How to Build Resilience to Depression

I wrote this piece for the local newspaper!

As we’ve attempted to settle into post-pandemic life, the mental health crisis continues to rage. According to a review by Boston University School of Public Health, rates of depression in the United States have risen from 9 percent, pre-pandemic, to 33 percent in 2021. 

With depression affecting one in three people, odds are you know someone, or you are someone who is suffering with depression. Here are a few principles that have been shown to help build resilience to and aid recovery from depression.

Aliveness instead of happiness. Andrew Solomon wrote, “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality….” Depression is a sense of internal deadening. Cultivating a sense of aliveness means building our ability to be present with the full spectrum of emotion. You can get started with this practice by thinking of the last time you felt fully alive and engaged in a moment. Maybe it was getting into the wintery ocean, or being in deep conversation with a close friend. Now think about a time when you chose to numb a feeling, maybe with food, alcohol, TV, sex or staying overly busy. For many of us, the numbing behavior is our default and aliveness must practiced.

Pay attention. However one chooses to do this (meditation, prayer, journaling, daily reflection, etc.), the act of noticing and processing the events of our day, leads to an increased sense of well-being. Regularly seeing a talk-therapist is a guided practice in paying attention. Whether you decide to seek a professional guide or start something on your own, paying attention to the experience of your life is key. 

Be curious. Curiosity, as a mindset and skill, might be the most useful tool in mental health recovery. If depression is deadening, curiosity provides an opening through which light can enter. There is a lot of pressure in our current culture to optimize every aspect of our day. But, instead of self-flagellating over missing a day of exercise or numbing with one of our vices, the practice of curiosity allows us to notice our shortcomings with compassion. Curiosity doesn’t condemn. It asks Why?, and How? and looks into our internal life with wonder.

My Wish For 2023

Last Fall I read My Side of the Mountain to River. It’s a novel about a boy who leaves the city to make a home in the woods on the site of his great-great grandfather’s failed farm. He builds a shelter by burning out the trunk of a great hemlock tree and he steals a baby falcon from its nest and trains it to hunt for him, though the companionship it provides seems infinitely more valuable. I don’t know how the story ends. River lost interest and we moved onto another book. But I think about the little boy on nights like tonight as the snow is piling up in great mounds around our warm house and the wind is heaving it here and there while I sit next to sleeping, fevering River on a queen-sized bed. There is a beauty to this moment that matches the tick-tick-tick of gently falling snow on a hemlock tree. 

I subscribe to Meg Conley’s SubStack newsletter, titled, “Homeculture.” She writes passionate and artful essays about women, home, money and care. She was recently banned from Twitter after she published a piece entitled, “This is a rant about beds at work” criticizing Twitter (and Elon Musk) for installing bedrooms for employees, encouraging them to work too late to go home.  She writes, “The consequences at an individual level are staggering, but this extends well beyond each employee to partners, children, roommates, even pets. It matters when a person is pulled from our lives.”

The rendering of the bedroom/office, which she quips, looks like an “IKEA showroom behind a 2022 Iron Curtain,” feels immediately eerie to me. It’s a corporate jail cell. And to what end? What exactly are we building and for whom?

I believe this is a question worth consideration as we set New Year’s resolutions and intentions. To what is my life a tribute? 

Those who know me, know I struggle to sit idle. If I have the TV on in the evening, it’s for the pleasant hum of its company more than the repose of entertainment. Rest days are my worst days. I need them every now and then but I still haven’t figured out how to rest without ending up in a mini-ditch of depression by the end of the day. So this is not a treatise for idleness. I like work. I like creating. I find great meaning in all of it. 

I’m not sure what my most meaningful work will be at the end of my life. What will “people” remember me for? What will my people remember me for? Oprah teaches that our most meaningful legacy will be the lives we touch, because we have no idea how our influence will fan out into the universe though those lives. 

I have this one very meaningful life lying next to me asleep. I must admit I am wrapped up in him. He is the one thing that pulls me away from my work (work being the other ways I hope to influence the world). My work life is wrapped around his schedule so I can do school pick up and drop off as often as possible. I cooked German pancakes for him daily this fall because first grade has been hard for him, and I wanted him to have the extra protein to get through his day. He is the one being in my life I know most intimately and yet he feels strange to me at times. He’s always changing, always coming home with something new to learn about or iron out or build up. 

What will the world be like for him? Does an Elon-Musk-work-cell await him? Surely not. This boy—who loves the mountains and dinosaurs and chemistry and Christmas—he will be a park ranger or an environmental scientist someday. He, just like me, needs air and curiosity and love to breathe.

Who is John Gault? This secret phrase is uttered between the titans of industry and the disenfranchised in Ayn Rand’s influential novel, Atlas Shrugged. John Gault, who begins as an enigmatic representation of “good-values” productivity, ends up being an actual person who has abandoned the world to its destruction and created his own society of like-minded individuals in a hidden location in Colorado. His created city is a sort of promise-land bunker for the few who are depicted as truly capable of supporting themselves in his closed society.  

When I was a 20-something, going to PA school, preparing for a life of meaningful productivity and taxes, I identified with the John Gault dream. At the time I was married to a man who listened constantly to the incessant ranting of conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. I was naive, and I took their salacious fear-mongering to heart. I felt I needed protection—me!—a middle class white woman (arguably the most protected of peoples). The only thing I needed protection from was the patriarchy which fuels these mens’ hatred and lines their pockets.

When I became a mother I changed. I started to notice the toll that fear took on my soul. To believe that everyone around me was trying to take what was mine—to see the masses as indolent and lazy and evil—it was bitter and foul and the more I tasted it the more I knew I had to spit it out.

Maybe this is why we need mothers now more than ever. We need mothers to step out of their kitchens, minivans, daycare centers, therapy offices, true-crime binges, yoga retreats and corporate ladder-climbs and enter the public discourse. Mothers see that our world is a mother. The same gravity that magically keeps us bound to her surface, binds us together. Our very molecules are in constant relationship to each other through electric and gravitational pull. There is no bunker, no secret city in Colorado, no private hemlock in the woods that can sever these connections. We cannot abandon each other. 

This is not a call to action for women with children. It’s a call for all of us to reconnect with the part of ourselves that knows nurture, that sees the commonalities between us and feels connected to how much we need one another.

Mothers are the ones who can see this much more palatable, even sweet, truth: People are good. We are good. I am good. You are good. We are good inside. The things we ache for are the same things they ache for, and the same things that boy from My Side of the Mountain ached for: air, curiosity, and love. We want freedom to be with those we love, to do something we feel matters, and a sense that the world is open to us.

This is my wish for 2023: That we see the humanity in our fellow humans. That we embrace love over fear. That we stop putting our faith in the fear-monger. That, together, we be free. 

I See Light Because I See Shadow

I just finished watching Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu this week. It’s the true crime story of a horrific murder that occurred in American Fork, Utah in 1984. The perpetrators of the crime were a couple of Mormon men who became interested in fundamentalist Mormon principles and began to practice them. The series is based on a book by Jon Krakaur that I’ve never read, but the portrayal in the series does an excellent job of showing how the generally accepted teachings of the church, might lead its members to accept acts and opinions and rules that, when carried out fully, are actually quite offensive to even the most devout. 

The Mormon church is the church I grew up in and the church I participated with fully from birth until age 35, but I was somewhat protected from that end of the continuum because I was raised by fairly liberal parents (depending on your frame of reference) in a community that was not predominantly LDS. My dad is a deep and critical thinker, university professor, descended from Mormon pioneers. But he had a grandmother who left the church around the turn of the century, when her husband, John Whipple, wanted to take on a second wife. She left him and she left the church. She found a new husband and took her two adult sons to homestead a farm in Southern Idaho.

Her name was Melissa Charity Adams, and she was my Grandpa Whipple’s grandmother. She was described as stubborn and not particularly generous by my grandpa. My grandpa was not raised in the LDS church, but he grew up surrounded by Mormons in Southern Idaho, and while they did not participate in the local church, his parents adhered to a high moral code. 

My grandpa was baptized into the LDS church in the Pacific Ocean after the end of World War 2. He was stationed in Southern California and my grandma joined him there, where they lived in a converted chicken coop until he was released from the service. I’m not sure what influenced my grandpa to get baptized, but I suspect it pleased my grandma and he had no intention of violating the covenants that were required; he may have even been a believer, of this I’m not sure.

Suffice it to say, one of the main diversions his family had from general Mormon culture of that time, was that his family was shaped by a strong matriarch, his grandmother. Perhaps this is something that appealed to my grandma. My Grandma Whipple, had a similar story in her family history with a different outcome. Her grandmother faced a similar situation around the same time, the turn of the century. 

My Grandma Whipple’s grandmother, Susan Tucker, also had a husband who wanted to take on a second wife around the early 1900s. He married the daughter of a friend, a woman who was much taller and more gregarious that my great-great-grandmother. They were living in Wyoming at the time where polygamy was not accepted by the general culture, so her husband and the new wife had to flee to Southern Idaho, leaving behind Susan and my great-grandmother, Zella, who was only 12 years old at the time. 

Years later Susan and Zella followed him to Southern Idaho, bringing only one piece of furniture, the piano that stands today in my living room. Zella begrudged her father. This I know because my dad knew his grandmother and he heard her speak, with contempt, that her father, “Traveled with a pillow under his arm,” between the houses of his two wives.

This is what I know of my family. My family has seen the light and shadow of the “gospel” enough to recognize that it is not all light. Some might argue that Mormon men practicing polygamy after the practice was officially banned by the church is not a reflection of the gospel. In the word’s truest sense, I would agree—gospel means good news. But in the sense of the way life actually plays out, these men were empowered by a system that told them their desires were paramount to their wives and sanctioned by God. Whether we call it culture or doctrine, similar themes were played out starting in the days of Joseph Smith.

Going back to the storyline of Under the Banner of Heaven, the writers skillfully weave together the perspectives of three groups: the modern, devout, LDS members; the tribe of men moving from the fringe of mainstream Mormonism to fundamentalism; and those entirely outside of the church. As the story progresses it becomes increasingly apparent to me that what most put people in jeopardy, what most deluded and darkened their sight, was the inability to examine shadow.

The culture of the mainstream LDS church has mostly been to avoid looking in the shadows. Much of the church’s early history has been honed down to, what is now the official telling of the stories, and anything outside of that can feel dangerous to members. I say this because it felt dangerous to me. 

But to avoid the shadow is to avoid half of life, half of intellect, half of feeling, half of experience, and it’s easy to see how this can muddy discernment. In the years since I’ve stopped participating in the LDS church, I have not looked for dirt. I’ve never been a history-buff sort of person, before or since. I have never had much enthusiasm for church history and there are people on both sides of the argument, for or against the church, who would criticize me for this. It simply does not interest me as much as what is happening in front of me right now. 

…Which brings me to what is happening in front of me right now. 

The most moving scene, for me, in the Under the Banner of Heaven series was in the last episode. Dianna, who escaped execution only because she fled the state with her children to escape her physically abusive and wildly egomaniacal husband, returned to attempt to rescue her sister-in-law, Matilda. She completes the rescue, but they are caught by the younger brother of their husbands at a gas station. On-lookers stand by as he physically attempts to force Matilda into the car. On-lookers. Stand. By. 

Dianna, in a show of emotional strength, yells to her brother-in-law, calling him weak. She implores Matilda to break free, to show him her strength. In that moment, Dianna is transformed into a beacon-warrior, not because she physically fights, but because she speaks the truth. She knows the shadow and she knows her strength. 

But instead of this moment feeling triumphant, I feel a hollow ache in my chest as I watch. These women would never have been here, so deep into an insane situation, except for the years of training and coaching and counseling to avoid the shadow. Don’t look in the dark places, don’t listen to the anger, don’t give voice to the shame. Smile, and be quiet, and look like we expect you to, and answer the questions the way we expect you to, and don’t ask the questions that would require us to look into the dark. In short, don’t trust yourself, trust us--whoever us may be.

I had no reason to violate these admonitions. I believed it all. I lived it all. When I left the church it was because I was confronted by the shadow; it came to me, in the same way it came to Dianna in this series. I saw, what seemed to me, subtle, at the time, but now feels enormous and looming—the shadow of misogyny, colonialism and bigotry—woven throughout church doctrine and culture.

I’m not writing this to disparage the church. Many of my most important and loved people are still very much aligned with it. I am writing this with hope that we can embrace the strength that comes from examining the shadow and rid ourselves of the weakness produced by hiding from it. 

We all have light and shadow inside of us—all people, organizations, organisms and entities. This could be said of the deer that, in seasons, overpopulate and overgraze the landscape, bacteria which in one setting are helpful decomposers and in another, infect and colonize the body to the point of death. Even personality traits carry light and shadow! Of course they do. The introvert shines at quietly filing his alone time with meaningful projects and pursuits, but shies away from public speaking or parties. The extrovert struggles to be alone. 

Carl Jung wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” Avoiding the shadow only gives it more strength. But we do avoid it because it is uncomfortable. Self-examination is uncomfortable. 

So last week in The Artist's Way we were encouraged to explore our negative emotions, to begin listening to them. And this week we are talking about integrity. The link I want to make clear here is that unless you are willing to explore the shadow, you will always be out of integrity. If the shadow is ignored it automatically creates a facade, so this is constant work.

Just yesterday, for a moment, I wished I could return to my previous life, where everything was laid out before me and simple, and I only needed to endure to the end to be richly rewarded. I, like Eve, now live in the lone and dreary world. I make my bread by the sweat of my brow. I am daily reminded of the shadow, but my life is not dark. It has become a rich topography of peaks and ravines, forests and deserts, snowy pastures and luxurious seascapes. 

I cannot speak about your experience, only my own. But, for me, I cannot imagine a God, who created this world, filled with so much diversity, so much light and so much in the deep, to have meant for us to skim the surface, not when the landscape of human experience is so vast and rich. There is freedom when I remember I am strong enough and humble enough to trust myself to see the shadow, to explore it and to emerge from it.

I see the light because I see the shadow.

I am terrified of the silence.

As children of mothers with depression, we have to teach ourselves how to cry because there is danger in the sadness. It feels like giant cavern that could swallow me whole, a darkness that I might never escape. So I flitter around saying, I’m fine! I’m fine! and going to parties and talking and drinking the wine. But I am not fine. I am terrified of this sadness. I am terrified of the silence. 

I have not learned to trust the silence. So every time I cry it feels like I am touching the hot stove, dropping into the underworld, but I always come back up. Why don’t we learn that lesson as kids? My mother came back up. I have watched her come back up over and over and over again. But I guess when you are twelve, eight years might as well be eternity without oxygen.

I think about River leaving for a couple of weeks and I am gutted. Even though I see we are both tired. We are both needing a change. It’s hard for me to trust it. It’s hard for me to trust that the times we sang, “I’ve got the Redstone in me!” at the top of our lungs will carry us through. How can a Minecraft parody hold us? The dinners we’ve eaten out on the back deck while we listened to the tinkle of the fountain and talked about aircraft carriers. He is getting more patient with me constantly bringing singing and dancing into our Lego war games. He is learning I am simply not a serious soldier. I, like Kermit T. Frog, am more likely to break out of a Russian gulag by putting on a musical than climbing through the sewer or stealing a gun and fighting my way out. 

I don’t blame my depressed mother for my fear. She was doing her best. I do feel recklessly devoted to letting my son see my full range of emotion, because it’s silence I must protect him from. I see it’s silence that puts the big questions in his mind. So I get mad when I have to tell him ten times to put his shoes on. And he cries as he asks, “Why are you rushing me?” And we both see the madness of the rush. We absorb it together for a minute. That minute is everything because it connects us instead of pushing us apart. And then his shoes are on and I am full of frustration, because I’ve told him to put his shoes on 7547 times in the past year, but also wonder—that I get another day with him, that I get to be the exhausted one telling him to put his shoes on over and over again. 

I’ve known for a while that if something happened to Rio, my feisty, loving, little purse dog, the thing I would miss the most is the little “cha cha cha” of his tiny claws on the wood floor. The sound he makes moving around the house. I cannot abide the silence.

So tonight I will drop my son off at his dad’s and say goodbye for a few weeks. And I will come home to sit with the silence. The thing I most fear. It's my work to do, that I've been doing these past five years. I am learning to transform the silence into quiet, which is much less menacing. Quiet is something I can live with. Quiet can hold the sadness.

Walking today

Walking todayI saw a bird in the tree overhead,I heard her first,Belting wildly, naturally,Into her head (or out of her heart).She tipped forward and backOn the branch next to the telephone wireWhich might have felt precarious,Except that, so clearly,She was meant for song and this light.Could you help but love her?Silhouette against the sky,Teaching you to sing with herWhole body, whole life, the momentDawn creeps into the sky?

This came out on the page this morning. Creativity is medicine, my love. It makes it possible to start again over and over and over and over...

Happy Monday!

And please take a look at what starts Wednesday! I'll be taking you through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron this summer. This book, this activity, this exercise can be life changing! It's about unlocking your creativity and confronting fear and it can be useful for anyone who feels they are living, not for themselves, but for anyone or anything else.

Read more here! The Artist's Way: A Summer of Creativity

The Artist's Way: A Summer of Creativity!

R is going to be with his dad a lot this summer. It's okay. It's in our parenting plan. But, whenever I have to go a long stretch without him I go through the five stages of grief (sometimes I can do this in a whole weekend!). So for my own sanity and because I so love this book, I'm inviting you to do something with me.

Let's read The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron!

If you are creative but feel your creativity lagging, if you used to be creative but haven't used that part of yourself for some time, if you think you might be creative but never really tried--this book is medicine.

And let me be clear, when I say creative, I mean the most broad and inclusive definition. Anything from visual art and writing, to homemaking to computer programming, to just living a creative life. Actually, that last one is the most important to me. And let me define it: living a creative life means living in the way that is most uniquely you, peeling back the layers of culture and socialization to reveal the truest version of yourself.

If that sounds good to you, or even mildly interesting. Grab a copy of this book and follow along with me for the next 12 weeks. I'm envisioning this as a kind of Julie and Julia experience, but instead of mastering the art of French cooking, I'll be going through the creativity exercises each week and posting about my experience.

So here are the ground rules:

1. Be kind to yourself. This exercise does require a little discipline but if I've learned anything from my work in drug and alcohol recovery, it's this--you can't hate yourself anything. You can't hate yourself into being sober, creative, productive, or kind, at least not with any lasting effect.
2. If you fall behind, just pick up where you can, or, if you intentionally set a slower pace for yourself, just come back to the posts when you get time.

That's it. Two rules.

I would LOVE to interact with you on social. Links are below, if you aren't already connected to me in that way. I'm gonna do my best to create Reels and TikToks to accompany the posts each week. And each week will run from Wednesday to Wednesday, so you can look for new content on Wednesday by end of day.

So grab a copy of this book! It's old so check a used bookstore if you like to be thrifty. This is the link on Amazon if you are convenience-motivated! I do recommend you get a paper copy of the book because you will need to refer back to the exercises and practices recommended each week. There is also a journal available--I've done this twice through and never used the journal but it might be nice--lemme know if you like it! And it is available on Audible or audio format, but like I said, the paper book will be nice to refer back to so maybe get both if you are dedicated to listening.

I'm writing this from my bathtub again! That's one of the things I figured out going through her book the last time - water helps things flow for me. So, I'll be here all summer, soaking and writing, and eager to hear about your experience!

We start next Wednesday, June 8 <3

Love (from the tub),

Michelle

Prosperity

The purchase of my house closed on March 9, 2020. The world was shutting down, no toilet paper on store shelves, the streets becoming more and more still on my morning commute. Days before the close, I went to yoga on a Sunday morning at the kundalini studio near my house, and I was the only one who showed up for the class. 

Shar, the teacher, guided me through the kriya, and then at the end we spoke about what came up for me. I told her about how lonely I was, going through this house buying process without a partner, as the world was about to enter a similar state of isolation that I was already feeling on the inside.

I had begun a sadhana (which is the yogic word for daily spiritual practice) doing the Subagh (or Sobagh) Kriya. I was not doing it absolutely daily, but I did it several times each week. The Subagh Kriya is for prosperity, and anyone who teaches it will remind you that there are many forms of riches and prosperity. They will direct you to put your mind on what prosperity means to you. 

I’ll link to the kriya here so you can see what it is like. The word, “Har,” is chanted repeatedly. Har means, “God as the creative infinity,” and the intention of the mantra is to affirm our ability to co-create with God, or the Universe, or whatever name works for the power that is outside us and bigger than us. 

At this point, I'd guess I've spent more than a hundred hours with that kriya, but as I was getting ready to buy my house, I had only been in the practice for a couple of months, imagining the life I wanted to create. Shar was delighted to hear how soon this big piece of my own idea of prosperity appeared after starting that sadhana.

That day, she looked at me with fierce, glittering eyes and said, “You will learn to become very good company for yourself in that space.”

It felt like a prophecy. 

The idea of being very good company for myself began to figure into my own definition of prosperity. I had a direction, something to work for that did not require a partner or family nearby. And since that time I have come back to that over and over again. 

I learned to be good company for myself during long weeks last summer when R was away with his dad. I learned to create little moments of play and luxury. I learned to go to yoga even when I didn’t feel like it because my body would be thankful and repay me in some small way later. 

I learned to feed myself delicious food and put my hands in the soil when I needed a friend. I learned to sit and write long letters to myself on the nights when I could not sleep. I learned to watch TV. I learned to listen for which internal voice was talking, that damn inner critic so often so loud. I learned to take something to help me sleep when I needed it. 

I learned to be less afraid of myself, my choices, my desires. I learned to climb to the roof to look at the stars or watch the sunset for no one’s benefit other than my own. I took myself on dates and vacations. I bought myself nice clothes and allowed myself to change them multiple times a day, so I could wear the right costume to the dog park or the grocery store.

I watched over myself and held my own hair back as I leaned over the toilet on nights of horrifically big feelings. I watched myself panic that something inside of me might be irreversibly broken. I reminded myself that the morning comes. It always comes. And I gently put myself to sleep in the dawn light, made myself a cup of coffee when my son awoke or it was time to go to work, after a night too short. 

This is prosperity--to become very good company for myself!

Sat nam.

It takes imagination.

The Nuvaring

Before I got married, I went to the student health center for a pre-marriage gynecology appointment. I was a student at Brigham Young University (BYU), 20 and a virgin. I didn’t think of myself as prude or naive, but I was probably both of those things. Raised in the conservative Mormon faith, I was taught that sex was sacred, reserved for marriage, but also should be fun (Woo-hoo!), and I was looking forward to trying it out. 

At BYU I heard whisperings of women sent home from the initial gynecology appointment with devices to stretch their vaginas, something to make the wedding night more pleasurable, less painful. I wasn’t particularly worried about pain, I just knew I wasn’t ready to be pregnant.

So I got a prescription for contraception. I knew I wouldn’t be good at taking pills every day so I opted for the once-a-month Nuvaring. My fiancé was a little concerned about being able to feel it during sex, a little ring of plastic resting around my cervix. I hadn’t even considered this, but I felt good about the method I had chosen and I was undeterred.

I imagined putting on sexy underwear beneath my clothes in time for my husband to return home. He would discover this and then we would engage in hot-steamy-sex in whatever room of the apartment we happened to be in. Life never really lives up to fantasy.

Pheochromocytomas

A pheochromocytoma (pheo for short) is a tumor that causes high blood pressure by secreting hormones that are normally secreted by the adrenal glands. Pheos are extremely rare, occurring in <1% of people with high blood pressure. I joined a ragtag Facebook group for people with pheos few years back, and in this group they refer to themselves as “zebras,” after the med school adage that goes like this: “When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras,” horses being much more common than zebras.

I was a zebra. And I had been for several years though I didn’t know it. It was these tumors that caused my chronic headaches and exercise intolerance. The first tumor was discovered in March 2005. I had a nose surgery that I hoped would solve the chronic headaches couple of months before this. During that surgery I became very hypertensive on the operating table and stayed in the recovery room all afternoon, while the attendants tried to get my blood pressure under control. I was lucky I didn’t stroke out that day. 

The initial tumor was discovered after a series of tests and I was advised to use two forms of birth control until it could be removed. They said if I were to become pregnant there was an 80% chance I would die. Since then I’ve looked back through medical journals, and I’m not sure where that statistic came from. There are only case studies of pregnant women with pheos because it occurs so rarely. There are not enough data points for a more robust study. But it was clear to me—pregnancy likely equals death. 

So we started using condoms in addition to the Nuvaring. 

I had three more surgeries that year to remove what ended up being four tumors total. One tumor remained. It was located on or in my heart (difficult to determine on cardiac MRI at that time) and I was terrified. It felt like a precarious place and the distinction between on and in felt important. Because it was small, and in a risky place, they recommended it be monitored rather than removed.

There are only case studies of pregnant women with pheos because it occurs so rarely. There are not enough data points for a more robust study. But it was clear to me—pregnancy likely equals death. 

And I didn’t become pregnant. No pregnancy scares. Nothing. My periods came like clock work. But even after the hormone-secreting tumors were removed, I was advised to continue two methods of birth control as my doctors predicted a high likelihood of recurrence. 

Insurance

The first pheo was removed two weeks before my college graduation. Right after graduation I became a full-time employee of BYU for the marketing department where I had worked as a student graphic designer. Before the tumor, I had plans to return to New York City where I had been the previous summer doing an internship for Young & Rubicam on Madison Ave, but I scrapped this in favor of the excellent employee health plan awarded to full-time 

BYU employees. It covered 90% of my medical bills. 

My husband was bothered that we had to pay for contraception (I think it was $20 per month) and asked me to write a letter to our insurance company requesting they cover the cost of contraception as I had a very legitimate medical reason for using it. 

I wrote the letter; I even had my physician write a letter. It was denied. They generously covered tens of thousands of dollars worth of diagnostics and treatment but NO to a $20/month contraceptive that was, according to all of my doctors, an essential precaution for keeping me alive and safe. 

So we paid for the Nuvaring. And we paid for the condoms. 

Preventing Pregnancy

A year or two after all the surgeries I was chatting with my mother-in-law in her kitchen. I was rattling on about what was on my mind, as I am prone to do. I brought up how I had been considering different forms of birth control and verbally weighed out the pros and cons of each method. 

When I paused she remarked, “I just knew I wanted to have children so I didn’t worry about it.” I believe what she meant by her comment was that it was something completely outside the scope of her experience. She had five children. Maybe she never prevented pregnancy. I never asked about something so personal. 

But at the time, I felt embarrassed for using contraception in the first place. Her comment was a reminder of our shared religion and culture that placed so much emphasis on a woman’s primary role as mother. Mormons do not condemn the use of contraception, but the value placed on a woman’s role as mother is so elevated, I felt I was doing something wrong by preventing pregnancy. I wanted children. But, more than the actual role of mother, I wanted to follow the righteous path. Even with the risk of recurrent tumors, I felt some guilt for playing it safe. Part of me believed I should just have faith, get a family started and hope for the best. Faith precedes the miracle, right?

I wanted the carefree sex lives that I imagined were enjoyed by my friends and family in their early years of marriage.

Another part of me felt envious. This is around the time envy became a quiet companion of mine. You see, sex had already become stressful due to the stakes around pregnancy. I was comfortable on some level with taking reasonable precautions and then letting the chips fall where they may, but my husband was not. He was scrupulous. Understandably so. But I wanted the carefree sex lives that I imagined were enjoyed by my friends and family in their early years of marriage.

Methods 

During my time using contraception (which has been almost the entirety of my adult life), I’ve tried numerous pills, rings, injections and an IUD. Trying the gamut of contraception is absolutely not unusual for women. Contraception has numerous side effects from weight gain and acne to heavy bleeding, depression and mood swings. Most of the women in my life have done the same because, in our culture, prevention of pregnancy falls upon the one with the womb—the one who has the most to lose by incurring an unwanted pregnancy. 

I gained weight and felt impossible depression on the Depo Provera shot. I felt horrible on any of the pills called Tri-. I did better on the consistent low dose pills. But my husband was terrified of impregnating me so any late pill or missed pill threw a wet blanket on our sex life. 

Even then, even while we lived in his parent’s basement, waiting for more tumors to appear, I still enjoyed sex. I just did’t have the freedom around it that I imagined I would—that I wanted.

During those years (more than a decade) I would guess many people within our conservative, Mormon cultural sphere, assumed we had fertility issues. I even had a few acquaintances ask me about infertility directly, like it was common knowledge that was the reason I had no children. I felt guilt around this too. Many of my friends struggled with infertility through those years, and they were looking for someone with whom to share the experience. But that was never the case for me. Our lack of children was due to eleven years of constant vigilance. 

A New Sex Life

I didn’t ever think my marriage was great, but I didn’t think our sex life was part of the problem. I see that differently now. 

Before we separated, and one of the last times I had sex with my ex-husband I told myself, Just enjoy this because it may be the last time you get to do this for a long time—and I did. In the event we divorced, I was planning on keeping my temple covenants by not having sex outside of marriage. I also still carried the belief that masturbation was a sin, so I was preparing for a sexless life.

The sexless life was okay for me for about six months after I separated. During that time, I was extremely stressed and terrified of all the kinds of divorce-related repercussions that might be headed my way. I worried about my physical safety. I worried about how I was perceived by friends and family. I worried about finances. I was working and caring for one-year-old son. Sex was the last thing on my mind.

But I remember when I started to notice I had a natural sex drive. I have to chalk it up to being natural because I definitely wasn’t looking for it. Esther Perel, psychotherapist and best-selling author wrote, “Eroticism is not sex per se, but the qualities of vitality, curiosity, and spontaneity that make us feel alive.” This tracks. I started to sift through my experience as a wife as I was getting out of the marriage. I became very aware of how I had become a shell of a human during those years. I was a walking to-do list, measuring life by accomplishments rather than joy. The weekends felt pressured as I tried to check off the box marked FUN.

I became curious about what would bring me back to life.

I became curious about what would bring me back to life. I was a vibrant and joyful child, and I wanted to reclaim that. So, like I said before, this absolutely tracks with Perel’s definition of the erotic. I began to focus on the present moment, in part because future and past thinking was gnarly enough to demand a reprieve! I found joy in those little moments, sensory experiences like eating breakfast, walking with my son in the stroller at night under the stars and the palm trees, putting my feet into the sand, letting the freezing winter ocean swirl around my ankles and toes. I was moving out of my head and into my body in those moments.

I waited a year and a half after our separation to start dating. I felt like enough time had passed that I was ready to move into the next relationship. I was so wrong. But, I was ready to start that process. 

I had a conversation with one of my close friends who had pre-marital sex experience (being as I had none!). Sex had been on my mind, but I also felt that desire in my body, to my core. I had been putting it off because I didn’t know what to do with it. I brought up masturbation because I was trying to figure out what to do with my sex drive as I had no outlet. She had a different opinion than I expected. She believed there was a place for masturbation. And she sort of gave me the permission slip I felt I needed to explore that which had always been forbidden, and so forbidden in my mind, I didn’t really even know how to do it. 

I sat with that for a while. Around that same time, I learned that the paraganglioma tumor in my neck was growing (paraganglioma is just a broader term for neuroendocrine tumors like mine). It was not secreting adrenal hormones like the pheochromocytoma had, but it was growing— a little reminder that life is precious, and I am not permanent here. As I said before, the whole divorce brought the preciousness of MY life to the surface. The fact that I had spent more than a decade (a decade I didn’t plan to live through at its beginning) in a marriage that didn’t make me happy seemed to punctuate time, but also life LIVED during that time, as the most precious commodity.

Sex was always a good thing in my life, even if it had never been a great thing. I wanted to explore it further. Yes, there was a part of me that was that casual about it. But there was also a deep longing in me, something beyond simple horniness. A part of me knew that it would be healing, but I resisted this because of the covenants, because of the garments I wore every day reminding me of those covenants, because I loved going to the temple, I loved my faith, and my community at church. All of that was on the line—if I chose sex. For the first time in my memory, I chose my desire over all of those other things.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands

I left my ex-husband once before in 2010. I felt unseen, unheard and uncared for in my marriage. But I took him back after two weeks for a couple of reasons. The first and most powerful was fear. I believed no one would want a 27-year-old, divorced, cancered woman.  That is what my culture of origin taught me. The worst thing I could be is a spinster. Divorcé wasn’t even on my radar of possibilities. 

And it stemmed from purity culture, like it or not. By purity culture, I mean placing high value on virginity. For example, teaching young women that losing their virginity effectively turns them from a fresh stick of gum into a wad of disgusting used gum. Even though I had followed the rules, I knew in my LDS community, I would be much less desirable as virginity, this one, pristine quality had been lost in my first marriage. I wanted children and a husband, and I believed that if I ended this marriage I would never have an opportunity for those things. 

The second reason was because I was convinced by my bishop (male clergy) and some family members that the problem had been that I was unclear in my communication. My ex claimed that if he had only known how I felt and what I wanted, things would have been different. He believed I kept those things from him. And it was believable to me because of the great lengths I had gone to keep the peace! I knew I had quieted some of my important desires. With the time that has passed, I now see that I had not been secretive or withholding of my desires. Simply put, a girl learns to stop asking when the answer is always No.  

I was convinced to reunite with him, and this was again related to the culture around men and women. Women are taught to expect to be patient with their husbands, to understand that men are not emotionally evolved creatures. I read Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands in my first year of marriage. I think my husband recommended it. The premise of that book is that if a woman is unhappy in her marriage it’s most often her own fault, and what she needs to do is be nice to her husband (care for and feed him and put out) and happiness will flow. 

I’m not a man hater. I love men. But also, that advice is complete horse shit. I did my best to properly care for and feed that man for years. And what I received in return was the blame for his inattentiveness. After all, we can’t expect men to be responsible for their thoughts about the naked female form, about their roll in unwed pregnancy, sometimes even sexual assault and rape, so how could I expect this man to know how to listen to me? It’s not in his chromosomes.

...how could I expect this man to know how to listen to me? It’s not in his chromosomes.

It seemed that it was also my job to carry responsibility for the success of household communication. And more precisely, to do it without being a nag, and initiate sex but only at the right time, and to pursue career and personal interests, but only as it aligned with husband’s wants and needs and his picture of womanhood.

So I invited him to move into my apartment after two weeks. He seemed repentant and I was the eternal optimist. It was almost instant after that when he began to punish me with silence and a cold shoulder. After all, it would take HIM a long time to forgive ME….for what? I guess for wounding his pride and humiliating him in front of the very small handful of people who knew about the split.

I took Celexa, an antidepressant, for about six months after the split. It took the edge off of my anxiety, made it easier for me to tolerate my wintery partner and almost impossible to have an orgasm. I regret it now because I didn’t need to be medicated into docility. I was appropriately outraged, wounded and bereft.

Optimism

I accepted that my wagon was eternally hitched to this man. He didn’t want children for many years. Not yet, he would say and then name a dollar amount we would need in the bank or the completion of school, or money for a house, and then retirement…it was always something. 

He told me just before we conceived our only child that he thought he was too selfish to have kids. I insisted we proceed, but I think he was being honest. Again, culture around men influenced my thinking. I expected men to be selfish creatures, their wild nature meant to be domesticated and improved by a wife and children. Insisting upon this next step was my role.

I was 31 at the time, and I felt my biological clock ticking. I also felt the foolishness of all of those years of, what ended up being unfounded, fear about my tumors. Plus, I was the eternal optimist, blindly hoping that a child would give him a reason to think of someone else, even if having a wife, even a wife with life-threatening illness, couldn’t. 

That sounds like I’m answering a biggest weakness question in a job interview. You know, when they want you to state what’s wrong with you so you twist a strength into the format of a weakness, something like, “I just work so hard it makes other people uncomfortable sometimes.” But the dark side of being an optimist is it is tied to the belief that, I am exceptional. I believed I had some power to transform this indifferent creature into a good husband and father. I believed I was special.

He saw me as a wife in the conventional sense, as a helpmeet, a vessel, a source of labor and income and dinner and grocery shopping. And this is why I left. The more I tried to be myself the more clear it became that there was no space for me outside of my designated role.

Why am I choosing to share this very personal story at this time?

Excellent question. I’d love to tell you. I suppose some of my readers are voyeurs and only want the dirt on my life and my marriage. I didn’t write this for them. I wrote it with hope that this meandering tale of marriage, contraception, sex and womanhood would build imagination in my readers. Imagination is the first ingredient for empathy.

I never spent any time studying feminist issues until about three years ago. I didn’t like or identify with the word feminist. It felt like a word for loud, annoying women who want to be men and don’t value family and children. I was raised in a family and religion that places the highest value on those connections, so that definitely wasn’t me, until I realized how those values (the ones I possessed) had, in a very real way, marginalized me directly.

I suspect that some women feel the way I used to feel about “feminist issues” such as abortion, access to contraception and access to sex education. Simply put, it doesn’t affect me directly, so I don’t want to think about it. I get that sentiment deeply—in my bones. Most women I know have a lot on their plate. They are properly feeding and caring for husbands, children, extended family, neighbors, congregations, and communities.

I was raised in a family and religion that places the highest value on those connections, so that definitely wasn’t me, until I realized how those values (the ones I possessed) had, in a very real way, marginalized me directly.

I don’t personally have any experience with abortion, and yet, I found myself crying in the car on my way to work after I learned about the leaked Supreme Court document that revealed a plan to reverse Roe v. Wade.

Let me explain. Women have been socialized to be a vessel. We have been socialized to believe that our central purpose is our use and our highest value is selflessness. What greater act of selflessness is there than to become a mother? A woman gives over her body, her sleep, her food, her earning potential and her hobbies to bring a baby into the world. Sometimes she must sacrifice her friends, her family of origin, work, colleagues, or possessions because she has a baby. It is beautiful. It is important. It is an experience I absolutely wanted for myself. 

The problem is that not everyone gets to do in the way they imagined. I think most of us imagine having a baby with a loving partner, someone who can support us through those major sacrifices. But we don’t all get that. I’m not sure that it’s even a majority of women who get that. 

My ex-husband has always loved our son. He always wanted to be involved, but he didn’t ask to get up in the night to help with feedings and he wasn’t the first one to jump up when the baby needed changed. I didn’t expect him to. I assumed that role. And I took it because I was socialized to do so, by my culture, but also by him who had required for so many years that I provide HIS care before the baby even came. 

I wanted to be a good wife. I believed a good wife was patient, easy-going, selfless, quiet, and small. And I did my damnedest to embody those things. Sisters, do we really believe the pinnacle of the feminine being is without a self? 

For my 20s I struggled because I was not living life for myself. I thought I was going to die of cancer by age 26 so I focused on my role as wife and tried make things easier on my someday-to-be-grieving-widower. At the time I could see that I should be living like I was dying, making the most of my time left on earth (however one does that!). But this was an impossible puzzle, because what I wanted was to be a good wife and a good wife is selfless. The resentment of this paradox festered within me. I wanted to live and I wanted to be good, but to be good, I had to be self-sacrificing. 

When my ex-husband and I started to talk in earnest about divorce, I remember he said to me one night that I had to let all of that resentment go in order for our relationship to have a chance. He was absolutely right, and I knew it. And beyond all reason, when I offered up that resentment to god, because I had no idea how to rid myself of it, it vanished instantly. It was replaced with a keen sense of what was true in the present moment. What was true was that my husband had no intention of giving me space in our relationship to have a self. What was true is that if I stayed I would shrink to nothing, like one of Ursula’s emaciated shrimp that litter the floor of her sea cave. 

Since that realization, my life has opened up. It happened gradually, but I started to believe that if god loved me as much as I loved this little boy (or even more), then my happiness might matter. That was actually my big feminist awakening. I was holding my son in the rocking chair as he nursed from a bottle and peered back into my eyes. It was a picture of selfless motherhood, mother love. Maybe it’s poetic that that is when I could finally hear the voice of my heavenly mother, the divine feminine. She told me I was important. As important as this baby boy in my arms, as my husband, as my father, as my grandfathers, as any man who has ever walked the earth or ever will.

It happened gradually, but I started to believe that if god loved me as much as I loved this little boy (or even more), then my happiness might matter.

I know we have laws for a reason. I hate the idea of killing babies. I hate the idea of abortion. I don’t think anyone, or rather extremely few (to eliminate hyperbole) feel joy about abortion.  Most of the women I know that feel strongly about abortion believe in a higher power. They love babies, others and their own. They are trying to be good and do good in the world. They are kind. They are ambitious and generous and they’ve got grit. 

My argument is that what women are asking for is not unreasonable. It’s not unrighteous. It’s simply to have the ability to direct their lives, to have babies when they are ready to have babies, to explore their ambition and creativity and vitality. 

Sex After Divorce

I chose to break my temple covenant, not because I was horny and needed an outlet, but because I felt like I was missing out on precious years of my life. I was compelled to claim my own sovereignty. I wanted sovereignty over my life in all ways. I wanted to feel the full impact of my choices. I wanted to be completely awake and alive. 

Me! Who never questioned the church, my marital vows and covenants, the culture that told me my needs were secondary if they were to be considered at all. I was complicit with all of those things for 35 years. I lived those values.

I found a man to date who was interesting and interested in me. Our physical relationship progressed quickly. I found myself drawing imaginary lines around parts of my body, places clothes had to remain, the same way I did when I was making out with my high school and college boyfriends. All the same it lit me up in an entirely new way and I found those lines slowly disappearing. 

I was terrified. I was still wearing my temple garments. I was still attending church. I didn’t even have proper panties! I was trying to figure out how to honor myself within the confines of my religion. But I gave myself the space to explore and figure out what was right for me. Sex after divorce was incredibly healing. I needed that experience. I needed to give myself the grace to be awkward, but also hot, sensual, complex and adventurous. I needed to feel whole as a woman. Sex was exactly what I needed, when I needed it.

It was my new partner’s unmitigated enthusiasm for my body that transformed me. He was a completely new exploit. I had only dated Mormon men previously, and Mormon men who were trying to stay inside the same imaginary lines I was. This man had no lines. It was freedom I had never experienced.

For most of my sex life, I was criticized—only in small ways, but a multitude of small ways. The hair on my body, that grew from my nipples, was unexpected. My vulva was described as, “so weird” (…that’s right…So weird.) I tried to make sense of that. I had no vulvas for comparison, except my mom and sisters, and I had never examined their parts up close. At the start, I was pretty sure my genitalia was in the neighborhood of normal. But years and years of anything will create ruts in the mind that are hard to grade out.

My new partner looked up at me once from between my legs. I had made some mildly apologetic comment about the state of something down there. He said point blank, “Michelle, this is a world-class pussy.” That moment is cemented into my mind. I remember the part of the bed we were on, the time of day, the lighting—I remember because it was healing.

A big, lingering question was answered: Am I defective? No.

Imagination

I used my imagination to open up life for myself. But I had lots of practice with imagination before that. For all of my 20s, I used my imagination to relate to the women around me. Women who had what I wanted. Women for whom life dealt the hand they more or less expected, a supportive partner, to raise babies with. I used my imagination on their behalf as I watched them face miscarriages and difficult pregnancies, infertility and too many children too soon. I used my imagination to care for them as they faced these difficulties, all while I waited for my own motherhood story to unfold.

It feels like a great tragedy when women don’t use their imagination on behalf of their sisters with other types of difficulties than the ones they’ve faced. I felt compelled to tell my own story so completely because I have realized that I, too, sometimes lack imagination, and I have particularly in the past. What I mean by that is I had a lot on my plate. I didn’t have the mental or emotional space to consider stories of women I didn’t know and, because I was in a fairly homogenous culture, the women I knew, were mostly facing the same things.

Now think about your own story, if you were to write an essay like this. Wouldn’t it take paragraphs and pages to flesh out the complexity? 

• How you thought about sex before you tried it. 
• What your first experiences were like.
• How you navigated sexual desire and its relationship to your own worthiness.
• Finding partners or not finding partners.
• How you handled menstruation, contraception, pregnancy and post-partum. 
• Even things like sexual assault and childhood mistreatment.
• Devastating miscarriages and the shame around an unwanted pregnancy.
• And what about menopause? I’m not even there yet and my story is already long.

Life is messy. How can we legislate the creation of life? Something so personal, something so ancient, something so sacred. Legislation around abortion is something, I am convinced, we as a society would not tolerate, if we had not been, for millennia, swimming in the ideology that a woman, at her highest use, is a vessel. 

My appeal is for the women who read this: Would you lend your imagination to the women who have walked a very different road than you? Would you consider that the lines religion draws around this very personal, ancient and sacred part of life, might not be universally applicable? Making abortion illegal places almost all of the risk of sex on the partner who has the womb. Sex. Something that is also so personal, so ancient, so sacred.

Abortion is only one part of a much larger sifting that is taking place right now. I have a Ruth Bader Ginsburg calendar on my kitchen wall because, without her, after my divorce, I would have needed a male cosigner to buy this house. I would have needed a male cosigner for my credit card, my bank account. She paved the way for me to attend college and graduate school on equal footing with my male peers. I am paid a good salary, equivalent to my male peers, and I had maternity leave and did not lose my job when I chose to have a baby, thanks to RBG and people like her. My life would look very, very different today had our legislative process gone differently in the 20th century. The lives of all women would.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how life might have been different for you. What would it cost you personally to put down the stone, and write in the sand while the crowd disperses? To give a woman her freedom? It takes a willingness to see oneself as human and fallible. 

It takes imagination.

Something good :)

Writing poetry about hard things is easy in a way.

But, what about that whisper from inside that says good things are coming?

The things you've waited for, even silently, as they seemed too big to speak?

They are in motion.

They are nearly here.

All you must do is keeping going.

Keep crossing that bridge.

On the other side, it's still just life, but something sweet is there waiting.

My morning pages are usually a list of my mundane worries, to-do list, things I am mulling over for the 64th time. But today this came out! A strangely auspicious premonition...I guess we'll see!

Still, it reminded me of this from Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things:

"Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”

I also made my TikTok debut this week with something very important! I look kind of serious--please! know this is concentration--not me thinking I'm a serious dancer.

https://www.tiktok.com/@michelledwhipple

Who is Heavenly Mother?

Note: This post is a throwback, originally published in June 2019, and it still feels true. Feels relevant to the LDS community right now. Feels relevant to the ongoing struggle for the sovereignty of women. But most of all it feels relevant to my role as mother at this point in my life, as co-creator and a witness to the life of my little one (as he become increasingly bigger!). Happy Mother's Day to the divine feminine in each of us.

I’ve been trying to understand, FOR ME, what is the most useful way to think about God.  In the Mormon theology I was raised with, God is male and usually referred to as Heavenly Father.  Mormonism has the beautiful, and added, benefit of a female counterpart to the male God, termed Heavenly Mother.  The idea is that we are all part of a massive human family with Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and all of humanity as our siblings.  There’s a lot that I like about this model.  It’s reflective of the family structure most of us have experienced so it’s familiar (it can also be fraught for the same reason).  

Little is said of Heavenly Mother in Mormon doctrine and culture.  This has usually been explained to me to be because she is so sacred that Heavenly Father protects her from the profanity of human conversation.  From a feminist perspective, this explanation is infuriating and degrading.  From the perspective one who views herself as a child with heavenly parents, it’s confusing.  Kids need their mom.  Why would you withhold that?  

Maybe strangely, this issue has been of little bother to me for most of my life.  My religious persona has been quite accepting of these sorts of problems and explanations, pushing them under the umbrella of, I’ll understand that better someday.  Sometimes that umbrella is useful because some of these topics can only be explored with time and life experience.  They live like little ghosts in the back of my psyche until an experience brings them to the foreground.  

This past week, I was talking to my parents about a problem, I’ve been trying to figure out for months.  I presented them with my current thinking about it and my dad said, “That seems really sensible.”  To which I replied, “I’m not going for sensible! That’s not how I’m making decisions anymore.  I want it to FEEL right.”  And he, so humbly and happily said, “Oh! Well that’s your mother’s domain.”  He’s so great!  I can’t remember what my mom said to this, but I remember the energy of it, and it was something about self trust.  And I’m going to come back to this in a minute. 

I want to write a little about what I’ve observed in the nature of the feminine.  And to use Elizabeth Gilbert’s term, I don’t want to get “gender-freaky” about this.  I’m talking about the iconic feminine.  

The feminine creates.  This is the energy in the universe that calls to us to experiment and imagine.  To me, the feminine creative energy feels like lying on my back looking at the clouds and seeing figures of airplanes and unicorns.  It’s not overtly practical or directional.  It might even feel superfluous, but, like air, its necessity is recognized mostly by its absence.

The feminine is the ether.  I like to think about this from the perspective of a child in the womb.  We are swimming in the feminine.  She is all around.  Think about the idea of mother earth.  She is the rock, the water, the sky and everything in between all of it.  Maybe this is why we feel close to the divine as we connect with the natural world.  It’s like pressing a fetal hand into the wall of the womb, becoming slightly aware of the being that is carrying us.  The problem is not locating the feminine, it’s becoming conscious that she is all around me. 

The feminine nurtures.  The feminine says, I will go on doing all of this, holding all of this, whether you notice or not, because I am doing it for my own purpose.  This is the subtle strength of feminine care.  All of this carrying and holding and love is not contingent upon outcomes and results, it is intrinsic. 

I’m sure there is more that could be written about this, but maybe that’s enough to nudge your mind in the direction I’m intending.  I’ve been thinking about these things in the context of Heavenly Mother.  And I’ve realized that most of the spiritual practices I’ve adopted this past year are things that put me in the way of this divine, feminine energy.   

Nature. I’ve noticed that one of the most universal ways of connecting with God or finding peace or hearing the inner voice is to be in nature.  While some are getting dressed up for church, many are heading into the mountains or the sea.  Church is sort of a masculine, direct pathway to God.  It’s like following a map to the divine father.  These are my office hours, so to speak.  But nature is always open—curious and diverse and meandering.  I believe this is where the divine mother lives.

My body.  I feel super cool about my body these days, because I feel like it is this beautiful echo of my divine mother’s voice.  I’ve come to experience this in several ways—child birth, exercise, meditation, sleep—but the yoga mat has been an excellent teacher.  There are truths embedded in my flesh that are revealed only when I am paying very close attention and yoga has given me a way to notice them.  Each time I get on the mat, I have to strip away all the expectations of myself for performance.  My intention is usually to listen or to let go—surrender, release, acceptance.  My mind becomes the servant of my body and my spirit becomes the quiet observer.  Teach me, I say to my self—to the part of me that already knows—the divine feminine.

Honesty.  Some of my most powerful connections with the divine, come during intimate conversations.  Isn’t this how it’s always been with women?  While men are hunting beasts and conquering legions, women are in the back room making dinner or folding clothes and talking about the heart of life.  The feminine divine is in these quite conversations, in the quiet honesty.  She is in the utterance of fear and uncertainty and the humble declaration of faith.  The feminine divine can hold all of this—the ugly and the beautiful, the weak and the strong.  It’s all safe with her.  

Art. Honesty is the birthplace of art.  The feminine divine cheers us on as we attempt to excavate those sacred jewels within and bring them into the world.  She is in the music and the poetry.  We do ourselves a disservice by relegating this category of expression to entertainment, because it is so much more than that.  Heavenly Mother is constantly asking us to dance with her, to sing, to write, to draw, because that is the way we can come to know ourselves in the way SHE sees us.  In the same way I encourage my son’s fledgling attempts at creativity, she is doting over my bad poetry, messy relationships and off-key singing with the hope that I will not let the world close my mouth.  

Linger and rest.  The iconic feminine meanders.  My therapist taught me this months ago and it’s something that frequently comes to mind.  The feminine is like the path along the cliff line that has amazing views but takes a little longer.  I’m someone who naturally values efficiency, so it has taken a conscious effort to allow myself to walk the scenic path.  The feminine suggests, maybe it’s okay to just sit here for a while and enjoy the beauty of this place or moment.  Maybe it’s okay to linger.  Maybe it’s okay to take a nap if you’re tired.  There may be miles to go, but there is time and it’s okay to be kind to yourself.  

Now that I better understand the feminine divine, I see that, because of her nature, she doesn’t fit easily into organized religion.  She is too big and complicated for that.  There are no instructions for breathing!  How would you teach someone to inhale?  Yet, I notice very quickly when I am becoming oxygen-deprived. 

So back to my story about the conversation with my mom and dad.  I don’t feel bad that I can’t remember my mother’s exact words because the words were not as important as the feeling.  And this is true to the feminine divine.  She doesn’t write instruction booklets.  She is unstructured and unshaped.  And because of that she can fit into the spaces where other things can’t.    

This is me in the flow: quiet mind, open heart. I think of these moments as glimpses. I just try to catch a peek of that feeling as often as I can. P.S.-- Heavenly Mother thinks SnapChat filters are fun too!

Heavenly Mother is the essence of self care.  A while back, I realized that the only thing that REALLY qualified as self-care—that really worked—was the activities that cleared the crap off of my soul.  The things that helped me to hear my inner voice.  This is Heavenly Mother.  So maybe you can pray to her.  Maybe you can visualize a heavenly being with kind eyes and a loving embrace.  If that’s helpful, then do it!  

My advice on this topic is really DO ANYTHING.  Reach out into the ether and you will find her because she is everywhere and all it takes to access her is a quiet mind and an open heart.  The practices that will be most helpful are the ones that create those two things.  And when you find her, tell me about it because I live for this stuff now! Namaste. 

A few things I know.

Sometimes when I get quiet here it’s because I feel like I don’t know anything. Nothing. And that’s not completely true. So here’s a list of a few things I do know. 

• I know if you are looking for sea glass on the beach, the best place to find it is in the patches of little pebbles. 
• I know that butter and flour and baking powder and salt, mixed together and baked at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes produces crispy, little pillows of heaven (aka biscuits).
• I know that as I get older, my body gets less forgiving and sometimes that means that little aches and pains will never be cured, they will only be managed. 
• I know rainbow painted toenails will make approximately 60% of the general public smile.
• I know that lasting change comes from compassion. 
• I know that compassion for others, only comes after compassion for self.
• I know despite everything, this hunk of flesh in my chest keeps moving and keeps showing me that it is amazingly capable of love.

Moving on.

Sometimes you get an email on a random Tuesday that's really a box of venom and darkness. And it's from someone you can't block. So you write. Not back to them. But to yourself.

Just because you disgust one person, doesn't mean you are disgusting. You are light. You are fire. Burn, baby.

Moving on.

Grieving the life I used to be. 

Everyone is really disappointed, he wrote. 

I said, 

Most of all, me.

February 2022, Michelle Whipple

Moving on, 4.30.22, charcoal pencil and watercolor crayon

A new direction

I've been mulling it over and I've decided to take a slightly new direction in this space. You can still expect essays but I'm going to put a little more emphasis on poetry and art and creativity in general. And joy in the midst of life that's always shifting and challenging and sometimes just shitty. Think smaller posts more often. Okay? Okay. I'm stoked. See you soon.

Seventy

I talked to my dad twice yesterday because it was his 70th birthday, and I couldn’t be there to make him a chocolate sheet cake and spell out 7-0 with candles (because 70 candles would poke too many holes in that delicious frosting!) But that’s probably why I woke up this morning thinking about him. My dad is a wonderful dad, and probably the last thing he would want is for me to write a blog post about him. He is a quiet type in most settings—a known introvert and a person with, what I suspect, is a full internal life.

The memories I have of my dad from my early days are him working out in the garage, building furniture, cabinets, then a new garage, then a barn in the back. He is absolutely a creative type, though he shies away from that label. To entertain his little girls in church, he drew faces on the program with faucets for noses, both silly and accurate. I remember the feeling of his hands, thick fingers with rougher skin than mine.

He loved having girls and always said (and still says) without reservation that he never felt bad for not producing a son. I remember as I was preparing to leave for college, he told me that he wished they had more children because the years we were at home went by too quickly. But my dad, always independent, raised independent daughters. We never felt bound to the place of our birth, in part because of my dad’s example. 

When he left the actual, physical homestead, the one started by his great-great-grandmother and her sons, my dad left to pursue the life and career he wanted, and my grandparents encouraged him to do it. When my parents moved across the country to Tennessee for his first job, my Grandpa Whipple gave my dad a bag full of change and asked him to call along the way. Their family culture was imperfect, like all families, but this aspect has become very important to me—the culture of being held and free at the same time. I believe this was created in the the union of my dad’s parents. I see it in the combination of what I know about their family-of-origin cultures. And it was practiced by my grandparents throughout their marriage: held and free.  

Dad retired from his work at the University of Wyoming around the same time that I left my marriage. For the past few years, many of our conversations have been a commingling of our explorations and experiments walking a new path in a new phase of life. My dad spent all of his adult life until retirement at institutions of learning. I might have expected someone in that situation to want to take a break from new ideas but he has not. When I went through my Brené Brown phase, he read everyone of her books along with me, not because I asked him to, but because he wanted to understand what I felt so strongly about. He has read and listened to many of the things I have spoken about in the past few years, not because I asked him to, but because he wanted to know. 

He coached me through buying my first house, through home repairs during the pandemic when he really wanted to come fix these things himself. He has empowered me, bought me tools, sent me YouTube videos on how to replace my spark plugs, even told me, “Michelle, I am an old man so I have opinions about lots of things but that doesn’t mean they are right for you. Ultimately you are the best person to decide.” He has listened to me, watched me make painful choices, and been interested in how I think about the world and myself and god and the universe as I turn all these things over and examine them closely for the first time. 

I remember sobbing to him and my mom on the phone a few years back when I was sorting through my feelings about my marriage. The world felt so small and scary and tight. He said, “Michelle, you’ve gotta be happy.” After years of my happiness being secondary, if considered at all, it was a permission slip to freedom.

I guess this is the biggest gift from my dad so far—he trusts me. And by doing that, he has been teaching me that I am someone worthy of trust, so I can learn to trust myself. This gift is enormous for anyone, but especially for a woman, and probably the best gift any parent can give to a child.

Happy seventy to my dad! The man who plays war with my 6-year-old over FaceTime. The mountain-biking, 4x4-exploring, builder, craftsman, all-around-handyman, ice-cream-loving champion of me. I am blessed. 

Tis the Damn Season

Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?

I found myself texting this to a friend who casually asked me how it was going? 

Not good. Not good at all. 

I mean, there are good things happening. But I think I wandered into the holidays a little off kilter. You see, I had the double whammy of Halloween and my son’s birthday this year. It’s something we probably didn’t think through very well when we set out the holiday schedule in our first parenting plan. 

These two near holidays fall to the same parent each year and this year, felt like expectations were high. I think five-going-on-six, might be the year when kids become fully aware of and have full buy-in to such events. By this age they’ve got a little track record of their prior celebrations and other celebrations they’ve attended, so they now know enough to get whether they are at a fantastic or weak-ass celebration. 

So the pressure was on.

I did the birthday party at the Air and Space Museum and invited his entire kindergarten class because we are new to these people and still making friends. It was a great success but way outside my comfort zone to invite 25 strangers and their parents to a museum to eat cake and open presents. I walked away feeling really thankful for the community we have with school. It was an enthusiastic, generous, beautiful group of people.

The week before that was Halloween. We did the regular thing of changing costumes last minute but luckily it was to the astronaut costume he wore last year. He wanted to be a fighter pilot originally and when we were looking at costumes, I asked if he thought I should be one too. He liked the idea back then (like late September!) but as Halloween grew closer, he grew out of that age where it’s cool to dress like your mom, so my Lucille-Buster Mother-Boy fantasy slipped away and not only was I not permitted to wear the fighter pilot costume, but he asked that I wear NO costume—just regular mom clothes. 

I now see how this arrow found a weak chink in my armor of self confidence. I started to ask him if he was embarrassed about how I dress. I started to rethink my bohemian Free People clothes, not just for their over-pricedness and impracticality….but was I humiliating my son….who is in kindergarten!?!

It took me a couple of days to shake that off but eventually returned to my usual mantra of, Ain’t no man gonna tell me…not even the short one who lives in my house.

Then I made the theme park mistake. 

For Veteran’s Day we were invited to go to Knott’s Berry Farm with some friends. To understand my tentativeness, you’ve gotta understand my theme park experience. I liked theme parks as a kid, but I was mostly terrified of the rides. I remember huddling on the floor of that giant rocking boat, The Tidal Wave, screaming in terror while my mom giggled and implored me that this WAS fun. 

When I graduated high school, someone advised me to make a sort of bucket list of things to do before I graduated college. Roller coasters were on the list. I grew up in Wyoming so it wasn’t like theme park rides were plentiful, but I had never chanced a ride on a big roller coaster and I wanted to face my fear. I planned a trip to Elitch Gardens in Denver. I took ginger root to ward off any motion sickness. And I rode all the roller coasters. I even paid an extra $15 to ride the SkyCoaster, which was really just a harness attached to a cable, attached to a sky arch. I strapped in with two other people and the harness raised hundreds of feet in the air until the employees counted down and one of the guys I was strapped to pulled the rip cord. We plummeted in a free fall until the cables caught, swinging us gently back up toward the sky. I liked it! It was what it should be—exhiliterating. 

After that I learned I liked rollercoasters!  It was within the same stretch of a few years I found out I had these adrenaline-producing tumors in my abdomen.  A while after they were removed, I remember visiting Lagoon in Utah on a slow night in the Fall. The park was empty and we ran from rollercoaster to rollercoaster and the adrenaline reminded me of how I used to feel somewhat regularly with all those little adrenaline-junkie tumors inside of me. 

It was when I became a single mom that theme parks changed for me. Gosh—the dark Disney Land days of 2019! I bought a discount pass via the military because I was still not divorced.  R and I would make the trip by ourselves, he would refuse to ride 99% of the rides, talk me into spending more money on overpriced toys in Cars Land and then fall asleep in the stroller, leaving me to drink alone in California Adventure, until he woke up and we could walk around for another hour before we got in the car to drive home. Those trips were a lot of work with a very minimal reward and they left me mostly feeling very alone. Dark, dark days indeed.

So in 2020, I declared NO THEME PARKS. Ummmm...I guess so did everyone else. 

So by Fall 2021, I felt like I *should* (always a dangerous word) be ready for another theme park experience. And I wouldn’t be going alone. And I wasn’t driving up and back in the same day. So it *should* have been fine. But apparently everyone thought the same thing because Knott’s Berry was packed! Literally a two hour wait for lunch. If we’d have known, we would have walked out of the park and driven to a nice restaurant and then home! It was sort of a disaster. 

So on the heels of that and in the midst of being a kindergarten parent for the first time, I find myself a little overwhelmed. 

The sun is going down at 2:30pm when I walk out of work. 

I find myself complaining about the cold when it’s 66* (but it’s humid! and there’s a breeze!—people in California are suffering!!!)

After a week-long hiatus from the mom gig, while R traveled with his dad, I thought I would be rested and ready for the business of Christmas. I planned to get a tree ASAP (terrorized by some goddammed article on Apple News that  promised they would be scarce and expensive). I took R to Lowe’s (our traditional California Christmas tree lot, since the mountains of Wyoming are no longer accessible). We picked a good tree and got a few other home essentials followed by a full on Kris-Kringle-meltdown on the drive home because I said it was bedtime and we would have to decorate the tree tomorrow.

Rather than giving toys, I have been taking them away all week because it appears I have given birth to the mouthiest kid on the planet. I am tempted to tell him that I AM Santa just so I can garner some of the awe and fear I deserve! (Don’t worry, I’m not a monster…I won’t do that—but I’m not above shoving his precious toys in the top of the closet if it buys me a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.)

I scheduled family photos this week because the week before Thanksgiving felt too busy (Note: This week was also too busy and there is not a good time to take family photos around the holidays). My friend Nick is an artist with a camera (and a wizard apparently!) because he got several great shots even though I was struggling to look easy-breezy while my kid and dog barely held still long enough for a 1/500 shutter speed in waning light at 4pm. God bless you, Nick. 

I’ve been so out of sorts I took a pregnancy test this morning just to be sure that wasn’t it—it wasn’t. No announcements here! [Including this because it occurs to me that this is something men never have to worry about, holidays or not.]

I’m guessing you are picking up from my tone that I am sort of crash-landing into this first weekend of December, which prompted my initial question:  Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?

In the words of Eleanor Shellstrop: “I mean somebody royally forked up. Somebody forked up. Why can’t I say ‘fork’?”

On Friday I went to the gym today for the first time in two years. It felt kind of gross to me—you know, such a collection point for viruses after the pandemic changed everything. So I was reluctant. But I did back squats and box jumps and hip thrusters and I walked out of there feeling slightly better, which bloomed into decidedly better over the course of a few hours. I suspect because, I finally put the thing that my body and soul had been asking for, for months, at the top of the list—for just an hour. 

I think the holidays are hard because we have the expectation that we can bumble into this darkest part of the year eating garbage food and giving up on the beach body of summer, substituting the religiosity of the holidays for any meaningful spiritual practice. Maybe the extra pounds become the padding we need as we attempt to embrace all the feelings of family and holidays, past, present and future, which, for many of us, are a mixture of beautiful and horrific. 

We stay busy and satiated so we don’t have to feel because some of us are haunted by loneliness and loss. Some of us are compelled to see and talk to people who have inflicted some of our deepest wounds. For most of us, there is a sense of loss that comes with the rift between the life we thought we would have and the one we had to leave behind, or left us behind. 

It feels incongruent with the tinsel T-rex sitting on my bookshelf, the happy-colored lights outside my house, even the nativity of Christ or the victory of the Maccabean army—because those are stories of hope—and sometimes hope feels dangerous.

Cheryl Strayed wrote, “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

Sometimes the holidays feel like a small, quiet room to me, even as I go through the insane motions to make them noisy and crowded. Some of the bustle is just me trying not to notice the small, quiet room. The place where I have to sit with my idea of what I thought my life would be when I was a bright-eyed, silly, enthusiastic, hopeful little girl, and the reality of what it is today, which is actually something much more complex and rich and deep and interesting than what I could have imagined back then. 

That’s hard. It’s forking hard. 

So please, take care of yourself. Let the dark nights and cool whether, drive you to the small, quiet room.

Pain is on the other side of the door. But so is peace.

Kauai is messing with you

This Kauai trip, it's been interesting. I had the extra burden of writing a book while I’ve been here. That has made the trip decidedly less zen than my typical solo retreat. Also mercury is in retrograde. The Verizon tower was down on the North side of the island for a couple of days, plus the energy feels kinda crazy. Like everything been shaken up a little bit. 

But mainly, it’s been windy as hell. And when I say that, I mean literal hell because I cannot imagine a worse eternal punishment than constant, strong wind. When I’ve traveled to other islands in Hawaii, I’ve encountered this [actually—Maui—also windy, also mercury retrograde…hmmm….] but I was able to escape the bluster by going to a different part of the island. That has not worked on Kauai. I don’t know enough about wind and ocean currents and the jet stream and mountains to say why the island isn’t blocking the wind somewhere, but I didn’t find it. 

Waimea Canyon

• 

  Waimea Canyon at the top!

Still even with the wind, I’ve made the best of it. I did a big hike in Waimea Canyon at the beginning of the week. I descended 2.5 miles and 2300 feet down the Kuku’i trial to the river below. The views were spectacular and I treated myself to a luxurious skinny dip in an amazing swimming hole alongside of four other nymphs. Then I ascended the 2300 feet, which wasn’t nearly as fun, but I felt like having a work out so it worked! 

• 

  Waimea Canyon at the bottom

• 

  Doin' it for the 'gram!

• 

  A beach of sea glass!

Waimea Canyon at the bottom and Glass Beach!

That same day I visited Glass Beach, the site of an old landfill, which has now produced a beach filled with grains of sea glass. It was lovely, but windy and raining and I nearly stepped on a sleeping Hawaiian Monk Seal—a federally prosecutable crime—yikes! So I didn’t stay long. I also didn’t take any sea glass even though I love collecting the stuff at home in California. I get it! Glass Beach needs the glass! I stopped at an adorable used bookstore to get another copy of The Artist’s Way to help me write some of this book I’m working on.

The Men

The universe seemed to be poking fun at me when I stopped for dinner after the long day of driving and hiking and driving some more. I decided I was too tired to go back to the AirBnB for a shower, so I rifled through my available wardrobe, found a clean shirt and threw it on over my dirty self. The restaurant had no wait and I passed by a man who said hello as I followed the hostess to my table, off to the side, away from the bustle—perfect for me with my book and my journal, ready for a quiet bite. 

But I hadn’t had my journal open for a minute before the same man was in front of me asking if he could sit down. Jake. From Boston. The exact name and city of origin as an ex-boyfriend who has made a pattern of resurfacing for YEARS and most recently, just before I left on this trip (I think that’s finally over now). It was all I could do to not laugh out loud, “You've gotta be kidding me!” 

This guy, was young. Twenty-five, I learned. Which flattered me even though the pickings in this beach town were decidedly slim. We chatted for a bit and then he invited me to join him at the table with his brother and three friends, all men from Boston. 

For once in my life, I said yes! 

I am characterizing it like that because, having been married from age 20-32ish and having joined the ranks of people who consume alcohol at age 35, I feel intimidated by this scene, meeting people at bars. I don’t really go to them unless I’m with a man already. Now I found myself surrounded by five of them. All of them decidedly interested in ME. It was really fun!

We played some betting game where everyone puts their finger on a glass. I lost the first two rounds, horribly. Had to dance next to a table of two diners—but the woman diner got up and spun me around declaring she was a ballroom dancer!

We chattered away as I ate my salad and we drank beer. When it came time to leave, is when the real cock-show began. At one point they all lifted their shirts to reveal several sets of nicely toned abs. I saw biceps. My gosh! I want to say it was like nothing I have ever experienced…that’s not entirely true. It’s been a loooooong time since I experienced anything like that. 

They were all so delightful and so nice and so young [the oldest was 30, and we were celebrating his birthday]. I felt to choose one would be unfair to the rest. Maybe they guessed this because, before I knew exactly what was happening, they were playing the finger on the glass game to determine who would get to enjoy a bowl of chocolate mini wheats at my place (I can’t NOT talk about chocolate mini wheats—duh!). 

So the birthday boy won the glass game and offered to walk me to my car. I let him, on the grounds that he had won the game AND it was his birthday. When we got to my rental jeep he asked if he could kiss me. Yes, of course! Because I was in too deep by this point. 

The way he kissed me felt like the other man I had known from Boston, the Jake from back home. Maybe that’s why I pulled back after a few minutes, wished him a happy birthday and drove myself home. 

Maybe that’s why I said yes when he asked me to have coffee the next morning over text. I got coffee and he got a smoothie. We didn’t have much time because I had booked a shuttle at 8am and I was committed to not sleeping with him. But I did enjoy a fiery episode on a picnic table while old people and honeymooners looked on (I guess…I wasn’t watching!). And I wasn’t lying when I told him, “That’s the most fun I’ve had in broad daylight on a picnic table in the public square.” 

He walked me to my jeep, kissed me goodbye and that’s probably the last time I will see the man from Boston. 

…Not the one named Jake. I couldn’t do that! I picked his older brother, which, as a younger sibling, I feel some guilt about. [Jake, younger brother, from Boston—if you ever read this, know—I thought you were just as handsome and beguiling as that older brother of yours. But it was his birthday, and he won the glass game.] 

Older brother and I carried on over text until we both left the islands. I realized regret lives on both sides of this decision. I wrote to him, “I think what we both want is to feel young and alive. We are, very much, both of those things.” I hope he brings those feelings home with him. Older brother told me he would not forget his 30th birthday.

• 

  Not pictured: Older brother. Jake. Or the other Jake.

• 

  Kauai has such lovely, pebbley sand!

The Beach

I went to the beach and braved the wind. The first time, it was arguably not worth it. Lying on the sand getting worked by the wind as you try to enjoy reading a book? Not my fav. Even the ocean was so churned up that I didn’t want to go in deeper than my waist. [Gosh, how do they get the Pacific Ocean so warm and so angry over here?] 

The second beach outing was better. I chose a more protected spot where I did some topless sunbathing [incidentally, it’s going to take a lot of topless sunbathing to alter the blinding whiteness of my chest] and read my book in slightly more peace. This beach also had a fair amount of shells for a little beach combing, and an old man, seated on a bench who told me about the great surf break of Kauai that is perfect for goofy-footed people like me. 

The Napali Coast

I also enjoyed a wonderfully muddy walk on the Kalalau Trail which, in it's entirety, traverses 11 miles across the Napali Coast. I did two miles. Partly barefoot because of the blisters I got on the Waimea Canyon hike. It was lush and lovely. And windy.

• 

  The beach that's 2 miles in. An old man interrogated me about the name of this beach at the end of my hike. I don't know. I don't care. I don't even have shoes on.

• 

  Hi Napali!!!!!

https://youtu.be/cYEfpphCSu8

The Hell-a-copter

This brings me to the helicopter ride. I have enjoyed a good travel guidebook for my vacations in the past. They’ve aided me in having some awesome adventures and avoiding some stupid tourist traps. I am a committed fan of the “Revealed” guidebooks for the Hawaiian islands (there is one for each island). 

So when the author, Andrew Doughty, recommended a helicopter tour as THE BEST WAY to see Kauai, I bit. It was expensive, but I remembered my own travel advice: You are worth it. [Yes! You are too!] So I booked a tour. It got pushed to the last day of my trip, which I think is just as well…now. 

I was excited for this. They called me to confirm the flight the day before and I was on a stand-up paddle board on the Hanalei River. I missed the call, but I called them back from the paddle board, just to make sure I was in. That’s how excited I was! 

• 

  SUP on the Hanalei RIver

• 

  Five stars--so peaceful.

https://youtu.be/bHtSDHzQ0l4

Apparently I look like a bobble head when I drive.

I drove to the appointed location, made sure I was on time. I wore the appropriate secure footwear and jackets. I was ready! 

• 

  This is the BEFORE photo.

A few observations: 

Being in a helicopter is hella-loud. So it’s kind of a surprise when it lifts off because the sound doesn’t really change. I would liken the sensation to what I would expect being dangled from a stand of thread feels like. It is gentle, in a way. And the first five minutes are awesome. 

I chose a flight with the doors off because I was worried about motion sickness. I knew this about myself. I took Dramamine before the flight. 

Five minutes in. I surprise-throw-up in my mask. 

Fifteen minutes in. Vomit is streaked on the side of my leggings because no napkins in the helicopter and I’m not sure I could hang onto it with the wind anyway. 

Thirty-five minutes in, still vomiting and now fear that I might also shit myself, not because we are suspended hundreds of feet in the air with the doors off—trust me!—a catastrophic collision with the Napali coast or a sudden-death fall to the waves below would feel benevolent at this point. 

Thirty six minutes in, flying over my AirBnB, I consider asking them to stop and drop me off right there. Twenty-four more minutes, Michelle. You can do this. Can—but should I?!? I start imaging where the shit goes when you are are wearing leggings and seated in a helicopter with four strangers.

Forty two minutes in. The pilot keeps mentioning me by name. I don’t think he can see me but I’m the only one sitting on his side of this contraption that inspires all of my internal organs to stop what they are supposed to be doing and vacate every possible molecule ASAP…he, the pilot, is telling me he will turn so I can see the weeping wall, the crater, this most remote part of Kauai. The wettest spot on earth, averaging 400 and some inches of rain each year (for context Seattle, averages only 46 inches per year). I’m listening, Steven. Obviously! Now let’s land this damn thing! 

[To you, dear reader, I will say this—I DID open my eyes and witness the weeping wall amid dry heaves. I did NOT photograph the thing. It was green and wet and my advice to you is to watch an iMAX movie of it. DO NOT under any circumstance, get into a helicopter.] 

Forty-eight minutes in, Stephen reports that we are returning to the airport. It’s at this moment, and only this moment, that I am sure I will not shit my pants in a windy helicopter with four strangers. I’m relieved I will not have to use that aircraft THAT thoroughly.

Sixty minutes in. We land with the shit still inside of me. Graciously, the woman charged with unbuckling me from the craft comes to my seat first. By this point, there is a light layer of vomit over everything in front of me. I tried to be careful! But the doors were off and it was incredibly windy and vomit is sticky! I take the vomit bag that is in my hand with me and leave one in the seat-back pocket on the helicopter. Sorry, Stephen. We all made sacrifices. 

It is hard to walk. It seems the helicopter has taken my dignity AND my balance. But I am committed to find the porto-potty before I shit myself. And I’m proud to say, I do. 

A woman, maybe the one who unbuckled me from my vomit, offers me a ginger ale. I accept, but then she sets it on the water cooler. I cannot summon the strength to mount the journey to the water cooler. So I find a chair and sit. I watch the rest of the passengers from the other flights return. Not one covered in vomit. Come on, people! Then this older couple in the classic Hawaii vacation clothes has the audacity to come and stand right by me while conversing with a (probably honeymooning) couple about all the wonders of New York. I get up and find a corner of cement away from everyone where I huddle into a ball. 

The woman, who got me the ginger ale, who unbuckled me from my vomit—okay this woman has done enough—tells me it’s time to go and asks why I haven’t retrieved the ginger ale from the water cooler. Whatever! (In my head). May I please have a mask? out my lips because I cannot imagine putting the vomit covered mask over my face for the van ride back to my car. 

God bless the woman at the van, who gives me a fresh mask from a pack she had to open. Obviously I’m the freak here.  I do the walk of shame. The last person in the van. The only one with her vomit streaked on her black leggings, jacket and shirt. 

Helicopter ride: Zero stars. 

I wait an hour or so before I attempt the one-hour drive back to Hanalei. I make it within a couple of miles of the house, when I have to urgently pull over and vomit, first into the extra barf bags the van lady gave me and then outside the jeep in the grass. This is two hours after we stopped flying.

• 

  Napali Coast. Not pictured: Me considering jumping into the sea from this height.

• 

  Dry part of the Nepali Coast to the west.

• 

  Waimea Canyon.

• 

  Glen. Dude who sat next to me while I vomited for an hour. I bet he hopes he never sees me again.

• 

  After. Is that a little residue of barf on my right cheek?

The AirBnB

Thankfully, my AirBnB is heaven. Five stars. It’s a perfect place to shower. Lie down. Feel solid ground beneath me. And eventually go to the laptop to compose this. 

• 

  Where I wrote the book!

• 

  Click on this to see the whole panoramic photo.

• 

  Where I hammocked on the lanai.

• 

  The sunrise [insert heart eyes emoji]

• 

  The view!

• 

  This place was perfection.

https://youtu.be/b5w0LVLeCt8

Video tour of the place.

Overall: 

High wind warning beach weather: Two stars.

Lush canyon hikes: Five stars.

Picnic table make out sesh: Five stars. 

Yoga and journal and coffee every morning on the lanai: Five stars. [Especially when it’s raining on and off and the sun is coming up and I’m watching a gorgeous waterfall spilling into the valley miles away.] 

Bottom line--don’t come to Kauai, unless you like old people and honeymooners and wind and vomit with a couple of magical hikes and make out sessions…actually don’t trust this review at all…

…because, the next day--the day I am set to return home--I do a yoga kriya for elevation. It feels fantastic. Pulls me from my post-vomit blues. 

After I hustle to get everything packed and ready to go, I am short on time and I know it. Kauai is dishing out some extra rain and wind. The bagel lady makes a big deal about my rush to get out of there, because they are busy EVERY morning. I get stuck behind some MF who drives 20mph in a 25mph zone. He also stops at a non-busy intersection to let people turn out in front of him, requiring me to say, “What the actual fuck?” to myself, because I’m sure he cannot hear me in his aloha state of mind.

But I make it to the airport. Slide into my A37 spot just as the Southwest flight starts to board. 

And I remember the insight from my yoga session that morning: 

Kauai is just messing with you. Don’t take yourself so seriously. 

I learn that wind originating from the North and completing to the East is associated with strong foundations for a new project. 

Exactly what I need for my book project. Five stars. Sat nam and aloha, Kauai. I feel your magic.

From the ashes -> Contentment

I just finished listening to a Tara Brach podcast about contentment. And it brought me back to this question I’ve been asking myself for several years, How do I relax and enjoy my life?

It’s an enigma, right? And I think it’s compounded by social media where it feels like everyone is doing just that. Totally nailing it. 

Take Tieghan, with Half Baked Harvest. Her recipes are amazing. She lives in some picturesque corner of Colorado (recipe book is conspicuously missing those famous Rocky Mountain High Brownies, so I’ll stop you right there if you thought she was THAT kind of Colorado cook) and shoots all of her photos and demonstrations in a monstrously beautiful kitchen. Damn, that girl has something figured out that I don’t. And she’s completely self made. No training. Just a killer instinct for food and bev. 

Or take Kate Hudson who is getting serious about working out for the first time since the baby. And she is putting out beautiful family photos and videos of intensely sexy workouts [I have yet to try the one where she balances a shoe on one foot with the leg is extended while performing a completely log roll…and I have no excuse because the equipment is literally leg and shoe]. Meanwhile, I’m in my comfy Snoopy jammies while she’s posed with a fancy bottle of vodka downing cool little drinks poolside with friends. Am I surprised I’m not as glam as Goldie Haun’s daughter?!

In the meantime we run into this ever-present crossroads of, Do I embrace eating or exercise or neither?… because the two kind of conflict. Actually, I remember when I realized this. I was almost 30 and I had spent the better part of my 20s dialing my domestic skills, including cooking and baking. I was working at the Idaho state mental hospital and I realized, after a cold winter’s mild weight gain (Seriously cold! The water in the toilet froze one Sunday and I had to run the oven, which was a convenient three feet from the toilet in our strange shack, just to thaw it!) that I was spending all of my time in this cycle: 

It might have been my first step toward awakening because I remember thinking to myself, There has GOT to be a better way!

Then in my 30s I sort of went the other way. I separated from my ex-husband and started weight training. [Highly recommend that, incidentally. It was a very helpful practice to show myself I was strong as I was taking on something so scary.]

So I was weight training and eating basically whatever I wanted, which meant I was gaining weight because exercise has a way of making bodies hungry! I liked the muscles, but was thinking, I CANNOT be getting divorced AND large at the same time! So I got into this keto diet and it was super effective, in part because I had this great layer of muscle built up, but also because I realized how much emotion I was buffering with food. 

And when your comfort item is a veggie or can of salmon, it becomes very, very dark, very, very quickly.

This was a mixed blessing. I did end up with a weird relationship to food, but I also got a lot better at listening to my body. I developed this ability to stop eating when my body said “full!” To taste the first bite of cake and then realize only a few were needed because only a few were really enjoyable. It required me to get really present with my body and subsequently my feelings.

It was also during that time I began to feel like a raw nerve. I wrote this post: Floating Like A Rabid Ghost, titled after a line from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things. It’s interesting because, of all the things I’ve written, that’s one that gets frequent search engine hits, likely because I quoted Strayed. But I’ve received some really beautiful feedback from readers who were going through their own rabid-ghost phase. 

So back to the raw nerve! In PA school we learned what a deglove injury is. It’s basically what you would imagine, the skin pulled from a person’s hand like a glove. And that was the image that kept coming to mind. 

I felt EVERYTHING. 

Deeply. 

Intensely. 

It was like I had been walking around in a sumo suit for my entire life and finally took it off. I felt freer, but it was also terrifying and So. Damn. Loud. [in my head].

It was during this period I started asking myself that question, How do I just relax and enjoy my life?

I felt like I was messing something up because I couldn’t. Life was not that enjoyable. The days were hard and they started so early because the nights were hard too! I would wake up early and on the days when I didn’t have R, I would walk the neighborhood in the pre-dawn light because the bed became so unfriendly.

I remember feeling like I had to change something and so I tried. I tried lots of things. And I tried lots of NEW things because I felt like the OLD things had gotten me to this point of great suffering. 

And people might have looked at this new life, however it appeared on social media, and thought I was killing it. Interesting job. Cool hobbies. Fit body. Cute kid. 

Those things were all true. And I was incredibly brave during those months and years. I earned massive chops on adulting and life. A lot of that is documented in the pages of this blog, though I still cringe about some of the things I’ve written, the way I’ve handled some things, the way I launched myself into things that didn’t work out.  

But maybe that cringe is exactly what we need to focus on here.

That cringe is what kept me from writing all through my 20s. I had this sense that I might change my mind about some things. I might learn something that would then make my previous writing a record of my past stupidity. And how could l tolerate that kind of legacy!? 

If I’m being honest (which is my current life’s work), I also had a sense that I was living in a manner that wasn’t true to me and when that’s the case, you kind of always worry you will be found out. And then people will know you are a fraud. I still carry this worry to some degree. It’s my fragile ego, that thinks I need more letters behind my name and more money in the bank before I can attempt to create anything that might be useful to anyone, anywhere. 

And this question!—What if it turns out I am completely ridiculous!?! 

Yikes! I might be! 

I might completely mess this life up. Like what if I get to the other side and realize that I should have kept all those Mormon covenants? What if I get addicted to alcohol or shopping? What if I feel like I’ve got the weight thing figured out and then get fat? What if I write a blog and no one reads it? What if I tell people I want to write a book and then I never finish or it never gets it published? How will I LIVE with myself!?!

Last year I went to family court to try to get my kid enrolled in transitional kindergarten at my neighborhood school. I started the process before any of us knew what covid would be and in retrospect that might have played a role in this failure. But I went into that hearing and lost custody time with my son. 

I lost. 

Family court never wants ANYONE to feel like a winner, so I got a FEW things changed that improved my schedule, but I lost. And I walked out of there feeling all the feelings you would guess. 

I actually fail at lots of things. I failed at refinishing my kitchen cabinets. For this reason, they have never had doors, as long as I’ve lived here. So far I’ve failed at talking my five year old out of right-wing conservative politics (election years are really difficult in this family!). I don’t save money as quickly as I want to. My car hasn’t been vacuumed in months. I gave up on cleaning my own house and now pay a wonderful, god-sent woman to do it for me. I kill plants on a regular basis. I broke an heirloom pick axe earlier this summer. 

But seriously. I fail in relationships. I say the wrong thing. I judge people. I am unkind to myself. 

And THIS is where contentment lives. I guess it HAS to because I keep failing and I don’t see an end to that.  

Contentment is acceptance. Tara Brach defined it as a state of needing nothing and pushing nothing away. I love that, particularly because so often I am pushing things away more than I am needing. Her advice was to make a practice of noticing the moments, when nothing is needed and nothing is being pushed away. And her promise was, by noticing those moments, we would build a gravitational pull to bring them near more often.  

I love that. 

We tend to fear that if we let go of the wanting or the pushing away, we never improve. We will fester and engorge ourselves or languish and die. 

Maybe some people will. I can’t speak for everyone on this. 

But, for me, I’m into this experiment—> What if I trust in my own goodness? What if I believe I have a good compass inside of me and it will tell me where to go and what to do, but also when to rest or when nothing will help? 

I believe this is an inner goodness we are all born with. It gets muddied and covered over by life. By trauma. By socialization. And, so far, every little fleck of it I pick off reveals that inner goodness.

Shhhh…let’s listen to her for a minute. 

She knows. 

She knows when to push. 

She knows when to fight.

To write.

To love.

To relax.

To enjoy.

The whole ball of wax that is 

Life.

The One Where She Starts Online Dating...Again

I’ve been dating to one extent or another since about 18 months after my ex and I separated. I naively stepped up to the plate thinking that I was basically a good wife and I should be able to find a suitable husband replacement fairly easily. People told me my most difficult job would be sifting through the suitors because I was “such a catch.” Professional, fit, kind, beautiful, blah, blah, blah. 

I started out going on some blind dates with friends of friends. These were okay but didn’t give me sparks, and while that was true, I still felt rejected when there weren’t follow-up dates, texts or phone calls. I was still practicing Mormonism then and Mormon men are decidedly not into dating not-quite-divorced women. This was frustrating because the road from separation to divorce was long (almost 3 years) and I felt divorced in my heart. So the Mormon dudes were either uninteresting to me or they seemed like such microcosms of catastrophe that I was terrified to chance a second date. 

Then I started online dating on a few apps. I remember spending time writing, what I felt was, a compelling profile, and then realizing I was WAY over the character limit. They want a few sentences, not a few paragraphs. So I edited that down and put up some photos. I tried to be honest but I also didn’t know myself all that well yet. 

And there were some dates. Most of the men I’ve met online have been decent and kind, from what I could tell. Of course, there were some exceptions.

I had one guy, a doctor (why are so many doctors creeps!?), just ahead of our first meet up, ask me if I was “a submissive.” Had to google that. It was what I thought. I cancelled the date. Felt like we would be off on a weird foot. 

I saw one man who described himself as “ammosexual” as in ammunition. Yikes! 

I ventured to go on a date with a man who was 14 inches taller than me. He was handsome enough, but as I suspected, I felt like Mike Wazowski paling around with Sully in the North Park bars. This guy also worked in sales and after droning on about himself for at least one beer, I tried to help him ask a question about me by offering that my job in psychiatry often feels like sales, because I’m trying get buy-in from patients on taking medications they need but sometimes don’t want. To this, he responded, Oh! I could teach you a lot about sales. [Insert face palm emoji.]

I had meaningless flings, though I figured out I wasn’t very good at that. Maybe it’s the psychiatrist in me, or maybe it’s the level of authenticity I try to approach life with, but I’ve found that men will talk to me. Like real talk. There was the Brazilian bus boy who was handsome and fit. He had all the makings for a romance novel but his back story was full of tragedy and disappointment. I simply could not use him even if he was okay with using me.

Another who emphatically admired the “beautiful life” I created but ultimately preferred to keep his mask intact rather than join the mess of a real relationship.

And the fireman who couldn’t keep up the ruse. He was deeply sad inside. Firefighting gave his life purpose, but he still didn’t believe he was worthy without the uniform. And life is strange because one day he told me he performed a trench cut (a rarely-used technique in firefighting) on a strip mall fire. I saw that strip mall days later and realized it was where another man had taken me months before to sing at a Korean karaoke joint. The place was destroyed…metaphor?

I think that’s the thing about dating. It’s not a straight line. It is very much a web. Each interaction forms a new thread, connecting one strand to the next in a zig-zag or circular pattern. For most of my experience, it has been indistinguishable which direction things were going. Even in my longer relationships, I was riddled with questions and misgivings. Is this what it's supposed to feel like!?

Just tonight I was listening to Oprah talk to women about their “emotional style.” The segment opened with women responding casually to how they would react if their spouse forgot a birthday or Valentine’s.  Women talked about silent treatment and hint dropping. Quiet resentment. I’ve been in those rooms. I’ve been that woman. 

My marriage was traditional. Man wears pants. Woman’s “power” is in how she can influence (manipulate) her man. It’s covert and inherently dishonest. I sort of always assume I will be good at things, so when I was married I assumed I was good at that game. But when I look back, I see now that we both lost. I lost because I completely lost mySELF. And my ex lost because he never got to know me. I carry some of the blame for the stupid game, but he does too because he didn’t want to know me. He wanted a fulfillment of what he thought a wife should be. 

Aye.

The Oprah conversation left me wondering, how does anyone find anyone at this stage of life?

It’s like I know too much. I know marriage doesn’t solve all problems. I know that loneliness thrives inside and outside of that institution. I know that people have lives secret from their spouse. They bring the baggage from childhood, the last relationship, all the relationships. And what’s funny is that if they had no baggage, that would be even scarier—because, if that’s the case, what kind of Truman Show life have you been living for the last 30+ years!?!

And yet, I still believe in magic. 

Despite all odds. 

I still hope to find my lobster. 

I knew I needed to end my break from dating this summer when, after a gynecologist appointment (which, incidentally was immediately followed by a covid quarantine, so YOU read between the lines), I announced to my sister that I might be falling for my gynecologist. “I need to figure out how to take this off MyChart!” I joked with her. [Luckily, I slept on it and realized that if this guy did go for my advances, then what kind of skeesy gyn was I choosing to date!?!….This is waaayyyy TMI, Michelle. Reel it in!]

So I find myself dating again.

After my last relationship attempt failed. I put an update on my dating app profile (which I must say has improved dramatically since those dark and confusing early days). 

[Note: The days can STILL be dark and confusing. Dating is like walking around a cave without a flashlight—actually that’s a really good metaphor! You have to trust what you feel. There are lots of groping styles. It’s painful and confusing and it reeeeaaally feels like there’s gotta be a better way to do this.]

My most popular dating profile pic--it's a few years old but I still look basically the same...right? Maybe I should photoshop in a few more wrinkles.

My new profile is darn effective though. 

I’ve got some active photos, but not too active. (If my family didn’t live in such granola-eating, Subaru-driving parts of the country, then I would have far less photos in such outdoorsy habitats.) I’ve got a full body shot. Not too much boobs, but not no boobs. I kept my descriptions casual and breezy but included several entry points for conversation. This was all before the revamp! And it was working pretty good. 

But one of the things you have to know about dating apps, is everyone on there has multiple things going on. Every one is complicated. I know that’s a complete generalization, but this is a helpful way to think about it because dating apps can feel like a lot of rejection happening fast. 

There are times when you think an interaction is going well, and then it drops off, suddenly. If you’ve met the person, I would classify this a ghosting and not cool. But if you haven’t met and you haven’t been messaging constantly, it’s probably an inbounds move. 

I’ve decided, that when that happens, it just means that another piece shifted into place for them. They don’t need my possibility anymore right now. That’s it. Getting to this point has relieved me a of a lot of bad feelings about dating apps. 

I’ve learned to assume the best about people when they don’t pick me (at least when they are enigma speaking from the great beyond of the internet). There is a Maya Angelou quote, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” 

Sometimes that’s just not interested or not available. 

Sometimes it’s, I dislike myself so much I won’t let anyone get close to me. 

Sometimes it’s, I’m a huge asshole who works on commercial ships and thinks because you put a poem about how you have perfect breasts on your dating profile, I’m entitled to some proof, even though we’ve never met and I’m probably lying on my couch smelling of fish guts and motor oil eating a greasy burrito. 

[Woah—that got specific! And you wrote what poem about perfect breasts?]

Oh, that’s my secret weapon, actually. I wrote a poem about how I have perfect breasts, and when I told my therapist that I didn’t think it was fit for publication on my blog or social media, she suggested I use it in my dating profile. 

I got my money’s worth from that session, because that thing is gold! Since it’s addition, I always get a response. Of course that’s an exaggeration, but it’s not FAR from the truth. Very effective little piece of marketing, that poem is.… 

Okay, you’re getting lots of information here and it’s probably prompting you to pull out a highlighter for all of these fabulous, modern dating tips, so let me try to rein it in for you—dating apps are a lead generator. That’s it. Of course some of your leads are unqualified! Some of them will choose not to purchase and some of them will get told to, “Fuck off,” by your complaint department.

And while I can get emotional about pretty much anything, I really try to keep emotion out of the dating apps. It’s not a popularity contest, it’s a marketing contest. My goal is to generate qualified leads, some of which will progress to the next round of vetting. And if swiping has taught me anything, it’s that there are a lot of different shoes out there,  and supposedly every shoe has a mate. [Like even a Jesus shoe—this man was literally dressed as Jesus…I’m still so confused!]

This brings me to the next phase. The first meet up. Since Covid, sometimes this happens via FaceTime. I actually didn’t find that too bothersome. It was lower pressure. I mean, you have to worry about camera angles and lighting, but not how you smell or what pants you have on.  

More commonly, it’s a face to face meetup, where first move is to act cool while you are waiting for a person you’ve only seen photos of and try to look incredible at all times and angles in case he sees you first. 

Most guys here want to meet for a drink, I’m guessing because it’s cheaper than dinner. Also, easy to exit if it’s not going well. And, you have a little libation lubrication for the conversation. [Yikes! Could there be a grosser way to say alcohol loosens you up!]

Bottom line, I think this is totally fine. I get that investment in a fully planned first date has a cost that may not yield benefit. Still, bars are not a great option for alcoholics, but good news for alcoholics comes next—>

It IS impressive when a guy goes all in on a first date! All in within reason anyway. My favorite first date, hands down, was stand up paddle boarding on Mission Bay. It was a day date which, for me, feels a little friendlier. You get to check out each other’s physique in a non-creepy way. You’re doing something active, but you can also talk. Plus you’ve got the option to proceed to lunch or dinner afterward, assuming both parties are feeling it. But if it’s not going well you can part ways, still having done something fun in the sun!

What comes after the first meeting, I don’t completely understand. Really. Like, any of it. The subsequent dates, the texting, the progress of the physical relationship. I’ve walked the road a few times, but I could not tell you how it should go. 

And it’s all the stuff I was talking about earlier that makes it terrifying. At first you’re just trying to rule out if he’s a sociopath or a narcissist or someone who thinks it would be cool to live in van. 

There’s the things you never thought to ask about too, like was he raised in a nudist colony or a have a wife who also wants to hook up with you, and how do you feel about dating a bisexual man? Wow! I thought I was pretty woke, but being in the actual scene really brings it home. 

And when you think you’ve worked through the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, then you have to decide if you’re going to let this person know where you live. Where you work? Who your friends are? It takes an enormous amount of faith to let someone in like that when you’ve seen what I’ve seen. 

And strangely enough, even after working with parolees and probationers, even after hearing the wildest things from patients, and my co-residents of Walmart parking lots across the nation when I slept in a car for three months (that’s a story for another time and place), I have this curse where I tend to see people as potential. It’s like this freakishly optimistic lens. 

But this, too, is where that Maya Angelou quote comes in handy, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” This has been hard-won but, I am getting better at believing the person over the potential. I like to see what a man spends his time on, because, ultimately, this is what he desires. And very little will separate a man from his desires, at least the kind of men I have experienced.

So as I embark on another round of swiping and first dates, let me remind myself what I am looking for: 

1. Someone who is kind to me. 
2. Someone who is honest.
3. Someone who likes to do some of the same things as me. 
4. Someone who wants the important same things as me.
5. Someone who realizes that people grow and change and is interested in the journey of growing and changing together.
6. Holds all the space for complexity and contradiction that exists in me. 
7. Smoking hot bod. 
8. Not a picky eater. 
9. Does not want to live in a car. 
10. Cheers me on while I run in the direction of my dreams and lets me do the same for him.

That’s a starting place, at least.

And a reminder that dating in your 30s, when almost all of your friends are married, makes you a sort of exotic creature, where everyone both hates the idea and loves it at the same time. SO if you’re with me, doing this crazy rigamarole to try to find some future partner or at least a little companionship along the way, remember this:

All that comes after this part of life is more moments, more days, more feelings, more life. And that’s if we are lucky enough to persist here for a little while longer. All that romantic relationships remedy is the idea, in our mind, that we should be in one. The rest is a gamble, a ride. I like the idea of the ride, so I’m going to keep looking, but I know that life is already here happening every day. And it’s deep, and rich and beautiful right now.   

Covid sucks. Can we turn it off?

In June I found my self saying over and over again, “I just need a minute to myself.” So this last week has been some strange karmic joke or the answer to prayer or maybe just a symbol of how in touch with the universe I really am. 

Because I got covid. 

Everyone wants to know, Where did you get it from? 

And I have no idea. 

I did just go to my 20-year high school reunion. I traveled on an airplane. I went to work for a couple of days before my symptoms hit. I even had an initial negative covid test.

At first I thought I just had a regular cold. It progressed from the mild sore throat, to the stuffy head, to the mild cough as expected. I did the second covid test at the end of the weekend just to assuage my own conscience that I was safe to go back to work, because I basically felt fine. 

But the second test annoyingly came back positive. So I got an urgent care video visit appointment and a drive up PCR test to confirm. Yep. It was right. 

I decided to work from home because I basically felt fine and the prospect of being alone in my house for ten days straight with nothing to do but putter around felt overwhelming. 

But also, I was like, Okay! I can work on the book and make art and catch up on my filing (who has personal filing to do in 2021?!?!…I can’t explain myself, but I do….) and garden and build the playhouse and wash my car and do the laundry….[list goes on in perpetuity].

And I did some of that. I rested and I didn’t rest. I felt bad that I couldn’t go surfing when the weather and the water was so nice. I talked to almost everyone I know on the phone. I finished binge watching Peaky Blinders. I even had a board meeting with all the parts of myself and took notes and then read them to my sister! (Slowly slipping into madness...or sanity? You decide.)

I reflected on my repeated request in June for some time to myself. And I tried to *enjoy* it. And you know? I have to give myself credit because, if this would have happened a year ago, or even more so two or three years ago, I would have been A WRECK. 

You see, R has been on vacation this month and away from me. And as much as mom’s get overworked and underpaid, it’s HARD to be away from that kid. Especially at home. Especially when I have not a lot to focus on. 

So I’m giving myself a round of applause as I have decidedly NOT been a wreck. 

I am, however, now ten days in, sicker than when this whole thing began. I wonder if what I had a week ago was a regular cold and what I am experiencing now is the dreaded corona virus. Don’t get me wrong! I’m not on a ventilator. And I still managed to shower today (one of the highlights in quarantine life). But I feel like garbage and everyone should feel sorry for me. (Gifts are welcome!)

But also, maybe this is my first taste of what real quarantine has been like for the regular customer out there. I work in healthcare so I was essential from day one. I’ve been leaving my house regularly. I’ve been seeing people other than those I live with. In some ways, life didn’t change much for me. (If this is the case, then I should be sending gifts to you! Because that was a loooong time and I remember the ugly, frantic energy at the grocery store and Lowe’s well enough to know, that if that was the only social interaction, then that was pretty bleak.)

So I’m not just posting to complain for myself and all of us... 

Or maybe I am. 

This is tough. I’m vaccinated. And it’s still tough. The numbers are spiking. I saw a meme yesterday that said, “We’re gonna have to retire the expression, 'Avoid it like the plague,' because it turns out humans do not do that.” Sort of reminds me of the Jerry Seinfeld bit about helmet laws—how you are making a law to protect a head that is already functioning so poorly it is not trying to protect itself.

And I’m hesitating to publish this because I know and love people who are choosing not to be vaccinated. And I’ve ridden a motorcycle without a helmet!

But here it is. One gal’s opinion. 

Covid sucks. Can we turn it off?

[Not pictured: Covid that is now in my left eye...why the eyes!?! Damn you, viral conjunctivitis!]

How To Attend Your 20-Year High School Reunion:

(In 38 EASY steps…because that's about how old you will be when you need this guide!)

1. Graduate high school.
2. Go to college and learn that you might have been too big for your britches. Let the bitches get you down. Aim sights a little lower. 
3. Get married before you age out of the college dating pool. (Yikes! Mormon women become old maids at 21?!?)
4. Learn you’ve got five tumors and five years to live. (How did that Tim McGraw song go again? Sky diving, bull riding?!? No thanks!…and what’s a Fu Manchu?)
5. Keep living. Get confused. 
   • (You: I’m not dead!
   • Cart-master: 'Ere!  'E says 'e's not dead!
   • Man: Yes he is.
   • You:     I'm not!
   • Cart-master: 'E isn't?
   • Man: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill...
   • You:     I'm getting better!
   • Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment…
   • You: I feel happy!)
6. Go to grad school to have health insurance to pay for the tumors that aren’t showing up to kill you. 
7. Work. Wash dishes. Grocery shop. Cook. Exercise to burn off the calories. Repeat for three or four years. 
8. Run a half marathon. (Because that’s what medical professionals do when life isn’t complicated enough—duh!) 
9. Have a baby. (Because that’s what married people do when life isn’t complicated enough.)
10. One hundred tiny steps make you realize that your marriage is leaching your essence. Look into your baby’s eyes and know that you must end it, for him.  
11. Realize YOU can actually live YOUR life for YOU. Start doing it. 
12. Start a journal. (Start being honest with yourself.) 
13. Start a blog. (Start being honest with others.)
14. Spend a few years posting the most literal and vibrant and wounding parts of your life. 
15. Enjoy kind or thoughtful comments from your parents, sisters and a few other people. 
16. Wonder if anyone else thinks it’s any good. Wonder if you’re any good. Play whack-a-mole with ego…for years? ...Forever?
17. Make mistakes. Write about those. 
18. Win victories. Write about those.
19. Get to know yourself. Write about her. 
20. Discover that it’s been t-w-e-n-t-y years since you graduated high school. 
21. Decide that you can attend your reunion because now, unlike 10 years ago, you can show up as your ACTUAL self.
22. Get really nervous that you’ve made a huge mistake. Go down the rabbit hole of past failures and insecurities. No one will like you because they know you walked out on them 20 years ago and didn’t look back. They will know you are ridiculous because they read that blog, or because they saw you do mediocre cheerleading or that strange scholarship pageant or they remember when you sang that bizarre choir solo that was more of a wail than song…There are so many you cannot list them all. And some of them are more memories of feelings that actual events. That gripping in the abdomen--I’ve made a huge mistake.
23. Be saved by the fact that Oprah is constantly talking about intention. 
24. Realize that all the fear and anxiety is based on THIS intention: You want people to be impressed with you. You want to be liked. (You’re basically screaming, Love me! Fear me! It’s NOT a good look for you.) 
25. Remember some people will like you and some people won’t because you’re not for everyone and everyone’s not for you.
26. Set a new intention: To show love for the people who grew along with you. 
27. Put on eyeshadow per the directions of the instruction card that came with the palate because this is the most makeup instruction you’ve had since you were 17. (Choose the one called Disco Nights because, you know…you’ve gotta look gooooood.)
28. Walk into the reunion mixer. Hug the first person at the door, your best friend from elementary school. 
29. Get lost in each interaction, one after another, after another. 
30. Choose the people who also choose you.
31. Hug all of them.
32. Boldly call people the wrong name and watch them forgive you.
33. Soak up their goodness.
34. Soak up their giddiness, honesty, laughter, dance moves, serious faces, wide eyes, clever remarks, humble brags, shrouds, curiosity, and acceptance. 
35. Realize that, Yes! Love is patient and love is kind. But love also disrupts. It flips tables. Love is angry. Love is uncomfortable. Love holds opposites. Love is patient—yes, but it moves! Love has no boxes. Love forgives because love sees the whole. Love defends. Love disrupts again. Love holds. 
36. Notice how you all bruised each other because you loved each other. 
37. Feel held. Feel free. Remember you ARE love. All of you are love.  
38. Wake up. Raise three glasses of water, a cup of coffee, and a couple of Advil to the class of 2001. To you. To all of you. Reunited.