how it began (part 1 of 3)
It’s not uncommon for people to ask during an interview just “how” this whole courage thing started.
Typically, I’ll explain the story from the point of 2009–when I took Mondo Beyondo and made my list and realized that everything that I was putting on my list was a compromise. I was trying to both “dream big” and “be realistic” at the same time. I quickly amended that, acknowledged that my big dream was to work for myself, and…well, got to it.
But of course, this all stretches back much, much farther, back to childhood.
If I really think about it, I have to credit my mother for at least 75% of the kahunas that I would later swing around, which means I would also need to credit the generations of women before her who were feminists, who wrote their books that ended up in the small-town library my mother grew up in (Elsberry, MO, population 200), where she would be so influenced by them that she would carve out a different life for herself.
My mother first met my father in high school. She and her brother had just been caught with pot by their parents, who had called a juvenile officer–and that would be my father, who is much older than my mother.
The story goes that when my father held up the bag of pot, he asked my mother, “Is this yours?”
My mother replied, flippant: “Not anymore.”
Years later, they met up again when my mother was a (legal and of-age) waitress at a diner. They met, they were inexplicably attracted to one another as conservative Catholic Republicans and ardent feminist atheist liberals sometimes are (huh?), and then I decided to make my entrance. They decided to get married.
After my parents divorced (that’s not a shocker, is it?), she bought a dilapidated 100-year-old Victorian in the same drug-ridden neighborhood that she had lived in with my father. Then she went about securing loans to rehab it, began rehabbing it, and got to work on the college degree she’d never gotten around to when she became pregnant with me at age 18.
Then she went about clearing the neighborhood of drug dealers, which means that I watched, time and time again, as my mother called the police when she saw someone going into the drug house around the corner. Her philosophy? If the police weren’t going to stake out the drug houses in our neighborhood to get rid of them after she’d reported them once, she’d badger them with calls until they did.
It worked, noticeably. Police cars began driving up and down the streets of our neighborhood on the regular. We heard fewer gunshots.
* * *
(Can I really quickly tell you this one? So–we’re coming home and just as we’re turning on to our street, a guy’s in his truck, um, having just solicited a prostitute. My mother swings the car around to face the truck, turns on her high beams, gets out of the car, walks over to the truck, and starts banging on the guy’s window and yelling at him to get out of the neighborhood! Can you imagine? I think I was nine, and that cemented in my mind the picture of my mom as being the bravest woman I knew.)
* * *
My mother was the one who taught me that if you wanted something in life, you could research how to get it at the library, or observe how others were getting it, and then? Well…she got to it.
I saw it modeled for me, over and over and over again, that being afraid was no reason not to do something in life. Also–there was no such thing as not having the answer. There was a book somewhere, or a person somewhere, who would have the answer.
If you wanted to do something, you just up and did it if you wanted it badly enough.
So, There I Am
I was a mouthy kid who grew to be a mouthy teenager.
In high school, I went to a public performing arts school where everyone had a major. Mine was music. True to over-achiever form, I played not just the piano, but also the flute, violin, cello, and on occasion–the viola.
If someone said I couldn’t do all of that because I was spreading myself too thin, my standard response was, “Watch me.” Then I’d go to state competitions with a part in the symphonic band and another in the chamber orchestra and another in a quartet or trio (one year? both) plus a solo on the flute. This was in addition to maintaining a good GPA and all of that jazz. Oh yeah, and I worked part-time so that I could pay for gas and insurance for my car.
Amazed? Don’t get too excited.
I was terribly, horribly lonely.
High school was the period of my most functional, yet most painful, clinical depression. I cried myself to sleep, nightly, for the first two years. Sometimes I hit or slapped myself, cut myself. For about a year, I was bulimic. I was convinced that I was hideously ugly, and unwanted.
I was surrounded by people and had friends, but inside I felt like a complete outsider, and I didn’t understand why. I look back now and realize that this is the cross that the sensitive and inquisitive always bear–all of us who are this way walk through high school wrestling with questions and thoughts and analysis and wonderings about humanity that few of our peers are wrestling with at that age.
While everyone else was having the kind of fun that can only be had when you aren’t contemplating Big Life Questions, I was wondering why I couldn’t quit analyzing so damned much. Drinking and drugs never appealed to me; to this day I’ve never taken drugs, and I drink so infrequently that a single glass of wine is enough to get me rollickingly drunk.
There was also the flip-side of my mother’s passion and energy, and that was–anger. I look back now and see all the courage that it has taken for my mother to process her life and childhood, but when I was younger, I was furious with her for being so angry, furious with her for teaching me anger.
Anger alienated, isolated, shamed, and humiliated. Anger was out of control and simultaneously a survival mechanism. I was walking through life with pain turned inward (depression) and pain turned outward (anger) and it was costing me the one thing I wanted most: connection.
When you walk with a subtle undercurrent of either, people can tell–and they keep their distance.
I coped with that by continuing to be ever the over-achiever well into my undergraduate and graduate years, which is to say, well into my early twenties. People might not have liked the edge that I came with, but they could at least appreciate me for “doing stuff,” or having ideas, and that was enough to keep me around–and I was afraid of being lonely again, so I was happy to over-compensate.
My undergraduate and graduate years were more of the same, though at least by this point I was no longer cutting, hitting, or bulimic. (How exactly did I stop? I don’t have an answer for this, really. I do know that stopping bulimia was a choice–one day, after someone made an unkind remark, I was considering throwing up and a very clear, strong voice within me said, “That isn’t going to get you where you want to go.” And like that, I stopped, because I knew the truth of that voice and trusted it, completely).
By my mid-twenties, I had figured out how to exist with a sort of low-grade, background depression. I was happy sometimes, happier a few times, and mostly walking through life laced with a bit of melancholy. A therapist once called it “anhedonia.” I had left behind the music world after deciding not to go to the music school to which I’d been accepted, and now my life was reading and writing.
And then, one summer, someone told me about a book. That’s when things began to shift.
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Part Two : Transforming complaints into prayers
Please take a moment to:
