Thirteen steps I can take toward my dreams

You know, being awesome – or recognizing, admitting to myself and others, how awesome I am – accepting awesomeness is scary. And infuriating.

Sure it’s awesomely exciting. But there’s part of me that thinks that the abuse is somehow more okay if I don’t respect myself so much. I guess that part of the function of shame, in abuse, is to get our abusers off the hook – to keep ourselves from really facing what happened by pretending that we deserved it. So if I really accept how awesome I am – even just accept it a little more than I did – then that really brings home how bad, how egregious, the way others treated me (and the way I treated myself) was. And that makes me deeply angry. Or, really, brings up the deep anger that is already there about the abuse.

Even more pressing, to me, is how scary it is. Because if I accept that I am truly awesome, I have to start showing up for the things I’ve been denying myself. I can’t shame-and-fear myself out of sending off book proposals, or launching businesses I’ve been playing with, or going for other great dreams. Because all that procrastination and fear is based on the belief that my stuff isn’t good enough. My ideas aren’t good enough. I’m not strong enough. I’m not brave enough. People will get mad if I promote my work to them. It’ll seem invasive and creepy. And so on, and so on. Accepting that I am awesome shines the light of truth on all those fear-based lies and shows them for what they really are. And then there’s nothing between me and my dreams… except maybe a liiiitle more fear!

My two big deferred dreams right now are all the book proposals that I could be sending out (and only occasionally do), and PeaceMeals, the grocery/meal planning business that I started and then abandoned. The latter is pretty awesome: for $40 per person per week, I put together boxes of healthy groceries, tasty recipes for them, and a suggested meal plan, so people have everything they need for the week – no crowded grocery stores, no need to figure out what to buy, no impulse purchases, and lots of organic beautiful produce and such. So, for Thursday Thirteen this week, I thought I’d make a list of thirteen steps I can take toward these dreams.

1. Actually tell people I know about what I am doing: businesses I start, websites I have, etc., and encourage them to spread the word and participate. You know, when I even link to this website from my personal journal, I get tons of extra hits from people I actually know who don’t think about visiting here otherwise. And I have several time started a business and shut it down for lack of interest or energy without anyone in my life really knowing the difference!

2. Recreate the blog that I used to promote PeaceMeals – I’ve rescued it from having been hacked but I need to fix the sidebar.

3. Ask all the wonderful people who linked to it when it was at the old address to update their links.

4. Post to it to share fun, exuberant, exciting things about food and grocery shopping and meal planning.

5. Find blog challenges to participate in to draw traffic back to it.

6. Clean up the Peacemeals site - add section listing the prices (!!) and comparing the prices to those of similar services (grocery delivery, meal planning, etc.).

7. Make sure the shopping area works and looks professional.

8. Plan out how exactly each week of work should look – when to do meal planning, how long, etc.

9. Make a set of four (attractive) meal plans to put up as samples and to use for first wave of new customers.

10. Order free boxes from the post office.

11. Write something simple and clear about policies – when things are shipped, when payment must be received, etc.

12. Write a FAQ about the benefits of using us – access to tons of fresh and organic produce,
nutritional guidelines, etc.

13. Do some promotion – announce a start date and a limited number of memberships available to begin with, offer The Diet Cure as a giveaway through BAFAB to one of first X members to sign up, advertise a contest where kids and families can create a logo for us and enter to win a free month’s membership, look into purchasing google ads and sending sample boxes to food bloggers.

One of the big points that Barbara Sher makes in Wishcraft is that you are a genius. That each of us is a genius when we are born, full of curiosity and passion and talents and all the other things we associate with genius.

She offers exercises which are similar to the one Penelope Trunk suggests that I wrote about a few days ago. I’ve found it incredibly useful to look at the things that overjoyed and fascinated me as a child through Wishcraft, and now to look at how my childhood memories can teach me about what I need in my adult life and work.

Tonight, all of this came together in my head and I suddenly understood why I am so awesome.

You see, babies are awesome. Little kids are totally awesome. I personally think this is a universal truth. It was obvious to me with my own kid, but I figured I was biased. But it’s also obvious in every other child I encounter, and especially with my girlfriend’s nieces. Meeting a kid is just like being whacked with the awesome stick. They don’t even know how awesome they are. It’s like fishes and water. They can’t see it because they don’t know any other way to be. (Or, with the sad exceptions, they don’t know they’re awesome because they’ve already learned from their parents that they’re not – even though that’s not even remotely reasonable.)

Proof?:

 

(Sadly, I could not find my favorite baby picture, but I think these add a little something too! How cute am I with those little chocolate eggs?)

Well, a huge part of recovery for me was first learning how awesome I was… slowly becoming aware of the great things about me, my strengths and beauty and character, and slowly becoming willing to accept those things. Learning that the negatives I brought to my life were old coping mechanisms, old responses to abuse, and that I didn’t need them anymore. And, eventually, becoming willing and able to SAY that I was awesome – in front of other people and everything! – without immediately having to shame myself, hedge it around with conditions, trying to keep them from thinking I thought I was TOO great.

I’ve come to see myself, more and more, as (on one level) a spark of universe-stuff. A little bit of what everything else is made out of, connected to everything, with all this stuff that makes me a separate person important because it’s part of my experience now, but not all that relevant to who I am deep down. And that’s how babies and very young kids look to me too – just big SPARKS.

Tonight I saw that I’m awesome for the same reasons, in the same ways, that babies are awesome. You are, too. We are all born with all this great joy and energy and potential. We are born worthy and loving and lovable. Wonderful and good and loved. We are born perfect just the way we are.

We are all incredible, awesome, exciting people. We struggle, a lot of the time, with past traumas and with the crazy messages and old painful coping skills we’ve learned from them. And sometimes we act out, like cranky tired children, because of all that stuff. But that stuff is all layered on later. It’s learned and it can be unlearned.

One reviewer wrote, “Most books on life planning have, to my mind, two fatal flaws: they assume that your ’strengths’ are an infallible guide to what you ’should’ be doing with your life; and they then attempt to map this to a ‘career.’ Barbara Sher starts with the basics: what is most important to YOU? Given that, how are you to get it? (And this doesn’t necessarily translate into ‘career’!)” It’s true: often the things we think of as our “strengths” are the ways we’ve learned to cope. We’re proud of coping, of surviving, sometimes at a cost. Sometimes we don’t notice that we’re choosing painful situations over and over again, things we’ll need to cope with, because we’re so focused on those strengths at the expense of ease and joy.

The weary battle with negative coping mechanisms – aka the effects of abuse – can eclipse the truth: The stuff that’s actually part of us, at our core, at our birth, is pure AWESOME. That’s the stuff we really get to own, and live with, and enjoy, forever.

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!)

Oh yeah: and that was the Mother’s Day episode of the comic, too. I know they don’t mention it, but I like to think that that is why Elly got to take a bubble bath after her day of a million errands. It’s Mother’s Day – let’s allow her to be “lazy” for once! Maybe in the very last panel!

After I went to bed I remembered another angle on “lazy”: the way it’s used in racism. I’m no ethnic studies major, but what I’ve got here so far is that first the white mainstream abducted and enslaved people from West Africa, and decided to label them “lazy,” clearly applying no logic to anything around them whatsoever.

(And again, there’s a connection to self-care as well:
“When the Europeans colonized Africa, they looked contemptuously upon native work habits. When they saw African farmers hanging around their huts in the middle of the day and drinking beer, the Europeans called them lazy. They said this was a reason Africans didn’t ‘prosper,’ and by extension a sign of racial inferiority. From the African’s point of view, you’d have to be crazy to go out and work in the 100 degree tropical heat. You stored up your energy during the day, and did chores at sundown when temperatures cooled off. From there a phrase was born, ‘mad dogs and Englishmen go out into the midday sun.’” I won’t vouch for the historical accuracy of any of those details, but you get the drift.)

Latinos, especially Mexicans, got similar treatment, in this case being driven into intense poverty and extremely low-paying jobs with terrible conditions, and again getting labeled lazy. (Supposedly for coming from a culture of taking siestas in the afternoon heat – for extra credit, you may write a paper about the north/south divide in specific countries, continents, and around the world, with special attention to cold versus hot climates. No longer than five pages, due in my office by ten!)

Of course, racism is a form of abuse. And this is a variation on the same game that we saw before, that leads people to workaholism: impose impossible pressure or impossible standards on people and deprive them of their needs for not meeting those standards, or just as a side dish to the pressure. On an individual scale, it’s the parents who make their kids work (way above their age level) in the family business, or keep up the house and raise the kids while their parents work, always trying to do tasks that even the adults in their lives aren’t doing well, always trying to do it well enough to earn the attention and approval that are one of their most basic developmental needs. Mainly, I suppose, when paired with the overt emotional abuse of lecturing, yelling at, or shaming them when they inevitably do something wrong. On the bigger scale, it’s the society or government that creates unlivable conditions for people and holds out the imaginary carrot of “We’ll stop abusing you when you do a good enough job to prove that we’re wrong.”

Play with it; I’m sure there are corners I’m missing here.