I never asked

All my life, I wanted to be a part of some crazy, big, amazing, world changing company. Instead, I got some steady jobs for things I thought my skills would do. Marketing isn’t a bad thing. I love my work, I love my people. But marketing for an accounting firm was never a part of my life dream. I’ve been standing on the sidelines of Silicon Valley, looking in and drooling and hyperventilating and yearning. But I realized something huge this morning.

I never asked if I could play.

I assumed that since my schooling was “wrong” and my starting career steps were “wrong” and boring and unsexy and all that, that it had already disqualified me from even asking to play the game. So I never asked. How sad is that.

Well, I think I’m going to start asking. 

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/halfrain/ 

You know, kids on a playground do something socially impossible. They get on a playground, play around for a bit, and put themselves out there by kind of just doing their own thing. Slide, swing, merry-go-round. And if another kid responds positively – or is just even in the vicinity – they engage. And if that goes well, and they talk and connect, then they ask something amazing ballsy. “Do you want to be my friend?” And there is a gods-honest answer on the other end of that question. Yes, or no, it’s honest, and it is what it is. The asker gets their answer. And if the answer is yes, then big smiles emerge and they start running or talking more or playing harder. If the answer is no, then the asker is sad. But also… it’s kind of a known possible outcome.

I want to be more like that kid on the playground. I want to be bolder in my asking about connecting and building with other people. I want to be prepared for both a no as well as a yes. What if the answer is yes? What if they DO want me to play with them, be a part of their playtime at the playground? Wouldn’t that be wonderful.

But I have to ask. And I'm going to start asking NOW.

Too Much to Celebrate

If you’ve ever been a part of a communications project that centers around holidays, celebrations, awareness days, heritage months, and others, you’d know that it’s insanely difficult to pick and choose between what to highlight when.

For example, do you choose to focus on lighter, more cheerful celebrations or heavier, more provocative history months? Do you focus on food (such as wine day today) or the fact that today is the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death? This is a dilemma that marketing, PR, and comms people deal with all the time. 

I find that for as taxing as life has become, I have become used to weaving in and out of poignant highs and devastating lows in different hours of the same day. I’m not sure if this is some superpower or just intellectual scarring at this point, but I would like to offer this up on a day like today: pick one thing to think about and reflect on at a time. One thing at a time. It seems basic, but we all know we could use a little encouragement and a reminder every now and then to follow good advice that we used to practice and preach. One thing at a time.

George Floyd. His name was George. And take a moment (or more) to breathe and celebrate the fact that you can take a breath. Take another breath and feel your feels.  And then another before you sip your wine. And another as you note National Missing Children’s Day. And another as you wonder how Towel Day ever came to be. And another as you honor Star Wars’ 44th birthday. Just breathe. Keep breathing.

Brick Houses

I went shooting yesterday for the first time in ages. For as unique as we are, being liberal people who own and enjoy marksmanship, I’m sure my husband and I fit some stereotype somewhere with his startup-branded backpack with an old Bernie Sanders button. Ammo tins, firearms case, shoot-and-sees. Earmuffs, my “baby Yoda” hat, sunglasses, and obligatory COVID face covering (a pink camo pattern). 

We shot next to a trio of Russians, the woman of the group constantly taking pictures and video, and being annoyingly ignorant of the rules. It’s cold range, ma’am. Please do not approach the bench. Or you will get escorted out by the guy in orange with hunting boots, small beer gut, and surprisingly patient approach to people like you and your crew.

It was unusually quiet for a Saturday, the range having been recently renovated. Fresh concrete and wood, freshly painted yellow and red lines, polite people keeping their 6-feet distance – all this populated by a wide range of languages, accents, and skin tones. Yes, this is America. It’s also the Bay Area, it’s very own country. I smell gunpowder and see fit, good-looking nerds out for a few hours of bonding with their friends or parents. Through firearms.

I so enjoy being a combination of the unexpected. A liberal who likes guns. The woman who is the primary breadwinner. An introvert in an extroverted marketing job. And as I think about this, I think it’s more a commentary on why the stereotypes exist at all. It’s not me; it’s the world. Humans are wonderously multi-faceted beings. Why shouldn’t we be full of M. Night Shyamalan twists and turns?

But I’ve also not enjoyed being the unexpected. All my life, I’ve felt the need to exert a systematic release of information with people so I wouldn’t overwhelm them with the complexity of me and my life all at once. Someone once accused me – not in a good way – of always being used to being “queen nerd.” She was telling me to get off my high horse, because I was amongst other nerds. Nerds who apparently didn’t have identify crises about being nerds.  

It’s not just my geekiness that has made me an outsider. It’s also this containership-sized pile of other contradictory and challenging things that from my experience have made me… interesting? Intimidating? Odd? It’s hard to find tribe when you have the kind of shit going on.

And all of the sudden, that was broken as I started talking one-on-one with the women in a writing group/class I entered this year. Recently, one of these beauties confessed she was in the middle of a separation. As if somehow that wasn’t a normal part of our 30s/40s something landscape. I remember how awkward that part of my life was, trying to explain to someone else that my world was being dismembered, and how I couldn’t bear to process their (very natural but most unwelcome) shock and awkwardness and sorrow on top of mine so please don’t say something trite. How comforting it would have been to be in a room where someone – anyone – would just sigh, offer expletives, ask if I was “ok” or needed anything to be fed or safe, and left the silence to speak for all the unspoken. I didn’t have that, but I offered it to her. And then the thought that frees the soul came to me, “Why can’t life be like this more? Why can we just ‘let it all hang out’ like it’s normal?”

Overwhelming health conditions. Abusive relationships or histories. Children with disabilities/limitations that make life excruciating. Devastating poverty. Death and loss. Shattered family lives. Unjust shaming of the outer self. Spouses with disorders who won’t deal with them. Jobs that suck because we haven’t unleashed our personal superpower yet. Caring for older family members in decline.

We are all brick houses. Stout and soulful, not always confident but always full of power. Our physical figures (beauty standards be damned) don’t even begin to tell the tales of our brilliance and resilience.

I think I’m close to the mark, don’t you? I’m dead on target. We are all brick houses?

 

Stacked souls. Minds with “great racks.” We are all brick houses. We are mighty, mighty. May you find a group of people with whom you can let it all hang out. And shake it down, shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now…

Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now…

No joke

(I started the ChairmanMom “Ready Set Write” class last month. It’s changing who I am.)

Suddenly, I wake up to community that GETS me. In so many ways. Women with stories and badassery, women with words and immovable ideas. All of us still struggling to write more, do more, be more, write more. I’ve been taking this class for more than a month now and have been hanging out with my own new thoughts and with new women. I can’t get enough of this. My words are more mine now. My story more mine. My mission more mine. I am more mine.

I can’t let go of this group. They are now a part of me, and I need women like this in my life for the rest of my life. I’m just shy of feeling anxious about how to keep the conversation going. How do I connect? How do I maintan? I don’t even know most of them well. Just an intrinsic trust that what we say together is accepted, amplified, clarified, blessed. We are all reaching toward who we want to be when we grow up. And we are discovering as well that we never want to grow up. At least, that’s me. (Projection much? Lol.)

So. This is what TRIBE feels like? This is what I’ve been missing and yearning for all my life? I’m now happily addicted, and I now swear I shall never go without again. This is too… what’s the word? Explosive, enriching, essential, nurturing, rocket fueling? Words ironically fail me now as I try to express how writing with this group of women means to me.

My sister-from-another-mister Rachel and I started talking a couple of years ago about women who are on The Journey. They are different women. They hear something different inside themselves, and as like calls to like, they hear something different in the world. We strive and struggle differently. Restless, but not wanton. Misunderstood, and almost always “too much” for other people. Hyper analytical, too word-full, too thinky thinky. Rachel and I talked about trying to find more women. More more more. And here they are. I have to get Rachel into this. (just texted her – she has to do this) We weren’t too much. The worlds we were trying to inhabit were too little.

Far be it from me to be the obnoxious, overzealous new convert to some idea that prescribes my solution for my life to everyone else and their lives. But, really. Tribe is where it’s at. It’s hard to find, but like any great treasure, you will hardly have time to regret the journey’s difficulty when you are basking in the glow of your tribe. Go get you some! All women need tribe!

To Blog

I want to blog. But I fear people reading it and, I guess… I fear my oversharing? I want to communicate so much, but I’ve been told all my life that I’m “too much.” Well, no more. No. More. I do this writing/story/idea thing, and I do me. You do you, ok?

And by the way. The problem never was that I was “too much.” I just had this superpower that wasn’t quite honed yet. I hadn’t gone through my superhero montage of discovering my powers and learning that I could weave and weld them for good. I officially dub myself no longer:

• Too smart
• Too curious
• Too wordy
• Too blunt
• Too obtuse

I dub myself:

• World maker
• Story weaver
• Cooker and consumer of delights
• Mother of incredible humans and ideas
• Asker of room-silencing questions 
• Soothsayer of the Whys in our world
• Flexer of my goddam godgiven mental muscles that will inspire

And you, dear reader, dear friend, can choose who I am to you. That’s your prerogative. I know who I am. I am me. 

Needing an Abundance of Words

And just like “that”, I’ve now tripled my writing activity as compared to last year. This is my third blog of the year. Mwa-haa.

I’ve been working with a coach recently, as a part of my professional development.* My coach and I have been digging into the self-limiting behaviors and thought processes I have. Everyone has them, and mine have been coming close enough to the surface of my consciousness that I’ve begun some kind of little emotional side war with them. I’ve been yet unsuccessful with understanding WHY I can’t take leaps, even as bold and no-nonsense as I am. I am uncovering them, and here are a few reflections along the way.

1) When you’re little, you don’t have words. The adult work is to find them.

Things do happen to you when you’re little, damaging things and wounding things – and these things don’t have to be anything that someone else would call traumatic, but they affect you for the rest of your life. Some folks have undeniable tragedies and horrors of course. But no matter what, if things happened to you when you’re little, you’re young enough you don’t have words for what happened and how it affected you. And you grow up, and you still don’t have words. And you don’t have words until you do some very hard work about bringing that little child experience into your adult mind and process, process, process. 

You know the things I’m talking about. That thing that one person said or did you remember clearer than anything. Something that’s buried deep, something you sense is shrouded in shadow, but you can’t call out and manifest without an expert guide’s help.

Well, I’m finding those little things, and because I was a sensitive child, they affected me deeply and rather inexplicably. They are echoes of feeling that ring outward and gain terrifying amplification the longer they live without words. And I carry those stupid weights with me apparently wherever I go. The way I know that there’s an issue is when I start to feel that sense of being cornered and sense of going a little bit (or a lot) crazy. Those are definitely issues that don’t have language, and therefore don’t have resolution. I think processing, resolution, healing and other things require words.

The reason I think they need words is that without words, we can’t make sense of what happened. In the void, chaos reigns and I think that’s what’s behind that sense of feeling like there’s not enough oxygen in the room when someone or something hits a nerve. When that bruise gets hit, I wonder if it’s sometimes more the sense of pure chaos that’s coming that we are stressed out by more than the incident itself. To put words around it defines it, and eradicates chaos.

2) It’s hard to find inspiration around abundance thinking. And why is there so much crap about abundance and money?

I think I’m a decent practitioner of abundance thinking in some ways, but I feel like I could do better. I went on a hunt to find symbols or reminders or inspiration to help me exercise this muscle better, and what I found was kind of dumb. Discarding all the hopeless memes and inspirational quotes, nearly every article and story and blog that linked abundance with money. And that was especially true with religious-flavored articles. It was amazing the consistency between the linkage of “abundance” and “money” page after page. 

Then I got to wondering: is this indicative of this specific point in time? What would abundance-related literature look like a generation ago? A decade from now? My guess is that:

• The previous generations would have equated abundance with ENOUGH FOOD. Who doesn’t have a grandparent from the Greatest Generation who hoards food? My grandmother’s fridge is like a massive 3D version of Tetris, with small wrapped up bits of cheese or meat or what have you precariously placed together creating complex brainteaser puzzles to access the milk.
• Generations now probably equate abundance with ENOUGH MONEY. The debt crises, housing issues, wage stagnation, etc. etc. etc. Busts and booms, esoteric economic forces that most people don’t understand but still affect the world global population with senseless recessions. The declining, elusive quality of life people used to think acquiring more money would solve.
• I think some generations now and into the future will equate abundance with ENOUGH TIME. We’re seeing the tradeoffs between fancy, high-paying jobs for slower paces of life. Young people are moving away from over-valuing money (what happiness did it ever bring?) to valuing time more and more. After all, they’ve seen money come and go – time is the truly most limited resource we have. I think this also helps explain the increasingly discussed phenomenon of FOMO (fear of missing out) – not being or doing things at the right time. There’s more talk now about opportunity cost than ever, as well. It’s all about time and timing. Tiny house owners talk about using their resources for experiences instead of things – which is an emphasis on time well spent.

I have no scientific basis for these observations, but I wonder if researching them would prove them correct. Before it was food, now (and before) it’s about money, tomorrow (and now) it’s about time.

In my own bones, I think I experience anxiety around all three of these. I have traced my being overweight in some respects to food anxiety (odd as it sounds). I have made myself miserable thinking too much about why I’m not further ahead financially. And I’m stressed out these days with the 41 years I’ve had on this planet and not quite enough to show for it, in my humble opinion. 

The next 20 years had better count, but I’m still running with these weights on my heart and limbs. So, let’s confront these childhood moments, put words to them, face them down, reframe them, and do the work to grieve, forgive, let go, or whatever. Right now, I need abundance thinking to find the right words.

* Ladies and gentlemen, if you are driven people, I can’t evangelize enough the value of a coach. For me, I’m pretty introspective, probably too reactive and honest, deeply passionate, and some odd combination of “too much” sometimes and “too introverted” other times. Probably, like most humans, I am some concert of clashing colors and ideals. But when you need help understanding some of that at a more intimate level, you need someone like a coach who tells you how things are – how you are – with the benefit of sophisticated paradigms and life experience.

Processing Your Order (How I Created my Vision Board)

Leah's vision board going to print

I heard about vision boards from a few friends. One gal friend was telling me about her experience putting one together with her sisters and cousins, who (I'm sure) were also as equally talented, driven, beautiful as she is. And not only do they meet and encourage/challenge each other regularly on their vision boards, they do this kind of thing every year. What a gift to have a cadre like that. (I'd almost kill for one.) And while I crave deep conversations and partnership, I've always struggled with spending a little too much time inside my own head, and find it hard to find folks to do this kind of thing with. #introvertchallenges

Well, normally I resist things that feel gimmicky, but I also realize that when I say that, I'm trying to shut things out that sound non-native to me. And. Well. But isn't that contrary to the point? When you need fresh perspective, you need to do things differently. Right? I need to be open, and stop being dumb about this. Ok. So here's my little project I did this morning. I'm ridiculously proud of myself for doing this. 

• I started with a bit of googling and youtubing, because sadly I've never done a vision board before. That was helpful to get started. The guidelines were simple and thoughtful. Just my style.
• I decided that since I didn’t have time to gather a bunch of magazines and print and cut out images and break out my glitter glue, I’d use Canva. I love Canva. I use it a lot for work and decided it would work great for me today. And it turned out to be perfect for me!
• The how is kind of fun. Canva has layouts with grids. You can upload images, and then “click” the images into the grids, reposition, crop, and apply filters if you want, and boom. It’s GTG. (Being a marketer helps here, as I do stuff like this – image selection, messaging, calls to action – all the time.)
• I searched for images online, free good ones. And I superimposed some words on top of them, like captions. Batta boom, batta bing, presto chango = vision board.
• My vision board is all about things I want. Things I want to be, to have, to do. I recently wrote out a bucket list, so some of those went onto the board. Some images and words were things I wanted in the near future, and some were longer term goals, and others were perpetual wishes for myself. I spent some time switching some pictures out for bolder images and words. That was an interesting process to notice that a particular wish or goal wasn’t bold or honest enough. It felt really good to dig deeper and deeper, and I replaced several images and captions a few times. I had to redo my layout a couple of times because of this, but that was a part of the process for me.
• I had one final issue – I need some physical version of my vision board to look at home or at work or whatever. (Vision boards supposedly work best if you look at them regularly, to inspire and challenge and focus you.) So this was one of the coolest parts: Canva has a print function where you can create flyers and posters with a few clicks. For a couple hours of work online, and for less than $10, I will have a few copies of professionally printed vision board coming my way in a few days.

How cool is that?

I’m not sure if I would have gotten through this process without these tools available to me. I’m a professional and a mom and a wife and all that other stuff, too. My evenings are crunched, my mornings harried, and most weekends spent chasing some elusive sense of rest and well-being. Finding the time to get a bunch of old print magazines and art supplies together is NOT my idea of a good time or one that even feels practical. I’m going to say God bless image searches and free online graphics tools and my professional skill set that made doing all this super easy.

And it’s funny. This image in this blog is showing the final step, which is submitting my flyer-sized vision board to print. And it’s also rather indicative of what a vision board is all about at its core – you’re supposed put an order into Life, essentially, about what you want. You tell LIFE what YOU want. And you’re to focus on realizing that order for yourself. Being present and reflective in the process, is important too. Processing your order, indeed! 

Burnout, Shmurnout

So, alas.  I am yet again entirely average. I have hit some kind of mid-career burnout, and am working on addressing it.  Which is more work, and too much work was the cause of this to begin with. Talk about conundrum!

Swamps of Sadness, from that glorious
childhood movie Never Ending Story

This isn't the excruciating moments of parenting with small children where one wonders how to get from one second to the next, or the piercing reality that "I chose this" of some hard job or something.  This is the relentless march of putting other things ahead of the truly most important things like self and family for far too long that one has pretty much lost one's way.  Bedraggled of hair and imagination, one is wearing torn, gray clothes in a torn, gray land, wondering what happened.  But scarily not caring overly much how and when it did happen so wrong.

It's REAL. And thank God some of my friends know what this is and have been there or are still there and regard this state of mind and heart with the death-like seriousness it deserves.  I am burned out utterly. 

Some say...

...that burnout is common for people in mid career.

...that it affects those in the "giving" professions, like medical professional, ministers, etc. more than others.  I don't quite qualify here, but whatev.

...that recovery is entirely possible - and I believe it. 

...that recovery takes time - and I believe it.

And I simply want to say, in the midst of this working on life with calloused fingertips with no fingernails and raw, bleeding tips - that I'm ok or will be.  But I also am confused. 

When did we get here?

-Lear

Stuff I Did in 2017, including Accepting my Balding Head and Becoming a Soccer Mom

I'm a big fan of reflection. I feel like it's better than resolutions. Way better. And it's nearly Setsubun, an obscure and hardly explainable holiday in Japan where you throw toasted soybeans out your window or sliding glass door and scream at demons.  (no joke)  "Oni wa sotto, fuku wa uchi."  Demons away, fortune come hither.  Or something like that.  My distant countrymen sure know how to celebrate the coming of spring.

Here are a handful of things I did in my 39th year that seemed momentous or odd or horrifying. Take your pick.

• I became a soccer mom.  It was time for my son to try organized sports, and soccer was the thing that worked for our schedule.  I felt terribly awkward, trying to figure out how practices and games and uniforms and chit chat worked. And before I knew it, I had created the team banner (and was responsible for bringing it every week), kept the parents organized around snacks and made a few new friends. This sounds so tame. Which is why it so thoroughly freaked me out. And the depths of my freak out were deep. NEVER would I have envisioned myself doing this! And it was great. We lost nearly every game, the boys learned a lot, and had a good time. I'll be back again next year.
• I accepted my baldness. Yes. It's true. I have a disappearing follicle problem, courtesy my maternal genetics. I considered "row-gain" (ha) for women, but decided against it; primarily because once you stop using it, the hair loss just progresses anyway. I started taking biotin, fashioned a really clever comb-over hair style, and (mostly) stopped worrying out my stupid hair. I try to pretend that I'll be fine shaving it all off and getting wigs if it thins any more, but alas. I'm still just that little bit too vain to truly not care.
• I started opening up about my husband's anxiety and depression. I started dropping subtle hints to a few friends that I was struggling and badly. One or two picked up on it and chimed in with their own stories of marital hardship, disappointment, inexplicable hope, desolation, loneliness and resilience. I'm developing a probably very overdue view of marriage as something that only a lucky few really get in healthy, big, lasting doses. The rest of us work harder, suffer longer, receive lesser and feel lower than those fortunate ones. We smile and put on makeup and show up to ladder-climbing jobs anyway. But it's gritty and bitter and exhausting most days. Mental/emotional illness is simply nasty stuff.
• I decided it was time for a make over. I've spent the past three decades cultivating my intellect, character, and other insides. To the neglect of my outsides. Unfortunately.  And damn.  I decided to start working on that oh-so-coveted "executive presence" I keep hearing about. But this time, I started working from the outside in. Some makeup tutorials, trips to Macy's and many blog readings later, I've achieved some starting motion that will likely take me a couple more years to manifest. It's a start.
• I proudly wear granny panties. Although, my sister disagrees that my nomenclature is incorrect. While true granny panties go all they way up to just under-boob, mine go all the way up to my waist, which is a considerable distance with my bulbous gut and extra-long torso (courtesy paternal genetics, this time). God bless cotton and the right cut around the legs that doesn't chafe.  That's all I have to say about that. And also this: ladies - being comfortable is always underrated.

It's been a year of many internal changes.  I'm proud to call these decisions mine, although I perpetually feel underdeveloped, at least half-way clueless and victorious all at the same time.

Dumb Sprouting Plants; Why Not Sprouting Ideas?

So restless. And always have been. When will these things sprout?!

All my life, I've felt like I can think faster than most people. It's not that I'm always right, but I'm fast. And for all this, I can't figure out why I can't figure out what to write about.

In school, I was a fast test taker. My classmates always assumed I knew all the answers, but that wasn't true at all. I simply knew what I knew and what I didn't know. This allowed me to power though fill-in-the-blanks and essay questions with confidence and methodology. I had read somewhere that if you need to guess, your first guess is more likely to be true than your second or third guess. So I left my guesses alone and went back after grading to see how well my guesses had done.  It was always kind of fun, in an objective, forensic kind of way.

Another thing that helps me think quickly is being able to hold a significant number of variables and pieces together in my brain long enough for them to start showing me interrelationships. What is happening + how I know the world works + some hunches = some pretty insightful ideas, sometimes. I often conceive of ideas or information pieces as hued 3D shapes that start fitting together somehow. (You can see some evidence of this internal process if you watch my hands as I talk; they move and create shapes that are reflections of what I'm seeing in my head.  It's odd, and I've been teased for it by loving colleagues over the years.)

I'm also able to really break things down to their most basic components. And again, this is in the realm of thinking. It's like taking apart a toy and putting it back together again, back and forth and back and forth in succession.  The mental sensation is a little bit like going up and down a ladder.  Once I'm confident I know what each piece does, I focus on the ones I want and discard the others.

I can also block out distractions, ruthlessly in fact. When I'm working from home and my family happens to arrive before I'm done, they know that expression on my face that means over 90% of my brain CPU is occupied. They'll get me back when the idea or task is played through.

All these things, all the workings of my beloved brain, are not helping me focus, sift through and strike out on a content path which I hope to lead me to my eventual dream job of writing and speaking for a living. I can talk about:

• Being Japanese-American in an era where Japanese aren't really coming from Japan to the U.S. anymore and when three historic Japantowns remain in the entire U.S.  We're a dying breed.  
• Theology of the heartbroken. After my first husband went atheist and then gay, I could talk about how awkward and painful it is for one to inch and crawl back to a community and life of faith.
• Straight Spouse, etc. Because I've worked my hiney off to keep myself and my family strong after my divorce with first (now gay) husband, I get occasional reachings out from people who have questions for themselves or for loved ones about a possibly gay partner.

I'm sure I could talk about a lot of other things. 

What's with the little garden picture for this blog? Well - if it's so easy to cover seeds with some dirt, water them, protect them and watch them sprout into precious, tiny green things, where the heck are my great ideas to make the world a better place?  This is an intentionally imperfect comparison. It's just that I feel like there have been seeds lurking in the soil of my brain for too long, and nothing has sprouted yet.  When will these ideas start growing?!