Reschool Yourself

Author Archive: mjdicker

Becoming a Real Writer

writer

During my late twenties, I earned my living for two years as a freelance writer. For the next two years, I supplemented my modest nonprofit salary with copywriting, blogging, and writing for social media. Throughout this period, I was also starting to draft the manuscript for the Reschool Yourself book. And still, although I spent most of my waking hours writing and was being paid for my work, I felt a little pretentious telling people that I was a writer.

The next question that people would ask, out of genuine curiosity, was usually, “Oh! What do you write?” I’m sure it would have been more interesting for them to hear that I’d written a New York Times bestseller and was just about to embark on a nationwide book tour. Instead, I told them what it was that I really did: write feature stories for a few local magazines and newspapers, and marketing copy for small businesses. Although I may have let them down a little, at least I could chip away at the gilded mystique of The Writer.

One day I was struggling with a long-form narrative feature that I was writing for the Jackson Free Press. My husband was a freelance graphic designer at the time, and we both worked from home. I came over to his desk and said, “I don’t know why people think writing is so glamorous. It’s really hard.”

He said, “That’s why writers drink a lot.” Touché.

I’ve felt that I can’t call myself a “real” writer until my book has been picked up by a mainstream publisher and I become a household name. Well, that’s a bunch of nonsense.

I think you’re a real writer when you lift the romantic veil from writing and experience the real work of it. Most of us can’t retreat to wood-paneled studies or lakeside cabins to write for days at a time, for example. I’m lucky if I can squeeze in a couple of hours at night after my toddler goes to bed. I sit cross-legged on my living room couch with my laptop, drowning out the FX show my husband is watching by blaring Latin music through my headphones. It’s surely not what people picture when they think of a writer at work, but there it is.

Writing is a solitary and often tedious task. It takes discipline and persistence if you want to get anywhere with it. One of my favorite pieces of advice on writing comes from Richard Rhodes, in his book How to Write: Advice and Reflections:

I worked in the Hallmark public relations department for a man named Conrad Knickerbocker, the public relations manager, who had already begun publishing book reviews and fiction. After I got to know Knick a little, I asked him timidly how you become a writer. … He said, “Rhodes, you apply ass to chair.” I call that solid-gold advice the Knickerbocker Rule.

I think you become a real writer when you receive your first rejection notice — or when someone invites you to write a piece for publication, and you put every effort into writing it, and it never sees the light of day. This has happened to me twice, and both times I have been confounded by how editors can get a writer’s hopes up, have her do the work, and then reward her with radio silence. A friend of mine posted on Facebook that she knew she was a real writer when her e-book received its first bad review on Amazon.

A quick Google search brings up dozens of examples of famous writers who were rejected before they found success, some of whom were told that they had no talent for writing. James Joyce. Louisa May Alcott. William Faulkner. Twelve publishing houses rejected J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter before one accepted it. Stephen King said in his memoir On Writing, “The nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.” I will bet that all of these people were writers before anyone knew their names.

I once interviewed an artist who was beginning to garner a lot of attention for his work. He had been touring graduate schools and had recently visited one of the most renowned in the country. He told me, “A lot of those art school kids are caught up in being artists. They think that an artist is something you are, instead of art being something you do.”

In the same way, becoming a real writer is less about being a writer than about actually doing the writing.

These days, I don’t tell people that I’m a writer because I don’t need to; I have another full-time job. But I’m still doing the writing. Right now I’m reworking the second part of my book, because unlike the first part, it didn’t have a cohesive thread pulling the reader forward. I’m taking out the boring and irrelevant parts and replacing them with new scenes. It’s not glamorous, and it’s not romantic, but it’s real, and I’m pretty sure it makes me a real writer.

This post is part of the seven-day Your Turn Challenge hosted by Seth Godin’s team. Flickr photo by davidturnbull.

January 23, 2015 Personal Development, , 2 Read more >

Taking Heart from Reader Feedback

feedback

For me, one of the most rewarding parts of writing is getting feedback from readers. I remember catching the bug for this when I took a creative writing elective in high school. My classmates and I would move our desks into a circle and take turns reading our work aloud. When I got a laugh or a knowing nod in the places where I’d intended them, it meant more to me than any letter grade ever could.

I didn’t do much creative writing in the ten years between high school and the time that I started blogging about Reschool Yourself. When I began posting to the blog, it took me awhile to get comfortable with sharing my work again. I wanted to wordsmith every sentence to death, but I soon realized that this just isn’t the nature of blogging. Blogging is fast, it’s conversational, and it’s often raw.

What helped motivate me to ship my work quickly was receiving comments from readers right away. There was nothing better than knowing that what I wrote resonated with or inspired someone, or that I’d captured in words something that they’d experienced but hadn’t known exactly how to describe.

While I was doing the project, I remember writing a post called “Growing Pains” at one of my lowest points, when I was truly struggling. It was one of the most vulnerable pieces that I’d ever written, and I was a little worried that it would depress people. I was surprised when this post in particular seemed to strike a chord. Here are a few excerpts from comments that people left:

Oh, how I feel your pain. Hang in there, love.

Dear Heart! Take courage! You are doing a beautiful job.

Eerily, I know *exactly* how you’re feeling.

Knowing that people understood what I was going through and were there to support me through it all was incredibly therapeutic.

Other times, my stories about school prompted people to share their own in the comments. They talked about how awful P.E. classes were, and about the lasting impact their favorite teachers had left on them. They shared deeply personal memories, and I learned things that I hadn’t known about even my closest family and friends. When I wrote about returning to my middle school, my cousin Lynn wrote:

I. HATED. MIDDLE SCHOOL…I think I should do a reschool experience too just to feel loved in 7th grade and erase the bad memories.

It was especially rewarding when strangers came across my writing and felt that it spoke to them. A young woman named Bonnie from Smith College in Massachusetts wrote:

I just stumbled upon this site tonight, and let me tell you: it is EXACTLY what I needed to hear. I am about to enter my last year of undergrad, am feeling entirely stressed and misdirected and not connected to my work. And I feel like I’m missing something in my childhood and in my education – that playful creativity, as you mentioned. But do I still have to finish this year? I want to reschool myself!

All of the difficult moments of the project felt worthwhile when I read and responded to these comments. It filled me with happiness to have added something positive to people’s lives. I loved feeling connected to my fellow humans through our shared experiences.

Of course, reader feedback isn’t always warm and fuzzy (oh, how I wish it were!). I’m still a bit terrified to publish a book because of the inevitable negative reviews that any real writer receives. I’m scared that some people will dismiss the project as a silly stunt, and that they won’t think my writing is any good.

But when I look back at the sincere and thoughtful comments that people have left on my posts, I feel more confident that I can ignore the naysayers and focus on the people who find value in what I write.

It’s scary to put something so dear and personal to you as a piece of writing out into the world. But I’ve found that the potential reward, for both you and for the people that you can affect with your words, is well worth the risk.

This post is part of the seven-day Your Turn Challenge hosted by Seth Godin’s team. Flickr photo by dskley.

January 22, 2015 About the Project, Personal Development, , , 2 Read more >

Recommitting to the Goal, Again and Again

dip_web

Right now, I’m in the midst of the two biggest challenges that I’ve ever chosen to undertake. What they have in common is that there is no linear path to the destination. Instead, there is a roundabout route with detours, roadblocks, and occasional dead ends. And, of course, there’s no road map.

My first challenge is parenting my toddler son with patience and compassion.

For me, taking care of a newborn was a piece of cake compared with parenting a toddler. I would take the spit-up and dozens of diaper changes and feedings every two hours around the clock in a heartbeat if I could trade the irrational tantrums, the constant demands and interruptions, and the times that my toddler bites me on the leg repeatedly and laughs about it. To him, it’s a fun game.

The last item has me at the end of my rope. I’ve read that toddlers bite for a number of reasons: to relieve teething pain, to get a reaction, to seek attention, or even to show affection — not because they will grow up to be a Dexter Morgan-class psychopath one day. But still, when I am trying to cook dinner and have to ward off his little fangs in my leg again and again, I find myself getting furious and exasperated instead of giving him a firm but loving course correction.

A major reason that I handled a newborn with relative ease was that I was on maternity leave then; the only thing I was doing was parenting, and I could recoup any lost sleep during the day. Now I am working a full-time job outside of the house, then I start my second shift as a mom, and after that, my third shift as a writer. Every day, I am exhausted.

I’ve found that parenting is a series of daily victories and failures. Among today’s victories were making my son giggle by playing peekaboo, and reading him the same books several times in a row. Among today’s failures were handing him to his father when he was screaming for no discernible reason, and saying, “You deal with him. I just can’t right now.”

I hope to do better tomorrow. I fail, I learn, and I recommit to being a loving parent. I focus on the goal of teaching my son to be a kind, resilient, curious person, and doing whatever it takes to get there.

My second challenge is writing the Reschool Yourself book.

As incredibly difficult as I’m finding it to be the parent of a toddler, it’s been even more difficult for me to write a book. I wish that reading a whole lot of inspirational, female-protagonist memoirs translated neatly to producing one myself, but unfortunately that has not been the case. I wish that writing countless blog posts added up to writing a book, but it turns out that they’re completely different beasts. Blog posts are short and make a single point. Books have a plot and structure, characters and dialogue, and a narrative arc that keeps readers turning the pages. Their sheer word count is daunting.

The six years that I’ve been working on the book have been comprised of a series of peaks and valleys. I’ll get some inspiration that will put fuel in the tank, and then it will run out and I’ll be stuck again.

Seth Godin describes this phenomenon as “The Dip,” or “the long slog between starting and mastery.” He describes the excitement that we all feel at the beginning of a new project, and the inevitable letdown once the novelty wears off and the hard work begins. All of a sudden, things get real. When they hit a low point, that’s the Dip. Godin says that if the goal is not worth the effort — that is, you don’t really want it, or your hard work won’t ever pay off — you should strategically quit, and quit fast. But if it is worth the effort, then you’ll be in the minority of winners if you keep going through the Dip and come out on the other side. A key to succeeding, he says, is knowing that the Dip is there, and that you’re currently in the middle of it.

I’ve let the Dip stop me from finishing the book many times, but what’s more important is that I’ve eventually picked myself back up and recommitted to my goal. Each time, it’s difficult to overcome the pure inertia — the habit of not working on the book — and the self-loathing I feel for having failed once again. But I do it anyway. I will keep pushing through Dip after Dip and recommitting to my goal as many times as it takes to get the book done.

I am also trying to keep in mind a vision of what it will feel like to achieve my goal, to run my hands over the cool, smooth covers of my book and to hear readers say that my words made a difference in their lives. The comments that people leave on my blog posts give me little glimpses of this feeling, and they refuel my tank when it’s running low.

To recap, what I’ve learned from being in the midst of these two tough challenges: Envision how you’ll feel once you achieve your goal. Know that you’ll hit peaks and valleys along the way, possibly more times than you can count. Celebrate your smallest of successes, forgive yourself for even your biggest failures, and recommit to your goal as many times as it takes. I’ll be right there with you.

This post is part of the seven-day Your Turn Challenge hosted by Seth Godin’s team. Flickr photo by keltickleton.

January 21, 2015 About the Project, Personal Development, , , , , , 4 Read more >

Making Space for New Ideas

lighthouse

I was 28 years old when I realized that I didn’t like where my life was headed.

To most people, I’m sure everything looked fine. I was in good health, was working full-time in the youth program that I’d co-founded, and had a busy social life in San Francisco. But I knew in my core that I wasn’t fulfilled by it all, and I wasn’t ever going to be. The hard thing was, I had no idea what I’d do instead. So I kept plodding forward.

I fell into a deep depression that winter. I felt like I was being swept away in a current of my endless To-Do lists for and social commitments. It was so bad that even when my family came together for Christmas at my parents’ house, which was my favorite thing in the world, it couldn’t lift my spirits. From behind the closed door of my childhood bedroom, I could hear my mom and sister laughing together in the kitchen. Normally I would have walked down the hall and joined them, but I just sat there by myself, because I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. I knew that if I didn’t make a big change of some kind, and soon, I would be in real trouble.

The only thing I could think to do was to get away and clear my head. I’d always wanted to take a reading retreat and hole up in a cabin somewhere, just me and a stack of good books. My nonprofit salary didn’t leave me much disposable income, but I found a hostel on the coast that was surprisingly affordable. After Christmas, I packed my Jetta full of books, art supplies, and my laptop — strictly for reading and writing, not for email — and drove out to the beautiful Half Moon Bay.

It was revolutionary for me to wake up and have the whole day to myself, with no plans or obligations. I jogged. I journaled. I sat on a bench and watched the waves crashing on the rugged cliffs below. At the hostel I sat by the fire and read for hours. Taking that retreat was the kindest thing that I’ve ever done for myself, before or since.

A day or so into my stay at the hostel — which I’d planned for two days but extended to four — I began to have ideas again. Actual ideas. I was used to keeping my mind and schedule so full at all times that I could only execute the tasks in front of me; there was no space for anything new. My brain was like a hard drive that was one hundred percent at capacity. Removing myself from my daily routine and endless To-Do lists — laundry! email! grocery shopping! — opened up a patch of fertile ground that allowed new ideas emerge.

I came into the retreat knowing that I needed to make a change in my life and hoping that I would figure out what it was. It was my last night at the hostel when I finally realized what was making me so unhappy. In addition to overscheduling and exhausting myself, I had been pushing myself to do everything perfectly. I was afraid to take risks and make mistakes. I’d grown so used to doing what I thought I should be doing with my life that I’d lost sight of what I wanted to do. It eventually dawned on me that all of these habits had all begun in school.

When I asked myself what I wanted, the answer was, “A fresh start. A school do-over. A chance to come out a happier person the second time around.”

The idea for a project began to form: What if I could go back to my childhood classrooms, from kindergarten through college, and do school over again?

That was the beginning of the Reschool Yourself project. It seemed like a nutty idea, but over the next few months after I left the hostel, through a series of emails and phone calls and face-to-face meetings, I received permission to do the project. I spent the fall of 2008 at my old schools, reliving many of my childhood experiences, and writing about how they were changing me. I finished the project much more grounded and whole than when I began. Shortly afterward, I moved across the country and began a completely new line of work. And yes, I ended up a lot happier than I was when I began.

If I hadn’t taken time away from my busy life in the first place, I can almost guarantee that I would never even have had the idea for the project. I would have miserably continued down the wrong path because I simply didn’t know what else to do.

We all have ideas just below the surface, waiting to appear when we create the space for them. It could be as small as a solution to a problem we’ve been wrestling with at work, or as big as an epiphany about the next chapter of our lives. But because we’re uncomfortable with silence or being alone, or because we’re addicted to being busy all the time, we fill up every spare second with noise. The shower is just about the only place that’s quiet and free of distractions, so it’s no wonder that people often have big ideas there.

I realize that most of us aren’t able to do exactly what I did and take four days off for a retreat, even during the holidays. It certainly wouldn’t be feasible for me now that I have a baby. But that doesn’t mean I can’t create the space to have new ideas. Lately, I’ve been working on not automatically pulling out my phone when I have a few seconds of downtime. When someone is running late for a meeting or I’m in line at the post office, I have to actively resist the sweet siren song of Facebook. Instead, I’ll just be still for a few moments and let the ideas come as they may. This weekend when I was in line at the grocery store, I thought, I want to bake something tonight. Hey, I can make a king cake!  If I’d been scrolling through post after post on social media, I wouldn’t be enjoying a piece of cinnamon goodness topped with colored sugar for dessert tonight.

There are other experiments in creating space that I’d like to try, as well. Here’s an excerpt from a Wired profile on Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos:

Bezos spends hours at a time thinking about the future: trawling for ideas, exploring his own site, sometimes just surfing the Web, particularly on Mondays and Thursdays, which he tries to keep unscheduled. “I catch up on email, I wander around and talk to people, or I set up my own meetings – ones that are not part of the regular calendar.” His surfing isn’t always confined to retail: Let the record note that on a Thursday in January he spent five hours on the Web using (his wife) MacKenzie’s MSN account, plumbing the depths of his space fascination and learning more about “roton” rockets.

If Jeff Bezos has the time to leave two days per week unscheduled, then I can probably reserve an hour a week, or even a few minutes a day. I’ll bet if every day we shut off all of our devices and just took a few quiet moments with our thoughts, we’d all be a little more grounded and have some new ideas that just might change our lives.

 

This post is part of the seven-day Your Turn Challenge hosted by Seth Godin’s team. Flickr photo by konvo.

January 20, 2015 About the Project, Personal Development, , , , 2 Read more >

Shutting the Door on the Resistance

shutdoor

I’ve been working on a book on the Reschool Yourself project for the past six years. I would very much like to have it finished by now, but I understand why I haven’t. It’s simple: It’s the resistance.

Steven Pressfield describes the resistance as “an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.” He writes:

Resistance is what keeps an entrepreneur from making the cold calls he knows he has to, to get his business rolling. It’s the force that keeps an aspiring painter away from her studio, or makes a writer back off from the blank page. Resistance stops us from going to the gym, from meditating, from donating our time to a cause we believe in.

The resistance looked a little different for me each time. At first, it came as the daunting question, How in the world do I write a book? It was much easier to do other things — like clean the house and watch TV — than sit down and try to figure it out.

Eventually I decided to jump in and just start writing the book as best I knew how. It came in small fits and starts. I’d get up in the morning before my husband did so I’d have some quiet time to myself and get on a roll.  Then I would hit a roadblock in my writing and give in to the resistance, until I worked up enough courage to start again. Years passed like this, more quickly than I could have imagined.

When I had a baby in the summer of 2013, I understood the difference between my internal resistance and tangible, real-world obstacles. Whereas before I’d had to contend with the resistance alone, now I had to deal with it AND find the time and energy to write when every ounce of it was already going toward keeping a newborn alive.

Now that my son is a toddler, I write after he goes to bed. On good days, I put him down around 8 pm and write for an hour or two. On bad days, I listen to the resistance when it says, “Don’t you need to finish a bit of work? Don’t you deserve to decompress for a while after a long day?” And by the time that I’m done with these things, it’s too late and I’m too tired to start writing. I go to bed feeling like a failure.

I’m doing the Your Turn Challenge this week because I want to shut the door on the resistance.

Committing to doing something every day doesn’t give the resistance any opportunity to weasel its way into your mind. It cuts off any discussion about whether you’re going to do it or not. There are no excuses or negotiations. A commitment doesn’t leave room for if you’ll deliver — only for when and how.

I’ve already used this tactic to beat the resistance once. While I was doing the Reschool Yourself project and spending each day at my old schools, I knew that I was going to blog about my experience each night. Because of that commitment, I lined up the rest of my waking hours to make sure I could deliver my post. Throughout the day, I would think about what I would write that night, so when I sat down I was ready to start typing without hesitation, and I sat in front of the computer until I published the post. I wrote about eating lunch in the school cafeteria, going to a middle school dance, and staying in my college dorms.

At first, I had to grind out each sentence. I would delete every other word because I couldn’t capture the perfect phrasing that I heard in my mind. But as I kept writing day after day, whether I felt like it or not, the words began to flow more easily. I even began to look forward to writing. This momentum slammed the door on the resistance and kept it out. But once I finished the project, I started blogging more sporadically, which cracked the door open and let the resistance slither its way back in.

I hope that posting every day for the Your Turn Challenge will shut that door on the resistance again and seal it tight. I hope it will translate to moving my book forward every day, whether I edit a section of the manuscript, put fresh words on the page, or publish a new blog post. I hope that being part of a blogging community will encourage all of us to make our big dreams happen.

The week, I’m sure that the resistance will tell me that I’m too busy or too tired to write a blog post every day. I’m sure it’ll say, “Cut yourself some slack. You have a full-time job and a 17-month-old. You should relax tonight instead of writing. Just post something tomorrow.”

And I’ll tell the resistance, “Thank you for sharing” — or, as Pressfield recommends, “Go to hell” — and write my post anyway.

 

This post is part of the seven-day Your Turn Challenge hosted by Seth Godin’s team. Flickr photo by t0msk. 

January 19, 2015 About the Project, , , 1 Read more >

A Mantra for the Holidays: “What’s Not Wrong?”

 

rsy-inspiration-holiday

This holiday season, I’ve been nostalgic for the kind of Christmas that I was lucky enough to have as a child. It was my favorite time of year, hands down. My family and I would drive out to a local Christmas tree farm in my dad’s truck, sitting four abreast, and cut down a divine-smelling Douglas fir. Back at home, we would put carols on the tape deck — Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and New Kids on the Block’s “Merry, Merry Christmas” were our favorites — and string colored lights on the branches. We’d unwrap newspaper from each ornament and smile as we remembered the person who gave it to us or the fond memory that it brought back. My sister and I helped our mom make fudge and three kinds of butter cookies, and on Christmas Eve my family would go to Mass, eat a home-cooked meal, and open presents. The whole season was filled with excitement and real holiday cheer.

Now that I’m an adult and a parent and I live far from my childhood home, I’ve had a much harder time getting into the Christmas spirit. I now understand why the holidays are the most stressful time of year for a lot of people. Everyone is rushing — to get work out the door before vacation, to drive out to the mall and pay for their purchases, to get the house clean and the meal prepared before family arrives. Then there are the financial strains. Being practical and money-conscious, the whole concept of Christmas shopping is stressful for me, because I don’t want people to buy me anything out of obligation, and vice versa. On top of that is holiday fundraising and sending Christmas cards and taking Santa pictures and braving the long lines at the post office. AND, AND, AND. There’s a lot more effort that goes into preparing for Christmas as a grown-up than as a child, and it’s difficult to accept that it isn’t the magical, carefree time that it was back then.

I had a mini-meltdown the other day because I let all of this holiday pressure get to me. I’d been so proud of myself for turning around our Christmas card quickly, and for completing a mad errands dash that included picking up the cards, exchanging lampshades at Target, going to the pharmacy, and buying stamps before I had to pick up our son from school. But when I got home, I realized that the lampshades were the wrong kind, and the 4×6 card we’d designed looked too small compared to the 5×7 that we’d done last year. In that moment, all of the effort I’d gone to seemed to be for nothing. I could feel the dark clouds gathering over my head.

Darren tried to reason with me, as he always does when I get like this, but it was futile. I could see that the holiday cards on our fridge were of various sizes. I knew that not one single person would open the card, see our smiling baby boy, and say, “I would really enjoy this card, if only it were bigger.” In that moment, it didn’t matter, because I wanted the card to be different than it was, and because it wasn’t, it felt ruined altogether. That’s the trap of perfectionism, of course, and the reason that it’s a surefire recipe for unhappiness.

It took a mood-shifter — in this case, the star-studded musical sendoff for The Colbert Report — to snap me back to reality and stop ruminating. I could see that the lampshades and the Christmas cards and the rest of it all qualified as major #firstworldproblems. I was able to step back for a moment and ask myself, “What’s NOT wrong?” — and the answer was, “So much.”

Even though most of my family members live far away and I miss them, I am fortunate to have a family who loves me and would do anything for me. Even though toddlerhood has been very, very challenging, I have a healthy son who makes me laugh every day, and a husband who is a doting parent and my most unflagging supporter. I have a job that I love, a financial situation on the upswing, and a community full of caring neighbors and friends. There is PLENTY in my life that is not wrong.

I went back to Target the next day and exchanged the lampshades again, this time for the right kind. I got to see how much the Christmas card made my coworkers smile and accepted that it was great just the way it was. I made a point of listening to Christmas carols and baking cookies from my family’s recipe to get into the holiday spirit.

I’m coming to terms with Christmas being more of a crazy time than it was when I was a child, but perhaps I can make it as magical a time for my son as it was for me. No, our tabletop Christmas tree from Kroger is still not decorated, and it may not ever be this year. There will probably be a few more tense moments to come, whether the turkey isn’t ready when I’d hoped it would be or the baby wants to eat the cookies instead of the roasted vegetables. But in the midst of it all, I will keep asking myself, “What’s not wrong?”, so I can look around and appreciate all the things that Christmas is really about.

What’s NOT wrong in your own life? Leave a comment!

December 23, 2014 Personal Development, , , , , , , 8 Read more >

The Highlight Reel Is Not the Full Picture

rsy-inspiration-lamott

The quote above is from an Anne Lamott piece in Salon about forgiveness that really struck me. I love how she puts this. I tend to think of “people’s outsides” as “the Facebook version of their lives,” or “the highlight reel.” It’s easy to get tricked into thinking that everyone else has a picture-perfect life, while yours is humdrum at best — or that you’re the only one who is having a tough time. The reality is that our outsides tell only one part of the story. The high points may be authentic, but they’re only part of the full picture.

My own Facebook timeline is Exhibit A. Of the last few posts I’ve made, four are pictures or videos of my 15-month-old son being adorable, and one is an article about loving life in Mississippi. All of these moments and sentiments are real, but what doesn’t show up on the page are all of the other moments that have lately stretched my patience thin. I’ve been sick with a bad cold for the past week, which has coincided with Evan cutting four molars at once and my trying to wean him from breastfeeding. Consequently, he has spent a large portion of the week wailing and shedding heartbreakingly big baby tears. He’s been waking up at 3 am crying and then rising for the day around 5, which has left me feeling exhausted and eager to get through this phase.

On Thanksgiving Day I posted a photo of Evan enjoying little portions of turkey and all the fixins, but what I didn’t say is that he had raised hell all morning while Darren and I were trying to cook, to the point where it was hard to remember my blessings. I also didn’t mention how much I missed spending the holiday with my family, and when I didn’t get to join their Google Hangout because of a tech glitch, I nearly cried. That stuff doesn’t get a lot of likes on Facebook, so I keep it to myself.

When all we encounter are people’s outsides — the pleasantries exchanged in passing, the smiling family Christmas cards adorning our refrigerators, the vacation photos on Instagram — it’s not unreasonable to think that everyone else is having a better time than we are. They seem more successful, happier, and luckier in love, and their kids never throw tantrums in the middle of the grocery store.

The truth is that any given day is a blend of the sacred and the mundane and the challenging, and that we have no idea what’s really going on with people under the surface. It’s a relief to remember that we all have some degree of “screwed-up-idness” inside. ALL of us.

I love Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook feed (and really, I love her in general) because she makes a point of sharing her whole story with readers, not the sugarcoated version. This week she posted about how she has committed to exercising for 20 minutes per day in spite of how much she loathes it, but every day she tries to make excuses and talk herself out of it. Then she goes ahead and does it anyway. Several women commented that when faced with a dilemma, they ask themselves, “What would Liz do?” To this, she responded, “Often WHAT LIZ WOULD DO is get a little weepy, feel a little overwhelmed, beat herself up a bit…and then eventually get sick of her own drama…and only then: ACT. (I’m working on eliminating some of those preliminary steps!)”

In a recent talk, Gilbert said, “For me, peace comes when I … embrace the beautiful mess that I am,” she says. “And embrace the beautiful mess that you all are, and that this world is, and just let it be that.”

No matter how we present ourselves on the outside, we’re all a beautiful mess on the inside. So let’s stop comparing ourselves and embrace that, shall we?

December 5, 2014 Personal Development, , , , 5 Read more >

Introducing the Reschool Yourself Book Cover

rsy-cover

One of my great fortunes in life is to have married an enormously talented graphic and web designer. Darren and I started dating just as I was beginning the Reschool Yourself project, and he volunteered to do the logo, website, business cards, and all manner of other design-related tasks. His latest beautiful creation is a cover for the future Reschool Yourself book.

Seeing this cover makes my stomach do a happy flip-flop because I can actually picture my book on the bookstore shelf next to my favorite memoirs of transformation, such as Eat, Pray, Love, The Happiness Project, and Wild. I can imagine running my hands over the cool, smooth covers of my hardback and seeing my own words in black and white as I flip through the pages.

Little by little, I’m getting closer to realizing the dream. There are many more steps to take before I can publish the book — more writing and editing and finding an agent and building an audience — but the cover gives me fresh motivation to keep moving forward. This image will be the centerpiece of my vision collage for the coming year, which has a pretty good track record of keeping me focused on my goals and making them a reality.

Perhaps one day soon you’ll see this cover in a bookstore near you. A girl can dream!

November 26, 2014 About the Project, , , 2 Read more >

5 Ways to Silence Your “Thought Bullies”

A sign caught my eye the other day as I drove by a mom-and-pop paint store. It said, “THE WORST BULLIES CAN BE YOUR THOUGHTS.”

I love this kind of roadside wisdom — it pops up in the most unexpected places and sticks to you like Velcro.

This sign especially resonated with me because there has been no bigger bully in my life than my own thoughts. On the one hand, I’m fortunate that I haven’t ever been seriously bullied by other people. On the other, having my own thoughts bully me every day of my life has been just as debilitating. The Thought Bullies — otherwise known as Inner Critics — follow me around 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and they know all my weak spots.

Most times the Thought Bullies come find me in the middle of the night, when I’m most vulnerable. As a kid, they would whisper in my ear that robbers and murderers could break into my house any second. They planted worries about school, too, how it would affect my future. My mom tells me that when I was in third grade, I was studying for a math test one night and suddenly broke into tears. “If I fail this test, then I won’t get into a good college,” I sobbed. “And then I won’t get a good job, and I won’t have any money, and my children will staaaarve!”

It’s kind of funny now, the thought of an eight-year-old having a major crisis over providing for her future children. But at the time, the anxiety was very real. More than two decades later, I still have these kinds of episodes and easily work myself into a panic. Nearly every night since the baby was born — and really, since I was pregnant with him — I’ve been up sometime in the wee hours, and inevitably the bullies come a tauntin’.

These days, they berate me about the past, about things I’ve done and failed to do. They rattle off a litany of sins for which I should repent. Why did you act so huffy with Darren the morning before his big presentation? Why did you post something whiny on Facebook that does not reflect your best self? Then they twist the knife the way they do night after night: Why have you let the Reschool Yourself project collect dust for so long? Why haven’t you finished your book already? Pretty soon I’m wide awake with my heart pounding, instead of getting the sleep I need so desperately. There are a lot of names for this behavior: worry, anxiety, rumination, perfectionism, catastrophizing, and generally being hard on myself.

It’s not easy to reason with the Thought Bullies, so these are 5 strategies that I use to cope with them:

1. Snap myself back into the here and now.

It’s so easy for my thoughts to drift into the past or future and go around and around endlessly. The best place to start is to snap myself back to reality by doing something that gets me out of my head. In the middle of the night I can grab my phone and read The Onion or look at photos of Evan. During waking hours, I bake — which requires me to measure and mix and taste — or play guitar and sing, which helps me breathe easier. When I lived in San Francisco, I’d lace up my running shoes and sprint up and down the hills for 15 minutes. These days I’ll do a couple of quick yoga poses or stretches. Having a child around helps, because whether they’re screaming or giggling, they are very much in the moment and require you to be, too.

2. Give myself the advice I’d give a friend.

One of my greatest challenges is to treat myself the way I would treat a friend. I would never, ever say the things to a friend that I think about myself. NEVER! When the Thought Bullies say, Why did you screw that thing up? You’re so stupid!, I tell myself, Cut yourself some slack. You did the best you could with what you had at the time. Things turn out the way they do for a reason, even if it’s not clear right away. This is what I would say to a friend who was beating herself up, yet so rarely do I think to say it to myself, especially in the middle of the night.

3. Talk it out.

Darren has encouraged me to share with him what’s on my mind, which I was hesitant to do at first for a lot of reasons. I didn’t want to burden him or sound unreasonable; I also thought I’d be feeding my fears by verbalizing them. But the opposite ended up being true. Talking out my worries gave me a pressure release valve, and often just naming them out loud took their power away.

4. Write it down.

Darren suggested that I tell him every single thing that was worrying me, and he would write it down. “Get it out of your head,” he told me. So we made a long list. Getting rid of the critters we hear in the walls sometimes (squirrels, we think). Eating more vegetables. Repainting the bathroom. And so on. It felt good to have to stretch for items to add. “Now we can start knocking them out and checking them off, one by one,” Darren said, pragmatic as always.

Journaling, too, helps immensely every time I make time for it. Even a page at the end of the day allows me to be completely honest and process some of the worries that would otherwise haunt me.

5. Channel the anxiety into positive action.

I ask myself, “What would resolve this thing you’re worried about?” and then, “What’s one step you can take to get you closer?” When I was upset about getting so many late fees, I put recurring reminders on my Google Calendar to pay the bills. When the clutter around the house was driving me crazy, I bought new fabric boxes at Target to organize it. Anxiety can be productive when harnessed and directed toward a goal.

***

Schools today generally have some kind of anti-bullying curriculum designed to increase tolerance and compassion, and to teach kids what to do if they’re being bullied. Maybe one day it will include strategies for coping with your own Thought Bullies, who can be the worst of the bunch — and the ones that can follow you around for a lifetime, if you don’t know how to silence them.

What strategies do you use to deal with your Thought Bullies? Leave a comment!

November 16, 2014 Personal Development, , 2 Read more >

Hello, Stranger!

familyphoto_sm

Hello, dear friends. It’s been a while. Since doing the Reschool Yourself project, there have been a lot of developments in my life: I moved from California to Mississippi. I co-founded a nonprofit organization and a small business. I had a baby and started working in state government. And throughout it all, not a day has gone by when I didn’t think about the project.

From the beginning, I wanted to write a book about what was happening to me during Reschool Yourself — about what it was like to have a school “do-over” at 28 years old and get to be a kid again, about visiting with my past, looking it in the eye, and letting it go. I hoped that it would help other people go through a similar healing process and make their own fresh start.

But I got tired of talking about the project, paralyzed by the daunting task of writing a book, and just plain busy with other things. I started writing the book, then put it down, and picked it up again in fits and starts. I stopped keeping up the blog because I felt like I should use that time to work on the book. It’s been infinitely more challenging to find time to write at all since having a baby.

There’s a deep, nagging feeling in my body that this project won’t truly be finished until I finish this book. I’m working on shifting my energy from anger at myself for not doing it already to motivation to do it now. There are plenty of reasons why having distance from the experience will make for a better book: I can see the story objectively and have more perspective on how best to tell it; I can include only the most meaningful details and let the rest fall away. I trust that things happen in their own good time, and they will with the book, too.

But still, I often wake up in the middle of the night with my inner critic running wild, berating me. Why didn’t you just ride the momentum of the project and write the damn thing when you had few expenses and ample time? Now you have a full-time job, a mortgage, and a child! The Internet and social media are so cluttered now! Publishing is dead! 

With all of this crazy talk, it’s no surprise that I’ve let the resistance get the better of me — but I won’t again. I can’t keep beating myself up about not finishing what I started. I’m starting to blog again and post on social media, slowly overcoming the inertia of the period when I didn’t do these things.

The book is close to being done, and I need your help to get it out of my head and into the world. Publishing a book becomes much more possible when there are people waiting to read it. If what you’ve seen on this site has added something to your life, and if you think the book would, too, here’s what you can do:

Thank you! Hearing from you helps me put fuel in the tank again and move closer to the dream.

November 5, 2014 About the Project 10 Read more >