Tomorrow I Will Be Fun Again

It’s a tired day here today. My racing brain woke me up at midnight, and apparently I’ve reached the age where insomnia is a thing? On the one hand, reading for a couple hours in a quiet room is pretty much my dream at the moment. But I have to say, I wish it weren’t happening at 1 a.m.

Thankfully, I am in a stage of life where I am allowed to move a little more slowly when I’m tired. I’m through the days when it didn’t matter if I slept, there were children who needed to be rocked, walked, and carried all day. Now, I can say things like, “I didn’t sleep much last night. You will be fed. You will be taken care of. You will probably find me ‘resting my eyes’ at every opportunity. Tomorrow I will be fun again.”

It took me ten months of lockdown to accept that “tomorrow I will be fun again” is something that I will say regularly. Not that my insomnia has been that frequent. But between being trapped inside by wildfire smoke and then rain, trying to manage zoom class expectations, and coming up with something to make for breakfast, lunch and dinner every. single. day., there are a lot of days when I am no fun at all.

I’ve avoided putting forward a new theme or series on this blog. I don’t feel like I have anything particularly cohesive to say. It seems, though, that a theme is emerging. And it’s called Giving Myself a Freaking Break. I’m not a terribly high achiever, I like a pretty small life where I don’t make high stakes decisions and no one dies if I have a bad day. But I like to think that I always had some standards. Things that made sense. Like, it’s important to put time and thought into friendships. Or, volunteering is really important and I should do it. Maybe a rule like, don’t use your kids as gophers who go get things for you just because you don’t want to get up.

When I’m running on fumes though, those standards fly out the window. My natural reaction is to use some form of willpower or adrenaline to force myself to keep going. But that willpower fled for warmer climates sometime during October. The adrenaline got all those Christmas decorations up and then seems to have decided to hibernate until spring. So I am barely keeping up with friends and have forgotten ALL the birthdays. I’m trying to meet my volunteer obligations (past me, why did you join the PTA?) but mostly only doing enough to get by. And my kids have learned how to make me tea just the way I like it.

Part of me hopes that the next few months will reverse all that but, for today at least, I’m Giving Myself A Freaking Break. I’m not sure if you all are facing the same struggle, but I’d invite you to do the same. Don’t lower your standards; take a short vacation from them. We’ll get our groove back eventually, right?

The Tale of the Leaky Sink

I’d like to tell you a story about a bathroom sink drain. Exciting, yes, I know. Let me start by explaining the setup of our house, and you’ll see why this sink drain is so important to me. Right now, we have 5 people and 4 animals living in 1,300 square feet. It’s Seattle, in the winter, so our yard is of roughly no use, except for the dogs, who have to be dragged out there kicking and barking to go to the bathroom. I know how blessed we are to be housed, to be safe, to have income. But the three girls share a bedroom, and during the day, there are three zoom calls ranging all over the house, plus Forrest working and taking calls in our room. Which means that if I want a moment alone, my best bet is our powder room. There’s a bathroom fan, which muffles the cacophony of three elementary school classes (they even gave them recorders this year), and a stool, where I can sit and take deep breaths.

I realized about a month ago that the drain in our powder room sink was dripping. I knew there was some water issue going on and so I put a bowl under it, taped an out of order sign on the faucet, aimed a fan at the wet spot, and ordered the parts. A few days later, there were still problems with water and now the floors around the sink were getting warped. Some more investigation and Forrest saw that the shut-off valve was leaking too. The drain seemed do-able to me - no spraying water, just remove and replace. But a valve connected to the water line? It seemed impossible.

In normal times, I’d call a plumber. But it’s not normal times and my handy do-it-yourself-ness kicked in. So we’d try on our own. No big deal, right? But it’s not normal times and every time I would go to hide in the bathroom and see the giant bin full of cleaning products that usually live under the sink, I would turn around. No longer my quiet haven. Plus, the floors, while not too damaged, will now one day need to have those boards replaced. And refinished. And. And. And.

I kept putting it off. How stupid! I would think as I walked by the giant reminder of my to-do list hanging over my head. How lazy! I would tell myself as I chose to use our other bathroom to avoid seeing the water damage. How childish! I would repeat when I saw how long I had let the drip go on instead of at least figuring out what the problem was.

I had therapy this week and I was talking about how in this year of sweatpants and eating cake frosting out of a can, I didn’t know how to tell when I was giving myself a needed break and when I was falling into the danger zone. In that annoying therapist way, she asked me to tell her what some signs would be that I had really hit rock bottom. I went through my list. “Not ever leaving the house, not even to go outside and get the mail.” “Not eating any fruits or vegetables all day.” “Watching tv all day long with no break.”

I realized how far I am from my rock bottom and used my small amount of motivation to set aside some time this morning to at least try to fix the drain. The sink valve, still seeming overwhelming, was for another day. I won’t lie, it was super gross and hard. But it was finished. And I had just enough motivation to look up a YouTube video for how to tackle the valve. I could at least order the parts, right?

The first video was one by SeeJaneDrill and it basically said, before you replace a leaky valve, try tightening the nut around it. It won’t hurt and it might solve your problem. I tried it, set a bucket under the valve and and a 1 hour timer. And of course, you guessed it. The problem that’s been on my mind for a month? Fixed in 30 seconds with a wrench.

I could beat myself up for not just tackling it, but we’re in a damn pandemic and I’m not going to do that. We’re all doing the best we can with what we’ve got. So I’m going to just feel proud that the weight is off my mind. And maybe hide in there with a bowl of ice cream after dinner tonight. In the peace and quiet of the bathroom.

Here Comes The Sun

Today was the last day in Seattle that the sun will go down before 5 p.m. I celebrated by starting the day playing “Here Comes the Sun” on the radio and ending my workday by going for a walk at 4:45. I’m not usually bothered by the gloominess of Pacific Northwest winters. In fact, the constant drizzle is more than made up for by the abundant green of the evergreen forests and ferns. Green and grey every day. But like all things, my tolerance of weather is different this year.

I long for sun. I long for warmer days when we can be outside for hours, using our full yard, going to the many untraveled hiking trails and using up our energy. I feel like I haven’t been properly tired for months, only in some sort of hibernatory haze where every day looks and feels the same. It doesn’t help that everything outside these four walls feels so momentous, so life and death. But here it’s all the same.

We’re watching as our world changes around us, for good and bad, and there’s not much we can do about it. What we can do, most of us have already done. At the same time, all we hear are calls that we’re not doing enough, even as our daily lives are increasingly exhausting. Forrest and I are tired. The kids are worn down. And all of it is taking a toll on us.

Our book club read “Dead Wake” this last month, a book about the sinking of the Lusitania. I had suggested it and in the discussion, someone asked me why on earth I would want to pick a book that had so much death in it. I realized as I was trying to respond that I like reading history because even in these huge events, people are just…people. Yes, big decisions are made at high levels, but for most of us? It’s keeping on in the best way we know how. It reassures me.

It reminds me that living through hard times is often more hard than exciting. Yes, there are truly horrific places in history that I would hate to be. But most times, for most of us, being part of history is making the small choices that we do have in the middle of terrible constraints. It’s making the time for someone who is struggling. It’s donating if we can. It might even be just making it to the next hour and the next and the next.

And that’s ok. Sometimes the only way to escape the grey is to wait it out. After all, the sun set at 4:59 today and it’s only going to get brighter from here.

Promised Frost

This weekend Forrest and I started our fall garden cleanup. It takes a few Saturdays and I have to admit, it’s not my favorite. Not because of weather; the spring planting is tremendously less pleasant with misty rain and slugs everywhere. Not because of the work; these days, any chance to get outside and use some energy is welcome. It’s because it’s sad. All of the plants get ripped out and put on the compost, the perennials get trimmed back, and any final straggling harvest is brought in.

By now I am sick of gardening, ready for a winter full of resting and planning. I don’t really want to plant anything else. But I also don’t want to say goodbye to the hard work from the last season. There’s something about pulling out fully grown cucumber vines, which it took me five (five!) plantings to get started, that makes me think, “If only, if only the sun could continue, the weather could stay warm, we would have gotten so much more.”

I’m not sure if that’s botanically accurate. Do annual plants just give out after awhile? I’ve never lived in a place where the frost wasn’t looming in the future, offering a hard stop to the season. A hard stop to the hard work. A time to think over the last season and plan for the next. A promised respite, whether we like it or not.

A promised respite. I think that much of my life has been in pursuit of promised respite. I’m not a person who loves work. Forrest, he does his job because he likes it. I do my job because I want it to be done. I want to hold the finished product in my hand while I lounge on the sofa and eat my celebratory chocolate.

But in this season, both professionally and personally, there is no promised respite. I send this manuscript out to agents and hope that someone wants it. Eventually, at some undetermined point in time, I decide to put it back in a drawer and start on the next manuscript. I parent these children through the daily torture that is distance learning and hope that they are getting what they need. Eventually, at some undetermined point in time, the grownups in charge will decide they actually are grownups and the schools will be safe enough to use again.

How do we sustain motivation when there is no frost coming? There’s no hard stop to this work. Again, this is where I, the blogger, am supposed to give you 100 words that sum up everything and leave you feeling hopeful and resolved. But I’ve been gardening long enough to learn that there are things outside of human control. I fertilize the soil, plant the seeds, water them…and sometimes the cucumber plants don’t come up. The second time…they still don’t germinate. I wait, and plant again, and then the squirrels or rats or rabbits eat them. I plant a fourth time and one, just one precious plant comes up. I talk to that little plant - quoting The Last of the Mohicans, “You stay alive! You’re strong! You survive! Whatever it takes, you stay alive!” - and then it, too, gets eaten. Finally, in a last ditch effort of cheap supermarket seeds, I plant again, telling the kids, “There will probably be no cucumbers this year.”

And six weeks later, those same kids come rushing in with the first fresh cucumber of the season. There have been probably a hundred since then. So many that I was putting cucumbers out for every meal, including breakfast.

There are things outside of human control. I don’t control the cucumber seeds, I don’t control the frost, I don’t control the agents reading my work, I don’t control the pandemic, I don’t control the people in charge. But maybe what I do control is the promised respite. The moment where I say, “Enough.” Where I stop feeling bad for all the work there is to do and let myself celebrate all the work that has been done.

Because the other part of the fall garden cleanup is putting in the bulbs for next year. We plant tulips and lilies, garlic and peonies, thinking of how nice it will feel to see the green shoots coming up through the frosty ground come March. We not only give ourselves the respite, we give ourselves a little bit of a head start - seeding a little bit of motivation for the next big thing we’re going to do.

How can you promise yourself a respite today? When is your break coming? How can you let yourself celebrate what you have achieved and plan for the next?

Stress and Self-Indulgence

I made a mistake this morning. It started out so well. I got the kids on their zoom calls with only one minor technical problem, cleared the breakfast table and did the yoga I’ve been meaning to get to for the past week. The stress around here has been palpable, between my work fears, the usual kid chaos, our annual October wind storms and then, you know, the hugely contentious election, pandemic, global warming and all that. My therapist likes to remind me that constant stress requires consistent release and that doing yoga once a month isn’t going to do it in these times.

So I did the good thing. I turned on my yoga app and did my workout routine, even through the interruptions and the dog who thinks that me laying on the floor means cuddle time and the cat who believes downward dog=kitten playground. And it worked. My chest was less tight, my breathing had steadied and my brain was no longer cycling through my to-do list. Yay!

And then I made a mistake. Because when I went to turn off the yoga app, I took just a second to check the news. And then Facebook. And then Twitter. And then I might as well have not wasted my yoga time. I suppose my muscles are microscopically stronger but who cares? I’m back in the rut.

One of the great struggles of our time is trying to figure out the balance of being informed with being overwhelmed. We live in a global world and there is just too much to care about. Because it’s not that I don’t care. I really do. But if I’m being pragmatic, I need to focus my efforts where I can actually make a difference. And compared to the giant struggles of our time, my efforts make such a small difference. And my yoga feels self-indulgent.

But I believe that those last two statements are false. Not even a little bit false. Lies, lies, lies. We need to focus on the small differences. That’s where the change happens. You think that gender equality efforts led to changed laws overnight? You think that smallpox was eradicated in a weekend? Every great thing is small moments repeated. It’s hard conversations that we don’t shy away from. It’s postcards written or hours spent mentoring about a child or even yoga workouts done so I have the gumption to keep moving forward.

And we will have missteps. Maybe no one cares about those postcards. Maybe I write a book that no one ever reads. Maybe you spend hours working hard with good intentions and it comes to nothing. But those moments weren’t nothing. They changed you. Hopefully into a kinder, fiercer, more resilient advocate for future days.

That social media spell I fell under just now? That changed me too. And not for the better. I think it’s kind of funny. I grew up in the era where fundamentalists told us that every song we listened to, every show we watched, every video game we played was garbage that would turn us all into school-shooters. And I ended up agreeing that what we take in does affect what we put out there. But it’s not The Matrix we should be worried about. It’s the lies, the hate, the casual disregard for each other’s humanity that we have to reject.

So what can you do today, however seemingly self-indulgent, that makes you into the person you were made to be? As for me, I’m turning off that damn phone for an hour or two. I can catch up on the news some other time.

The Impossible Thing

I’ll admit it. I have no idea what I’m doing. I usually have a plan, a 12-week blogging outline, a path that I’m leading my readers on. But literally as I am writing this, the distance learning interruptions are coming fast and furious, the dog is monitoring the front window so she can bark every time anyone walks by, and I’m struggling with my own self-doubt about whether or not I can keep all the balls in the air. I already dropped the one about submitting the second online form about picking up library books from the school this week. I thought the first form I filled out was enough, but alas. No library books for my poor children who only have three bookshelves full to choose from.

All of that to say, I don’t know what to write today. Except that if you’re in this same place as me, this place where there are few wins and too many struggles…welcome. You’re in good company. This is hard.

But the nice thing about having no idea what I’m doing is that I haven’t learned what is impossible yet. I just finished my second manuscript, this one for a fluffy, fun fiction. I’m getting ready to submit it to agents, which I hear will involve a lot of rejection. One of the few people I’ve talked to about this made sure to let me know how impossible it was, how it won’t work for me, how no one really gets a book published.

Maybe they’re right. But I don’t know that for sure yet. And life around here is already so messy, so humbling, so terribly non-ideal, that I keep asking myself, “Why shouldn’t I try? What could adding a few (or a hundred) rejections really change?” I’ve been rejected before and somehow my family and friends still love me.

What is your thing? The thing that you don’t know is impossible yet? Why not try? Maybe there’s good reasons - you’re overworked as it is, or you don’t have the money to pursue that dream yet, or you just don’t have it in you to take on another struggle. Makes sense to me. But maybe today, consider mulling over the impossible thing in your mind. Maybe as you think through it, the path will become a little more clear. The fog will lift for just a moment and you’ll see that your impossible thing is not as far away as you thought. Or you’ll see another path towards that goal, one you hadn’t noticed yet.

Even as I write these words, they sound fluffy. What is an impossible goal compared to the very urgent needs around me right now? (And I wish I could share with you a photo of the sheer number of living beings surrounding me and a recording of the noise of three simultaneous zoom calls and various online learning platforms.) Those demands are real and great. But they are not the sum total of my life. I can offer ten minutes to my impossible thing.

Even if you’re interrupted every thirty seconds.

What is your impossible thing?

I'm Back!

Hi Everyone!

I apologize for disappearing two months ago! I had my nose to the grindstone to finish up my second manuscript but it’s done now (yay!) so I’m back and will be filling your feed with more content, I promise. I don’t have too much to say today except I missed writing down my thoughts for you all. And think of me fondly, if you think of me, as I embark on the treacherous journey to finding an agent for this new fiction book!

Starting tomorrow, I’ll have a new longer post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but I don’t know about what yet. The world seems to be getting darker both literally and figuratively (our lights are flickering with an October storm). But I believe that with each small decision to be good to each other, we add a little more fuel to a fire that will keep us all warm.

Take care, thanks for still reading, and see you tomorrow!

Uncomfortable Learning

Back when I was in college, a friend and I had a recurring debate that we’d have over and over again. As psychology students, we’d read the studies that showed that women who embraced traditional gender roles were less successful but generally happier. At a time in our lives when we weren’t particularly happy (although who is when walking to class in an upstate NY winter?), the idea that we might be able to drop out, stop worrying about finals, throw some lipstick and an apron on and call it a day – well, let’s just say it had its appeal. But we knew that happiness would be fleeting. Knowledge brought discomfort, anger, and often sadness, but it also brought fulfillment, passion, and tools to help other people. I wouldn’t be able to do the things I love to do now if I’d given up then.

I always, always try to remember that I’m not learning about our complex world just for funsies. I’m not reading books by diverse authors to become a better person, or to seem more woke, or to show off. I’m curious about other people’s lives because if I move through this one, beautiful life I have without learning, I’m going to hurt people. I’m going to assume things about them that aren’t true. I’m going to attribute my successes to my awesomeness and their failures to their terribleness. I won’t allow myself to hurt people like that.

I could have chosen a 1950s life. There are many who do, and if it works for you, go and be blessed. Even having stayed home with my kids for so long, I feel like I straddle that line. But I don’t embrace traditional gender roles, because I’ve seen too much of life. I’ve seen people cross those roles again and again to become the people that they were meant to be. And when I start to unpack my ideas of who people are based on gender, race, and sexuality, I start to be able to approach the world from a more complicated and more beautiful place.

Too much advocacy, especially that done by well-meaning white women, has failed to be informed by the complexity of the world in which we live. If you look at the history of non-profits and social work, middle-class women just like me created the types of solutions that work in our world instead of looking at the worlds inhabited by people in poverty, immigrants, and people of color. We must be curious or we will do harm. That internal work? It’s not all of the work we have to do, but it is the starting block, and we must continue to learn our whole lives. It’s not the easy, happy way, but it is the only real way to create change that helps all people.

A Rough Day: Bringing Emotions to the Table

It’s been a bit of a pensive day around here. We’ve been watching some homebuying show from England, me and the twins, and as much fun as it is to debate which house they should buy and why, it’s hard to watch scenes from far-off places that feel impossibly distant. Not that we’d be hopping on a plane to go to England any time soon, but we’re so stuck here that our big vacation this summer is a VRBO an hour away. No new scenes, just a house and lake that are slightly different than the house and lake we spend all summer visiting. We’ve been spending time thinking and talking about what we have to be grateful for, how lucky we are, but also processing our grief and sadness. And by we, I mean the kids. They’ve been processing, which looks less like snuggly tearful moments and more like calling the house hunters on the TV idiots for not appreciating the beauty that surrounds them. And then picking on each other because we’re stuck here and we can never leave and there’s nothing fun to do and, “No! I will NOT go on another hike as long as I live!”

As a mom, it’s hard to experience all that processing when, frankly, I agree with them, especially about the “never hiking again” part. I feel stuck too. I feel like my life will never be good again. I feel exhausted and stressed and increasingly isolated and worried that my friends won’t even like me when this is all done. My inner 8-year-old is also screaming at the TV.

Which is why I need to do some work on my internal state. Because when I’m trying to help these little people I’ve been blessed with, they don’t need me to dump all of my emotional crap on top of their emotional crap. There’s more than enough crap with just them. So I have to take care of myself. I have to educate myself. I have to confront my own fears and take the hard steps and reach out to people who can help me get my head on right. And then I’ll be ready to help them.

If I don’t? I’m going to discipline them for saying the word ‘idiot’ instead of asking why that might be their reaction to some stranger not liking the exposed beams in a 300 year old house. That word won’t hurt anyone on the TV, but if I come down hard, I will. I’ll fight back in the face of disrespect instead of earning their respect by seeing that little hearts are breaking with every day spent in this limbo of fear and isolation.

What does this have to do with advocacy? Well, when we’re dealing with people, we need to do our own internal work before we step into emotionally charged situations. Otherwise, we can think we’re behaving rationally and they’re the unrealistic ones, but we’re both bringing our unexamined selves to the fight. And from there, we’re only going to find more conflict, less cooperation, and create more pain when we’re trying to make the world a better place. Our good intentions mean nothing if we’re not willing to do the work to make sure that we don’t hurt other people while trying to help them.

What crap are you bringing to the table? How has that affected your efforts to do good in your community?

Curiosity in a World That Makes No Sense

I love my phone. And the reason I love my phone is that because no matter where I am, if I have a question, I can find out the answer. Now, people love to dunk on technology, and they’re not wrong, but if I’m on a hike with my kids and we see a plant we don’t recognize, I can use an app and we can satisfy our curiosity right then and there. And I love it.

I think curiosity is the most ignored value that our society has. In fact, too many of us are incurious. We don’t want to seem ignorant, so we learn what we think we need to know and then we stop. But the problem is that we are ignorant and the world is such a beautifully interesting place. How could we not be interested in history, science, art, music or even just the people around us?

I love this curiosity. But even more than that, curiosity is sometimes our best tool when we’re coming up against someone whose way of looking at the world is so foreign that it feels repugnant to us. Sometimes I just can’t even understand how someone could be so wrong. And so, if I have any hope of building connection with them, I need to figure out how. I need to be curious and ask big questions.

Why do you think that? Why does that feel true to you? How do see that solution working? What problems seem important to you? Why those and not others? What about those counterarguments fails to resonate with you?

I’m not in this life to convince people to my way of seeing things. I don’t honestly think that’s possible. But I’m also not interested in pretending like I am the only moral being in the universe. Often my curiosity helps me see why I think what I think just as much as it helps me see another perspective. Often, it helps me discount entire realms of discussion. (Once I learned enough about anti-LGBT rights advocacy, I realized I wasn’t going to engage with arguments about the basic rights of any group of people anymore. That decision alone gave me back a lot of time.) Either way, curiosity is necessary to figure out how to overcome obstacles in advocacy and how to move forward in a way that recognizes the true scope of a problem.

If we could all stop ourselves when we think, “But that doesn’t make sense” and then force ourselves to ask, “How could that make sense?” problems might not become simpler, but they would move from the realm of the impossible to the realm of the complex. And while complex is hard, with enough thought, effort and resources, it can be overcome.

Breaking Expectations, But Not in a Good Way

Forrest and I have this thing we like to call the “Shithead Principle”. What that means is that often, the correct course of action will mean you’re not living up to the expectations of the world around you. Whether that’s choosing to spend time with your kids instead of have a perfectly clean house or helping out a younger colleague rather than getting your work done 100% on time, the Shithead Principle will often lead to people looking at you and thinking you’re lazy, or unmotivated, or disrespectful. But it’s not any of those things. It’s realizing that sometimes there are more important things than checking off all the boxes. And the most important part of that is not justifying yourself, not wasting a minute somehow trying to make it ok that you live in a messy house or your work had to wait until after that conversation.

Because if we keep trying to justify these choices, we’re giving weight to the idea that there is something deficient in choosing to spend time with our kids or helping someone else out. We’re acting as though the point of our work is to check the boxes rather than help people, when in reality, a clean house means nothing if your kids are disconnected from you, and a business can’t run if new workers aren’t brought up to speed. But not apologizing makes you seem like even more of a Shithead.

Forrest and I run into this quite often because, given our personalities, we’re always riding that line. We want to be good, responsible adults, but we also realize that a lot of the lessons we learned as children aren’t worth wasting our time over. And when we’re working on making our community better, sometimes we have to learn to ride that line. We have to be willing to push back against authorities that are making easy choices instead of good choices. We have to speak out against policies that hurt our neighbors, whether that be due to poverty, race, homelessness or anything else. We have to be present in the small moments to offer freedom for kids to be kids, letting them be loud or raucous in a world that wants nothing more than to just not be bothered.

After these moments, when we have the be the shithead, I usually feel like crap. I second-guess myself. I wonder if I used the right words or said the right thing or if this overwhelming feeling of vulnerability means that once again I got it all wrong. But those are just feelings. They come and then, if I let them, they go. And in the end, I find that my instincts – to care for other people, to make space for them in our community – those instincts guided me well. My work to learn and grow changed me and I can trust that change in the moments I need it most. So while I may look like a shithead, I’m not really acting like one.

When have you had to break other’s expectations to do what was right?

Showing Up is Half the Battle

Forrest and I were looking around at our garden last night and talking about how if you’d told us five years ago that we would have an urban garden complete with 15 raised beds, we would have told you that you were crazy. In the same way, if you had told me that within nine months, I would have written over 150 blog posts and 35,000 words on a second book, I would have told you that you were crazy. Heck, if you had come to me ten years ago and had said, at some point, you will own two dogs, a cat, and have three kids and will think it’s no big deal when those kids ask you for a kitten, I would have told you that you were crazy.

As I get older, I realize how many of these seemingly gargantuan life tasks, like writing thousands of words, don’t just happen. Instead, they are the slow accumulation of small choices. If you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, you’ve realized that’s pretty much my schtick. But when it comes to advocacy, I think it’s so, so important to remember that. The big social movements we see are the culmination of thousands of small choices. The smaller changes we see at a local level are also the culmination of thousands of small choices.

In some ways, this feels daunting. If I want to advocate for low-income housing in my community, I have to accept that it will take thousands of small choices. Anyone who has worked in any organization for any amount of time knows how hard it is to change the direction of any group of people. But in other ways, I find it reassuring. These huge, seemingly impossible tasks were made up of many very possible steps. Our job is to figure our what those steps are and then, to do them.

So much of it is unglamorous. So much of advocacy is hard, painstaking work that comes to nothing. Often that work is on ourselves. Reading, learning, asking questions so that we might learn to understand lives that are different from our own. Showing up to every meeting, showing up to volunteer every time. Showing up to hard conversations and showing compassion to others even when we don’t want to.

That low-level work is so underrated. The people who do it are often overlooked and when we engage in it, we’ll often feel unappreciated. But showing up for our community is the most important part of advocacy. Because we can have all the right opinions, all the right words, and all the right plans for change but if we do not show up in the small things, nothing will ever happen.

How can you show up for your community today?

It's Too Hot to Change the World

We’re having what passes for a heat wave over here in Seattle, which means the temperature hit 90 and we’re all moaning about how unbearable it is. I could complain that I don’t have air conditioning, but we didn’t have that when I was a kid in humid Pennsylvania, and we also didn’t have the beauty of the west coast’s dry heat. I’m not kidding, it’s 91 here right now, but since I’m sitting in the shade, it feels about 75 and I’m drinking a cup of hot tea. So there’s not too much to complain about.

At the same time, in these dog days of summer, I don’t want to do much besides sit in the shade. The kids have been pretty happy with our inflatable pool and it’s hard for me to remind myself that outside of my shady chair in the backyard, the world is facing very real problems. So my question today is, how do we stay motivated, even when life is pulling us in the direction of rest?

I happen to be married to one of the most motivated people in the world. If Forrest has a spare moment, he’s off somewhere working in the garden, or building an obstacle course for the girls, or just getting caught up on some fun project he’s got going for work. Frankly, it’s quite annoying. I’m more of a couch potato kind of person. But between figuring out working from home for two people, parenting full time with no breaks, camps or playdates, and then just keeping up with normal stuff while coping with the underlying stress of life, even he’s getting tired.

So how do we keep up this motivation? Can I confess that I think the answer is to stop trying? There’s a difference between distracting ourselves with meaningless clutter and truly letting ourselves get tired and rest. And the difference, I think, is in trusting ourselves. Too many times, I refused to trust the warning signals that predicted burnout. I told myself I was lazy, or that I was weak, or that other people would be fine under this burden. And then, when I couldn’t berate myself into keeping it up anymore, I crashed, watched too much stupid tv, and filled my time with the type of mental kitsch that kept me from acknowledging the truth: I have limits and if I don’t respect those, I’m going to end up dead in the water. No power, no direction, just floating along wherever the current takes me.

But if I trust those signals, refusing to give into the lies about comparison and weakness, I can keep moving forward. Maybe stopping to refuel or plot a new course, but still capable of getting where I want to go. Maybe in resting, I realize that I’ve been going about things wrong and I need to adjust. Maybe in resting, I let myself just grieve all these losses instead of running around like everything’s ok. Maybe in resting, I can look out at the bees doing their work in our poppies and remind myself that even they, the busiest of bugs, stay in when the weather isn’t to their liking.

So if you’re lacking motivation to change the world today, pull up a chair. Being tired isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. Trust yourself. Take a break, and then figure out what’s next. We’re in this for the long haul, after all.

Trial and Error

A friend of mine recently had a baby and she just posted something about missing out on some of those typical newborn moments due to Covid. She mentioned missing out on Mommy and Me and swimming

A friend of mine recently had a baby, and instead of spending her maternity leave doing baby class and playdates, she’s had to spend it away from family and friends and nervously awaiting the day she needs to put her little one in daycare to go back to work as a teacher. When I first thought of her being stuck at home, I thought to myself, well, if there’s a time of life to hang out at your house, it’s with a newborn. Going out with a baby is such a pain in the butt I hardly wanted to do it at all when I had one.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about how often I needed to get out of the house as a new mother. When I had an infant, I spent a lot of time with other parents at the same stage, just…being together. Watching and seeing that, yes, babies develop at different paces and, yes, we all are exhausted, and yes, sitting around watching a baby all day is not always the happy golden moments we’ve longed for. Sometimes it’s just…boring. Those friendships were essential to me, because in addition to the commiseration, I learned a lot of tips and tricks. It was as if we were all learning through trial and error, but I had four or five other people’s errors to learn from.

Learning how to make our communities stronger is better if we can learn from other people’s errors. Maybe you already have something that you’re working on, or maybe you’ve got a cause dear to your heart that you need to get started doing. Either way, linking up with other people in the same boat is going to serve you well. The work of creating a better world is hard and often demoralizing, just like parenting. It helps to have people who are going through it with you, and people who have done it before.

So where do we find these people? Often, they’re already in organizations that are helping and there Google is our best friend. Even if there isn’t an branch in your exact location, check out the closest one. Perhaps they serve both areas or they would if they had more help. Another place to look is amongst friends. Do you share common interests? Maybe try volunteering together. I find anything I try with a friend is much more likely to happen that if I had just tried alone. Lastly, read books, articles and interviews with the people who have worked on this problem before, especially if they are local. This is simple, easy and takes no bravery at all. And every step taken, no matter how small, is one step farther than you were before.

What step can you take today?

Learning from Experts

I read a lot of nonfiction books. Well, if you’re going to be a stickler about it, I listen to a lot of nonfiction books, because my best brain time is when I’m doing something else and audiobooks make the three loads of dishes I do every day a lot more tolerable. One thing I’ve learned from my hours and hours of nonfiction listening is that the experts really do have insights that the rest of us haven’t thought of.

I don’t think that we should always do exactly what any given expert is saying, and frankly, the state of science reporting in this country is appalling, but one reason I like listening to nonfiction is that every field brings with it its own lens for looking at the world. People who have spent their whole lives looking deeply into one thing are changed by it. I’m a people person, so I like hearing their views just to see how they’re so different than I think.

For example, I listened to an amazing book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness, which was about how our brains trick us into thinking the world is terrible and getting worse every day when, in reality, many of our efforts in medicine and economic development are steadily working. The writer was a research physician who had worked primarily in the developing world, and then later in his life, had devoted his time to making complex information more digestible to leaders and laypeople. Throughout the book, he talks about how, as a doctor working in places with limited resources, choices are just…different. You begin to think in terms of how many lives are saved with low-level intervention instead of how to save every last life.

Why am I talking about this in the context of advocacy? Well, I think that a lot of us are great at identifying problems but not so great at figuring out useful solutions. For example, our neighborhood doesn’t have consistent sidewalks. It’s a problem. If you want to stay on a sidewalk, you have to cross the street several times over the course of a block .Kids walking to school are unsafe, people walking their dogs are unsafe, and it makes it less likely that any of us will get out there and exercise.

So far, I have identified a problem. And since I’m not an expert, I have an easy solution. Get the city council to build more sidewalks. So maybe I decide to go to some city council meetings, I put my name on the list, make a public comment, hey, I even get a few friends to help me. And still nothing happens.

Because I’m not looking at this through the lens of those who are experts at this. I need to go out there and find out what the true steps are. How many people do I reasonably need to get together for this? Should I reach out to a city councilmember individually to get their input and support? What have other towns done in this situation?

As it turns out, my city council has a sidewalk plan that is publicly available. Now I’m starting to see through their lenses. The project lists off all of the roads in our city that have inadequate sidewalks, assigns points to them based on proximity to schools, connection to public transit, current safety status, and…wait for it…public demand for replacement. My sidewalks haven’t had much public outcry, but given the criteria, it looks like that’s the only lever I have to pull. The public works people have thankfully already done most of the work in assessing safety and cost.

Now that I’m seeing how the experts approach it, I can see what I need to do next to maybe get this problem solved and make my community a nicer place to live. This may seem like such a simple example, but first of all, anyone who has tried to get their town to do a public works project knows it’s complicated, and second of all, solving small problems often helps to solve the bigger ones, in my experience. How can you start to learn about a problem you’ve noticed? Can you find information from experts on how to approach it?

The Second Problem With The Puzzle

Last time, I talked about the first problem with each of us working on our piece of the puzzle: How do we know which piece is ours? Here's the second, harder problem. How do we know that other people are actually working on the other pieces? This problem isn’t harder because it requires more thought, it’s harder because it requires more faith. Faith in other people, something that is often misplaced. Other people will let you down. They will screw stuff up, they will forget stuff, and they will straight up tell you that all that work you did was wrong and doesn’t matter. But still, we need to have faith. Faith that even if things are done differently, or not done at all, other people are holding those puzzle pieces. They are not ours to hold.

Part of this faith in our fellow workers is understanding that, if we try to hold too many puzzle pieces, it will be worse than leaving them in unexperienced or disagreeable hands. How many times have we seen some burnt-out leader callously ignoring new ways of doing things because they have been holding on to too many pieces for too long? Or watched an experienced leader refuse to pass those pieces along because the new people will screw it up? (And they will, that’s part of learning.) Or watched details fall through the cracks because someone needed to control it all instead of delegating?

This faith in other people is not optional. We can refuse and then what? Give up our piece because what does it matter? Or try to swipe the whole damn puzzle and die exhausted without anyone to take our place because we didn’t let them learn and fail and learn again? It is hard work to trust that what we have is enough for our part. But it is not impossible.

I’d like to offer up a few of my tips and tricks for restoring my faith in humanity. As always, feel free to ignore, or riff off of them, or take them, try them, and decided for yourself. But know this: they come from experience. Every few months or so, I get what the Victorians called a “case of morbs.” I get down, defeated, teary, oversensitive, and generally pessimistic about myself, everyone else, the universe and even my cat. It always happens after I’ve had an experience that dealt a blow to my faith in the goodness of humanity.

When I say goodness of humanity, I don’t mean our general altruistic, parents-love-their-kids schtick. I mean, my foolish idea that if we all come to the table, offer what we have, try to be flexible, well, then we can figure out hard situations. Mostly it works, but sometimes it…doesn’t. Someone refuses to even come to the table, or to go the extra inch even when you’re going the extra mile, or they take what you offer without bothering to thank you, let alone offer anything back. Sometimes it just gets me down.

First, I wallow. I watch sad movies and eat yummy food and wear comfy clothes and listen to hipster music while gardening. It really, really helps. Then, I ask my people, my closest of close people, to remind me why the world isn’t shit. I make them tell me about kind people, and good experiences, and times when we all came together. Then, I do some godawful physical exercise to tire my brain out so much it can’t think for awhile. And then I remind myself that I don’t do this work for some quid pro quo. I offer it up in gratitude for all I have been given and hope that I may leave this world a better place.

And then I still take it easy for a little bit. Because faith in other people is hard. Trusting them to do their part is hard. And I’m allowed to rest after doing hard things. But I’m not allowed to rest forever.

How do you maintain your faith in other people? How do you rest when you’re struggling?

The First Problem With The Puzzle

In the last blog post, I talked about each of us taking our piece of this puzzle and working on it, trusting that everyone else is doing the same. In the last day or so, my mind keeps fidgeting over two big problems with that worldview. It’s hard when your own mind won’t just give you a break and believe what you tell it to believe.

First and foremost, how do we know what our piece of the puzzle is? This problem is less of one in my mind. The way I see it, we have two ways to figure out what our puzzle piece is. The first way is easy – there is something that grabs your heart. Some people are like this; they know what they are passionate about. It moves them, it drives them, it fills their hearts. And so they go after it. Maybe the how changes over the course of their lives, but the what does not. Maybe they start out caring about animals as a child by keeping good care of their own pets, and then they volunteer to be a dog walker for the Humane Society, and then they become a good advocate for abused animals, and then maybe enter a career as a vet or a administrator for an animal rights organization. Their puzzle piece has always been in their heart.

I’m always in awe of those people. But, confession time: that ain’t me. Nope. I couldn’t tell you a single thing, or even a handful of things that I care deeply about. I am like a toddler at the fair, stumbling from one flashy ride to another, constantly distracted and excited about whatever is in front of me. For awhile, I thought that I was less than because of this. I thought I was just not committed enough to things to care about them like some people care about water access in the developing world or racial equity in public schools.

That’s a damned lie. I care about all those things, and because of that, I can’t make any single one my focus. So where’s my puzzle piece? Unlike someone who changes the “how” but keeps the “what”, I accepted that I’m going to let the “what” change, but keep the “how”. I have skills, and at each stage of my life, I have been able to find the thing in front of me that needs those skills. Right now, I’m immersed in my local community and elementary school. So I’m bringing all my skills, thoughtfulness and passion to making sure those two places are as welcoming, just and resourced as I can. Someday, my kids will age out and I will find another thing in front of me. When I find it, I’ll bring those same skills to that piece of the puzzle, perhaps passing on the elementary school piece to some new parent coming along.

Ok, this blog is already getting long, so I am going to save the second, harder problem for another day. But I’ll leave you with this, reader. Which type are you? How has that worked for you? Have you embraced it? Have you fought it? What is the “how” in your life and what is the “what”?

Refusing to Do Nothing

I am tired. Even while isolating, we’re out hiking trails, kayaking, gardening, biking and generally using up all of the energy we’ve stored over the long winter and spring. Add to it the sun which shows it’s first light at 4:45 am and which keeps its last light until nearly 10 pm, and we are doing whatever the opposite of hibernating is.

There are just so many options available now that the weather is nice; it can be hard to choose which thing to do each day. Do you ever feel that way about causes? Like there are so many amazing things to care about, whether it be endangered species, homelessness, child abuse prevention, prison reform, or any of the other 1.4 million charities in the United States alone. I get exhausted thinking about all the good work out there being done, all that good work that needs help, and my inability to do more.

Can I let you in on my own private conspiracy theory? I think that the feeling of helplessness in the face of so much need is there to keep us from taking action. Eh, I don’t know if it’s on purpose or calculated or anything, but the fact that most of us just freeze up in the face of how much suffering there is? I think that frozenness exists because if each of us took just a little bit of that giant puzzle, we could create some major changes.

So here’s what I propose. Let’s each take one piece of this puzzle and work on it. Those of you who are up to our necks in diapers and daycare or crunch time work and overdue deadlines, you guys can take the edges and the corner pieces. Those of us who maybe have more time on our hands than we used to, we’ll take those bright blue sky pieces that all look the same. Together, each piece will get taken. And that way, we don’t all have to move heaven and earth to change the world.

We just have to change the small part we’ve been given.

Changing Community One Choice at a Time

I’ve spent the last eight months blogging about building connections and creating the kind of community that we all want to be a part of. While doing this, I’ve watched as so many of us have had to rethink what community means in the midst of catastrophic changes in our daily lives. At the same time, we’ve seen as the very deep, very damaging cracks of our society are no longer papered over with the façade of economic prosperity and endless busyness.

In thinking about how to write about advocacy, working together for change, and creating a more just world for all of us, I’m frankly overwhelmed. While not completely unequipped, there are thinkers and writers for whom this is their wheelhouse. I plan on spending a lot of time pointing to them and their amazing work in creating paths for us to follow.

At the same time, when reading so many of these ideas, I myself have been struck with feelings of powerlessness. Who am I, to think that I can make this world better? Half the time I’m just barely making it to the end of the day myself! What could I possibly offer to the world that would address these huge systemic issues – things like lack of health care, racism in policy making, or gender-based employment inequity? I can barely conceive of how these things affect us on a daily basis let alone how I can affect them back.

The authors, advocates and leaders who write these books are so extraordinary, so consumed with this life-changing work that it all feels so inaccessible to me. But I refuse to allow myself to stop there. Everything feels inaccessible before I’ve done it. Everything feels impossible before I’ve tried. Building community felt like this giant big thing, until I started just making small choices day by day, building it brick by brick until I was amazed to see what those small steps had taken.

At the same time, like community, advocacy is going to look different for each of us because I believe down to my core that each of us has something unique to offer. If I tell you, today, call your city councilman or tomorrow, lead a letter writing campaign, you may just tune me out. In the same way, when someone tells me that the only effective thing I can do is go protest, I tune them out. We are each perfectly equipped to do our kind of work. The important thing is that we’re doing it.

So, step by step, inch by inch, I want to ask you to consider taking this journey with me. I’m as unsure as you where it will lead. But I do know that if we’re pursuing justice with fierce passion, tempering our passion with humility and generosity, and using both wisdom and optimism, we’ll all be in a better place than we are today.

Thank you for joining me.

What IS Next?

Whew! Thirty posts in thirty days is a lot, especially since my brain refuses to keep to the word limit I’d decided on. I’ve been blogging about community for 9 months, much longer than I thought I would keep it up. I want to start talking about how we can take our skills and our connections and use them to make a difference. There’s often a lot of internal work that we need to do before we jump out there. We need to learn. We need to ask hard questions of ourselves. We need to look at what other people are doing and join them humbly rather than barging ahead and doing everything our way. (Maybe that last one is just me.)

So I’m going to take that deep breath and a week to enjoy what will hopefully be a sunny week here in Seattle. I’ll be back on July 15th with the first post in a series on connecting our skills with our passions to make a difference. I can’t wait.

See you then!