The Holiday Season Upon Us

How did it get here so fast? Where did the year go?

And with that comes, we’re going to blink and it’s going to be January!

It’s hard to believe that it’s December already and all I keep thinking is how quickly the next few weeks are going to fly by. Seems so different than childhood when it felt like Christmas Day would never arrive, like it took all year for time to pass on just Christmas Eve.

The Christmas season– Advent– is one of waiting, of listening to what’s inside us, of the end of the year when we reflect back on not only where we’ve been, but where we want to go. All this as we await the magic of Christmas Eve and the joy and peace of Christmas Day.

While it’s a challenge during this time when we’re pulled in all sorts of directions for different reasons, take the time to think about what it means to you, what’s inside of you that you’ve been pushing aside or ignoring. As we come to the end of another year, it’s the perfect opportunity to seize what we don’t want to miss in the future.

And have a few cookies, too.

Thankfulness

Since my mom’s death, I’ve been able to write more about her struggles and challenges in life– many of which I believe stem from her having had polio when she was six and walking with a limp the rest of her life. But I also have become more aware of how the way she felt about herself translated to us, her children. She loved us, I have no doubt about that, but that’s not what this about.

Instead, it’s about how she never felt good enough with anything that she accomplished or had in her life.

And if you know me well enough, do you see the connection?

While she often told me that I was from another limb of the family tree– one that didn’t connect with the rest of the family– what reflects back at me is how much I saw the pain, the challenges, the unfulfilled lives of my parents, and how I didn’t want that to be me.

Maybe I am from another limb, maybe I’m an old soul, but with each passing day I am more and more aware of how I choose to spend my time and what goals I want to achieve are a culmination of everything that makes me who I am.

Long before there was social media where I could share what inspires me, the items I create, or anything about my writing (how different my life would have been if there had been social media when my first book about sibling suicide grief was published), I was still doing everything I am today. I was still a bit crazy (okay, anal is a better word) about my housekeeping, after all who judges a husband on how clean a house looks?! It’s always the female half who gets the judgment. I ran, I swam, and I ran my dogs. I cooked, I tried new recipes. And there was that doctorate somewhere in the midst of all of this. I thought people who took three-day tests were crazy until I became one of them.

Everything.

These things that make me not just who I am, but who I want to be. As I stand here, I’m in front of a gulf that separates me from where I am today and where I want to be. I used to call it a gorge, but I’ve changed it to a gulf because I can swim that gulf. I wasn’t sure how I’d get across the gorge as there wasn’t a bridge.

I struggle some days with the fact that I am not where I want to be, that my goals that seem so close in my mind, still look so far away on the outside. And then I take myself back to my youth, to the very things that have inspired me to get here, that have kept me motivated. And I remind myself to keep going.

I don’t want to live an unfulfilled life. I don’t want the sadness and depression that I saw plague both my parents in their lives. The inspiration is flowing so fast some days that it’s overwhelming, but it’s what keeps me going. I rest when I need to and gather strength for the next leg of the journey.

I have worked hard to get here. I might have a long way to go to where I want to be, but somehow I’ll get there. I refuse to be sidelined by the thoughts of “not good enough” that my mom had.

More than anything, for this Thanksgiving week, I am reminded how much I am thankful for who I am.

Why not?

Lois Bloom said some of the most significant words in my life to me when she turned around in the car and asked me “Why not?”

She and her husband Sam had just picked me up from the airport in Orange County where I had flown in to speak at an event several days later. First, I was going to spend a few days with them at their house and a friend I was texting in the car asked if I was going to surf while I was in LA.

I told Lois and Sam this, and that I had told him no, and that’s when Lois turned her head toward me in the back of the car and said, “Why not? You can rent a surfboard.”

But I also hadn’t thought to bring a swimsuit, I told her– not even addressing that I’d only been out on a surfboard three times and was both exhilarated and still fearful of the experience.

“You can buy one,” she reminded me.

I don’t want to say that I was raised in a home where new opportunities weren’t encouraged because that wasn’t the case. As I grew older, I began to sense that because my mom had spent all but the first six years of her life with the effects of Polio lurking in the background and being told she couldn’t even have ballet slippers because she couldn’t wear them, that life became more reserve, more tentative.

I wondered in later years, while my friends were on the swim team and soccer team, why I hadn’t been asked if I wanted to do them. She told me I’d shown no interest although when I asked to join summer track after sixth grade she signed me up and took me to buy a very new thing, running shoes.

Surfing had been something I never thought I would do, after all, in that time you didn’t see girls on surfboards like we do now, and having had the opportunity three times, that was great.

But Lois knew there was no reason I couldn’t do more of it. And she was right. She, Sam, and I took what I called a “family outing” to the surf shop and I rented a board and a wet suit. I found a bikini between Target and TJ Maxx. I took one lesson and then for those few days I was in LA, I drove down to the beach attempted to get up on the board. Even if I paddled around, even if it were a cloudy and dreary day (it was June gloom), I got out on the water, shivering, and did it anyway.

By the time, I returned to Chicago– where I was living at the time– I called Jamie, the surf shop owner and a board maker, and asked him when he could have a board ready for me.

Why not? I thought.

I won’t say that I’m any great surfer because I’m not, but the lessons from surfing, from the ocean, have taught me more in those eight years since I got the board than in most of my life.

All because of two words, one question. Listen. There is always a way forward to more.

Setting My Creativity Free

When I was growing up, we had a big plastic bag filled with crayons. It was a Kmart bag or something similar and we were always adding stray crayons to it. When my sister Karen was in college, she would bring home the green and white dot matrix printer paper– stacks and stacks of it– so Denise and I were never without scrap paper to draw on.

But somewhere along the line, I stopped drawing, I stopped using crayons. And then I stopped using markers. As it was with sewing, I guess I just thought I was busy doing other things and really didn’t give it a second thought.

When I started Chelle Summer four years ago though, one of the goals was to start creating my own fabric designs. This meant, yes, that I had to draw and paint and create. For some reason I found this hard and while I would travel with markers and paper (I stopped taking paint and canvases to Los Angeles, much to the relief of Greg who was glad we had the extra space in the car) and yet I drew nothing. I set small goals, like an hour in the evening of just doodling. Still nothing.

What was this block? I finally realized it had something to do with the freedom that I give myself in my head to do things. While I’m good about writing five days a week, about spending some time each day working on sewing projects, I was having a harder time getting my visual creativity of drawing on paper to emerge from my head.

Finally, one afternoon in the middle of the week, I told myself to take some time and do some creating. From there I started doodling on the church bulletin during the homilies (shhh, don’t tell anyone that– but as I do the church’s social media, I’m also writing quotes down from the homilies so it gives me a better focus than of the crying child that’s keeping me from hearing everything). I spent several hours yesterday working on paintings, something I typical only can do on Sundays otherwise I end up going somewhere with paint on my hands.

Slowly but surely, that side of my creativity is emerging again. The hardest part– like my writing and sewing– is that there is much I want to do. And yet I know that if I spend time on it when I’m not doing other things or even just a few minutes a day, that is moving forward.

Giving God a Chance to Talk

I’ve been talking too much in my prayers.

I hadn’t thought anything of it until I was stopped in my tracks last week by a Facebook post that had a quote from a book reminding me how easily prayer can become a one-sided conversation. That’s totally me lately– there’s a lot of movement and traction I’m trying to put into place before a major job change in late January. I’m afraid time is running out on me and I don’t want to miss any boats, planes, or trains that I’m supposed to catch.

So I keep talking, I keep asking. But I realized I wasn’t giving God a chance to speak to me.

While I know that the answers I seek aren’t always found in the prayers– many times they come later in unexpected places– I am also aware of the important of silence to give God a chance to speak.

On Saturday, we joined what we call “the winter pool” so that I can swim all winter– outdoors in a heated pool while our pool has dipped into the fifties and we’ll be closing it in a month. I made a promise to myself that when I go to swim each day, I’ll take that time to do a better job listening.

And I’ll use the silence to make sure that I’m not missing the messages God’s been trying to pass along to me and I’ve been too busy talking to hear.

Making Each Day Meaningful

Pain, routine, life in general. You name it and it can be hard to get out of bed in the morning. No matter what’s going on in our lives, the days can be monotonous or we might dread them for a variety of reasons. Or we can simply be bored because life in general is routine.

That’s why it’s up to us to find the joy in each day. Even when the list is long, someone is always nagging at us to do something, or we have a time consuming project that we simply don’t want to do, we have to find something meaningful in that day, something to not just keep us going, but to inspire us in our journey.

I know that my posts are generally positive and that’s done for a reason– if I post anything negative (like the time the health insurance company had me irked to no end many years ago), it leaves me feeling angry and that anger it starts to fester and eventually ooze. That means I can’t function, or move on.

But by posting things that are positive, inspiring, motivating, and/or meaningful, the vibe of the day ahead for me changes. The glass is half full.

And it’s the same for finding meaning in each day. There are days where I feel tired or just don’t want to do the items on my list. Sometimes boredom sets in because, while I have plenty to do, there is a monotony to writing and sewing when I have editing or stitch removal to do. None of that is fun, however, it’s during those times where I have to find something small to do, something that will make me happy and feel better. Then the tasks don’t feel so overwhelming.

Often, I’ll choose a project I can finish in a few hours simply so that I have completed something, so that I can see what I’ve completed, and I can enjoy what I’ve done.

There is meaning to be found in each day if we choose to. It’s not always the same, but even something small can turn the day around into one of gratitude.

The State of Suicide Prevention

Yes, New Mexico, this is for you, but the reality is that it could be for any state – or any country.

Several weeks ago, The Albuquerque Journal ran an article about suicide here in New Mexico talking about how much the numbers have gone up. When I thought it was time to move on– that I had done everything I needed to– the numbers were increasing, but we could see what was happening. The economy had tanked, but there also were more people reaching for help. And today it’s hard to really know how much numbers compare when suicide has become a more acceptable death for people with terminal pain and illnesses.

The discussion always turns to the increasing numbers of teen– and younger– suicides. People term these the most heart wrenching because of a life that barely starting ending early. But people also forget that we lose more middle-aged men to suicide than other other age group. That means that these teens are losing their fathers, their uncles, their role models.

While we don’t exactly know how much influence a suicide has on the bereaved, anyone left behind to mourn the death, we do know there is an effect. And we know that when you’ve had a suicide, that word becomes part of your personal vocabulary. I used to say it was no longer something that happened to the family down the street on the “Tuesday Night Movie.” While we say it’s not an option to those of us who have had one, yes, it is an option because it’s happened once before and now it’s in our own orbit.

I used to train people on warning signs of suicide, how to ask the question if one was suicidal, what to do when someone was worried about someone. However, what we were never able to do was to keep going back and inoculating people year after year. You can’t just get trained once. Every place– and this should include school bus drivers, cafeteria workers, coaches, and anyone else who comes in contact with kids in any sort of setting– should be trained yearly as staff changes, as situations happen and people have questions maybe they didn’t have before.

The end of the article stated that they had reconvened a group that would suggest recommendations to make changes here in New Mexico. They aren’t reinventing the wheel, what’s changed is the people doing the work. We’re not talking about it more than we used to. Rather people are more likely to listen. However, true change will only happen if we continue to educate people – no differently than on the ill effects of smoking, on CPR, on how to spot skin cancer, how to do a breast exam– year or after year.

After all, isn’t life itself worth that?

Exploring Deep

I believe one of the hardest things for people to do in life is explore deep inside themselves. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly it’s because it, well, it’s painful and it’s work. After all, wouldn’t it be easier just to coast through life on the surface where everything looks okay, especially on a sunny day?

I don’t know where I heard this– and it was related to swimming, but it also can be attributed to life– someone said that what’s really important is what happens below the surface. For swimming, that means your breathing, your strokes, your body movements. But in life it means what’s inside you, what’s happening in your soul, in the deepest depths of who you are and who you want to be.

And that’s where the most meaning of life is. While it’s great to have lots of social media likes (believe me, I don’t mind lots of likes because it’s then that I know that people are seeing and reading what I’m posting), it’s what’s inside ourselves where we find true meaning. But if we don’t allow ourselves to “go there” then we’ll never know that. Instead, we stay on the surface and continue to coast.

However, in that coasting, we also find that things don’t necessarily come together or work out. And we wonder why!

After my divorce, I bought a book by a therapist about how to move forward and find the man of your dreams sort of thing (I gave the book away and now have no idea what the author’s name or book title was). I was trying to figure out why I was attracting the wrong sort of man (lots of emotional unavailability there!) or not attracting men at all (unless they were my mom’s age– if you’ve never heard the story about what happened in the church parking lot after morning mass one day…).

I was in LA and had driven south to Huntington Beach for some surfing. After I was done, I decided to take the book to the beach and read for a while. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember exactly what the book told me, but at first I was thought, Oh, that doesn’t apply to me.

What finally admitted to myself was that DID apply to me and the sooner I admitted it and figured it out, the better off I would be. But it was my resistance from reaching deep inside of me that was keeping me from finding deeper meaning and from truly moving forward.

It’s uncomfortable to reach inside ourselves, to walk a rocky, uknown road. But it’s well worth the journey when you see the view from the other side.

Is the Grass Really Greener on the Other Side?

We are very fortunate to live in this time for many reasons. One of those reasons is that we have many choices, whether it be for toothpaste or laundry detergent, or even what career to choose. But it also means that we might be spending more of our time looking at how the green seems greener on the other side, especially when it comes to the romantic relationships in our lives, wondering if we’re missing out on something better.

There are definitely areas in life where we always should be looking to be better, to do better, but is that always the truth in relationships? In marriages?

While usually I speak about moving forward, about letting go of the past, about helping people see that they can do better, this time I’m taking another perspective because I’ve watched many people do this and the unnecessary havoc it wreaks and their lives and everyone around them (and I’m guessing most of the people I’m referring to will never read this blog because they are seemingly unaware or in denial of the havoc they are creating for themselves). In another way, they are keeping themselves from moving forward.

There was a time– and I think back on a conversation Fr. Gene and I had about a year ago when he had twenty-something come see him and the man was feeling so confused about getting married because he felt there were so many options of women and relationships that he wasn’t sure he could settle on one. And what about the person in a marriage who looks around and doesn’t like the way things are and peeks out the window and wonders if maybe things are better across the street, down the road, or that the grass in the next town grows greener?

It’s easy to believe what is right here in front of us isn’t enough because we see what others have– especially in the misconstrued social media spotlight.

Spin it around though.

I’ve been married before and I’ve had other relationships in my life and there’s a huge major positive I can say about Greg– he makes my life easier. And because he makes my life easier, my inspiration cup has been bubbling over so much in the past few years that I can’t keep up with it. I know that all the stress I let relationships cause in earlier parts of my life– when the grass was definitely greener on the other side– kept me from being who i’m supposed to be.

So what if I thought that the green were greener on the other side? I clearly believe mine is the greenest it can be- and should be– and if I were to start looking elsewhere I’m the one who would be missing out.

Go ahead, take a look at where it might be greener, and then take a look around you and see if it really would be better over there. After all, there is much you can’t see from a distance– like crab grass and dandelions.

Maybe the focus should be on making your own grass greener through looking inside yourself and wondering why you think it might be better over there. That sort of reflective journey is painful and challenging for many people, but it’s a road worth traveling because it’s about finding you, not about finding who you think will make you better. If you’ve really got it good, don’t let it go.

Taking a Step Back

I am easily irritated by many things, especially when they seemingly get in the way of my list of items I want to complete in one day. Don’t get in the way of my grocery cart and make sure you use your turn signal if you’re going to cut me off in traffic.

But I have learned to take a step back when what feels like continued derailment of my day is wreaking havoc with everything I want to accomplish. I have also learned to take a step back when someone irritates me. Or when people in my life react in unexpected negative ways.

While I might not like it, there is always a reason that things are unfolding the way that they are. I might not understand it now, or even in the next ten years, but I believe at some point I will get it when I reflect back in the rearview mirror.

Thinking that way has made it easier for me to cope with many situations and also to remember that we’re all navigating something in life and not to take it out on others (well, except when you blatantly cut me off in traffic and I’m driving faster than you– but maybe we’ll address that another day– I usually try to move on by turning up the radio and singing along with an eighties station).

I also have learned that somehow the list gets completed. Maybe not on my schedule but clearly someone else’s– let me poke the sky at the universe for that one.

In the meantime, often the best we can do is roll along and remember that a step backward is really several steps forward in own growth. There is much we can’t control in our lives, except our on reactions. That’s where taking a step backward matters the most because eventually– by doing that– we’ll be taking two steps forward instead of anything backward at all.

Keeping the Dream Alive

I have this memory of my sister Denise. I’m not exactly sure where we were, somewhere in Florida, and we’re playing in the waves. I was in high school and she was in junior high. I remember us laughing and the sense of feeling free that we had, a trip Mom had taken us on when she worked for Midway Airlines.

On this past Friday morning while I was out running, I missed Denise. But as I thought about it more, I realized what I missed is not being able to share Chelle Summer with her because so much of what she and I did together– drawing, making houses and clothes for a our Barbies– and the late 1970s into early 1980s and the styles of that time– form the nucleus of Chelle Summer.

And then I remembered that she is with me. We can’t have a conversation, which is what I felt I wanted when i was thinking about her, but she is still part of this journey. I just wished I could share with her the influence our time together has on what I’m doing today– share it in a way where we have a two-way conversation.

Then I began to think how there probably would be no Chelle Summer if she were here. I probably would be a sports journalist or something similar. While I will never truly know, I’m not sure I would have tapped into our style and fashion history to build Chelle Summer.

The reality is that I can’t bring her back and because of that I’ve tried to embrace the journey as much as possible. This has become more prevalent to me in each passing year and the more I embrace it, the more creative I’ve become. So in a sense Denise is responding by helping me choose what I create.

And that’s enough for me, even on days when I doubt everything, that I am keeping the dream alive. And I won’t give up until I get where I want to be.

How we've complicated the message

Today– September 10– is World Suicide Prevention Day and I’ve been thinking about what kind of message I want to spread today. While there are many directions I could go, there is one aspect that sticks in my mind and it’s how we’ve complicated the message of helping people.

In the last year or so of Ed Shneidman’s life, the father of suicidology, I was lucky to have several phone conversations with him. He came off as a gruff man, although that must be prefaced with the fact that his body was failing him which made it harder for him to see and walk. But there is one important message I came away with from those conversations and his not suggestion but assignment that I read his book, A Commonsense Book of Death.

That message was that ultimately it comes down to two questions when we are trying to help people: Where do you hurt? and How can I help you?

How simple that is, yet we’ve complicated it so much, especially in this time of anger and animosity we have toward our fellow human beings. We have more suicide prevention resources (I’m not talking about hospital beds– that resource we have never have enough of and that’s another topic for another day), but the phone numbers to call, the billboards that remind people to reach out, newspaper articles that discuss the warning signs of suicide.

And yet our numbers keep climbing.

I don’t believe we will ever get to zero. It’s wishful thinking that we will eradicate suicide given the pain of both the terminally ill and the severely mentally ill and their constant struggle to find peace in just one moment in a day. However, there are still things we can do to minimize the pain for so many, help people see there is hope in the world, that hope still exists.

I know that life isn’t all warm fuzzies, but don’t be scared to ask someone where they hurt or how you can help. Maybe you don’t know what to do, but there is someone you can ask (there is Google and the national toll-free suicide prevention line is listed there right at the top when you type in the word suicide (1-800-273-8255).

When my colleague JoAnn and I used to do suicide prevention workshops around New Mexico, we always told people that if suicide were so easy to solve, we’d give them a piece of paper and send them on their way.

I don’t expect everyone to know everything about suicide, but I hope that if you are worried about someone– or yourself– that you’ll reach for help, that you’ll hold on for another day (just like the song) because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I often say that when the sun comes over the Sandia Mountains just east of my home in Albuquerque– as I’m walking my dogs Hattie and Ash– I have the sense that the slate has been wiped clean during the night and I get to start all over again, no matter what happened the day before.

When people are down because of the way they see the world today, I remind them that if I thought that way, I would just stay in bed rather than get up and attack a long list of things I’d like to accomplish. Whether I might be down about the world or about something happening (or not happening in my own world), I remind myself to reach inside to what does make me happy, what makes me tick.

The glass is half full. Life isn’t easy. Be courageous, I have begun to tell myself.

Telling Stories

I started Chelle Summer mostly to fill a gap for myself– to create items that I really liked. I didn’t expect that along the way I also would create a brand that is about telling stories.

While this idea has sat in the back of my mind for some time, it came to fruition in many ways over the weekend when I was selling at the New Mexico Prickly Pear Festival.

I knew it wouldn’t be enough for everyone to want to stop at my booth– despite the bright colors and prints– some people would need to know that there is a message behind the items I create. While most of the first items I made were created from new fabrics, much of my recent work (with the exception of clothes, however, much of it comes from end rolls or leftovers from manufacturers) is made from either upcycling a vintage item like a dress or fabric that I found at an estate sale.

For me, turning embroidered dishtowels into a tote bag is a way to give those dish towels new life. When I see an item at an estate sale that resonates with me, I realize that the woman who lived in that house kept that item because she either made it or it told a story about her life. And while I will never know what her story was, I know that I can at least give that item new life.

As I pointed out items and told stories about the various fabrics behind the items at my booth to people, many of them told me about the items they have at home that they haven’t figured out what to do with (I do custom work) and others were happy to see items not end up in the landfill (a huge trend in the fashion industry although I had been doing it before it hit “trendy” status).

Ultimately, it goes much deeper than that for me. There are items that belonged to my mom that are long gone, mostly because she and I weren’t sure what to do with them. I think of the shift dress she wore to my first birthday (among other events) and a small piece of fabric that she had made a shirt from and how I hope to recreate one day.

With the cars packed up at the end of the event, I turned mine on and immediately “Hot Hot Hot” by Buster Poindexter began to play on Sirius radio. My mom loved that song and each time I hear it, I know she is with me, doing what my sister Karen calls her “hip shake.”

In that moment, after being present with people all day and sharing the stories of my Chelle Summer collection, I realized Mom was with me, cheering me on. All those items of hers that I mourn in some way gave me Chelle Summer and many more stories to tell.

Perspective

It pains me when Greg’s team loses (especially only the second game of the season), so much so that I found myself contemplating why on my 26-mile drive home from his school on Saturday. An early season loss isn’t a bad thing as long as it’s used as a learning experience. While my head knows that, I don’t think my heart could acknowledge it on Saturday as I left the field.

But I was quickly reminded of my own experiences in high school as a runner and how they have a deep meaning in how hard I work today. And that’s what I realized bothered me so much about the loss.

As a runner (and as I have written in the past), I worked extremely hard and when I started to experience the success of accomplishing my goals, I saw that if I continued to work hard, I would eventually have more success. There was a caveat to this though– I had a hard time overcoming the intense pressure I put on myself and the negative thoughts that plagued my mind.

Because of that, I never truly ran a race up to my potential. I left high school feeling as if I had wasted many opportunities and promised myself, especially after my sister ended her life three years following my high school graduation, that I wouldn’t allow that to happen again.

Deep inside me, that is probably the base of the fire that is always lit inside me and why I have accomplished all that I have (with still much to come!). That’s what I draw on to motivate me each day through a long list of items I want to accomplish, and what I remind myself of when life events and experiences try to drag me down. I take myself back to that teenage girl on the track or at a cross country course and remember the disappointment I felt all those times I finished a race knowing I had squandered yet another opportunity.

We don’t realize how short life is, but it provides us with repeated opportunities to grow and learn and be more than we ever thought we could be. That’s what drives me and keeps the fire inside me lit.

Finding Joy in Life

My friend Bonnie taught me so much about not just sewing, but life, too. However, there’s a vision of her that saddens me and yet also is a reminder to me of the importance of how we live our lives. She shared much about her life which– like many of us– was littered with disappointments and losses. Her mother had disappeared at some point after Bonnie was married– mental illness taking over– and Bonnie was never able to find her again. Her daughter Sadie suffered some of the most extreme bipolar that I’ve been exposed to.

There were many other things, but I know those two haunted her and I have a vision of us sitting in her crafting room in the later evening hours, her smoking a cigarette, and her face filling with sadness as she shared stories about her life. I knew she was disappointed at much of how her life turned out, finding happiness in cutting and drying her lavender for potpourri, making quilts, devouring a new copy of Martha Stewart or a quilting magazine that had arrived in the mail that day. Or the show and tell she insisted we had when I would arrive for an evening of working on a project.

While he never said it, I also had the sense that my dad was disappointed with life, too. Quite honestly, I don’t really know what his goals and dreams were. My mom said once he wanted to leave her and take off for California and another time she told me that he was an enigma. He shared little, letting his pain simmer while he drank another beer and smoked another cigarette.

I get it. We get older and we question our decisions. Did we choose the right next chapter? The right next road? Did we miss an opportunity because we chose something over another? The routine of life can bog us down. The bills that force us to keep showing up for work rather than be the footloose and fancy free we believe would be more exciting. It’s easy to let sadness and anger boil over when we seemingly believe the grass is greener on the other side.

And that’s when it’s important that we reach back into our lives to find that time that filled us with hope, a time when we believed the world was our oyster and nothing (nothing!) would get in the way. When I feel down for whatever reason (I work at home– I am left alone with my thoughts much of the day– that isn’t always a good thing for someone who has been taught from my doctorate to dissect a lot), I reach back to that time in my life. I might play a song, bring back a memory. Just something that reminds me that I’m not where I want to be. And I can still get there.

Stay the course. The dreams are still alive. The joy is still there. Sometimes it gets lost and it’s up to us to uncover it. Never forget it’s always there waiting to be found again.

The Age Factor

I was doing pretty good for a long time. I had felt my body change at some point in my thirties and then around forty and I made adapted and made changes, mostly in my diet. My ophthalmologist had warned me– checking my birthdate in my chart– that I would be needing reading glasses at some point.

I’ll be honest, it’s disappointing. I keep running– although run-walking some days and trying to be okay with that– because the chronic injuries that I have are all dog or surf related, not from too much running (translation: don’t let your dog run her head into your knee in the stairwell of your house). I swim in the afternoon partly for my mental health, but also because the water makes my body happy, especially my feet.

And the list of foods I can eat in small amounts is growing larger. There is hardly ever bread in the house– or chips. I have no self control and I know it so I don’t keep them tauntingly around.

Finally, a pair of Kate Spade reading glasses rests on the sewing table because sometimes I can’t see well enough to thread a needle. I can’t read the dates on coins anymore without help although the ophthalmologist says I still have great vision, especially for someone my age.

What’s hardest is that we don’t enjoy our youth, the days of eating whatever we wanted to without worry. Or how much we wanted to. Running without feeling any aches and pains is such a happy morning, not one I can take for granted anymore.

I’m not complaining, I’m still lucky that I had parents who passed on great genes to me. Neither one of them really “aged” until the last ten or so years of their lives. Yet, it’s a challenge to find that balance, that middle ground, of being okay that as things change, all is still well. Is it society? Or is it my own warped view of myself? Probably a little bit of both. Sometimes it just feels like I didn’t appreciate all that I was given until it was starting to seemingly fall apart.

Then I ask myself what I was doing all that time that it didn’t feel like I had appreciated it. And I am reminded that I was busy living my life. Just as I should be.

The Challenge to be Yourself

The goals are high, the dreams are big. And yet I don’t believe I could do it any other way if I were going to be true to myself.

I realize that my life would have been easier professionally and personally if I had chosen to follow something more mainstream. However, when I looked at a future with a family and kids in the suburbs, and even life as a stay-at-home-mom, I knew I’d never be happy. I also saw that it wouldn’t be fair to the family I’d have. Families need to be nurtured and it takes time to do that. My time, I felt, needed to be spent birthing books and working in creatives realm that sometimes take time I might not have otherwise.

From the age of six, I knew I wanted to be a writer and that has shaped much of my trajectory. I see now how life kept me from certain things, like solid romantic relationships before I moved to New Mexico. When I was a high school student and then a college student, while I wanted a relationship on one level, I also saw how it would have easily complicated my life and kept me from moving west. I’d always wanted to live in Los Angeles and while I didn’t quite make it that far, Albuquerque is definitely my home now and LA my other home.

But choosing that road has meant I have sacrificed opportunties along the way. I’ve also put myself on the outside ring of relationships because of the distance. In this, I have also learned that no matter what road we choose, there are sacrifices. What has meant the most to me is not just being who I believe I’m supposed to be, but being more than presently I am.

Most of all, I’m being true to myself which is worth every road I have chosen.

Life and the Ocean

I really hoped that on this LA trip that I would finally get to surf again. It’s been several years since my shoulder started to pop out (subluxation) and I’ve been scared in the water since the time it happened while I was paddling in the surf.

In the year since seeing an orthopedic who told me to go on with my life, that he wasn’t going to do surgery (not that I wanted surgery) because I would only lose range of motion, I’ve been doing exercises three times a week on a ball, hoping to strengthen my shoulder. After a dismal June gloom trip to LA in June, we decided we’d try one more time before soccer and school start again for Greg. The weather was perfect, the water comfortable, and I had lugged Orangey, my surfboard, down the hill from the parking lot to the beach.

Yet as I stood at the water’s edge I was scared. I knew I needed a day where the ocean looks like glass and I could paddle around without worry of getting tumbled around. However, I wasn’t going to get it. I thought I would swim a while and get my courage up. That lasted until I got tumbled around and– bam– the shoulder popped out.

Instead, I found myself standing at the water’s edge again, my arm popped back in, but sore, and knowing that it wouldn’t happen on this trip.

I started to ask myself what I’m so afraid of, why I chronically have dreams where I’m back in high school and late to class or can’t get my luggage packed on time to make an international flight– all signs, I’ve read, that I’m afraid to seize an opportunity. I have certain goals in my life that I want so badly to achieve and I’m constantly asking myself what’s holding me back from getting where I want to be.

The ocean is such a good metaphor for life. When I first started surfing ten years ago, I remember my fear of getting past the breaks in the ocean– in many ways right back where I am although for different reasons (the fear of my shoulder popping out). The breaks are the events in life, the ones that we have to traverse or plow through somehow.

As I write this I don’t have all the answers. But what I do know is that I’m constantly asking to move forward, to learn what I must learn to to move forward. And when I reflect back on the eight years since I first climbed onto a surfboard, I see what life taught me about moving forward as I navigated the end of a marriage, a divorce, and moving forward from all of it.

Now, when I’m not sure that I will ever surf again, I see that life is teaching me other lessons about continuing to forge forward, even in the face of the unknown. I don’t like them, yet I know that if I learn from them I will move forward, onto what’s next for my life.

Life is too short to not pay attention to the messages the ocean gives us.

The loss of something, the open door of something greater

Some years ago– not long after I had returned to Albuquerque after my short time in Chicago post divorce– I had a conversation with one of the priests at my church. I asked him about something he had said in one of his homilies, that sometimes God asks us to give up something for something greater.

I explained that in my divorce, I had given up the house in Albuquerque (we had a second home in my hometown in the Chicago area so that’s where I moved to) which also meant I gave up the swimming pool. I knew one day I would have a pool again, but I hated not having the instance access to the water that brought me so much peace and happiness.

When I had the opportunity to return, I told Fr. Anthony, I knew I wouldn’t give up the pool again.

So how could God ask me to give up the pool again? I asked him.

He thought for a moment and then asked me, “What if God asked you to give up your pool for, say, the ocean?”

What he meant was that when we are asked to give something up, it means that there is something greater for us out there.

I know, as I write this, that many people are in pain and doubting me. If something were to happen to me, I would doubt this statement, too.

At first.

But I have learned that when I reflect back on the road there is always something greater for us when we’ve been asked to give something up. The key is that we choose to make the most of our lives here on this earth, to learn as much as we can, and to be more than we presently are. Traveling that road isn’t an easy one, however, it’s the most rewarding one.

We must be willing to give up something for an unknown behind a door we haven’t opened. And believe. And trust. And know that when we reflect back on the road, we’ll not just understand it, but be grateful for it.

What do you say?

When my sister died– and it was over twenty-five years ago when there was much more stigma surrounding suicide than there is now– I remember thinking how could she end her life, believing that she valued and cherished life much more than I did. And that also meant people often didn’t know what to say to me.

But there is another time that leaves people speechless– after a suicide attempt.

What do we say to someone who has attempted life? Life is the whole of everything we do and believe and when someone tries to end it, we know it goes against everything we’ve been taught about preserving it.

In the years that I trained people in suicide prevention and in the experiences I’ve had working with suicidal people/attempters, I’ve learned that it’s an opportunity to be there for someone, a time not to speak, but to allow them to speak. Suicidal people are looking for a way to express their pain and when they don’t find it, they might attempt to end their lives.

They don’t need to hear from us how wonderful their lives are and how great they are. They are trying to reconcile feelings inside themselves that we might not have any idea are there.

We have a tendency to want them to stand in a sunny place with us. The spot where they are standing is stormy and they don’t want to move from it until they have an opportunity to express the pain they feel, the road that led them to the attempt, and how much they hurt. It’s like the clouds in the sky continuing to hover until they’ve had a chance to drop moisture on the earth. Expressing the bad allows us to see the good again.

It’s a relief for them to express their pain and sometimes enough for them to move forward. Others might need more help in the vein of a therapist or someone to walk the road for them as they try to find a way forward. There might be other circumstances around the attempt that they need to cope with as well. No matter the depth of their needs, there is a place for all of us to be there for them to some extent.

Ultimately, I think of the founder of the field of suicidology, Edwin Shneidman, who said that it came down to two questions: “Where do you hurt?” and “How can I help?”