Sex and the City meets Eat Love Pray meets Little Red Riding Hood, on acid. It is a journey. It is a great book. It must be read.
Dorothy knows this. She feels it right from her soul to the soles of her ruby red shoes. She can see the future: a movie. Musicals. The talk show circuit. Oprah. Much money, much love, much conversation, and a place in popular imagination.
It can be all of these things, not because she promotes the flying monkeys out of it – which she will, and absolutely should do – but because it offers a watery answer to our thirsty, questioning souls: you are the author of your own affair.
(Plus there are weird scary creatures who learn to love each other and grow as twisted, maturing moral entities and we all know that stuff sells. I hear a little book called Twilight is doing quite well these days.)
So this book should sell. It needs to sell. Dorothy wants it to sell.
Even more than that, Dorothy wants it to be read, to land, to take root, to grow, to inhabit, fertilize and animate our popular imagination.
If I was Dorothy – and I am – I would start a blog before I even started writing the book. I’d go all Seth Godin and build a tribe on Twitter. I’d find my people. I’d give them somewhere to find me. I’d get on the cluetrain. I’d Oprah. I’d firestart. I’d listen to Leo Babauta when he says he doesn’t believe in SEO. I’d make friends. I’d work the aich-ee-double-hockey-sticks out of ProBlogger and spend serious time with Outspoken Media. I’d figure out the lessons learned by our pantehon of blog gods and best-selling writers. I’d figure out the mechanics of demand and distribution and audience and I’d build it and they would come. And if they didn’t come, I’d go get them and then hug and pet and feed them because that is the purpose of promotional tricks and lassos and rodeo ponies and hoopla.
But I would only do that if, like Dorothy, I had something wizardly to offer: the journey. The passion. The learning. The love. The living. The lessons. The magic. The really, really great content. Please.
And this is what exasperates me about the ‘blogging and social media for money’ superhighway. So many times I follow the yellow brick road laid by an enterprising blogger who’s working the system – rocking the comments, manufacturing controversy, guest posting, paper-training SEO, tweeting – and when I get there and pull back the curtain…nothing. No wizard. No magic. No message. Just a lot of mechanics and whirling buttons and a robotic, soulless special effects machine.
Honestly, that’s what a lot of problogging and blogs and social media enterprises are looking like these days. It is turn-key blogging. It is execution unsparked by ideas. It is a waste of time and tweets and it won’t make you money.
Straight up: I LOVE money. I want money. I make money and you should, too. I want you and Dorothy and every other problogger out there to have as many tiny dogs – more! – as you and your minions can carry.
I just want you to make that money from selling wisdom, truth, experience, art or sparkly scarlet maryjanes (and if you are, I’m ALWAYS in the market for red shoes, so please put me on your mailing list).
I want you to make an offering. I want you to have something to offer. I want you to be a Red Shoe Blogger. I just made that up.
A Red Shoe Blogger is not blogging exclusively for money.
A Red Shoe Blogger has a mission and is animated by passion and all the tips and tricks and hacks and tools and tweets are harnessed in service of that divine, cosmic, helpful, genuine, meaningful objective.
That mission is Home.
So this is what I want from all the Red Shoe Bloggers out there: I want you to buck the system, or work the system, but know that the system is not a slot machine that will pay off if only you keep pulling that arm and never ever run out of nickels or take a pee-break.
Success is not only about the systems.
The home address of success is passion, talent (let’s be honest), creation, contribution, collaboration, conversation, and community.That is where hot sweaty abundance and cold hard cash reside (FYI, they’re totally a couple) and I wish more bloggers lived there too.
Because, after all, there’s no place like home.
___________________
Red Shoe Blogger was my first guest post for ProBlogger in October 2009 – and, as I tried to say yesterday, it is my manifesta and my mission.
Sometimes I have to pinch myself because my life is a reverie. My life is like a dream I dreamed when I dreamed of beautiful people.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever before had the kind of love and loyalty that I have in my life right now – and all I can say is thank God and thank Twitter and Thank God For Twitter.
There is a perception that Twitter is frivolous and we’re all talking about our last ham sandwich – and we are, and that’s ambient intimacy – but I have met incredible, inspired, talented, heartfelt and heart-full people on twitter.
People who’ve become my soul’s people, my sisterfriends, my brothers-in-arms, my mothers, my lovers, my compadres.
So I could wax lyrical about Twitter, but that’s not the point.
The point is that right now, and during the past year, every time I was stuck I have been overwhelmed by the visceral, tangible support of people who want to love me up (and do).
Just over a year ago, I had a new place, a newish job, and was newly single. Life was fine. I was going to work and taking care of my kids and running on that hamster wheel every day and it all meant…nothing.
So I started a blog and discovered another blog that rocked my world, and, dare I say it, changed my life.
Yeah, I’m talking about White Hot Truth with Danielle LaPorte. I read it obsessively. It lit me up. I learned things. I stayed motivated. This thing I was doing – writing, blogging, making meaning – seemed…
possible.
And so one fine day last June, I took a day off work and drove to Whistler for a firestarter. And on the winding highway on the way to Whistler I wrestled with my identity, my purpose, my practicality, my comfortable suburban life, and my bills. (As in: how is this cute thing I do – writing – gonna pay ‘em?)
Finally, forty-five minutes into the drive and thirty-six years into my life, I gave up the fight. I gave up the stuck.
I said, fuck it. I’m an artist.
And everything Danielle said in that firestarter was for me and everything in that firestarter affirmed that I must scrape back the bullshit and be faithful to my purpose. That I must be true to who I am.
An artist. A writer.
I got misty-eyed and emotional only moments into the session.
And when I got home, I found an e-mail from Danielle:
you are one talented writer. You’re hot shit and the Real Deal and you should be getting your ass published as widely as possible.
I cried my eyes out.
I needed that.
I needed that to keep going.
I kept going.
____________________
Now, almost a year later, writing is paying the bills. I still get stuck, though. I get stuck because I take too much on. I get stuck because I’m wed to what I should do rather than what I want to do. I get stuck because there’s something I want to offer and I’m scared to offer it. I get stuck because it is easier to start a piece or an essay or a book than it is to finish it.
And people – my mentors, peers, friends – are what un-stick me every time.
I wrote a piece about Dave Doolin last week – about how much his consulting, his website, and his book have helped me improve my blogging.
And then, a couple of days later, I wrote a piece about how I was stuck.
Within moments of posting that piece, I had a text message and then an e-mail from him. Minutes after that, we were on Skype talking to each other and he was totally in it to win it with me.
Dave and I had been making noises about writing a piece together but hadn’t actually done it…and that night Dave told me we were going to write that piece together, now.
So we did. We texted on Skype and wrote a post together using a shared Google doc. We wrote the piece from start to finish in forty-five minutes.
This was huge to me.
It was huge for three reasons.
First.
Something wasn’t quite right in my life – I was stuck – and here was my friend instantly, 100% in it with me, helping me muddle my way through it.
That kind of loyalty means everything. And this is why I love Twitter (and Dave) with an unholy passion: because I first talked to Dave on Twitter. Now he’s my friend and he’s got me when I’m stuck. Wow.
Second.
I’m not a team player (don’t tell anyone). I am a writer. I like to do things by myself. Also, I’m pretty book-smart, which means I’m still scarred from years of group-work in high school where well-meaning teachers matched me up with kids who saw me and saw an easy A. So my experience with group work (slow, and all on me) is why I don’t much care for collaborating.
Recently I’ve had people – really lovely, talented, compelling people, people I really do want to work with – approach me to collaborate on projects and I’ve turned them down simply because I thought I don’t like collaborating.
But writing this piece with Dave etched a new collaborative groove in my head. Usually it takes me two to three hours to write a piece; when we wrote together, it took forty-five minutes. It was fast and it was satisfying.
It was fast because as I was writing something, he was finishing another sentence, or editing a paragraph I had just written; or as he was writing something, I was inserting digressions into the middle of his paragraph or pulling the threads through the piece. The back-and-forth and the pace and the creation was rewarding.
So that was a clicky lightbulb moment: collaborating can feed the creative process instead of stalling it.
Third.
I was stuck last week because I had a number of pieces started and zero pieces finished. I was frustrated. I wasn’t crossing anything off my list. And the less I finished, the less I finished. Over and over. Not finishing was feeding and breeding more not finishing.
And Dave instinctively knew that what I needed to get moving, to get unstuck, was to finish something. Anything. Now.
And so we started – and finished – that piece, together.
And I was lightened. The whole week hadn’t been a waste, after all.
Good-bye, stuck. Thank you, Dave.
————————–
So that’s how Danielle LaPorte helped me get going, and keep going when I first started out, and how Dave Doolin helped me get going, and keep going, last week.
Your people will get you unstuck if you let them.
————————–
Which brings me to my Big Stuck.
For a while, I’ve had the feeling that what people want from me (and what I want to give them) is not Yet Another Boring E-book.
I’ve felt that what we need to do, together, is connect.
I’ve felt like what I have to offer is writing, and love. (And writing is just a channel through which love flows.)
I’ve wanted to offer classes and consultations about how to develop your unique writing voice, and how not to be a boring writer.
(Please, let’s not be boring bloggers. There’s so much competition for that. There’s none for being you.)
But…I Am A Copywriter. I should be doing that – not hanging out on Twitter all day and talking on Skype and answering questions by e-mail.
But that stuff – the answering questions, the helping, the loving – is what I love to do.
Recently I was telling my friend (insert mental air quotes around that, please) F that my best qualities are also my worst qualities. My best quality is that I’m a Lover which means I take care of the people around me. My worst quality is that I’m a Lover, which means I make other people’s missions my own, and sometimes more important than my own.
F said, maybe helping other people with their missions IS your mission.
Maybe he’s right. I thought the same thing just a week ago when I read Danielle LaPorte’s The FireStarter Sessions vook (video-book).
In The FireStarter Sessions, Danielle insists that you MUST do what you love. You must lead with your strengths. You must choose the things that light you up so that you can light the way for yourself, and for others.
I write and I love and even my writing is loving. The things that get me really excited are helping other people. When someone e-mails me and they have a question, or they need help, a close review, or advice, I’m all in. I’ll drop the things I should be doing to do that.
I can look at someone else’s writing and instantly, instinctively know if it needs sugar or salt or more heat. I know how to season it and cook it. I know which ingredients are missing, how to amp up the emotional contrast and tension, and what technical tricks – rhetoric, typography, poetic devices – will work.
I understand how to train your writing voice to sing. I love editing your pieces. I love talking to you about your writing and encouraging you to take risks – and I’ve done that quietly, informally, and freely for several writers and bloggers.
So that’s what I want to do, and what I’m going to do – and what the people around me have encouraged me to get unstuck enough to do.
So let’s do that.
Do you want to write more persuasive, emotional, meaningful pieces?
I’ll download to you everything I know about writing and teach you to do that.
Do you want to unlock your writing voice?
I’ve got the keys.
Do you want to know how to build (and make money from) a blog, all while juggling a job, family, and life?
I can show you how I re-framed every single obstacle in my life – full-time job, single mom, two kids under five, very little child-care or support, no money, no time – into an opportunity and out of those opportunities created a rapidly growing blog, new business and new life for myself.
Do you want to guest post for A-list blogs?
I can tell you how I did it so you can do it, too.
Do you want to blog better? Do you want to know what you’re doing right (and maybe what you’re doing wrong)?
Dave Doolin and I will review your blog – the art and the science of it – consult with you, construct a report for you, and tell you how to do it better.
And do you want it in a face-to-face class or do you want it on the phone?
Because baby, I can do it both ways.
—————–
How Not To Be a Boring Writer: The Workshop
Vancouver, Saturday July 17th, 25 spaces available, $50 per person E-mail to reserve your space (or to organize additional dates! Hell yes, I’ll travel!)
I review three of your pieces and then we work together on the phone to amp up your unique writing voice. E-mail to book a session ($100)
League of Extraordinary Bloggers
The Art and the Science of Blogging. Blog Review, Report, and Personal Consultations with Dave Doolin and Kelly Diels. E-mail to book your blog review ($150)
I have a convoluted relationship with faith. For a long time, I thought faith was something you bought on Sundays with the clink of coins on a shiny plate or the whisper of dollars disappearing into a basket.
And I tried, many times, to get close to my God this way. By going to church – or temple or mosque – and sitting quietly and hoping to feel.
And I never did.
I tried. I asked around. I had conversations with friends who are madly in love with God, or Allah, and they feel it. One of my friends tells me how she truly feels the spirit when she’s in church, how church is a sanctuary for her, how the fullsomeness of Jesus’ embrace can make her weep. When she told me that, I took my jealous ass to church and warmed a pew. And…nothing.
I’m an emotion-driven creature, and that applies as much to sex and money as it does to meaning. If I don’t feel it, I won’t do it.
So I didn’t do it. The faith thing. For years and years – forever – I never considered myself spiritual.
And all of that time, I thought I didn’t have faith because I didn’t have Religion.
There’s a difference, of course – but I only recently learned that.
I learned that from Danielle LaPorte, who claims and communes with and is the Divine Feminine – AND she’s a self-professed, certified and pedigreed “spiritual mutt“, as well.
His piece about rules and lazy people is living with me.
Siddhartha defines lazy, not as “ignorant or gullible or any other pejorative descriptor attacking a person’s mental abilities,” but as “a state of conserving effort or energy.” And he says that we make rules to conserve mental effort.
Effort is expended in all kinds of ways, mentally as well as physically. While we’re probably most used to seeing people avoid physical effort, the same tendencies apply to mental work as well.We will avoid it whenever possible.
This is because mental work is hard. Anyone who’s tried to understand Stephen Hawking knows this. But even thinking about things more mundane than the vastness of the universe takes its toll.
Thinking hard is one reason couples fight during home construction and remodeling projects; the stress of making the innumerable important decisions weakens their mental capacity to tolerate each other’s imperfections.
Have you ever looked at a whole aisle of different kinds of shampoo and inwardly groaned at all the choices?
One of the ways we’ve been able to avoid mental work is to make rules. We have to think hard about some things to reach a decision and come up with the best possible course of action. We don’t want to do that every time so we develop a rule. The next time we’re in that situation, or a similar one, we can simply apply the rule we’ve previously developed. Easy peasy.
So after we’ve decided on a brand and formulation of shampoo we are satisfied with we make it a rule to always get that kind of shampoo and shopping is less mentally taxing.
Rules are shorthand. And so (maybe; sometimes) is religion.
My experience – so far – with religion is with rules. Religion as rules and rules as a shorthand for moral decision-making – and making religious-, rule-based decisions in the best interests of your family, community, and culture.
Individual – and feminine, just ask Ronna, or every Catholic woman who ever wanted to be a priest – sacrifice is a recurring theme.
There’s wisdom there, and I can see it, but it isn’t mine.
And so, because I don’t have religion, and in fact am intensely repelled by the way the female body and experience gets constructed and controlled in most major religions, I thought I didn’t have faith.
But I do have faith. And I’ll tell you how I know that.
On Friday, I did something profound, meditative and woo.
I drove to FedEx.
You know when you go to conferences or retreats or workshops with granola-crunching types (I am currently barefoot and enjoying a breakfast of granola and raisins, so I know of what I speak) those new-age police-types enforce mandatory intimacy with trust-building exercises?
(You show up to hear about X and suddenly you’re threading string emerging from your neighbours waistband through your shirt-sleeve and out your pant leg to your next neighbour and pretending it’s fun and you’re such a good-and-transparent sport.)
(I hate that shit. Every time I sign up for a conference or a retreat I pray the leaders believe in personal privacy and organic – not forced – intimacy. My prayers almost always go unanswered.)
(Ah, faith.)
The reason that conference throwing/retreat organizing/kumbaya fascists make us do those things is because those activities are ice-breakers. Those things crack you open so the learning they’re about to throw down has somewhere to pool. Those things create a shared emotional experience and intimacy – and community – emerges from that shared emotional experience.
(Dave Doolin told me so. He doesn’t only teach me how to blog.)
So trust-building exercises…build trust and create intimacy.
And I wanted to get intimate with the universe. And myself.
(oh, so many ways to read that last bit.)
So I drove to Fedex.
There’s a backstory. Of course.
I was in Richmond (a suburb of Vancouver) checking in with a supplier, and after that I needed to go to FedEx, which, conveniently is located at the airport in Richmond.
Less conveniently: I don’t know my left hand from my right (unless I wear huge and wildly fake rings on my left hand, which is what I do most days), can’t tell time on an analog clock, and navigate by landmarks (you know the yellow church with white fence? Not there – turn at the next street just past the boxwood hedge) and mountains and the ocean.
If I’m driving towards the North Shore mountains, then I’m (perhaps obviously) driving north. If I’m driving towards Mt Baker, and it is the only mountain on the horizon, then I’m driving South. Whatever side the ocean is on is west. Abbotsford is almost always east and almost always a mistake.
Street names elude me. Maps confound me. Ask for directions? NEVAH.
And Richmond? Richmond’s landscape is flat, open, and devoid of good landmarks – except the airport – and mountains. Richmond’s roads, on the other hand, are as clotted, clenched and tragic as a failing heart. Always.
I worked in Richmond for almost two years and still, all I know how to do in Richmond is get to my former office, the bank, Amanda Farough’s house, the coffee shop, Ikea and the airport. Basically if you spin me around twice in Richmond and I don’t land somewhere Swedish for common sense or a hangar, then I don’t know I am.
And on Friday I was in a unknown neighbourhood in Richmond (which is basically every neighbourhood in Richmond except that of my former office) and had to get to FedEx by some unknown route (which is every route in Richmond that doesn’t lead to the highway home).
Now I’ve been to FedEx many a time, because when one is in the proposal writing business one gets pretty intimate with courier offices, especially at 4.52 pm on the day before the damn thing is due. And FedEx is at the airport, which is a pretty significant landmark, usually well-marked by big green signs and purple and orange planes (I would like to thank FedEx for the large purple and orange planes parked beside their building. That was a super helpful clue). So I decided to trust in my tax paying money at work (good road signage), my ocean-based sense of direction (it was on my left – you know, the hand with the ring), work with my profound aversion to asking for directions, and intuit my way there.
And I did it and it was an unabashedly woot woot experience.
It was a beautiful sunny day, I took my time, trusted my instincts, trusted my basic experience and knowledge of the way the world (aka “Richmond”) is plotted, and felt my way to FedEx.
And that was my simple, satisfying trust-building exercise with the universe and me.
I’ve written before about how this year at New Years I didn’t set SMART goals, nor did I break them down into milestones and plot out my path. Instead, I conceived of my goal as my mountain.
I can see my mountain. It rises above the houses, the city, the hills. It is off there in the distance but so large I can almost touch it. So large and so close that I can see it from everywhere I am. I believe – I know – that if I walk towards it long enough, eventually I’ll turn around and find I’ve climbed halfway up.
So this trust-building exercise I did with the universe – and myself – is like my mountain. I believe that if I keep my eyes trained where I want to go and trust in my general knowledge, intelligence, experience, talent, work ethic, judgment, and friends, then I have everything I need for the journey.
I have faith that the universe is both chaotic – but not malevolently so – and fairly orderly and is not going to swallow me up while I’m on my way. Or if it does, it isn’t personal. And I still have everything I need to get back on my way.
So this little woo-woo trust building exercise that looked like a drive to FedEx was about talking to my soul and saying it’s okay when you don’t know what the streets and landmarks look like, because you just keep your eye on that mountain – or the building beside the purple and orange jets – and you’ll get there.
It was about faith. In myself and in the universe.
And of course ‘the universe’ is just my hippy-dippy way of saying God.
——————————–
This piece is part 2 of the answer to ‘stuck’ – which is where I’ve been, business-wise, for the last several weeks. If you want to follow the series – and hopefully, get unstuck with me – here’s where to start:
Stuck can be your own resistance and I think we all know from the Bible Star Trek that resistance is futile. Your practicality might fight your heart but your heart wants what it wants. The heart is a predator – a lonely hunter, an organ of fire, a bucking bronco. Desire will make you do what you need to do, so your practicality best saddle up and ride.
Because there’s no use fighting what you want. It wants you back. You two should totally get together.
Really, only good things happen when you cuddle up on the couch together.
I write emotional algebra – Anais Nin
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Last weekend (and the weekend before), F and K had a super sweet Saturday night and as a result K is crushing on F and F seems to be feeling the same way.
F spends x numbers of minutes each day calling and texting and charming K, for a total of y hours this week. A significant investment, thinks K. “Significant” is not defined.
K has two children, S and L, and every other weekend they spend the weekend with their father, C, and so every other weekend is pretty much when K is available to see F.
F works very long days, wrapping up at 8 or 9 at night, and has Sundays and Mondays off. On Friday night, F calls K when he’s off work. They talk for hours but F does not invite K over. K is disappointed.
On Saturday night, K drives to Bellingham for a goddess summit dinner and hopes – even expects - to meet up with F afterwards. F calls K when he finishes work. F is heading out for drinks with coworkers. K is not invited. K is disappointed (again) but expects that F will call Sunday morning – because F calls most every day – and maybe they’ll spend Sunday together.
F calls on Sunday on his way to church and mentions that he’ll be meeting up with friends after church.
K thinks WTF? Does this F-er not want to spend time with me or WHAT?! But K sucks that up because that’s not a very nice question or approach.
Solve: If F is calling and being sweet and open and apparently interested, why isn’t he inviting K out this weekend?
Whilst on the phone with F, K works through the formula and concludes, with a little help from Greg Behrendt, that F is not interested. If he’s not asking you out, he’s not interested.
F and K spend 30 minutes chatting while F is on the train. F asks K if she’s having a nice weekend with the girls. K is confused.
K: The girls are at C’s house this weekend.
F:What? I thought, since we saw each other last Saturday – and you didn’t have the girls that night – that this weekend you had the girls.
K: No, last Saturday night was an anomaly. It was my weekend with the girls but C wanted to take the girls to a party so it just made sense for them to sleep at his house on Saturday.
Solve: If K has the girls every other weekend, and is only free to see F when she doesn’t have the girls, and she saw F last Saturday night, when is she next available to see F?
Earlier in the week, F worked through the formula and concluded that K had the girls this weekend.
Solution: Always do emotional algebra long-form. Out loud. Together.
Otherwise K will conclude that F is Just Not That Into Her and write him off and stop answering his calls while F assumes K is busy and keeps himself busy.
And nobody gets any lovin’ this weekend. Or next.
Bonus Q: why aren’t F and K going to get f-k’d next weekend?
I survived childhood sexual abuse. I survived a soul-shattering divorce and depressions so cavernous that my family feared I’d never climb out. I have been abandoned by a man while travelling in a foreign country. I have grown entire human beings using only my body. Twice. I have had squalling children carved out of my naked flesh. Twice. I have fed babies using only my breasts. I have worn a bikini in public (repeatedly but not recently). I have loved. I have loved a man so physically beautiful that I feared leaving my girlfriends alone with him – and that fear was not irrational. I learned to drive on a standard. I have spoken – well – in front of crowds. I have counselled women who were raped. I have been held down when I didn’t want to be. I have been pregnant when I didn’t want to be (she’s beautiful). I have written myself out of broke and into business. I have ridden a horse that had never been ridden before. I have been hit square in the chest by an errant pitch and got back up and knocked the mothafucka out of the park.
So why am I so fucking stuck right now?
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This question triggered a series of pieces in which I try to find the answer to ‘stuck’ – which is where I’ve been, business-wise, for the last several weeks. If you want to follow the series – and hopefully, get unstuck with me – here’s where to start:
I started blogging one year and two weeks ago (April 18, 2009).
When I started, I wanted to Just Get Started. Now.
(‘Just do it’ really is a recipe for success. I have LOTS of great ideas, but the only ones that count are the I ones I execute – and NOW is always the right time.)
And when I started, I didn’t want to figure out WordPress, I just wanted to write.
So that’s what I did. For the first six months, I used GoDaddy’s built-in blog whatchamacallit and a template. I wrote and I pressed publish. I wrote and I pressed publish. I wrote and I pressed publish.
And then I got to promoting my pieces with links on Facebook and Twitter.
So it was publish and promote. Publish and promote.
That works, but it takes a lot of muscle (and a lot of friends!) – and it does not really endear you to Google.
Google loved my name + cleavage but not much else. My search traffic was mostly imaginary.
And search engine results are pretty important for building passive traffic. It is how you maximize the impact of your magnetic words.
Some of my old pieces, for example, are pretty good, and they’ve been read by six people: me, my mother, my sisters, Heather and Monica.
(There is a profound irony here: my most fervent supporters and early day commenters get the least of me IRL because My Blog Ate My Life. I’m sorry, my loves. It will get better once I figure out how to scale my business beyond my time.
I will have to cut and paste this into an e-mail from my mom, who had to stop reading my blog when I started writing about my sex life. I’m probably more relieved than she is. I’m also relieved that my six year old does not have independent internet access. Yet.)
But, as they are, Google will probably never send good traffic my way. These post lack tags, they’re not categorized, they don’t have descriptions…and so on. After all, I wrote and pressed publish. I didn’t do any of the backend stuff to make my blog posts search engine friendly.
Mostly because I didn’t know how to.
Learning To Blog – AFTER I Started Blogging. Whatever. It worked for Me.
In October/November, when I decided to get serious about blogging, I knew WordPress was the way I’d go. But I didn’t want to figure it out. I just wanted it done for me, so I could write and press publish, write and press publish.
So kickass web developer, Amanda Farough of Violet Minded, takes care of all of that. I tell her what I want to happen. She makes it happen and sends me invoices. We’re both happier for it, and so is my blog, which now looks and feels so much more ME.
But I still wasn’t getting a lot of search engine traffic. ‘Write and press publish’ wasn’t serving me very well. I knew that all those boxes in the WordPress interface that I left empty probably had a purpose.
They do. They really do. They want to make your blog posts kiss up to Google and friends.
I sighed and said some bad words and knew I had a little lot of work ahead of me. Fortunately I have a friend who knows ’bout this stuff.
Wherein I Extol The Virtues of Dave Doolin’s Website in A Weekend and Blog Post Engineering
Any of you who follow my Twitter stream already know that I’m obsessed with Dave DoolinWebsite in a Weekend.
We’re sort of in the same business (blogging) but Dave Doolin is terrific at all the things I’m not – which is basically everything that is NOT writing and being social.
I’m good at the outward facing stuff. I like the promotion part of blogging. I could mainline Twitter. Facebook and I are going through a bit of a rough patch, but I think we’ll pull through. Guest posts? We started off slow but now I’m all in. Commenting? We’re friends with benefits.
Most of that stuff I picked up, intuitively, and then figured out the ‘rules’ thereof from ProBlogger and Copyblogger and a little prodding from Josh Hanagarne.
And sites like ProBlogger and Copyblogger are TERRIFIC for explaining the promotion and the how-to-write a blog post part of blogging – which is all the stuff I like to do and am naturally pretty good at.
Website in a Weekend covers the ins-and-outs of writing and community-building too, but I read it because Dave Doolin teaches me the stuff that is not intuitive – like how to link to a specific paragraph or section of a blog post instead of the entire piece. Or how to structure the url (slug) of your piece for maximum keyword/SEO bang. Or how to make sure your tags, categories, description, title and slug all echo each other’s keywords and get you lots of good SEO juju.
In other words, how to do all that stuff I wasn’t doing.
(As Dave says, I was basically treating WordPress like it was an online version of Microsoft Word. Write, save/publish. And that’s it.)
And this stuff – the stuff I wasn’t doing – is pretty essential.
Look Ma, RESULTS!
The way I was blogging meant that I wrote a piece, tweeted it, and it got lots of love for a day or two and then disappeared into my dusty archives – without a way to find it again. That kind of blogging is like putting a book in a library without cataloguing it. Not smart. Not find-able.
So I got Dave to teach me how to do it. I bought his book, Blog Post Engineering, and did a couple of consulting sessions with him.
And look what happened:
When I do the things that Dave taught me, personally and in Blog Post Engineering, I get search engine traffic. That means that pieces I wrote a month ago or a week ago are continually getting hits, because the search engines can find them.
That makes me really happy – because the point of all of this writing is that people read my words.
So getting the backend right – optimizing each blog post so that the search engines can find it – means that I’m extending the life and audience of each piece I write.
And I don’t have to write for search engines (which is good, because I’m an ARTIST, doncha know, and We Don’t Do That). Instead, I write what I want and then wrap it up in tags and title attributes and anchors that help search engines find it and love it up.
To me, ‘blog post engineering’ is like interior design. In interior design, you’ve got to get the envelope right: the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the light. The basics. Once you’ve got those right, everything else builds on top of that. If you’ve got peeling plaster walls, your sofa will never really look good and the room will never feel comfortable.
Blog post engineering helps me get the envelope right so that my words can find their audience, and invite them in, continually.
I’m so glad I took the time to figure it out, and that Dave (and Blog Post Engineering) helped me do that.
It is not just because I’m kissing up to Dave (though there’s that, too). It is because Dave Doolin + Website in a Weekend + Blog Post Engineering, taught me stuff that made me a little smarter and my blog a lot better.
Just ask Amanda Farough, who I am pretty sure fell out of her chair when I – the queen of don’t tell me a damn thing about tech because I Don’t Wanna Know, just make it work and we’ll never speak of it except in hushed tones – e-mailed her a line of buggy code and said “someone has hacked my site; I found this”.
I might have told Dave this story in a giddy, “look at me! I’m so smart!” moment. He was very proud of me.
But I digress. Go check out Blog Post Engineering. I guarantee you’ll learn lots that will make you (and your blog) better.
This week I was an electrified, jangly live-wire of need.
I need to hire a VA. I need an accountant. I need to do my taxes, omgod. I need for this child to stop fighting me like I’ve snatched her last cornflake. I need for small minds to expand. I need for x, y, and z to stop calling and a, b and c to start. I need to finish all these 80% finished pieces. I need a new bulb for the headlight of my car. I need serious kissing.
Need.
My reflex – whether of habit or instinct – is to talk. To vent. To fuck. To seek approval and validation. To get a little seratonin and dopamine flowing. To get my fix and get fixed.
So I had a moment (or 8632 moments across the last 6 days) when I considered going on an ill-advised and predictably plotted date (if you know my former first date rule, then you know what I’m talkin’ about…). I considered doing regrettable things with forgettable people.
That’s my usual MO. And then, inevitably, I wake up four years later, married, with navy blue sheets, and wonder what the hell I’ve done. Because everyone knows white is the only appropriate colour for sheets.
Imagine you’re a kettle on a hot stove. Your water starts to boil and steam. You’re uncomfortable. You want that to stop – so you pop the lid and let the steam out. Phew. But the water keeps boiling…you’re just less acutely aware of it. And when you’re not aware of it, you don’t heed the signal: GET OFF THE HOT STOVE ALREADY.
That’s what complaining does for us. It lets off steam but keeps you on the stove.
And that’s what any number of reactionary coping methods do, too. Like sex.
I have no problem with sex.
What I do have a problem with is getting into wildly unsatisfying relationships – and sex often leads me there. I feel needy, someone fills up that need, and I start overlooking the ways in which we’re not right for each other or he’s not very nice to my family and next thing I know we’ve moved in together and procreated.
So my moments of urgent, psychic, vampiric need are possibly not the best time to be seeking connection.
There was a paragraph in Eat Pray Love that I recognized, intimately, from within my own shoes:
“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
Of course, there are contexts when casual sex is not that. But I don’t usually do it like that. I do it deceptively. I have casual sex wanting committed sex.
Let the heartache and psychic abbreviation commence.
And I almost did spill my tragic tale to a friend – but then I thought: no, I’m going to write it out. I’m going to put this out there to talk about this because I know that this is not only my experience. I’m going to channel all this need into creation instead of aeration. I’m going to channel instead of vent.I’m going to give.
That’s what I did. I wrote the damn thing out. I contributed. And I heard from a lot of mamas – and single mamas, and men – that I was not alone, and that what I wrote helped them.
Which is exactly what my girl, Ani Di Franco (she’s on my List) writes and sings:
So that has been my strategy for coping with urgent, greedy need. To create. To give.
It is not that I think I don’t deserve support: I do.
But I want to be less driven by my needs, emotional and sexual.
I adore emotions. They’re my language and a long, luxurious bath. Same with sex. But I don’t want to be led around by either of them, any more. I’d like to be in the driver’s seat. So I need to find a way to manage both of these delicious creatures but make sure they know that from now on, they’re in the passenger seat.
Emotions and sex and need can be great navigators: they’ll pipe up and remind me where I want to go (and with whom) and when I’m wrong, off course, or need to take a break.
I learned that from Lianne Raymond and Danielle LaPorte, who both know that authenticity and purpose and self are found in your desires.
I believe that. Desires are great guides.
But for a long time, I let my desires lead me rather than guide me, and there is a huge difference.
So, given that I’m committed to doing things differently and learning new ways to manage my own emotions, this week I backed up and thought through the frantic: what can I do? What can I do that is different? What can I do that is not vampiric, predatory, or requires a scratching post? That is not teeth and nails?
The answer came to me and the answer was Michael Buble.
Specifically, the answer was:
I promise you kid: I give so much more than I get…*
(This song makes me happy and bouncy. Michael Buble is The Wiggles for adult women.)
So that’s what I decided to do. Give more than I get. I knew it would make me feel good.
So I did a bunch of sweet stuff for other people, whole-heartedly – and not so that I would get the strokes and thank-yous, but because it just felt good to do and I needed to do it.
And surprising, unexpected things happened. I wasn’t “asking” but I was receiving.
For example, my sister read my blog, noted that my car headlight was out, called her husband and asked him to take care of it – which he did at dinner the next night, without me even asking or knowing that all of that took place.
I felt loved.
And that is really what I need. Always.
And then I started receiving poignant e-mails and phone-calls appreciating my underwater secret contributions. This touched and humbled me.
Because here I was being thanked for doing things that were, frankly, a selfish sanity-saver, and a privilege.
Because what a privilege it is to be invited in.
yes, this is an outrageously cheesy OTT video. I could have forgiven it all, though, if he had realized the whole thing with the blonde was a massive mistake and set to wooing the cashier.
…but then, I always root for the pale-skinned ravenettes with big eyes. Go figure.
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