Bear Homily

So, somehow, I’m back here: back to feeling pissed off – or at least aggravated – all of the time. I want to hide in my bedroom, “my cave,” and I find myself wanting to bite people’s heads off when I see them coming. My sleep schedule is out of whack, and I don’t have any enthusiasm for the things that I know I should be doing to make myself happy. I go to the gym feeling resentful that I have to do so much extra work just to keep my mind and body functioning well enough to do the things I actually want to do with my time like writing, and cooking. While I’m there I feel stuck and frustrated – largely due to my own vanity - and I leave feeling unsatisfied even if I’ve had a good workout despite my crappy attitude.

I haven’t been able to decide if I just need an attitude adjustment, or my general irritation is a side effect of being forty-seven: I just don’t have time for crap that gets in the way of doing what I know I should be doing to make full use of the time I have left. I guess that makes me selfish, and if it does, I’m OK with that. Still, I’m struggling to accept that this is the path I’ve chosen in order to deal with my depressive episodes, and ADHD spectrum brain. It works, and it’s consistent with my values, the fact that I have to do things I don’t want to do when I don’t FEEL like doing them, is just a consequence of that choice. I get it, but none of that makes it easy.

Thing is, I love my brain. No really! It has got some bugs in the hardware, but it does some pretty amazing stuff. And, let’s be honest here: it’s the only one I’ve got, so naturally I’m rather fond of it. In fact, I much prefer my brain to a “normal” or “average” one even when it’s being a dick, and trying to convince me that life, the universe, and everything sucks, and is always going to suck. I have episodes of wishing my brain worked differently, but I don’t subscribe wholly to the illness/deficit model for ADHD either. Our brains can get sick, episodically, chronically, or terminally, just like any other organ in our body, however, when it comes to ADHD I’m married to the idea that my brain functions how it functions, and I am better served working with it than fighting it, or medicating it. Medication is not completely out of the question, nor is it an invalid choice. If it becomes necessary, I have no guilt or internalized stigma in taking it, but I would prefer to avoid it. In general, I don’t like taking systemic medications for any condition that can be managed in another way because (in this case) your brain isn’t the only organ in your body that receives the medication, so does your cardiovascular system, kidneys, liver, etc.

In my world view, we are a walking bag of chemicals, bones, and organs, so sophisticated that we have emotions, and reason. We can remember the past, and project our thoughts forward into the future to predict the outcomes of our behavior. We can love others, and believe things so fiercely we are willing to die for them. Isn’t that amazing? Our brains – The Mother Ship – hold everything we are, every memory, thought, and breath: our complete understanding of reality, our ability to dream of something beyond what we know, and our ability to create new things that have never existed before. The brain inside my head, and the one in yours too, is made up from my genetics, learned behavior, and habits I created myself. The question of nature or nurture is a waste of time, the answer in most cases is yes, and both. It may sound counter intuitive to those of faith, but the idea that there is nothing else, that we cease to exist when we die, IS what gets me out of bed in the morning. If this is all there is, then I better make it a good’ne! Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s the reason I didn’t end my life more than a decade ago when I was suffering from a major bout of clinical depression: death offered no relief, only annihilation. Fortunately, I had enough will to live, or blind stubbornness, to keep taking the meds. and going to therapy. By the way, you will never hear me apologize for being stubborn, it’s only a label people give to tenacity when they don’t agree with you.

For the record, I do not identify myself as an atheist, non-theist, or even agnostic: these labels only tell you what I am not. What I am is, a secular humanist, meaning we decide what is sacred, and holy, and worthy of our worship, and that doesn’t make it any less valid. Community is important, faith is important to those who have it, and we are hardwired for connection, ritual, and story. Faith, and religion, are rich sources of all three. It’s in our DNA, it’s how our ancestors survived in tribal times, and it continues to serve us well – most of the time – today. I personally don’t need the construct of a god – or several – to share a sense of wonder and awe in the universe, or to give meaning to the things I am not capable of understanding. The very best and the very worst in all of us, is driven by our unique mental abilities, and our biology. We are the sum of the stories we write by our choices as individuals, and as a society. It is the story that goes on after we are gone, and it is all the result of being a human animal: exquisite, and flawed.

How exactly a journal article about my cranky mood turns into a discussion of faith, or that lack of it, I’m only beginning to figure out. This week I’ve been forced to check in with all the crap that’s going on in my head, and do the work to reevaluate my thinking. By check in, I mean, ask myself how much of my thinking is evidence based, and how much of it is a story that I’m making up about a situation, or individuals, that I cannot change. It’s an ongoing process. If I’m being completely honest with myself, I’ve been kind of “half-assing” my mindfulness meditations lately, (yes, I know that’s not really a verb) and it is definitely time to change techniques, or at least reinvest some energy into the practice. So, here is where the whole thing begins to come together: in the absence of a prescribed faith or prayer, I must deliberately and regularly be sure that my behavior is consistent with my values, and ideals, and not allow others to force me to act in ways that contradict those values. The price of that concession is my unhappiness. I have to create rituals for myself, and I must live in my story so that I'm not be distracted by my own desire to know how it will end. If I can do all that, and there remains a consequence to living the life I want to live, I simply need to be prepared to welcome it in.

Social Media Sabbath (What's wrong with Social Media)

A few weeks ago I read a blog post by the fabulous Liz Gilbert (author Eat, Pray, Love) about how she had been taking a “Digital Sabbath,” every weekend to make space for quiet time, reflection, family, friends, reading an actual book, that kind of thing. This coincided with me working on a writing exercise about the problems with social media, so I was, admittedly, primed for the message when it appeared on my news feed. And, I have to tell you, I instantly fell in love with the idea. I also knew, just as instantly, that a complete digital break was not going to work for me. My husband and I have put significant effort into downsizing and living smaller over the past decade, almost everything in our house is digital, including our books, movies, and music. I didn’t want to dismiss the idea completely, so, I’ve been taking a Social Media Sabbath every weekend for the past three weeks. It was embarrassingly tough to log out of Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Pinterest - all my favorite drugs - set up an auto-reply message on my email account, and then stay off for the whole weekend, but it has been a very productive, and introspective time. 

I realize that productivity wasn’t exactly the point, but relaxation doesn’t seem to be in my wheelhouse lately. I’ll be happy to chill out when the weather changes and there’s nothing to do but watch the snow fall. What I have been doing is cooking, spending time with my hubby, and our family without my iPhone and iPad getting in the way. Yes, I posed with my nieces for an insane number of Snapchat photos over the Memorial Day Weekend, but I wasn’t the one taking them, and I got more enjoyment out of seeing them laughing at our silliness than I ever could out of someone hitting the like button.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my on-line life. I love reconnecting with old friends, and being a witness to everything they are doing: the big, and the small. Social media has been a great boon to many, with great qualities in its favor. However, as important to me as my Facebook and Blog are, there are downsides to a connected life. It’s become normal for me to check my phone, or tablet first thing in the morning, or even in the middle of the night, to see if my social media friends have done anything interesting while I was sleeping. It’s become a completely normal part of everyday life, and it’s so quick and easy, that it has replaced picking up the phone and actually calling friends, and relatives in order to find out what they’re up to. 

The troubling thing is, our brains aren’t designed for the 21^st century: we don’t have the bandwidth. We’re so busy tweeting, poking, skyping, pinning and liking things to really know what’s going on in our own heads. There is no doubt around the fact that social media is designed to appeal to our dopamine response mechanism, and can become as detrimentally addictive as any drug, food, or bad habit. We cannot control all of the content of our news feed, some of it may be (usually is) distressing, whether it’s sad puppies or earthquakes, our brains cannot tell if the danger, or distress is thousands of miles away, or right behind us. Our dopamine receptors may be taking a hit every time someone likes that funny thing we said – and why wouldn’t they, we’re all hilarious –  but our brains are also spewing out stress chemicals like adrenaline, and cortisol all day long. Eventually all that over-stimulation leads to burnout and empathy fatigue. Social media so successfully mimics connection on a biochemical level, that we gradually lose our ability to connect with each other outside of an App. Most of us are only partly fooled by the biochemical mechanisms in our brains, we know the real-deal drugs of laughter, conversation, touch, sex, and presence that come from interacting with others in the flesh. Social media can only function as a kind of emotional patch, a stand in for the real thing. It is completely possible that the pituitary glands of future generations will adapt to the pervasiveness of technology in our lives, but for now we’re stuck with some pretty ancient equipment ratting around in our heads. It’s elegant, sophisticated, and beautiful, but there are certain bugs in the firmware.

Our profiles, as personal as they might be to us, provide a kind of buffer for our actions. This cushion enables us – to greater or lesser degree - to inflate our successes and hide our defeats behind someone else’s uplifting message. In the end, what many of us develop is an online persona that provides our private vulnerable selves with a degree of anonymity. An unfortunate side effect of this is that we become divorced from our actions, and others become disposable and infinitely replaceable. This separation enables some of us to be incredibly cruel to others in the form of trolling, and cyber bullying. Social medias pervasiveness in our lives, and the hold it has on our emotional state via dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol makes cyber bullying all the more potent to those being bullied. Nobody is saying mean things to you in a specific context, they’re putting it in writing in front of everyone you know and are connected to. As much as I believe in personal responsibility, anonymity provides the perfect shield for less ethical people to act as poorly as they feel entitled to act with very little risk of reprisal. The shield of anonymity, the very thing we need to protect ourselves from harm, is the same thing that stops us from connecting in any kind of authentic way. 

Nothing in life is free. Most social media outlets do not charge their users because they are not the real consumer. The content we create and share is not impotent: we are the product being sold. Our clicks, our likes, our preferences are being tracked. That information is being stripped from our identity, bundled, used, and sold to market researchers, while time in front of our eyeballs is being sold to advertisers. We live in an increasingly public world, privacy is a precious commodity, and social media constantly encourages us to give away our privacy unwisely. I know, I know, I’m on social media RIGHT NOW, but too many of us are not aware of, nor manage their privacy appropriately. At the precise moment our lives are becoming public, our privacy – our only asset and means of protecting ourselves from harm – is being sold off to the highest bidding corporation. Just like our brains are not hardwired from this much information, we aren’t socially evolved enough, yet, to handle social media responsibly. This is how you get a generation of individuals who won’t change in a locker room at the gym, but will freely send a “dick pic” to anyone they think might be interested. We don’t even have a working model – as a society – of appropriate online behavior. 

Given social medias pervasiveness; its ability to reward our dopamine receptors, the cocoon of anonymity, its ability to so exquisitely mimic connection and make us feel like we’re never really alone, we have begun to spend so much time on line that many of us don’t know how to sit down and have a real conversation anymore. There is no discourse. People can be deleted and blocked without having to deal with any uncomfortable conversations. We don’t work through difficulties: we just walk away from them. Sometimes that is the best, in fact, the only reasonable action we can take, but it is becoming the societal default. The way we’re hardwired to experience connection is though story, shared events, the touch of a hand, a smile, the sound of a voice, or plain old physical proximity to the people we care about most. We might be able to tell our stories, make each other laugh, and share a picture of a smile, but that will likely never replace the real thing. 

Although I’m always available via text message and phone, taking a Social Media Sabbath has been a good object lesson, and it’s a habit a I plan to continue. I truly value the people on my friends list, and the time I’ve spent connecting with them – on whatever ever level possible – is not time wasted. I do, however, need to keep perspective, and direct some of that energy into my work and life. I don’t think participating in social media needs to be a zero sum game because it is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad: it has its benefits and it has its flaws. We can, and should, choose when and how to participate. To do that, we need to recognize what it is we’re doing, understand the consequences of our actions, and who is benefiting from our choices. Then we can begin to set appropriate boundaries for ourselves so that we don’t become chained to our devices every moment of our waking day.

Typewriter Music

The assignment was "First Memory"

I don’t remember my exact age, but I can remember clearly the clacking sound the keys made as they sprang up to slap a ribbon of ink against white unlined paper: the height of gravitas and adulthood to a young kid who’d only been allowed to work in pencil on dull wide-lined newsprint. It was Army Green with a black irregular pentagon shaped crest on the front panel that read Royal in engraved creamy-gold letters. My grandfather had died years before, but his office remained unchanged, and anytime my grandmother would babysit, I would hound her for hours so that I could sit at a huge wooden desk that had once belonged to him, and tap the time away until my parents came to collect me.

As a fairly unsentimental adult, I can’t deny the significance of sitting there surrounded by the belongings of a man I would only know by the stories my aunts and cousins told of him, and the things he’d left behind. The caramel colored art eraser and triangular ruler in his desk drawer, and the smell of onion skin carbon paper, and envelope glue, were as much a part of him as the collection of carefully displayed mugs, and beer steins, that circled the whole room on handmade shelves. For all I know his hands may never have touched the keys of that big green machine, but I always believed that they had, and that was enough for the connection to be real to the child I used to be.

I had not, yet, learned cursive in school, but I was already a better two-fingered-typist than printer. I had a tendency to forget how to shape certain letters, or reverse their direction. Someone said I had dyslexia, without much explanation of what that meant. I knew I had difficulty reading quickly, and hated to read aloud. I made lots of mistakes, but how many of those mistakes were nerves and how many because I wasn’t good at reading, I don’t think anyone knew. What I knew, is that my problems with printing disappeared sitting at that massive green machine, poking away at the clear acrylic buttons that protected parchment colored letters, what were framed with silver: some more worn than others.  I could memorize where the letters were, and never have to worry again about how to shape them with a pencil. Unfortunately for me, school wasn’t filled with big wooden desks, and heavy steal typewriters. 

The machine made a kind of music. I loved the way the carriage mechanism thumped up and down to accommodate the pressing of a shift key. By pressing, I mean, shoving it with my whole hand, it took so much strength to move that heavy rubberized roller up and down. The clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, clacking of the keys, the fast double click of a spacebar, and then a thump-thump-clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, of the begging of a new sentence reminded me of snare, and bass drums. It made a funny hick-up sound when I pressed the backspace key to type the right letter multiple times over a wrong one, and at the end of each row a very satisfying ding-zip-thump of the carriage return ratcheting back to the beginning of the next line so that the impromptu melody could start again.

Sometimes I’d push the carriage return arm over, and over listening for the rolling dull clunk of the spacing gears change from single, to double, to triple, and back as I moved the lever with my opposite hand. Tapping the enter key on a computer, or even an electric typewriter, just doesn’t have the same gratifying sense. Then there was the ratcheting sound the roller made as you loaded a whole sheet of blank paper, and a shiny metal roller-guild sprang back into place: the sound of possibility.

It didn’t yet occur to me that this device could be used to record the thoughts and stories in my head, I just liked the sound it made, and how terribly adult I felt pretending to write terrible adult things in permanent ink.  Back then I held two contrary beliefs, that I still struggle with today. One is that everyone made up stories in their head, and the other, that it was not OK for gown-ups to make up stories in their heads. I kept my typing to the basics, the alphabet, the full names of my family members, cousins, teachers, and pets. Sometimes I would just type gibberish to see how fast I could go without locking up the keys, and sometimes I would deliberately try to tangle up as many keys as possible.  It was a dangerous game: if I tangled so many keys I had to ask for adult intervention I’d be made to stop playing with my favorite toy, and if I didn’t press my luck I’d be stuck unsatisfied, convinced I could have ensnared one more key. I wasn’t just fascinated with the letters imprinted on the page, and sometimes on the roller I had hit the key so hard, I also loved the mechanics of the heavy machine. The way one lever pressed would physically translate to a small metal arm raising out of a curved chassis to strike the page, leave its mark, and then return just as quickly to its well-ordered resting place. When I was strong enough, I would turn the whole thing over to see if I could watch the interaction of springs and levers that made the typing happen. 

My attraction wasn’t limited to my grandfather’s typewriter. My maternal grandparents had a Jet Black Underwood with black and white keys. Much more sophisticated with more buttons that I didn’t know how to use, but opportunities to play with that machine were limited. It wasn’t, in my grandmother’s opinion, an appropriate occupation for young boys, even if it did stop my non-stop fidgeting. The music I made on that machine was just noise to her easily irritated ears. At home, my parents had a Gunmetal Grey, Smith and Corona “Silent Secretary” that was anything but silent. That machine had its own pitch and music, and I was more prone to be careless when playing on it, the machine being ours, and all. The piece de résistance, lie dormant in our attic, for me to find a few years later: a Remington Portable with retractable keys. The Remington had certain quirks, the ribbon was near frayed through and no replacements were available, the carriage return would slide clear out of the machine and it tended to drop certain letters if you typed too quickly. It was temperamental. I had its own ideas about line spacing, typing speed, and what noises it should, and should not make. But then, what could you expect, it had been in The War.

Please Don't Pet the Peeves

The writing assignment was “Your Pet Peeve,” so here it is in 700 words more or less…I hope it will resonate with some of you.

I am always going to be the creative, introverted, over curious, over sensitive, “not so good at real life,” type. Generally, I’m ok with that, in fact since I don’t know how else to be, I’m rather fond of it! BUT, I deeply resent having it shoved in my face to justify someone treating me like I’m some lesser form of broken, or incomplete human: not quite a real adult. I am tired of never measuring up because I was not made to work in a cubicle, and drive my safe SUV to my McMansion, in my safe little suburb. I have never received a blue print for, nor do I have the skills to build, that sort of life: even if I wanted it. There is nothing wrong with that choice, but it’s not the only valid choice! I’m not going to devolve into criticizing someone else’s path just because I’m biologically hardwired to reject that path. Security, and stability are important, and human beings co-evolved to reward conformity. These are facts, I get it!

I am not some overindulged child playing an elaborate game of make believe and finger painting. I work very hard, I wrestle frequently with the kind of thoughts and ideas that cause most of the population to bury their heads in the television. When I sit down to work, every one of my demons is there waiting for me, and I have to push my way through the crowd, make space in a shit-storm of fear, insecurity, and shame, sit down in all that noise, and do my job. I do hard things, and I am brave, every single day, with no promise of a positive outcome, or payoff. I have maintained a marriage for twenty-five years, and anyone who’s been married for five months knows that’s not easy. When I say I’ll do something, I will do it. Every. time.  I am ALWAYS the person who steps up – and cleans up – when the shit hits the fan. I have a lot of responsibilities, that I take too seriously. I make choices based on my values, not because of some promise of a reward in this world or beyond. That’s what adults do. 

In other-words: I adult harder than most nine to fivers do before they’ve finished their morning commute. I am completely, and totally responsible for my success, or failure. There is nowhere to pass the buck. I am the boss, accounting, shipping, sales, production, and the guy who cleans the toilets. This is not a game, and I am not playing!

I respect and am grateful for the freedom I have, but others are only too happy to claw greedily at my time because they perceive it has no value. Their excuse is always the same: I don’t have to show up at work from nine to five, therefore I can work anytime. Let me tell you right now, so there isn’t any doubt. NO, I can’t. By the time I deal with feeding cats, scooping litter, making breakfasts, packing lunches, and putting out whatever fires need extinguishing, all I want to do is deposit a penny in my savings account, and think about what I’m going to order at Milliways. Douglas Adams references aside, I am not quick to focus on non-urgent tasks, and I have ADHD which makes me alternatively hyper-focused and unable to focus at all. I survive using structure, and discipline, both of which require strict boundaries on time.

I like pleasing people – hello, Chef and Writer – I get a great deal of fulfillment from earning approval, but, I have learned that I cannot rely on others to set boundaries. That’s why I’m such a prick about time, and not over-committing myself in any aspect of my life. I realize it means I have to say no a lot, and I realize people don’t like to hear me say no…a lot. I truly value my friends and family, and the time I spend with them. I cannot be fully present and enjoy the people I care about if I’m resentful, hurt, frustrated, or worried that I am not getting anything done on the work I feel I was put here to do. So, if I do something for you, or with you, it is because I chose to do it. I do not owe it to you! You do not get to discount the value of that choice because it didn’t take time away from my “Job.” 

It did!