Rejection. Shame. Death. Pandemic.

It has been a minute. It has been a season.

I started this blog and website as part of my personal development journey. Just another in a long list of ‘goals’ that I am continually setting for myself.

There is a pile of goals.

In and among the pile of goals set, achieved, failed, revisited and forgotten, this is the one that is me. This is me being me, and the one I will return to again and again and again.

I don’t write sometimes. But I don’t give up writing.

The best way that I can explain to my children how to not give up, is to share with them one of my first stories of how I learned to change the paradigm.

When I was young, it was so painful to be me, that I barely survived. Sadly, that is not drama, that is just fact. And maybe that is what it feels like for all the humans. I don’t know, because I am only this human. My therapist, however, says I tend to downplay. So for what that’s worth, if we trust her judgement, I am a minimizer and not a drama queen. When you don’t know or can’t say for sure, these points of reference are important.

When I was young, I was already trying to fix what was broken. And of course it was me that was the brokenist. And fixing was urgent. All the time. Urgent. And so I didn’t just do things playfully, like other children seemed to. Rather I tried to do the thing that I thought that I was supposed to do. To fix the broken. Over and over and over and over again.

When I was young, I went on a driving trip with my father to visit relatives in Texas. This was big and exciting and interesting. And I want to say I was maybe 10ish? Young enough to be incredibly awkward, and old enough to remember being relieved that I had something to share about after the school break. Being relieved that, even though we didn’t fly to Aspen or Florida, we went somewhere and did something. (I didn’t know what Aspen was, but the right sort of people seemed to go there. And we were not the right sort of people.)

And so, since we were about to act like a normal family and do a normal family thing, I decided to start another very logical and life changing thing, and keep a Diary!

Obviously this trip was going to change my life, and I was going to be normal people now. Having a diary was going to be proof of that.

I think that I am missing 2 journals from my lifetime, and this is one of them. (Don’t throw your creations away. No matter how awful they seem. Or maybe do, what do I know, I’m too clingy!)

What I wouldn’t give to read those pages! Or maybe not. *Blech.

I knew a few things were important when starting a Diary. Here is what I knew:
I knew a Diary had rules.
I knew it should be pretty and private.
I knew you should write in it every day, or what’s the point?
I knew that you always started with ‘Dear Diary.’

And most importantly, I knew that you filled the pages with fabulous and interesting and pain free stories about your fabulous and interesting and pain free life, and that somehow if you did it the right way, you magically became the fabulous and interesting and pain free person you were writing about.

What I have learned is that what I have in energy and enthusiasm and creativity, I lack in fastidiousness. So this ‘fix it’ plan, like all of the diets and other ways to ‘fix’ me that I started at far too young an age, was doomed to fail. I am not sure that it even lasted the one week trip.

I couldn’t be consistent. I didn’t know what to write. I edited it away before it began.

This was a problem. This is a problem. This is the problem.

So I put writing, and certainly ‘diarying’ away. For years. Mostly.

Except (fortunately) for those school projects, and one in particular, that kept me connected to the skill. My 7th grade ‘me’ book project was a dream to make, and I got an A+++++. I wrote most of it the night before it was due. Not all of it, but a lot. I remember looking at everyone else's books on the day the project was due, and deciding mine was a C for sure. Everyone else's looked like they had been in a craft booking class, like before those even existed. (You know like those wedding invitations where doves and unicorns fly out? Like that.) And mine was just in a floppy, thirty cent report cover booklet, and mostly handwritten. However, I do recall that when told to ‘creatively write’ a story about something, all I could do was stare at a blank page, and think something about a girl and m&ms, but not be able to write a single word on the page. When told to ‘make something’ I edited before I began. A personal project was a glimpse at freedom. A taste.

So I put writing away. For years. Until one day, a magical thing happened, and I changed the paradigm.

Well, first, I did the same old thing again. What we don’t learn from, we repeat.

When I was 18, and still a baby at life, I went off to college. Away from home. College. In many ways this will always mark the beginning of the beginning for me. And yet there was still too much sludge to trudge through.

I bet you can see this right....here was another, the ultimate, opportunity to...

Change my life.
To finally become interesting and fabulous normal people.
And certainly, time to try that Diary thing again.
Maybe the last chance, for change. For good.

This time, it will stick! This time it will be different!
This time I will be different!
Swing and a miss. It all went wrong. And oh, Lord, I have that Diary.

It was bad. It was wrong. It was so wrong that though I kept it, I also pasted over the earliest pages with collage. So you know I have it, but it was bad enough to paste over. If you look through those eyes, I didn’t destroy it, but I couldn’t retrospectively bear it either. You know how they analyze, or at least TV tells me, that experts analyze, handwriting to characterize psychological aspects of criminals?

Well this one is a doozie. And you can see the freshman year changes within this new, first, ultimate transformation ‘Diary.’ Fortunately, I never committed any significant crimes.

I repeated all the same, well worn, unsustainable mistakes of old. And I am sure that I almost quit.

But somehow this time it seemed like quitting would be quitting at life.
Last chance. The only way out was through. Through or out. Literally.

Shortly after that fluffy-freshman stage of my life, I came to the conclusion that I was not going to live past 30. I am not sure if this was a decision, or more of a knowing that became a part of me. It came after going off to college as a wide-eyed freshman and giving a ‘normal person’ make-over one last go of it. And failing. After that, not living past 30 seemed like a natural conclusion. It was just sort of a new assumption, a new given, that I carried with me. I think it was something I always felt or ‘knew’ but started to let breathe a little, for lack of ability to stuff it so far down any longer. Like as a strategy, and something I couldn’t really control anyway. So I stopped trying.

It really took the pressure off. No joke.

Suddenly the perfect diary or the perfect life it represented, just didn’t matter so much.

Suddenly I could try, and be awkward and have permission to fail. If I was going to die anyway, no other consequences of failure really seemed so bad.

It was a little less painful to be a hot mess. I got to lean into it a little. And as it turned out, it was the 90's. And I started to notice that lots of people were sorts of messes, and sort of OK with it. Kind of like how when you buy a new car, and suddenly you see that there are lots of the same kind of car on the road that you never even noticed before. But there they are. 

Were they there the whole time?

I have this theory about Karaoke. I put people into roughly 4 categories of performers:

Too shy to do anything. ‘Oh my god, I couldn’t!’ (This person doesn’t try. No risk, no reward, they suffer in silence.)Really Fucking Talented! (This person is amazing and everyone loves them, and it doesn’t seem that they even have to be brave to perform. Though I am sure they still are. Brave.)Terrible. But they belt it out and the crowd goes wild. (This person is so brave and awesome, and everyone loves them for owning their terribleness.)Terrible but awkwardly tries to be talented. Awkward. (This person doesn’t want to settle for terrible, but they don’t know how to be awesome. And the result is Awkward. This person is very brave. But the result is painful for all.)

I am, and may always be, number 4.
Awkwardly tries to be awesome.
Pain.

Until I went to college and discovered a whole generation of people not from my borderline Stepford neighborhood, who were a bunch of number 2s or 3's, or 1's even. Terrible, or awesome, but either way, they were just belting it out, or not, because they didn’t need to try to be anything or anyone else. They somehow got the memo way before me that the game was rigged. And they could just reject the game.

The only way to win the game is not to play.

Mind. Blown.
Paradigm Shift.

Of course there was still a kind of an outsider to the outsiders thing going on here. All the others seemed like they got the memo at birth. And so in a weird way, I was still trying to catch up. (If you are ever trying to catch up with counter culture, I suggest you awkwardly join the college radio station and skulk around in corners at parties chain smoking Camel Lights in Doc Martens for a long while, until one day it seems like you’ve always been there, and you pick up enough scraps of the language to communicate.)

All of a sudden a Diary didn’t seem so important or relevant. In fact it became more of a relic of something that I was trying to be.

But this time I didn’t give it up. I evolved it. I let it become a journal.

With a new set of rules:
1. The first rule of journals is there are no rules!
2. You never have to start with ‘Dear Diary,’ but you can if you want to.
3. You don’t have to write every day, but you can if you want to.
4. It is better if it isn’t edited, but you can if you want to.

You can stop and start as much as you want. It can be anything you want it to be. It is there to serve you and not the other way around.

There. Are. No. Journal. Rules.

“Trace or Transformation?” My College Art History Professor published a book about photography by that title, and I have never forgotten the sentiment.

Did the journal change me? Or did the journal record the change of me?

Either way. Paradigm shift.

And it has served me well.

When I tell this to my girls it is just a simple example:

“Hey kids, you know I have this example of how I learned not to quit stuff when it didn’t fit me. I used to write a Diary, but that didn’t work for me, so I called it a journal, and I changed the rules. The most important thing about this is that I didn’t let the way it didn’t fit me, keep me from doing something that I might really like or be good at, just because the rules didn’t fit me or I couldn’t fit the rules. Almost nothing feels good or natural when we are trying it on, but if we keep doing it, we find a way through.”

I had a really hard winter. Several things and people have quit me. Through my lifetime, and in the past few months. But I have lived way past 30. And I am living by a new set of rules.