There's No Need To Hide

Hi. Hello. I see you in there. Whether you're fully in the world or a moss-lined hermit, there may be some aspect of yourself that you're hiding. Because you're afraid, because you feel it should be different, because you're ashamed of it. Maybe it's your financial situation, maybe it's your relationship, maybe it's that you aren't doing what you truly feel called to be doing with your life. Maybe you haven't found a calling, maybe you have more money than you need but you spend it in ways that don't feel peaceful.

Come out of hiding. When you do you will see that there are so many others who are hiding that precise thing that you've tucked away and guarded so closely. Maybe you can help each other. Maybe you can begin to see yourself as whole, even though you aren't perfect, even though you aren't who you thought you should be, even though your life isn't where you thought it would be by this moment in time.

Emerge from the bushes, shine a flashlight into the shadow, talk about the thing that you're most afraid of. When you open your vulnerability up to the world, you will be surprised by the love and support and acceptance that flood back to you. For we are all afraid, we are all hiding some part of ourselves. We all have something that we wish would just die off already and leave us in peace. But peace is found in fully accepting that piece of ourselves. Building a relationship with it. Allowing it to provide us with more connection, rather than less.

If each of us pull out the monster hiding in our rib cage or our solar plexus or the back of our skull, we will lift each other up and the world will shift in indefinable but measurably great ways.

Show us your monster. We will love it, and we will love you. For you are one of the greats, monsters and all. 

When Bad Days Strike

When bad days hit, it's easy to wish them away. To wish them into oblivion, into the nearest deep cave, to any place but the one you're currently occupying. But bad days are part of the wholeness of life. When we're in the wholeness of life, we experience everything fully - the good, the bad, the indifferent, the annoying.

Bad days can show us where we judge. Where we judge one situation as better than another, that person as better than this one, this aspect of ourselves as better than another - judgments that rarely serve us.

Days are sometimes seen as bad because we need to process something painful to move forward. Maybe we need clarity around a certain situation, maybe we need a blow up to clear the air. Maybe we need a bad day to show us where we aren't taking care of ourselves. Maybe a bad day is precisely what we need, even if we can't yet see it.

When a bad day shows up out of the blue, ask it what it needs. Ask yourself what you need. Ask those in your life what they need. Taking care of needs - first your needs, then the needs of others - is one of the best ways to realign with what you truly want. If that feels too daunting, ask what the house needs. Sometimes doing the dishes or tidying clutter will bring the answers to you.

Don't worry about the bad days. Don't let your cunning little brain use it as proof that you're doing things wrong. You're doing nothing wrong. Don't let yourself veer into the dark and tangled weeds. Or if you do, sit in the weeds for awhile. Revel in it. Roll around. Wonder about it. Ask yourself why you're in the weeds, ask yourself what you need to get out of them, ask yourself why you like it there and why you're staying.

Curiosity is the first step. Finding the joy in the situation is the second.

Maybe if you're in the weeds for awhile, you can get some time to yourself. Maybe if you stay in the weeds when your brain is telling you that you need to fix this toilet and finish that work spreadsheet, you'll emerge from those weeds with better ways of solving and doing and being.

Trust yourself in the bad days. Trust yourself to keep putting one foot in front of the other, trust yourself to keep moving forward. Or trust yourself to sit quietly, let the bad day flow around you, and stop labeling it as better or worse than any other day. Sometimes the worst days are what is needed to get us where we want to go. Sometimes the worst days draw us closer together. Sometimes the worst days point you toward what you've been longing for.

Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day. And that's okay.

What To Do With Worry

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Some days, worries creep in to tug at you. Some days, worries bop you insistently over the head from the moment you awake. Some days, worries feel easy to blow up and send away.

If today is the former, remember that you always have the power to offer up your worries and let them be taken from you. You always have the option to expand those worries out like a great bubble so that the still exist but they aren’t knocking around inside your skull. (Sometimes, letting go of worries completely doesn’t feel like a good idea so you resist it. But you can always push out the boundaries so that they don’t impede the joy of your day.)

Worry is something we feel we need to cling to for protection. We all know that worries do nothing but ruin an otherwise lovely rainy morning, but our hearts and our soft animal innards are not so easily convinced. So play with worry. Approach it like a friend. A friend who sometimes annoys you, but only has your best interests at heart. (But, like most friends, worry doesn’t know you the way you know yourself. So its version of your best interest may be understandably skewed.)

Play with worry. Collect all your worries into a ball and hurl them into the atmosphere. Approach each worry separately and light it up like a firework and let it surprise you with the great exploding dragons and balls of colorful flame in the sky. Imagine a great church, thousands of years old, where you can walk through the vestry under that high arching ceiling and lay your worries down on the altar, knowing that when you walk back out the door, your worries will be cared for and won’t follow you.

Worry is simply a protective mechanism designed to keep us safe and then left running in the background long after our software has been upgraded and what was designed in the past is no longer necessary. Now it’s just eating up space and memory.

Delete the program, play with it in new ways, allow it space and give it love. Worry can be another way to know yourself in a deeper and more intuitive way, if you approach it like something that can be loved rather than a dark monster intent on ruining your day.

Confessions of a Sugar Beast

I'm a hormonal, sugar-fueled mess this week. I find these labels empowering. Because they give me reasons and solutions for the way I feel. You're cranky, hungry, tired, and head-achey because being a female is terrible sometimes. To feel better, wait.

You're cranky, hungry, tired and head-achey because you've been eating a lot of things that you know are bad for you. To feel better, stop eating sugar.

Unfortunately, the blithe "stop eating sugar" mandate is tough sell right now.

Sugar is my achilles heel. My mouth loves it, my body hates it. If I eat sugar, I feel tired and cranky and my brain goes foggy and my skin breaks out and I have cravings for a week.

In the past, simply acknowledging the cycle and recognizing how much worse my life is when I'm eating sugar has been enough to pop me out of the dreaded cycle.

Making good food choices is an experiential process. Quitting certain foods to lose weight or because it's healthier isn't enough of an incentive for me, because the concepts are too vague. Vague does not hold up well when confronted with butterscotch pudding on a sunny patio. But experimenting with alterations - over the past five years, I've experimented with raw, vegan, and no sugar - for long enough to learn how I feel and how my life shifts without those things provides amazing incentives. Like, stop eating that thing and life gets 100% better and you know this to be a fact. Now, that's an incentive.

When I'm off sugar, I don't have food cravings, I sleep well, my energy is high, creative work feels easy, my moods are cheerful, my skin is clear and my jeans fit.

But sugar is in everything. It’s in your curry chicken when you go out for Indian food, it’s in bread you buy at the grocery store, it’s in basically any food that comes in a box or from a restaurant. It also craftily hides under innocuously healthy sounding names, like honey and brown rice syrup. Alcohol reacts in your body the same way sugar does. So do potatoes.

Sugar is also in pancakes and oh my stars, how I love pancakes. Green juice is so terribly uninspiring when what you really want is a stack of buttery blueberry pancakes.

But pancakes make me feel terrible and green juice makes me feel like I’m flying through the sky on a friendly dragon.

I’ve been dabbling in sugar again, because I've been going out to eat a lot more often than in past years and I'm in a relationship now so my exercise routine is all thrown off and also the demon of over-confidence started to whisper in my ear about how "sugar doesn't affect you that much!" and "you're fine!" and "mmm, buttercream-frosted cupcakes!" 

I’ve given up sugar four or five times now. Sometimes it lasts for a year, sometimes it lasts for six months, last week it lasted for about three days. Usually, I have to hit some point of pain - like watching the sugar cycle of crankiness and depression roller coaster me up and down for awhile until I decide it’s absolutely 100% not worth it. Then everything clicks in and abandoning sugar feels easy for green juice feels easy. But I just haven't hit that point yet. And I'm a little mad at myself because I need that point.

Willpower isn't really a thing for me. I have no interest in torturing myself, even for the sake of health or feeling better. Self-control and discipline have never made me jump for joy. So I wait until eating sugar is actually a more painful prospect than not eating sugar and everything gets easy.

On Fear and Its Uncanny Effect on Your Solar Plexus

Fear is the emotional equivalent of termites. Find a tiny sliver of fear stashed away somewhere and suddenly your house is full of it. When I talk to people who fear things I used to fear - spiders, economic collapse, glitter eyeshadow - I start to get worried. Fear breeds quickly and discussions of Terrible Things That Should Make Any Sensible Person Very Scared kick up my dread of being sucked back into that sticky black mire. Like being sent back to stormy Kansas after tromping through the Emerald City. I'd prefer to avoid tornadoes, thank you.

Fear itself doesn't scare me much - it's mostly visceral. It feels like a blow to the solar plexus that shortens the breath. So if you just remember to breathe, it will pass.

Oddly enough, that's also what excitement feels like.

Maybe it's possible that fear is really excitement. Maybe it's possible to rewrite fear as opportunity. I have to look at what I fear and what that fear is calling me toward. More action? Less action? Rather than just breathing through the fear, rather than just surviving it, transform it. What wonderful things are waiting beyond the sticky black mire?

When I look at today's episode of fear, I realize that I fear not following my own self-knowledge. I fear letting other people's beliefs sway me. I fear that the world will prove to be as grim as all the news outlets are yelling it is. But if I allow myself to trust my response and my knowledge and my choices, then I can start to see the opportunities. Opportunities to let go of old stories that came from a father who would rather bury his money in the woods than trust it to a bank. Opportunities to allow myself the space to do what's right for me, opportunities to recognize that there is no right or wrong, there's only what feels right in the moment. Opportunities to follow what makes me feel good and inspired, because feeling good and inspired is the only way I can hope to affect the world for the better.

When I do this, the weight in my solar plexus starts to resemble a bird - a bird with strong wings that can pull me up out of the tornado.

Making Myself a Wizard Hat Out of Felt and Rhetorical Questions

Crushing, soul-grinding doubt seems to be the legacy of humanity. We doubt our worth, our contribution, our ability to meet the standards that society or we ourselves have set. I spend a reasonable chunk of every day convinced that I’m not doing enough, feeling enough, living enough, earning enough, being enough. Why on earth would I do that? Why on earth would I pour so much of my finite energy into a sticky black pit of doubt?

Why isn’t it enough to be breathing every day? Why isn’t it enough to wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I help today?” Or wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I have fun today?” Why do most of our early morning thoughts begin with, “How can I survive today?”

My tiny-fist-shaken-at-the-sky rhetorical questions crop up whenever I find myself in the unconscious loop of work and budgets and doing all the things I don't particularly want to do in hopes of one day being able to do what I really want to do. I have a bad habit of feeling like a victim of my own life rather than its creator. But work and budgets and doing things you don't particularly want to do right this very minute aren't bad. Sometimes work and budgets and things you don't want to do right this very minute really are a good idea. It's not so important what you do, as long as you're being conscious

I don't believe we're here to eke out whatever small life we can manage. I prefer to think of us as wizards of our environment, whisking what we most want out of the ether the way Dumbledore presents hundreds of thirsty adolescents with jugs of pumpkin juice. We're here to make what we want to make and do what brings us joy and spend as much time as we can in the midst of things that light us up - whether that's music or writing or knitting or running through dewy grass or eating that expensive granola that you feel bad for buying. (STOP FEELING BAD FOR BUYING THE GRANOLA YOU ACTUALLY ENJOY.)

Creation beats sacrifice. Joy beats doubt. Picking up a stick on your morning walk to wave like a found magic wand while pretending to be Dumbledore and yelling, "I shall conjure up time for more writing and plane trips to visit friends and also better breakfast cereal!" beats just about everything.

Dream + Real World = Trust

In my perfect world, the world I'd like to create for myself because I am an almighty god person who can mold her environment to her every whim, I get to spend all my work hours writing about things that mean something to me. And "all my work hours" cap out at about three or four hours a day.  All the hours that come after that get to be spent picking cherries in a sunlit orchard or something. My time is mostly spent having adventures with my favorite people and taking care of my family, including one or two moderately well-behaved children. Living life, then turning around and writing about it.

What trips me up is what I think I need to get this life. As I dive into the How To Make Amber's Dream a Real World Thing, I enter an uncomfortable space. To get a book published you need x, where x = brilliant idea or ready-made audience of a hundred thousand or some unspecified brand of magic. To get an essay published somewhere people have heard of, you need to have a book published. To make money at any of this you have to be a wizard of many disciplines, and my brain has mastered only whimsy and baby animals. I build up insurmountable roadblocks in my head until I wind up going in aimless circles.

I don't have a clear roadmap and that makes me uncomfortable. Even with roadmaps, I tend to get lost. Even the omniscient voice of the GPS deity can't account for every variable and all it takes is one off-kilter message to send me twenty minutes out of my way on a ten minute trip.

What I want to do comes from a good place - writing brings me joy and helps me learn more about myself in the world. I want my writing to help me feel more love - for myself, my people, and the world; and I hope it does so for others as well.  I want to transcribe my soul so that maybe people can learn to see theirs in a new way. It's a little grandiose, but hey, if you don't hand yourself a purpose, who will?

I don't like posting this. I don't feel comfortable saying, "I want to be published. I want to write books that sell to a lot of people. No, more people than that. Just go ahead and double the most outrageous number you can think of. That's what I want. So I can write a few hours a day and spend the rest of my time with my family." Because to this day - despite my belief that if you really want something, you have the capacity to get it, despite what I would say to anyone else who approached me with this problem - I still think, "Who am I to want that? Who am I to think about getting that, when so many other people want that too?"

When I think about Publishing and Audience Building and All The Things You Need To Make That Life Happen, I just want to open my closet door, arrange my shoes and sweaters into a nest, and curl up in the dark for a week or two. I stop writing and start focusing on what I think I need to do in order to write. Which doesn't make any sense.

So I have to trust. Trust that my work will find its people and its place. Trust that I can live the way I want to live and spend my time doing what I want to do. When I twist it up in my head because I don't know how to make it happen and spend my time worrying and not doing, I learn what trust is. Trusting that the path leads where I want it to go even though I don't know what that path looks like.

What I want is actually contained in a very simple process - create and share. Create and share. Write, finish, ship, repeat. No matter what the fear in my head sounds like, the answer remains the same. Meaning, the more I write and the less I tangle myself up in what it feels like I have to do, the happier I am. Because writing is all I ever wanted to do in the first place.

A New Frequency

Most of my writing is heavily influenced by my brain. It's for me. It goes up on a public domain, but it's for me to process my stories, my life, my sometimes incomprehensible emotional space. I write to discover how I feel. To discover what I need. To discover what pieces of my psyche require attention. To find out who feels the way I do, especially when the feelings make me wonder if I'm all alone out here. That's what writing is for me - healing, comfort, connection.

But this new kind of writing works differently. Writing this way is like tuning my brain to another station, another frequency. Instead of mining my thoughts and history for patterns and clever ways to share them, I have to abandon my brain altogether. Blank it out and listen to something else, something bigger, something brighter. Channeled writing requires listening to you.

If you've found your way here, you're probably extraordinarily sensitive in some way - to yourself, to other people and all their moods, energy, emotions. You may walk into a room and feel bowled over by the power of all the other humans in your immediate vicinity. I spent a lot of years doing my damnedest to block all that out so I could function in the world. But now I'm learning to relate to it in a different way. I want to be open to it, rather than walled off. I want to be able to access that energy, that power of feeling, in a new way. By treating this connection to everyone around me as a gift rather than a burden, my life feels happier, lighter, and I'm able to tap into my own feelings in a new way, a way that guides me rather than hinders me.

We all know what to do. We all know what we need. Every one of us carries all the love, perspective and wisdom to have the experience we want to have. But the world is big and scary and exhausting and many of us don't know that part of us even exists, let alone where to find it and what to do with it when we get there. Our world doesn't often value instinct and intuition. The part that nudges you to bring an umbrella in the morning - ignore that nudge and you get wet. The part that nudges you to leave a relationship - ignore that nudge and life gets progressively harder until something cracks and your life shatters.

The more I open up to my intuition, the more I can open up to yours too. When I turn my attention to myself, I can find what I need. Now, when I turn my attention toward you, I can also open up to what you need. Because what I need and what you need all comes from the same place - somewhere everyone can access. I'm learning to use that piece of me that I wanted to ignore for decades, the piece of me that I thought was making life harder, but may just make life infinitely easier. Because feeling what others feel, even when it's draining, can be a great gift.  It reminds me that none of us are alone. Different stories, same experience. 

Emotions are our most profound guidance system - they will unerringly point us toward what we need. We just need to learn how to interpret the message. It's like learning another language. After spending years being buffeted around by my emotions before getting heartily sick of it and learning to interpret them, I've chiseled my own Rosetta Stone of feelings.

Now that my emotional space is clearer than it's ever been, I can find that different frequency. The interpretation is simple, as long as I keep my brain out of the way. I think of this new writing as transcribing what your soul wants you to know, in this moment.

I think of it as a love letter from your soul. 


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If you asked for one of these way back in March and haven't received it yet, I promise I haven't forgotten you. This particular learning curve has been a roller coaster and I'm still working my way through the list. If you didn't and you'd like to be my guinea pig as I practice with this, leave me a comment or send an email. 

X = Me

Solving for x is astonishingly easy, as it happens. If I am the x factor, then the x factor is me.

Simple, right? Almost brutally so.

What's particularly brutal is that I've known this for years. My brain understood. People told me, books told me, my reasoning skills parsed it out. But just because you understand something doesn't mean you know it. Just because you know something is true doesn't mean your heart or your emotions have any idea what that big gray lump in your skull is prattling on about.

I am the x factor. Not because I'm the reason dating hasn't worked, but because I need to focus my attention on me.

If I am the x factor, that means I get to put all of my time and attention into things that make me happy, instead of going out on first date after first date in a time-consuming attempt to play the numbers and manipulate the system into giving me what I want. I get to put my energy into what feeds me on a deep level, rather than spending my time trying to create some safe, loving space for someone else because I thought that if I make them feel loved, they'll make me feel loved.

Pro tip: That doesn't work.

Trying to force people to feel something - even if it's something we all want to give and experience - is a really bad bet. Good intentions, poor execution. People can feel it when you're coming from a place of need, rather than a place of "here, I have so much that I would like to share it with you." I can't name that place because I haven't found it on the map yet. I'm still looking.

In my efforts to find me in this new map, I have claimed this month. All of it. All of it is mine, henceforth to be known as Be Nice To Amber month. You don't have to be nice to me, but I have to be nice to me. Being nice to me means no dating. No online suitors, no constant checking of the apps, no wondering when he's going to respond. Unless some epic romantic comedy kismet slams into me at the grocery store, I will go on not one single date. Instead, I will focus on what makes me happy, rather than on what someone else is thinking or feeling. A month of fixing up the hobbit hole and going to yoga and reading Harry Potter in the fairy garden that was recently discovered near my house. A month of less caffeine and no self-recrimination. A month of things I rarely allow myself, like manicures and chocolate bars* and afternoons at the beach.

* Lies. I always allow myself chocolate bars.

My month began on June 11 and will end on July 11, my 36th birthday. Everything feels better already. Lighter, clearer, like I'm more me than I have been in a long time.

Maybe the best way to date is not to date at all.

Fork in the Road

My dad’s sister got a reading from a psychic in San Francisco a few months after he died. Because that’s what we do in my family.

Dad showed up, as a spirit or a ghost or whatever you get to be after you're dead, and the psychic said he was wearing jogging shorts. As far as I know, my father never owned a pair of jogging shorts in his life. He was fond of joking that running was the worst way to be healthy. “Sure you live longer,” he’d say, “but you have to spend all that extra time jogging.” Now that I spend a lot of time circling trails, I wonder how much longer he would have lived, and how much more peaceful he would have felt, if he had been a runner.

As she told me this, writing off dad's curious post-death jogging shorts as psychic dissonance, I remembered a thought I had months before he passed away. Dad lived in Swall Meadows, right next to Inyo National Park. After spending the day in the care center with him, I would run in the shadows of the sunset-tipped mountains. This thought came to me in the middle of one of my afternoon runs, feeling weirdly like a vision - an idea I’m really not comfortable with, minus Peyote and a Native American chieftain or two. So I wrote it off as the product of mild heat stroke and my new and strange obsession with running. At the time, Dad had already started to talk about dying, but we wouldn’t accept it for months yet. But as I was running through the desert, I saw two paths for my father.

One, the widest and bleakest, the path he eventually chose, was of him spiralling down into the worst the human experience can offer - a broken body and a mind that can’t heal because both are so separated from their own processes and emotions that they can’t find their way back.

The second path, much fainter, showed my father running. Conquering what ailed him until he was healthy enough to become one of those sun-leathered old dudes pounding the pavement in running shoes with wet bandanas tied around their grizzled heads.

Knowing now how badly off he was by the time he fell, I don’t know if that was possible. Maybe what I was seeing was a path that had forked off many years previous and was no longer an option. Maybe it was a path he could have chosen. I don’t know. But I saw him running. I saw him healthy. I saw him beating back the demons with sweat and salt and endless miles of asphalt.

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I'm writing a book about my father's death. I'll be sharing pieces of the Dead Dad Book as I work on it, because writing here and on Twitter led me to this book in the first place.

Making Space For All The Feelings

You only have so much room in your brain and your heart and your body. When your body gets clogged with emotion like fear and anger, it seeps into your heart and your head, leaving less space for things you actually want. I spend a lot of my time clearing space. I cry at least three times a week. I do that free write thing where you sit down for ten or twenty minutes and keep your fingers typing constantly, so that whatever is choking your brain can be laid out on paper for you to delete or burn. If something is pressing on my throat or my chest, I determine what it is and what it's trying to tell me.

In my younger days, the manic pixie dust of the mantra made me scoff, but I'm learning how deeply valuable a good mantra can be for reframing situations and popping my brain out of its habitual negativity. Like when I catch myself worrying about some new relationship possibility and why he hasn't called, I've trained my brain to call up what I want instead, using a phrase that reminds me that he doesn't need to call, that's not where we are now, and all I need to do is hold a light, curious space for both of us to discover what this is. Usually, when I dissolve whatever is knotting up in my chest, he calls. Or I call and he picks right up and says he was just thinking about me.

Using whatever causes pain - often a thought your brain is convinced is the most deeply true thing in the universe but has no real truth in anyone's world but your own - as a trigger for investigation rather than a trigger to shut down can change your life.

Investigation allows you to instill new habits. New habits can shift the Pavlovian response of your brain so it tips toward positive thoughts rather than negative. In the end, your brain just isn't that smart. It's a tape recorder that only knows what has gone before. In order to expand and create and experience new things, you need to move out of your brain and into your body. Because your body registers emotion in a very physical way and that emotion is where change happens. When you dive into an emotion and feel it until it shifts and dissolves, space opens. When you track a negative thought and reprogram your brain to shift toward how you want to think about a situation rather than how you've thought about it in the past, space opens.

When you create that space, you get to decide how to fill it. Love and joy and progress need room. You can't try to paste good stuff on top of bad and hope it all works out okay. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the good stuff dissolves the bad. But keeping it good requires cleaning. Your emotional life needs just as much attention as your career and your relationships and your home. At first, this pissed me off - the last thing anyone needs is one more place to tend. But when you tend your emotions, everything else gets exponentially easier.

The more space I create, the less cynical and more creative I become. When I'm not so bogged down in fear, there's more room for wonder and awe. When I'm not constantly dodging how I feel, I have the space to notice that it truly is an amazing world, full of tilting giraffes and ballet dancers and people who strap wooden boards to their legs and go spinning off cliffs. Humans flying through the air on wings made by hands. Music that can touch the emotion you didn't know you had. Words strung together in just the right way. Actors who reflect feelings you recognize and offer them up from a different place, a place of story, so that maybe you can understand yourself in a new way.

Our favorite things - movies, music, books - often evoke our own emotion. Because they're a safe space where our feelings can be reflected back to us and maybe begin to heal.

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This post came from watching this video. My favorite part is at minute six where everyone starts dancing. My least favorite part is where the dude at 6:41 punches a stuffed giraffe. 

Anger's Pure Burn

For most of my life, whenever I was confronted with extreme emotion - especially the loud, yelling kind - I would shiver like a chihuahua and search desperately for the nearest exit. Not this time. There were some opinions this weekend about how I live my life and they were vehement. Maybe I shouldn't be proud of standing up, shouting straight in someone's face. But I am proud. I gave as good as I got and I didn't sit there and take what was thrown at me - something I did in different situations for a reasonable portion of my twenties. Taking someone else's story as fact, especially someone else's story about you, can be poisonous and that poison can eat away at your soul. I know, because I had to spend the first half of my thirties collecting pieces of myself from where I'd abandoned them, chewed up and forgotten. Obviously, someone else's opinions and stories won't bother you unless you see a nugget of truth in them. That's when other people's opinions - as infuriating as they can be - are valuable. They can shine a light on a part of you that needs attention and love.

What needs attention and love right now is me.

You can't ignore a child and expect them to flourish, you can't ignore your career and expect it to expand, you can't ignore a houseplant and expect it to be all perky and green. You can't ignore yourself - your real self, whatever that means to you - and expect to thrive.

I need to surrender my habit of allowing my worth to be determined by outside factors. I need to surrender the fear that makes that possible - the fear of not being enough, the fear of not doing enough, the fear of not doing it right. Because when I judge my value by based on what I've written, the zeros in my bank balance, how my family thinks of me, how men think of me, it detracts from me.

When I get caught in a loop like this, it's like I float out of my body. I go about my life. I look before I cross the street, I answer email, I do the dishes. But I'm not conscious of any of it. My brain is so far lost in what has happened or what might happen that I have no idea what is happening.

That's why I'm proud of myself for being angry. It took me a long time to learn how to be that present with my emotions or that willing to share them. I dropped right into what was happening and anger is was what I found. It felt pure, somehow. It was a pure emotion that burned through me and I allowed the fire to the surface, instead of letting it blacken my internal organs. Without even trying, I fought fair. I was mad, but I didn't hurl accusations or character denigrations. I just let how I was feeling in that moment fly.

Now when I think about how to let go of identifying myself through other people's stories, I start to worry. Worry about how I can change that, how I can do it right, how I can be right so I can get what I want. Doing exactly what I'm trying to move away from.

But if I drop into the present moment, things start to feel clear. It's a crisp, sunny day in San Francisco. I'm sitting in a cafe with a latte and a bagel. I can see the sun shine on dark blue and bright green and warm orange. I can take a deep breath, my fingers can type, I have legs that can run, and a brain that can think - and then accept when it's time to stop thinking. I have plenty of money for the moment and ideas on how to extend that moment into the more socially acceptable future. I have a home today, I'll have a different home on Saturday, and I have several good options for homes in the future. I have friends who love me and things to look forward to. I have so much and, when I focus on that, it's hard to remember why I was worried in the first place.


Choosing Flight

When I was a kid, I was immortal. I could barrel down snowy hills with sticks strapped to my feet and feel no fear. I could go streaking down grassy hills slippery with dew, without even recognizing the possibility of a broken femur. Even when I broke my left arm in third grade, it didn't slow me down because I didn't feel a thing.

Remember that? Diving head first into whatever caught your whim because you didn't know what a broken femur felt like? Or a shattered heart? It's easy to barrel down a snowy hill when you don't understand the cost of failure. But everyone eventually learns what it feels like to fall.

September 11, 2001 was the first day I truly felt my own mortality. It's become an epic cliche, but I think we all gained a fresh sense of fragility the day the towers fell. I was 22 that year, after graduating from college the year before and leaving Manhattan for San Francisco. But I knew people who worked in the buildings or near them. When I managed to catch one of those friends on the phone that night, she told me how she had to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge, limping in her high heels as thousands of people crossed the water in shattered silence.

That was the first time it occurred to me that one day I would die. That I - and my friends and family - can be broken. I was lucky to make it to my twenties before truly feeling that. So many kids aren't that lucky. Being sheltered can be good - all children deserve the opportunity to spread their tiny wings without fear.

But eventually we all learn that we're breakable. We can and will shatter and we'll have to put ourselves back together again. But wrapping yourself in cotton batting and protecting yourself from the world is more dangerous. Too much joy and too many opportunities missed. As a champion cocooner, I know I've lost out. So I'm learning to be fearless because hiding is no longer a viable option.

I went to the Salton Sea this weekend, to visit the ocean that lives in the middle of the desert. It's beautiful, but the salt in the water is death to anything that lives there. But if you brave the stench and the flies and a shore littered with fish corpses, you can stand and gaze out at something beautiful that shouldn't exist but does.

Last year, I went zip-lining over the jungles of Costa Rica. I went with a friend and, as I was strapping on my harness, he called me fearless. Something I'd never really considered myself. But after the first terrifying line where plummeting to my death seemed a not so much a probability as an inevitability, I learned to enjoy soaring over the jungle. Soon, I was twisting and turning and flipping upside down to zoom toward the horizon with my stomach to the sky.

You can teach yourself to fear less. Especially when doing so means you get to fly.

Shifting Years

Last year, I traveled thousands of miles to realize that it doesn't really matter where you are - your capacity for happiness doesn't change, whether you're on a beach in Central America or in the house where you grew up. I watched the wind of my first hurricane whip past the second floor of my friend's house on Staten Island, bending towering trees in half, like they were genuflecting to the eye of the storm. I had my first panic attack in the parking lot of a hospital. I handed out thousands of dollars in cash. I went soaring over the jungles of Costa Rica. I got kissed on a bridge in Amsterdam. I watched both my parents become incapacitated and unable to communicate. One recovered, one didn't. I learned that seven almonds buy you a lot of attention from a squirrel. I lay by the side of the highway next to the Intensive Care Unit, tears running from the corners of my eyes and into the grass.

Driving away.

"Driving away."

Driving away from the hospital after saying goodbye.

Last year, I watched New York marathon runners jogging from the Staten Island ferry to Rockaway beach with supplies on their backs. I learned that when the power is out for a week, it's not the electricity you miss, it's the heat. I roamed the streets of Manhattan the way I did in college, music pouring through my headphones to create a soundtrack to a city that seemed to expand and contract around me, as my own feelings ebbed and flowed. It was hard to be so far away from my family during that month as my dad was failing and my mom had a concussion from hitting her head on the kitchen floor, but it patched over the gaping hole I felt had been kicked in my chest. Taking that time allowed me be who I needed to be during the last week we spent with my dad. There's still some guilt there, but I'm learning to trust in my own instincts, to know that I can balance my own needs with those of my loved ones.

At the same moment.

"At the same moment."

On the Staten Island ferry.

Last year, the furrow between my brows - the one that appears when I'm confused or in pain - became permanent. The ridges smooth out when I relax, but they're always visible now, something that would have horrified my younger self and occasionally still does. That furrow is the physical legacy of my 35th year and my father's death.

Other things are less visible.

Last year, I learned to sit on my hands when what I really want to do is yell and scream and react. I learned to be kinder to people who lash out, because it stems from their own pain and they're only really hurting themselves. You're allowed to feel your feelings, but when you use them as a whiplash to sting others in a desperate bid to make yourself feel better 1) it doesn't work and 2) now everyone's mad at you. I learned that being kind to yourself means making healthy choices and other people don't have to like those choices. I learned that the journey toward death - even when it's painful and hard and you begin to think that no hell devised by even the fiercest of religions could be as bad as this - can be full of grace. Even joy. Certainly love.

If I could grow wings, I would.

"If I could grow wings, I would."

The world is a beautiful place, and I saw more of it. Autumn leaves on Staten Island, canals in Holland, fireflies in Central America. I met and reconnected with amazing people. It was a year of adventure and stuck-ness and great change. It was a year where I further cemented my faith in myself and in the world around me. It was a year where the roots in my heart grew and extended down through my legs and my feet and into the center of the world. I feel like you can't face death with a loved one without your roots both growing deeper and also disconnecting you from what you previously knew. But where you feel untethered, there are always people to catch you, to be the rubber bumper as your heavy ball hurtles toward the pins. People - friends, hospital workers, folks on Twitter - helped guide my family and me as we picked and spun our way down the lane from my father's accident to his death.

The second half of 2012 was tough for me. But there was a lot of grace and magic in it too. I'm learning not to be frightened by the tough stuff. Because it opens the door to so many good things. Love. Relief. Growth. Change. Pattern busting. Sinking fully into each good moment - the ones with bikes and color and grace - because they're worth so much more when what surrounds them is hard. Parties glow with brighter light, tea with friends takes on new weight, and the words that flow through your headphones and into your brain assume fresh meaning. But I got what I needed from 2012. I think the best you can hope for from a year is to love yourself and the world better than you did when it started.

Sidewalk in front of my old apartment in San Francisco.

"Sidewalk in front of my old apartment in San Francisco."

I couldn't have possibly imagined what 2012 held for me back in January. So I'm letting go of the need to know what this coming year will hold. I want to find an easier forward motion because I tend to go full-throttle and then slam the brakes on myself, which makes for a rather lurching existence. I want more stability and creation and giving. I want to be a better person, a better friend, a better daughter and sister.

Beyond that, who knows? Some things will be good, some bad, some painful, some joyful. But whatever it holds, there will be love and there will be grace and there will be discovery. Before my father died, my brother grabbed his shoulder and said, “I’m excited for you, dad. You’re about to go on an adventure.”

I think that's what 2013 holds for all of us. So I'm excited. We're about to go on an adventure.

Dear Amsterdam

I'll miss plowing through you on my bike like I'm on a mission to careen past every idly pedaling Dutch person on a cell phone which, let's be real, I totally am. I'll miss your bridges strung with lights and your soft, flaky croissants that make your American counterparts curl up in mortification. I'll miss your medieval castles and taking trains the wrong way through Holland and getting away with having the wrong ticket because everyone in your country, from policemen to train ticket collectors to grocery clerks, is just really really nice. I'll miss riding home late at night, when your streets are dark and empty of people but still full of sedate brick buildings that have been standing watch over nighttime pedestrians for the last three hundred years. I'll miss drinking coffee in the sun by a canal. I'll miss eating lunch on the balcony and wandering through stores marveling at the intersection between foreign and familiar. I'll miss your black licorice and the three story windmill that pointed my way home. I'll miss the friends I made, the people I met, and the cats I yelled at for sticking their fuzzy snouts in the butter.

I'll even miss the Red Light District, which totally skeeved me out until I started wondering about the underwear-clad girls posing in those red lit windows. What are their lives like? Why are they there? I wanted to ask them about their stories, what kind of love they have in their lives, and what they think about all this. But I didn't, because how do you ask something like that?

Living in Costa Rica and Amsterdam for the summer taught me that when I travel, I want to have a specific creative project. Specific to the place and specific to my interests - something to frame my time there and give it more of a purpose. To come home from wherever I was for a month and be able to hold or watch or read this thing I made. A creative souvenir that takes the feelings I had and amazing things I saw and molds them into something I can share.

I wish I figured this out three months ago, but that's why you live, right? To figure out the things you wish you could apply retroactively to the rest of your life. But you can't, so you just keep trekking out into the world and hope to whatever sky-dwelling deity you prefer that you remember what you figured out for next time.

At Least Now I Know The Dutch Word For Chicken

Figuring out which soup is chicken in a Dutch supermarket when you're feverish is a daunting task. I could have asked someone, but simply forcing one foot to step in front of the other in a vaguely normal fashion felt like summiting Kilimanjaro without a sherpa or even a water bottle. Conquering my squeamish belief that it's rude to walk up to someone in a foreign country and assume they speak my language was really too much to ask on the day that the insides of my stomach made an abrupt and brutal reappearance. I insist on being a pansy about this, even though everyone in Amsterdam does speak my language - even the yoga classes are conducted half in Dutch, half in English. I should probably just get over myself. But conquering deeply entrenched beliefs and getting over oneself are definitely too much to ask when the only thing between you and what feels like death is a mug of chicken soup. All of this to say, would a convincing graphic of a plump and obvious chicken be too much to ask, Dutch soup makers?

NMmF_iEtBd
NMmF_iEtBd

Panda by Brian Andreas. Because he does things like that.

Traveling by yourself to random countries for months at a time can get lonely. I'm pretty good at being alone. I'm even reasonably good at being lonely. But at some point, being good at something stops being a good reason to do it. So you start dating instead.

There was the Italian man who wore his hat through dinner. There was the man who somehow found me on a random bridge after I'd manage to miss the very obvious landmark at which we were supposed to meet. Two days in a row. I missed it twice. Despite having been there many times before. My brain is missing the GPS component that comes standard in most models.

But the true winner in my own personal Dating Olympics was the guy who went to the police station with me instead of to the museum. Because my purse had been stolen on my way to meet him. HI. I JUST MET YOU. HELP ME FIGURE OUT ALL MY SHIT.

When we got to the police station - after I almost started crying into the iPad he very nicely let me use to skype the credit card companies, credit card companies that really really do not want to send replacement cards to the Netherlands - we learned that the efficient and genial Dutch cops had already nabbed the guy. They returned a very strange selection of items - my credit cards and my makeup and my umbrella. But not my purse or my sweater or the keys to my bike lock. But they were very apologetic about making us wait a whole fifteen minutes and told us about how they found the thief sitting in bushes (really) and so the cops crept around the building and hopped out from behind it to wave a cheery five fingered hello before tackling the guy.

If you have to sit in a police station and give a police report, you may as well do it in Amsterdam. Thanks for getting my debit card and my lip gloss back, guys.

On our second date, we did that whole nice dinner, night stroll along the Amsterdam canals thing. This would have been the best date in the world, were I not starting to feel queasy. I thought I was just low energy, maybe an adrenaline let-down from the whole purse thing. It wasn't until I was pedaling home like a 93-year-old grandmother instead of zipping around as many Dutch people on cell phones as possible that I realized I'd contracted the flu. Stopping on the side of the road and reintroducing myself to my lamb entree confirmed it.

First date, purse gone. Second date, flu. Third date...accidental arson? Horsemen of the apocalypse? Dinner theater?