Eloquent as Fuck - Eloquent as Fuck

Feeling Alive

4/23/2018

Expression comes easy when feelings are sharp, shaped like icicles and just as cold. The prickling sensation around my heart, the wrenching in my gut, the ache in my lungs, all signs of life throughout my first 30 years.

Joy makes me uncomfortable. The bubbling excitement in my chest replaced the ache but has nowhere to go as I have no way to express it with any comfort. My attempts are awkward, corny, boring.

But now I am greedy for it.

I don't want anything less than the joy I sometimes feel for no reason because it makes me nervous. Who am I to deserve this? When will it be snatched from me by the inevitable?

Joy still does not sit well in my body, perched, anxiously waiting. I focus, I meditate on enjoyment. I try and wake myself up out of the sleep of passive distraction, and do everything I can to not engage. I must work for everything, and fly in the face of nothing.

People more often than not prefer to sleep and connection is hard even without the distraction of distraction. There is so much right in front of me, smells, tastes, sounds, full of color and chorus and purple-y gold citrus. I can see why this is frightening, this heaven. I am startled by how much I love it, how much I want it.

I do not contort myself in order to enjoy anything, it all comes easy. The less I think, the more I love, the less I maneuver, the better I float in the tide of sensation.

Can I enjoy this human experience without other humans? Can I be only me, floating in the detritis of my activity without arousing suspicion?

But who would suspect?

Soon my joy will be more of a comfort and I will turn over all the pages of my life to this happy monotony which no one will wish to read.

But its enough to have lived it.

Isn't it?

Sometimes I just need to write stuff. This came out of me today like a volcano. I don't even think a lot of it makes any sense. I will read it again later and try and figure it out. If you have any idea, let me know. I would be happy to hear...

Anger in my Shoulder

4/20/2018

The electric pulse coming from the whirring machine to my left caused the muscles under my scapula to jump. Relief. The kind that went from my shoulder to my brain and trickled down into my sinuses. The pain, caused from overuse of my mouse I was told, was an aching, nagging I could not shake. I came to lay on a strange table in a small, cold, vanilla room to get this treatment that I hoped would eventually chase the pain away.

It skulked under my scapula like a secret, waiting for the right time to flare up, maybe when I was holding a freshly opened bottle of Kombucha, or when I was attempting to make change for someone else, causing enough pain for me to dump my drink or toss coins in someone's face.

Week after week, I would come to the cold room with the same problem. My chiropractor, disappointed that it had not abated, asking suspiciously if I had been doing my exercises, not believing me when I said I had. I was dissapointed in my lack of success, and he was too. It didn't make things better.

But the pain that comes from within cannot be cured from without. This is physics. This is gospel. The more I shrunk myself to fit into a job that would have me be less than I was, the more I would stretch myself to do more and more in my relationship as I watched my partner disintegrate, the more I fought back the tears over the deaths of my parents, the more this pain persisted. The more my body tried to get my attention. And I never made the connection.

How could I not know that my body was trying to get me to take care, to slow down, to pay attention to everything I was giving up in order to keep going? How could I not know that all of the ways that I bent myself, all the ways that I tried to fit into boxes would eventually surface as the physical pain that would persist through the many guaranteed cures that were thrown at me?

I just didn't.

And then, in a miraculous explosion of emotion and rage and force, I freed myself. It had nothing to do with the pain, what I did to get free of all of it, but after, I knew. One week later, I awoke pain free, and I cried. I cried for days. I cried for the loss of myself, my marriage, my job, my parents, and the life I thought I was going to live. All of it.

My cats sat staring as I would walk from room to room, crying and blowing my nose, the cheap beige carpet in my nondescript cube of an apartment strewn with snotty tissue. All of it bright red and purple pain. All of it orange, green and blue sadness, grief, resentment, desperation, all the things I would not allow myself to feel came pouring out of me. My beige apartment finally began to take on life.

In the quiet of the aftermath, I built a wailing wall of my last life. I would sit and stare at all of it for hours, wondering how it got away from me.

Then one day, I took it all down, put it in a gallon jar, and I was done.

And I have not felt that pain since.

The new pain is instructive. I listen to it attentively and move quickly when my wise old body sends me these miraculous signals. That dark time, where I forced my life into a corner and dared myself to come out, pushed me into the open. I won't hide anymore.

And now, when I feel anger in my right hamstring, or sadness in my ankles, I listen. I make my own map. I do what my body needs and in the end, I am free. In the end, my body, my friend, heals me.

This is my take on Body Positive. It's about function. It's about attention. It's about using your body as an instruction manual. What do you think? Have you had this experience? Where you know your body is trying to tell you something, but you don't have the time or the inclination to listen? I suggest you do. The relationship you create with your body will be the longest you have in your life. Investing in that relationship by merely listening can improve everything you care to touch.

Give it a shot.

Play

4/13/2018

Stepping onto the field held its own kind of magic. Whatever the outcome, the anticipation just before the game, whatever game it happened to be, was intoxicating. I wanted to feel it all the time.

Memories of the games of my youth are laced with gold. Learning to push myself, focus, and work with others were just a few of the lessons I learned through victory and defeat. I learned that I could be a winner or a loser and still be just...me.

Relationships made in sports were impenetrable, but not everlasting. Walking down the corridors of my horrid school, I would see teammates, and be warmed in the memories of what we did together, and in the dreams of what we might do again. Anything that could make me feel good about myself in such a wretched place was a miracle, and also, a lesson.

When things at home went bad, I spent all my time playing. It didn't matter with who, I was out the door and running, jumping, climbing, throwing, doing anything I could to feel the rush of physical accomplishment, and have the ability to spread my wings and jump into the empty space where my potential waited to catch me. It didn't matter how much my mom screamed, how little my dad paid attention. I had proof I was special.

Walking in potential was something I took for granted, unfortunately. I didn't realize that there would not always be games to play, that the end of the last game might be the end of the last game I would play. I don't even remember when that was, and I feel like I should. I feel like I should have made some type of document, listing the games, wins, losses, achievements and failures of the sports of my youth. I would gladly trade all of the yearbooks I ever received, if I still had them, for a list of all the times I dared to step up and on to the field of play.

It takes a special kind of courage to dare to play a sport, to put your body in a position where it could get hurt, where it might fail, or maybe, unwittingly, soar. My body proved to me, on more than one occasion, that it knew better. My arm, in reflex to a ball zipping near my head that I had not yet seen, would shoot out to catch it, sometimes pulling my legs out from under me, with the thinking part of my body left only to look in awe at the ball in my mitt. Many is the time I made more freethrows in a game than even I thought possible, or threw the football further than anyone thought my small frame could muster.

Playing sports proved to me that I was more than I thought I could ever be. It showed me how spectacular my body could be if I gave it the chance. I discovered more joy in using my body well than worrying for a second about how it looked. I valued strength, speed and stamina above all things. Dexterity was a constant focus. Throwing a ball exactly where I wanted it to land was one of my proudest achievements.

I am old now, and I use the lessons of the body of my youth. I don't participate in sports, but I do push myself to see what I am capable of. I still get that joy, that rush of understanding just how much my body is doing for me without my mind participating. I know that it is a part of my happiness, my identity.

Whatever the engagement, I am attentive. I revel in the joy my body can bring me. Play has saved my life and elevated my level of awareness. In play, I wear expansive potential like a cloak. In play, I find comfort, joy, love, and purpose. In play, I discover myself, over and over, unveil new levels of ability, and with that, new horizons on which to ruminate.

We live in a time when it is a rebellious act to be loving, or show compassion, when it is more acceptable to be ashamed of our bodies than to celebrate them, when money and profit is held above all things, including human life.

In play, I rebel. In play, I fight against the tide that tells me to fear, to hate, to be consumed by the appearance of my body, rather than its function. In play, I can hear the resentment, watch the pain, smell the solitude, and still know that I am special.

Play rocks. I have always known it, but never put it into words. This is my first stab at writing about my happiness. I think I did okay but honestly, I would love to hear feedback if you have the time.
Yes, I am still off Facebook. And it is GLORIOUS.

Tripping

4/10/2018

My body is a tuning fork. It reverberates with emotion. The pain I feel in my heart that rolls out to my fingers warns them not to strike back. The joy I feel in my gut that shoots straight up and around to the back of my neck, tickling my skull reminds me that there is love. Even the ache of sexual attraction I feel in my core spreads down to my feet, as if I am being erotically guided by some unseen, wildly aroused spirit.

The nerves from my toes talk to the nerves in my face. When I trip, a bolt of shock shoots upward, twisting my face as it scrunches in its own little dance of awkward. I used to believe this reaction was to blame for my acne. The more clumsy I became, the more I would break out.

But I was only ever clumsy with my feelings. I could never get good at the random and unpredictable, even as I attempted to squelch them with food, alcohol, or anger. My tripping triggered the echo of the pain that had come before and woke me up to the rhythm my body was unintentionally and methodically creating.

This echo informed me that I had become the nail, hammered too many times by too many painful interchanges. The damage inflicted by other hammers reverberated within my body any time any insignificant tap tap tap was taken. I was at the mercy of whoever might even look sideways at me because I had left so much of my emotional landscape unattended. Even an unhinged floorboard, a cracked sidewalk, or loose brick could cause problems if I wasn't watching my steps. These small incidents chimed in reminder of the horrors I was afraid to ask after.

The horrors of, "What is wrong with me?"
"What is wrong with me that I would be screamed at?"
"What is wrong with me that I would be lied to?"
"What is wrong with me that I would be forgotten?"
"What is wrong with me that I would be shamed?"
"What is wrong with me that I would be abused?"

The answers burrowed at the root of my deepest fears, bottomless and terrifying.

When I took a step outside of the echo, my ears stopped ringing, and I saw it. I was handy. I was safe to be screamed at, lied to, forgotten, shamed, and abused. I just happened to be there when the hammers started to fall. I realized that all I had to do was not be the nail. I realized that all I had to do, was leave.

So I left. I left all the time. I left places, people, and jobs as often as I could muster. I moved constantly. I broke up friendships. I stopped talking to relatives. It was the best way I knew to get them to stop, because I shouldn't have to ask to not be pummelled. I shouldn't have to ask to be loved. I would not contribute to the clammoring in the echo chamber by being still long enough to get battered.

But the world is not split up into two categories, hammers and nails, but one in which everyone is both, and sometimes, most times, with a staggering lack of awareness as to what they are doing outside of the pain echoing in their own broken hollows.

So I leave less now, and as much as I can, I stay sound in my body. It reminds me what it felt like to stay still long enough to be hammered, and the bones that have kept me, the blood that has nourished me, and the skin that has contained me remind me that I don't have to be either, hammer or nail, but something else entirely.

I am something else, entirely.

I know this is late, but what can I say? This one has been percolating. As you might or might not know, I am no longer on FB, so if you want to have a heads up on all the stuff I do, just go up to the right hand side of this blog up there and sign up for my newsletter. It only comes out once a week, it's short, and I rarely if ever will try to sell you anything or make you believe you are in some way lacking and I have the answer to your pains. I promise.

Floating

3/30/2018

The light comes in from the far corner of my room. That's how I know if I have slept past dawn, and it is a comfort to me. I have, in my adult life, been prone to waking up at different hours of the night, and this corner lets me know how well I have done.

When I see the light shining in the far corner, I have done well.

It isn't so bad sleeping in a storage space. It is large enough to fit my art supplies, clothes and bike gear, and leave a space for me to sleep, work, and write.

The bed I sleep on is bumpy. I turn over in it and feel as if I am about to be ousted by some mysterious and insistent force that is always pushing, pushing, pushing. My blankets are slippery and they slide off the bed throughout the night. I wake up in the dark sometimes, wondering why it is so cold. My floor just lays there, grinning.

I live in a space with tools and handling things. A stark contrast to the spaces of an ancient youth. One in particular, my Aunt's house held a White Living Room. It was full of things I couldn't touch, and walls that held art of every sort, each piece completely unrelated to the next. It was not a room to be lived in, but admired. I never understood that room.

My bones need to live in a space that feels occupied. There is no comfort found in spaces that appear unused, or meant for observation. My blood chills when my body is too careful of its path between objects that seem to hold some mysterious and overriding value. My mind and heart spin downward into the posture of defense, like I am against the objects that surround me, and my struggle for dominance rages within me as long as I am contained within these cold spaces.

These rooms live in many homes, and my experiences within them bring me back to The Architecture of Happiness: "One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kind of walls, chairs, buildings and streets we’re surrounded by."

My aunt's living room stands in my memory as a bright white reminder that this is the norm. Taking great pride in the stuff acquired is an early lesson, and it is hard to shake when it is combined with the exhaustingly ubiquitous and brutal dogma of comparison. I have many times found myself in the awkward situation of being explained to, or educated about this religion. I understand it, I just don't want to have to pray to that particular god.

It might be ego, but I want to feel like I am more important than the things that surround me. To feel my clothes supporting my lifestyle instead of working against it is a joy I create daily with as much enthusiasm as I can muster.

And my body. My body. My body I hold above all things; dresses, cars, shoes, homes, or any other item which a person might acquire. I take joy from being in my skin and living a life that encourages love of body. If I bought into the myth of ideal in this culture, I would have to believe on some level that I am inherently flawed.

I am not flawed, I am floating on the beauty of the human experience that does not require my body to be thin, or tall, or anything other than what it is. I am living in a body that has been handed down to me from generations of people who labored under unrealistic expectations and assumptions in order to not appear to be what they were. People who kept secrets in their cells, hid their love, passion, and unique wonder in their sinew, and in the end, died a stranger to their own bodies.

What a lonely life it would be, to live without a body.

I am endeavoring to end this for their sake, and for mine. I do not want to be another person watching her body die, even as her hate for it burns brightly. I cannot stand the thought of being against my very self when I breathe my last. I want to say good-bye to my body, in the end, with gratitude, love, and compassion. I want to say good-bye to my body knowing it is the one thing in this world that truly held me.

I cannot say all the things I want to say about the daily work I do to love and honor my body, but this comes close. What do you think? Does this ring a bell? How do you feel about dying in the body you occupy? Would you change your relationship?

Also, I am off facebook, so if you want to share this, you are going to have to copy and paste, the old fashioned way. Thanks for being here!!

Carry

3/22/2018

The joy of a free body keeps me active. I have seen to it that conscious, intentional movement is a part of my daily life because I like feeling strong, flexible and able to do anything I need to do. When I look down at my body and see what I have done with what I have been given, I am genuinely proud.

My conscious presence in my physical body, in stark contrast to the hovering distance I have kept from my emotional body, pushed me to the edge of what I could do half-heartedly. It convinced me that I could not linger too long in emotional non-committance. I had to jump in.

Like extra pounds, fear weighed me down, anger cramped my body, and suspicion curled me in on myself until I could only feign health and happiness. Only show a nervous smile to the world as I hovered in between rage and shadow, and behave as if I had it all together, even as I snapped at my loved ones and pushed people away. In this, I didn't even fool myself.

When considering what I have done to free myself of my emotional weakness, my emotional heft, I would say that physical activity has been by far the easier task. Taking a bike ride or a yoga class is a joy compared to looking at myself and taking stock of my regret, resentment, and pain. .

Maybe it has helped. Maybe my ability to sit with the physical discomfort of breaking my muscles down and building them back up has pushed me to do the same with my emotional sludge. Maybe watching my body grow healthy, even as I stretched it and pushed it to work through muscular pain that sometimes brought on tears, has taught me that I can do that with my emotional body. Or believe that I can.

Emotional workouts are involuntary on some level. Unlike a nine a.m. yoga class, my grief or pain or sadness springs up and I must ride it the full eight seconds in order to break it. Sometimes eight seconds lasts weeks. This last time it was a full month of breaking down into the dark of my hollow places, where I fear the worst, feel only loss, and hold on for dear life as I am tossed and turned through the gunk of my innards.

I could let go. I could just leave the rodeo and never return, instead choose something outside myself to distract. Something outside myself to keep me from my work. But it gets harder and harder to stop once you start. It's like the first time you see real gains in your yoga practice, like touching your toes or bringing your body into a headstand, once you taste just a bit of emotional freedom, it becomes hard to stop.

The release of the bullshit that holds me back is revelatory. Better than any high or amusement, walking around with a little less pain in my heart, a little less tightness in my chest, a little less gunk in my guts, is a feeling of pure potency. It is a glimpse of what could be. It is the light that blinds in its clarity.

I remind myself from time to time. I used to be tighter. I used to be heavier. I used to be all closed up. I used to carry more than I could possible hold in my fractured heart and bound up chest. The weight could be seen in my eyes and heard in my voice. I remember.

I used to carry so much more.

This, for me, is what body positive means. Developing a relationship with your body so that you can understand, accept, and love yourself as thoroughly as you deserve. If you like what you have read here, please share it. If you don't agree, let me know. I would love to talk further about this topic.

Why Pain is Easy.

3/19/2018

There is this in-between place where I put my hopes. I keep them there because I want to protect them. I wouldn't want people to know what I want for myself or what I think I might achieve.

So I tell people my fears. I write about my struggles and my burdens. I write about the pain I have wrestled with for so long, because this is a real thing. I have moved through so many dark spaces, sat in the middle of my shit and mourned my soul and tore at my skin until I could feel escape on the other side.

I have become so comfortable with my pain and my struggle that writing about it has become an almost poetic experience. I am actually able to write about my rage without sounding angry. I never thought I would get there. But I have.

The joy I feel on the other side of this darkness is another matter entirely.

I have had days where I just feel happy. I don't know why, I just do, and everything my eyes rest upon is lovely, and all the food I taste is delicious, and all of my friends are angels and my home is a palace I cannot believe I have the fortune to inhabit. I feel like I can do anything on these days, like I can change the world by smiling at it.

I protect these feelings. Being open about them feels like a risk. It feels like I could lose it all if I appear too happy or too satisfied or even too hopeful. I am the little girl who finally got the dress she wanted but never had the courage to put it on.

I am not yet comfortable enough with joy to write about it in any real way. I am so afraid it will come off as Disney or worse, Hannah Barbera, that I just keep it to myself. I am almost fifty years old and I am not comfortable feeling joy to the point where I can own it.

It's not like I haven't worked my ass of to get here. It's not like I haven't stripped away all the layers I gathered over the years to protect me. It's not like I haven't admitted to all my shitty behavior, all my tortured and tragic experience that had for so long kept me from feeling this joy.

I have, but I have also felt the wrath of the pained. The people who cannot stand to see someone happy, or confident, or satisfied, because it is an aching reminder of what they lack. It is a prod at the open wound that might never heal.

It is their proof that life is not fair and that they are as they suspected, damned.

Pain is easy, a universal experience, and often enough, pain begets pain. Joy is hard because I have been taught to believe it is a fairy tale. I have been conditioned to accept that happiness lies outside the boundaries of my body. That the reason I am not happy is because I am missing something that can only be filled by something outside of me. But joy is not as easy as swallowing a pill, or buying a new car. Joy is an ability to believe. Joy is an ability to hope, and happiness holds the belief that I am lovable, and that I am loved.

Even when I am told otherwise.

So I will continue to keep my hopes in the in-between. I will continue to work on being comfortable with joy, happiness and hope. I will work until I can write about it as easily as I write about pain.

I will work until writing about joy is also a poetic experience.

What do you think? What is your relationship with joy? With pain? With hope and happiness? Strange how that stuff looks so easy in the movies!!!

What and How I Remember

3/11/2018

This is how I carry you. I carry you in my bones. My sinew speaks your name and carries the pain of you into my fingers where it seeks a final escape, but I grab and pull you back into me, where you have always been held.

I hold and nurture you so that I might justify my rage.

I grew up in a house reverberating with the anger of generations, carried from different continents to this new land, where the promise of escape from oppression or famine or fear proved empty at the least, and was replaced by a whole new kind of horror, a new seeking that left people I never met empty with longing for anything other than what they felt they had to settle for. This pain converged in my parent's house and held all of us within it.

I left the house eventually, but this pain, your pain, came with me wherever I went. You were my constant companion, my personality, my aggressive nature. You made me interesting and frightening and sometimes to my great dismay, untouchable. This pain, you, and I, we would throw each other against people, walls, oppressive institutions, and while I never did, I always hoped to wear you out. I always hoped to figure out a way to elude you.

But this wretched illness is where I empty out.

I have been sick for several days and I wake to find an elephant sitting on my chest, my head being held in talons which at any moment might crush me utterly. I drink fluids, and rest, but nothing comes, until I bring this pain forth, and then everything.

Everything that has been held, protected, and carried is now spilling out. I cry for hours, I sob and shake and feel this history move through my body. The next day, lighter, I cry more. I cry for another hour, again, heaving with sorrow and ache and the fear of not being loved.

And then it stops, and my head is clear and my chest can take in more air than I every thought possible, and I wonder if I am free because my body was finally sick of what my mind thought all these years was a good way to handle you.

I can only hope I am free.

At this point, I can only hope.

What can I say? Sickness does strange things to me, like changing my writing style completely and making me a stranger to myself. Go figure. You like it? Let me know. I would love to hear from you. Also, on the 20th, it will be four years since I started this blog. That makes me pretty happy. If you have been here since the beginning, thanks for hanging in. If you have joined me lately, welcome, and for those of you who have come at any time in between, I appreciate you.

The Comfort of Absence

2/27/2018

I sat in the window seat, always the window seat, because from there I could watch his truck pull out and travel down the frontage road next to the tiny airport in Maine I would travel in and out of, once, maybe twice a year.

His red truck with the driftwood put together around the sides as a kind of fence, was an item I would never forget, even after he moved to Portland and gave it to me, even after I sold it.

He was always leaving, my father, even when I was the one departing. I have carried this with me all of my life. To this day, I am comforted by leaving. The familiarity of the ache in my gut warms me, the longing, the sad departure. This is all soothing to my nerves.

My father is long dead, but I have settled happily into a relationship where I must leave, every Monday. And when I arrive, every Friday, I have the palpable longing that makes me so happy when I see him again.

Summers are a joy. He leaves for two weeks at a time and comes back for two days only, and when he leaves, I am ecstatically gutted, leveled by his absence, and almost immediately anticipating his return. By the end of the summer I am such a joyous mess at his strangeness that I can barely contain myself when fall comes. The excitement of not knowing my love is almost too much.

It is the same with the random men I see here and there throughout the year. I love the longing for them, dreaming into them what is not there. I have a romance with the impossible and in this a perfection I have never known. Time on my hands to do what I want, whatever I want, is a freedom I did not have with my ex-spousal unit.

It was a horror to ride home in the dark, rainy winter Portland nights, an hour into an hour and a half ride, wishing there was more time for me to ride, hoping that he had somehow found something to do that evening. The sameness, the feeling of lock-down was a burden and I always thought it was my flaw, my impossible nature that made this relationship such a struggle.

And maybe it was. But maybe it wasn't.

It doesn't matter now that I have found my freedom in love. For in love, I have dared to create my own type of delicious torture. I have created a life that will keep me longing, keep me wanting. In this state, I have found my peace.

Not my usual skull and bones, but worth the effort, I think. Let me know what you think. I will be writing another one shortly if this isn't enough for you.

I have some new stuff up on The Self Love Workshop. Check it out. It's getting juicy over there.

Choices and Your Value

2/15/2018

"What are you most proud of in your professional life?"

I am sitting in a room, being interviewed for a job I want, and this question passes the lips of one of the three people interviewing me. I think, for only a moment. I know what my answer is, it comes right up in my head, but I know if I say it, I most likely will be disqualified, because my proudest professional moment was the moment I had finally had enough at my last job and decided to do something about it.

In that position, over the course of four years, I had been felt up by the college president, dragged through the mud after I found out a colleague was stealing from the college, overheard my boss and a colleague badmouth my abilities, incorrectly, to cover for my colleague's inability to do her job, and undermined by some of the faculty who did not like the rules that applied to them. These events are only the highlights of a tenure that was filled with misogynistic dealings that I had to contend with on an almost daily basis in this position.

The moment I had had enough was when one of my employees told me that my new boss had been badmouthing me. I decided to use it to my advantage, and I did. When I was finished, they paid me to leave. I will not go through the strategic wizardry I pulled off in order to make this happen, let's just suffice it to say that it was worthy of a Lifetime Movie Event.

In the end, I told this story in my interview, and as I predicted, was disqualified from the competition for the position, but, to this day, I hold that this was still my finest professional hour, because against all odds and what I have been brainwashed to do, I stood up for myself and won. I was able to keep my cool, operate in an ethical manner, and come out on top.

After this, handling the ridiculous undermining and backstabbing that occurs at some jobs was pretty easy, because I realized that the best way to handle misogynistic behavior is to not engage, but document EVERYTHING. The thing about bullies at work, and yes, they are bullies, there is no better word for them, is that they are looking for the fight. They are looking for the struggle. They want to engage in the power games they create. When you don't engage, they lose. When you don't engage and keep a daily journal that you share with HR, you win. When you don't engage, document everything, and build an alliance at work among your colleagues you can depend on to stand with you, you are at all-star level professionalism.

I did not get that job, which turned out to be just fine, and from then on, I never used that as my answer to that particular question again, but I hold to it.

There have been so many times in life when I have felt like I couldn't stick up for myself because if I did, I would have been punished. I have felt like I was caught in a losing game where only the cruel and under-handed could win, and I was too afraid of losing what I had to stand for the right thing. If I told my boss to take his hand off my knee, I might be fired, or lose a chance at the promotion I had been working for. If I told a colleague that she would not get away with blaming me for her shortcomings, she would make it more challenging for me to do my job. If I told my boss that one of my colleagues was stealing, he would turn the tables by accusing me of even worse.

Over time, the more I allowed, the more it wore me down, the more badly I felt about myself, and the more I would allow. It was a vicious cycle and over time, it began to ruin me. It also began to effect how much I wanted to work, how good I could be in my position.

I realized in that moment, when my employee told me what my boss was saying, that I didn't care. I decided I was more important, and that if I lost the promotion, or the job, or what have you, that was okay. I was so tired of letting people walk on me. I was done with allowing people to get away with being shitty.

Now that I have come to this point and crushed it, I am no longer afraid but prepared. I know that I will stand up for myself no matter what. This mindset gives me power and confidence in almost any situation that no matter what occurs, I will choose me, even if I lose an external goal or reward I have been working toward.

No matter the arena, I will choose myself, and in that, I will be a better employee, boss, friend, lover, mentor, artist, writer, or whatever else I choose to be.

Next month will be the fourth year anniversary of this blog. I have been writing it consistently, almost every week, and I started with this same message.

Choose yourself first, always. The more you do it, the easier it is, and the less you will be willing to give up for the comfort of others. Be strong in your convictions regarding your value. We live in a culture which profits from our self-doubt. Do not allow that to convince you that you are worthless.

You are not.

Dig it. The power people have over you is the power you give them. Keep that shit for yourself. It is yours. Use it to do good in this world. We need it now more than ever.

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