A friend of mine just wrote, in passing:

So, for instance, I didn’t realize that my roommate, whom I loved, was a dyke, and into me, until TOO FUCKING LATE. I mean, how I could miss that is still not clear to me. I was an ignorant het, is all I can say.

I had the same problem in college. Not, as far as I know, with dorm roommates, but with plenty of other people. Why I missed it so much is pretty clear to me though – I couldn’t have told you this at the time but I had pretty wretched self-esteem, and constantly second-guessed myself anytime I thought somebody liked me or was flirting with me. It seemed worth it to constantly second-guess it, the times I did notice SOMEthing, because (I thought) it would be so horrible if I thought they were flirting or liked me and THEN THEY WEREN’T/DIDN’T. (Translation: I subconsciously shamed myself for thinking anyone would like me, because I was so afraid of rejection that trying to keep myself from even thinking someone liked me seemed like the best recourse.)

And also, I rarely did notice it because I had so little experience of healthy sexuality. Because I was raised with (on the face of it) a near-total absence of any talk, especially sane and positive talk, about sex/flirting/dating, and (underneath) a huge lack of physical or emotional boundaries around sexuality, in the form of everything from my dad just plumb walking around nekkid at night or telling me my mother was “frigid,” to of course flat-out (and well-repressed) sexual abuse. So I never really got the concept of flirting, or of what it might be like when people like each other and want to be sexual with each other.

Actually now that I type that I don’t think it’s true: obviously I spent a great deal of my time with someone who wanted to be sexual with me and who thought that was a great thing. (and obviously, when only one of the people involved wants to be sexual, it’s no longer sex.) I think the truth, which makes even more sense to me, is that I couldn’t afford to, or couldn’t bear to, recognize people flirting or wanting me until I was well away from my family. It wasn’t until I was off in college that I could even start learning what that stuff was like and experimenting with it and testing the waters, and so I missed a lot of what was otherwise perfectly clear stuff.

Funny thing: everyone in high school thought (I was told, *eventually*) that I was a huge flirt because (well this is what I thought at the time) I didn’t differentiate between boys and girls when I joked around – I joked around the same way with everyone. I was like, I’m not going to start censoring that based on gender norms or whatever, just to change what people think of me. In retrospect, the way I joked around was EXTREMELY sexual. I mean, I knew it at the time; I’d sit around in drama class or at lunch talking about how we could see anything as phallic and daring people to come up with something that I couldn’t sexualize in some way.

And a ton of the jokes I made were based on some kind of sexual innuendo. Because while I experienced a lot of bullying in junior high, in my high school people seemed to have matured past that, or maybe I had just gotten away from the kids who had done it, or something. I had my own community of drama geeks I could hang out with all the time. I was finally safe, in high school (and only in school) to – like a small child discovering naughty words for the first time – experiment with this stuff safely. I am so grateful for the other kids in that community who patiently waited it out, or participated in it with me.

Cody’s on Telegraph

Originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes

Cody’s Books is a famous and beloved local chain that began in Berkeley in 1965. It’s been struggling for at least ten years, I think, despite (or, in my opinion, because of) trying to expand across several cities to at one point three whole locations. On Friday, with very little warning, it closed its final location.

It’s tempting to color this in as a story about multinational conglomerates crushing local chains, or about the painful losses caused by an ailing economy. But the fact is that Cody’s struggled with the same circular, self-sabotaging addict behavior that is so familiar to many survivors.

I’m no expert on Cody’s Books history; I’ve only watched and read about the drama for the short time (12 years) that I’ve lived in the area. But in that time, I’ve seen them shoot themselves in the foot over and over, each time crying out to everyone who will listen that they are just victims of gun violence.

First, they opened their Fourth Street location, a nice big store in a swankier part of Berkeley than their original spot – and, when it naturally drained some traffic from the first location, they complained loudly that their decreased revenues there were because of the homeless people on Telegraph Avenue. They began hustling the neighborhood and the city to “clean up” Telegraph, increasing the police presence on the street and instituting new policies trying to keep homeless people away from the area around the store.

The San Francisco store opening came next – an odd choice at a time when the business was already struggling financially. It stayed open for only 18 months in the high-rent, high-profile downtown location. Owner Andy Ross mortgaged his house to open the San Francisco location: a basement-level local bookstore, with just the door and sign at street level, in an area that caters to tourists who want the familiar and the visible.

When it hemorrhaged money and closed, Ross again searched for someone to blame. He seemed baffled by the possibility that any big store in the busy area could fail: “In spite of the location and the size, it just didn’t work. I can’t interview the customers who didn’t come. The customers who did come liked the store.” Well, that’s all there is to business, right? You see if the people who become your customers like you, and if they do, then you should make a profit? You spend all your money on a fancy spot and wait for it to pay off? No?

In the end, Ross concluded, the killer was… construction of a nearby Barney’s. Even though they chose not to stay open through the end of construction because they weren’t sure it would make enough of a difference.

That store closed April 20, 2007. All that was left was the Cody’s Books on Fourth Street, which – depending on your viewpoint – either closed or simply moved to Shattuck Avenue in April of this year.

APRIL.

The Shattuck location was open for TWO MONTHS before its abrupt closing. This was the most shocking development of them all, and the most telling. Nobody knew that the store was going to close. There were no press releases sent out; no signs announcing its departure; no inventory close-out sales; no attempts to find a new owner or new investors; and certainly no attempts to do anything differently.

It’s shocking because when the original store on Telegraph closed, the community was up in arms. People begged them not to close. Every newspaper, both the daily and the free weekly papers, wrote about it – often more than once. There were letters to the editor, calls for action, and a huge closing event where people came all day to pay their respects.

Which means that Cody’s had options. They had a huge fan base to call upon: not only whatever customers they normally had, but also the many bibliophiles and radicals all over who had fond memories of the store. They just chose not to call on that community at all.

The funny thing is that when the San Francisco store closed just over a year ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the Fourth Street location is thriving and Ross said he plans to keep it going,” and quoted him as saying, “The Cody’s brand lives strong in the East Bay, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

It’s frustrating because the store, inasmuch as a store can be, was the victim of addict behavior. It suffered from the classic signs of addiction, which of course are also classic signs of abuse. The Chronicle’s article about it today had a telling quote:

One local Pulitzer Prize winner, Berkeley author Michael Chabon, said of Cody’s closing, “I think it’s a terrible shame. It was a wonderful bookstore. It’s painful, sort of like watching someone suffering from a chronic illness painfully and slowly die. (Cody’s was) part of the fabric of Berkeley, the social fabric and commercial fabric.”

It was very much like that, and the chronic illness killing it was abuse. And, of course, addiction – untreated abuse – is a progressive disease. If you don’t deal with it, it will get worse and worse until it kills you. This is not only true for drug addicts or alcoholics; any abuse survivor who does not have a way of dealing with the effects of that abuse will have an increasingly numbed, deadened, painful, difficult life until they can begin reversing that damage with the tools of recovery.

There was even a twelve-step program for Cody’s Books. Business Debtors Anonymous is a sub-group of Debtors Anonymous which provides lots of clarity and guidance about what does and doesn’t work for people in business. They have a huge emphasis on being clear about spending, assets, business plans, agreements, and detaching from drama with customers, competitors, and employees. It seems as though Cody’s management was missing a lot of those tools.

There was the tunnel vision, that special form of denial where people look at everything as an isolated incident in a desperate attempt to make it controllable and deny the big picture.

There was the constant attempt to pass the buck, the refusal of appropriate responsibility for anything that was happening. “Appropriate” because it’s quite common for abuse survivors to feel tremendous shame and guilt for things that we’re not actually responsible for – while continuing to feel like powerless victims in our lives because we have no idea how to set boundaries, take care of business, or reclaim our power. And because we want to find proof that what happened to us is not our fault, and misguidedly look for that in our present day instead of in the past. It’s the homeless people’s fault! It’s because there’s not enough parking here! It’s because of the construction! It’s because of the internet! Because of the chains! Because the darn students aren’t buying their books from us anymore! Because people don’t read!

I read business books and business blogs like they’re chick lit, and let me tell you: from a business perspective, all those things are challenges, not business-killers. So revenues dropped from $30,000 a month to $10,000 a month between 1990 and 2000 – so what? As long as your doors are still open, that’s an opportunity to take inventory of what you could be doing better, and to come up with some really exciting and innovative changes.

Powell’s Books is a fantastic, if over-used, example of this: like Cody’s, they had a huge store and a huge following before the internet came along. And the market changed, and they changed with it; now they have a huge internet following, and more thriving stores. They evaluate what is working for them, and change what is not, and try new things, and evaluate those too.

Surprise: this corresponds exactly to what people in recovery do. It’s just like the twelve steps, where people learn to take inventory of what has and has not worked for them and make it right, without beating themselves up along the way.

Then there was the search for a quick fix: moving stores around, closing stores, selling the business, mortgaging the house, trying San Francisco, anything but change what they were actually doing within the business.

And the relentless negativity that goes with searching for someone to blame. They were literally surrounded by thriving independent bookstores: Moe’s Books, Half Price Books, Shakespeare & Co., Black Oak Books, Pegasus Books, and many more, in a community that still supports as many as three bookstores on the same block. And yet, they had this growing chant of complaints about how terrible everything was, which rose eventually to drown out even their ability to do business.

And, my favorite, the all or nothing thinking – either we have to be doing the same thing we were doing before, or we have to just close everything down and run. They could never seem to see any other possible solutions than keep trying what they were doing or close down.

This spiraled out of control, by the end, to the point where they left with a store full of books and a pile of paperwork on the street. On the street!

I was there today. I came with three friends, in part specifically to go to Cody’s. (Which, by the way, was in what we thought was finally the perfect location for it: right next to the university campus, on a huge street with lots of bookstores but none right next door to it, with tons of foot traffic and enormous windows to show them what it had, right next to BART and lots of bus stops, next to the Berkeley City College campus as well….)

We were surprised to find the still-full bookstore locked, with printed-out notices on the front doors explaining that they had shut those doors forever on Friday. And we weren’t the only ones who were surprised: during the course of hanging out on Shattuck for a few hours that afternoon, we saw at least a dozen other people try the doors or collect in front of the store staring at it in shock, at several different times. There must have been dozens of surprised would-be customers who went through this on Sunday alone. What the hell was Cody’s doing that meant that that kind of foot traffic wasn’t enough to support one store?

I’m guessing that at least part of it was the former owner’s lust for opening new stores. (Ross sold the business in September of 2006 but stayed on as president, which – along with the store’s continuous bad choices – makes me suspect that not much changed at Cody’s with the sale.) When the San Francisco store closed, the Chronicle quoted Ross as saying, “This is the second store I’ve had to close in two years. This is not what I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to open stores.” While clearly at least some of that cost came out of his pocket, I suspect that the business took a series of financial hits too, hits it was still trying to overcome.

From BDA’s Signs of Compulsive Debting in Business:

• We confused our personal finances with our business finances and drew from one set of funds to cover the other.

• We lived in a state of self-deprivation for the sake of our business. (Ross had to sell his mortgaged house after the SF store closed.)
• We did not or were unable to ask for help when we needed it most.

The most intense sign of the chaos, to me, was that stack of papers. One of my friends spotted a dumpster full of boxes as we were about to leave, and ran to snag them for her upcoming move, with my girlfriend’s help. A long while later, they returned with news: the boxes were full of discarded paperwork from Cody’s Books.

So, not only did they not even bother to pack up the books and clean out the store either before or after closing it, but they for some reason spent some time throwing out papers first? How very fishy.

Upon investigation, they found a wide selection of different kinds of paperwork. There were records of orders the store had made, of advertising and ad prices. There were in-store memos and recent store newsletters. There was at least one whole box of personal correspondence from customers, complete with names and addresses as well as any other personal information the customers had happened to give them. And there was another entire layer of sealed boxes, which they speculated might have been the bookstore’s way of getting rid of more sensitive information. Of course, in a way you don’t need to have more sensitive information when a person or organization is already telling you at top volume how crazy it is.

So that’s Cody’s coda. After decades of passionate work with books, they chose to go under unannounced, unnoticed, and unsung. Maybe over the coming days we’ll see a community response to their closing, or more explanation of it, or some kind of good-bye from the long-lived store. Otherwise, fans will have to get their closure from the awareness that the beloved bookstore was just another victim of the same patterns we see all around us every day: the effects of abuse in our society.

I’ve noticed feeling more anxiety lately. Anxiety is a good signpost, for me, of what’s going on. Precovery, I had really high anxiety levels. I used to take kava to manage them. It was pretty good, but the thing about anxiety is that it fucks up our baselines. I mean, I didn’t have a consistent everyday experience of what “calm” or “healthy” or, god knows, “safe” felt like. I didn’t even identify myself as having an anxiety problem, and I certainly didn’t want to go TALK to someone about it, or mess around with horrible pharmaceutical chemicals or what-have-you. I just knew that sometimes I had a lot of stress, sometimes for no particular (apparent) reason.

(And I think that having a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, as an everyday part of life is pretty much a guarantee that there’s past trauma or abuse behind it. It’s a very simple, powerful, connection: trauma and abuse teach us that we’re not safe, and often teach us to disconnect from the conscious knowledge that we’re not safe since there’s nothing we can do about it as children. And then we go around as adults, hypervigilant, reacting to everything with a lot of extra fear, anger, shame, and other emotions left over from the trauma, but often unable to make that connection because by then it feels so damn normal.)

And, after a while of working on my abuse issues, learning to trust that I was safe and learning to let go of what wasn’t mine to try to control, I realized that I hadn’t even thought of taking kava in months. Recovery is a wonderful thing….

Lately, over the past few days, I’ve noticed that I’m feeling much more anxiety than normal. Which is to say, “any.” There’s an undercurrent of tension, of stress, going through life with me. I realized that it is coming up as I start taking the final steps on that list I made. I’ve been doing all those things that I would have to do if I celebrated my awesomeness, if I stopped blocking my goals and dreams out of fear.

Now I’m down to the last few steps to make it all concrete. I set up my AdWords account. I wrote my little text ad, which currently reads something like this:

Meal Plans At Your Door
If you shopped here, you’d be full
by now! Recipes & groceries.
fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals

I think I’d like to also test one that says:

Save On Groceries
If you shopped here, you’d be full
by now! Ingredients & meal plans.
fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals

(You should see Target’s ad when you search for online groceries. The headline is something hideous like “Shop On Online” – and it doesn’t get better from there.)

I found out I can use a bank account to pay it, even a savings account, instead of linking it to a check card (which I don’t have) or a credit card (which I don’t want to use). Oh, and here’s a fabulous story about following a higher power’s guidance and how things work when I go with the flow: I had tried many times before to set up an AdWords account, back when I was both terrified of starting this business and trying to force it to happen. And I had always stopped when it wanted a credit card (don’t know if they just didn’t allow bank accounts yet or if I never went far enough to see) or gotten stalled out somewhere.

And then yesterday, I was reading my email on my cell phone and found an email from AdWords that offered me $50 in credit (which turned out to be $55, with $5 covering startup fees). I immediately started setting things up, using my little cell phone browser. It didn’t work all the way – I ended up at a page that had no exit button – which, as it turned out, was perfect because I hadn’t read the email closely enough to realize I needed to copy down the special code to enter to get that credit. So if I had been able to push through and do the whole thing, it would have cost me money. I went back today, though, on my work computer, and set the whole thing up with the code. And I realized that in my Gmail account, the email that offered me that credit was already in the trash.

I don’t even know how I saw it on my cell phone. It just appeared, by magic, right when I was ready to start setting up advertising.

So, it’s both exciting and validating when things just start coming together of their own accord like that. And I’ve been pushing through the fear, just a little, to set up advertising and plan all the meal plans so that they’re delicious and realistic – the last, biggest steps. And it’s these steps that (in my mind) make or break the whole thing that are so scary to me.

It’s not that the steps themselves are scary, although I notice that I want to make them scary, obsess about details and throw up roadblocks to each one. It’s just this anxiety – fear – comes up underneath. And this is a good thing, because I know that if I am willing to sit with the fear and to explore what it is telling me, it will release all that energy that it is currently sucking up and I will learn all kinds of stuff I can use here.

So what is the fear saying to me, deep in my subconscious? If I half-listen, and brainstorm:

You’re not good enough. People are going to see you. You’re not prepared for this. You’ll be swamped. Then people will get mad at you. You’ll hate doing it. You’ll be so sorry you even tried. You’ll die in an avalanche of full boxes. They won’t find your corpse till weeks later, under a mountain of orders that you never got paid for. You’re going to dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of. You’ll hate it and not be able to let go because it will be all that makes you survive. If you quit you’ll starve. If you don’t you’ll die from hating it so much. You’ll be hot and sweaty and people will hate your food and they will cancel their orders and never tell you why and laugh to their friends about you. Nobody will like you. Nobody will tell you why they’re not ordering from you. Nobody will ever ever want this. It’s too complicated. It’s confusing. How will they ever choose to want this? They will run away because it sounds weird. They will want more control over it. They will each have four thousand special orders. No one will just take the regular box. It will take forever to put together and you’ll be trapped in it. You’ll be perched forever, indeterminately, on the edge where you desperately need other people to do this but you don’t quite have enough money to hire them. You will be scrabbling and scraping and living hand to mouth and running around like a chicken with its head cut off and going crazy and everyone will buy it only if it makes you crazy. Everyone will ask you a million questions and you will be spending all your time answering them or feeling guilty that you didn’t and losing customers because of it. You will hate it hate it hate it but you can’t sell it and no one will let you close it down because you will feel so guilty about it if you do. You will struggle on forever trying to keep this tiny birthday candle-sized light alive in the world and never ever getting what you really want.

It’s the old binary: the extremes of “either it will be so successful that it will be far too much for me” (which is why I’m only allowing 15 regular customers or 60 one-time customers a month to start, so that’s taken care of) “or nobody will come and that will mean that I, personally, am a failure.” Or worse: just too few people will come and it will somehow mean that it’s not worth my time – even though it is paying work.

Clarity is the antidote here, at least in part. In fact, I seem to remember that there is something in twelve-step literature that says along the way, “Clarity will replace fear.” Vagueness? “Clarity will replace vagueness, faith will displace fear”? It’s in the promises, the things people get from, when all is said and done, working on their abuse. Faith is turning it over, accepting the reality that we are safe right here and now (and learning to go with the guidance of our intuition, and make safe choices, as our part in that).

Once I have done that, I can employ clarity to get to the reality of the fears. For example: If I am worried that I will be overwhelmed by the amount of work, or that it will not pay me enough to justify that work, I can figure out how much I am willing to work for, listen to my gut to see how many hours it is reasonable to work on this a week, and crunch some numbers.

I’d like to spend no more than three hours a week grocery shopping, which I think would be plenty – because even if I am shopping for 15 boxes full of food for 15 people a week, it’s all the same ingredients. So it’s not 225 items, it’s 15 heads of organic cabbage and 15 pounds of organic locally-grown peaches and 15 small tubs of organic fresh-ground almond butter, for example. (I could get a shirt that says “I Feed Hippies”.) (It’d be funny to make one with that hungry hungry hippos game that said “Hungry Hungry Hippies,” too. Especially what with 10% of the profits going to peace-working non-profits.)

And I’d like it to take no more than an hour to stuff and seal and label all the boxes. I know that the post office has some deal where they will pick up your packages to mail for you, but I don’t know where along the line I’d be paying them if I did that. That’s something to look into soon. I may have to drive them all to the post office during open hours, which sounds like much more of a pain on my end: loading 15 boxes into the car, driving there, trying to figure out whether I had to unload and drag each one in and then push them along while I waited in line or what. Research here is definitely a must.

That’s pretty much it, other than making meal plans. Which I’ve been doing over the past couple of days, with the realization that I need to offer a premium plan that has even healthier food instead of trying to cram that into the lower budget that I came up with when I first started the business in December or so. Now I eat even better, and I want to be able to offer that to people, but not in a way that bankrupts either me or them! I’m thinking that there will be the $40/week option and then a new $60/week option.

Making a meal plan for the week could take an hour. I guess I could even afford for it to take two. So, I just have to look at my profits and make sure that I don’t work more than about six hours, in order to keep my hourly wage at a reasonable level. (I’m running the damn business; I want to be making at least $25/hour. Half of me thinks “that’s crazy! don’t tell people that! they won’t want to buy anything you sell!” Which is the shame/fear talking. The other half is like “That is ridiculously low for a business you own. Your shame is showing.” Yes. I know it is!)

And, of course, I can’t control whether the business succeeds or fails; I can’t control whether even one person signs up for it, or what happens at all. All I can do is whatever is reasonable to work toward my goals, move with the flow instead of trying to push the river, and reap the benefits of being aware of and processing my way through all the old crazy ideas from the abuse. There really isn’t any failure available there.

Mrs. S. said something I really identified with in reply to my last post. And I realized that my comment was turning into a whole blog post of its own, so I decided I’d better do it here. We can do lots of Sunday Salons, right? I don’t see any rules about this

So, she had written:

I have a similar issue when I’m travelling. Like tomorrow I have to spend about 3.5 hours ona train – so what should I read. The book I want to read next is heavy – so not good for travelling – so I need to pick another – but what if I finish it? Then I need a spare one – or what if I don’t like either of them once I’ve started?? EEk.

Now this is why I want to buy a Kindle… then I’d have 200 books in my pocket and no stress

Exactly! That’s the exact issue! I don’t think Kindle is the solution tho, at least for me. I mean, it’s one solution for that particular problem… although if I had had Kindle I think I would have then freaked out about whether any of the 200 books it had on it were going to be What I Wanted To Read or not.

The problem, for me, was… basically a lack of serenity. Not trusting that I could sit without books. Not trusting that I would feel okay if I didn’t have something to use to check out. It was a total carryover from using books to survive in childhood. I used them to escape bullying (and got bullied for that!), I used them to have my own life outside of my dysfunctional family, I used them to find my own voice and write about what happened to me… they were a great escape valve, but there was a point where I hadn’t yet truly escaped, where I was still clinging really hard to the books.

I think that there are layers of escape from abuse. There’s actually getting out, of course, but even after leaving abusive relationships or situations there’s still a lot more to go through to get the abuse out of our heads. Because it’s natural to internalize it to some extent. Especially as children. And often we get out of abusive adult relationships without knowing about the internalized stuff from our childhoods that brought us into an abusive relationship in the first place. And often we internalize a lot more of an adult partner’s abuse than we otherwise might in the process of trying to make the relationship work. Adapting and adapting and adapting to a partner (or boss, or friend, or whoever) who isn’t meeting us halfway. (and how much more so as children, when escape is so much harder?)

I think a lot of readers are like me: we have many many reasons to love books, and one is that they were a great escape. And when something saves your life like that, it’s hard to let go of – and it’s also hard to trust that it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t think I set out consciously to Not Need Books All The Time, in any kind of planned way. I set out to escape the abuse in my head: codependency, shame, control issues, dissociation. I worked on my trust issues, and learned how to tell who was trustworthy. I learned what my boundaries were and how to set boundaries with others. I learned what I really liked and disliked and what I felt at any given moment. I learned how to turn things over when I had done whatever I could to change them (or when there was no need to do anything). I learned to listen to and follow my intuition. I learned how I had harmed myself and others as a result of my abuse and to heal that harm so I could trust and love myself. A lot of things just fell away in the process; compulsive reading was one of them. I still read a lot; my relationship with reading has just evolved.

And that’s the kind of stuff that Life More Awesome is going to be about. Near-daily writing and weekly challenges for making our lives more awesome – in part, how to set boundaries, how to trust ourselves, how to love ourselves, how to deal with feelings and shame and control issues and all that other crap that gets in the way of truly enjoying life. That gets between us and serenity, so that we have to work around it, carrying around extra books and extra work and extra beliefs that don’t end up serving us. Taking those big rocks out of the stream of life.

The first challenge will be posted soon….