• 2 frozen bananas

• 1 and 1/2 cups frozen pie cherries

• 2 cups vanilla almond milk

• 3 tbs raw cacao nibs

• 2 pitted dates

• one tsp vanilla (or a scraped vanilla bean, even better)

Blend the living crap out of it.  Then devour, making many an obscene sound as you do.

Alas, the Winter Without Colds was not to be. Wound up with one, and one where the little edges of the thing seem to keep holding on some, seeming like it;s gone, then coming back just to taunt me.  But I was SO FREAKING CLOSE.

I’m betting this has something to do with spending more time in town right around the time I caught the little bugger.

“Town,” otherwise known as the area on the island where, for about four blocks square, there are things like a grocery store, a few restaurants, some shops and people, rather than numerous tress, beach, a lot of mushrooms and critters, big and small, with even more hair than I have.  The latter makes up far more of the island.

It’s hilarious to me, as someone who spent the vast majority of their life so urban to live somewhere where there is “town.”  It doesn’t seem weird at all to live in the forest, after all, forests are where I always got myself to when city life stressed me out: living here usually just feels like I decided to go camping and never come back. (Something I truly wish I had done long before I did, for the record.  I have few regrets in my life, but not getting rural far sooner than I did is one of the few, and a big one.)

I like our town: I find it charming.  While the forest feels like home, town doesn’t, not yet, anyway: I feel more like I’m visiting some provincial little place as an amused observer. That perhaps sounds condescending, but I don’t mean it that way.  Rather, I just feel like a fish a bit out of water, but in a way that isn’t uncomfortable.  I want to squeeze half the people we see or run into in town, because so many of them — and the places they make and keep up — have a kind of soft, zany sweetness I admire but don’t think I myself possess.

I can probably look forward to it, though.  One of the nice things of living in such an isolated way in such a gobstoppingly beautiful place is that there’s really nothing to be besides yourself; no one to model yourself on or either try to conform or contrast yourself to but yourself or the land. There are people who move here who find out it isn’t for them pretty quickly; I suspect that liking this kind of place or not has a great deal to do with whether you like to be forced to turn and look inward pretty much 24/7 or not.  If you don’t, this would be a pretty hellish place to be, I imagine.

I love it: it feels like getting a giant permission to do what I’ve always generally been inclined to do in the first place, but to do it, always either had to get out of the city and run off to somewhere like this, or drop LSD, or lock oneself in one’s apartment for days, or maybe find one other person where you could both really sink into just the two of you, at least limiting the amount of other-input to one, rather than so many.

We have some folks who live on the island in tents on other people’s land, or who, I suspect, do a good deal of couch-surfing.  I really feel like I never want to leave here, even with some of the downsides — like the fact that Pacific Northwest summers are really just springs in disguise. If things ever turned around where renting here got impossible, I strongly suspect you’d find me seeking out a place where I could just borrow some space for a tent, wishing I could grow out a beard to match.

On the other hand, that means the retirement of the old, almond-colored Osterizer I got from the Salvation Army back in college, probably for no more then five bucks.

Over the years — decades! — that old chum has been trying so damn hard to stay running, and to do so many challenging things. Sometimes it rocked it. Sometimes it just failed completely. Other times, it has done as much of the job as it can do, and often quite loudly, before it just stops and says, “No more. That’s all I’ve got, kid. Sorry, babe.”

You may think letting go of the Osterizer would be an easy thing.  Initially, the plan was for Blue to bring it to work and have it be a blender there, but then I started having pangs of attachment. Notions it should be put on the shelf I reserve for awards for work, commemorated in prose and poetry, or at the very least, bedazzled.

I realize this is because I perhaps relate a little too strongly to that old blender.

It’s outdated and horrifyingly nostalgic. It was cheap. It came from the humblest of origins. It had only half the tools or power to do most of what I asked it to, but goshdarnit, it tried to do it all anyway, even burning its little motor completely out plenty of times because it was not going to stop trying until it just couldn’t try anymore.  It had the grandest of aspirations, and tried to do so many very big things for such a small, crusty, and tired little blender.

In a word: it’s been me. I’ve been it. I am Ol’ Osterizer.

We get each other, that old appliance and I. Perhaps like no one else could possibly understand — or ever will understand — either of us.

• Bounce it out. I found a cheap mini-trampoline for my office a few months ago, and the ability to just jump over for bouncing is DREAMY.
• Watch Harold and Maude for the 578th time.  When I was younger, I said I wanted to be Maude when I grew up.  Methinks this was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Play with the puppy.  Particularly since he demands it anyway.
• Walk around the house with weird stuff piled on their head like they’re attending a five-year-old’s tea party.
• Breathe. Then they get annoyed and think it’s silly. Then they make oneself do it again until it’s clear it’s not even remotely silly. Especially when you are not breathing and would like to stay alive.
• Put cucumbers in the water.  Because it’s pretty. And also tasty.
• Recall the conversation I had with a user the other day who asked, in utter earnestness, if sex was or wasn’t supposed to be better than snickerdoodles. (“Why choose?” I thought.)
• Look at the picture of themselves looking all open, perky and mighty at the tender age of eight, and think, “What would she do?”
• Note that the comfy chair is begging for one’s ass, while the office chair wants a damn break.
• Take a bath.  On that note, I’m trying to bring, “Go soak your head!” back into vogue.  Please help if you can.
• Sing Todd Snider’s “Beer Run.” Loudly. Oh, so very loudly.
• Stretch it all the fuck out. ALL the fuck out. No halfsies.
• Remember that your state has recently legalized marijuana. Even if you don’t have any, just the mere thought of this now-real-thing remains quite constantly pleasant.
• Dream of being in the forest—OH WAIT. You LIVE in the forest!  Go out into the forest, you silly ninny, you.
• Check out all the awesome people you love who love you right back.  You can just think about them, you can call them, and if they can see you, you can even click your tongue and wink at’em, all suave-like.
• Remind yourself of two of your old high school friends you saw recently and remember them in the dive bar when you did, loudly singing “Let’s Dance” as a collective Elmer Fudd.
• Spit like you mean it.
• Remember that you grew up into exactly the kind of person you wanted to be.  You just didn’t imagine the annoying or frustrating parts, that’s all.

I can, come to think of it.  Life has been full of a lot in the past year, the good, the bad or the sad,  the incredibly rough and the pretty-damn-easy, the insanely busy and the…well, more of the insanely busy.  One of the things it’s been particularly full of, though, is my turning inward a great deal, and working hard to try and really cut back on all of the things I had tried to pack into a life, a month, a week, a day. There were plenty of conversations and thoughts I could have shared here, and found the time to share here, but ultimately, they were really things I mostly only wanted to share with people I’m close to and, even more so, only think, feel and work through myself. A few times over the last year I tried to bring some of that here, but I’d get about halfway through something, and it just didn’t feel right.

Earnestly, when it’s come to the stuff of my life — not work, my life — the truth is that I have wanted to be alone. I needed to be alone.  Sometimes I think it’s harder, instead of easier, to see yourself the more visible you are to others.

I can’t sum up the last year in one post, so I’m not going to bother trying.  I think the best bet to getting back into the habit of this is to just start with the simplest of right now: there’s time to go backwards, if I want, later.Here’s my aim: I ideally want to come back to creating something here (or perhaps in another place: this particular site as it is right now may be something that I say goodbye to in the next year), near-daily, if it feels right.  It was a home for me for such a long time, and one I miss. I miss its space, but most of what I miss about it is the time made for myself in it.  Sure, it’s public, so it’s obviously not just for me, but the practice of just sitting down and putting words or images on a page, that are primarily for myself, but might be of benefit to someone else, with care put to both, is what I miss and what I want back.It’s taken me a ridiculous — or perhaps it was just right — amount of time in the last year to finally, over the last few months, carve out one hour, every day, that is only mine.  It’s just for me.  It’s by myself.  That hour as I have created it has been an hour at night, before bed, for my yoga and meditation practice.  Sometimes it’s a little less, sometimes more: I don’t pay that much attention to it, I just go up to the loft when it’s time and I take whatever time it is I want to take without a clock around to tell me how long that is.

I got to that — or rather to understanding how very much I needed that, and how incredibly important and non-negotiable that is — when I took a few days all the way off a while back: without work, without ‘net, without much food (on purpose), with a whole lot of water and juice and things to eat that only came out of the ground, a few books, a whole lot of quiet, yoga several times a day, sitting several times a day, even trying to learn to nap some (with limited success, unsurprising as a lifelong non-napper, but hey, I tried) and the intent to give myself to myself for a little while, where the only person’s needs I thought about in that time were my own, and the only needs I really focused on were the ones that came from a place of the simplest kind of hunger, and not the kind of hunger you get when you’re starving.

It sounds simple. It was. making the time and space for it, not so simple, but doable.  And thankfully, now that I live on the island, having a peaceful place to do it all was easy as pie, since where I live is just that when I let it be.

How I felt at the end of those days was also simple: a kind of simple I think I’d somehow managed to forget how to be save in fleeting moments.

I also felt like more than a bit of an idiot.

The work I do is stressful. Emotionally rewarding and the kind of intellectually challenging I have to have in work or else I feel bored to tears, yes. But stressful as hell.  I’m in people’s most loaded stuff all day, often every day, working it through with them.  Sometimes I get accolades for it, but just as often, there’s a cost to it: the cost of working hard and long with very little pay and other things, like healthcare or special perks; the cost of doing a thing that is just as often devalued as valued, the cost, to both myself and people in my life, of pretty much giving everything I can possibly give of myself to a lot of people, every day. That’s all stressful. That’s physically and emotionally expensive.

The amount of stress, toil and expended energy it requires or results in, of course, like with anything, or for anyone, means I also require an equivalent amount of the polar opposite. When something costs, you have to have something to pay that cost with.  When we put pressure on something, at some point we have to move back from it and give it room to regroup and expand again, or else it will break or burst.

My chronic pain was getting worse and worse, my body was doing various things I know my body just doesn’t do when it and I are cared for.  I looked ill, pretty much all the time: my hair was literally starting to fall out in clumps when I took a shower. I had turned into one of those vegans who eat like crap, which really is tremendously silly, especially since I live somewhere now where I have access to some of the freshest food there is. Things that were tough to manage already became infinitely tougher. Little annoyances were turning into big stresses. When any wins happened, they kept feeling more and more like nothing. My keep-on-keepin-on kept begging me to hitch a ride somewhere else, anywhere else, where it could just pass out and tell any passerby to fuck right off. My insomnia started coming back with a vengeance, and it brought friends. I was doing the small things that give me joy less and less, and that was a real kicker, since finding joy and pleasure in small things has always been such a big part of who I am, and such a big part of what has not just gotten me through a life that’s often been rough, but has made life, even in the tough parts, still feel so worthwhile. I smiled and laughed less. Probably a lot less than I even think I did.

When I did take downtime for myself, it was turning more into ways to tune out rather than ways to tune in, which not only way likely part of how crappy I was feeling, it was something so uncharacteristic of me as a person, that, probably more than almost anything else, I was starting to feel I was earnestly losing myself in a very, very big way.
I felt physically, emotionally, intellectually and even spiritually exhausted so much of the time: far more so last spring, and less so once I got to the summer and started making small changes, but I still couldn’t shake that feeling for good.

Why I felt like an idiot at the end of those three days was that I should have seen that I needed those three days WAY before I did.  More to the point, I should have seen that I needed all that was within those three days, not just now and then, but constantly, as much as anything else in my life and my days, way before I did.  After all, before those three days, I’d been gradually making small changes for months: getting back to eating the way I did years ago, the way people who make vegetables the core of what they eat should be, cutting back on a ton of things — smoking, booze, sugar (I managed to totally ditch sugar almost on accident last fall: that was a wacky surprise), negative thinking, toxic people — and adding or working on more of the good stuff, like sleeping the amount of time human beings do, playing outside, and things like just letting myself cry my heart out when I felt like it instead of bucking up and being macha about my feelings, even to myself, so much.

Where I’m going with all of this is that after those three days, I knew I needed to at least start with that one hour a day that was mine, all mine, for two of the things that make my body and mind the happiest. The cool part is, something about those three days made establishing that hour as a habit tremendously easy all of a sudden.  That hour is goddamn sacrosanct: I look forward to that hour at the end of the day even when I’m waking up in the morning. I know making one hour for yourself might seem like it’s not so challenging, and like it should of course be easy, but before recently, it really wasn’t for me. Not for a long, long time anyway. I can make a million hours for someone else, anyone else, but myself. Getting to the point where I could make it for myself again wasn’t easy until it because far more than clear that if I didn’t, my body, my mind, or my heart — maybe all of them — were probably going to start limiting all the hours I’ve got left in my life for anyone soon.

I wish, every day, that that hour could be way longer than that hour.Which brings me to this: I’ve got that hour. It’s untouchable. Now I just need to make more of them. And that includes the time to sit down here and write just like this.

If you’ve read this in the past, I’m going to ask that you extend me a little breadth this time around; breadth I need to extend myself. What I need with this is room to be brief sometimes, and also to be unimportant sometimes, if not much of the time. So much of what I do when I write or share is about The Big Work About Big Stuff. That’s part of my life, and I’ll no doubt bring it here sometimes. But I’d like to take the — mostly self-imposed, mind — pressure off to have to do that here, and give myself permission to just share whatever it is I feel like sharing, and perhaps even share less (as my life has changed in my freedom to do that as freely, too, and I’ll talk about that in time, as well), but share as much that perhaps is of little to no real consequence as that which is.  I suppose it’s about permission to be a person who is also just living a life, and a relatively simple one by desire and design, rather than a person who is doing the super-duper work or thinking the Very Big Thoughts.

And permission — again, probably more from myself as anyone else — to, when I talk about that life, talk about it the same way I’ve been re-learning to live it, where it’s very different, and separate from, work.

I have to say, my introversion epiphany of a couple months ago was possibly the very best thing that’s happened to me in a long time, even though, as I keep exploring this, it’s bringing up some things for me that are kind of a bummer.

For instance, I’ve been feeling like this is yet another place where I really got a bum deal by not being able to live full-time with my father before I did, the introvert of my two parents.  I’m scrolling back in my life to even the weekend visits we spent together, and realizing what a great model they were for managing introversion well and not feeling like I had to conform to extroversion. Of the couple days we’d spend together, there was always just as much, if not more, quiet time as time spent out and about. Even the out-and-aboutness usually involved just the two of us or small groups. I’ve been thinking about the days where sometimes almost for the whole of a day, we’d hang out at his favorite deli, both of us with a book, where we’d read for a while then talk for a while, where people could stop, visit and chat us up and then move on, and if I wasn’t feeling open or chatty, I was never told to put my book down so as not to be rude.

At my other home, there really wasn’t room for being introverted. About the only time I really got any kind of acceptance, or was even just left alone for a little bit without conflict was either around achievement or performance, and ideally, both. If I did some kind of dancing monkey routine, then I was marginally acceptable.  But most often, my introversion was framed as rudeness, or trying to hide from people, or hide things from people; a need for privacy to refuel was often presented as a need for secrecy. Sometimes my need to be alone was framed as my not liking or loving people. Or, my desire to be slow in conflict or step away from it before reacting instead of quick and reactive was framed as not taking conflict seriously (when really, it was quite the opposite, and is still: it’s taking the time I need to react thoughtfully and well instead of getting caught up in a tidal wave of upset).  Of course, in the worst of the worst of conflict, I tend to do what my Dad does when people won’t give him space, which is to just vanish altogether, which then winds up being seen as abandonment when all we are really going for is some space to ourselves so we don’t implode or explode or just get utterly lost in someone else’s drama.

Suffice it to say, the wound around being way too separated from my Dad during a lot of my life is always one that stays a little bit raw, so more salt on it basically blows. It’s clear he would have done a bit better if we’d been full-time earlier, and in so, so many ways, I would have, too. This may be the least of them, really, but still.

I’m sure this is something other folks who survived a lot of serious trauma can relate to, but it also always feels so strange and surprising to me to identify smaller — per my perspective, anyway –  things in your life and upbringing that have messed you up or just steered you the wrong way.  I feel like it’s so much harder to see them, hell, even to remember them, through the thick fog of much bigger trauma. That’s not helped, of course, by the cultural narrative we have around certain kinds of trauma that paints those of us who are survivors as, of course, so, so super-messed up by X-thing, with everything that isn’t right for us or okay as automatically attached to that trauma. But the big trauma itself obscures the smaller issues that sometimes maybe aren’t so small after all.

In some weird way, it kind of makes me feel more connected to people who have NOT gone through some of the horrible shit I have, and who I’ve often had awkward conversations with when they feel bad about things like this having been traumatic for them, versus things like my living through rape or other abuses. I never felt like anyone needed to compare that way, or that there was any need to feel bad (and heck, I’m nothing more than happy when I know people haven’t been through the mill so badly in their lives).  But I have always felt a little disconnected, like we weren’t quite living in the same worlds, and these kinds of realizations make me feel a connectivity I really appreciate. I think this kind of connected feeling around the smaller stuff may be what people are actually seeking when they’ve been through The Big Awful and say they “just want to be normal.”

I’m recognizing a lot of seemingly-smaller things around all of this. I don’t want to do that thing people do where they latch on to this One Big Thing to Explain Everything, but you know, this does explain a lot. Also? It’s really kind of col to be learning brand new, shiny things about myself.  As someone who has done a lot of reflection, got counseling way earlier in my life than most, I confess that I’m often a bit hungry for new growth.

For instance, the more reading I do, the more I become aware of why friends with ADD have expressed that maybe I’m ADD: there are a bunch of introvert things that are a lot like ADD things. I’m starting to understand more and more why I sometimes feel so daft when I’m overstimulated, and how at times when the pressure is on to be so smart so fast it often IS in the context of overstimulation, and that just can’t work for me. That’s awesome for extroverts: a recipe for disaster for me, especially if I’m not doing that I can to dial everything down so I can step up.

Longtime readers may recall that a bunch of years back, I felt utterly crippled by a sudden. inexplicable anxiety about public speaking.  I’d never really liked doing it, especially with big groups, but I always could do it, but from outta left field, I suddenly really, really couldn’t.  I’d get sick to my stomach, have panic attacks, the works. I could never figure out why it got so bad so suddenly.  Then I took a look at that timeline, and noticed that happened at a time when I was so, so very exposed on the whole, had so many people and so much work I was juggling, I was so visible, and it was all utterly nonstop.  It didn’t even occur to me at the time — nor later, when it calmed down some, also fairly inexplicably — that it might have been about much too much happening all the time, with me having to be on almost 24/7, and was just to do with that business of straws, camels and their backs.  In retrospect, now, it seems really obvious.

Also?  I had this idea that because so much of my work life anymore doesn’t have me with people in-person, that a breakneck pace, so long as it wasn’t face-to-face could work just fine. Now I’m starting to see how marathoning direct service still isn’t so great, even when I don’t have people right in my face.  In fact, I think what can happen is that I miss the cues I’d otherwise pick up in in-person interactions to know when I’ve hit a limit and need to recharge, so with online work, I need to create breaks and downtime in built-in ways, rather than only realizing I went over my limits once I am utterly wiped out.

Anyone who knows me very well and has stayed talking with me for hours and hours and days and days has probably heard me go on at some point about my (apparent) very strange non-reaction to dopamine geekouts.  Now, I can’t tell exactly how well studied the neurochem around introversion I’ve been reading about it, but it seems that being introverted, all by itself, may be why I’m just all yeah-reward-neurochem-hit-that’s-nice-whatever-moving-on around dopamine, because the word is that that’s how interoverts are with dopamine, and it’s acetylcholine we need and crave instead. Oddly enough, my nutritional deficits usually are also acetylcholine-related, and I’ve also had low blood sugar and low blood pressure all my life, which it seems may have something to do with it, too. Who knows how useful any of that may be, but more to geek out about, always fun.

Unsurprisingly, a bunch of this involves Aha! moments for me, that when I bring them to Blue, is all “Umm, I know.” I suppose it never does fail that all of us are often so much more aware of the behavior of those around us than of our own. I think that’s one of those things we’re supposed to magically outgrow with the wisdom of age and a lot of meditation. And yet. That said, my sweetheart has been beautifully patient with my process in this, making extra room for me to have extra room, when I’m already someone who errs on the side of more-time-alone than most as it is. Those “Umm, I knows” also are delivered with likely less boredom than I’d expect from someone has who has already seen a lot of this from their side of the screen already.

I still, I’m sorry to say, have yet to come up with the miracle plan of how to change the world as it is right now so that there’s more room in it for introverts and for what we need to be who we are.  I know, you’re disappointed. Me too.

But my own plan for right now is to just keep reminding myself that when I feel like there’s no room for me and I need to conform that that’s not the deal: the deal is that I need to conform to this no more than I ever have with anything else in my life, and instead carve out the space and place I need and ask for room to be made. I’m still barely just starting with that, because it asks for quite a bit of revamping and revising, but I’m getting there. This includes asking myself for that space and place, or, perhaps more to the point, the part of myself that — quite counter to almost every other part of myself through my life, so I’m resistant to even acknowledge it sometimes — really bought the bill of sale that said I had to be a person in some ways I not only am not, but a person which often obscures the uniqueness of who I am and my best ways of being me.

For that matter, it obscures a whole kind of people who’ve always had a lot to give the world, but who the world has to quiet down to hear, and slow down to see and really take in, people who I’ve probably appreciated most in my life far beyond the mere fact of having a mere temperament in common.

P.S. Holy bananas, do I know how out of date some of the supporting pages of this journal are. Updating them is on my to-do list. But since that’s been on my to-do list for, oh, two years and change, I’m seeing if stating that intention where other people can see it — and thus, I’ll feel really embarrassed if I don’t get to it soon — helps.

When it was over — or not over, really, since it didn’t really happen, but you know what I mean — I realized that I had stayed off my personal Twitter without even noticing.  Then I realized that going back on filled me with some level of dread. So did the prospect of doing pretty much anything that involved promotion or standing out from the madding crowd in any way.  While I didn’t get the time off I wanted, I was at least able to get a handful of days separate from my larger work world of late and away from its constant din. In a word, anything potentially extroverted or which carried the pressure to be extroverted made me feel highly anxious and depressed.

Growing up, music, writing and teaching were always my big loves, as they are still. Unsurprisingly, my musical abilities tended to be the ones that got the most attention and focus from others.  Some of that was just because I loved to make music, but I suspect a larger part of it was that making music tends to involve a level of performance that writing (well, until fairly recently) and teaching, especially when you do it the way I’ve always liked to, do not.

The thing is, I never liked performing. I still don’t. What I liked was making music, being a part of music, or even more to the point, being so much a part of music that what I was in those moments was music itself, separate from myself, invisible as myself.  My favorite part of any kind of art has always been the process, not the product, and really being able to get lost inside that process. Before I went to the arts high school I did, I was always in the choir at every school I attended. I remember people feeling very invested in getting solos or not, but that was never my interest. Being in the choir — in it –  was my favorite part.  I especially loved those moments when you’d be singing with everyone else, and all the harmonies would be just right: even though you were still singling just as clearly and loudly when your own voice was more audible, you’d blend in so that you couldn’t distinguish your voice from anyone else’s anymore. It was like you opened your mouth and everyone’s voice came out, and yours was only one part.  It’s the same reason I loved being in the mosh pit during my high school years: things were loud and intense, sure, but everyone was part of the crowd, it required going with that flow or people would wind up underfoot.

I loved being at the arts school. Being able to focus on my writing was fantastic, but I was there primarily to study music, and I loved that, too. At the end of senior year, everyone needed to present their own project, and I was so happy to be able to form a band and be able to collaborate with a group, rather than playing alone. But by the time graduation was coming up, I,d realized that a life in music would probably mean a life performing. Making my living as someone who only stayed in the studio was not likely to be doable (I should have learned a brass instrument, I know). If I wanted to sing, I’d need to learn to like performing. I tried. During my gap year, my friend Joe and I would play open mikes and at a couple bars and I literally tired to see if I could learn to like performing if I just sang and played my dulcimer with my back turned to the audience.  (Yes, really.  I did like it better, but audiences, as you’re probably not surprised to hear, found it a bit odd.) What about street performing, I thought? Maybe that would work. Nope. Also? Fucking brr.

So, when I started college, I decided to stop studying music and focus instead on literature and sociology, and on writing and teaching. There’ve been two decades between then and now, and a lot happened in my life and in the world in between.  And of course, silly me, I decided to write and teach about and subjects that seem perfectly normal and relaxed to me, but also wonderfully complex, so never boring, but which most of the world finds provocative and feels the need to yell about a lot.

But over the last couple of decades, the biggest thing that happened around my little epiphany I’m about to talk about is that it seems to me that our culture has become a culture of constant and en-masse extroversion to the exclusion of all other ways of being.  A “look at me” world. If how a lot of the world seems to be going right now was a kid in class, it seems like it’d be the kid who always has their hand up for every question, even though half the time, they don’t have the answer or weren’t even paying attention to what the question was.

Everything seems to involve marketing. Everything feels like it involves making yourself louder and louder and louder and bigger and bigger and bigger. If you don’t want to be on television — or, if you’re like me and that kind of visibility sounds like a circle of hell Dante would have invented if he’d written the Divine Comedy in the 21st century — it must mean you’re not really motivated to do whatever it is you do. Hell, we have reality television, and people who aspire to be on reality television as a what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up. If you just want to quietly do your own thing, it’s often assumed you must not want to involve other people or make an impact on the world, since making an impact involves being seen as widely, as largely as possible, even if what you have to offer when given those opportunities is less than the best you’ve got to offer. I can’t express how many times over the last year or two I have found myself arguing with colleagues who just don’t understand — they’re not being assholes, they just clearly don’t get it –  why I don’t self promote more, more, more and how I can be highly dedicated to doing what I am without wanting to spend more time marketing myself and my work than time doing my work. It’s gotten to the point where if anyone around me even starts the sentence, “You know, you really should promote yourself better by….” I feel on the verge of tears or shin-kicking, sometimes both.

And in the subject I work in, in sex, I feel like it’s just gotten really bad — and maybe it always was — to the point where the promotion and marketing schtick has gotten so fever-pitch that even smart people I know with great intentions frequently sound like snake oil salesmen to me. I ran from two professional email lists screaming in the last year because where I had been looking for educated community to deepen the actual work we all do, most of what I found was what sounded like a nonstop infomercial from hundreds of people at once, some of whom, it seemed to me, spent more time marketing than actually doing the work, because when they did ask about work-related things, the questions they asked were so rudimentary it made it obvious how little time they spent doing the work they were promoting.

When I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve felt so burnt out and tired, I kept finding myself very perplexed. I love the work I do. Working with teens and young people, especially when they’re in crisis, can be very challenging, but it rarely wears me out: it tends to energize me instead. I never get tired of writing: I still love the process. Same goes for teaching: I still love working as en educator.  The money stuff is always tiresome, so I often look there when I’m trying to identify a source of stress, but that’s not it. I wish I had more time for my life, still, and for my own creative work, but I’ve been working on that with some measure of success. I keep being asked for things from too many people who seem to forget I’m just one person over here, but as frustrating as that is, I can let mostly those annoyances go when I experience them. I’ve wracked my brain with all of these puzzle pieces and more, trying to find out where, exactly, so much of my stress seems to be coming from.

Then I realized that I somehow have managed to often fall into working in this extroverted mode that doesn’t work for me at all. In fact, it keeps me from doing my best work; from my best self, even. From who I am and the way that I do things best.

I’m gragarious, sure. And very open. Sometimes loud and boisterous. But I’m not extroverted. I’m introverted. It’s one of the reasons I always loved writing. It’s one of the reasons why I’m always much more concerned with getting enough time alone than with getting enough social time, and why I always feel completely perplexed when people ask me if I get lonely now that I live on the island or if I get bored out here. When I was in the UK early this year, Blue took some time off and was home alone for several days.  When he told me on the phone he hadn’t seen a single person in days, I said, “I know, isn’t it AWESOME?” (I think it is. Blue, on the other hand, was a little freaked out by the experience.) It’s one of the reasons I fell so in love with Montessori when I discovered it, where the teacher isn’t the focus, the students are. It’s one of the reasons I still love making music, and tend to save it for cherished, quiet times when I’m alone. It’s the main reason why it’s been very hard for me to have to adjust to the fact that semi-regularly now, I have to do public talks for big groups, something I’ve gotten decent at doing, but am always most thrilled when it’s over. My introverted nature is not news to me nor is it to anyone who knows me well.

And yet. Because — and really, I can’t believe how unaware of this I have been — it seems like the way things have been around this is that this, this high-key extroversion, is The Way you do them, I have tried to do them that way. I have tried to keep my own personal and professional din at something resembling the level of what seems like everyone else’s. I have pushed myself really hard to perform the way a lot of my colleagues perform. Heck, I can actually track this back to way earlier in my life, to times even as a kid where I forced myself to learn to be loud because I so badly wanted to do things, and the only way it seemed I was going to be able to get a chance to do them was if I acted like I was extroverted.

And that, my dears, is what I realized has been making me so incredibly worn out, above and beyond all else.

For an extrovert, see, that stuff obviously feels energizing and exhilarating. Not for an introvert: it gives me an intense desire for a rock to go hide under where I can take a long nap or listen to my records alone all day. An extrovert loves to be in the spotlight. We introverts generally can’t stand it, especially if we’re not at least sharing it, ideally with someone who wants that spot right on them, far, far away from us. My sense is that for extroverts, being constantly visible and in the middle of everything helps them focus. For an introvert, especially for this introvert, it feels like trying to watch one screen while 50 different screens with different things on them are on at once. It’s distracting. For me to see out clearly, I have to start by seeing in: and I can’t do that very well if I’m trying to be extroverted. It’s like extroversion puts a flashlight in my eyes.  Not only does it just feel wrong — wrong like you feel when you’re trying to get somewhere, and someone tells you you’re on the right street, but you are 110% certain you’re utterly turned around –  it makes it really, really hard for me to even remember what I’m supposed to be doing, let alone enjoy it.

The thing is, I — and my other fellow introverts — should be able to be who we are, the way we are, and do what we want to do in life and in the world in our way. It’s no more wrong or right than the other way: these are both ways of being. Not putting out a constant, flashy, look-look-look outflow doesn’t mean I don’t want to do things that have a big impact, nor that I don’t think my work has value: it usually just means that I want to be in the work and focusing on the work itself, and focusing on myself in such a way that I’m the vehicle for it, rather than the other way round.

I thought a little about some of the people I’ve admired most in the world who were clearly introverted: Blake, Goodall, Thoreau, Ghandi, Woolf, Bronte, Curie, Einstein, Dr. Suess, Jung, King, Van Gogh, Chopin, Yeats, Joni Mitchell, Georgia O’Keefe, Remedios Varo, nearly every writer and artist whose work I find most visionary and my father. Then I started thinking about how they’d fare in the world right now, and how hard it might even be to find them and what they did if they didn’t shift to an extroverted model. I mean, would Virginia Woolf really be like, “No, srsly, everyone, COME SEE MY ROOM! Pls RT!” Would Thoreau have a daily photoblog of Walden Pond? Why? How the hell would Chopin have composed anything with one hand on a cell phone? How on earth could activists like King and Ghandi have done what they did as well as they did with the kind of reactive urgency we have right now?

Then I realized that all the people on my list were brilliant people, very self-possessed and visionary people who I feel certain would have found a way to be who they are, and to do things the way that felt right to them, without taking on a way of being that would be more likely to stand in the way of their work and their lives than it would be likely to enhance it.

I am, at the moment, without solid answers about how to do this differently. At the same time, it’s not like I’ve ever really thought about it before: I only, and quite foolishly, just hit upon this awareness last week.

But I’m so very grateful to have gotten to that awareness, even if what got me there mostly seems to have been a lot of deep annoyance, a ton of new grey hairs, distraction from all of the things I actually want to do and which need a level of full attention tough to come by anymore for me to do them as well as I can, and feeling very misunderstood pretty much constantly, all unpleasant things.

For now, I’m just going to start thinking about this. I have a few strategies to start with, though, like staying away from social media I can until I figure out a way to manage it that really works for me, taking baby steps to ask the extroverts in my circles to accept I’m different than they are, doing things more quietly, even if it seems like a gamble to do so, and just reminding myself that the way it seems like everything has to be done isn’t the way everything has to be done.  There are other ways to do things than whatever the predominant model is or seems to be at a given time, something I know and have always applied to near everything in my life and my work, something I tell other people at least several times a day, and something I used to do all the time, so there’s no reason I can’t apply the same here with this, starting now.

Even though I left Chicago over a decade ago now, I remain, and always will, a diehard Cubs fan.

If you assume I care at all about baseball, or even understand how the game is supposed to be played, you may be wondering why.

I have my reasons, but one of them is that the Cubs provided me — and provide me still — an amazing lesson in owning your suckitude. The Cubs never really acted like they sucked as much as they do, nor did we or any of their other fans. Sometimes it was fun just to see what new, creative way they’d blow a game: they have never seemed to run out of ways to do that, which strikes me as its own genius, really.

Every now and then, the Cubs would actually win or at least actually play well, and that was awesome, I suppose, but I feel like the times when that happened we were all so busy looking for pigs flying overhead or the four horsemen of the apocalypse that we, Cubs fans, were always distracted enough to not get the full impact of the amazing lack of total failure.

The Cubs, especially to me as a kid, made sucking actually seem kind of cool. Like a rebellion, in some ways — Oh, winning. That is so last year. And the year before. For everyone else, anyway. It’s cheap to be a winner: we aim to LOSE, because we are THAT MUCH COOLER THAN YOU. — but mostly they sucked, and then the next game, they got back out there and they kept playing.  And that’s been how it’s been for the whole of my life. Players keep actually joining the team and seem to be excited about it. Fans still fill Wrigley, and the jeers and cheers are full of equal amounts of love. The Cubs seem to basically give suckitude a hug, a kiss, slap it on the ass than have a beer together.  I think that’s pretty super-amazing.

I’ve been thinking about the Cubs lately, because I feel like I forgot these lessons in sucking they taught me so generously. When I was younger, they informed a lot of what I did.  I think, because of the Cubs, no lie, I was a lot more fearless than I would have been otherwise, and a lot less afraid to try things I might lose, fail or just plain suck at.

Lately, I feel like I have been failing a whole hell of a lot. Heck, last week, I had a much-needed staycation planned, and I even managed to louse that up.  One assumes there are no grades given for recess because no one could possibly fail recess.  Clearly, those school systems have not met me. I totally failed recess last week.

I keep feeling like I’m watching some of the people around me excel at things I have tried and tried to do well, but either failed at or…well, failed by my ridiculous standards.  Mind, some of these things are things where I just wouldn’t be down with, or have time for, doing the same things to have that same level of achievement.  Others are things where someone else is simply more invested in winning or succeeding at them than I am.  But with other things, those conditions don’t apply.  Some of these things are things I very much wanted to do very well with, or well with consistently, and tried the same things but got different, less awesome results.

Blue, because Blue loves me and is lovely to me, says I’m being too hard on myself.  That may well be, of course, as I’ve a bit of a reputation for that sort of thing. A couple other friends of mine roll their eyes, and with love, not malice or dismissal.

At the same time, my standards are my standards, and sometimes they aren’t actually higher than other people’s standards. By whatever yardstick we’re using, I feel like I keep failing and have failed a lot in the last year or two with a lot of things.

What I want, though, is to be able to allow for that. I want to have it be okay for me to fail sometimes, or even a lot.  After all, I try a lot of things, constantly, unceasingly, so it’s not like I can be amazing at all of them or amazing at them all the time, nor should I have to be. It needs to be okay — with anyone, but most of all, with me — for me to suck. Ideally, I’d like to get to a place where it’s not only okay, but I can have a Cubbish sort of Zen about it and actually embrace sucking.

I mean, it’s not like messing up, or not hitting the highest bar or just being meh at anything doesn’t have its benefits or offers us nothing.  It offers us plenty: humility, patience for ourselves and others, compassion, humanity, humor, and the ability to have a life that is about something more than achievement or whatever we count as success.  It keeps us playing the game, as it were, to play the game; to be in the process, not the product. I’m sure it offers more than that, those things are just off the top of my head, and I’m not where I’d like to be with it yet, remember. I feel confident that when I get to that enlightened place where feeling like a failure is nothing close to the end of the world, a place of ass-slapping comfort, good cheer and one more reason to just keep going back out on that field, picking up that bat, and trying again, I’ll have a lot more benefits to report.

But in the meantime, I kind of suck.  And dammit to hell, I am going to get okay with that being the case sometimes if I’ve got to fly to those now-unaffordable bleachers and make myself positively sick on cotton candy, cheap beer and completely misplaced optimism towards a team doing well that never has to make it happen.

About a month ago, we had a crap confluence of pet events around here that seems to have begun with flea season here on the island, something we were totally unprepared for, and so they basically caught us unprepared and seized their moment, investing all the pets and causing all of us to itch for weeks.  I still have scabs on my ankles just from how thick they were outside in the grass.  It’s nuts. So, she got the fleas, then also got a UTI, at the same time one of her nails had a bad injury.  That meant a bunch of different meds, and I think all of that, combined with her age, was just too much for her.  The vet tested her for everything, and save that UTI, which went away, there is nothing technically wrong with her.  She’s just really damn old.

People who know us well know that Flora is really a goldfish.

Around 1992, when I first opened the little alternative school that I ran for a few years, one of my very first wee students came into the place I had set up and created with such care, looked around, then announced, “This is not a real school.” I think I probably gasped, I was so heartbroken. In asking for the criteria of such a determination, he explained to me that real schools have an orange goldfish in a bowl, something everyone knows. Duh. I tried to explain that no matter how much care I give them, I seem to be terrible with fish. I tried to explain that already, there were three cats at the school (and have I mentioned that despite a near-lifetime of having cats around, I’ve always been allergic to them?  Oh yes.), even though they mostly stayed in my office. No explanation would do. I mean, that was all fine and well and good, but it just wasn’t a real school because of this fish issue, and that was just that.

There was a pet store a few blocks away, so — very much needing my school to be a real school, darnit — I asked if we all took a walk down there and got one, with the understanding the kinds would need to help care for the goldfish, if that would fix the problem. This was met with agreement.  So, off we went.

When we got there, did they have every kind and color of fish under the sun?  Oh yes, they did — well, almost. All except goldfish, of course: there were no orange goldfish. In the middle of a desperate discussion with the petshop owner about what fish might look orange under different light, I heard the little guy saying, “Heather, I found it!” Thank christ. I walked to where he was.

He was standing in front of a little cage full of mostly sleeping kittens, save one very rambunctious and especially tiny calico who was jumping all over all of them.  “That’s a very cute kitten,” I said.  “So, where’s that fish?”

“She’s got orange on her,” he said.

“She most certainly does,” I said.  Then we had this same exchange about three or four times.

“She’s got —” he went to say again.

“Orange,” I said. “I know, she’s got orange on her, I’ve got it. Are you saying she’s an orange fish? I know you know she’s a cat. We have cats at the school already, three cats, which is already a lot of cats, I think. And just because they don’t have orange goldfish here doesn’t mean they aren’t somewhere else. I can go to another pet store myself later if this is really important to me — erm, you.”

“She’s got orange,” he said. “And I really like her. She’s funny. She’ll do.”

And so she was, and so she did.

At the time I got her, my hair was down to my waist, and the first few mornings I woke up, I’d be all “Ugh!  My head feels like a bowling ball, what the hell?” This was because she’d nest in there while I slept, continuing to hold on after I stood up.  A few years later, we had an insanely hot summer, and I was also very tired of people mistaking me for Rapunzel and thinking I was in need of rescue, so I shaved my head.  (An experience which taught me many things, the biggest one being that I have a very round head and face, which means that instead of looking hot and butch with a shaved head, I look like a Cabbage Patch Kid. Yay.) She was very unhappy with me for years until most of it grew back.

The other cats made a point of hiding from the kids at the school: not this one. She was playful and friendly and awesome with all of them: they adored her. There were kerfuffles about who got to rest with her at naptime: some years, we even had to make a schedule. A couple years later, in an ironic twist, we were at another pet store and brought back a white lop rabbit who was in a cage with a bunch of dwarf rabbits hopping all over his poor head, after the sympathies for bouncy animals had apparently switched. The other cats were mortified by this: but Flora and Moe often played together.

After I had to close the school  in ‘97, I was in a horrendous financial spot for a while, including having to spend some of a Chicago winter without decent heat and sans electricity or gas. Flora, with the other cats, made it through our awful spot, making do on about as little food as I did, save that the cats could eat the leftover meatstuffs I’d manage to gather from the school lunches at the school I was working at then for my Montessori internship. When I moved to Minneapolis in ‘98, she had to stay with an ex of mine for about six months in Chicago. Flora has always hated being in any kind of moving anything, so moving four unruly cats at once in an 8-hour-drive just was not doable, and she was always the most socially flexible of all the cats. When we finally did get her, she howled the whole. Drive. There.

When Sofi, my pug, came into our lives as a very small puppy, the other cats tried to kill her. For reals. Once I walked into the kitchen and Rita, my eldest cat at the time, in cahoots with another of them, were trying to push knives from the counter unto the unsuspecting puppy below. Flora, on the other hand, often circled the pug, hissing at the other cats. She slept near the puppy, she helped guard her when she ate, she did her level best to teach her all the things puppies ought to know, like why not to grab cat tails and how to clean your face (my dog still bathes herself like a cat sometimes: it’s ridiculous). When Rita began to die, Flora kept her company when the other two cats wouldn’t have anything to do with her. When I was crying my eyes out for days after euthanizing Rita, Flora worked in tandem with Sofi to keep me in fuzzy cuddles.

When I moved to Seattle, Flora howled the whole plane ride over, managing to drown out my own sobbing and very graciously make herself the hated enemy of every other poor fool on that flight so it didn’t have to be me. That’s about the same time Flora learned to yell all night and sometimes all day, for reasons unbenownst to anyone (though my guess is that always living in tiny places with lots of animals, the adjustment to a big old house with its own noises and only one other pet was not easy: it wasn’t easy for me, either, and I felt like howling sometimes, too).

She got a serious kidney infection somewhere in there, something that had felled another cat of mind years back — the lone cat who lived a normal kitty lifetime, unlike my others who all seem to want to hit 20 — and the few days she spent at the vet, they didn’t want to give her back. She’s a very loveable fish: everyone thinks so. They were particularly wooed by the way she lies which everyone instinctively calls Superman: stretching both her arms as far in front of her as possible and just kind of freezing like she’s flying, a posture she often did in the times she spent in my hair when I first got her.

When Blue moved his big dog into the mix, at a time when it was just Sofi and Flora left — a smaller family I think they were both enjoying — Flora was very whatever about it.  Fur did not fly between cat and new dog. When we moved to the island, she delighted in looking out the window at he world outside. When mice found their way in here, despite having only one sad old tooth left in her little mouth, she caught one. She woke us up in the middle of the night with extra-loud yelling. We came out, and she had it in her mouth like, “Umm, okay, I got this thing I think I’m supposed to get.  But I think I’m supposed to do something next I do not want to and also lack the tools to execute.”  The mouse was looking clearly confused. Flora dropped the mouse and it ran away, probably feeling awfully grateful that day for what is, potentially, the world’s most gentle cat.

I have listened to this cat yelling and screaming for hours sometimes, for no reason I know of, where nothing makes her stop.  She has driven me up a fucking wall with that yelling. But you know, I’ll look at her little fishy face, and pretty much think, “Ah, well.  When I get that old, I’m going to annoy the crap out of everyone, too.” Then I’ll bitch about it some more, of course.

She stopped yelling a couple weeks back. I do not miss that yelling. Not even close.  But after a few days without it, it was hard not to know that it probably meant something was wrong.

I’m really hoping I won’t need to put her to sleep.  It’s not a political stance; I’m someone who feels very strongly that if and when life is ending and it hurts and has nothing good to offer, that whether we’re talking about my pets or me, making it better by making it stop is a good thing. But I had a horrible experience putting Rita down, the last animal I went through this with.  Our regular vet was sick that day and his replacement was a shitheel who basically grabbed my cat from me, jabbed her with a needle and put her down while she screamed.  I know that likely wouldn’t happen again, but I’m just really hoping that Flora will pass quietly here while I have her set up to be as cozy as possible and die in a much better, less traumatic way.

Mind, if she keeps going without eating, or barely doing so, or seems to be in real pain rather than just really out of it, I’ll cave, because I don’t want her to be uncomfortable.

It’s weird, Flora dying, weird and so sad.  She’s been an awesome cat, a very strange, very awesome cat. But she’s also the last of my kitty brood, and I won’t be having cats again for a while, something I decided about the time we got Flora. I’m not allergic to her, specifically, thanks to a parent at the school who was a vet tech and who gave me some tricks when she was a kitten, but I am to most other cats, and my skin and sinuses need a break.  It’s also really hard to be able to go places when you have more than one kind of pet, and the dogs really are more than enough for us to care for here, as it is. Plus, I can only take so many vet bills and so many elderly cat experiences.

I was never a “cat person,” whatever that means.  In Chicago, you can’t be a renter and have dogs, so cats it was. Plus, almost all my cats save Flora — though really, even she in some ways — just kind of seemed to find me, rather than the other way round. But I like and understand dogs. I like cats, but I do not even remotely understand them.  I feel about cats the way I think John Gray feels about people: I would need to construct some kind of bullshit philosophy in order to grok their motives or behavior or to make them make sense in my own limited understanding of life.

So, with the end of Flora comes, first of all, the end of Flora.  Flora who I have loved and who has loved me, a big bunch of kids, my pug and other critters and pretty much anything and everyone else she’s come across. By the time a pet of mine gets to this age, I always think I’m so ready for this, but then, you know, I get there and it’s always so much harder than I thought it would be. I’m a very sad camper right now. And it’s also kind of the end of an era, one which started with the first member of my personal kitty brood when I was 18; the end of a kitty family which has, at times — thanks to a stay who entered our midst, had sex with other cats in our building, then left her kittens — been as large a group as eight. There have been some of the roughest times in my life where at least one of those cats was there, and we could morosely sit with booze in hand and catnip on face and say, “Hey, life fucking sucks, doesn’t it? But here’s lookin’ at you, cat.”

And now it’s down to one, this delicate, little one, and then, it seems, to none. And that’s just weird. And sad. Really sad.

Who knows, maybe she’ll turn around: they do that sometimes. But not only do I doubt it (I tried to feed her three times in the midst of writing this, and she just refuses to eat or drink), I just wanted to sing her silly kitty praises and take some time to tell her tales while it was all in my head.

So, here is looking at you, my little cat/fish with the orange on you. May you fall asleep soon, gently, and dream marvelous, endless dreams of hair to nest in, howls to howl, and big oceans it makes no sense at all for you to be swimming in, except to us, for whom you’ve sometimes magically made some important things real.

In short, there are often times when I would really, really like to NOT have to engage in discussions or make criticisms with depth and thoughtfulness and care.  I’d like not to have to worry about what someone is going to feel/say/report that “Heather Corinna” said.  I’d like to be stealthy, and not feel any kind of social responsibility not to hide behind anonymity nor any to be a decent person and a Buddhist who isn’t fucking around about it. I’d love not to have to reread what I wrote even once, let alone several times.

In a word, there’s a post I keep wanting to leave online on at least one article or blog somewhere a day, and it is, simply, something like this:

This thing you said/wrote is seriously stupid, and I think you’re an asshole who is mean and also shitty.

Yep, that’d do it.  No careful analysis, no diplomacy, no “we’re on the same team so let’s work together,” or even “we’re not on the same team, but I know you’re a good person, right?”

Just that.  Without my name, without having to say anything else or engage in any way, without any kind of responsibility.  Just that lazy, drive-by not-at-all-thoughtful letting go that I know happens all the time because I get emails and posts kind of similar to that every day.  They’re more like, “That’s stupid and you’re stupid (or pretentious or arrogant or a dyke or a girl, the most offensive thing anyone can be, in case you were unaware), which I have to say because you’re not being mean or an asshole, even though that’s not stopping me from being both of those things,” but still.  Same gist.  Same words that elicit what I strongly suspect is a very, very satisfying — albeit pithy — feeling somewhat akin to a decent bowel movement of some kind.

One might knock that and call it small, but probably not one who feels chronically constipated, be that literal or symbolic.  I, too, want the online version of metamucil.  I am hoping having said it here just might suffice.

(It won’t, but it seemed worth a shot. And yes, most of what I just said was stupid, I’m being a bit of an asshole, and I literally even talked shit. But at least I’m not being mean.)