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Day 14 Reflection: Hunger

Hunger, the gnawing in our stomach and uncanny fear in our bones, disconcerts us. Wired in our most primitive brain, hunger presses us to seek sustenance so we don’t die.

We have borrowed the word ‘hunger’ to describe other forms of sustenance, usually in a spiritual sense. We hunger for love, for truth, for justice, for a right relationship with the earth or with our conception of God.  The word is fitting, as our desire for these needs can grow uncomfortable and urgent in our souls.

 Hunger drives us, no matter what its source. Hunger doesn’t take us on a gentle walk through the orchard after dinner, but sends us in pursuit of what would make us satiated and whole. We walk with hunger on a rocky path, but we barely note the stones because we are in pursuit of our sustenance. 

Hunger reminds us that we are akin to the other creatures of the world, who need, who toil, who search. We may hunger for more than basic sustenance, but we do hunger.

Day 13 Reflection: Search

Humanity searches.

The poorest search for sustenance and shelter. The disenfranchised search for justice. The lonely search for love and belongingness. 

We all search for meaning in a harsh, capricious world.

It’s hard to live in such a random world, where one’s life can be turned upside down by a natural disaster or a crash of the economy. It’s harder to live in a world where the wicked game the system and come out on top, where structures that disadvantage people by race and social class keep people down.

We all search for something beyond ourselves, for comfort, for meaning. Some find it in a Supreme Being, others find it in nature or music, still others find it in service to higher ideals. Sometimes our attempts to order our world yield injustice, as when we decide that those who are advantaged deserve their status by order of a deity. Sometimes, when we realize that what we thought was natural order are actually the structures of injustice, we make meaning of the need to right wrongs. 

We define ourselves as the seekers of the Mystery — followers of the Book, calling ourselves Christian, Jew, or Moslem; Hindu or Buddhist or Zoroastrian; seekers of Truth. No matter how far we travel on our path, the Mystery of life will always be just beyond us, hiding in a random world.

Day 12 Reflection: Heal

I have been in a state of healing for most of my life. 

I grew up with childhood trauma — sexual abuse and rape, bullying, an unstable parent. I will talk about resiliency later in this series, because today I want to talk about healing.

This is hard to write, because society tends to tell survivors to ‘get over it already’. The heart and mind don’t work that way. Childhood trauma changes one’s whole trajectory — how one sees oneself, what one believes is possible, how abnormal one feels compared to the children around them who haven’t faced the trauma and who blithely live their lives without picking around the traumatic experience.

I didn’t start healing until I left my hometown for college. Before that, I was still immersed in the toxic culture of the town and could not see my life as anything but pain. In my new life, however, I met people who loved me for myself, wreckage and all.

It was only then that I began to heal. I think love is an integral part of healing, because it shows us that we are more than the sum of our damage. It’s hard to let love in as an abuse survivor, but I had friends who persisted in loving me, and I became the person I had been denied.

 I’m still healing, many many years later. It’s much better; the nightmares come rarely, and the memories have faded to neutral-toned snapshots, devoid of the pain. Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out if I hadn’t had the childhood I had. But my life has turned out so much better than I had dreamed as a child, which I credit to healing.

I will likely heal for the rest of my life, as do many (if not all) of us. But healing is possible.


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Day 10 Reflection: Partnerships

I like to work alone. I feel working with people complicates things and takes up extra time. It’s not as efficient as working on my own. I have to work around other people’s schedules, and … 

I imagine many of you reading this are nodding your heads in agreement. It’s just easier to get things done on our own. Unless, of course, they’re things too big for us to accomplish. Or we don’t have the know-how to do them. 

So we seek partnerships. And we find partnerships difficult, because we have to deal with the messy tension of working with other people. We struggle with communication at times. We see the problem differently, and the solution differently as well. We have different priorities, different perspectives. Even in the best of partnerships, we struggle at moments, because we’re not psychic twins with our partner.

But partnerships have a power that working on one’s own lacks. The power that comes from those different perspectives. The advantage of having a complement of skills to address a situation, to find a solution. The ability to tackle big problems. 

The power of a partnership is worth giving up a little independence, stepping back to negotiate rather than charging in and doing something, and having sole control of the vision.

Day 9 Reflection: Acceptance

“It is what it is.” This phrase has always bugged me, because I want to fix things. I want to make things happen. I want to be in charge of my destiny. All I need are some affirmations and I can —

Sometimes, it turns out, I can’t.  

Sometimes I don’t have the energy to put more effort into something to influence the outcome. I give what I can, and then I accept that I’ve done the best I can, and I take my needed rest. I find this with my writing career, which thus far has not taken off. Because I have a full time job which supports my family, I cannot devote myself to full-time writing, so I write as much as I can and then accept my time and energy limitations.

Sometimes I don’t have the power to change reality, and I have to accept it. I cannot bring a loved one back to life. I can’t reverse a layoff. All I can do is accept and mourn and adapt.

Sometimes, though, it’s dangerous to accept things as they are. Injustices may be too large for me alone to solve, but that doesn’t mean I should dismiss them with “It is what it is”. I have limited power to change others’ minds or to change society, but I must address what I can rather than accept. I accept that I can’t change the world, but I try, and I listen to those who face the injustice so my energies go in a helpful direction and are not wasted. 

At the end of the day, “it is what it is” … for now.

Day 8 Reflection: Mistakes

When I was in college long ago, I dated an engineering student. I remember telling my mother at the end of the semester that he had gotten a D in his differential equations class. 

“Does he know what he did wrong?” she asked.

I told her he had no idea why he’d gotten the grade.

“That’s too bad,” she noted. “He won’t be able to fix it if he doesn’t know.” 

People don’t like admitting their mistakes. It’s easy to assign an external factor to failure — the teacher hates me, the instructions were too difficult. But without admitting mistakes, one can’t work out the solution.

Sometimes mistakes can be catastrophic. A few days ago, something caused a deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in Ethiopia, the second such crash with a 737 MAX 8 in six months. Several countries’ airlines have quit flying the model in the belief that a mechanical failure took down the craft. One of the holdouts, and the country that flies the most 737 MAX 8 aircraft, is the US. One hopes that the US isn’t trying to cover up a catastrophic mistake by an American company with false confidence.

We have a crisis of responsibility in leadership because of the inability of people to admit making mistakes. Politicians pass blame to others or make equivocal statements: “Mistakes were made.” They fear that taking responsibility for mistakes will alarm the electorate, who don’t like admitting their own mistakes. This leads to the crisis — taking responsibility for mistakes is the sign of a true leader, one who is willing to learn for the sake of her constituents, yet leaders present themselves with a flawless facade for the sake of electability.

We need to admit our mistakes to learn from them, to fix them, to grow and to become wise.


Day 7 Reflection Part 2: Looking Inward at Resilience

I manifest resilience in my life, and I find it’s one of my most enduring characteristics. 

There are many ways in which my life has been privileged — I was born into a white middle class family, I have been gifted with a good deal of analytical and verbal intelligence — but I have had to overcome a childhood of bullying, unstable parenting, sexual abuse, and the beginnings of what was later diagnosed as Bipolar 2. I have made it to 55 years old with a reasonably well-balanced life. 

As I wrote that, I realized that I (as I suspect many do) began to conflate resilience with accomplishment and judging my resilience by the degree of my accomplishment. This transmogrifies an ordinary, developable skill into an attribute of the rarefied few. This is the script of what I referred to yesterday as inspiration porn: ” … overcame a difficult childhood/debilitating disease/life-shattering accident to become a lawyer/doctor/marathon runner/fill in the blank with an accomplishment most of us reading the story couldn’t manage. If I look at what I’ve accomplished (a modest career at a small Masters I university where I’ve made few waves, six novels that I can’t get an agent for/published) I don’t feel very resilient. But if I look at what I’ve survived, and the current quality of my life, I feel very resilient indeed.

If we want people to be resilient, we have to believe that resilience is ordinary, is learnable, is measurable by one’s quality of life and not their level of achievement. 


Day 7 Reflection: Resilience

Resilience is a concept that has passed from the psychological lexicon to everyday language. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors” (American Psychological Association (APA), 2019). More simply put, it is the ability to bounce back.

The person with resilience as a trait recovers from being let go from a job by planning to regain employment rather than falling into helplessness. They recover from life-altering trauma stronger than before. They star in our inspirational stories, and we admire them for their blossoming in the face of adversity, their ability to bounce back.

We need to remember two things about resilience. The first one, as the APA (2019) reminds us, is that resilience is a common trait. People in general have displayed this trait countless times, after major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina; terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and Oklahoma City, as well as during common events such as illness, death of a loved one, and loss of a job. 

The other thing we need to remember is that resilience is fostered by a series of internal and external factors. The biggest factor in resilience, according to the APA (2019) is “caring and supportive relationships both inside and outside the family“.  This is not a small thing; people need other people to make sense of adversity and tragedy.

Other factors include:

·       The capacity to make realistic plans and take steps to carry them out.
·       A positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities.
·       Skills in communication and problem solving.
·       The capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses. (APA, 2019).
To become resilient, we can work to develop these networks and skills. Those of us with disordered childhoods or other challenges may choose to see a therapist to get coaching on how to develop these skills, and we should view counseling as a positive.
We can also contribute to others’ resilience by providing that community support needed to foster resilience. As such, we need to embrace people in their messiness and neediness, allowing them the process of bouncing back from their crises and challenges. As much as we want to take the pain of the crisis or challenge away from someone, our role may simply be to listen and hold space for that person.
Resilience is not a rare gift. It is a key aspect of our humanity, to be nurtured and developed.
American Psychological Association (APA) (2019). The road to resilience. Available: https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience[March 12, 2019].

Day 6 Reflection Part 2: My struggle

I may be moving away from writing. Or at least writing novels.

I just haven’t felt it lately. The thrill of writing hasn’t been there since I finished Whose Hearts are Mountains in December. I haven’t started a novel since then; now I have struggled with proofreading/editing the last of my backlog of novels before developmental edit. 
 
The fantasy of getting published has pretty much died. I don’t know if the average of 250 readers per self-published novel is worth $500 in developmental edit fees and sixty to 100 extra hours of work per novel. I don’t know if I could even get that many readers.  I’m wary of the pitfalls the vulnerable writer can fall into: vanity presses and publishing mills, and will not consider those as choices.

The thing that really worries me is that, when I say “I could quit,” I often don’t feel a thing. No cheer, no relief, no regret, almost like I hadn’t spent five years, countless hours, $2000 and an investment of identity into writing novels and trying to get published.
 
I don’t feel bad about quitting until I write this out: I might quit my quest to be published. When I say that, I feel the death rattle of a dream, but at the same time I wonder if that dream of being published, being read is unreasonable, unworkable, pie-in-the-sky. I wonder if there are more reasonable things to dream about.

This is my struggle. Pray for me, or wish me luck, or whatever you feel moved to do.