Long Form

The Barren Roots Rodeo

/ It Takes One To Know One / 3 Comments

It was an odd time and place to have my eyes well up with tears, but what I was watching had been suddenly, inexplicably, transformed into a meaningful and encouraging exhortation offering solace directly to – or from- a deep and wounded place within me. But because I was surrounded by a whir and whishing of industrious friends and family in our garden, I quickly wiped the tears from my cheeks without taking time to sit with that message or with the emotions it stirred up within me. Three weeks have passed since that day, and while my landscaping project impatiently waits for the rain to stop and the next phase to proceed, I want to do a little digging into that free and unexpected moment of therapy.

The Neighbor

That morning I woke up to the penetrating sound of a jack hammer outside of my window. Our neighbor, Bela, was already sitting in the open cabin of the excavator we had rented and, with the jack attachment, was skillfully demolishing a low concrete wall which has vexed me for the last twenty four years. Over the years, Bela (Bay-la), the very German man with a deep, loud, and gravely voice that lives across the street from us, has become an unlikely friend of my husband’s and a Godsend to both of us.

My husband and I both studied Theology, Religious Instruction to be more exact, so it would be fair to say we fall into the academic side of things, actually, perhaps even the most abstract side of the academic side of things. Theology is basically a swirl of philosophy, sociology, and psychology, but beyond studying the ideas behind the actual things and behavior, we studied the often intangible realities behind the ideas behind the things and behaviors. In addition, my husband is a musician. That means in our home there is a lot of singing, whistling, guitar playing and talking about why things are the way they are and how they might be instead. The flip side of that is that neither of us has become a master of the things themselves. So when it comes to realizing my dreams for our home and garden, we plod along slowly with the enthusiasm of DIYers who would rather be, and be better at, reading and writing poetry than pouring or breaking up concrete.

Not so with Bela. He is much better adept to this world of things than my husband or I are, and he has become a valuable point man, mentor, and resource at innumerable junctions during our ongoing renovations. Not long before, he had retired from his many years as a construction worker and is still licensed to operate just about every construction machine there is. He was not only a master at operating the excavator we rented for two days, but he was actually chomping at the bit to get to do it! This was already the fourth time Bela had scooched my husband out of the driver’s seat of a digger. We had rented a smaller one in previous summers to take out over a hundred cedar shrubs from the hedge that surrounded our property and put up a fence in their place. I had been impressed with my husband’s efforts, who had never operated such a machine in his life and yet had managed to remove a few of the meter thick, two meters high, seventy year old shrubs within as many hours. But once Bela took over, the hedge that had plagued us since we moved to Augsburg in 2000 went down like dominos.

This year the smaller machine was not available, so we rented the next size up to do the heavy lifting of our somewhat ambitious landscaping project. Our son, one of our daughters, and her boyfriend were home for the week to help us extend the patio, dig a foundation for a garden house, remove said concrete wall, and take out a tree stump.

The Stump

The low concrete wall was broken up before I had finished my breakfast, which the kids (in their late twenties now) wheelbarrowed to the trailer hitched to the back of our car, and my husband then drove to the dump. The next order of business was the stump, which Bela, perched high on his excavator throne, was confident would come out without much ado. With the digger now attached, he began mauling the ground around the stump, then, scooping up the grassy dirt, he piled it up in an area of the garden that would have to wait its turn. The digging went fairly quickly, and with every scoop, more of the stump was exposed. Though the mountain of earth, which I now refer to as Mt. Doom and can still be seen from my living room window, kept growing and growing, there seemed to be no bottom to this stump. Not only did it reach deep into the ground, but it sprawled for at least two or more meters in every direction from its center like a giant octopus. My son had gotten a spade and was trying to dig under the long, thick fingers, which were clenching the floor of the only home they’d ever known, so that the digger could get under them and pry them loose. Once under the roots, Bela began an upward leveraging, but instead of the stump or its long tentacles being pried out of its lair, the whole excavator heaved and lifted off the ground. For the next couple of hours, as he tried to wrangle this surly stump from its grip on our garden, our neighbor looked like he was riding a mechanical bull. All he needed was a cowboy hat, and Bronco Bela could have been mistaken for a rodeo attraction.

That is when I started to cry.

The Tree

Looking at the diameter of this stump for a reason why its removal was proving so challenging, Bela concluded that the tree must have been at least forty years old.

He was wrong.

The large cherry tree that I had hired a man to remove in late February was not even half that age. We only began renting the apartment on the second floor of this house 24 years ago, when we returned to Germany from Papua New Guinea in 2000. In, or shortly after 2002, in conjunction with the work our landlady was doing on the north side of the house, we planted an apple tree and a sour-cherry tree. We had no idea what we were doing, and not only were the trees planted in the wrong spot too close to the house and in less than optimal soil, they were also too close together. Subsequently, the apple tree suffered in the shade of the cherry tree and died a few years later. It took a long time for that cherry tree to finally produce any cherries, but, though the fruit bearing years have sometimes been sparse and unpredictable, we have gotten at least some jam and pies out of this tree.

We also got another cherry tree out of it. By 2015 we had bought the house and were finally able to clear away and remove the overgrown flowerbeds left by our landlady. As my husband was clearing the flowerbed planted along that low wall Bela removed for us three weeks ago, the offshoot was only a scrawny two meters high sapling. At the time, I was the one who chose to leave it in, a decision I’v regretted miserably for the last nine years. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready to give this usurper tree its walking papers several years ago, my husband had grown a tree conscience and insisted we keep it. To some degree, it was understandable that he would want it to stay. The cherry blossoms in spring were very pretty… (for five minutes, then they littered our patio for weeks with a continual rain of rotting petals). It did provide shade…(just not anywhere someone would want to sit and enjoy the garden). And of course I think trees are an important feature in, and add character to, any landscaping project… (just not when they randomly and unintentionally crop up in all the wrong places).

Within no time at all, that little sapling grew to three times the size of our original cherry tree. In less than ten years, it was taller even than our three story house. Not only did this tree grow smack in the middle of where I wanted to extend the patio, but it littered our current patio throughout the whole spring, summer, and fall with every phase of its foliage. Not only did this tree tower over and in dangerous proximity to our house, it cast the whole north side in even more shade and turned it green with mildew. Not only did this offshoot not produce any edible fruit of its own, but its crown was so high and so wide, that it hogged all the sunlight from our actual fruit bearing tree, which eventually stopped producing any cherries at all and showed all the signs of a diminishing and dying tree.

So, while my husband and I were at a standstill, the tree seemed to just double in size every year until we were finally able to resolve our differences. And by “resolve our differences,” I mean I just went ahead and hired a guy end of February who took it down in a day’s work, leaving only this stump in the way of our landscaping plans.

The Email

Whatever my body may be doing in any given moment, my mind is always in some kind of discourse with itself. Either it is engaged in a socratic debate about some new/old truth claim taking the world by storm, it is holding court over something someone did or said that annoys me, upset me, or just pissed me off, or it is trying to resolve an internal dilemma between what I really want and what others want from me. It was no different during the days we were all at work in the Garden. In this case, what was front of mind, when I wasn’t actually answering logistical questions and doling out tasks, was an email I had gotten a week before. Though it may have seemed benign on the surface, this email had woken up all of these discourse monkeys, who in turn woke up the rest of the zoo animals that I thought I had fed and put to bed.

There is no doubt in my mind that the author of the email believed they were doing a good thing by writing to me. It was surely with the best of intentions that they offered me their morally laden suggestion of what would be appropriate for me to do in the situation. They had generously taken the time to offer advice in a conflict in which they had the most minimal historical knowledge or insight, no relevant professional competence, and a demonstrable lack of impartiality. But none of this is what had set the monkeys off. Rather, it was the assumption underpinning the admonition that was so noisily disturbing my hard won internal peace about the matter. Boiled down to its most basic message, the email was little more than a notification from a third party debt collector. With the subtlety of a town cryer, the solicitation meant to remind me that in the relationship under question, my accounts would always be in the red. Because of their initial, rudimentary investment, I was now on the ropes indefinitely. I should make regular “interest” deposits to their personal “account,” and they could withdraw any amount at any time from mine without even a hint of recompense, accounting, or restitution. No matter how often, nor how hurtfully, they plundered our relational account and left it in the negative, I would still owe them on that initial capital. In any other context, this would be seen as usury.

In my extended foster family, however, this is simply the debt of gratitude I owe for being taken in as a foster child. Though never said out loud in as many words, the official family myth had always been clear to me: when I had been a child in precarious circumstances, the well meaning, selfless foster parents had done me a favor by taking me under their roof, and, now and forever more, anything other than a “thank you” was out of place… no matter how bad things got. No amount of trauma, danger, neglect, attachment confusion, rejection, resentment, contempt, or diminishment my foster parents might have subjected me to could minimize the enormity of this debt. Or perhaps the extended family just cannot imagine that any of these things had ever taken place. Either way, no matter how much time went by, no matter how much effort went into pretending, mending, and bending my reality to make things add up, that initial capital hung over me like an albatross.

Such a framing of the foster relationship is founded on the deeply disturbing notion that the foster (or adoptive) parents are only the helpers and benefactors, and the children are only ever beneficiaries. This is a profoundly diminishing and dehumanizing message to give to anyone in any relationship. No one wants to exist in a relationship where they are only ever perceived as the one being “helped” and the one solely indebted to the other. Anyone who finds themselves pressed into that role can know for certain that they are actually being used to validate someone else’s idea of themselves as a good person.

But to cast a child in that role with caretakers they did not choose for the life they did not initiate undermines the very foundation of their self-worth and existence. If a child is never told, shown, or given even subtle cues to let her know that her existence, in and of itself, enriches and contributes value to the lives of her caretakers and community, she assumes that she must produce (ie manufacture) that value in order to remove the negative balance in the relationship. Since that is an impossible task, the child either gets stuck in an appeasement treadmill, all efforts oriented toward keeping the peace with those upon whom her very life depends, (ie filling the hole by meeting their needs and expectations rather than her own transformative growth), or, as I had done, gives up entirely and acts out in self-destructive ways. In both cases, the child will struggle to cultivate a healthy sense of self-worth and emotional regulation; find it difficult to discover inherent interests, develop competences, and focus on personal objectives and values; and will often default to a rigid conflict strategy and substitutions for genuine intimacy. From the outset, children in such circumstances will be preoccupied with getting out of the hole they inherited, rather than building a stable identity on the solid ground of being wanted, cherished, and seen as the precious gift they are.

It would be hard to overstate just how crippling such a dowry is. After describing his personal odyssey growing up in the foster system in his memoir, Troubled, Rob Henderson documents what this looks like statistically on a national scale. In Henderson’s comparisons, he isolates the relational instability from economic factors by contrasting the statistical averages for foster children not against averages for the general population but just against children living in poverty and against their own siblings who remained in their family of origin. Henderson writes, “a poor kid in the US is nearly four times more likely to graduate from college than a foster kid, and that only 3% of children from foster homes ever earn a bachelors.” He goes on to say that, “Compared with their siblings who were never placed in foster homes or other types of out-of-home care, kids who are placed in care are four times more likely to abuse drugs, four times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime, three times more likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety, and twice as likely to be poor as adults… The findings from the 2021 study show that on average, kids who are placed into care do worse than their siblings who are not.” (Henderson pg. 297). And of course the discrepancy to the general population is even greater.

Those of us who have grown up in this predicament are not just beginning the race far behind the starting line, but we were further handicapped by being tethered to this myth of liability. Living under the shadow of this paradigm means that, even as adults, we divert too much of our emotional energy and resources away from the task of creating a worthy life for ourselves and our progeny and toward feeding the dysfunctional dynamic which continues to demand our allegiance. It was this dogma that seeded itself in my garden early on, took root, sprouted, and shot up to a towering menace in just the ten short years I was with this particular family. But for years afterward, it littered my self-esteem with a sense of inferiority, internal conflict, and a doubting of my instincts. It grew to overshadow the fruitful vegetation of my self-assertion, creative agency, and sense of purpose. And it redirected my energies and resources toward relationships that never bore the fruit of intimacy and mutuality.

But I had felled that tree some years ago.

The monkeys had scattered.

My garden project was well underway.

Yet this email had come in with the weight of a cease and desist order alerting me that I needed to redirect my funds back toward those barren roots.

And as one might trip over a tree stump, I stumbled over it and fell headlong into my internal dialogue.

The Tears

That internal dialogue sounded something like this:

“WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

I should be over this by now! At my age, other people have a fully finished back yard, and I am still just digging up these barren roots! I’m almost 60, and I am still tripping over these stumps from my past? Just get on with it already! What is taking you so long?! How much digging around it do I gotta do? How much higher does Mount Doom have to get, before I get enough leverage to pry this gnarly thing out of my life for good? I should have nipped this relationship in the bud, spoken up for myself, set better boundaries years earlier than I did! You’re so slow at EVERYTHING! It will be stuck like this FOREVER! Grow up already! Do better! Be better!

SHAME ON ME FOR STRUGGLING WITH THIS FOR SO LONG!”

Not the kind of cheerleaders you want to have in your head on game day. Whenever a gap opens up between what others want me to do and what I want to do, between who I or others want me to be and who I actually am at this moment, it is this troop of negative, self-defeating, mocking mind-monkeys that wants to race in and fill the space. Brené Brown calls these the Shame Gremlins. I have dedicated a lot of time, effort, and resources to taming these shame monkeys, and to a large extent it has paid off. But the debt-solicitation email from my relative had tripped the alarm and set all these old, familiar monkeys into motion again.

That was the zoo inside my head as I walked over to check the progress at the stump-removal-rodeo. There was Bronco Bela riding his mechanical-excavator-bull, tugging and heaving and huffing and hurtling and mauling and digging and scooping and lassoin’ and having a devil of a time trying to get this ten year old stump out of my garden, so that I could move forward with these beautiful landscaping plans of mine. While I was watching the show, suddenly I was aware of another voice whispering something inside that gap between who I wanted to be and who I was.

Without using any words but only the scene before me, it said, “look at him struggle with this stump! Even with all his expertise and experience, even with this heavy-duty machine, even with all this team work taking shovels and axes and even a chain-saw to the long roots, it takes a lot of effort and time and persistence to get these barren roots out of the ground. Be patient. Have hope. Don’t give up.”

And just like that the monkeys were back in their cages, my eyes welled up with tears, and an hour later, Bronco Bela had triumphed over that formidable stump.

To Forgive or To Forgive…

/ It Takes One To Know One / Leave a comment

“I will always be guilty,” he said matter of factly. “Nothing changes that.”

I have forgotten the exact question I had asked him. Maybe I had asked if he felt God had forgiven him or if he could accept that he had been forgiven, or something that, even then, felt silly the moment I heard the sound of my voice. Alistair Little was not a man who couched or minced his words, nor did he let euphemisms do the heavy lifting when talking about his past. Little’s story can be read in online articles, his book, “Give a Boy a Gun,” and seen in a film starring Liam Neeson (as Little) and James Nesbit, called Five Minutes of Heaven. When he was a 17 year old UVF member, the man having lunch next to me at this peace center in Northern Ireland had shot a catholic man dead in his home. The victim’s younger brother, who had been playing in the street, saw it all through the window. It was a terrible trauma and eventually dissolved that whole family. Little served twelve years of a life sentence as a political prisoner, and since his release, has been doing the work of reconciliation among victims, survivors, and perpetrators of political conflict in Ireland and abroad. Our paths converged when I had the privilege to take his and Wilhelm Verwoerd’s workshop as part of my M.Phil. in Conflict Resolution & Reconciliation.

This memory resurfaced as I have recently had reasons to have a good hard think on the word forgiveness and how often it is used in a number of different ways that, in my view, undermine its real meaning. More often than not, it is this misunderstanding of what forgiveness is and isn’t that actually gets in the way of healthy boundary setting and real, wholehearted reconciliation. Living amongst a flawed human race myself, I cannot escape the need to forgive and, truth be told, be forgiven. So, it serves me well to take stock if I am dealing in the genuine article, or if I have been duped by one of these counterfit versions of forgiveness. Little’s transformative journey from committing a heinous crime to being a force of nature for reconciliation could not have happened without forgiveness, even if he may not even use that word, and the memory of my encounter with him comes up just in time for his story to serve as a good ‘authentication tool’ against which to compare these pseudo versions of forgiveness.

Pseudo Forgiveness

These substitute usages of forgiveness apply to both the forgiveness we are offering as well as the forgiveness we ask/demand of others. Here is a short list: Forgiveness as a…

Get Out of Jail Free Card: Of course this is probably the most common and the most obvious miss-use of the concept. Probably since Constantine, humans small and tall, from our very own children all the way up to mega-church pastors, have effectively been pulling out the forgiveness card when caught in both minor and severe transgressions. The person who is quick to invoke this core Christian duty usually has had too little time to actually have even begun a truly transformative paradigm shift. Being more concerned with the likely consequences of their actions, a plea for forgiveness can be a pragmatic tool to bargain a person’s way out of any social, financial, or physical pain which may be coming their way. Forgiveness becomes a magic eraser which disappears any logical, natural, and causal lines connecting behavior with negative outcomes. Besides doing absolutely less than nothing to move the relationship needle toward genuine reconciliation, this Get-out-of-jail-free-forgiveness, if granted, robs the user of one of life’s most valuable learning and character development tools: the pain of consequences. Any wisdom any of us have has not come purely from theory and book learning. We have gained it the hard way, through trial and error, through experience, through the hard knocks of bad choices. Taking those knocks away from someone obstructs the growth of wisdom, character, and maturity and is likely to breed entitlement instead.

A Muzzle:. “Why can’t you just forgive and forget. Why can’t you just let it go?!” When we say this to someone who is calling us out and asking us to do better, we are leveraging forgiveness as a mouth gag to anyone who would want to hold us accountable for our actions. It implies that bringing it up at all is already a failure to forgive. When we say this to someone, what we are really saying is that we want them to privately do all the work to reconcile our differences. We don’t want to know anything about it. Behind this is the need to remain flawless in our own eyes, so if someone has a beef with us, it can only mean that they are unforgiving (if you are a christian) or intolerant (if you are a liberal). But beyond that, both the core teaching of forgiveness in the Christian tradition and the core value of tolerance in Liberal Humanism are often wielded as extremely effective tools to squelch dissonance and maintain dominance and control in social/political groups.

A Witness Relocation program: For those who procure this kind of forgiveness, it means not only do they get a whole new identity (“You are a new creation in Christ”), but also they receive a whole new back story! Not only are we no longer one who cheats on their wife, commits murder, or skims from the top, but we never were that person! In this way of understanding forgiveness, being forgiven means we get to tear out all of those unflattering pages and snap-shots of our story, put them through the shredder, and just leave the wholesome, flattering, respectable bits in. They are never to be spoken of again. They are the “sins” that shall not be named! In groups practicing this understanding of forgiveness, everyone is a generic sinner, “the worst of sinners” actually, but no one has ever even made a single, concrete, nameable mistake, let alone done anything that would put a speck on their wholesome, respectable, good christian/good liberal image. They all just slipped in through the side door and took a seat in the back pew as if they had been among the saints this whole time.

In the new gender-cult, there is a similar dogma called “dead-naming.” Here it is not only the person transitioning to a new identity who hustles to keep their past identity on the down-low, but the entire community and world around them that must be forgiven for having gotten it wrong to begin with! It is everyone else who must delete every possible trace of a person’s pre-transition selves from our memories, perceptions, and experiences, if we want any crumb of relationship with them going forward. In both cases, the past identity is whitewashed of everything a person finds intolerable about themselves and is unwilling to integrate into a new, shiny, and allegedly more worthy identity.

A Jack-in-the-Box: Being in a relationship with a person practicing this kind of forgiveness seems too good to be true…because it is too good to be true. This person appears to have the capacity to overlook (forgive) (tolerate) all of our shortcomings, annoying habits, Faux pas’, and even more serious transgressions. This person can seem to be the model of tolerance right up until you have to draw a boundary or ask them to do better in some area. Immediately the music stops and, BOING!, out springs this very ugly, unflattering version of you marked and blemished with every-single-thing-you-ever-did-or-didn’t-do that hurt, disappointed, or irritated this person at some point in your relationship with them. My brother calls them, “Whatabouters,” because if you ever bring up something that bothers you about their behavior, they counter with, “Well, what about when you…” (full discloser: my brother and I did this with each other for years while we were growing up together, and I can neither confirm nor deny that my husband and I have done this!). As it turns out, they were not even in a relationship with you this whole time, but with this simulated-monster of you they kept to themselves – and everyone else they would show it to except you. In this way, they would never dare risk loosing your favor by speaking up for themselves, but all the while in their own mind, they maintain a steady sense of patronizing superiority and hold you in private contempt and maybe resentment. … that is, until you break the “contract” and BOING!

The “Free Zone”: In the game Capture the Flag, each team has a designated side where they hang their flag. The goal of the game is to be the first team to capture the opposing team’s flag (which is supposed to be visible and accessible). Only to do so, a player must venture onto the opposing side of the field/landscape where they run the risk of being captured and “imprisoned.” To get free again, another teammate must tag them, thus risking their own freedom. Team members are only safe on their team’s section of the field or in the designated “Free Zone” in-between the two sides. There are always players who hang out in the free zone because they are either afraid of getting caught, if they move into the ‘home territory of the other team, or they are afraid someone might steal their own team flag, if they do not patrol their home border.

Of course the game is only fun if all the players are willing to take risks, and it is not really worth playing at all, if all the players just hang out in the free zone. But this is how many people live relationships. In these groups, Forgiveness or Tolerance is this “free zone.” Here, only safe topics are allowed, the kind that do not cause any tension at all. This, by necessity, excludes most of what truly matters to people: religion, politics, values, struggles, our vision for how things could be. The “flag” of their true identity is safely hidden away on their home turf. If someone behaves in a way that is or seems unacceptable to someone, it is not discussed in the free zone. It is brought behind the line to our home-side of the field and tallied there against the other team without the offenders knowledge. The game is just one very long stalemate, with at least some players hoping that the tally will fall in their favor when the game is “officially” scored at the very end.

This is the cowards version of forgiveness (or the liberal’s Tolerance). It is not based on generosity, but on mitigating loss, competing morality, and image-protection. It is peace without justice, which is no peace at all. In this Free-Zone there is a lack of wholehearted integrity, a lack of growth, and little if any movement toward mutuality, true collaboration, and intimacy. Instead, there is just light entertainment and a polite, superficial, and often unspoken agreement to stay clear of any topic that creates tension or calls into question our own or someone else’s flawless Avatar.

It takes courage to wade deeper onto the other’s ‘home field’ in generous candor to say what we really think and feel about the impact they are having on us and to get to the “flag” of real, authentic relationship with the actual person behind their projected, idealized image. And it takes courage to let others onto our home field, to let them see our scratch-pad where we are still working things out before we deliver a more palatable version of ourselves to the free zone, and to also hear what impact we are having on our community and world.

None of the above scenarios are what I would call true forgiveness or tolerance, and whether we find ourselves on the receiving end or the granting end, they do not do the job that real forgiveness is needed to do. In actuality, all these tactics are just your standard ole Conflict Avoidance masquerading as forgiveness/tolerance. In one way or the other, they are simply another means that we try to avoid one or more of the Big Three nuisances of being human: Responsibility, Limitations, and Discomfort (pain, loss, effort) and the inner conflicts that they create for us while living in a world where everything is so unlike us in all too many ways that matter. For conflict avoiders, it is more often than not the fear of losing favor with others (to not be good in their eyes) which is in the driver’s seat, and so they fall into a pattern of ignoring or masking their own limitations (boundaries, insufficiencies, wants, needs, values, purpose), while also shouldering responsibilities that belong to others and/or dodging taking 100% responsibility for themselves and the impact they have on their community and the world (blaming, excusing). But none of that sounds very nice, so it gets dressed up as forgiveness/tolerance.

I don’t mind telling you that I have lived for far too long in relationships on both sides of this kind of conflict-avoidance-forgiveness-tolerance, and I can report back that it is a cheap knock-off of the original! But buying into these street-vender versions of forgiveness is much worse than buying a fake Birkin bag. When we forgo engaging in the conflict necessary to practice real forgiveness, we miss out on the three most valuable things there are: Our Integrity, our growth, and movement toward mutuality and intimacy with others. So, for me, in any and all of my relationships, doing conflict has become a non-negotiable.

The Real Thing

Alistair Little is, of everyone I have ever met, a No Bullshit guy. I experienced more candor in that one week workshop than I had ever experienced in most of the long relationships I have had, some of them for almost my entire life. And how could he not be? When working with tough-as-nails, Irish ex-combatants who had suffered tremendous loss at each other’s hands, one cannot tip-toe around the bloodshed. Polite & Superficial aren’t going to deliver reconciliation. Alistair may or may not have used the word forgiven to describe himself, but his answer to me that day clearly indicated that he had not been duped by the knock-off version of it. “I will always be guilty.” “Nothing will change that.”

Guilt is just a shorter word for responsibility. It is the responsibility for the past, what we have done and left undone. In other words, he was saying that forgiveness does not absolve him of the responsibility for what he had done. “I will always be guilty.” It is a simple statement of fact without any emotions necessarily tied to it. He murdered a man. That will always be part of his story. An act that has far reaching ramifications into the future.

To acknowledge my guilt means I continue to take responsibility for my past and present self, no matter how unflattering or truly awful it may be, by owning it and transforming it into something meaningful and beautiful for community. That is a job that never ends. And I would say Alistair Little’s life is as good of an example of this as I have ever come across. His acceptance and integration of his past, his ongoing transformational growth, and his offering this wisdom and insight in generous candor for the service of healing the environment that had seeded his own violence are all the evidence I need to know that he is dealing in the genuine article of forgiveness.

How it Works

I think mostly forgiveness is thought of as letting go of negative feelings toward someone (and this someone can also be ourselves) who has harmed or disappointed us in some way – feelings of grief, resentment, irritation, animosity, anger, vengeance, contempt, or dread, for example. But I have wrestled with some of those feelings in some relationships for many years and have thrown everything at them, including the pseudo-forgiveness’s I’ve listed above, only to have these feelings compounded rather than diminish. I have come to suspect that it is a fool’s errand to keep trying to dissipate emotions while ignoring what it is exactly that is causing them. Like trying to relieve the pain of a blister while still wearing the shoes you love but that are simply too small. Those feelings tell us that something is amiss in a relationship, that there is a disconnect that is compromising either our integrity, our flourishing, or our need for meaningful connection – or all of the above. This disconnect will have to be addressed if we ever hope to have those negative feelings dry up or, better still, transformed into empathy and compassion.

In this light, forgiveness is not an act of letting go of our negative feelings toward the other (the painful blister), which I believe is not possible anyway, but an act of letting go of our fantasy about the other as well as the fantasy about ourselves. To let go of the fantasy about the other is to let go of the idealized image that we have of who they should/could be to us or how they should have behaved (a shoe that looks good and fits comfortably!) but fail to live up to. This image can be what they project and want us to believe about themselves (The Wizard of Oz), or what we project onto them (Nate’s Ted Lasso). To let go of the fantasy about ourselves is to let go of the idealized image of ourselves as being more magnanimous than we are (Grandiosity). It means letting go of the idea that by performing forgiveness and tolerance and inclusion for people whose behavior toward us consistently demonstrates their lack of interest in who we actually are, their need to outdo us (in status, achievement, or even morality), and how little we matter to them and factor into their priorities, we can somehow manage to win them into a relationship where we finally feel seen, supported, and included. Ironically, the more magnanimous and inclusive we strive to appear, the smaller our actual selves become, since it is only through self-betrayal (denying our limitations), self-diminishment (staying small), and self-exclusion (staying silent), that we are able to maintain the farce of community.

So, in forgiving someone, and even ourselves, we are letting go of the fantasy of who they (we) ought to be and acknowledging the reality of who they are and what they are actually capable or willing to offer us. We accept not only the limitations, inability, and/or unwillingness of the other to meet our needs, wants, expectations, and boundaries, but also the space (gap) which that inevitably creates between us! It does not fill that space with more effort, skilling up to better defend ourselves or disarm the other, coddling, badgering, pretending, exceeding/ignoring our own limitations (boundaries), a continuous shouldering of the other’s responsibility, or resentment, hellfire, and fury. In other words, forgiveness relinquishes the insistence that the other be something they are not yet, and may never become, while also maintaining the integrity of one’s own identity by not trying to fill, erase, or ignore the space created between those two realities. It is only once we have done this, that we are able to appropriately redefine the relationship in a way that no longer compromises our integrity, limits our growth, nor cheats us out of meaningful connection.

This space which gives us all room to both acknowledge and transform who we really are, some might call the Growth Mindset. I call it a guilt/grace paradigm, and it is the practice of forgiveness which unlocks that space for us and for others. This practice of forgiveness, which acknowledges and allows for the gap between where we actually end and where they actually begin, recognizes and honors both our and the other’s worthiness and dignity to exist as imperfect, not fully matured human beings, it holds each of us responsible for our own limitations as well as our transformational growth, and it invites the other into an authentic, better quality, and mutually satisfying relationship. Forgiveness stands with arms open wide as an invitation to the other to recognize our worth as the reality (boundaries/limitations) we are, share and pursue values that will enable us both to flourish and grow to full maturity, and to move toward mutuality, collaboration, and intimacy with us.

But this is not yet reconciliation.

Forgiveness is only the invitation.

Reconciliation can only happen when that invitation is accepted.

Below I’ve tried to illustrate what this looks like to me:

Forgiveness :

When we are forgiven it…

  • Changes the future not the past
  • Releases us from retributive punishment & condemnation (contempt) for our choices, not from the consequences of our choices
  • Frees us from being limited to our past not from the responsibility for that past

When we forgive we…

  • …Open the possibility to create/restore authentic relationship (each as they actually are), not idealized images & shared fantasy
  • …Cancel an unpayable debt from the past as an investment in a generative future (either together or apart!!), we do not keep upping the anti on a losing hand!
  • …Relinquish the insistence that the other be something they are not yet and may never become, while maintaining the integrity of one’s own identity by not trying to fill, erase, or ignore the space/difference created between those two realities.
  • …Keep the path clear and open for the other to grow into a person of wholehearted integrity who respects our boundaries, shares our values & purpose, and wants meaningful connection, instead of canceling for good those who have failed us. (Murdering someone in your heart = dead to me)
  • …Have an inner attitude of Standing with arms open wide in generous candor as an invitation to the other to recognize our worth as the reality (boundaries/limitations) we are, to share and pursue values that will enable us both to flourish and grow to full maturity, and to move toward mutuality, collaboration, and intimacy.

Wrap up…

Forgiveness does not erase what we or others have done or left undone (if it did, we wouldn’t have a Bible at all!). It does not pretend that wrong doing never happened or that it does not elicit a strong emotional response in us. And it is not a vow of silence that must be kept to protect someone else’s image and reputation. It is not a Witness-Relocation Program nor a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card. Rather, forgiveness is the open window which lets the fresh air and sunlight in, giving us the space and visibility to begin exactly where we are to name the mess for what it is without fear of condemnation and retribution. In this Guilt/Grace paradigm (Growth mindset), I do not have to be forever stuck being the worst version of myself, living under the fear of exposure, shame and pay-back, nor do I need to spend valuable resources keeping my flaws hidden behind a perfect image. Rather, I know my limitations, mistakes, and ugly moments (and those of other’s) can be transformed into something that is generative and connective, when I acknowledge them and integrate them into the story of who I am, do what I can to regain trust wherever it has been broken, and invest my energies into creating a more just and beautiful world.

Serendipity

/ It Takes One To Know One / Leave a comment

I know I have already put up and posted some fall decorations (that’s about the extent of it for this season!), but I never posted about the highlight of my trip up north this summer. Maybe”highlight” isn’t really the right expression. It might make it sound like it was the best thing… that everything else was secondary to it. And that is not the case. I loved everything about being in Denmark! Lazy reading days on the scarcely populated beaches and the rainy days of antique shopping with my daughter; the cool cafés and scrumptious pastries; the delightful shops and the well-mannered, friendly, hospitable people; the trade-mark Scandinavian home designs- exterior & interior; the wide open spaces and the intriguing, tucked-away-in-the-woods places & spaces. So it wasn’t a “highlight” in a comparative sense.

Rather it was the cherry on top, flower in the lapel, sort of thing. It topped off an already successful vacation with just the right amount of unexpected, “just-because” kind of delight that makes everything else feel even better, feel “right” somehow. And it really did happen at the very, very end of our stay.

We had left the rental tidy, the car was loaded and all we had to do was to bring back the return bottles, fill up the tank and we would be on our way to Hamburg. We drove down the road from our rental and made a right onto the road we had taken most days to get to the larger beach ten minutes away, past the gas station to the small grocery store we had shopped at almost daily for our meals. We passed by a bearded man walking with a young, pretty, blond girl with black-rimmed glasses, whom my daughter pointed out, “Mom, look how adorable she is!” By the time I had registered what I had seen, we were already pulling into the parking-lot. “Oh wow, they look just like the family from one of my top favorite instagram accounts!” My daughter and I quickly got onto Insta to check and confirm it must be them. So I let her and Jan out of the car, too embarrassed to join me, and I drove back. Not seeing them, I made a u-turn to head back to the store. By then, they had come out of the Gas-station store and were now walking in the direction of the grocery store.

Writing this all down, it does give off some stalking vibes! Maybe even more than a little. Hmmm?. But I had to! To be honest, it felt like catching sight of an old friend or work colleague you hadn’t expected to see at an event. You have so many shared interests and history, that you just have to make a fool of yourself and call out to them across the large room of strangers, elbow your way through the crowd and say, “hi!” That’s all this was! Right? I mean, I’d known Anthony and Caroline for a couple of years, shared their aesthetic taste, was inspired by how they included their young children in their creative endeavors (something I had never been good at doing), and appreciated the beautiful things they were creating. The only thing that made it a little bit creepy is that they didn’t know me!

That had to change! I had to stop and tell them I was a big fan of the Instagram account documenting them as they restored and converted a small town doctor’s clinic into their beautiful home @-our-new-home-. I had to express my gratitude to them for sharing their creative content. I felt compelled to mirror back to them not only what a beautiful family they had, but what a beautiful family-life they seem to share. So that is what I did. I interrupted their little walk, introduced myself, and laid it on‘em!

I really hope they didn’t feel creeped out or disturbed. The exchange couldn’t have lasted much more than a minute or maybe two, during which Anthony graciously and humbly accepted my outpouring of praise. Once we were back on the road, Charis and I basked in the afterglow of what had just happened at least as far as to the ferry: “I can’t believe it was them!! What are the chances!?!” It had been the perfect bow to wrap up what had been, on the whole, a lovely ten days.

That was a little more than a month ago. And still, since then, I keep coming back to this encounter with some nagging questions. I can’t help but ask myself why I felt all those things. Why did I feel the compulsion to introduce myself? Why the need to express gratitude? Why did running into Anthony and his daughter feel meaningful and special somehow?

So after thinking a lot about it, I have come up with an answer:

Electricity.

“Throw the Ball of Yarn!” Is an uncreative name for an activity I’ve often done with groups, either for first introductions or to illustrate a basic principle of relationship dynamics. Everyone stands in a circle, and I have a big ball of cheap yarn which I throw to someone while still holding the end of the thread. Depending on the objectives, they are to either introduce themselves according to the given criteria, or respond in some way to what the yarn-thrower has asked or stated.

This palpable act of throwing the ball of yarn to someone represents what John Gottman Ph.d calls Bids for Connection. Anytime we share something personal with another or others, whether it be a need, a longing, a disappointment, something we’ve created, a boundary, or a joy, we are making a bid for connection. Even if my husband enthusiastically points to a new bird at our feeder, he is making a bid for connection. He is wanting to share his momentary awe and joy with me. Or in keeping with the illustration, he is throwing out a ball of yarn, a fishing line if you will, as an invitation to form a node of connection.

But throwing the yarn is only the invitation. It is, in and of itself, not a connection. To be a connection, the other must catch the yarn. And if that sounds obvious, it is even more so when one is actually standing in a circle throwing yarn at each other! But, evidently, it is not nearly so clear in the real-life of our actual relationships. So I often also describe this game in conversations with people to describe what appears to me to be a central cause for relational dissatisfaction and dysfunction, not just in the most intimate relationship of marriage, which the Gottmans explore in detail in their marriage books, but also in our wider social circles, both on and off line, which, in turn, inevitably weakens the broader fabric of society.

What does not catching the yarn look like in real life interactions? How does one catch the yarn? The answers to both of those questions in the microscopic will be as many and varied as grains of sand. We can deflect, defend, dismiss, disengage, devour, delude, deny, disavow… and we could go through the entire alphabet that way. But zoomed out, they will share common attributes. In the yarn-circle, illustrating the different attitudes we can take to the ball of yarn being passed to us becomes visceral. When the polyester clump just falls to someone’s feet with zero acknowledgement and no effort made to catch it at all, something that is all too common in our daily interactions suddenly becomes undeniably visible and palpable to everyone in the circle. We can also slyly shove it out of sight, as if it never happened, so we won’t be called on to make some kind of reply. We can just reflexively, maybe even aggressively bat it away. Or simply give lip service to it as we politely pass it on or stash it in our basement. The real life circumstances of not catching will vary in every shade of every color, but it will be in one of these three categories: some form of an aggressive refusal, a passive avoidance, or an inauthentic concession. Fight, flight/freeze, and fawning. Odd what a simple ball of yarn can make us feel when it is kicked aside after we have thrown it – our bid for connection.

What does catching look like? Again, in the details, like every color in the spectrum. From a higher altitude maybe something along the lines of “Please,” “Thank You,” and “I’m Sorry.” It doesn’t follow that Catching must mean we say yes to what is offered or asked of us. For starters, not every demand, enquiry, or request made of us is a bid for connection. Sometimes, maybe even a lot of times, it is simply some form of exploitation; to extrapolate some good or service from us without any meaningful connection at all. But even the genuine bids for connection that come our way can exceed our own unique capacity to accommodate them, and there are ways to catch these even if we can’t or don’t want to keep them.

Again, this can be easily demonstrated in the yarn-throwing-circle. There is a huge difference between letting the yarn fall to the ground in front of you unnoticed, and catching it softly, like in an egg toss, by expressing acknowledgement and gratitude for the precious gift of vulnerability – since the genuine bid for connection is always an act of vulnerability – and tossing it back, or onward, just as carefully. “Thank you for sharing with me, including me, thinking of me…I’m sorry I’m unable to meet your expectation for these reasons… Please try again or this instead…” One small stitch of human connection made!

I bet you didn’t think you were coming here to be lectured on group warm-ups and knitting social connection. You came to see what I meant by “Electricity” and what it has to do with the way I felt in Denmark meeting an Instagram hero of mine.

But it shouldn’t take much nudging from me to see what happens when we replace the yarn with a coper wire and add a battery. We get an electrical current. I believe there is a kind of “power-current” that circulates when real, human connections are made, when relationships are reciprocal, when attention, intention, and commitments are exchanged, when we choose to see each other, when we acknowledge the invitations for connection and handle them with care, and when, against all odds, we find some shared space, some point of value around which to meet, even if it is only two or three of us.

This is the current I felt on our last day in Denmark… in fact, I felt it the entire time I was there, but it peaked at that last encounter. Social Media can often feel like millions of balls of yarn being thrown around indiscriminately, and with the “Like” button hardly feeling like a sufficient catcher’s mitt, they are rarely soldered into meaningful connective conduits. I’m sure I don’t have to explain in any detail how attention begins to flow only one way in almost every media sector, even in this supposedly flattened one, and, beyond that, there is little to no shared Intentions or Commitments between the participants of this digital market place. In other words, one may become either an invisible, anonymous consumer or an increasingly more visible content-provider feeding hundreds, thousands, or millions of anonymous consumers. Either way, few real nodes of connection are being made, and where there is no connection, there is no juice flowing.

I am definitely on the consumer end of this transaction, having traded in buying decoration magazines for Pinterest and Instagram, so I can attest to this. The hours spent on these apps are certainly feeding something, they are just not feeding my most primal need for human connection. So when I happened to drive past a person who is at the top of an almost 70,000-follower-media-pyramid I belong to, from whom I have “caught” untold numbers of “yarn-balls,” you better believe I am going to grab the opportunity to try and make a genuinely meaningful stitch by tossing one back in a face-to-face encounter! For that brief moment, I was not anonymous. For that minute and a half, I was not invisible. In the space and time that it takes to make an introduction and say thank you, our wires crossed and, at least for me, released the flow of energy.

Serendipity

Serendipity, one of my two favorite words, is usually defined along the lines of “finding something good without looking for it.” A happy accident, as it were. But none of the definitions I found encapsulate the special flavor the word, or rather more to the point, the occasions for which we harness this particular word, has for me. It is not just any “good thing.” It is not just an accident. It is also not entirely accurate that one is not looking for it, since once it has happened, we realize that it is exactly what we were looking for, we just didn’t know it. I only ever use the word Serendipity to describe the unexpected convergence of the right good thing happening at the right time to make a needed or helpful or invigorating connection. And often it turns out to be just the thing that helps us move forward or get unstuck. Finding a hundred Euros on the street on a random Tuesday is a “happy accident,” but it is not necessarily serendipity. However, winning €10,000 in the lottery the very day the courts tell you you won’t get the €10,000 back of which you had been defrauded (true story – actually happened to our landlady!) – this is serendipity.

When I think of all the things that have to align in such moments, I cannot help but feel as if there is an undercurrent of power which, in some mysterious way, arranges the convergence for us. As if the time and place has been in the calendar all along, and we simply had not been told beforehand. I would even go so far as to say this positive, electric, under-current is always happy to flow through us and, needing these nodes of connection to do so, is willing to take some liberties with our schedules!

Dear Trans Ally,

/ It Takes One To Know One / Leave a comment

(This is carried over from comments on a facebook post)

Hi again Ben! Thank you for engaging with the post and even more so with my comments. I really appreciate that.

First, I want to say that it sounds like you know personally and care about trans identifying people. There cannot be enough of that in the world, so that makes me glad to hear that you are willing to carry their concerns in this way. I too have a trans person in my life, who, though we seemed to be estranged at the moment, still matters very much to me and whom I care about more than I care about most people in the world, and it grieves me deeply and has cost me a great deal to be in conflict with them. It is because of this person that I began paying attention to this issue in the first place.

You make several points in your comment, many of which, unfortunately, I must contend with. I thought it easiest to just go through them one by one here on my blog, rather than over tax the comments on facebook. I hope that is ok!

1.) Ben: I, as I noted, live in the SF Bay Area. As a result of living here I have had the chance to know and be friends with many trans-women and trans-men. Not one of them that chose to share their story with me had reasons for transitioning anything like that.

Lee: No doubt every Trans identifying person has a unique story all their own, and I am sorry if anything I have said has led you to believe that I know or question the motives of Trans identifying people as a whole for making what I can only imagine are the most excruciating kinds of decisions a person can possibly make. That is in no way my intention when I criticize self-id specifically and queer theory in general.

But it is necessary to point out what the real-world consequences for women and children are when those who advocate self-id drill down on the misnomer that “Trans women are women,” and then insist that this means no door can be closed to them. There are many trans people who are just as appalled at this development, but unfortunately, ever more men (dysphoric or not) are taking the new, politically correct mantra to its logical conclusion ad absurdum. Sports, prisons, shelters, hospitals, changing rooms, quotas, criminal statistics, to name only some of the areas effected.

2) If you believe science points to a binary system of sexuality you are definitely not reading the same articles I am. From what I have read both biological and personality traits related to sex and gender exist on a spectrum, not within a binary. Yes most of us express within the binary due to biological averages and societal pressures but definitely not all of us.

2.)”Not reading same science”: where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, climate change deniers, creationists, covid-deniers, and flat-earthers.🥴 Of course this kind of statement pulls the plug on any dialogue. To simply claim a “different science” as an authoritative voice to again try to silence legitimate questions and concerns. Science has and still does acknowledge only two sexes. I won’t dive into the actual science of sexed bodies (Brett Weinstein & Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists, do that better than I can in their book “A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century,” as does Helen Joyce in “Trans.” My point is that THIS has been and IS the accepted science, and until there is sufficient, broad-based, independently peer reviewed reasons to over-turn it, which certainly has happened in the past in many areas, I, nor is anyone, obliged, nor likely, to suppress the overwhelming amount of salient reasons to keep the categories male and female as they are, as strictly describing biological bodies (which can be objectively verified) and not inner feelings (which cannot). Again, it is a most useful category, has considerable social, reproductive, statistical, and medical implications, and is one that I believe does more harm than good to erase.

What I believe it is less helpful to do is to attach extremely narrow, role-specific, and confining behavioral definitions to our sexed bodies, and then to blame a person’s body for not aligning with that stereotype. This is, and has been, the main tenant of feminism. I think Queer theory is making a confused jumble out of several different kinds of categories: the physical realities we all face (as healthy/normative & non-normative); the force of sex-roles in evolution; impossible, idealized stereotypes; hyper-sexualization of our culture; personality traits (as listed by either the big 5 or Cloninger’s 4 habit systems for example); Character (again, see Cloninger, Seligman, the Stoics, or just about any religion); the process and states of becoming/being an adult/not yet being an adult; individuation & belonging vs non-conformity & conformity (cynicism / group-think); Extroversion vs. Introversion; self-ideation (narcissism) vs self-transcendence (having values far above and outside of the self/self-forgetfulness (flow)); high vs. low sensitivity; intuitional vs. rational; Trauma and our responses to that trauma; attachment theory; and, and, and. All of these and more play a role in forming our personalities and how we express those personalities. And yet Queer theory wants to force all of these aspects of our identity and make them thread this one tiny needle, the relatively recently developed concept of “Gender,” making that the arbiter of absolutely everything else. I think it is tragic that we have a whole generation of young people pre-occupied with trying to pin down some unique and more eccentric gender than the next person, rather than learning how to come to terms with the reality they were born into (time, location, family, body), internalizing responsibility for positive, transformational growth for themselves and their immediate communities, and learning how to collaborate creatively and seek healthy, intimate friendship with those who may be very different from themselves, physically, cognitively, emotionally, economically, ideologically, and geographically.

So I do not think in terms of gender (except when I am speaking German, and I stumble over every noun!). I think in terms of men and women. And within those two groups, there is an infinite and fabulous assortment of individuals. And I suppose many of the traits, proclivities, and limitations these men and women have, and the contributions they make, overlap in a myriad of ways in all kinds of Venn diagrams that are always shifting and reconfiguring- much like a kaleidoscope. And though some might find it amusing to give every new variance a specific name, it is a fools errand to bully the entire world at gun-point to submit to this new and mercurial nomenclature.

3) Making other oppressed people your enemies is the oldest trick in the book.

3) “Making other oppressed people your enemies…” you lost me here. I’m not sure how you got here? From our conversation so far, you began your first comment on my post by not only aligning yourself with those in the Bay area who revile women who insist on their right to name themselves & protect their own (and their children’s) interests and boundaries, but also by condoning the aggressive and pernicious use of the slurs TERF & SWERF to dismiss, intimidate, and silence us. I believe labeling people in that way is very seductive, but never productive (just as true of using the word “woke” in the same derogatory way).

I have made no-one my enemy. I work very hard to keep my heart open, curious, and soft toward even those who treat me as their enemy. It is a spiritual practice I take very seriously, and I imagine it as a posture of standing with my arms open wide (as if on a cross) in an invitation to embrace, embrace me in my limitations, my interests, my boundaries (“This is not OK for me!”), my unique vantage point, my hopes and dreams, my unique contributions, my vision for what a community of just-harmony (beauty) might look like, and my failures to live up to that vision. And for those who cannot accept this invitation to embrace in vulnerability, to let them go in peace and forgiveness and the hope our journeys will one day lead us closer in the future. And though I often tire of holding those “inner-arms” up, I am deliberate about being held accountable to re-assuming this posture when I have let them fall.

We may be in conflict over this issue, but that need not make us enemies. It only means we have “difference with tension,” the best definition of conflict I have yet come across. Our interests appear to be tugging in different directions causing us to feel a tension on whatever chord there may be that connects us (in our case our shared past at high-school and facebook). The tension is uncomfortable, and the temptation is to relieve the tension by either dropping my own hold on the chord (negating/silencing myself) or severing the other from the chord (negating/silencing the other). I believe conflict, difference with tension, always brings a revelatory possibility with it. If we stay the course, withstand the tension while looking for a way forward, we might just find a greener pasture for all of us which may well surpass the kinds of solutions either one of us can imagine alone. And usually, that means a willingness to go wide, by gathering as much information as possible from all interested parties, and deep, going below the surface and getting to the actual heart or well-spring of the problem by finding out what the real unmet needs driving this movement and counter movement are.

4)Feminism is constantly being attacked by the ideologies and power centers of the status quo that want to discredit it. Those attackers exploit the topics of the day to focus attention on flashy divisive issues and away from issues that affect their power, like abortion rights or equal compensation. Of course a wedge has developed over transitioning. It’s an easily exploitable issue focused on a small group of people who do not fit the status quo and don’t have much power to fight back at a cultural scale.

Here we have some overlap. Though this does sound a bit like “mansplaining” -you, as a man, telling me, a woman who has born the stigma and consequences of being a (sometimes the only vocal) feminist in my conservative family and communities for a couple of decades now, about how unpopular feminism is! I know, I know! Believe me I know!

And, yes, I am very perturbed that instead of pushing forward on the already exhausting list of issues that women and girls are up against because of our sexed bodies and because of male entitlement, male appeasement, and male violence, we find ourselves faced with yet another form of male entitlement, infringement, and violence, which is targeting our economic livelihoods, our reproductive capabilities & selections, and even our personal sovereignty! But let me ask you this: who is diverting whose attention here? It is not Radical Feminists who have the infinite funds that have been bankrolling and secretly lobbying state and industrial institutions over the last decade to bring about such a dramatic cultural shift in record-breaking time. Being a “Trans-Ally” is the new virtue signaling for the Elite-left, the ‘smoke & mirrors’ that keeps those with power and money from having to address any of the issues that would actually cost them some skin (reproductive care and protection, maternity leave, pre+post natal care, domestic violence, equal pay, equal representation, and on and on). “Trans-Rights” is to the Elite Left, what ‘Pro-Life’ is to the Right, and both are harming women and allowing the rich to get richer. And just now SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade!)

5) Insisting that people are defined as who you say they are not who they say they are does not have a good history around here, in San Francisco and Berkeley. We’ve all seen directly how those concepts are regularly used against people, especially those in marginalized groups.

Gender is a concept. Sex is a reality. No one gets to define themselves alone. It sucks, but it is the truth. We don’t live in a vacuum, and whether we like it or not, our identities will always be shaped as much by others as by ourselves. (“Am ‘du’ werde ich mich selbst!”) “Only on the ‘other’ do I become myself!” Only narcissists claim absolute editorial control of their identities. I am observing and naming what I see, the physical and tangible reality that I have access to, and responding in a way that is prudent, safe, and, I believe, empowering for both men and women. I have the personal sovereignty to do that. So do you. Any trans-woman who refuses to acknowledge and take responsibility for the obvious negative implications self-id has for women’s protected status will never be woman enough for me. I have empathy for the tension they feel, but anyone trying to relieve that tension by replacing definitions and removing protections from women rather than the more difficult task of stretching the perimeter of how men can express themselves is avoiding the task of growing-up and shifting the costs for their inner conflict onto women and girls specifically and onto society as a whole, and it will have disastrous consequences if it continues.

6) Is there a discussion to be had about what being trans means and how that relates to feminism? Sure, with trans people included in the dialog.

I am not sure if you have just not been following what has transpired the last 5-10 years, which is completely understandable (I was totally oblivious until two years ago!), or which window you are looking out of, but insinuating that trans people are being kept out of the conversation is flipping reality on its head. Unless you mean the trans people who are speaking out against self-id and de-transitioners, who are just as reviled by those pushing queer ideology as we women are. This whole ‘discussion’ began as a secret lobby campaign by trans activists, and once the reality of the institutional capture of their successful lobbying became visible to regular people who were alarmed over the implications for women and children of this new ‘group think,’ that had come about without any input from women’s rights activists, these women’s activists have been most aggressively and violently bullied, hounded, and smeared in every way possible to try and completely silence any contrary input. On top of that, the most aggressive and most vocal trans-activists have refused to come to the table with people like Julie Bindel, Helen Joyce, and Kathleen Stock, all solid liberals, to have good faith dialogue! I will give you the benefit of the doubt on this one, and assume you just don’t know, because otherwise, this would be just about the most infuriating part of your comments.

If someone is starting from the position of having already decided who can be part of the conversation or adopts TERF as a badge of honor, making it part of their identity to exclude someone we will have a hard time finding common ground even if on many things we have similar goals.

Again, I really don’t know what to do with this. You brought up TERF as a slur, and I wrote that these kinds of labels are cheap and only meant to silence the other. Now you are turning it around and insinuating that I not only consider myself a TERF (which I don’t), but that I wear it as a badge of honor? If I was less gracious, I could believe that you were deliberately trying to turn the tables on me. Women did not come up with the term TERF. Because women who are honestly and prudently looking at the Big Picture and asking good questions about what the ramifications are for self-id and the life-long medicalization of children in all areas of our society, know that finding a way forward that helps dysphoric people live their best lives, while not jeopardizing anyone else’s, is not at all exclusionary of trans people, period! Continuing to insist that I, and others who hold my views, are trying to exclude anyone is a character smear and is simply unacceptable.

They are questioning others validity as people because they don’t fit into their classification system. I don’t understand that.

That is a pretty huge jump to go from “humans that have penises are not women” equals “humans with penises that think they are women are not people”! I know that I am not saying that, thinking that, or in anyway supporting the dehumanization of trans people, so I am wondering how you got there? I wish I could say it went both ways. But women who are against self-id, the medicalization of children, and affirmative only mental health care have faced the most vile forms of verbal abuse, ostracization, threats of violence and actual violence for stating things that are facts believed for thousands and thousands of years, and for daring to question if what seems good to trans activists is actually good for women, children, or even trans-people themselves.

Look, if there is one thing I have learned in my 56 years on this earth, and believe me, I have learned it the hard way, it is this:

It is NOT MY JOB TO VALIDATE anyone’s idea of themselves!!

Not my boss’s, not a pastor’s, not my husband’s, not even my own children’s! To assume it is anyone’s job to validate your idea of your identity (“or else!”), or even your worth, is abusive and manipulative. This need for validation is the foundation of co-dependent and abusive relationships. I believe every person is a precious child of God and I do my fallible best to treat them as such, but as far as our self-worth is concerned, each of us has to figure that shit out on our own. It’s called growing up: 1) Accepting the reality of my situation with all its light & shadows, plusses & minuses, opportunities & limitations; 2) internalizing responsibility to creatively move myself and community to more fully realize our inherent potential; and 3) reaching out for mutually edifying and collaborative relationships. I am happy to welcome anyone who is committed to this journey, and I stand with outstretched arms inviting every man and woman to join it.

My Striving and Me (part II)

/ It Takes One To Know One / 3 Comments

(This is the second part of To Strive or Not to Strive)

When I listen to Bilyeu and hear this oh so familiar clarion call to chase your goals with “these ten rules and this secret sauce,” I can’t help but wonder how my life has stacked up to my own dreams. I am no stranger to having caught a ‘vision’ for/of my future: the resonance I felt around teachers, speakers, and preachers even from as young as four or five; the inspiration and sense of kinship I feel when reading certain authors; the pure delight that these wordsmiths seem to forge in me; and the confirmation I received of my own abilities for writing/teaching/preaching during my time at college. But in the years since, I have had to contend with an undercurrent of panic fueled by the thought that I have somehow missed my calling, have squandered my gifts and training, and have receded into obscurity, having not filled in my spot of the grand puzzle.

I have so often flagellated my conscience for not hustling harder to make this future happen… that I have not already written my book, not already become a public speaker, not already unleashed a movement. I berate myself for getting distracted by the circumstances and the needs that those circumstances presented. Never-mind that these ‘distractions’ were that I fell in love, threw all my energies into raising a family, tried to form deep community, lived in several foreign countries and learned a few languages, followed my curiosity and my interests for designing spaces and events, worked for years for free to fulfill other people’s goals- I let them shift my focus away from pursuing this one vision of myself and my gifts!

Over the decades, I have felt the excruciating pressure of multiple longings and interests competing for my limited time and attention, and no matter which thing I focus on, feeling a sense of guilt and restlessness for neglecting the others. I have so often anxiously suffered under that sense of urgency to reach all of those goals before crossing that final finish line, before my time is up. Sometimes it seems to me that all these other needs and longings have led me down a different path entirely, have somehow stolen something from me… my future perhaps?

Compounding this dilemma, is the sad fact that I am the slowest human being alive. Implementing any one of the million ideas, the possible worlds that exist in my head, is an excruciatingly slow process. The ideas are backed up for miles and miles, each waiting impatiently for their day to be born into this time-space-matter matrix we call life. And just as waiting on too many tables always put me in the weeds and would find me in the walk-in fridge cussing and crying before the night was over, my inability to keep up with the onslaught of things going on both in my head and around me often overwhelms me. Because of this, I experience this creative process as a kind of hustle, an anxious striving, and always a race, not always against others, but always against the clock.

So the discussion that Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu have had is deeply relevant to me and touches on this irksome question about pursuing any goals of any kind, having any images at all to aim for, even as trail markers along the way, as we are guided by a worthy, universal, and truly infinite North Star. Does every image trap us in a dopamine-induced hustle for a finite identity based on a comparative/competitive measure/orientation? Is every creative idea an image casting on the pavement ahead of us, like hopscotch, that pulls us to scuttle and scurry after it? Every new thought and idea of what could be taunting the shortcomings of our current reality?

This is what I have struggled against for what seems like my whole life. The image of the idea in my head drawing the yardstick, the finish line, plum line for the reality that I struggle to make it become. The longing for a beautiful home, a worthy goal or a hustle for the hit of dopamine that status and comfort can give? The dream of a lovely garden, an expression of creativity, or a refusal to be content with things as they are? The vision for a certain kind of loving, intimate community, a new reality worth the effort and conflict, or proof of my intolerance for human fallibility? The log-jam of things to write about, raw ideas needing only the logic and language I can give them, or simply a restless spirit and an over active imagination? The impulse to preach/teach, a promise of certain contribution, or a pipe-dream that taunts me with FOMO? Change the world, or be content with the way it is? Lord knows the people telling me to leave well enough alone are stacked a mile high and more than fifty years deep.

A New Perspective

But while contemplating this conversation with Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu, I had a new thought, and for the first time I can remember, I can begin to feel the pressure lifting. This new thought rises up from a deep well I dug a long time ago and which has quietly sustained me all these years. This well is filled with the imperfect, but invaluable narrative and propositional wisdom which has been passed along through millennia like a precious family heirloom. Filtered? Worn? Problematic? Contextualized? Misappropriated? Shocking? Yes, I think so. And yet, I have always been able to trace within it, as if my finger were tracing a red thread, the very questions I ask of myself and the world today: Am I enough? Why am I here? And Where do I belong? And like a weary and bedraggled currier, it offers me a gulp of water it has smuggled through 3000 years of rough terrain, and instantly and instinctively I know that it is curative.

I am talking about the account of a shepherd boy’s rise to the throne in the Judeo/Christian traditional literature. In this narrative, when David is anointed in secret by Samuel to be king of Israel, he is still a boy tending his father’s sheep, and it isn’t until many years and many trials later that it actually came about. Joseph’s dream of ruling over his brothers is another such narrative. There are many other times the Universe seems to give people a peek into their future, though they still have a long way to go to get there, and if you are caught up on your quantum theory, it is no longer far fetched to believe this is possible. But even if the narrative is a fiction, a myth to transport a deeper truth, what is the wisdom it wants to convey? What is the medicine it offers me?

What is the message of such a future glimpse? “Here, you should strive to be king! And all of your priorities and everything you do should be oriented toward achieving this goal!”? Get yourself an MBA at King School, do these ten things and add this special sauce so you can claim your crown? I don’t think so. There is no indication in the narrative that David is being told what he should do or what should happen, but instead it relays what will happen. It is a promise. It is drawing back the curtains and saying, “look, this is in your future, for certain, so whatever else comes your way, whatever obstacles or apparent detours you may face, whatever menial chores, whatever or whoever conspires against you, whatever obligations or needs you will be asked to fulfill, don’t worry, it is not a fools errand! Because the outcome is already secured, you are free to give your full attention, commitment, and engagement to the moment by moment, the step by step of your life as it unfolds before you. You do not have to hustle for this future you have glimpsed. It already exists.”

The promise, the sneak peak, was not a finish line to ‘cross or be doomed’ with which God goaded him. It was not a Vision-carrot to increase motivation and participation in company goals. It was not a fix point of orientation around which to plot and scheme and prioritize the people, places and things of his life, so as to orchestrate that end. It was an “It is done” declaration that would be a go-to well of comfort and hope in the midst of the extraordinary hardships, challenges, and drudgery that David would face in the years that preceded his wearing the crown. Ascending the throne was not something David achieved. He became King. He grew into a sovereign able to exorcise authority on this level through a curriculum David would not have chosen nor have known to create for himself. In so far as David rose to face each of the challenges that confronted him, doing what seemed to be the right thing to do to the best of his knowledge and abilities for himself and his people (or sheep as it were) at that time, he collaborated in that process…leaving the outcomes to God, or fate, as you will.

So what if I have gotten it backwards all these years? What if this thread of longing and intuition I have had my whole life about the kind of work I should be doing, which has goaded me for as many years, was actually just a promise of what the fact of what some part of my future would look like? What if it was meant as an assurance to help me relax into my life, with all the unexpected bends and twists that it would have, and not panic about meeting the myriad of markers that are held out to us to gain “worthiness” points in this world? What if it was never meant to drive me to scurry along this yellow brick road toward some ambitious goal in the future so I will win the prize? What if instead, God was saying, this whole area is filled out already! This is who you are, past, present, and future, and it is enough! You are free to take it one step at a time, one challenge at a time, at your own pace. You are free to live in the moment of it, even while you and the universe move toward the future together in a collaborative dance. There is no hurry. There is no scarcity of time, because you will get there exactly when you need to.

Just because David was anointed King long before he would be King, God never said that is all that he will be. It is like David only got a glimpse behind the last window of the advent calendar, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t other windows, or that the same kind of chocolate would be behind every other door. Or in other words, we want to make a B-line from where we are now to some marker of success or fruitfulness on a distant horizon. We want to cut across the grass, so to speak. If we take that route, all we have from our lives is that one, well worn path and perhaps a significant amount of time being “ahead” of others and smugly waiting for them to catch up – or hoping they never do. This kind of hustle may get some somewhere faster, but almost always by externalizing the cost of their lives or denying and excluding other pressing needs. But just as disturbing, by having such a laser focus on some marker of success, we could be denying the fullness, depth, and dimension our life could have had, had we been fully present for all of it.

Life as a Spiral

What if instead of cutting across the grass, we are meant to weave a spiral out of what we’ve been given, the way one would crochet a round area rug from leftover scraps of material? Each crochet loop tightly stitched to the row that came before and the one that comes after, going around and around in a spiral, one stitch at at time. By the end, we will have a multi-colored, rich tapestry, full of unexpected things, hard things, joyful things. At any given point along our journey, we are what we have woven out of the scraps life has given us, and what we have woven forms the basis for what comes next. In this way our identity is our foundation not our orientation.

But if we were shown any one part of it, say a short stretch made from a silk tie, or worse yet, see someone else’s rug made of desirable fabric, we may come to believe that our whole rug should be made from that yellow and blue striped silk, spend our lives looking for this particular fabric, be willing to pay exorbitant prices for it, and waste all the good fabric we already had. That is the hustle. The striving.

So what could be a worthy orientation for our lives? I think to truly be a worthy North Star, it must be values that are infinite, eternal, and universal. It must give us the questions we can ask ourselves in any and every situation to help guide us. It must leave the door open for others, especially the least of these (anyone who is not/will not be instrumental to our ego-goals), to shape the answers to the question what is good at any given time. For me that leaves Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, in that order, as worthy points for a North Star. Not trying to Be Right, Good, or Beautiful (harmony of just relationships), but seeking them like water or oxygen to nourish a thirsty and gasping soul. My curiosity, my creativity, my energies, my attention, my resources, my competencies all attuned to seek and create these realities in my immediate vicinity, in others, in my circumstances, even in my enemies, as one would precious minerals, no telling where it may lead me save for the few reassuring glimpses I have tucked away in my heart. These are the magnets that draw me forward, as I stitch row for row on what came before, who I was every bit a part of who I am as the new creation I am becoming moment by moment. In this way, I weave a life that accepts the givenness of things even while I reach toward connection and grow in ways that are true and good and just for me and my neighbor.

Full Circle

The narrative in no way whitewashes David’s grave moral failings, and yet, in the final equation, it tells us that God chose David to be King because he had a heart after God’s own heart. Maybe another way of saying this is that David navigated his daily life oriented toward the North Star of the infinite, eternal, and universal principles of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, because that is what was most valuable to him. Even when looking into the mirror of truth meant seeing the ugliest things about himself and what he had done, he did not look away, nor did he expunge the public record of it. He was able to do this because he was deeply and securely grounded in the knowledge and acceptance that his past, present, and future self, his Identity, were in the hands of a power greater and more benevolent than himself, and would be enough.

Though Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu’s conversation was about understanding and moderating dopamine, the neurochemical responsible for motivation, at the heart of their exchange, I believe, is the age old duality between what is and what is not yet. The reality we are born into and the world we are creating. The centripetal forces that pull us around and around what is known, and the centrifugal forces that pull us out into that which is not yet known. To err one way is to circle in place like a broken record, to stagnate, to wither, and become irrelevant. To err the other way is to chase a mirage, dissociate, become unmoored, and be lost to chaos. I think what we are avoiding in our endless over-consumption of easy dopamine (and I am thinking of my own eating, binging, and shopping habits!) is the unique pain that each of these two forces brings with them. I wonder if the kind of balance that Dr. Anne Lembke is advocating is to allow both forces to act on our lives in a way that produces a stable but growing spiral. Not just chasing for the sake of chasing. Not just resting on our laurels, or on those that came before us. We form a solid and stable spiral by leaning into the promise and the pain of both of these forces. Facing what has come before and what is with radical honesty, embracing this imperfect reality with grace and compassion, and salvaging and curating whatever good we can with gratitude, while also allowing curiosity, creativity, and empathy to pull us outside ourselves so we may venture into the risk of failure and danger, as well as all the novel truth, goodness, and beauty that still lay waiting to be both discovered in and given to the world.

To Strive or Not to Strive?

/ It Takes One To Know One / 1 Comment

Recently I watched a podcast with Dr. Anna Lembke and Tom Bilyeu centering her book Dopamine Nation. In the book, Dr. Lembke describes how our pain-pleasure system has adapted to never be satisfied, making us always want more, so as to keep us pursuing food in a pre-modern world of scarcity. Now in our modern society of plenty, we are flooding that system with readily available substances and behaviors which throws this delicate balance (Homeostasis) into chaos. Dr. Lembke explains the role the neural-transmitter, Dopamine, plays in our co-located, pain-pleasure pathway; why too much pleasure is actually stressing us out and leads to dopamine-deficit states; how in the long run this decreases our sensitivity to pleasure (needing more and more stimulus for less and less reward) and increases our sensitivity for pain (it becomes stronger for longer); and how all this leads to addictions and robs us of meaning, vitality, and well being. But Dr. Lembke also draws on her many years of clinical practice to reveal how through a life of radical honesty, self-transcendence, and a time of abstinence, we can reset our baseline for a healthier life of balanced expectations when it has gone awol. It is worth hearing at least her concise explanation in this short clip, if not the entire podcast.

Though in the interview Dr. Lembke is given enough space to expound on her research, she was gently and politely resisting the reframing of her conclusions throughout, since Bilyeu had hijacked them before she had said her first word. They continued back and forth, amicably, but she was not able to entirely winnow out his chaff from her grain. With the last words of the interview, Dr. Lembke says, “What I’ve loved about this conversation is how much you and I agree, and yet there is still this strange kind of friction where we don’t agree and I still don’t quite know where it is.” That Bilyeu managed to evade Dr. Lembke’s probes into his work/life philosophy was dissatisfying, and I was left with the urge to have a go myself at working out what was causing that friction.

Though all I know about dopamine is what I have learned from Dr. Lembke’s book and subsequent podcast interviews, I have thought about and wrestled with the issues at the heart of their differing approaches to this information for so many years now, I can’t remember not thinking about it. How it shows up in our understanding of ourselves, our relationships, to the pursuit of excellence vs. perfectionism, growth mindset vs. fixed mindset, and its impact on setting boundaries and when, how and why we do or don’t do that. That dopamine plays a role in this push and pull of our pain-pleasure-motivation system is new to me, but the dilemma has always been there. Essentially Dr. Lembke and Tom Bilyeu are pushing back and forth between the duality of being and becoming. And though Dr. Lembke’s research is incredibly helpful in understanding the mechanics of motivation, how we are pulled forward or stay stuck, these mechanics in and of themselves don’t resolve the issue entirely, as their conversation shows.

Having listened to this interview twice, once while transcribing most of it, my professional layman’s opinion is that Bilyeu has gotten everything upside down. His self-descriptions sound a bit like the reciting of paragraphs from a catechism, principles that he is intentionally applying to reach an outcome. And though these principles in and of themselves are not untrue, they don’t seem to add up in a one size fits all kind of way. On a few points in the conversation, Dr. Lembke remarks that they seem to agree on some basic principles and yet they end up at completely different conclusions, which, understandably, confuses her. I believe this is because Bilyeu has slotted these, almost right, principles under the wrong headings on his work/life’s philosophical ‘canvas’. In fact, they are in reverse order of where they need to be to have a healthy, balanced, and fruitful life.

I say canvas because I often think in pictures. I am a designer, so I know that I haven’t understood something until I can see a picture of how all the different pieces stand in relationship to each other. What follows is an analytical tool to help visualize the different pieces of their conversation and to locate the disconnect.

The Conceptual Canvas

The headings of this philosophical, conceptual canvas, as I’m calling it, are Foundation, Orientation, and the Guardrails. Like the four sides of a rectangular canvas, the Foundation is the bottom side, the Orientation, the top, and the guardrails are the left and right sides. The Foundation refers to the ideas, principles, inner-dogmas, conscious or unconscious beliefs, and assumptions about ourselves and the way the world works upon which our lives are erected. The Orientation denotes what we are reaching for, which direction we are pointed, where we are headed. Orientation is the focal point of our attention, efforts, and resources, and reveals what is most valuable to us. The Guardrails channel the abstract of our values and beliefs into reality by hedging them with the particulars of our life and the context in which we live. In other words, how our foundation and orientation show up in real time and what their impact is on us and the world. These are the four directions or dimensions which form the conceptual canvas or space within which our lives unfold.

It is within this conceptual space that we try to answer three existential questions about our lives. 1) Am I enough? A question of Being, of Identity. 2)Why am I here (what am I here to do)? A question of becoming, of Agency. And 3) where do I fit in? A question of belonging, or Relationship. I imagine these three existential questions being represented by a triangle on our larger conceptual canvas. But it is how we “draw” our triangle in this space that makes all the difference, as I plan to argue.

The Conceptual Canvas Applied to Bilyeu

His Foundation

Bilyeu is a You-Tube, life and business coach, who appears to be a start up, go-getter kind of guy. Throughout the conversation Bilyeu talks openly about the beliefs, methods, and systems upon which he constructs his life. He is especially excited by this research because it confirms the path he had taken out of his own stuckness, which he did by hacking his Dopamine-motivational system. The most important thing, he explains to his guest, the dopamine expert, is the pursuit. Dopamine is about wanting something, and he has “become good at tying wanting something to a flood of dopamine.” His own life began to change when he realized that his brain is a chemical cocktail which could be managed by ensuring that he attaches his internal rewards only to sincere pursuit and not to actually attaining any specific goals. In this way, Bilyeu believes he can create a self-perpetuating motivation for a productive life. He gives himself those internal rewards, kudos, (I’m ok!) for working long and hard (striving) toward the goal, even if his particular efforts have failed. At a later point in the conversation, Dr. Lembke observes that Bilyeu sets a lot of stock in his will, which Bilyeu confirms saying, “I worship my will.” Bilyeu’s foundation is a belief that through striving, exercising his will, and cleverly manning his biological systems, he can orchestrate a worthy life which others will want to emulate.

His Orientation

Key to sustaining this motivational loop, Bilyeu expounds further, is having a goal that is so far away, that he will always have something to strive for and not risk attaching rewards to the actual attaining of something. One must set a “North Star,” a goal so high and unlikely that it sounds absurd to anyone who hears it. This is Bilyeu’s orientation. What he pours his time, energy, efforts, and attention into. It is the measure and crucible for deciding both what trade offs he will make throughout his life, and when he can stop pursuing, or in his case, striving. Bilyeu’s “unattainable” goal? To be the next Disney.

His Guardrails

But after push back from Dr. Lemke that this sounds like a recipe for addiction, Bilyeu offers qualifiers to this goal. Since nature crafted humans to be the ultimate seekers, quoting Dr. Lembke, Bilyeu recognizes that we have to choose wisely what we seek. The goal must be exciting (something to get us out of bed) and honorable, elevating rather than harming ourselves or others. With these guardrails, Bilyeu makes the case that he can evade the trap of addiction that this modern eco system of abundance poses for our ancient reward-deficit pathway.

Gentle Pushback

Dr. Lembke’s intuition was to be skeptical of Bilyeu’s ambition right from the start of their interview, and more than hinted that this sounded like a kind of addiction in and of itself and not the balance that she is advocating for in her book. Her own personal conclusion to her research and extensive clinical experience is that, though it is good for us to do hard things, it is not about ‘striving,’ working harder and longer, to reach some specific goal, no matter how far away, but more “doing the small things,” and in calibrating the immediate of our lives in being present, intentional, and having realistic expectations about how hard and difficult life can be. Life can be a drudgery, Dr. Lembke admits, is filled with hardship, and is costly, and we should resist the urge to escape that pain by indulging in easy to access and potent dopamine providers (alcohol, drugs, sex, porn, work, food, our phones, binge watching, body modifications, novelty seeking, high-risk activities, etc). She pushes back against the prevailing message of our time, that the goal in life is to always be happy and feel good, and that pain, effort, and suffering are things to avoid, overcome, hack, and medicate any way possible.

As I watched and then studied their conversation, I found myself not only drawn to Dr. Lembke’s person and manner, but also in agreement with her intuitive suspicion that something wasn’t quite right with Bilyeu’s life strategy, even though many of the things he said also ring true. Though how Bilyeu lives his life is none of my business and he has certainly not asked me for my thoughts, there are so many Bilyeus out in the world, and their message is so pervasive, that I feel almost compelled to “fix it.” In a nut shell, I think Bilyeu’s existential triangle needs to be flipped inside the conceptual canvas of Orientation, Foundation, and the two Guardrails.

Problems with His Orientation

Bilyeu is almost right in his wisdom to have a goal so far away that he knows he will never reach it in his lifetime. That means there is always movement and progress. There will never be a moment where he doesn’t have some reason/motivation to take another step forward, solve another problem, move into new territory. That is the basic precept of the Growth Mindset. There will always be another step forward, another horizon. It keeps us from becoming bored, complacent, smug, stale, stagnant…and dead. And it keeps him moving for sure. In another interview, Bilyeu reveals that he has optimized his work week at 93 hours! 94 hours would be too many, but 93 hours is just the right amount for him, he assures.

But I see at least three problems with Bilyeu’s hack. First, and most obvious to me, is that Bilyeu’s “North Star” is too Close. It is not nearly far enough away. It is more like the Moon than a North Star. The moon is unattainable for most of us, but some have actually made it there. He could, theoretically, actually become the next Disney (whatever he thinks that means, I can only guess). It is a goal, not a fixed point by which to navigate. I have never heard of anyone navigating by the moon. Presumably, even the real Disney navigated by some other celestial marker much farther off than any of the milestones he, himself, reached.

Second, it fails the North Star test because it is Comparative. Actually what Bilyeu is saying, is that he wants to tie a record that has already been broken, or maybe actually break that record (be even better than Disney?). It is two very different things to navigate your ship by the North Star on the open seas of the reality of this earth in the here and now, than it is to try and get to the North Star, or in his case, the moon. The second is a race. He is saying he wants to occupy a singular, rarified place in the future history of mankind. The person who ushered in a new era (receive the one gold medal). That of course means he would have to cross that finish line first (a race against time). In order for him to be the next Disney, no one else can be (a race against others). Anna Lembke recognizes and reflects back to Bilyeu that, “I think where the gap is, is that the thing you are trying to get is a materialistic, king of the mountain kind of thing. ‘I am going to be king of this mountain.’” It is a measure dependent on scarcity. There is only space for one at the top. The measure used to define success is still other people. The standard they have set, the mould they have created, which is static rather than dynamic, since it is already finished, and will never suit someone else entirely, never be a perfect fit for anyone else.

Third, it is too Cramped. In a number of ways, Bilyeu’s goal of becoming the next Disney, in all its outlandishness, is not broad enough. Its scope is too specific and narrow.

• Picking this one spot on the horizon and focussing solely on it has the danger of being an Inflexible Tunnel vision. It excludes multiple other spontaneous or important and urgent ways of being and serving that may be presented to him in the course of his life that might need to be prioritized over his becoming the next Disney (Olympian, Academy award winner, Steve Jobs) in any given moment. Whether changing the diapers of a new born, caring for a sick parent, helping someone who has been left for dead by the side of the road, or his own needs for recreation and connection. How does such a North Star help him navigate the kind of son, husband, friend or father he wants/needs to be?

• It is Elitist and Exploitative. Since decisions and action are always defined by an Image in the future rather than a present, observable or expressed need or curiosity, other individuals, community, society, and the planet are excluded from giving input into what his priorities might need to be at any given moment, or even in what a worthy vision might be to begin with. At one point in the interview, he says he believes in a collaboration of equals and wants to create a culture of good soil for honest feedback. However, he is creating this only in the context of serving the goal he has already committed to- only as an extension of his self-Image of being the next Disney- which is, in essence, an ego image. That is not the same as a collaboration of equals toward a more universal understanding of the Good for all, which includes what is good for others also. There is, at the very least, an element of exploitation involved. Is the world crying out for another entertainment empire? Is that all that the people closest to him, or impacted by him, need him to be?

• It is precarious. It is based on a fixed and specific set of circumstances which could change at any moment. The wording for a North Star kind of orientation should be something that we can pursue in any circumstance, at any time, in all places, with anyone. If he was in a plane crash on a deserted island, would his North Star give him orientation? Would it help him know what needed to be done, and what was needed from him? Would he be able to recalibrate and allow the immediate and expressed needs of the circumstances, together with his competences and resources, chart the course for decision making and action? I am not saying that he should not pursue what may actually be a good thing for him to pursue. I am saying that this is not tall enough to be the center tent pole of his life because it does not make space for all the other good he may want or need to pursue over the course of his lifetime.

Ultimately, his goal is an Identity, to be the next Disney, to be the next man on the moon, king of some mountain, the next olympic gold champion, the next mother Theresa, the best Mom on the block. To be the North Star. When we make our identity, even our future identity, even one we believe is unattainable, even if we believe it serves mankind on the grandest of scales, our orientation, it never actually serves anything outside of ourselves!! We are serving our own ego, Hubris, and no one else. No wonder the attaining never brings him satisfaction, because striving for an identity never does. The “rewards” just fall out of the bottom, because there is no foundation based in the reality of his actual and true present self. It is an ego goal. His answer to the question, “who am I?” is, “I am the next Disney in the making.” His identity is defined only in relation to the idea he has of himself, rather than to the accumulation of circumstances, experiences, choices and relationships that have been his life thus far, or even how he is showing up in that very moment and the impact he is actually having currently.

Whether or not he ever attains the goal, in his mind, his identity is about what he will fashion himself to be, not what he is or was, but about what he will make happen. Either it will become a “fixation”(compulsion) urging him to hurry ahead of his own pace, ignore his own limitations, or it could quite possibly become a defining limitation, putting a cap on how far he feels he must go. In that case, it becomes a brittle fixed identity, limiting him to become only that thing, becoming overly sensitive to anything that might question him or challenge him to become more or something else. The hustle to prop up/maintain and defend that identity is his Dopamine addiction, his hedonic treadmill.

Problems with His Foundation

Whenever our understanding about ourselves is based on a projected image, either an idealized portrait we curate or a future self we strive toward, then that becomes our orientation, the thing we pour our attention, time, energy, and resources into creating and validating. It becomes the measure by which we judge not only our real/present and past self and our contributions, but also others and their contributions, as well as their honest and constructive feedback about our real selves and the impact we are actually having on our environment. Having an identity as an orientation makes us extremely fragile and unstable, like a triangle standing on its tip, easily tipped over into shame. There is simply too little grounding in reality to give it the secure base it would need to not be easily rattled by the opinions, otherness, or push-back from the world around us.

To flip that triangle onto its base would be to recognize that the only stable Foundation we can have, the starting place for everything that is then built, is the awareness and acceptance (rather than denial) of who we actually are. To radically embrace and show solidarity with the truth about ourselves and the real impact we have in the world is the only stable foundation for any kind of transformative growth. It is the AA member’s “Hi my name is Bob, and I am an alcoholic,” to Bilyeu’s, “Hi my name is Tom, and I am the future Disney.” Tom’s identity is aspirational, an orientation. Bob’s identity is foundational. Whatever the future holds for Bob, it includes and doesn’t hide his past and present self and is still open for whatever forces, choices, and serendipity may yet play their part in it.

In place of a foundation, Bilyeu has constructed a scaffold which keeps his ‘triangle’ erect and from tipping over into shame. In listening to the interview, I could not help feeling that Bilyeu’s scaffold was cobbled together with a collection of truisms, management advice, and current research, like Dr. Lembke’s on dopamine, not unlike using inspirational post-it notes to wall paper your house. Some of the poles of Bilyeu’s scaffold are his beliefs that through striving, exercising his will, and cleverly manning his biological systems, he can orchestrate a life worthy of approval, emulation and perhaps admiration. Dr. Lembke, in stark contrast, seemed to be the very embodiment of the concept grounded. Throughout their conversation, she remained rooted in her own thorough research, decades of clinical experience, and radical self-awareness, while still remaining flexible enough to genuinely listen for, mirror, and find overlap with Bilyeu. It was truly inspiring to watch her.

The more aware, truthful, and accepting we are of our limitations (biological, time, space, matter, conscience, abilities, resources), our organic nature (our needs, potentials, and vulnerabilities), and our impact (of what we think and believe and how we act on the world), the more secure our grounding will be. The more aware, truthful, and accepting we are of these realities outside of us, the better able we will be to navigate them successfully. We may argue and dialogue with each other over what is really true, but the proof will be in the pudding. The one who builds their life on the rock of reality, which is how truth usually shows up, has no need to fear that questions, otherness, setbacks, or pushback might take out the pillars of such a scaffold.

Problems with His Guardrails

Bilyeu’s attempt to qualify and give safety-rails to his ambition are in part miss-placed and in part miss their mark. In order to be successful and relevant, and avoid both motivational entropy and the treadmill of pursuit, Bilyeu offers these guidelines: the North Star goal one chooses must be both exciting (something to get us out of bed) and “honorable, elevating rather than harming ourselves or others.” In theory, that rules out choosing things that would spiral into addiction or peter out into less and less satisfaction. In practice, we must remember, and Bilyeu should too, that he admits to working 93 hours a week, has no friends, and, besides his wife, no family.

Bilyeu’s use of the adjectives, exciting and honorable, are misplaced in this part of the conceptual canvas, because they are simply more values and not concrete particulars of reality. Without realizing it, he has placed these two values as watchmen over his “North Star,” north stars to his north star, or as I mentioned earlier, his moon. This should clue us in to what kind of thing should actually be the celestial marker by which we can assess our current location and navigate forward growth, as well as weigh the worthiness of the mile-markers and landmarks we choose to move towards.

However, Bilyeu is not completely off track in the guardrails that he offers. By instructing us to choose a “North Star that elevates rather than harms ourselves or others,” Bilyeu comes closer to hitting the ball on the green. Earlier I wrote that “the Guardrails channel the abstract of our values and beliefs into reality by hedging them with the particulars of our life and the context in which we live. In other words, how our foundation and orientation show up in real time and what their impact is on us and the world.” No matter how good our values and beliefs appear on paper, it is the living of them in the here and now of relationship that will ultimately reveal their true impact. This makes ‘self’ one of the guardrails, and ‘other,’ everything that is not us, the guardrail on the other side of our conceptual canvas. At the end of the day, what matters is not how lofty and noble our ideological castles were, nor how logically neat and tidy our dogmatic house of cards may be, nor even how closely we adhered to either one, but rather what matters is if we and those around us actually flourish. As you might imagine, the “guardrails” turn out to offer a much more dynamic process than their image conjures up, as they insist that moving forward into more truth and goodness is a continual negotiation as we reach out to the other for connection and intimacy. This does not mean that Truth and Goodness are negotiable, only that our finding them in authentic connections will entail negotiating between our internal and external worlds. Self and other are the sheep dogs for abstraction, if you will.

A Look at Both Triangles

To bring this all together, I want to put Bilyeu’s existential triangle with the sides Identity, Agency, and Relationship, on our conceptual canvas. Just from what Bilyeu reveals about himself in this conversation, it sounds that he has drawn the identity side of his triangle on the top of the canvas, Orientation, meaning it consists of an idea, an image, or a delusion that must be maintained from within and from without. This leaves the sides, Agency and Relationship, to come together in a point at Foundation. This is an inherently unstable structure, like building a roof before the house. The efforts and successes of his agency and his relationships all serve to keep this triangle propped up and stable, and therefore, ultimately serve his idealized image (hubris). Also, since the foundation is missing, all these efforts are going into filling a cup without a bottom, or in other words, a vortex or funnel, which is the opposite of growth. There will never be enough validation, and therefore questions, otherness, and pushback can easily destabilize the system and throw it into defensiveness and a shame spiral.

Identity as Integrated Foundation

To flip this triangle is to plant the identity side of the triangle on the bottom of the canvas, Foundation, with the two sides pointing up toward Orientation. Here, identity forms a solid base because it is grounded in the truth of what is. The person with this triangle is unflinchingly committed to pursuing and embracing (as opposed to living in denial) the truth about self without shame or condemnation. Because they are already sure of their worthiness to exist and take up space in this world in their unique way, they are able to face and take responsibility for their limitations, their potential, their needs, their vulnerabilities, and the impact they have on others. The person with this triangle experiences internal cohesion because there is no discrepancy between the truth of who they are and the idea they have of themselves. This is often called wholeheartedness because one is not divided between being loyal to an image and being loyal to the reality of self. This triangle represents an identity of integrity, since, as it grows, it remains a solid structure, having no gaps between what is and what is projected outwardly.

Seeking Self-Transcendent Values

The two sides of the triangle, Agency and Relationship, rise from this foundation. As we pursue the Good (for ourselves and others) through our agency, we experience transformational growth. This is a natural and organic byproduct of focussing our attention and energies toward seeking self-transcendent values. To seek the Good means to go through life with that hunter-gatherer mentality looking for and consuming that which will truly nourish our mind, heart, and body. Because the person in this triangle is seeking self-transcendent values, ones that are infinite and eternal and serve something outside an ego-image, there is no scarcity to fight over, no running out, no finish line to hurry toward, and no winner’s circle in which to hang out and get comfortable. There is always more truth, goodness, and beauty to move toward, uncover, and contribute to the world. And because these values are truly nourishing, giving us what we need to reach full maturity and fruitfulness, they motivate us to continual pursuit without the danger of addiction or compulsive over-consumption.

A Harmony of Just Relationships

As we seek a harmony of just relationships, what I have been calling Beauty, between ourselves and the people and things around us, we experience intimate connection. The person in this triangle knows that others also have limitations, needs, vulnerabilities, potential and agency and is present and aware enough to see these and respond in ways that encourage their transformational growth toward maturity and fruitfulness. That will mean nurturing, protecting, empowering, and collaborating (co-creating) with others, just as it will mean holding them accountable to do the same. The person in this triangle is neither driven by a desire to be king of a mountain, nor lured by a desire to remain dependent and coddled, but rather is motivated to action by a deep longing to both be known and to know the other in an intimate connection of mutuality. The more we truly see and engage each other in this way, the more we experience intimate connection and the deeper our sense of belonging becomes.

Because there is a solid foundation, the more we make truth, goodness and beauty our orientation and pursue them in any and every circumstance, the more our triangle grows, or rather, our life flourishes and so do those around us.

The Crux of It…

At this point it is important to remember that I am offering these triangles on this conceptual canvas as an analytical tool to uncover the disconnect between Tom Bilyeu and Dr. Anne Lembke in their conversation and not to make general assumptions about what really grounds or drives Bilyeu or what kind of impact he is actually having in his life as a whole. I am fully aware that it is not my place to stand in judgement of him. It may be that Bilyeu actually has his triangle right side up and only talks about it in a confused and wonky way. My guess is that he, like all of us, is a mixed bag of both triangles and is doing his level best to figure it all out. But since he is publicly proselytizing his work/life philosophy, it is my duty to myself to investigate and evaluate if what he says here in this interview is worthy of emulation. I think we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t carefully think through our core values, our self-perception, and what we want from others, and the language we use can either help or hinder us in that process. Using this tool helps me to see that, though it often seems that Bilyeu and Dr. Lembke use similar vocabulary, “it’s about the process,” “North Star,” “truth telling,” “doing hard things,” among others, they end up having different outcomes because they appear to be operating from opposite, existential frameworks. Dr. Lembke argues for the stability and balance that comes from being grounded in accepting the truth about our identities and moving forward in a sustainable pace from there. Bilyeu is advocating for a life of chasing the moon.

Only one question remains: How can these triangles help me?

My attempt to answer it is in Part II.

Left at the Alter

/ It Takes One To Know One / 10 Comments
Author at 14 yrs.

The shock and incredulity were still washing over his bearded face as he approached me, and they softened and deepened his voice as he spoke. It was so unlike his usual, merciless teasing of me, his constant, often drunken or stoned, goading of my teenage sensibilities, his having a laugh at my expense at each encounter, that his words felt especially weighted that day. I did not know him to show gravity, empathy, or humility, but there they were as he stood before me condemning and still recoiling from the ceremony. A liturgy that only moments before had pierced my juvenile heart and so crushed me, that I felt I was standing naked in the middle of this happy reception with a gashing wound where my heart had been, unable to breath let alone make a sound or verbalize my agony.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, “that was awful and wrong and such an insensitive and hurtful thing to do.” There was no pity in his words, only the bridled fury of solidarity and a humble awareness of his own powerlessness to have prevented the spectacle of abandonment or undo the pain it must be causing. To me the words offered an immediate cloak over this feeling of naked shame and worthlessness now engulfing me, and in the ensuing years they became a buoy to cling to when the stasis of gaslighting threatened to wash away what scrap of faith I still had in my own perceptions and meaning-making abilities or any residual self-worth.

For that, I forgave him everything else.

The Big Kids

– Eight Years Earlier –

“We went camping with the Big Kids,” I answered Mrs. DiPietro, when she asked each of us second graders how we had spent the past weekend. The alarmed look on her face begged for more information. I thought she must not know what camping was, since I had never heard of it before that weekend either. So I explained that we had gone out of the city to a big lake in the woods and put up tents, which we slept in, and cooked on an open fire, and roasted marshmallows…” I wanted to tell her about the fun we had had playing games and swimming and hiking, and singing Bye Bye Miss American Pie and listening to the Big Kids tell scary stories around the camp fire, but my favorite teacher interrupted me to ask about these Big Kids, “Who are they? Were there any grownups? Were your parents there?”

That was a bit of a puzzle for me. It was hard to say what or who these people we now lived with were, let alone what they were to me. People called their parents Mom and Dad and grownups were called Mr and Mrs, like at school or in the previous foster homes. But one day in spring, when we were picked up from Ms. Perry’s in Virginia and taken to a big brownstone in Adams Morgen, DC, an attractive couple, she, thin and tan with long, straight, blond hair and a tight and nervous smile, he with long, reddish-blond hair, gleaming eyes, and a jovial grin crowning his beard, greeted us warmly and told us their names were Marty & Kenner, not Mr. and Mrs. Thomson, not Mom and Dad.

My new guardians and their friends were not like any grown ups I had ever encountered in my long, little seven year old life. No grownup outside of school had ever even read a book to me before, let alone played games with me and made craft projects. No grownup had ever laid down in the snow and taught me how to make snow angels or joined the snow ball fights with all of the kids on our street. No grownups had ever gone sledding, or ice-skating, or swimming, or bike-riding before. No adults had picked us up and swung us around, or played chase, or rough-housed with us, or tickled us ‘til we screamed uncle. No grownups laughed and told silly stories or goofed around, or made ridiculous bets they always lost.

People who played were kids and people who didn’t were grownups. The best way, in my mind, to describe these caretakers and the loose conglomeration of tall, playful-creatures whom we called by their first names, who had weekly pot-lucks at each other’s houses in winter and played soft-ball with all of us on the Washington Mall in summer, who went camping and sailing with us, who sometimes might sit around our kitchen table and play a dulcimer or smoke a joint, was not to call them parents or grownups, but to call them Big Kids.

Despite never having been told how long we would stay and the inevitable tantrums and turmoils that beset children in such circumstances, my two year old brother and I came to adore these mythical beings, and, over the next three years, we settled into the habit of being their wards and navigating the various playful and eccentric characters that now peopled our lives, hoping our social worker wouldn’t again just show up one afternoon to take us to the next placement. To that end, I stopped calling them Big Kids at school.

My Brother and I with Marty & Kenner

Hank

Hank was one of these Big Kids. He was not as tall as the other men, nor was he a heavy-set man, though his beer-belly did expand over the years. Few would have said he was handsome, fewer still that he was unattractive. It was Hank’s personality that was large and magnetic, not in the kind, generous, Ted-Lasso way, but in the provocative and entertaining way of a late-show host. Because of this, Hank could be found in the center of attention at most gatherings he attended. He held a certain fascination for us little kids too, the way fire does or someone’s pet tarantula. Though we could usually manage to provoke one of the other men, Mac, Bob, or Pat Patrick, to chase after us, throw us in the air and shake the pennies out of our pockets, or catch us in a “death-grip” we had to squirm our way back out of, with Hank, these poke-the-bear games were only ever verbal, and they were always more dangerous.

If a friend was with me, we would stoke each other’s courage until we had the nerve to challenge him with some childish insult about farts or things growing in his beard, or that his baby must be due any day now since his belly was so big. Without fail, and to the amusement of anyone present, Hank would not just take the bait, but he would run so far with it, that the line would tear through a deep insecurity as it was being yanked out of our hands. Hank always managed to hit just below the belt. It always ended with my feelings smarting from the sting. And I always went in for another round the next time we met.

The older I became, and the more things fell apart at home, the more bare surfaces there were to inflict injury on my self-esteem. No doubt Hank underestimated this fragility, or was unaware, or could not have guessed just how little positive reinforcements there were in my life to stack up against such low-flying banter, but I grew to resent him for it none the less. This acrimony reached its peak my last year at the YMCA summer camp on a river off of the Chesapeake.

Camp Lets

YMCA Camp on the Rhode River, Edgewater, MD

It would be my last, though only my second summer here, but these two weeks of summer belong to the best memories I have growing up. This year I had signed up for the equestrian program instead of selecting several different activities. The year before I had done diving, sailing, archery, and water-skiing, but this year, camp was all about horses. Though we didn’t get to do as much riding as was promised, I got to spend most of the day at the stables. And all good things converge in horse stables: the smell of leather saddles, the sound of the hardware on tackle, the sweet smell of horse sweat, the look of riding boots up over our tight riding pants and the black riding helmet perched on top, the warm wood of the barn siding as we leaned against it on a break, the fresh scent of hay and the crunch of it underfoot, the dust fairies that dance around in the beams of sunlight pouring through an open barn door. Even the horse manure that we spent a lot of time shoveling, is like no other shit on the planet.

The only thing better than being around horses all day at that age is being around boys. I had one in my sights who had also been there the year before. Michael and I spent most of those two weeks with each other on our radars but lacking the courage to do any serious flirting. Having a crush is an exhilarating preoccupation. Underlining everything you do and everywhere you go is the question, “is he here?” Then there is that elevator-drop you feel in your belly, when you see him. After that you are self-consciously trying to act normal while at the same time trying to draw his attention by laughing just a bit louder than usual at your friend’s jokes. It is all very silly and not unlike anyone else’s experience, but it does make life more delicious when it is happening and is one of the very best parts of that age. Finally, at the party on the last night, we slow-danced and made out, and Michael became my boyfriend for the rest of the summer… that being all of about three weeks, which is when the enchantment always wore off.

It was a great two weeks. Sherry and I found each other on the first day in our cabin of ten girls, and it was all Laverne & Shirley after that. We doubled each other’s wardrobe and were each other’s accomplice in whatever schemes and pranks we came up with. She shared her care-packages with me, and I helped her write letters to her boyfriend back home. Making friends has always been easy for me. No matter how many times I had moved or switched schools, I always found ‘my person,’ someone to belong to, to identify with. Those Someone’s kept me from feeling all alone in the world, and Sherry was my Someone at camp. The person your eyes sweep the room for in the dining hall or out on the sports field, the one you move toward in relief once you’ve spotted them, the one who anchors you in belonging, so you can relax into the social gathering and maybe even dare to be more of yourself. Everything is better with a Someone, and that was true at camp, even if we weren’t always together.

I loved all the things at camp: rising to Reveille, the long walk alone up to the stables in the early hours, the call to attention at the flag pole in the center of the camp, the rituals and songs and duties in the dining hall, the free time to swim and hang out at the camp store, the smell of the cabins, the walk to the bathrooms and wash house carrying our toiletries with our towels slung over our shoulder and talking to the other girls, and the melancholy sound of taps at days end. Never once did I question whether I belonged. Never did I doubt if I was liked. There was not a single time I felt I was a bother or an interference.

I was in high spirits while all of us campers checked each other for ticks and waited with our trunks by the end of the lane where our parents would pick us up. Michael was picked up first by both of his parents in a shiny sedan. His mom was all smiles and hugged him longer than he wanted. His dad did the guy thing with a hand shake and half a hug and then grabbed Michael’s trunk and heaved it into the back of the car. Both his parent’s were glad to see him and said they couldn’t wait to hear all about camp when they stopped to get something to eat on the way home. Sherry was picked up by her boyfriend in his pickup truck. He was a few years older and had already graduated from high-school. Eventually all the girls in my cabin had been picked up, and I felt awkward waiting without my posse, though I was secretly relieved they had gone before Marty and her boyfriend, Art, came in their rusty old 1965 VW pick-up truck.

The cars came and went and came and went. I waved to each camper as they left, my agitation growing with every goodbye, until I was the very last camper standing. When there was still no sign of them for what seemed like hours after everyone else had gone, that toxic mix of feeling unseen, unwanted, and betrayed, which had come to be an almost constant companion over the last four years, returned after this two week hiatus and surged through to every last nerve ending in my body. The resulting rage could only hold the line of defense against my rising panic for so long, and eventually I threw myself into searching for a contingency plan.

Looking around to see if anyone at all was still here at this camp miles from nowhere, I saw a dripping wet, naked man with a beard walking toward me from the shore. As this odd figure came closer, a kaleidoscope of information hit me simultaneously, which, when aggregated, revealed that whatever exaggerated and awful situation my catastrophic thinking had drummed up the last few hours, nothing could trump the reality I was now facing. In that moment, my worst suspicions about my foster mom and her boyfriend were confirmed: they were sadists!

The Sacred Thread

“Those Fuckers came with Sea Fever!” I said out-loud to no one. The soaking wet man approaching me was none other than Hank. Marty and Art were not coming in Art’s rusty old VW pickup, nor in Marty’s rusty old VW bug. They had come with their 35 foot, wooden Dutch Sloop. Art was still in the dinghy rowing ashore, but Hank, who actually was wearing a speedo, had jumped overboard and beat him to land.

I can’t remember anything about the rest of that trip, how long it was, or who else was on board. My nine year old brother had been shuffled off with one of his friend’s families as usual, but my three year old foster-sister must have been there, though I can’t remember if she was. Most likely I spent the rest of that trip, like so many others, sulking in the head and screaming obscenities at them, which had become my only retort on such occasions. But the image of Hank walking toward me in his speedo, which left nothing to the imagination, and of Art and him trying to fit my huge trunk into that wet, little dinghy will forever be seared into my mind.

At fourteen I had no where near the fortitude, self-esteem, or even the sense of humor I would have needed to hit a curve ball like this, let alone spin a golden narrative of love and care from straw so wanting in empathy and circumspection. Maybe somewhere there is a 14 year old girl who could have been cool with waiting alone for hours in a deserted summer camp, could have improvised with such a capricious escort, and could have conjured a positive identity out of thin air and navigated it successfully through the exacting world of her peers entirely on her own without flinching over her exotic associates. Maybe there are hoards of such girls and boys. But I was not one of them. I would never be one of them.

The failure, or refusal, of my Peter-Pan-guardians to be aware of and appreciate my reality and factor it into the calculations of literally thousands of decisions that impacted me over the previous seven years, as well as the remaining three years I would live in their house, was a relentless sabotage on the filigree of trust that should have bound us together. Though this fine and delicate strand, without which no caring and loving relationship can be woven, had been severed into innumerable pieces, there was rarely, if ever, an accounting for them, let alone an attempt to mend the thread. To this day, these parents, who would not be my parents, these adults, who would not grow up, fail to see the true preciousness of the thing they trampled underfoot that day, and on many other days. A thing that can be carelessly, even unknowingly, broken, but takes intention, hard work, and humility to repair. If only they had known the words, “I’m so sorry, that was awful and wrong and such an insensitive and hurtful thing to do,” I might have had a different story to tell.

As it was, I was thanking my lucky stars that they did not have the audience they may have been hoping for. Their own extreme tardiness had spared me this humiliation at least. I was not so lucky the day that Hank approached me at the awful wedding. A day that was still over a year away.

Kenner & Diane

It was an intimate ceremony at her two bedroom, cottage-style house in Bethesda, Maryland. The kitchen had been expanded into a large, bright, open space with sky-lights, a kitchen island, and dining area near the sliding glass doors from which the modest, enclosed garden could be accessed. Now there were maybe thirty white, fold-up chairs rowed in a long semi-circle facing a tastefully decorated archway that had been placed off to the right. Some of Diane’s bronze sculptures were on pedestals in the garden, while her more recent stone pieces could be found in the house.

Not seeing anyone to whom I could attach myself among the arriving guests, I headed for the kitchen and found something to do that made me look busy and useful and signaled that I belonged here. I still didn’t know what to make of this union or what it would mean for my brother and me. On the one hand, she was a dream come true. A svelte woman with long, dark hair, she could have been Sarah stepping out of the pages of the Old Testament, who, even in old age, tempted kings. Not only was Dianne beautiful, but she had keen aesthetic sensibilities, impeccable and expensive taste, and a Midas touch. Whether it was rooms, stone, food, ceramic, words, or oils on canvas, she managed to turn them into something that delighted. She was smaller than I was, even then at fifteen, but she had an abundant and lavish personality that filled every room she was in and enchanted everyone she met. I was enthralled from the moment she was introduced to me. She was generous, open, interesting, curious, creative, wore lovely clothes, and had a clean, comfortable and gorgeous home. The rare occasions we came for a weekend, she wanted to hear about everything, had a point of view and, with a master’s in psychology, an educated opinion about my social life. She also found things to notice and compliment me on, showed enthusiasm over my creative endeavors and celebrated my successes, and once or twice took me shopping and out to lunch in Georgetown. In this way, Kenner’s soon to be wife was all that I had ever fantasized about in a mother, and I drank it in. How could I not want someone like this to fill a role that had been vacant all my life?

Last Photo of Author with Kenner

On the other hand, my relationship with Kenner had already changed quite a bit in the short time he had been with Diane, and I could not tell whether this trajectory would continue once they were married. Certainly his moving in with Diane was a healthy step for him, even though it meant that he was farther away from us and we now had to schedule times to “visit.” The past five years had been chaotic and confusing and heart-breaking for me, and they must have been excruciating for him. I was ten when Marty told me she was pregnant. Whatever sense of emotional stability I had begun to rely on the past three years with this couple as guardians vanished the instant Marty spoke the words that night by my beside, “Kenner is not the father.” It ripped the rug right out from under my new found life.

Nothing was the same after that. Kenner moved up to the third floor apartment which was still open to the rest of the house, and Art moved into Marty’s room. Kenner’s bedroom right above theirs. And that is how we lived for the next five years, outwardly, one big, “open,” progressive, patchwork family with four different last names; inwardly, completely dysfunctional, isolated and emotionally shut down individuals without even a family name to unify us.

Once he moved upstairs, Kenner did not actually spend a lot of time at home. More often than not, he was away sailing up and down the East Coast until he ran out of money and had to come back and pick up some renovation work, only to then be off again. When he was home, I was his constant shadow, “helping” him work on the house or do projects for clients, hanging out at the boat yard as he renovated Sea Fever, or joining him on his trips to the hardware store. Because of him I learned my way around a hammer and saw, still love the smell of sawdust and turpentine, and can spend hours in hardware stores. It was Kenner who took my brother and me and our friends sledding and ice skating, built snowmen and had snowball fights with us. It was Kenner who took me to the Washington Monument to fly the elaborate kite he had bought me, and took me on movie dates. Only Kenner could brush the knots out of my hair without hurting me. It was Kenner who bought me a large chemistry set, taught me the names to all the bones in my body and the names of all the semi-precious stones in the collection he helped me grow.

When he was away, he would write letter’s and send us pictures or trinkets from wherever he was, and I would get to fly to meet him for spring break. One year I flew to the Bahamas and stayed with him on Sea Fever in Nassau Harbor, sailing around the islands, sleeping on the beaches of the smaller, uninhabited ones, leaping and hopping on moon shadows together. Another spring break, I flew down to Miami and drove back to DC with him and his then girlfriend, Dana, switching up between riding with him in the ‘69 VW bus and riding with her on her BMW motorcycle. Even from quite a young age, Kenner would let me sit in his lap and steer the bus, and from twelve or thirteen, drive on roads with little to no traffic. When I was 14 and Dallas was the big show on Television, the two of us flew to Texas to visit his parents in Irvine. Besides visiting Southfork, I got to ride his parent’s mopeds and shoot cans with a real gun.

Me with my Rescuer in the Bohamas

But this had all begun to change since he met Diane. The only time we spent together alone anymore was when he picked me up from school to bring me to her house for one of the scheduled visits I had managed to wrangle out of them. I doubted that there would be any more spring breaks with just the two of us, but maybe, possibly, something more substantial would replace it. Something I couldn’t quite name, but that might ground me in a sense of my creative agency and keep me from being swept further away from my own potential and sense of purpose. Maybe their union could offer a knew hub of positive energy and magnetic beauty. Maybe if I could grab onto to that somehow, plant myself in their garden, it would keep me from being sucked down into the entropy and enmity that had taken over the home Kenner had left, a vortex of decline that was leaching away my vitality. I had little reason even at this point to believe there may be room for me, but down to the marrow, I yearned for it none-the-less.

As I placed canapés on a tray and covered them with saran wrap to keep for later, all I knew was that Kenner was the sun of my universe. Without him, I would wither in frosty darkness.

The Awful Wedding

Life is simply a series of yes and no choices. Being finite creatures, limited by time, space, and matter as we are, we cannot have all the things. We cannot do all the things. We cannot be all the things. We are forced to choose. It is the burden of being human. Every single moment of our lives, we must choose. One thing over another. One person over another. One path over another. One principle over another. One love over another. Even God, rumored to be infinite, revealed himself to us through his choices. Able over Cain. Jacob over Esau. David over Saul. No less his very first choice, the choice to create a world of beauty, love, and suffering over being eternally alone, or so the story goes. Many times over, life leads us to a fork in the road where we must choose what matters most to us. What or who is most precious? What do we really value? Our lives are the sum total of these choices we make, and, in the end, we are exposed by having become who we really are. But as Cain and Esau, Hagar and Leah will tell us, the only thing worse than having to choose, is not being chosen.

The white, wooden fold up chairs in the garden began to fill up with people I did not know. The faces I did recognize were standing packed together with me in the back for a shortage of chairs. There must have been music of some kind. There was probably a cute flower girl; Kim, Diane’s daughter from her previous marriage, I think was already too old for that role. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen. Diane wore a long cotton lace dress with flowers in her hair. Kenner wore a white linen tunic shirt, beige pants, and leather sandals. He still had hair almost as long as Diane’s, and though he usually had it up in a knot, it was combed out and worn long for the ceremony. It would not be long after this that Kenner would cut his hair, shave his beard and replace his T-shirts and faded and torn jeans for button ups and slacks, but for the wedding, he looked every bit the bohemian child of the ‘70’s I’d always known him to be.

He beamed at her as he spoke the vows he had written. She promised to love and be faithful through all the storms ahead. I wondered if she would be able to keep her promise better than his first wife had. They exchanged golden bands, their union was blessed, and Kenner took her into his arms and kissed her.

But this was not the end of the ceremony.

They both then turned toward their guests as the pastor called Kim up to join them. She stood between them, each of them with a hand on one of her shoulders as the pastor of the Pentecostal church they had recently joined consecrated this new family. He prayed for every blessing any family might wish for. He prayed that Kim would receive the full blessings of a godly father who would love her as well as her mother, and that Kenner would take on the responsibilities and joy of having a daughter, not only by loving and honoring her mother, but also by becoming a father to Kim. The pastor prayed that god would put a spiritual wall around these three, that they would be protected from any forces that would try to harm or come between them. Families were God’s plan, and he smiled down on this new family, the pastor said. I waited for the pastor to then call my brother and me, but he never did.

I was suddenly outside of my own body, my limbs frozen in place by the wash of adrenaline coursing through my veins. Though I had always feared the day would come when we would have to find another family, I had not seen this coming. I was blindsided. My brother and I were being boxed out of Kenner’s life not just to make room for a wife, but to make room for a new daughter. Never mind that she already had a father and a mother for whom she was the center of their universe, but now Diane and Kim were taking the very sun from mine.

It was torture enough that I had not been chosen to join this new family, but apparently God himself would guard the gates that kept me out of their lives. And all of these people dressed in their Sunday-best must agree. As I looked around, no one had flinched. No one seemed embarrassed. There were some “Amen!”s And “Yes, Lord!”s from a small group off to the right, but no one who looked down or turned away from the shame of it. After the ceremony, Kenner and Diane beamed and greeted people with exuberance as if nothing at all peculiar had taken place, while I felt I had been drenched in pigs blood in front of everyone at the prom.

Hagar & Ishmael

What happened that day was never mentioned by Marty and Art, by their friends that were at the wedding, nor by the extended family. The world was silent on the matter. No wounds were bound up. No comfort offered. No explanations. No repairs made. No second place prizes. That day the sun was blotted out and my sky turned black, and it went entirely unnoticed by any of the people that should have been looking out for me, caring for me, and wanting the best for me.

There was only one lone star in that night sky and it was Hank.

“I’m so sorry! That was awful and wrong and such an insensitive and hurtful thing to do,” he had said.

Without those words I might have been convinced that it was all an awful dream or that I deserved no better. I might have doubted my reality and swallowed the lie that was so often fed to me, that my internal cues for what was uncomfortable or hurtful or even odious only ever indicated that something was wrong with me. I might have given in to the pressure to believe that the world belonged to others better than me, and it was always only ever my place to bow out quietly and make space for them as they had need of it. I might have drowned in the pervasive message, that if I did not give over my good things freely and without objection, I was selfish and problematic. I might have been pulled down into that incessant undercurrent which made me feel that, as a foster child, I had no rights and no claims to make on these guardians to be the kind of parents every child needs.

Without a doubt I did spend time shipwrecked in these waters. Too much time. Things spiraled out of control for me after the wedding, and two years later, when I was seventeen, I was told to move out of the brownstone in Adams Morgen. After a few years of couch surfing, I finally began to get some sure ground under my feet. But the scrap of ship-wood I clung to to keep me afloat during those lost years were the words of an adult who had seen my reality and mirrored it back to me. Someone outside of myself had seen and heard what I had, had also found it odious, and then actually told me so. I don’t think that had ever happened before. And it has rarely happened since.

Years later, we found out that there had been a back-room-deal between Marty and Kenner as part of the divorce settlement. Initially, Kenner, as the wronged partner, was set to keep the Brownstone in Adams Morgen and would pay out Marty her half of the then real-estate price. Marty and Art had already found a house a few streets over to rent for them and their daughter. They had agreed that whoever stayed in the Brownstone would keep us, the foster kids. But at some point, Kenner and Diane backed out of that deal, and decided to let Marty pay them out instead. They used that money to buy property in Annapolis, MD and, after the wedding, never initiated contact with us again. We stayed in the brownstone with Marty and Art, who, at that point, appeared to be the bigger people for sticking it out with us. But they had already had one foot out the door of this foster commitment. Though Kenner’s abandonment was abrupt and couched in public, religious ceremony to justify it, Marty’s was a slow, silent, and private freeze. In the end, neither one had chosen to include us in their new families, we had simply come with the house by that point.

There is hardly anything more painful than not being chosen. When the one we prize chooses another to be their prize. When we are not able to rise to the needs, desires or expectations of those that we believe to be existential to our lives. When we are written out of someone’s story, erased, every ephemeral trace of us burned to purge the world of the shame of their choice. Few things in this world are more painful than that. Hagar knew that pain. She and her son were sent away by Sarah for fear of her own child’s future. They were sent away to die of hunger and thirst in the desert, but they lived. They lived and thrived. Abraham and Sarah sent them away, but they could not write them out of their story. Hagar and Ishmael would not be silenced.

The pain of these events stretches across four decades to reach into a life that is now full and abundant. It initially took me out at the knees, but I have long since regained my footing. The crater that was left in my life in the wake of the choices these Neverland-guardians made has been refilled many times by others. There is no invoice waiting for payment. I cannot harbor ill will or contempt for those who, like me, are subject to the same, at times, unbearable fate of being human, of being finite, of having to make awful choices. I can let them go. Because I now know that it is not the crippling blows we’re dealt that kill us, it’s the silence that does.

Kenner