The World’s Second Worst Halloween Poem

I held a skull close to me
And asked, “Who am I…honestly?”
“I’ll show you.  Follow me,”
The skull said, telepathically.

It led me to an open door
Where bones lay scattered on the floor
And a raven let out a cackled roar
“You will be nevermore!”

“In case you haven’t heard,”
I yelled loudly at the lunatic bird
“I mean right now, you trifling nerd!”
But…the skull had the last word

“You are who you are
And you will always know!
This existential questioning
Has got to go!
Because you’ve forgotten
An important thing:
Today is today
And it’s Halloween!”

“It’s Halloween!” I shouted, running out the door.
“Dear skull, I have a question more important than before!”
“What is it?” the skull huffed, dramatically
“Who shall I be on this Hallowed Eve?”

The skull shook its head and began to moan,
“You figure it out! Leave this bone alone!
Be a frog or a witch, a ghost or a spore
Just stop questioning me forever more!”

Happy Halloween!

 

The Last Door: On Healing the Generation Gap

The generation of my parents kicked down the doors.

This group of idealistic kids looked at their parents, society, government and religious institutions, found them wanting, and said, “No more.”  No more degradation and marginalization—no more punishment, really—for those who happened to be born the “wrong” way: Black, Woman, Native American, Homosexual.  No more sending youth to fight a war with no good purpose.  No more conforming.  No more denial of the Self.  No more hiding.  No more bullshit.

What this generation did is truly amazing.  They definitely kicked down the doors…but after the dust cleared and their young heroes were assassinated and their idealism was tempered, they did not quite know how to walk through those doors to rebuild on the other side.  It was a new, terrifying, traumatic time, and many people simply became lost…even as they were giving birth to my generation.  I know very few people my age whose parents were always present.  Instead, our parents were never married, or they divorced, or our fathers and mothers walked away never to look back.  Or our parents went a bit crazy, or were strung out on drugs, or never received treatment for PTSD or the effects of Agent Orange when they returned from Vietnam.  Or they taught us how to be transitory and restless: we got used to living out of a bag, moving from place to place or staying with grandparents, relatives or even foster care for a while.  We grew up too fast, and many of us were preyed upon—physically, sexually and emotionally—by caregivers, relatives, strangers or even our parents themselves who carried with them oceans of pain that none of us could understand.

As a result, my generation has never felt safe.

And what we’ve done is overcompensate with our own children.  We are so filled with a great longing to rewrite the history of our childhoods into an ideal that we handicap our children.  We disallow imagination and play for its own sake and over-schedule our kids, running all of us ragged to the dance lessons or baseball games we never had.  We protect them religiously from any form of possible pain or discomfort: we douse them in hand sanitizer…we insist that no child be awarded a first-place trophy but that all children receive a participation ribbon…we threaten to sue a six-year old boy and his family for sexual harassment for tugging on our six-year old daughter’s braid…we don’t allow our children to speak for themselves and we certainly don’t allow them to speak up for themselves.  We love our children but the way we raise them is motivated not so much by that love but by our own deeply rooted fears of pain and lack.  And so, we coddle our children.  We give them everything that money can buy at earlier and earlier ages and expect little in return.  Too many of our children are technologically sophisticated but they don’t know how to wash dishes, read a map, clean a toilet, sew a button or cook food without using a microwave.  They are allowed to behave with entitlement.  We control our children to such an extreme that we don’t allow them to accept any age-appropriate responsibility.  We are cultivating a generation of divas and princelings…and we wonder why bullying is on the rise. 

But what is worse is what my generation of women is doing to itself.  In our need to create a perfect childhood environment, we have regressed.  We look at our mothers—those that broke the professional ceilings and became doctors, lawyers, business owners and politicians; those who are sweating it out at factories or driving trucks; or those who are still on the path to personal enlightenment—with disdain.  Sure, many of us went to college and we even went to work.  But once we got married and had our kids, we forgot about our individuality.  We took on the hardest job in the world and became the moms we always wanted but never had.  We became the perfect 1950’s housewife.  We’re more conservative than our parents.  We conform and keep up with the Joneses.  We dress alike.  And we live vicariously through the reality shows where women behave badly and dramatically, giving a much needed but unhealthy voice to the dissatisfaction we hold inside.  We hide, we rumble, we seethe, and because so many of us don’t honor who we are—those longings that tell us to paint or write or dance or ride horses—we are, in fact, sending the wrong messages to our children.  We’re showing them, day in and day out, that once their glory days of childhood are over, the women they will become or the women they will marry, must once again sacrifice needlessly for their families.  We, too, are damaging our children…but unlike our parents who tried so damn hard to celebrate equality and acknowledge the individual, we spend so much toxic energy pushing down our individual souls, terrified of revealing the truth of who we are to ourselves and to the world.  We are afraid that if we fulfill any of the ideals or promises made by our parents’ generation, we will also invite in those parts of our parents that put us in harm’s way.  We did not feel safe; and yet, ironically, we’ve created a world that for all of its controlled, neat, and pretty veneer feels more dangerous than our childhoods.  It feels like dying on the inside…and we wonder why zombies have resurged in popularity.

I speak in generalities, of course.  Some of us had phenomenal parents and some of us are excellent parents.  But, overall, it’s easy to step back and see the connections between the generations—and to see just where the bridge between them has collapsed.  How then does that bridge become rebuilt?  How do we stop punishing our parents for what they were not?  How do we stop punishing ourselves by accepting lives that are not fully lived?  How do we stop punishing our children with our fear?

Compassion.  It is not easy to be a parent.  Imagine then trying to be a parent in a time when the fabric of society itself changed so completely, yet the only role models our parents had were the very people they were rebelling against.  Parents make it up as they go along—our parents’ generation even more so.  Life was chaotic for them and we were raised in chaos.  And that’s okay.  It made so many of us stronger than we even know.  Strong enough to uncover the tiniest amount of compassion for our parents.  To admit that most of them probably did the best they could even if their best fell way short of what we needed. 

While we also need to be compassionate with ourselves, we need more to be honest.  To look at who we are and what our purpose is outside of our children.  We need to acknowledge the dark sides we all carry if only not to have them erupt in unexpected or violent ways.  We need to give ourselves permission to take the time we need to fill our souls—or even to just fill the bathtub, lock the door, and soak for an hour.  And we need to look at our motivations for why we treat our children the way we do.

And then, we need to look at our children honestly.  Are we raising brats?  Are we dysfunctionally over-protective?  Have we been handicapping our children in any way?  Maybe that little boy tugging on our daughter’s braid is a life lesson for her: maybe by learning how to stand up for herself at a young age will give her the confidence she needs later in life to not get involved in an abusive relationship, to protest unfair treatment at her job, or to run for President of the United States.  By all means, we need to protect our children…but it is in the disappointment, loss and yes, even pain, of life that teaches our children how to be strong, capable and well-rounded.  Besides, as much as we try—and we all know this—we cannot prolong childhood.  In the mind-numbing self-sacrifice fueled by our fear, are we really willing to turn our children out into the world so unprepared to actually be in the world?

Of course, it’s not easy.  Fear does not allow compassion to be easy.  Honesty is even more difficult.  But it is in the long, painful journey of compassion, honesty, and eventually forgiveness that we rebuild the bridge spanning these three generations.  Truth by truth, person by person, we can forgive and we can rebuild…and maybe together we can kick down that last door that blocks our way from having lives fulfilled, whole, equal and powerful.

F*** You, Fifth Grade: On Fear, Death and Trying to Live in the Moment

I never told anyone this: in fifth grade, I passed out. 

Sitting at a table that served as my desk, a snake of release that managed to be too warm and too cold at the same time climbed from my abdomen to my face.  I felt separate from my body, not above it or to the side but no longer of it.  I had the distinct impression that I had been here—wherever here was—before.  My head slumped forward onto my arms and everything went black.  I was aware of the blackness, but I can’t be sure if that awareness was in the moment or only because within a minute or two, all of my parts had re-coalesced and I had returned to consciousness.  At the time, I was curious: what just happened?  Where did I go?  And then, an overwhelming sense of loneliness filled my core.  I had exited from the world, even momentarily, and no one had noticed.  No one had cared.  No one but me had touched the blackness.

As lonely as that experience was—as frightening to think of it as an adult—I believe I passed out because my little ten-year old body and mind were so stressed, my soul gave me a respite.  A taste of death without death.  And at that time, I thought mostly of death.  I lived every day simply and completely terrified of dying.

Fifth grade began in 1980, in the midst of the Cold War and on the cusp of the Reagan years.  My teacher, Mrs. K., seemed old before her time.  I remember a navy blue wool skirt and jacket, a ruffled collar, dried-out hair, lipstick that bled, and a smell of flowers—powdered, decaying and reminiscent not of nature but a laboratory.  Mrs. K. was awful.  Fatalistic.  And obsessed with nuclear annihilation.  She talked about bomb shelters.  About how life would be completely and utterly destroyed.  When we would leave school for the day, she would say things like, “See you tomorrow…that is if we make it through the night.”  I had nightmares about nuclear war and so did many of my classmates.  Parents called to complain.  Near the end of the school year, Mrs. K. suddenly left.  We kids joked that she had a butt rupture, which made us finally laugh as kids should.  And we were thrilled by the vibrant, young substitute; that is, until following Mrs. K.’s curriculum, she showed us a movie about a film crew making a movie about nuclear war.  At the end of the film, a siren rang out its warning.  The director yelled, “Cut!  I didn’t cue the siren yet.”  And a sickening realization filled the set: this siren was the real deal; nuclear war was imminent.  It was meant to be ironic and artistically macabre.  The last image I remember is a group of people waiting for the nuclear bombs that would end their lives.  The substitute teacher frowned and said, “Hmm.”  We didn’t discuss the movie and she no longer followed Mrs. K.’s lesson plans.  But the Fear had already been embedded.

The Fear was added to by my Catechism teacher that year.  I remember nothing about the Bible or Catholicism.  But I do remember horror stories of people being buried alive and coffins dug up with scratches on the inside of the lids.  Of fingernails ripped and bloody from the panic of trying to get out of a premature tomb.  Or stories of decay—of how that decay smelled and looked and what remained: putrid, green ooze.  Occasionally, a completely intact body would be dug up smelling of roses and that, according to my teacher, was the mark of a saint.  Of course, she saw no saints among me and my classmates.  No, our deaths would be the oozing, gross kind.

Around this time, my great-grandfather died.  At the cemetery, after the service, as the coffin was to be wheeled to its burial site for the comfort of sad eyes, my great-aunt threw herself across it and cried, “Daddy, don’t leave me!”  Although other family members mocked her, my great-aunt’s despair opened me completely to the pain of loss.  My great- grandfather’s death meant a hole was growing in the hearts of his loved ones.

John Lennon also died in the middle of fifth grade; which shouldn’t have meant much to a ten-year old girl save for the fact that he was my favorite Beatle.  Actually, he was my mom’s favorite; and since Mom was my favorite, I adopted her likes as my own.  And on December 8, 1980, when he was assassinated at the age of 40, my mom, sister and I prayed for him.  With tears in her eyes, my mom then said, “Just as he was starting to finally get his shit together, he was killed.”  My mother’s words, although innocent, cemented into a personal belief: once a person has success, once someone finally discovers her purpose in life and lives that life with a gratitude that transforms, then, what will happen is death.  It became a fear: the closer I get to who I truly am just means that I am closer to dying.

Extinction, the horror of physical decay, the loss of love, and the loss of self: an onslaught of death revealed in all its forms in one short, stressful year of my life.  Fifth grade influenced me in ways that still haunt to this day.

Once again, I find myself obsessing about death.  Living with death.  It’s the never-ending torment of 2012—of the Apocalypse, Armageddon, Doomsday, solar flares, meteors, mini ice ages, global warming, implosions, explosions, alien invasions, biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare, economic panic, conspiracies, and terrorism—that infiltrates all media all of the goddamned time.  I go to bed with visions of annihilation.  I get knocked off my spiritual core; I forget my connection to the Divine because even if I turn off the television and radio and only check my e-mail, our planet’s destruction still forms the background noise of my life. I feel as if Mrs. K.—crazy, pessimistic Mrs. K.—is whispering in my ear all of the time telling me I won’t make it to the next day.

Death and all of its decay is on the news, TV, or in the road kill I see when I go for a walk or a drive.  Just last week, in trying to get out of my head, a walk of less than a mile brought with it two dead opossum hit together; a turtle on its back and drying out of its shell; the still feathered wing of a hawk attached to its skeleton.  I cried all the way home, unable to escape death. 

Death is still in the loss of loved ones: my grandparents, my great aunt, two great uncles and my cat.  This last decade, I’ve been saying goodbye to the touchstones of my life.  As my family, friends and I age, there’s this sick sense that my goodbyes aren’t over.  That they’ll never be over.

And finally, as I am becoming more of who I am—as I’m writing and teaching more, connecting with people and latching onto my purpose—I am scared that the other shoe will drop.  That like John Lennon, I will finally get my shit together and then, I will die.  It becomes a daily battle.  I so desperately want and need to be myself, to embrace my reason for being; and yet, sometimes, my fear is so great that I will lose my life, that in my worst moments, I stop.  I don’t self-sabotage, necessarily, but I stop.  My whole being feels as if it is held in stasis.

This is no way to live.  It’s one thing to be aware of death.  It’s completely detrimental to entertain it like a houseguest.  I am afraid of death.  Despite becoming very close twice in my life, I have not accepted that someday I will cease to exist.  That I will return to blackness.  I can no longer live like this, with this incessant fear.

Maybe fifth grade holds the key.  In all of that turmoil, I finally passed out…and perhaps passed into awareness.  Perhaps I died for only a moment to be assured that I am meant to live.  Without fear, I am meant to live.

Smiling on the Outside: On the Body, Mind, and PTSD

Awareness arrived, innocently enough, with an e-mail.

Six years ago, I received a questionnaire from a friend asking about such things as my favorite foods, colors and movies.  Once I filled out my answers, I had to send it back to my friend and any others I wanted to give a deeper glimpse into my life.  While a bit self-absorbed, it was also fun.  And I thought nothing when I answered the question, “Do you prefer hugs or kisses?” with this answer: “Nothing beats a first kiss.  I don’t like to be hugged.  Whenever a man hugs me, I feel panicky.”  I hit the Send button.

Then I realized what I had written.  Suddenly very nervous, I called my husband and told him what I did.

“You wrote that?  Oh honey, why would you write that?  Aren’t those meant to be for fun?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled.  “Because…because it’s the truth.”

I felt bad immediately.  And to all of the males in my life I had sent the questionnaire to, I sent a follow-up e-mail about how I didn’t mean them.  That I was okay with hugging them.

I lied.

I hesitate to use the word hate but it is the closest thing that describes how I feel when I am hugged.  While there is a part of me that always craves to be held, for a very long time, I have hated to be hugged.  I can hug a child or a small woman but once I find myself hugged by a man, woman, or even a child who is bigger than I am in height or weight, it takes an incredible amount of focus to remain in place, to smile, and to say, Hello, Good-bye or I love you.  Because my body is reacting: my chest tenses, my lungs hurt, my breath is in danger, and my arms ache to push the other person away.  Even with my husband.  I trust him, but rather than submitting to him spooning me, I tuck in behind him and hold on for dear life.  That’s okay: I can connect with the man I love and feel safe at the same time.

And feeling safe is really what is at the heart of not wanting to be hugged.  Actually, it is at the heart of everything.  I’ve realized this lately: my need for safety commandeers my thoughts, my behavior and even my sleep.  Vigilant to an extreme, whether I’m driving or walking, I plan my route.  I keep a list with me not because I’m anal but because to not do so allows in distraction.  When I’m at the supermarket and discover something I normally buy has been moved, I am beyond annoyed: too much time wandering around looking has me feeling like a target.  Yet, I appear to be the friendliest person at the market: I walk with my head high, I make eye contact and I smile.  I say, Excuse me, sir, or Ma’am where can I find such-and-such? and behind the polite smile, is awareness.  I’m noticing how people are walking and carrying their bodies, how they’re talking to their children or spouse, who is an obstacle, who needs help, who needs to be left alone, what can be used as a weapon, and what aisle is overcrowded.  I’m noticing the women who are so distracted, they walk away from their carts, leaving their purses and children unattended; and I’m noticing who is looking at those abandoned purses and children.  I’m willing to stand in a long line if that means no one else will slide in behind me, boxing me in.  In the parking lot, I’m willing to park farther away from the store if it means my truck is not surrounded by others.  I never walk between cars, especially vans or trucks.  I load my groceries into the passenger seat because it means my back is turned for a few seconds less than if I had to arch over the backseat.  I visually inspect the space under my truck and how the tonneau cover lays on the bed: does it appear that someone is hiding?  I do not go shopping at night.  When I drive by myself, even if it’s for hundreds of miles, I will play one CD over and over again, meditating into its familiarity, or drive in silence because the varied music and commercials of radio stations can be too jarring.  At a restaurant, I never sit with my back facing the door; unless I’m with my husband, who is both military-trained and holds a black belt in karate.  At home, when I was a teenager and then a young adult living on my own, I slept with a chair propped under the door handle.  Now, it takes everything not to return to that behavior.  My house is surrounded by woods that at one time I would have felt very comfortable in, but I don’t venture very far into them alone.  At my worse moments, I scan the forest wondering if anyone is looking in.  And yet, I prefer to be in this rural area: at night, my eyes acclimate well to the darkness; in the city, streetlights cast shadows.  Danger can hide in shadows.  And overall, I don’t sleep well.  My mind searches for noises familiar and not: the water filter turning on, the truck without a muffler that leaves for work two hours before sunrise, the sound of the cat scratching his post.  I sleep on average four hours a night; until finally exhausted, I sleep for ten, waking up both refreshed and self-condemnatory that I spent a night sleeping rather than keeping watch.

Tedious, isn’t it?  I seem a bit crazy, don’t I?

But I’m not.

I’ve been working on an article about alternative therapies helping veterans overcome missing limbs and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  I interviewed an occupational therapist who works with patients who have suffered trauma from war, car accidents and sexual abuse.  According to her, PTSD is not truly a psychological disorder but a physical one.  The memory of the trauma suffered is the most powerful memory in the brain, and everything in both the brain and the body reacts according to that memory.  Already in a state of hyper-vigilance, the brain and body react to outside stimulus as if they were lost in the original trauma.  The body floods with adrenalin which triggers a release of glycogen.  The glycogen converts to glucose.  Glucose feeds the brain but in this case, glucose floods the brain causing the pancreas to overreact and dump insulin.  Blood sugar drops, the brain feels it is going to starve, and the result is an overwhelming sense of fear.  Hyper-vigilance exacerbated by fear caused by trauma and the chemical processes of the body.

As the occupational therapist explained this, asking every so often if she was making sense, I wanted to take myself out of the interview and cry.  Yes, she was making sense.  She was validating my growing awareness about how I’ve been navigating my life for the last 26 years…and how, despite healing emotionally from being raped when I was 15, from truly putting it behind me as if it were another woman’s life, my body remembers.  My body reacts.  Constantly.  Without getting into specifics, when it happened, I weighed not much more than 100 pounds…and I was held down.  Across my chest, into my sternum, I was held down.  I couldn’t breathe.  My mind floated elsewhere as my lungs compressed.  Being forced down, not being able to breathe was actually worse than anything else.  And it is this sensation that remains with me to this day.  My body remembers so strongly that without even being aware of it for decades, I have tailored my life so I never relive that sensation, so that I never find myself held down, searching for breath, searching for safety.  Ironically, what should feel the safest—being hugged by a loved one—doesn’t.  Hugs hold me down, they compress my lungs, they leave me searching for breath.

At least I know.  I’m not crazy.  I’m finally aware.  And because I’m aware, as uncomfortable as it is for me, I am the one who now initiates hugs.  I hug everybody.  I still hate it…but what I hate even more is that something that happened to me a lifetime ago tries to claim this life.  So, I hug.  I smile.  Whenever the panic threatens or the vigilance reveals itself to be extreme even to me, I remember that beyond any need to search for my breath, is that in fact, I have my breath.  I have my life.  And I need to be engaged in it: memories be damned and hugs included.

The Worst Halloween Poem Ever

Bones rattle in their crypts.

Pumpkins grin without lips.

Vampires take large sips.

Mummies peel decayed strips.

Witches fly high like blips.

Aliens probe in ships.

Monsters scratch with long tips.

I write really bad quips.

Which can mean only this:

It’s Halloween!

Yeah!

 

Photo ©2007 by Sandra Payne

 

 

 

 

Taking a Stand on a Bed of Marbles

Unaware of its origin, all I know is that one day when I was little, an antique crate of marbles appeared in our home.  I loved those marbles.  Such a simple plaything; yet each marble was its own world of swirling green, blue or orange glass.  Steelies, vicious little warmongers in their own right, added balance to the colorful box.  My most favorite marbles were the chipped ones: those that had been sheared against a rock, a steelie, or even the hammer of a curious child.  Like jawbreakers bitten in half, these imperfect marbles revealed the source of their magic.  I loved marbles so much I coveted them.  When an opportunity came to add another to my collection, I ensured it would be mine: I cheated.

My second grade teacher, a kindly woman who’d be horrified to learn I thought of her as Mrs. Claus, tested the class weekly in spelling.  Whoever received a perfect score also won a little gift, such as a sticker or sucker.  I became very used to those little gifts.  But the week she offered a marble as a prize, there was a word that had stumped me for days.  The night before the test, on the smallest piece of paper my overly large childish scrawl would allow, I wrote the spelling words.  When the test arrived, I lay the paper on my lap and glanced down when my teacher said the difficult word.  Confident I aced the test, I passed my paper forward and quietly folded the cheat sheet and tucked it into my sleeve.  Sent out to recess then, I passed the bowl of marbles on the teacher’s desk.  I knew which one would be mine: deep reddish orange with a few brown flecks, it looked like autumn compressed into a perfect sphere.  It wasn’t the largest but it was the most intriguing.

Recess was a formality.  I returned to my seat and my teacher handed me my test.  Written in a red circle was -1.  Minus one?  How could this be?  There it was: my nemesis with a red line drawn through it.  Even using a cheat sheet, I spelled the word incorrectly…probably because I misspelled it on the cheat sheet itself.  I can’t remember the word that gave me so much trouble, but it should have been Karma.  It was instant.  Filled with pain, shame and a mist of cold fear, I watched as a classmate chose my marble.  Okay, his marble.

That lesson was swift.  While I never cheated on schoolwork or a test again, I did steal:

When I was about five years old and at the grocery store with my mother, I saw a beautiful bunch of green grapes.  I reached out and grabbed one without thinking.  I popped it into my mouth only to have my mom’s scolding immediately sour the sweetness.

When I was nineteen years old and in a relationship with a man who used my self-esteem to scrape his muddy boots, I bought him a sweater for Christmas.  When I returned home, I discovered that instead of the receipt, the cashier put the check I had written into the bag.  I told my boyfriend what happened.  Because I intended to return the money, I welcomed in a barrage of abusive words.  “If you have such a problem with keeping the money,” he snidely said, “I’ll take it off your hands.”  Then he pointed out the stickiness of the situation: if I revealed the cashier’s mistake, I would probably get her fired.  Could I live with myself then?  I still wanted to return the money.  I remember putting the check into an envelope, but I don’t remember mailing it.  Despite knowing better, I allowed the pain I was enduring to trump the honorable course of action.

Age twenty-four brought me a stolen stapler.  This truly was an accident.  My boss sent me to Europe and gave me the stapler to use while there.  When I returned, he told me I could use it at home.  Two years later, when I moved out-of-state and away from the false identity I was cultivating at my job, the stapler, forgotten and thrown into a box, moved with me.

There it is: my life of crime.  A cheat sheet, a grape, a sweater and a stapler.  I realize that for many, my infractions may seem mild.  Laughable.  Even a little on the preachy or self-righteous side.  I get that.  But I know what I did, how badly I felt and how quickly Karma–in the guise of a lost marble, an angry mother, a prick of a boyfriend, and the wrong job–acted.  Realizing this is good enough for me.  Even though I also know for many–too damn many–stealing is easy.  Everyone does it, from the government to corporations to college students; really, it’s almost the American Way.  And if everyone does it, how could it really hurt anyone?

Stealing has been on my mind a lot lately.  Obviously.  Like a person who’s suffered from poison ivy only to walk barefoot in the same patch of earth, I’ve allowed my mind to re-infect me with the pain of the past.  I’ve hit an unwelcome anniversary: a year ago, the workshops I created were stolen.  Experiences and words that came from my life, from writing my book, from digging through each painful and joyous moment, were claimed by another.  That hurt me.  That was a Karma I couldn’t easily assign to my own negative actions.  As a creative person with a truly generous spirit, all I did was open the door to someone whose smile hid a black soul.  Yes, that hurt.  A violation: especially because my experiences, what I’ve learned, and what I teach are meant to add honesty and positive energy into the world.  By being taken away, something beautifully personal and universal seemed tainted.  And what desecrated it the most is the fact that I lost my naiveté: now, I have to access a coldness I didn’t know I have; I have to protect myself at all costs.  There is no doubt I created my workshops–I have five years of proof before I ever met the person–but I am protected to the hilt.  Rather than use the money I saved to take a trip on my fortieth birthday, I registered my trademark.  My copyright is registered in the Library of Congress.  And once my baby was kidnapped, I fought like hell to attach my name, face and words to it: there is no question who the hell I am or what the hell my work is about.  It’s a matter of public record.

So why obsess about stealing?  Because I realized that even though the experience taught me a lot and blessed me with growth, I’m still pissed off by the audacity of it.  What gives anyone the sense of arrogant entitlement to take what someone else has created?  Truly, I can understand stealing if a person is starving or dying and needs to steal food or medicines to survive.  But what I can’t understand is how, in a society in which most of us have our basic needs and beyond met, people pilfer words, ideas, music, marketing, and designs without compunction.  Even with all of the protections in place!  Is it really as simple as buying into the bullshit that Everyone does it, so I might as well, too?  Is it fear, greed, envy, a game?  I don’t know. 

I know that no matter which side of the stealing equation you find yourself, it hurts.  It hurts being stolen from and it hurts when your better self calls you out…and no matter how deeply hidden, we all have a better self.  I know that eventually the renewed anger I feel will blaze out when I allow myself to step back from an old, useless threat.  And I know that with the litany of misdeeds–the mortgage crisis, bailouts, plagiarizing of term papers and books, music stolen from the artists who created it, and stolen again in our time through illegal downloads–it does indeed seem like everyone is stealing. 

But not everyone is.

Some of us learned firsthand the pain of losing our marbles.

Some of us still need to.

 

(The clip art used is free)

Richer or Poorer: On the Perspective of True Wealth

While I can speak only for those I’ve seen, surrounding the respectability of the average stateside military base is a ghetto.  With an enlisted population that is very young, new to fiscal responsibility, and largely transient, outside the front gates are liquor stores, pawn shops and churches engaged in competition for souls.  If you sneak out the back gate, you’ll find the strip clubs.  Tension hangs above the base and its environment like the blade from a guillotine.  As if serving one’s country isn’t stressful enough, it is exacerbated by the military’s dirty little secret: many service members and their families live in poverty.

At least my husband and I did.

Even with a non-taxed housing allowance, my husband earned only $14,000 a year for the first two years of his service in the Air Force.  While he was in Basic Training and then technical school and then had to report to his first base in Kansas, I stayed behind in Michigan to finish my degree.  When I finally moved to be with him, within a few months, I was humbled.  At one point, we couldn’t afford to eat or pay two of our bills.  Thanks to the Air Force Aid Society, we received a loan, two bags of groceries and two vouchers for the commissary.  Grateful, terrified and ashamed, I accepted the job I had just interviewed for: I would gross only $1500 a month but that was better than living on handouts.

I stayed at that job for about five months until a better one came along: I’d be grossing $28,000 a year.  But better wages did not mean a better life.  Working in freight forwarding, I was on-call twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.  I averaged sixty hours per week.  I went in on Sundays.  I went in at three o’clock in the morning.  I was paged at restaurants, in the movie theater, in the bathtub.  As the breadwinner, I suffered.  In the twenty-three months I lived in Kansas, I was sick with five sinus infections and two pieces of my cervix were clipped off because a doctor thought I had cancer.  Even on Christmas Day, in a dramatic scene reminiscent of Charles Dickens, with bronchitis, a fever of 102 degrees and wearing pajamas, I had to meet a truck driver at the office.  Angry and ashamed, my husband drove me to work and remained with me until I was finished.  We both knew that if I stayed there, this job would kill me; but we both believed that if I didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to take care of our basic needs.

But then arrived an opportunity out of the despair: we could finish out my husband’s last year of obligated service in Kansas, or we could extend for two more years and spend that time in Italy.  This option excited us both until I discovered that there was a good chance I wouldn’t be working.  Twenty percent of the jobs on base would be going to Italian nationals—they should; it’s their country, after all—and many of the professionals were civilians hired stateside.  I was (blissfully) overqualified for most of the remaining jobs.  Just what would the breadwinner do in Italy if she wasn’t working?  How the hell would we be able to afford to live?

How could we afford not to?  Sick, exhausted all of the time, and angry at my husband, the Air Force, the world, and my boss, I knew I had to take this chance.  Whenever fear or doubt crept in, I kept thinking back to my initial reaction when my husband told me about this opportunity: I had smiled for the first time in months.  Like a hug from God, relief and excitement had snuggled me, and even though I had buried my inner, guiding voice for nearly two years, she popped back up and insisted, “You’re doing this!  You’re moving to Italy.  If you don’t, you’ll end up divorced, dead, or both.”  She won.  We moved to Italy.

In Italy, my husband received a Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) which started us at about $22,000.  Without me working, we lived on $20,000 less that first year…and we never lived so well.  We were rich.  We saved money to buy furniture.  We paid cash for trips: by the end of my husband’s service, we had been to Ireland, Germany, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, San Marino and to Rome twice, Venice at least ten times, Florence, Pisa, Turin, and to meet my cousins in Sulmona.  Eventually, I even paid off my credit card.  And I began doing something that I used to only dabble in when I was a full-time student and then an overworked employee: I wrote.  In Italy, we lived on so much less but we were happy.  Truly happy: we had determined that we were going to embrace our new life not with fear, shame or lack.  If we had approached this opportunity carrying all of the pain from Kansas, our time in Italy would’ve been more of the same.  Instead, we chose differently…and learned a way of life, a way of being, that was beyond beautiful and connected.  Sure, there was stress and illness but because we chose to be better, we dealt with those things in a positive and forward-moving manner.

For us, Italy was our Gold Standard.  When we returned to the United States in 2002, we tried to bring that sense of connection and love with us.  It was difficult from the start: we mourned what we left behind and who we had become.  Worse, we no longer recognized the country of our birth.  Reeling and terrified, and rightly so, America had become Fear.  It’s amazing how quickly Fear can overtake you, especially if you’re already grieving.

In this state of Fear, my husband and I allowed ourselves to forget.  We listened to too many conflicting voices and we bought into the American Dream, but one that wasn’t ours.  It was my husband’s turn to work sixty hours a week, to always be on-call, to become angry and sick and shed twenty pounds he didn’t need to lose, and to bury his big smile and bigger Irish laugh.  I determined to make peace with my grief and to write—and I did—but I also allowed myself to become lost in a house we bought that needed more plastic surgery than Hollywood.  We walked too far from our path: having spent so much time, energy and physical, emotional and spiritual health on a job and house that loomed like cancer, Life made the choices we couldn’t.  My husband lost his job.  Our house—eighty percent of the work done by me—sold short.  Appraised at $164,000 with a brand new roof, windows, flooring, walls, and fixtures, our house sold for less than a new car.  Within a few years, our neighborhood had become tense, then poor, and then crime-ridden.  It was time to mourn anew.

In standing back from all of this, I can see the truth.  Whenever I sacrificed my writing for working on the house, I used to think, I have a feeling I’m doing this work for someone else.  This isn’t meant for me.  For us.  Whenever my husband’s sadness flared up, I’d think or even say, Please just quit.  We don’t need this.  It’s not worth it.  We’ll start again and live how we want.  We already know how happy and beautiful life can be, so why not do it?  When I acknowledge how I really felt while we were in that situation, it becomes easier to shake off the grief and then the self-recrimination and anger.  And then, it becomes exciting.

Seriously.  It’s not just the idea that great loss brings great gain; it’s that calling something loss is a matter of perspective.  When we moved to Italy, we “lost” $20,000 a year in income…and never lived so well.  When we returned to the States, my husband “lost” his job…and learned that his overall well-being and happiness are more important than a paycheck if that paycheck means he has to spend twelve hours at a job and another three at night dealing with the drama of office politics.  We “lost” our house…and thank God, because it sucked our time, money and energy.

And this is important to remember—especially now, during this time of seemingly never-ending negative news, energy and economy.  Not only are my husband and I still going through transitions, so is everyone else I know.  On the surface, these changes seem to be about the loss of money and things; about lack and fear.  But deep down, they reflect what could be gained: how much better would our lives be if we could just find the courage to walk away from the job, relationship or material baggage that steal the goodness from life and run toward what actually makes us happy?

It is possible.  It takes a hell of a lot of courage to change your perspective.  To admit that maybe what you’ve been doing for so long isn’t for your highest good.  To allow the loss you need to actually happen.  If you can view life from a place of gain and honesty over fear, life has a crazy way of meeting you and supporting you where you need to be.  I believe this because I experience it in my own life.

Now, that doesn’t mean my life is without stress or that as I put myself more and more on my path, life manifests exactly how I want it to be.  It doesn’t always.  I haven’t yet won the lottery.  I still get bills I hadn’t planned for.  Sometimes, both my husband and I buy into the pervasive sense of fear and find ourselves lamenting and snapping at each other.  It happens.  But it only happens for so long.  I can’t stand feeling unhappy or ground down by life.  When I finally get sick of feeling sorry for myself, my mind remembers what my soul knows: I already know how beautiful life can be when I allow myself to live it correctly; and I know I can lose what seems to be my world and not only survive but come away from it stronger.

I know this to be true.  For everyone reading this and for everyone I love, my sincerest hope is that you also come to know this.  That you value yourself enough to live life with courage.  When fear invades, tread in it only for so long; then pull yourself out of it with gratitude, a sense of abundance and a change in perspective.

Otherwise, life becomes a ghetto…and you are worthy of living in a much better place.

 © 2001 by Syndy Sweeney