Practiced isn’t false. Rehearsed isn’t inauthentic. Preparation is a peace-building gift to yourself and to others.
(And so is style. A friend of mine, remarking upon a mutual acquaintance who is sartorially splendid – her undeniably modern yet dandy-inspired ensembles are detailed and dapper - said: “Her style makes you feel special. Like, all of that is for me?!”)
That’s why canned speeches are like canned peaches: delicious.
Except no one needs canned peaches.
But we all need canned speeches. For business, elevators, interviews, first impressions, cocktail parties, first dates…
…and even predictably and potentially awkward conversations with intimates.
And having a practiced patter doesn’t mean you’re inauthentic. Instead, it means you’re ready to give good convo. It means you’re able to turn potentially fraught interactions into amusing and often surprising connections. It means you invite connection.
To wit, an example. A deeply personal one.
After a failed attempt to see The Help (sold out, alas) my generous mama mediated my disappointment by treating me, my house-guest and my sister for drinks. They ordered margaritas while I pondered my pregnancy-induced deprivation. I wanted alcohol. I wanted something festive adorned with a tiny paper umbrella and a sense of occasion. I may have said so (I don’t ponder deprivation with a lot of discretion) whilst resentfully muttering “I’ll probably have to have a Shirley Temple.”
And so, when the waitress took our order, I asked for her advice. I said, “I can’t have any alcohol, but I want a fancy-schmancy fun and frivolous drink. What do you recommend?”
She paused, then offered, hesitantly, “Maybe a Shirley Temple?”
I had a Shirley Temple.
There was no little stick with a cherry, no umbrella, no bedazzled orange peels. It was loudly disappointing. Or maybe that was me being loudly disappointed.
I digress.
Confession 1: I have a raw spot about being pregnant and unmarried. Not because it conflicts with my moral values or I’m disappointed that my loverloverman hasn’t offered up an entirely unromantic shotgun wedding, but because I’m continually anticipating judgement.
Confession 2: I have an even rawer spot about the imminent prospect of having three children with two different men. The unmarried thing compounds it. I feel quite exposed.
So, my darlings, do you sense a potential flashpoint?
Back to drinks. We’re talking about my girls, the baby, baby names. My sister noted that the children will have to go to different schools because, based on their paternity, my girls have a Charter right to an education in French and therefore attend a Francophone school. The new baby’s papa is not Francophone so he’ll not be allowed to attend the same school.
I hadn’t thought about that. My sister was right. She was observing reality. She was utterly inoffensive in intent and delivery, and I wasn’t put out at all. But my raw spots tingled – not from injury. From contact. As the kids these days say, that’s my shit.
And then my mom, in an equally utterly inoffensive way, noted that all of my children will have different last names. Again true, and by choice – my first two daughters have the same daddy and we deliberately chose to give them similar but different surnames. But when you add baby #3 with a third surname fathered by a different man to whom I am not married…
…and…
Raw spot. Contact. Ouch.
Confession #3: In my younger, more tempestuous days, like last month, I would have taken this observation as not a slight but a grievous injury complete with malicious intent. And I would have reared up like a wounded bear and used my fearsome claws, which is to say my words, to carve something irreversibly damaging into the psyche of my mother who intended and offered no harm.
But.
I recently read a Salon piece about a married couple, Cecilia Jethe and Christopher Ryan, who co-authored Sex at Dawn, a book examining monogamy via anthropology – and reframing some evolutionary theories of sexuality along the way, hallelujah [1] - and was struck by their sensibility. Clearly, once the book was published, they’d be doing media interviews. Obviously, since they are married and writing about monogamy, they would be asked about their own marriage. It only made sense to be prepared. So they prepared an answer that was both informative and unsalacious: “Our relationship is informed by our research.”
Brilliant. Boundary-setting. Marriage is sacred and the details of their intimate lives are theirs to share, if they care to. Or care not to.
Imagine though, if they hadn’t prepared an answer and just hoped no one would articulate the question we’re all thinking and wondering. They would have been unsurprisingly surprised and perhaps even rawly offended when the question inevitably came up, over and over again. The interviews would have been a trial. The answers would have been worse. They could have come off as prickly and reactive.
Possibly I know a lil’ sumthin’ sumthin’ about prickly and reactive and raw.
But, because I had read that piece – and because I regularly preach to my Red Shoe Blogger peeps the importance of an elevator speech – I didn’t go grizzly when people brushed by my invisible scrapes.
Instead, I quipped, “I like to err on the side of trashy.” And I laughed, for real.
And so did everyone else.
And no fragile egos were flayed in the making of a delightful evening.
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1. Yo, God Bless Darwin. Yay, evolution. However evolutionary psychology, in my extravagant opinion, is more often used to justify contemporary and hind-sightedly hierarchical gender relations than explain anything and can kiss my fat ‘n fabulous ass.
2. You don’t have to be promoting a book or a business to prepare artful, amusing and invitational responses to predictable inquiries. Having ready answers doesn’t mean you’re a great, big phony. It means you’re prepared not to be a skinless aggressor/defender who attacks and alienates the people you love.
3. Elevator Speech tip #1: Get one. You’re not self-aggrandizing, you’re giving people an opportunity to understand you. And, done heartfully and artfully, you’re also creating an invitation to meaningful conversation. You’re givomg someone an opportunity to ask questions and really connect.
4. Elevator Speech tip#2: Thanks to a tip from my magnificent friend Astarte Sands I regularly recommend the Wow, How, Now approach to my Red Shoe Bloggers. Watch it and work it – because it does work. Beautifully.
5. Elevator Speech tip #3: It’s critical. It’s how you present yourself in the world. It’s more important than a business card (I don’t even have a business card). And so it’s worth investing in. And so if you’re struggling to define and practice your magnetic, compelling, follow-up and meaning-inducing pitch, you must work with Dyana Valentine. Her Pitch Perfect (she has a wildly useful self-guided program as well as a catalytic one-on-one pitch-perfecting phone session and an intensive workshop that produces not one but several multi-purpose speeches) is, well, purrrrfect. I regularly, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically recommend her to my peeps.
And to you.
I looked into the face of faith – and grief - and it was beautiful.
And it was awful.
It is awful. Indescribably.
But she - a family friend and mother of a young man who drowned last week at a lake just 50 feet from shore, 50 feet from the eyes and arms of his waiting wife and five year old son – held my gaze and told me that in the days before his death, he was joyous, so joyful, filled with joy.
“He told me he knew his purpose. He knew what he was supposed to do. He told me he knew his mission, why he was here.”
He had a family, a son, a wife, a life.
And, finally, a purpose. And that gave him joy.
And it gives his mother peace.
She has faith he is in a better place. And that was his purpose.
And that’s probably the truth: knowing and declaring our purpose is a form of heaven.
But discovering, admitting, acknowledging, accepting and activating our purpose is not a mystical process. I suspect most of us know what we are here to do, but we tamp down that audacious vision because it’s not practical, or no one else has done it, or who are we to do it?
Or, how do we do it? How is that thing even possible?
It’s one tiny task, one insightful inquiry, one compelling truth at a time. As my sweetie says of commitment, it’s not one grand decision that alters the sweep of time (though that resolution can be a crucial ingredient), it’s the daily decisions. It’s the decision to wake up and get up every day and do it, even though you’re tired, it’s hard, and there’s no glory (yet).
And that thing might not be externally glorious. You might never be lauded for it. There are millions of working poor living heroically, honestly, persistently, without applause. There are frustrated, frazzled parents who get by on next-to-no cheerleading.
But doing your best by your family is magnificent. And that can be a purpose.
That’s a truth I’ve been fighting about myself. I’m a blazing feminist and all-out champion of women owning themselves, their ambitions, their careers. I’m lit up by stories of women CEOs, pioneers and trailblazers. But all I want to do is adore my partner, raise my babies, and write (preferably best-sellers, but any form of writing for an audience will do, marvelously). I don’t take business or money or even career that seriously. I’m serious about developing my craft but that’s a minor occupation in comparison to my devotion to my man.
And that feels like a shameful thing to say: that I am, at heart and with primal purpose, the woman whom, in my twenties, I despaired of, criticized, and tried desperately not to be. Motherfucking Betty Crocker. With a pen.
But that’s who I am. Lover. Mother. Writer. And knowing that is knowing my purpose and there’s expansive, directive clarity there.
And faith.
Because we only have a limited number of days and years – my friend’s son only had 31 - on this earth, in this life.
Let’s live them well and fully. Divinely. With purpose.
There are a few qualities I abstractly covet but don’t get. Or have. Actually there’s a long list of admirable qualities I lack, but those I comprehend and am therefore comfortable with my virtuous incompetence. These ones, however, have long mystified me:
- Patience.
- Good intentions.
Patience
When I think about patience, I think of long-suffering, indomnitable, admirable women. Ang San Suu Kyi, Mother Theresa [1]. They will not be moved. They will not be removed from their missions. They suffer indignities, confront darkness, and voluntarily, necessarily live circumscribed lives in shadows and hospices and homes-cum-jails. They sacrifice luxuries, freedom, their lives. They wait. They wait it out. They wait out their oppressors - disease, dictators - even though they themselves may not witness the curve they bent in the long arc of justice. They endure – even after death. They patiently coexist with and outwit despair.
And so I despair: despite my elaborate ideals, I will never be a good advocate of anything except The Good Life.
Because I like to get laid, eat bon-bons (that’s a lie, candy does nothing for me, I’m trying to convince you of my frivolity), sleep late, write lots, buy pretty things. And I need to do it all right now.
And so, until recently, I didn’t get patience and thought I would never get to patience. Patience was another country. Patience was for big causes, practiced by women bigger and better than me.
And then maybe I had an epiphany. I say maybe because it was a while ago so I forget exactly what triggered it but it’s likely I was mentally reviewing my surprisingly epic history of patience with my man. It’s not consistent with my customary romantic practices or inherent inclinations. Usually with relationships, I end them. I throw my hands in the air and a lot of curse words into the ring and then I demonize him to my friends and several thousand followers. You do this too, yes?
(Pssssst…don’t do this: “hands in the air, “in the ring”. Those are cliched descriptions/dying metaphors and I specifically teach people NOT to allow these things to slip past their editing eyes. ‘Tis lazy phrasing.)
So. My fledgling patience. It’s so noticeably new and disconcertingly enduring that my man admiringly refers to me as his “persistent bitch”. I tingle with pride. I dig the possessive and I am a persistent bitch. I’ve never given up on us even though we regularly experience defining moments when I’m ready and he’s only, barely, soon-to-be willing. And that shit tears me up sometimes. This patience gig isn’t easy.
And that’s it.
I always thought patience must be easy. Mother Theresa and other smug saints and martyrs were blessed with a natural, apparently effortless patience they beatifically oozed everywhere.
What I was aiming for wasn’t patience but ease and fucked if there’s no short-cut to character.
Because, yo, patience is hard. It requires faith, mostly in your own resilience. But you can do it.
Even I’m doing it. True story.
Good Intentions
Good intentions are a rule of thumb and like that zombie expression (it’s dead but won’t die, dammit), it’s so oft-repeated it’s forgettable, unexaminable. What does rule of thumb even mean? What are good intentions, anyway, other than a platitude and an excuse you offer when you fuck up? “I had good intentions” is an adult version of a seven year old’s “I didn’t mean to.”
Yet people I respect, adore, admire – gurus, women of experience – write and say and insist that intention is everything.
Which, despite my good intentions (ahem), I don’t get. Because the good idea fairy doesn’t pay jack [2]. Neither do good intentions, or, for that matter, potential. Potential is alluring and seductive but realization is climax and communion.
So intentions, even good ones, mean nothing to me.
However, intentionality, a term that my friend and insistent truth-teller Ronna Detrick bandies about with great intensity and purpose, is the shiz.
Intentionality is conscious design, purpose, and realization. It’s craft. It’s the way I (usually) approach writing and it’s the method I teach. It’s editing. You can edit your art and your life. It’s the same damn thing.
Here’s what I mean. When I write, it’s easy. I sit down and it flows. It’s usually pretty good. Sometimes I can get away with publishing the raw goods.
But I don’t do that often. Most often, I re-examine my prose with two levels of intentionality.
- The story I just told: what is it that I’m trying to say?
- How can I say it with more art, invention, surprise?
And then, to serve my theme, I mercilessly expunge the lazy phrasing, dead metaphors and cliched descriptions. I find inventive, inverted, perverted ways to express sometimes standard ideas. I extend metaphors with surprising word choice. It’s an exacting, microscopic process. The result can be luminous.
Lots of people are potentially good writers. Lots of people are naturally good writers. Lots of people loosely intend to write good stuff. But great writers are meticulous, intentional editors. They realize their potential and then speed past it to park at actualization.
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2. According to Google Analytics, ”the good idea fairy doesn’t pay jack” is an actual search term that led someone to my site. I smell a t-shirt slogan.
2.1 These footnotes are a tribute to my new imaginary boyfriend Peter Orner and seven long years of undergraduate and graduate political science training, all of which is to say, I adore footnotes. It’s another way to squeak in musings, asides, and direct reader addresses. Like young girls in shabby dresses, parentheses and dashes, they do get weary.
2.2. And bloggers, therefore, especially ze Queens of intimate address and direct conversation, could and should use footnotes more often. Arwyn’s doin’ it…and hot damn did I just footnote my footnotes?
2.3. If you wanna use footnotes in WordPress – and darling, you do, and I’ll tell you why in three seconds, approximately the length of time it will take you to finish this sentence – try the FD Footnotes plugin.
2.4. If your friends are whispering in the next room, do you stop what you’re doing and listen harder? Do you find the longer you talk to someone, the more you reveal – even when you don’t mean to? Used semi-unconventionally (look at how Peter Orner uses them), that’s the gotta-hear-this tone footnotes can convey in writing. And blogging.
2.5. Semi-relatedly, studies of effective sales letters and newsletters reveal that the most-often and closely read line is the “P.S.”. (Stephen Elliott is a promiscuously effective post scripter. Sign up for his newsletter and you’ll see.) Why? Because it’s like a whisper…and it’s the last line. Eavesdroppers (aka “humans”) and skimmmers pay attention.
2.6. And that’s why you should use footnotes and postscripts in your blog posts, sales copy and newsletters. Also it’s just wacky. I’m a big fan of all things wackadoo.
2.7. Like The Rumpus, it’s newsletter, content, contributors and ever-refreshing, rotating tagline. Delish.
Scattered, fragmented, fractured, frenzied, spinning, doing-doing-doing and doing too much: it’s a great sign.
It’s a sign that you’re being practical.
It’s a sign your vision is so large, grandiose and wildy impractical that you’ve backed away from it because how do you make a living at that?
(Please tell me you viscerally resisted agreeing with that last line.)
It’s a sign that you have a calling. (Callings are rarely practical.)
I’m being unfair. I dig practical. We’re homies from way back and Practical has almost always had my back.
You know this drumbeat: Ditch your job. It’s a prison. It’s shackling your artistic impulses.
Well my trumpet has a clarion call answer to that:
HAH!
IF your job IS a prison and it’s killing you, then by all means ditch it. Just have a way to eat. Starving won’t serve your art.
Sometimes it is better to quit. Better to exit the profession that’s killing you and find a temporary gig that’ll keep the bills paid while your Real Career begins to blossom. Better to paint all day and sling beer in a bar on Friday nights than serve time five days a week as a ___________.
BUT.
Having a day job, having an interim career – or a decades-long one – that keeps you fed and clothed and watered and well WILL serve your art if you let it. I find freedom in security. I created a business and grew my skills as an artist while working five days a week in an office job. And knowing that each month my bills were paid (and then some) is what allowed me the freedom to create. It also allowed me to buy books and tools and courses and coaching and childcare.
A moment of reverence, please, for children and childcare.
It also gave me something to push against. It gave me structure. After the kids went to bed, I had two hours a night, five days a week to create. And that was it. If I let those hours waste away, they were indeed wasted. They were all I had. And like a stubborn boyfriend who warns you that he’s like a train and only goes in one direction – forward – once those available hours are gone they won’t come back.
And so I cancelled my cable and most of my social life and I got down to it. Writing. Creating. Learning. Getting better. Getting a business together. Every night.
So: you don’t have to quit your day job to be an artist or an entrepreneur. You can do both or all three until someone in the threesome demands more – and offers more.
Offering more, and being more is an answer. Doing more just to do more is not.
Contradictory, yes? Perhaps even paradoxical, since I just said, do more. Do your day job and your art and your business all at once.
Here’s when doing more is effective and productive: when all three serve your Big Blue Sky Mission.
When developing your skills as an artist and entrepreneur requires a certain level of security and solvency, your job can be an act of devotion. It can be consistent with your Big Blue Sky Mission. And when that’s the case, all your activities, your doing, your busy-ness cohere. They’re foundational. They’re serving – and subordinate to – your calling.
And here’s the thing. Six months of twice-daily Red Shoe Blogger sessions with driven dreamers and ambitious revolutionaires and mild-mannered malcontents (oh how I adore the malcontents: they quietly insist on sitting in the front seat and resist scaling back their wildly impractical dreams of justice) has taught me something profound:
You already know what to do.
But the magnitude of your magnificent vision intimidates you. Or it doesn’t offer a clear money-making path. Or it includes a controversial element that is daring, destabilizing, taboo-breaking.
And that element is essential.
And so there will be fallout. It’s predictable. You can predict it. Your neighbour will be astonished. Your best friend will be scandalized. Your mother will send you concerned e-mails. Your sister will raise her eyebrows. Your lovers – all of the former – will worry. The haters – and oh God, sometimes your lovers and haters are one and the same – will hate.
And your accurate predictions force you – you think – to neuter your dynamic, daring, generative mission into something practical and palatable.
Because if you commit to kissing the sky you will abandon safe ground. It will be impossible to please everyone. You will polarize. You will pioneer. You will often be alone with only your vision to comfort you. You will spend long low times in The Dip, otherwise known as depression. Financial. Mental. Social.
But you will do that thing only you can do.
And you already know what it is.
Give yourself permission. To dream, to do, to dream, to do, to do too much for your dreamy dream. Devote all your practical doings to your wildly impractical dream.
That’s what I do.
———————————
This piece is dedicated to an extraordinary Red Shoe Blogger who heard – really heard – and then acted on the hard and true thing I told her: that she was fracturing her efforts and needed to focus all of her activites – even if they continued to be many – on realizing her Big Blue Sky Mission. You can do many things and flounder and hope one is a winning lottery ticket and, well, you know how that usually turns out.
Or.
You can be and do many things – and yes, sometimes you have to – but you must ensure that all your activities and efforts interlock into a wall that holds up your big blue sky.
And that’s the test around doing too much. Only do too much if all the doing is an act of devotion to your dream.
Hey you. Artist. Entrepreneur. Earner. Do-gooder. Seeker.
Let’s talk about your money.
Money is deeply personal. Our relationship with our money is directly connected to our relationship with our creativity. Getting right with money means that you can get right with your contribution to the world. Getting right with money means you can better practice your art.You can create more. Offer more. Give more.
More abundance, more art, more you. Money is CENTRAL.
Faith: that the people commanding the highest prices will not hoard their wealth nor will they flaunt it. They will use it.
You will use it.
I want you to be one of the people who use their wealth because I trust you and I love you.
Faith: that the value of what I provide far outstrips the price I charge. I’m not extracting a luxurious lifestyle from unsuspecting clients; I’m delivering services and products that help people earn and create more than they pay.
Your gain is not your customer’s loss.
Faith: in your abilities and talents; in your customers and their circumstances; in a system that is changing more quickly than we can keep up with.
Faith. Fear.
Our relationship with money is often just that: we want more but fear what will happen when we get it. So we keep our prices low, we don’t offer for sale all that we could, we “neglect” to tell people we’re in business at all. We leave money on the table and, with it, our ability to be truly feeling, creative, and in-our-own-power. It’s a nasty cycle and it’s not all about money.
It’s about our fear of greatness and fear of all we can truly become. It’s about our fear of the greatness we can bring into the world.
The antidote: faith. In yourself and your abilities. In your customers. In your art and your contribution.
Because once you believe – and this isn’t an airy-fairy wish-it-were-so affirmation, but a declaration borne of experience, offer and contribution – that the value of what you provide far outstrips the price you charge, money gets easy. Faith-full.
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Friend Much by Theilr
You know those magnetic poem puzzles? The box of words you arrange and rearrange on your refrigerator door?
This piece is that. I extracted and rearranged almost every single word and phrase from Tara Gentile’s 79 page guide/practical money manifesta, The Art of Earning.
(And so if this found poem/money manifesta affected you and your urge to do and be and earn more, imagine the full impact of the guide, itself.)
In the last several months – when I turned my tanking business around by fueling it with oranges, offerings and shiny gold coins – I’ve wondered if we (yes “we”, we’re definitely in this together) get comfortable with broke. If we stay at the survival line because we know how to live there. We know how to cope with lack and so lack the skills to manage lots.
I’ve wondered if earning more so you can do more requires giving yourself permission to ask for more.
Mostly, of yourself.
And that’s what Tara’s The Art of Earning is about.
(I know because I contributed to it. I’m promoting it. I’m telling you because I believe in it - and in Tara Gentile’s ethics and business coaching acumen.)
The Art of Earning is about more. More art, more earning, more faith.
If you’ve ever been embarrassed to post your offer at the bottom of a blog post; hesitant to charge people for your services – hell, charge at all – or starved your art and your business and yourself because you’re undercharging, you need this guide. We all do. The Art of Earning is about getting your head right so your money can follow. And it’s for you, dear Artist, Entrepreneur, Do-Gooder, Seeker, Contributor, Earner, Sharer.
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image credit: Friend Much by Theilr
Severian loves Thecla. Forever. And not even death will part them. After her suicide – she was a prisoner, he a torturer, and he smuggled her a knife so she could both end her suffering and choose her own fate - he ‘ingested’ a piece of her body so she would become a part of him.
In that world – a reality imagined and written by Gene Wolfe in his four volume novel, The Book of the New Sun – that act allowed a person’s memories and shades of their personality to live on in another body. It is a grotesque, gorgeous act of desperate grief, love, respect. Commitment. To the bone. Of the bone.
—————————
When I sent a note to 537 (yes, my list is that small) of my fiercest friends and allies announcing that I’m currently incubating another human, I did not do it in this tone:
Awesome! Amazeballs! A unicorn just slid down a rainbow and gave me a cupcake! Wheeee!
Instead, I detailed my unconventional, sometimes wrenching and now wonderful love affair with my baby’s daddy.
Because I wanted to tell the truth. Yes, we’re in love. Yes, we’re committed. Yes, we’re having a baby and setting up house. But it wasn’t always a charmed road.
What relationship – friendship, parental, romantic – is uncomplicated by mixed feelings, profound acts of tenderness and betrayal? Is there anyone you love whom you have not failed in some minute or monumental way?
Yet our stories of courtship are often told in one key: happy. Crinoline and garters and place settings, oh my!
————————-
Of course I’m happy. And of course I’m sad. When you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to so many more.
——————–
Oh, I want him. Then, now, always. And I wanted a baby. In a year or two. Maybe.
——————-
There’s a reason I’m telling you this and it isn’t catharsis or confession. It’s life.
Life is a composition, a song written old and new, every day. An alm of ambivalence.
We seek coaches. We seek clarity. We seek to be the hedgehog and not the fox and see only one thing.
But choosing your One Thing doesn’t mean you will feel only one thing. Clarity is accompanied by exhultation and grief. Clarity is ruthless, mercenary, affirming choice. One thing over many.
This thing. Your thing.
——————–
This – my lover, the wounds we’ve inflicted on each other, the tender poultices we’ve applied, our baby – isn’t a path I’d trade. I wouldn’t want to walk another with anyone else. In the last year, I grew. I grew into nomaddawhat. I ground up commitment, mixed it in my life cocktail, and drank deeply.
——————
And it’s not just life. It’s art. Your art.
Someone - it is variously attributed to Gene Fowler, Douglas Adams and Ernest Hemingway – once wrote,
Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Similarly, someone else - probably Hemingway – said,
Writing is easy: open a vein and bleed on paper.
Or: live and drink deeply. Eat your love and your loves. Wind them into your DNA and then write them. Write your alms of ambivalence.
—————
PS This piece was inspired by last night’s class in my Artful, Heart-full Blogging Course.
PPS If you want to live and write (and blog!) with more art, heart and soul, please join me in the Summer or Fall Session of Artful, Heart-full Blogging. They’re my last two offerings of the year and for a good long while after that. (As of November, I’m surrendering to babydom for the indefinite future.)
PPPS “Alms of Ambivalence” is a phrase I lifted from Ronna Detrick’s Beauty that Aches. Ronna is in the current Artful, Heart-full Blogging cohort and wrote ”Beauty That Aches” (as well as ”It Could Be Worse“ which is equally stunning, you must read it) using some techniques I teach in my class. I read that phrase and was smitten, instantly. This feels like success – for both of us. Thank you, Ronna.
“That’s your stuff,” said Joanie. She has a knack for delivering unwaveringly uncomfortable yet tender truths.
I spent a long, long time – a life – with a man who survived war and torture and wrongful imprisonment and ethnic persecution. Who witnessed atrocities. Who buried bodies knowing when his horrific task was complete, he’d be the last corpse in that mass grave. Who wasn’t the last body to lie in that hole and, of the dozens of men whose last journey was a one-way trip to the killing field, was one of only two men who made the grim, guilty return trip to prison. Who survived. Who, back in the jail, caught the eye of a wife demanding, pleading with her husband’s captors – “police”, “soldiers”, “bureaucrats”, sadistic, soul-dead thugs just doing their jobs and then returning home each night to their wives and children – to know the whereabouts of her man.
He knew where her husband was. From inside his cell, he held her gaze until tears streamed down her face. She said nothing. She knew. She left.
He survived. He survived that day because a Red Cross worker registered his existence the week before - which meant if he ‘disappeared’ there would be questions. And every day before and after, he survived because he was lucky, and he was wily.
And he drove me crazy. He circled around safe Canadian parking lots for eternities, passing up perfectly fine spaces for what? The one nearest the exit that he could back into and therefore drive out of in a hurry. Should he need to. In restaurants, he insisted on having his back to the wall so he could see out the windows and have a clear view of all the doors. No one could surprise him. He tensed up at the sight of skytrain police, who aren’t really even police, at all. They can give you stern lectures and semi-stiff fines and maybe the stink-eye for not having the right ticket. They can ask you to get off the train.
Public places, he scanned for signs of trouble. He knew every car and man and dog that belonged in the neighbourhood and on our street. He knew what time neighbours came and went and recognized the sound of a ‘foreign’ car from a block away.
Because that’s how he survived, in another place, where police and soldiers have permission to prey on the people they ought to be protecting.
And it wasn’t just men in uniforms who were a threat. It could be your neighbour, who told his soldier friend you had a big TV and small sisters, and then that soldier-friend would come with a few of his soldier friends in an army jeep to your house in the middle of what would be a long and terrifying night. It was a person you’d known all your life, invited to your parties, shared your beer with on a Friday evening, who said to an official, I know a family who speaks Swahili. They’re from the East. I think they’re Tutsi spies. And left the office a few dollars richer.
There were conspiracies. There was betrayal. There was danger. There were signs, and he knew how to read them.
And so he was looking for the signs, always, everywhere – even in bland Canada. And he found them. Others found them too. We knew a woman certain that the apparently Hutu student on the bus to UBC was looking at her and plotting to kill her. She knew he’d said something to the driver and any minute he’d pull over, lock the doors, and they’d finish what had started in Rwanda, continued in Congo, and undoubtedly followed her to Canada. After that, she couldn’t take the bus. Later she couldn’t eat at other people’s houses – brunches and dinners and kiddie birthday parties – lest they’d poisoned her food.
It wasn’t paranoia. It wasn’t even wrong – even here, a whole family could find harm at the fiery hands of a son’s friend. But most often it was post-traumatic stress. It was a soul-scarred sensitivity to signs. It was the same hyperattention that saved their lives two years and a lifetime before.
The signs were the same, but they meant something new in a new country. In a new context.
And isn’t just veterans and refugees and survivors of trauma who read signs and find danger where there is none. We all journey - scarred, experienced, innocent - to different countries and carry the meanings of one culture to the next. Even in our imagination. Especially in our imagination.
And in relationships.
Take the man whose last partner betrayed him. Cheated on him. He saw signs, and found a way to confirm his suspicion.
Now, in his next relationship, he looks for signs. He scans the contents of the bathroom trash can. He takes a close look at the sheets. He notes the call that doesn’t get picked up in his presence…and he thinks, maybe. And the last time he thought “maybe” it was sure.
And so he thinks his partner is cheating on him. But she’s not, and if he could see inside her head and her heart, he’d see his name in a continuously playing and replaying loop. There is only him. There is no space – and no need – in that divine harmony for someone else to play.
Sometimes it isn’t the external circumstances or true intentions of other people that trigger us. Sometimes our interpretation isn’t objective reality. Sometimes it is our own stuff. Sometimes the safe harbour – the secure country, the truly loving relationship – is where we let our gleaming-eyed demons and traumas out of our heads and into the water and hope with help and time and patience they will finally swim away.
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