Allowing Fate

My last date ended 20 minutes in after he asked "What would happen if you accidentally got pregnant?" and I said "I would want to have it" and he said "I would not want you to have it" so we shook hands and walked back to our cars.

This true ass story perfectly illustrates my current stance on dating. Which is: hahahahahahaNOPE.

Dating was actually going better than it's ever gone before - aside from that random 20-minute misalliance, I've never before been able to basically snap my fingers and have amazing guys pop in like magic.

But, as it turns out, I have zero interest in dating.

I don't want to get to know you. I want to get to know ME.

Even though I just turned 40, I still have so much about the interior of my soul and brain to discover. There's a multi-verse to play in, within me and in the other dimensions. Healings to do, dragons to channel, books to write, coffee to drink, friends to meet, goals to dance with.

So no more playing the numbers game, no more going out with random strangers in the hopes of finding the partner - I am now relying 100% on fate. Maybe fate will deliver, rom-com-style, maybe it won't.

It's amazing how much space in my brain this has freed up. I feel like I'm able to really truly enjoy being single for the first time, possibly ever.

There's nothing to do, nothing to worry about, nothing to strive for.

My future relationship is entirely in the hands of god, the angels, karma, my higher self, destiny or pure unadulterated chance. Whoever makes these decisions, I surrender entirely to you.

In the meantime, I'm going to take singing lessons, work a lot, FaceTime giraffes, dance as I clean my house, write animal stories, drive anywhere I please on weekends, take myself out to fancy meals, get my nails painted wild colors, go out in the city with my girlfriends, lie on my bed and heal the cracks, eat crackers for dinner, and genuinely enjoy the hell out of my life.

My Heart Feels Like Charlie Brown Trying to Kick a Football

Plowing forward, filled with hope, leaving the ground with the high of the kick as you look up to the sky ...and then the nausea-inducing spinal trauma of crashing flat into the ground. Yup, my romantic life most accurately resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick a football.

This is mostly my fault. If I try to date out of fear that I'll miss out, or because I'm bored, or because I want the quick hit of validation, or because I think I should, or before I'm completely out of the grieving cycle, that's when I get stood up four times in two weeks by four separate people or end up unraveling a tangled mass of karma. 

So I vow to be more careful a dozen times a week, to guard my heart better. But that’s not really what I want, and I know it. Even when I’m carefully instructing myself to just go ahead and be a different human this time. 

Being in a relationship with me means you occupy a portion of my heart’s real estate and you get to live there for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. Luckily, my heart is growing bigger every day, so I don't begrudge the space. Construction is ongoing.

So far, three people have annexed a corner of my heart. As much as it hurts in the healing stage, if I love someone enough to assign them a lifelong corner of my left ventricle, how could I pass up that love for as long as it lasts? I can't, and I wouldn't want to, no matter what I tell myself in the getting-over-it process. 

Minor heart fractures do fade. Karmic entanglements do drift right back out again. Melt like ice cream on a hot sidewalk, leaving only a sticky residue to eventually wash away in the rain, the cement no worse off - and maybe even retaining a hint of that invisible sweetness.

But the big cracks, the breakages, those don’t recede as easily.

Two major heartbreaks in one calendar year strike me as more than plenty - and explains all this hard-felt keening and flopping in my ribcage over the past few months. 

(This is what keening and heart flopping looks like.) 

I was wrangling last year's heartbreak around this time in Hawaii. Hey, if you have to get over something, you might as well do it on a tropical island. The big energy of those islands had me rolling through vision after vision of my not-on-this-plane-but-still-very-persistent daughter. 

As these visions drove saltwater into the cracks to unapologetically bust me wide open, I saw my heart being knit back together with gold light.

Heart breaks open, you put it back together again. With Elmer's glue, if you have to. 

A friend once called me a dating warrior. “You just keep throwing yourself back out there to get trampled.” I'm an enthusiastic warrior, but apparently not a very good one. 

But every time I hurl myself into the ring, my heart does grow bigger. It has to. 

Feeling big clears out big space. Space for unconditional love to flood in naturally, replacing the sadness and the anger and the “here are seven reasons we both royally fucked up” judgment parade marching through my brain in an alarmingly predictable loop.

When the unconditional love starts sweeping everything clean again, the space that lets everyone have their own experience and knows that the love doesn’t go away even if the people do, that’s when I start having more trust in the process.

Trust in myself - that I haven’t profoundly fucked up this time, even when my brain is pretty certain I have. Trust that the right relationship will work out at the right time for everyone involved - and that I don’t have to hurl myself warrior-style into the coliseum to be gnawed on by a tiger for the privilege.

I do want to be kinder to my heart. I'm learning what that looks like, slowly but surely. It means not proceeding out of fear or need for validation. It means giving myself plenty of space and room to nurture me and my relationship with myself. For now, I'm just thrilled that my heart is finally feeling less raw. Joy is starting to feel more natural, and all the I'm-in-a-grieving-period bad decisions and massive karmic tangles have finally stopped. It kind of feels like a hot shower and big meal after running a marathon - routine experiences that suddenly feel like Christmas morning, simply because you put yourself through the wringer first. 

It's like the universe is asking for my faith, asking me to just surrender. Because the more I try to control, the harder everything gets. But if I just trust what comes my way, and trust myself to handle it, everything simplifies. 

What Happens When You Meditate For An Entire Day

Spoiler: Nothing. 

Nothing happens when you meditate all day. Sweet, blissful nothing.

You go in with an agenda, because of course. You are a human being and if you're going to spend all day staring at the wall, you'd damn well better get something out of it, thank you very much.

You walk out having no idea what your agenda was or even that you had one, because you’re all pumped up on peace endorphins.

We all want the answers. We want to know that our actions will yield fruit, that our life is headed in the right direction, that we are safe. 

But sometimes we have to realize that it's not time for answers. That there is absolutely no way we can take a wrong turn in life. Because there is no right path or wrong path. 

My brain is already kicking in with OF COURSE THERE'S A WRONG PATH AND YOU HAVE OBVIOUSLY TAKEN IT, EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT IN THE GUTTER WITH A NEEDLE, WHICH IS ANOTHER WRONG PATH. OF WHICH THERE ARE MANY. 

Why meditation can be really nice. Especially a day of it. Because, after two sittings where my brain spun mercilessly, it finally wore itself out like a three-year-old after a birthday party with Spider Man, a piñata and multiple rainbow-frosted layer cakes. 

And then there was silence. My need for answers quieted. My desire to be safe quieted because I am safe. In this moment, I am always safe. My path is just my path. It just is. 

Quiet.  

My inner guidance has been prompting me to meditate two hours a day. Obviously, my brain thinks that’s bullshit, so I haven’t been doing it.

But absent other answers regarding my life, I’ve vowed to follow my internal guidance and trust it, even when it doesn’t seem logical - which, frankly, is most of the time. So when a friend invited me to a day-long meditation retreat on Sunday, it sounded like exactly what I needed. So off I went. 

It was held at a beautiful home in the Oakland hills - complete with pool, mountain view, and strategically placed Buddhas - and the day was run by a man with luxurious locks of the Inigo Montoya variety. He also had a duck wing to wave the smoke of burning palo santo on us.

I admit, I did wonder where he got that duck wing. Is there a one-winged duck moping around in a field somewhere?

I also wondered how everyone else kept their lower extremities from falling asleep. I had to do the awkward attempt-to-slowly-and-subtley-stretch-my-legs-out-in-front-of-me as my feet get caught on my skirt and I almost tip over, while everyone else is a marble sphinx of enlightenment. 

What I learned from a day of meditating with my body: Healing can be easy. (Except for the feet thing.) 

It doesn't have to be this elaborate ritual of energy clearing and slightly-frantic prayer and lists of things I have to do daily in order to stay sane. My god, no wonder I burned out. My perfectionism even got my healing in its sticky grasp. 

Sometimes, allowing ourselves to just quiet down and rest is the very best healing there is - the very best thing we can do for our brain and our body and our life. 

What I learned from driving to Oakland to meditate with my body: Men I have dated are everywhere.

This is the problem with being single for a long time. At some point, people you once dated become impossible to escape. Driving to the house on Sunday, I drove past the street of one of my poor dating decisions a few months ago. (The one who yelled at me a lot, if you happen to remember that.) Then, on the table at the retreat center, I saw the face of a guy I dated years ago staring up at me from his business card. He's now, apparently, a Tantric sex coach. It was too good not to share, but we were on a silent break. It almost killed me not to wave the card in my friend's face so we could die over it together. 

Anyway. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Is not to meditate two hours every day because that's still crazy talk. But do pay attention to those little nudges - the ones that are prompting you to a new habit or a new creation. They're gentle, they're quiet, but they're so very worth listening to. Listening to your intuitive nudges is the easiest way forward in this time of uncertainty and change. 

Unexpected Things That Make My Life 100% Better

The more I take care of myself, the more I see that self-care is the golden ticket. On June 11, I declared it Be Nice To Amber month. Because I enjoy making grand pronouncements that don't mean anything to anyone but me. I encourage you to try it - bonus points awarded for grand proclamations made while wearing a paper crown and wielding a scepter made out of a broom and tin foil.

In the past, these types of pronouncements have required massive lists of things I probably wasn't going to do, so that I could feel good and terrible when half of it didn't happen. This time, I just set the intention. I was going to be kind to myself, deeply kind, in a way I've rarely been - whatever that ended up meaning.

Here's What That Ended Up Meaning

Listed here because one of my favorite things on the internet is reading about what other people do and how it works for them - and maybe you like reading about that too. 

Not Dating: Dating stopped making me happy, so I stopped dating. Easy. When I stopped dating the way we date these days - constantly prodding my dating apps and spending my days in a daze of hopeful despair over some random guy or another - I started feeling good again. Like all the pieces of my power and self-worth that went on vacation with Hot Guys #1-27 could come back to me. Like I could go about my life feeling whole and happy and not wondering if Hot Guy #16 - that day's favorite - was going to text me back. The energy that brand of dating sucked away from my work and my life and what truly makes me happy was immeasurable. I'm becoming very aware of the energy leaks in my life, and dating is a leach (and a leech - hi, fellow word nerds!) that's simply not worth it. Besides, the internet isn't the only delivery system for a mate. Certainly not when you're poking at it like a cocaine-addled lab rat in search of its next hit.

Stopping with the List Making: My lists expand into any media on which you can write words. I have lists on my phone, lists on my computer, lists on paper, lists on post-it notes, lists in my head. My lists have lists. This is exhausting. Draining. Lists are the Dementors of my life. So I gave them up - trusting myself to know what I had to do and trusting myself to actually do it. My happiness quotient jumped by a factor of a zillion. I would nap when I needed to nap, write when I had something to write about, work when it was time to work. Easy.

(Note: I started panicking and making lists again a few days ago. The lists are far lighter and more realistic than they used to be, but I can still feel them pulsing in the corner of the room, ready to suck out my soul at the first misstep. I'm thinking about walking over and ripping them up. Obviously, my relationship with lists is still in process.)

13 Minutes a Day Toward a Personal Project: Just enough time to get something done, but not so much time that you stress out about it. I always feel better when I'm working on the thing that's been squatting in the back of my brain for a year, throwing a bottle at my skull every so often to remind me that it exists. Not ignoring projects > ignoring projects.

Real Food: This one isn't so unexpected - I've known for years that if I eat more veggies and fruit and 90% less processed stuff, I feel better. More energy, more mental clarity, no worry about stuffing my thighs into denim tubes. But sometimes life happens and suddenly you're eating pancakes made with chocolate milk three times a week. When I started taking care of myself - looking at what truly makes me feel good and give me energy and what doesn't - the shift back to eating things that grow in the ground was effortless.

Bye, Bye Black Beans: Giving up coffee, yo. In all the dietary changes I've made over the last four years, in all their rises and falls, coffee is the one thing I could never bear to abandon. But suddenly I just didn't want it any more. When I experimented a bit, I realized that it fuzzes me out in a way that stunts my creativity and my connection. Nope.

Yoga with Candles: God, I'm such a girl. But Lanny told me about the Yoga Download app and instead of watching episodes of Frasier until I fall I asleep, I've been doing 20 minutes of yoga before I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning. My spine sounds less like bubble wrap being stepped on and my rest is better. 

No Glowing Boxes Before Bed: Yeah, yeah. Everyone tells you this and I've always meant to do it. Really, I have. But there's something so comforting about sleeping with your phone right next to your head, isn't there? But then I wake up in the morning and instead of getting up to be a productive, happy human, I start jabbing at my phone with my index finger and then I've been in bed an extra hour for no good reason. Yoga cured me of sleeping with my phone like a teddy bear. After I'm all stretchy and glowing, the last thing I want to do is turn on the blare of a screen.

One Decadent Thing a Week: Massage. New running clothes to replace the hand-me-downs and ancient t-shirts. Reading Harry Potter on the deck with a peach. Decadent doesn't have to mean expensive - though in the case of the running clothes that's precisely what it means. (Being adorable during exercise does not come cheap, it seems.) It just means something I wouldn't ordinarily do for myself. Something I really, really like.

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With every passing day, I feel better and more whole and like I am worthy of the fundamentals that I believe everyone deserves: work they adore, enough money to live the life they want (it's just lucky that I don't want a tiger on a gold leash*), a home that nurtures them, and to feel and radiate love every damn day. It all rolled out naturally, born of a desire to be good to myself in a real way. Deeply kind, not "I want to do this thing so now I'm going to do it because that's being nice to myself, right?"

* On second thought, A TIGER ON A GOLD LEASH SOUNDS AMAZING. Sign me up for that too.

My Be Nice To Amber month ends on July 11. Which also happens to be my birthday, if you happen to have a baby giraffe to unload. (Please note: Now accepting deliveries of baby giraffes.) All of this has changed the way I feel so significantly that I'm going to keep right on doing it. Especially that part about the massages.

I've taken care of parts of myself in the past. But I've rarely taken care of all of me - mind, body, spirit, emotions - all at the same time. This month, I've been happier, I've gotten more and better work done, the brain hamsters are all asleep in their hammocks, and I feel energized and peaceful. Well, okay then.

The day Be Nice To Amber Month ended. I felt good, I was happy, great experiment, the end. 

Your Turn

What's the nicest, most deeply kind thing you could do for yourself right now?

You don't have to answer here - although I'd love to know what your answer is - but give it a few minutes of thought. It's shifted so much for me in just one month that I want to walk up to people on the street and shake them and yell, "ARE YOU BEING NICE TO YOURSELF? IT HELPS! IT REALLY, REALLY HELPS!" Maybe while wearing a tin foil crown and riding a baby giraffe.

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.