I am preparing to start the blog challenge/carnival/meme/throwdown of a lifetime, over here.

It will be called LIFE MORE AWESOME (in a direct challenge to all my perfectionistic control-freak grammar bugaboos). It will involve weekly memes and daily (or at least semi-daily) posts here about related topics. The weekly meme will vary: it might be a quiz, or a series of personal questions, or a writing prompt, or an art project. (I’m going to be running an art therapy group for tweens for six weeks this summer, so it’s possible a lot of it will be art projects.)

But no matter what it is, there will be two common threads:

1. Every post or project will have something to do with making our lives more awesome. It might not be immediately apparent why or how, but it will be totally life-changing.

2. Each meme will be something you’re invited to share (or share about having done) on your own blogs that week, and you’ll get kickbacks beyond whatever you personally get out of doing that work.

Usually, the point of stuff like this is that you get to meet other bloggers, get a little more community, and also that more people discover your blog. That’ll be a part of this; I think I’ll post weekly round-ups of everyone who’s shared their stuff, and I’d like to make an RSS feed where people can read any post that’s part of Life More Awesome.

But also, I’m thinking about doing contests. So, for example, maybe everyone would get to score points – like, one for every comment on a LMA post here, one for every weekly meme they participate in, one for every comment they post on someone else’s meme that week, one for helping spread the word with a LMA badge on their blog or something – and people could win prizes at the end. I’d like to do something like give prizes for highest number of points, highest number in each category (most comments vs most posts vs most comments elsewhere), and also for a randomly selected participant or two. Maybe even for most participation in each of the TWELVE parts of… what I want to start calling a quest. It’s a quest now!

A quest for AWESOMENESS!

You might love this quest if you:

Someone in our youth group at work asked me last week, “What do grownups do to have fun?”

It brought back vivid memories of having the same question myself. I didn’t care about or understand adult life when I was a kid, but as I faced young adulthood I started wondering. What did grownups do that was so special? Weren’t they supposed to get to have so much more fun and do such cooler things than kids? What was I going to get to do? When was I going to get invited to the party?

I think this is a huge part of the cycle of abuse and addiction. I mean, there’s even a whole 12-step program devoted to people figuring out how to have fun and joy in their life: Workaholics Anonymous. Basically, as I understand it, it works like this:

Abuse, and dysfunction, separate us from ourselves. We get separated from what we feel, and need, and want, when it becomes clear that those feelings won’t be respected by those around us or that those needs and wants aren’t going to get met, for whatever reason.

Where that gets mixed up with addiction is when we try to fill that hole between us and our needs/wants/feelings with something else: TV, work, drugs, food, sugar, sex, whatever. Our needs – and that pretty much invariably, in my experience, includes our need for fun, for fulfilling, joyful experiences – continue to go unmet. And on top of that, whatever we’re using instead is turning into an addictive spiral that puts more and more space between us and our feelings. Which makes it harder and harder to know what we actually want and get it.

I used to have the worst time figuring out what my hobbies were. I would look at all those online profiles, on dating sites or journaling sites or wherever, that asked me what my hobbies were. And I’d just draw a blank. I knew I liked writing, but that was about it – and mostly I wasn’t writing, anyway. And I didn’t want to put “reading” or “watching TV,” because even then I knew that to me those sounded like the most boring, passive “hobbies” ever. I mean, I liked them, but weren’t hobbies supposed to be interests that had some active part in my life? Maybe if I were MAKING a TV show….

And I just couldn’t come up with the time or energy or interest or know-how to do anything different. I was just marooned out there without a good sense of what I wanted or how to get it. Which is a pretty common stage of abuse or effect of abuse, I think. It’s a natural step after leaving the abusive situation – it’s the “So… now what?? Isn’t my life supposed to be different?!”

I thought I was going to make this a list of things that I think are fun. But I also want to write about how I got to the point of being able to identify fun things for myself and do them. So many choices! I’ll do them all eventually, probably this week, of course…. Fun things first, I think. I realized recently that I was looking at a free day and coming up with tons of things I wanted to do, things that were fun and interesting to me and which I actually try to do regularly now, and I thought: OH! HOBBIES!!  Here are some now: tune in later for the next installment of this story!

1. 1. Gardening: messing around in the dirt, watering, watching things grow
   2. Preserving: making stuff out of what is growing!
   3. Being in nature: barefoot usually, listening to birds, meeting trees, seeing crazy plants and animals and insects and places I never knew existed
   4. Cooking: all kinds of stuff, anything I ever wanted to eat and never believed I was capable of making – and things I invent myself
   5. Writing: like now!
   6. Painting: especially fruit and plants
   7. Drawing: whatever comes to mind
   8. Yoga: I like this a lot, and I was doing it about every day before I started this job! I am very bendy.
   9. Learning about abuse and addiction: and working on my own recovery, which is a constant string of mind-blowing realizations and discoveries and excitement
   10. Dancing: especially in my own living room
   11. Playing with my cats: they are each insanely individual, loving, bizarre geniuses. also: very very soft.
   12. Reading: yes, it’s true. and it seems more of an actual hobby, like, more ACTIVE than watching TV
   13. Hanging out with my friends: especially doing karaoke, playing board games, going out to eat, wandering around stores looking at shiny things, and talking about stuff.

This is a reading/blogging challenge put on by Renay over at Bottle of Shine. Basically, people list ten books they love, and/or go pick out three books to read from other people’s lists, and then review the ones they read.

Like most blog challenges, the benefits are that we get to discover new blogs, meet new people, have our blogs discovered by new people, get some writing inspiration, and in this case, read some awesome new-to-us books.

So, after much thought I came up with ten books that I LOVE that are in some way connected to this blog’s theme: abuse, addiction, and recovery. I think this list reflects how that theme plays out in real life: they’re about learning how we work inside, how the abuse in the world and in most of our families affects us on a very practical and everyday level, and how to make our lives freaking AWESOME. That last part, pretty much, is the core, the essence, and the damn point. In fact, I guess if I thought there was a question about “why we are all here anyway,” that would be my answer: to understand and love ourselves and each other (but especially ourselves) in order to make our lives freaking AWESOME, heLLO.

I highly, highly recommend reading each of these anyway. Obviously, if you have I would love to hear about it, and if you have reviewed them somewhere (including in one disgruntled or excited sentence in your blog) I will be thrilled to link thereforunto.

1. Repressed Memories: A Journey To Recovery From Sexual Abuse, by Renee Fredrickson
I’ve written about this book before, and I will probably write about it again. The very nature of repressed memories means that we can’t just assume we don’t have any. Everyone should learn about what they are, how they work, why people repress things, what indicates that someone has repressed memories, how to distinguish between memories and fears, and (my favorite part, maybe) how dysfunctional families work and how people’s roles in them affect the rest of their lives. It’s just an incredibly well-informed and information-packed book for something that looks so tiny!

2. Sensual Living, by Claire Lloyd
Not about abuse, but a great help to me in my recovery. Sensual Living is about the tactile, beautiful, sensual delights of the objects around us, with a specific aim of showing readers how to make their surroundings more enjoyable to each of the five physical senses. It’s very calming and nurturing to read, and even more so to live. From a survivor standpoint, it’s a wonderful tool to use in overturning the deprivation we often bring to our living environments without realizing it.

3. Wishcraft: How To Get What You REALLY Want, by Barbara Sher and Annie Gottlieb
This book is fucking brilliant. It’s divided into two portions: the first part helps the reader explore what they always wanted to do, what their passions are, and especially what interests and talents they have smothered because of, basically, abuse, or for any reason at all. It explains very clearly that (and how) we are each born geniuses, and how that potential gets smooshed away inside many of us. The second and I think part is about getting what we want. She is incredibly creative in this. My favorite angle is that we often don’t have to wait to become rich or famous or work for years to become actors or pilots or whatever our dreams are; we can figure out what we actually want from that goal (to travel, to be admired, to perform, etc.) and see what ways there are of getting that sooner. And then she outlines how to do even that. She’s just merciless in breaking down exactly how to do it every step of the way, which is my favorite kind of writing.

4. Facing Codependency, by Pia Mellody, Andrea Wells Miller, and J. Keith Miller
I admit it: I haven’t read much of this. I’m familiar with it, though, and I love it from afar. I love, especially, the way that they explain very clearly how abuse causes codependency, and its relation to other addictions, and what it is. These are really important points that should be taught in the most basic psychology classes, which instead many therapists and other mental health professionals are absolutely clueless about. And I love books like this that break down a complicated subject into a series of often mind-blowing yet simple links.

5. At The Speed of Life: A New Approach to Personal Change Through Body-Centered Therapy, by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks
This book changed my life. How often do I get to say that? Well, every time I mention this book, anyway, so I guess as often as I want! It’s written by a husband-and-wife team of somatic therapists, aimed at other therapists but with plenty of tools and stories for lay readers – and I have to admit that I love learning about how professionals in any profession think and what they know that we aren’t supposed to. The basic subject matter here is how to recognize when memories and emotions are trapped in our bodies, and how to (safely) “get them out.” To that end, they’ve filled the book with fantastic breathing techniques, ways to explore the feelings in our bodies, detailed explanations of verbal and physical “flags” that signal repressed feelings and memories… it’s just crammed with helpful stuff that everyone can use.

6. Double Vision: A Travelogue of Recovery from Ritual Abuse, by Anna Richardson
I sort of think this should go at the very top, “no particular order” or not. This book is gorgeously written, magnificently clear and full of hope and beauty and recovery rising from the chaotic wreckage of addiction and ritual abuse. Abuse writing is one of those genres where books sometimes seem to get published more because there’s a need for books about abuse than because there’s a need for that particular book; Double Vision, I think uniquely, could fit on any list of well-crafted, luminous writing in or outside of its genre. It’s about humanity and pain and joy and growth, in a way that transcends any concern of whether a particular reader will identify with the specific subject matter.

7. Workaholics Anonymous Book of Recovery
This might be my favorite book-to-do-with-twelve-step-stuff. It has lots of personal stories, different experiences with and tools for working the steps around work issues (and just in general) and a TON of other helpful tools. Every time I open it I learn something new about having fun, about balancing work and the rest of life, about how work issues can play out in any area of my life, or just about myself personally. Do I have to point out that work issues are basically perfectionism, codependence, and shame, that those three things are basically the same anyway, and that that all comes from abuse? So information like this is vital. And who can resist an approach to it that often boils down to “recovery is about joy and fun”?

8. When Society Becomes an Addict, by Anne Wilson Schaef
Even though, as I’ve said, I think Schaef missed the crucial question of WHY addiction is the way it is (that is, that the signs of addiction are also the effects of abuse), she wrote some intense and explosive stuff about it twenty-plus years ago. If you want a dead-on look at how addicts (abuse survivors) behave, how that looks when it isn’t about drugs or alcohol, and how it looks when it’s on the huge group or governmental level, check this out. If you want a dead-on look at how abuse affects people’s lives and why it doesn’t really help in the long term to get to “it doesn’t bother me anymore that I was abused” and then sell yourself short by taking off (as many therapists suggest their clients should do), likewise, check this out. (Or, more felicitously: if you want to get a good idea of what the effects are that we all get to deal with and see a little bit of how great and unimaginably different life is without them, read this book.)

9. To Be Healed By The Earth, by Warren Grossman
I really like books on alternative healing – really far-out (for us now anyway), wacky, hippie-sounding, energy-work alternative healing – written by people with serious medical degrees and decades of mainstream medical practice. Not only is it refreshing, but it often means the information is studied more carefully because they’re used to thinking analytically and applying hardcore principles of science and logic to what they do. At least, that’s the case with this book. It’s extremely practical, it doesn’t expect the reader to believe a word of it unless it works for them, and it is super-clear at every point about where it is coming from and what to do to see if it works for you. The basic premise is that spending time with nature helps us heal and feel more grounded and energized; I suppose that doesn’t sound very radical, but having a simple system of meditations and ways of lying or sitting or standing with trees and the ground, and talking about how this brought him back from death’s door, is both radical and wildly helpful to anyone recovering from anything, whether it’s physical or psychological – and of course, almost everything is both.

10. One Day My Soul Just Opened Up: 40 Days and 40 Nights Toward Spiritual Strength and Personal Growth, by Iyanla Vanzant
Spirituality is a huge component of recovery from abuse. Particularly when we are little, our abusers often seem like the mainstream image of “God”: they’re these huge creatures who seem to end up around where the sky is, from whence all food and shelter and safety and love come – and anger and judgment and abandonment and tragedy. Maybe the most important part of recovery is learning to separate our abusers from a loving source of guidance, whether we think of that as a God or Goddess or our intuition or the universe or love or some other wild thing. Because until then, our decisions are all informed at least partly by the burden of shame from the abuse, the crazy voices in our heads telling us that we don’t know what we are doing or that we need to be perfect or that we always fuck up or that something terrible will happen if we get another job/relationship/whatever.

To Be Healed By The Earth is one way to explore that spiritual area; twelve-step programs offer another space in which people often explore how all this plays out for them; One Day My Soul Just Opened Up is a third option. It is laid out as a series of daily readings, meditations, and writing exercises that explore issues just like this and many more. It’s basically a deep exploration of our relationships with spirituality and ourselves and others, done in about 20-30 minutes a day for a couple of months. (Plus, afterwards you have all this writing and highlighting and wild inspired or angry scribbling to look back at and see how far you have come!)

Thirteen Things about Traveling for Fun

They’re experimenting with giving us topics every week over at the Thursday Thirteen site. I hope it’s not mandatory. but I think I can bend a lot of them around to suit our topic anyway. And, you know, one of my mottoes in life now is that when you become an adult, almost nothing is mandatory. Even in childhood, a lot more things are choices than we think (or are told). This week, they ask for recommendations of thirteen places to visit. Fortunately, travel has been a huge part of recovery for me.

I’ve noticed, when reading about 12-step stuff, that a lot of people in Debtors Anonymous – that is, people who are working on having a better relationship with money – share incredible stories about how much deprivation and chaos they used to live in and how now they are going off to spend six months in France, or getting all their expenses paid to visit Brazil, or finding scholarships and grants to travel around the world studying whatever they want. Going from deprivation to great abundance and freedom.

One of the major effects of abuse is to live in chaos and deprivation. We learn that we are not enough, that nothing we ever do will be good enough – whether it is because we are directly given this message by our families, or because although they accept our school and work performance nothing seems to stop the abuse at home. We learn that we can never be good enough.

This is also part of the guilt and shame that children take on when they are abused. Young children, especially, are developmentally supposed to think that they are the center of the universe. They’re supposed to be the center of their parents’ universe. Unfortunately, when all they can understand is that the world revolves around them, and they are abused in some way, they have to assume that they did something to cause or deserve it. After all, as far as they can tell, everything else that happens in the world is about them. So, they subconsciously reason, if they caused something this terrible to happen to them, they must have deserved it; they must be as bad, deep down, as their experience of abuse. Or else why would it have happened to them?

This is of course totally ridiculous and illogical, but what more do you want from a little kid? Being wild and ridiculous and illogical and making huge creative leaps is kind of their job, or at least their specialty. The problem is that these ideas form part of our psyche, part of the way we learn to approach the world, from a young age and for a long time. Sometimes we never do learn to question them. We’ve bought into them for so long, reinforced them so often and had them reinforced so well by others, that it is terrifying to consider that they might be complete and utter bullshit.

And for a lot of people, travel becomes an area of deprivation. We underearn and claim we could never afford to go anywhere. We overwork, filling our time with errands or work or other responsibilities so that we just never seem to find the time to travel. We hoard our resources, stacking up money in the bank and going without the good stuff we really need, terrified of spending too much lest we experience a terrible crisis and get caught short. We pull back from life, avoiding the things that most excite us because we are afraid that if we get what we really want it will be torn away from us. We avoid joy, because we have been avoiding so many other feelings so long – because somewhere deep down, we think that if we start feeling any strong emotions, all the fear and sadness and rage we feel from the abuse will rise up and devour us.

So, travel for fun is a great part of recovery. Last year, my new year’s resolution was to have more fun, and I ended up going on several trips both locally and around the country. For my Thursday Thirteen, I’d like to share some of those trips with you! In no particular order:

1. The American Girl Store in Chicago, Illinois.
   
   They let you borrow American Girl dolls to eat with at lunch! Molly on the left was mine, and Blonde Doll Whose Name I Forget was my girlfriend’s. Oh I know: Nikki. I think. The store is a lot of fun if you like American Girl dolls. Which I do. I used to get the catalogs and just stare at them all day when I was younger. Funny: at the time the prices seemed OUTRAGEOUS, but now they seem pretty reasonable. I know they are still a little pricey, but I don’t think they’ve gone up at the pace of inflation. Once you have a doll (or some other doll who wants American Girl accessories) the accessories and toys and stuff for the dolls are downright reasonable to me: generally $20 and under for things like Victorian-era nightgowns, horses, orange-crate scooters, kittens, bicycles, et cetera. I even ended up buying myself the Samantha doll I ALWAYS WANTED as a child, and my girlfriend the Nikki doll (it was the doll of the year last year, so there was a limited time in which to get it!) so we could play together.
2. Mojo Spa in Chicago, Illinois.
   
   Besides all their great spa treatments, they also have a fabulous line of totally natural products made with fresh fruits, vegetables, and other foodstuffs (like truffle oil in the High Society face cream!) by one of the owners who used to be a chef. And their customer service is agonizingly good. This is a picture of my girlfriend unwrapping her dinner on one of their nail tables. We got there late for our appointments and they squeezed us in afterward anyway, then stayed open for hours after they normally would while I got I think the most lavish manicure and pedicure they had (in celebration of my 29th birthday!), and let other people come in and browse and buy stuff… and then they let us stay and eat our dinner and hang out with them afterward… and helped us figure out how to get to the Zipcar we were renting… and then the woman who did my nails even gave us a ride to the Zipcar on her way home. Which wasn’t on her way home. They are very, very nice people. If I lived anywhere near there, I’d be at their weekly and monthly brunch-spa-type events ALL THE DAMN TIME.
3. Boston Common: Boston, Massachussetts
   
   (picture courtesy of Alejandro T. on Yelp, not mine)
   Sooo pretty. We went to Massachussetts for my gorgeous friend Yael’s wedding, and stayed in Boston for a few days too. They have a frog pond full of statues of frogs. And tons of trees. And one side is bordered by the theater district, and another by the street where most of the spas are. I got my nails done somewhere there for the First Time Ever. I haven’t bitten them since. Ta-da!
4. The Beech Tree Inn
   
   (That’s our room, I think! Bryanne R. put that picture of it on Yelp.)
   My girlfriend and I stayed here for a few days last summer and we LOVED IT. We stayed in the topmost room, under the eaves with a private bathroom across the hall. It was so gorgeous and welcoming. I heard so much about the lavish breakfasts and the fresh cookies baked every day but I still had to experience it to really understand how amazing it was! All kinds of fresh cookies, take as many as you want, tea, coffee, a little library, a kitchen you can use to warm up your dinner or leftovers, near incredible restaurants, and the bathroom was huge! And so well-stocked with comfy towels and nice bath supplies. And they were so nice. I asked them how I might get a subway/bus pass for just a day around there, and they just handed me one that another visitor had left that had a couple of days still on it. I would kind of like to live here!
5. Apple Lane Inn in Aptos, California
   (Apple Lane Inn’s picture of our room)
   This was our first trip away together! My girlfriend and I stayed here on a weekend trip to the Monterey Aquarium. It is the CUTEST little Victorian. They serve a full, elaborate and very friendly breakfast, and the place is stuffed with things like a player piano, an old-timey radio, and other cool antique stuff. The bed was a huge four-poster with a private bathroom that had a chaise-longue and HUGE clawfoot bathtub we could both get in. Best place EVAR.
6. Carmel-by-the-Sea, California (warning: website talks. Why god why?)
   (picture is from the above “official travel site” for the city)
   We visited this adorable, expensive little town for a day while staying at the Apple Lane Inn. It has really really nice beaches, and really really nice fairly expensive places to shop and eat. We met someone who raised the same kind of weird pointy dogs as Annie’s mother, and walked past The Tuck Shop, which would be on this list for serving great cream teas if they had been open, and visited a cute tiny place that sold tea sets, and Annie got some amazing shoes, being a Shoe Person, and we saw really cute houses. Plus, it appeared to have free wi-fi everywhere.
7. Monterey Aquarium, Monterey, California
   
   (picture by my lovely friend Abra)
   I love the Monterey Aquarium. Parking is expensive, unless you are willing to park in a residential neighborhood and walk five blocks or so. Monterey has made their parking meters very expensive and charges for them until very late at night, even on weekends. They know where their money comes from. And of course parking garages cost money too. But the aquarium is vast and fun: there are tide pools where you can pet the starfish and gingerly touch the sea urchins; there is a place to watch otters frolic, as they are the world-renowned Experts in Having Fun; and there are gorgeous jellyfish displays, among many many other exhibits. They have really good food there, too, for a public museum-type place.
8. Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, Santa Cruz, California
   
   (picture from the Beach Boardwalk website)
   I think we went in the middle of the week or maybe too late in the fall or both, so a limited number of rides were open. But still, we got to go on the old wooden rollercoaster (surprisingly uncomfortable), the bumper cars (really fun! total strangers raced with us and played with us), and best of all the… thing whose name I don’t remember, where you are lifted hiiiiiiigh up in the air and then dropped and lifted and dropped again. It is like being bounced in the Goddess’ lap. If you bring that level of trust to it, anyway, otherwise it is terrifying! And then you can get a picture of yourselves riding it with all the zero-gravity forces or whatever of being dropped. I will try to post a picture of ours. Plus, the whole thing is right next to the beach and has an awesome arcade full of old-fashioned and new games. Which reminds me of another place:
9. The Musee Mechanique, San Francisco, California
   
   (Picture by Rona J. of yelp.com)
   This place is amazing. It houses a vast collection of really old penny arcade machines. They no longer cost a penny, I’ll tell you that, but your change will buy a lot of entertainment here. That picture there is of a whole carnival built from toothpicks, which lights up and plays music and moves around when you put a quarter in. They have old-fashioned machines where you can watch tiny old-fashioned movies, and even turn the handle to move them at whatever speed you want yourself. It’s amazing to see what they could do with all that heavy metal technology before we ever came up with plastic or microchips or anything.
10. Mendocino, California
    
    
    Just last month! We stayed with Annie’s grandparents, who are fabulous people, hung out with her equally fabulous brother and toured their farm, Gowan’s Oak Tree, which is so vast and beautiful. That’s in Philo, on the way to Mendo. Mendocino has gorgeous beaches; we played at this one where Big River (possibly) empties into the ocean, so you can actually walk up the beach and watch it transform from ocean into river. I decided that that happened when my foot suddenly went down into a foot of water instead of a tiny edge of surf. I even have a picture of myself playing on this beach when I was little, covered in sand and a muddy pair of shorts and about nothing else because I was only two or three. There is a great bookstore called Gallery, where I got a book about how to collect and cook seaweed, an incredible toystore which sadly closed before we got there, and some great food to be had.
11. Tilden Park, Berkeley, California


(Picture by Harold Davis, who also blogged about his visit here!)
Specifically, the vintage carousel at Tilden. It is beautiful, surrounded by even more beautiful parkland and majestic views, and also you can get a ton of sweets and goodies along the lines of candyfloss/cotton candy and giant cookies and hot dogs and such. Carnival food, like they should serve around merry-go-rounds. Plus, it is really cheap to ride.

12. Golden Skate, San Ramon, California


(picture from Arnold M. on Yelp)
Sigh. This place is so much fun. We have been twice and I want to go sooo many more times! Not only is roller skating fun (and you can get quads or inline skates; I always get quads because that is what I learned on and I figure the more surface area I am balancing on, the better) but also, they have games to play and prizes to win at the end of each skating session, they play good music and take requests AND dedications (I dedicated a Justin Timberlake song to my girlfriend when she got her MFA in Creative Writing last year), they have fun video games to play, they have snacks and hot dogs and such…. PLUS they have tons of theme nights. Disco nights, 80s nights, all you can eat pizza nights… so much fun to be had here!

13. The Plumed Horse Restaurant, Saratoga, California


(picture by Katy Raddatz of the San Francisco Chronicle; more here)
A great place for fabulously expensive food that is totally worth it. I didn’t think about the prices before I went, so I was less well-prepared than my girlfriend, who had planned ahead and saved up for the over-$100 tasting menu. She got some incredible food, but I didn’t do too badly with my $60-$80 myself: I EXTREMELY recommend the “Camembert cheese fondue, duck fat fried fingerling potatoes, black truffle, $15.” I think they mean black truffle oil, and also: who cares? BEST THING EVER. EVER. This was our New Year’s blowout, not on New Year’s itself.

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