mono no aware

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of "doing enough" - something that I am not too familiar with, but I am striving to learn about.

Let me explain. In a society that is forever defined by what we achieve, not who we are or what we stand for, we often feel as if we must always be actively improving just to keep up. We must get another degree. We must get a promotion. We must win a race. We must be perfect mothers and fathers. We must go to countless yoga classes. Furthermore, we must be thin, fit, on time, smart, witty and incredibly good at our jobs.

This would be possible for robots, but for flawed humans, not so much. I believe it keeps us in a constant state of less than and forces us to comparison with the people around us. We compare our insides to their outsides, saying "They have it together - why don't I?" This is self-abuse if the message is spoken internally more than once. If it inspires us out of stuckness in a positive way, then congrats - you are one of the few people on earth that doesn't flagellate yourself for being less than perfect.

In a time like we are currently in not only in the United States but in the world as a whole, I think we feel helpless a lot. I know I do. My heart hurts so much when I see the suffering and terror on the faces of people during major tragedies. When I worked in breaking news it was too much for my heart to take as I am an empathic person. I'd go home from work physically and emotionally exhausted and I hadn't even been at the site of the latest shooting. All I had had to do was tell the story and even that sucked the life out of me.

I will share with all of you the words I now tell to myself every day in an ultimate act of self love. You are enough. For today, you have done enough. It is OK to sit still. In fact, it's more than OK; it gives us essential time to rest, heal, and see within ourselves to hear our own messages. If sitting still right now means feeling tremendous pain, I understand and I offer you all the compassion in the world, because I know. I know all too well. And if you can even sit still and feel it for one minute, you are doing warrior's work. Because the real journey for us is within.

If you feel helpless in the face of tragedy, sit still. Channel compassion for yourself so you can later give it to those who need it most. When your energy is gathered, help where and how you can. Remember that can look like everything from donating money and food to being kind to a stranger who desperately needs it. The opportunities are everywhere if you can cultivate enough inner silence to HEAR and then see them.

[SPOILERS - PLOT DISCUSSION WITHIN]

The first thing most -if not nearly all - audiences are going to say after the credits roll after Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is “What the fuck?”

I did, and I really wish that I had left it at that, but I wasn’t able to.

The film seems like an insane clusterfuck at first (and to be honest, it really still is in retrospect). But as I continued to process the film’s themes as it set in afterwards lots of thoughts and emotions surfaced, most of them uncomfortable. I was reminded of when I saw Requiem For a Dream so many years ago and thought “That was brilliant and poisonous and I don’t ever want to see that again.” He pulled that same card (the latter that is) and I paid to see it, so joke’s on me I suppose (but honestly, I think joking was the furthest thing from his mind when he wrote this).

Aronofsky has shown unflinching intimacy with darkness in all his work, but mother! feels especially disgusting, especially since the heart of what he puts on screen translates into torture porn for the central character. (never named but called Mother in the credits). I felt sodden after watching her passivity and muteness for so much of the film as her life is bulldozed down by this man who claims to love her. Of course, those of you who have seen the movie know it gets much worse than that in the final act.

As the film set in for me I felt a terrible sinking in my chest: watching a woman be ignored, silenced, beaten and destroyed on so many levels is traumatic to watch despite being fiction. There’s something painfully resonant about it; something that feels horribly familiar. I already know so many viewers are going to read this film as misogynistic on Aronofsky’s part, and perhaps it is. But much more disturbing is how it highlights micro-aggressions to major wrongs like rape and abuse and reminds me that women’s subjugation to the male figure has terrible resonance.

In Milan Kundrera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he writes in regards to sex, “The woman longs to be weighted down by the man’s body.” It bothered me when I read it because I know it’s simultaneously a joy and a burden to relate. As a younger woman I felt a deep sense of hopelessness on occasion about my desire to have a partner. Despite the fact that the world is full of good men who work hard to overcome decades of poor societal and familial programming, the history of the sexes and how they interact is hard coded. There is so much subjugation and passivity from women that is INSTINCTUAL. There is so much abuse, both from men and self-inflicted. Mother! draws it out on a fantasy stage in painful, slow detail.

The "Man” of the film has been equated with God by some reviewers, a creator who seems gentle and kind at first but really is subversively using everything surrounding him as a means to obtain the worship he desires. This is the worst of man (and frankly, not limited to the male sex, but in this case that’s what it looks like). It’s less hard to watch him, but still hard. In a final scene where he rips “mother’s” heart from her burned, barely living body after she willingly still gives him her “love,” it’s nearly unbearable to watch. Once again, the horrible familiarity.

The average person may say women have come far, while feminists will say women have a long way to go towards equality. For me mother! was the foul, rotting taste of that long battle, the agony of being silenced, of DEFAULTING to silence. Of existing to hold up a man’s creations, to make his life smoother and happier while your own needs and wants rot. Beating on doors and windows trying desperately to be heard. That goes far beyond some token male counterpart, too - the world is deaf to mother’s value in the film, and our world is equally deaf and dumb to women. If it wasn’t we’d be paid as much as men, treated with respect instead of catcalls. and no longer valued most as young and sexually objectifiable.

I’ve been incredibly excited about a new version of Stephen King’s It since I heard the remake was being taken on last year. I am a horror fan, as many of you already know, but I’m not really in it for jump scares. I like psychological horror, and King is a master of it. His brand of it translates poorly to film, which is why so many directors have tried and failed to make his films work. Translating all that inner dialogue and bits of memories to screen would make for a disjointed presentation. They work well on paper and sound just like our minds’ dialogue, but on film it must be translated in a shot, a look, an exhale of breath with the nuance of an emotion in it.

It has tremendous meaning to me. As a teenager reading it for the first time, I was awed but not only King’s wordsmithing but his ability to tell such a long story that he could flesh out these seven people from their child selves to their adult selves, and tell how they had changed and how they had stayed the same. It’s funny that when people think about It, Pennywise is the center of the story to most of them. To me the Losers Club always will be the center of It, and it’s that that makes the novel so much more than just an effectively-told horror story.

I saw the film last night and I was amazed and inspired all over again. From the details of Pennywise’s horrible physical movements to the tenderness and grit of the Losers Club, it was all captured in perfect detail. Not just visually, but a depth that went way beyond that was present. Of course there were nods to the parts of the novel that are too impossibly big to cram into a two hour film: the Turtle most of all, and the fire at the Black Spot another. But they didn’t feel like “Hey, I read the material!” nods (which The Dark Tower adaption did so, so poorly only a month before). We don’t need these references to know that director Andres Muschietti cared deeply about the material, something that is super rewarding for me as a fan.

As always when I reread the book, I find myself fully absorbed into the all-too familiar bittersweetness of the Losers Club. I was a loser too in grammar school. I was tripped in the hallway and girls threw schoolbooks at me. The shame is so immense you don’t even have a name for it. You don’t even have the maturity yet to know how to cope. You just pick yourself up, clean yourself off and move on, wearing that horrible dirty feeling like a fur cape slung about your shoulders.

One thing I didn’t have as a young teenager was a group of friends. Maybe that’s why I became so attached as a young reader to Bill, Bev, Eddie, Stan, Mike, Richie and Ben. I’ve written in the past about how I found friends in fiction and video games, so I am not surprised at all at the depth of my tender feelings about these characters. They crossed out of the realm of fiction and into that place where I spent so much time with them they occupied a part of my heart. And so I went to see my friends last night, and I sat with them for two hours and remembered every bit of their story.

Watching them brought on a sort of soft heartache, as it brought me back to that rare place of childhood where we are our tender and most vulnerable selves. We haven’t learned to build walls yet. Because of that, we are willing to try even the most fantastical things, to love with our whole hearts, to dare to risk absolutely everything we have without hesitation. It’s really the combined power of that in the seven children that goes up again a limitless evil and wins, not once but twice. King can’t always explain that magic in his novel, and he doesn’t need to. The pages are alive with it. 

As a writer that’s the place I always hope to capture most, to call up my writing voice from: that vulnerable place of shining courage. As a young person I didn’t understand why It made me want to become a writer, but more than two decades later I get it. It’s a perfect novel when it comes to horror but even more so when it comes to telling the stories of children that found each other when they most needed to. That’s the part that still touches my heart the most all these years later. We need stories that give up hope when darkness seems most insurmountable. I need them.

[Art above by Picolo-Kun]

A dear friend said something to me yesterday that really hurt me and I woke up thinking about it today. As I was thinking about it, I also recalled something another dear friend reminds me of repeatedly: “What other people think of you is not your business.”

I am an easily hurt person. I also think about people’s words too much, give them too much value. When I was a child a lot of things happened in my household I didn’t understand, so I worked hard to try to make my family happy. When things went wrong, I believed it was somehow connected to me. I think this is why today I struggle with criticism and conflict so much. There’s a subconscious idea that I have the power to control whether or not other people are happy by how good I am, or how hard I try. This is a self-created hell.

If there is any one thing that I believe my life has been centered on, it’s been the discovery of who and what I am. This is not as simple as it may seem. It’s easy to ridicule insecurity, but I’ve always had a conflict with acceptance of who I am, perhaps because of the upbringing I mentioned above. As an extremely self-critical person, I am never thin enough, tall enough, smart enough, pretty enough, kind enough, or driven enough.

Of course, these are all thoughts I choose to nurture. That’s up to me, and I have to be careful. One of the most startling things I’ve learned about myself this year is that I get something out of self-victimization. I’m not sure what it is just yet, but I do know that I wallow in these beliefs sometimes, creating yet another hell inside my mind that is wholly a fantasy.

It’s often difficult for me to remember that the things people say are filtered through their own lenses, and no matter how much I might try, I cannot see how that colors their world. When someone knows me very well, criticism from them is the hardest to take, because I assume that what they see is reality. But reality to one person makes no sense to the next.

The only reality you can trust - and really the only one that matters – is your own. Humans fantasize in film and books about creating worlds with our minds or magical powers, but often we don’t click with the fact that that IS reality. So envision every day as a blank canvas, which you walk up to with your paints and brushes. There is no limit to what you can create here. None. Paint a black world if you like, where you are bad and everything is bad. Add gray for the clouds over your head, dark reds for the pain you bleed. Or pour water over the whole thing, wash it away, and paint a magnificent sunrise which you burst from like a phoenix. Or any one of hundreds of millions of things you can think of.

People connect to this concept with quips like “Fuck the haters!” and “It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.” The spirit of those is good, but for me personally they ring a bit hollow. When I think of my friend’s hurtful words, my real, vulnerable gut reaction is “I wish she didn’t see me that way.” But I have no control over what she thinks of me. I have something infinitely more valuable: What I think of me. 

I fear very few people, but for the ones I do fear, the emotion runs deep. I steer clear of these people if I can. If I’m forced to face them, I try to put my finger on the fear. What I’ve learned so far is that I am afraid of people who have hurt me badly because I expect them to do it again.

There are plenty of platitudes about fear out there, and I’ve read many of them. I don’t enjoy fear, but I do grasp that typically it provides an opportunity for growth. That sentiment sounds good in theory and in type, but in practice its a lot harder to execute. When I’m a little afraid, I’m nervous but have the skills to comfort myself semi-appropriately (real talk: sometimes this ends in ordering a pizza). When I’m terrified, I’m dropped down a horrifyingly deep hole that hurls me back into the heart of my 10-year-old self, which curls up and hides at the sign of anything that could threaten her safety.

I remember once when this had happened to me. I was so afraid, so completely in that child mode, that I shut down. Trying to eat made me cry. I’d fall asleep only to jerk awake an hour later, afraid of the world, of people, of anything other than the dark corner of my bedroom in the corner of a big, old house in uptown New Orleans, where the trees cast long, bony shadows like the knobby fingers of skeletons trailing down the windows,

Going into the fear is typically not what we want to do. One of my great mentors, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, has some terrific teachings on it, which I cherish. She has taught me that getting deeper into it can yield some really fascinating insight.

I think my truth, right now, is that I’m finally making the steps toward a change that my heart needs, but I’m also afraid of change because it’s a move away from what’s “safe.” As a kid I learned to hide and stay still for comfort. As an adult, sometimes I do the same thing before I know I am doing it. It’s perfectly OK to do that, but there are also other options -- something I didn’t know when I was 10.

There’s likely a word in another language when change is happening to you and you’re aware of it but have no choice but to sit still and wait as it works its magic. If you know the word, let me know.

It’s taken me a long time to adjust to the fact that the way I want things to go and the way they go are typically unrelated in most ways. I used to think I could twist anything to fit my plans as long as I tried hard enough. Now I get that that’s not the case.

For the last few years, I have believed that things happen in my life as they are intended to. I’ve noticed the feelings differ between when I try to force something and when I let things happen. There’s no anxiety, my constant bedfellow, when I simply go with the flow. As things evolve, I watch and notice a complete lack of fear. There’s also a conviction, a sense of feeling at home in the circumstances. I’m no tin the past or future. I’m nailed to the present moment. This is a rare emotion for me and I cherish it.

I wish it was as easy to cherish fear and unsurety. Those really are beloved emotions too, powerful ones. They transform and force growth. But I haven’t been able to do anything with pain than writhe away from it. In a moment like this, a happy one, I feel I could if presented with it. But that’s easy to say when you’re feeling hopeful and positive. Then pain swoops in and you’re like -- get me out of this.With my limited knowledge, I hope the direction things are going is the right one. But if it isn’t, the right one is coming along, in it’s own time. I respect that today.

Six years ago today, the most important romantic relationship of my life (up to that time) came to an end.

At the time, I believed my world was ending. I had never fallen apart the way that I fell apart when it did. It pulled out my guts and left me hollow. It forced me to look at much bigger things than just the heartbreak of a lost love -- it also gutted out all the issues laying under that, the way I learned to live in my family home, my egotism, my selfishness, my fear of fulfilling my own creative abilities.

There are a lot of analogies for what happened to me when someone I loved so much left me, but I was unable to understand any of them, despite kind advice from a lot of loving friends. It burned like hot fire for years. I wanted to die. I wanted anything but to descend into this hell of awareness, this place where I had no choice but to see everything about the human I was that needed to change. It wasn’t about the things he hadn’t been able to handle or failing him. That, with time, fell away as it became clearer that I had no idea who I was and that I was living every day in fear, hiding in someone’s shadow, too terrified to go out and find myself on my own.

Poet Nayyirah Waheed found the perfect words for what I experienced.

Agony can be the greatest teacher. In this, my ex gave me one of the greatest gifts I’d ever receive by leaving. I don’t think he intended it that way, but I got the gift regardless: The flowering and opening of my heart, peeled open like a tight budded flower, far from ready to bloom. But with time the petals relaxed and began to open. 

I’m writing this to share with you, whoever you are, that the most blinding pain is transforming you. If you’re hurting now, be still and let it hurt. Grasp the hands around you for help. But know that you are being forged in fire, like a fine blade. You’ll emerge shining.

Sitting on my sofa writing this with the sun streaming through my balcony windows, I’m so grateful to that time. I’ll be forever grateful to that person that hurt me more deeply than I had ever been hurt. Thanks to it, I have a home I love, a career I adore, a partner that I’m passionate about, and best of all, a confidence in myself, a love of myself, that I couldn’t have dreamed of having six years ago when I lay on my bed curled in a ball and my cats crowded around me for comfort, tucked into the curves of my belly and my legs, breathing in my tears.

I always get a little spiritually ill when I'm in New York. The density of people is a lot to take. I sometimes feel as if my skin is becoming thinner, more easily penetrated by others. If I'm tired, it intensifies. I look into faces and feel glimmers: She's distrustful. He's pushing through life. A child's energetic enthusiasm. People deeply distracted. Perhaps most notable a distinct lack of smiling faces, but beyond that a similar expression of closedness. Perhaps we all shut down around strangers, don our silent armor. I might do this too, and not yet know that I do. 

It’s a bit unusual to know that a person long dead was someone you would have loved, in that way that burns in you where you can’t imagine a world without them, but Rainer Maria Rilke was that person for me.

It’s National Poetry Day, so you should know about him. He had great soulful eyes and a beautiful face which he hid behind a long, carefully trimmed mustache. His mother was broken-hearted over the loss of a daughter that died, so she dressed baby Rainer in dresses from time to time. He was madly in love with Lou-Andreas Salome, his passion connection. It took him a decade to write the Duino Elegies, his best-known work, because of creative crisis. He adored the work of Rodin and eventually acted as his secretary.

“Everything is gestation. To let each impression & each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, & await with deep patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life, in understanding and in creating. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap & stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear.” 

His world was one cloaked in magic, even as he fought through suffering and poor health. He saw a profound beauty in the order of things, just as they are, not as he wished them to be.

“You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame And make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”

When I stumble in my own life (which is often), I return to his words to find some wisdom. As many times as I read them there is always something there for the human in me, the artist, the fragmented child, the explorer.

This the the voice that springs forth magic inside me, again and again, to this day. Discover him. <3

[Via @positivedoodles]

Here’s another of my list of things I don’t want you to know: I have no fucking idea.

I feel so bad about money. So bad, so often. Partially because managing it has always been a challenge for me and partially because I use shopping as a crutch when I’m sad, happy, nervous, and all levels of emotion inbetween. I’ve done a lot of work around this issue, and it’s gotten a lot better, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have moments (like now) where I sit on my sofa like a lump and forlornly think to myself,“You are so bad at this.”

I talked yesterday about the story we tell ourselves, and I see that there is a story here, again, like there often is with me. My well-worn story about money sounds like this:

“Well, my parents weren’t great with money, so neither am I. I’m addicted to buying stuff and to packages arriving in the mail. I always had crap jobs so I never had enough to save. I didn’t open a savings account until I was 32, and even now there’s never enough in it. I spend too much on stuff I don’t need. I’m bad with money. Saving is hard. I started a 401K so late in my life I’ll never have a sufficient amount to retire on. This is not how an adult uses money.”

That’s some high-level fearmongering, right there. I am so good at telling myself this story -- it’s been on repeat (parts of it anyway) since my early 20s. If someone I loved said the same things to me, I would feel gentle emotions towards them. I would want to soothe them. I’d hold their hand in theirs and say “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re doing fine. Your rent is paid, your bills are paid, and you’re learning the best way you know how. Be kind.”

As i reread that paragraph, I realize I need to be able to do both: To be the despondent version of me that’s ashamed, and also to be the nurturing, warm version that can say “You’re doing fine, you’re good, you’re alright.”

[Via @positivedoodles]

One thing I have learned about identifying “my story” is that it can be rewritten at any time. As one of my inspirations, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, often says, we can choose to “drop the storyline.”

Right now, I can replace every word on my inner monologue so let’s do that. Because, as a dear friend of mine loves to say, you’re aren’t responsible for the first thought that comes into your mind, but for what you choose to do with it.

Thought: “My parents weren’t so great with money, so neither am I.”

Rewrite: “They did the best they could with what they had. Now its up to me to make my own practices.”

Thought: “I always had crap jobs so I could never afford to save.”

Rewrite: “I always had enough to spend on buying things for me, so I could afford to save. I just chose not to. Next time that happens, I have a choice.”

Thought: “This is not how an adult uses money.”

Rewrite: “I’m a worthy person and I’m doing the best I can with what I have at this moment in time.”

It’s awkward to write these, and even more so to think them, at first. It’s practice, like any other thing that’s worthwhile and takes time. It’s sort of like petting yourself on the head, slinging an arm around your own shoulders. 

A dear friend of mine believes she is getting let go from her job today. Like me, she struggles with ADD and has that terrible feeling that she did something wrong, that if only she could have “done better” this wouldn’t have happened. And that made me think about all the times I have been fired.

I was also thinking this morning on my daily walk that there is so much that people don’t want you to know about them. And that led me to the things that I don’t want people to know. How many times I have been fired is one of them.

My count is four: Two straight up “You’re fired” and two “We really like you but you make too many mistakes at work and you can’t be here anymore.” Not knowing I had ADD, I just thought that I was incompetent and useless. The story I told myself (and I’m a good storyteller) was that I didn’t belong anywhere and I wasn’t good at anything. Let me repeat the essential takeaway of that sentence. “The story I told myself.”

I don’t tell myself those types of stories very often anymore. The reason why is because I had a severe breakdown in 2012 where I was in panic attack mode every hour of every day. There’s something else I don’t want people to know. But it happened. I believe it happened because after enough time goes by where you tell yourself stories where you are the victim, you can’t take it anymore. It’s too painful and you can’t go on. So you break.

People respond to getting fired in a lot of different ways, but one thing I learned that I really want to share with all of you today is that getting fired is not something that reflects on your value as a human being. LIke any other fall, it hurts. But the error we make is that same error all shame is rooted in where you tell yourself “I am bad.” 

You are not bad. Something may have happened to you. Maybe you didn’t do your best. Maybe you did. Maybe the job wasn’t a good fit. But you aren’t a failure. FAILING and BEING A FAILURE are very different things. And failing isn’t always a bad thing. “Being a failure” is actually a story you tell yourself. The only person who decides you are a failure is you.

I kept getting fired and talked to until I faced that there was something wrong and saw a doctor. There was another piece too though -- I got a lot of jobs over the years that weren’t in alignment with what I truly wanted for my life. I wanted to be a writer -- had always been one -- and when I started finding jobs that allowed me to write, I bloomed. I naturally performed well because I loved my work. When I loathed what I did every day, 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month, it was a lot harder to perform well because I was in constant conflict with my calling.

Let’s say you do get fired, or get upbraided, at your job, and you feel terrible about it. How to do you rise strong after that sort of fall? Start with a core basic that needs to become an everyday thought you rely on: You are not your job.

Go ahead, say it aloud, or write it down if that works for you.

You are not your job.

You are a lot of things. Possibly funny, bright, kind, intelligent. Maybe depressed, maybe struggling, maybe unsure or afraid. But you are not what you do for a living. That’s just what you do. Even if it’s your calling, and you have a job doing it. If I get fired from CNN today, I’ll feel sad, and I’ll struggle with feelings of shame.

Well, it was when I woke up, that is. I stayed up a little later than usual last night drawing for an imagination project for work (which is something I haven’t done for a very long time) and lost myself in the relief of drawing perfectly straight lines with the edge of a purple ruler. I have always loved doing things that let me focus closely on details (although I do have a few of those gorgeous adult coloring books sitting around that I’m not giving enough to love to and I need to change that).

I thought I’d sleep a bit later this morning because I’m the sort that needs eight hours of sleep or I turn manic, but I woke up at 6 and couldn’t relax enough to go back to sleep because the moment my mind was awake it started working on the puzzle of this drawing project immediately. And I tried to lay there and ignore it and it just didn’t work. I had to get up and start drawing.

I know it works this way for a lot of other creative people; you can’t choose when it strikes. This is when I feel most like the vessel that creativity passes through, just a channel to get it moving from wherever it comes from to fruition. When I first started freelancing for CNN, I remember coming home from work (I still had a day job) and sitting on the sofa with my laptop and almost feeling myself fall into this hole in the keyboard when I worked on a story that was a joy to write. It felt like blinking, and seeing 1200 words had just appeared in that millisecond I had had my eyes closed. 

I can’t really be mad about when inspiration strikes this way, because it feels good to make the thing that it compels me to make. But I also get frustrated too when there are long dry spells on creating where I can’t bring myself to do it. I have a 20,000 word novel that’s just sitting there, untouched for months. I have a fully completed picture book about my cats unsold. I go to pure joy drawing lines with a ruler, so why wouldn’t I continue to actively pursue that joy?

I have a theory that chasing our creative truth is consistently terrifying. Or at least is it for me. In a group of artists and writers I maintain on Facebook, I once asked everyone how often they dealt with fear that what they created was no good. Over 30 respondents all said “Every day.”

[Pic via thelatestkate]

It has been a while since I kept a daily blog.

Perhaps this is now because my passion, to write, is what I also use as my tool to earn a living. Writing the news rarely sucks me dry, I usually have more to say that I can’t say within the narrow halls of AP style, but these feelings tend to nest within me and I don’t make time to release them.

One thing I am cautious about is motive. Why do I write my life? Do I do it for attention? For likes, reblogs, etc? I don’t want to broadcast for that reason.

A few days ago I was reading the new Brene Brown book, Rising Strong, and she has a passage where her husband asks her “What’s the vision for your career?” and she replied “I want to start a global conversation about vulnerability and shame.”

Both that question and answer have been hanging around in my shadows. I went home and took out a binder I do a lot of my own self-realization work on and sat in front of a blank page until I could answer that same question he asked her, which might sound just like a variant of “Where do you see yourself in five years?” But to me, it’s pretty different -- where you see yourself as society might demand, versus your vision, your dream, the beat of your heart pulling you towards a very specific sort of reality.

I wondered if my heart would speak, or I’d sit there looking at that blank page for a while and have to come away feeling like I don’t know what I want to do with my life. But the words came. And I wrote this.

I could have had any number of emotions, or a blend of them, in reaction to those words. But I looked at them and felt, in the very lines of the script, the turns of the letters, that what I wrote was what I was was intended to do. Not by the design of a God, but more like the way a blade of grass is intended to grow.

I desperately, deeply, more than I ever want to admit, want you to like me.

For some, this means making sure makeup is right, hair is curled, or carrying the bag of the moment. For others, it means getting the degree, the accolades, the job, the promotion. No matter what it is, you can pare it down to a single message - you aren’t good enough, and you need to change these things about yourself to become good enough.

Trust me, there is no “good enough.” It’s a place that doesn’t exist in the outside world, frustratingly enough. It’s pretty elusive. But it’s absolutely something you can find, as long as you can come to a place to admit that you have no clue where to begin.

I’m writing this because HLN is launching a series called #MeForReal this week. and I’m really excited to be a part of it. It’s about the world we live in and the ways we try to fit into that world, a world that is more visual and self-proclamatory than ever. We can define who we are in a more curated way than we ever have been able to before, and in a prettier way, thanks to Instagram filters. As a result, we see one another in ways that are us, but also not quite. And then we compare our insides to other people’s outsides, and we think that we could be more, better, if we were more like them and less like us.

My shame, as well as one of the most authentic parts of me, is that I play video games. In fact, I built a career on it, one I had no idea I was building because I was too busy passionately writing about them for anyone who would let me. I also never got a formal education. My life has been spent questioning my own intelligence, my worthiness, asking myself questions that I needed answers to: Would I be more lovable if I was less nerdy? Thinner? More together? If I had gone to college? If I liked normal people things, like football and Netflix, than Japanese dramas and Deviant Art paintings and strange shirts with Engrish on them?

I still struggle with the answers. But, I’m also lucky that at this age, I’ve had to grow into my own skin a bit, to accept that no matter how hard I try to manipulate some of the things about me I wish were different, they aren’t going to change. I’ve had to follow that need to be liked down to its source and see what part of me is still a little kid that wants to be loved and accepted. I’ve had to see the love others have for me in their eyes and realized they found me lovable even if I achieved nothing at all, looked my worst, laughed my most unattractive laugh. In fact, those people loved me MORE for those things, and I was unable to turn away from the me that I saw in them, reflected back to me.

#MeForReal is unique, and also not. Humans are messy, and so am I. We are afraid to be real, and so am I. We’re afraid to die, and so am I. And we’re afraid to live. I’m afraid to love myself. I don’t know how. We aren’t born knowing. It’s a process we spend our whole lives on. So here I am, 37 years old, about to be 38 soon, still not sure. And I’m starting to see the devastating beauty in not being sure, because we are completely vulnerable when we admit we don’t know. In that vulnerability is a seed of the person we are for real. Me for real is writing these words right now, telling you that I don’t know. And that my most lovable, wonderful, incredible self is right now, here, the frightened, unsure, vulnerable self. It’s quite the opposite of the thin, well-dressed, well-educated self.

Dear me,

At 18 you are already weird, super weird, and super scared about it. But trying your best to find your tribe. And I can promise you that that pain that drives you nuts  is going to end up connecting you to people that will be a part of your life for the rest of your life.

You are going to suffer a lot and a lot of that suffering is going to be of your own making.

You're going to think you aren't good enough constantly. But you always are, even while you reinforce your determination that you could better, and you never notice that you just keep moving.

You're convinced that you will be single forever, but that's not true (and if you knew how many people you were going to have fantastic romances with, that would also be laughable).

You're afraid you'll never get a good job, because people with good jobs went to college, and you didn't. It will take a while. But you will. In the meantime, you'll agonize over all the jobs you have before that, and how bad you think you are at all of them. And if you agonize one bit less, you won't get to where you are today, right now, where I'm speaking from. So every bit of your hurt, your pain, your feelings are sadness, are warranted, because they will serve a purpose.

You're going to listen to a LOT of sad music, and it'll be about 20 years before you realize that you like to be sad. Listen anyway.

In a decade or so you're going to be crushed. Absolutely demolished. You'll be in so much agony that you'll want to die, not just one night, but night after night. You'll feel like your skin doesn't fit you and everything inside your guts is vomiting out of you. And this is the most important thing I can possibly tell you, so I hope you will listen and maybe even write it down in one of your journals: Having your heart shattered is going to make your life incredible. Trust me.

It is going to make you strong, stronger than you have ever been, and clear in a way you never were up to that moment. Recovering won't look like they say it will. It will happen at a pace much slower than you would like. It'll make every heartbreak before it invisible. And then, you will start to become the version of you that you always, always hoped you might become.

You're afraid you'll never do anything worthwhile. 

I've been thinking lately that I'm not as smart as I hoped.

Intelligence is, to a degree, relative. There's book smarts, street smarts, emotional smarts, physical smarts. In short, an IQ is a measuring tape for a certain kind of intelligence, but there are many others.

I grew up reading early, so I've always thought I was smart. It may have had something to do with the litany of "You're SO bright" I heard from my grandmother throughout my life. I appreciate that she chose that reinforcement over others, but too much of any one thing can cause an overflow.

I quit high school. I would like to say I had a solid reason, but I was tired of feeling like an outcast and I hated math. The truth was that I was an outcast, but there was also something I didn't want to admit to in front of anyone: I couldn't comprehend math no matter how hard I tried, and I found topics like civics and biology horribly boring.

I also quit college. I don't actually recollect my motive for this. What I do recollect was that those two incidences of leaving school behind gave me a sense of failure that I was never able to let go of for the rest of my life. I was ashamed then that I didn't have the tenacity to earn those diplomas, and sometimes, I'm still ashamed now.

You do a lot of things to live with choices like that. I dived into literature, sure that I preferred philosophical smarts to college credits. I talked widely about the ideas I found in books to anyone that would listen. People listened. They kept telling me I was smart. I collected their praise and stacked it up against the walls of my citadel. In the middle was a burning rock of shame, concealed under mountains of accumulated words.

I started writing professionally at 29. I was delighted to learn that blogging required no class credits, and no one asked any questions about what college I graduated from or what requirements I had to meet. I was accepted as myself, which now I know is a thing I have an endless hunger for.

Thousands of blog posts, articles and essays later, I love to tell my story to people seeking hope in a career as a writer: I didn't go to college, I paved my own path, you don't need a degree, you don't need a diploma or an alma mater. I see their eyes shine and their faces flush with color and I think to myself, yes, I am smart, I am doing good.

What I do not tell them is that every time I make an error in my work, or pretend to know something I don't know, or try to fit in with people that know what I don't, I'm still blindly protecting my ego. And that's not so smart.

I once read that ego is not just about saying you're better than everyone else, but also about saying you're worse. Whether you're below or above, its still all about you, your fixation on your own  existence in the world. And as long as you're clinging to that, your ego will endeavor to keep you small.

Every time I catch my ego wallowing in the past I chose, I see I'm trying too hard to be the smart that I think the world wants me to be. Instead, I wish to drop all that, as challenging as it may be. Being good isn't about the diplomas, achievements or status, even though those things can be a great deal of fun and incredibly rewarding for the person who achieves them. For me, its about recognizing your value as a human being -- and that's something that's actually not related to any of your achievements. I'm exploring my value, unrelated to any outside influences. And it's quite startling to realize that it's absolutely up to me to define it.

It's the last day of the year, and I feel more strongly this year than ever before that turning your focus on how to help others and away from your narrow view of self is how I most want to live my life.

I used to really think that if my life was happy, I'd be out on New Year's Eve, thin and muscular from all the working out I'm doing, rocking a fabulous dress, on the arm of some tall man that would pledge to adore me forever and really follow through, as I glistened my way into the happily ever after.

Instead, I'm sitting on my sofa in navy flannel pajamas pants with stars on them watching the light outside fade and thinking about how I spent almost all of the last day of my year writing about the death of a transgender girl who decided to end her life because her parents refused to accept what she was.

I had a rude wake-up call when I realized I was irritated because I had to work on the story for so long on New Year's Eve. Irritated to tell a story that is absolutely essential for people to hear, because the core is about how to live compassionately, and the tragedy waiting when we don't. I saw my own selfishness clearly, and it dropped a weight on my irritation and broke it. 

Now I realize I'd rather be here than anywhere else. Because meditating on her life and the world she decided to leave only brings me to one conclusion: We must be better. Kinder. We must be compassionate to complete strangers. We have to go further than that, even. Consider our enemies as human, with feelings. Look to the people we feel the most hatred for -- people are ruining our world -- and recognize that we even need to cultivate compassion for them. It is very hard. But it is possible.

Last year was the first New Year that I felt it would be a good idea to meditate as the old year turns to the new. I wanted to, but I didn't do it. This year, the feeling is even stronger to sit perfectly still and to be quiet. To be completely aware, as I so infrequently am. I'm sure many will enjoy their firecrackers tonight, but I'm excited to sit on a cushion and do the hardest thing I know -- just be alive.