Tag: sayin' ain't doin'

Winding Down

Two days to go before my one year blog writing anniversary.

Here’s the most important thing I’ve learned this year.

Sayin’ ain’t doin’. I could wax on about why and when and how I learned this but that is a much longer story. It is a story I have already told in this blog in one form or another.

Basically, it means putting your money where your mouth is. It means, in effect, that words aren’t worth much of anything unless they are followed up by meaningful, demonstrated action.

I play freely in the world of words. They are my friends. They are my guides. They have been my saviors. That may sound like hyperbole, but isn’t.

Had I not had words to capture what I was seeing unfold around me and what I was going through and putting those things down on paper, I am not sure what other outlets I might have found.

Well, I actually do know. When I was younger and not writing as much and devoid of self-esteem, I drank like a fish and regularly ran from pillar to post with the childish conviction that the succor I sought was somewhere “out there.”

It wasn’t. I came from a background of madness and learned a lot about madness and acted out madness. Though I didn’t know at the time that that was what it was. Madness is sneaky that way. It looks a lot like other human behaviors if it exists within accepted social parameters.

Didn’t all of us think at one time or another that slamming down a case of beer or a 26 ounce bottle of hooch was prerequisite for having a “good time”?

Didn’t all of us at one time or another really truly believe that we could “save the world” or at least make a significant contribution that would land us in the history books? Okay. Maybe that was only me.

As you skim these blog posts because a title caught your eye, maybe you picked up a perspective you hadn’t thoought about. Or maybe your own thoughts were validated and made you feel less isolated. Or maybe you realized that your life has significance, too, and is worthy of sharing with others.

I have learned that from reading the blog posts of others. Nurse Patty regularly shares anecdotes and frustrations about her profession. Anthony Robert (whom I think is a marketing guru – forgive me if I got that wrong, Tony) regularly shares witty, succinct insights into life.

Climber Margo Talbot tackles and shares a wide range of healing insights on her occasional posts. Always helpful and enlightening. I skim other blogs once I have established a relationship with the author as someone I admire and appreciate.

In all of these words that I produce and others produce, they are a reflection of living and not life itself. Margo can only write about her relationship with ice because she has been out there doing it and is an integral part of the climbing community. Nurse Patty’s perspective and insights come from caring for actual patients.

And me? I wrote a blog post a day for a year [almost] to see if I had what it took to write a blog post a day for a year. I set out to see if I could write a book. And if I were to write a book, what would I write about, I wondered?

Being a writer is about digging deep for honesty, and truth and integrity and facts. But as I‘ve often said, and gratefully have found other authors who agree with me, I write exclusively for myself. Author/columnist Joan Didion explained that she wrote “to find out what I am thinking.”

I do the same.

Yet, today, when this post is finished and published, I will get up from my chair and reenter my life again. The words I’ve written inform my actions and hold me to account. But I am human and far from perfect. Very far. Still, I have claimed my voice and present it as my own.

There is little to no artifice in what I write these days. I did that to make a living for years. Some pieces I produced were truly cringeworthy. But this blog has felt more like having a chat with chums. A little one-sided, I grant you.

But if we got together in person, you’re likely going to hear more of the same. And that’s a good thing. By reading my blog, you can decide in advance if I am a person you deem worthy or someone you want to stay far, far away from. Either choice is valid.

Much like life after you earn a degree or acquire a trade or other marketable skill, you still need to move forward and apply that learning to real life. It is no use talking about how to make the perfect omelette. The proof, they say, is in the pudding. Or, in this case, the omelette.

We cannot pre-think our daily life much less how it will unfold. Inevitably, there will be surprises and challenges and work that needs to be done every day if we’re lucky. Our value system informs what we do and well, or badly, we do it.

We can never really know for sure. In the end, it comes down to how we feel about how we did and are doing. Whether we are meeting our own goals and honoring our values and standards. That is very individualistic.

I am contemplating all of that at the moment. I accomplished a goal I set for myself [well, I will have in two days’ time]. I found out a lot about what I really think and feel about some subjects.

The other learning I will take away from this daily writing exercise is that I got, and get, to determine, “When is enough.” When you achieve that to your own satisfaction, I’d say you’ve done pretty well.

Getting Real

I have only a few days left to say whatever I might have been holding back this past year. I’m going through the list to see what I might have missed as issues of note.

I have come to realize I write to stay sane. Was I ever insane? Well, no. Not in a clinically diagnosed sort of way. But I definitely drifted far enough away from the piers of nice North American female normalcy that caused many, and me, to wonder.

I didn’t have you would call a “normal” childhood. At least, I now know what a normal childhood means. A set of parents (or caregivers) who were consistent, available and sober.

Children knowing what bed they were going to sleep in every night. Kids who had a right and got to enjoy their privacy. They could slap a “no boys allowed” sign on their bedroom door and expect it to be respected.

Nope. Didn’t have any of that. So forgive me if you have read all this before. Essential backdrop if you haven’t. My father was an abusive, alcoholic, womanizer. My mom got through the marriage with countless bottles of “Mama’s little helpers.”

No one was there to answer my questions and help me sort out difficult situations. Just as often when I would bring an issue to my mother, I was mocked and invariably silenced. A very dry well.

It wasn’t so much that my parents were not interested in listening. For the most part, it was more that they simply weren’t there. Booze and pills are famous – and relied on – for taking you far, far away from your troubles.

Looking back on my life from this vantage point, I can see what was missing and forgive myself for the things I did to stay alive. The caregiving gaps in my early childhood affected me. What I did to make up for those gaps was rarely what I wanted or needed.

Booze couldn’t take the place of genuine love. Sex was a particularly transient and unsuitable substitute for comfort and belonging. I was a very poor conformist, no doubt partly due to my upbringing.

I never could happily adapt to the 9-5 life. I did one mindless contract after another over the years with the single intention of keeping body and soul together. No joy. no sense of purpose.

I didn’t have the courage to follow my dreams of international photojournalism. I had limited faith in the Universe at that point. My great dream of international media stardom never came to pass.

Truth be told, fame was never a real goal. Most of the time, I was just happy to have the press credentials to get me behind the scenes at a lot of big travel events. The official opening of Disney World’s Chautauqua Institute as one example.

I look back with some bemusement on the doggedness that led me to do a deep dive to see why I landed where I’d landed. I learned a lot. For starters, no man is an island. We are all part of a bigger story. Our people were working-class stock through and through – a fact I believe chagrined my mother.

To compensate for the lack of family pedigree, she imbued her three daughters with an undeserved sense of specialness and entitlement that could never have been sustainable in the real world. Even the best and brightest will falter and fail to thrive without safety and careful sensible nurture.

What I realize today is that above all else, I needed stability and safety to grow. I am only just finding it in my life. The stability gap between my life today and where I came from is vast.

In retrospect, mine was a story of survival that grew into eventual stability. It is not the sexiest script out there, I realize. But it is mine.

From the age of fifteen, I tried to find the source of my constant emotional discomfort and deep insecurities. I swung from one vine on the healing path to the next and the next.

I learned a lot along the way, including the importance of my famous catchphrase, “sayin’ ain’t doin’.” There is lots and lots of talking in the world. Backing up what people often say with action, however, is just not as common.

So this year of daily writing has been about seeking answers and finding my own authenticity. What matters to me and what most emphatically doesn’t.

It has caused me to look back on many of the roles and work I tried on just to get by. Some of it was ridiculous. A lot of life is actually if we give it a hard look.

Now I am planning the next phase. The final one. And mentally exploring what I think I want to do and where I might go one day.

I now have the time now to pursue any dormant passions. I have cleared most of the interfering childhood crud out of my psyche.

The future beckons and is also right in front of me.

Armed with my emerging sense of a solid self, I say, “Bring it on.”

Sayin’ Ain’t Doin’

My beloved daughter just returned home after visiting for a week. So many feels.

I write this blog primarily to share what I’ve learned about personal healing. And to eventually capture all of that learning in a book, of course. Intellectually, I know a lot. But navigating fraught emotional waters with actual human beings is a whole other ongoing challenge. I still have lots of trauma and triggers inside me. Turns out, so does my daughter.

She is at a different age and stage than me. Duh. It is the way it is supposed to be. She is a smart, ambitious, accomplished, and interesting adult. But she is a much younger adult who has had an entirely different life experience than me. Kindly, she backs me up when I say she has a much better relationship with her mother than I had with mine. Frankly, it wouldn’t have taken much.

I started early on the healing path in my children’s life. The marriage to her father broke down in fairly short order after their arrival. The consequences were devastating and endure. When I moved my two young children (6 and 4 y.o.) from the East Coast of Canada to the West Coast over thirty years ago, I immediately enrolled them in a community program for children of divorce called, Caught in the Middle.

I didn’t like that their conversations with therapists were confidential. I believed that knowing what they were talking about with those strangers would help me better meet their needs as a mother. That hope was quickly shut down. Session disclosure was against the rules and ironically, it helped break down my habitual patterns of triangulation.

At some point in my academic studies, I learned that “triads” were the most stable – if dysfunctional – of social relationships. Three individuals involved in a triad – I learned – are the “perpetrator,” a “victim,” and a “rescuer.” A perpetrator would somehow “hurt” a “victim” who would then run to and disclose that hurt to a “rescuer” who would then comfort and validate the “victim’s” hurt feelings that the perpetrator caused. Then the “rescuer” and “victim” would form an alliance against the “perpetrator.”

So the pattern of issues or hurts went round and round and was rarely resolved. I have learned resolving issues is best handled by working it out with the person you hurt or who hurt you. Triads prevent this by deflecting the energy and the issue to someone not directly involved. So the wheel of hurt keeps going around and around.

The most public (and tragic) example of a triad in my generation was the relationship that Bill Clinton’s young paramour Monica Lewinsky had with her so-called friend, Linda Tripp, about her “boyfriend” troubles. Triads in normal daily life rarely generate such widespread interest or put a Presidency on the line. However, triads that play out on a smaller scale can be just as hurtful and damaging.

[It amused me that a Google search on “triad” revealed a more common usage of the word today for “polyamory” or “throuples” (a three-person romantic relationship). Gotta tip my hat to them who can manage that. It was everything I could do in my romantic career to keep one relationship on the rails. But I digress.]

Love is action. I was desperately confused about that for the longest time. Of course, I was desperately and generally confused about what love was, period. The sexual component was fairly easy to operationalize. But all the other love stuff intimidated and confounded me. Caring for someone by actually “taking care of them” and putting their interests above my own was a stretch for the traumatized child I was, dealing with my own history of inadequate care.

Then my babies came. Words are inadequate to explain how profoundly one’s life changes when a baby comes into the picture. In their earliest days, I was utterly unprepared and overwhelmed by the experience, and beyond. Motherhood has been a step-by-step, learn-as-you-go proposition. My beliefs about love were upended after having children.

It wasn’t made any easier for me by my discovery that I had married an incompatible partner with his own set of unresolved childhood issues. When I was a little girl and into adulthood, my parents frequently said, “I love you.” But their actions did not consistently match those words. I became wary and suspicious about the utterances of love and was careless about using them myself.

During my daughter’s visit – which was largely fabulous and filled with joy and gratitude and fun – we had a couple of glancing blows on triggers we didn’t – okay, I didn’t – even know were still there. With both my daughter and my son, I have tried to mobilize actions to back up words of love. Her visit – and her presence on the planet – reminded me that there is always more work to do in a loving relationship that wants to heal, grow and be truly loving.

My brother-in-law put it best: “Parenting is unrelenting.” No matter how old they or you are. Duh.