Let Your Life Speak

Let me tell you a few things about me, which you may or may not know depending on the length or depth of our acquaintance. Though it occurs to me that maybe some of these details could not be called up even by my nearest and dearest. Perhaps because they never came up, or perhaps because the sheer avalanche of things that have poured out between us over the decades make it hard to keep track of every story, every tiny detail of significance.

But I digress, which is perhaps another thing you should know about me, or would if you listened to me talk in real-time. I am prone to digression, and rambling, maybe, just a touch. Or what I prefer to think of as telling stories with all the colors in the crayon box. I mean, why would there be 64 different colors in the box if you weren’t meant to use all of them?

Anyway! About me. Perhaps, obviously, I’m a writer. My writing has evolved over time, taking different forms, but the thru-line has always been this thing about wholeness, integrity, and how we hold all the messy, lurid, ecstatic, horrifying, and delightful aspects of being human in our very limited hands. I have been chasing this question for nearly fourteen years now. I don’t know if I will ever catch it. I don’t know if I’m supposed to.

What else? I love to garden, though I am not a great gardener by any stretch. But put me in front of a trellis of sugar snaps, or place in my reach a tomato plant that I planted nearly falling over with the weight of the Sungold cherries ripening on its stems, give me fresh herbs and a big, dented metal bowl to collect it all in (though it wouldn’t be sugar snaps and Sungolds at the same time. Even a haphazard gardener such as me can tell you that. One being an early crop and one being much later.) and I am happier than nearly any other moment of my life.

Let’s see… I’m also a singer. I sing in a choir whose repertoire focuses on spirituals and gospel, which is a relatively newfound love of mine. But it is also a function of American popular music that it steals from and commodifies the music of Black folks, most often to their detriment, so it’s also true that I’ve loved the music of Black folks most of my life whether I knew it or not. Sometimes the knowing was quite obvious, though, like at my first stadium show in 1984 when I went with a friend to see DeBarge open for Luther Vandross at the Cap Center. Me, perhaps the whitest girl on the planet, my light-skinned friend, Amina, and a sea of Black women who made it clear in no uncertain terms that we did not understand what we had gotten ourselves into. They were right. We didn’t. Why am I telling you this? Stick with me for a moment. It will make sense, promise.

Now, let me tell you some things about my brother David. My brother David was an artist. He painted and drew. He also loved music, traveled with The Grateful Dead, and like most Black men of our generation, got super turned on by hip-hop, eventually becoming a DJ. Did I mention that my brother was Black? Both of them, actually, but we’ll get to that. David was also athletic and intensely physical. He skateboarded, skied, and rode bikes. Like me, he did stints in team sports as a kid, but individual pursuits in community were more his bag. Also, he was something of an adrenaline junkie (and eventually a heroin junkie, though I’m not sure the two are related, but maybe. They are both escapist in their way.), so activities through which he could go fast, hurl himself at things or down things, risk life and limb (Ah! There’s another way adrenaline and heroin are similar.), those were always his passion.

My brother Paul, he’s the oldest, is another person entirely, because of course he is. He works, has worked for 15 years (maybe 20? I’m not, honestly, sure.) with old people. He’s the activities director at an elder care facility, which takes a certain temperament, for sure. Paul is loud, a bit of a bull in a china shop, but this works when the people you care for are mostly hard of hearing and increasingly hesitant. He chivvies and cajoles and gently bullies his residents as necessary to get them to continue to engage and participate in life. Paul loves a good story, mostly the telling, because he’s not the greatest listener, and is never short on philosophical insights and opinions. Being 10 years older than me, Paul introduced me to certain aspects of culture that I might have missed or not gotten to until later. For instance, he insisted I listen to and appreciate the work of Patti LaBelle and he took me to my first R-rated movie— Purple Rain— all hail he who does not even need a name. Like me, like David, Paul is also intensely creative in his own way. He dreams of returning to his passion for photography and building himself a darkroom again. Awkward, enormous photo-developing equipment waits in a corner of our mother’s upstairs bathroom even now in anticipation of that day because there’s no space in the Section-8, 8th-floor apartment that he shares with his wife, step-daughter, and periodically two of his step-grandsons, who he loves with an unwavering tenderness and enthusiasm that I’ve never witnessed in him previously, and that moves me.

And now, let me tell you about Ross Gay, which was ostensibly why I started this essay, but I am realizing that, if we’re honest, all of our sharing of people with other people is filtered through why they matter to us particularly, and how Ross resonates with who I am, who my brothers are, or were as the case may be, is a crucial part of this story. Still, Ross is a force unto himself, and that matters, of course, so let’s talk about that.

Ross Gay is a professor, a poet, and an essayist. He has written four books of poetry– Against Which, Bringing The Shovel Down, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and Be Holding– and two books of essays. His 2019 book, The Book of Delights, grew out of a project through which he attempted to write a short essay about delight every day for a year. This book, y’all. It is a wonder. It’s not a sweet book, though you might imagine it would be looking at the lovely, arboreal cover. (Vegetal? I don’t know. It’s pretty.) It’s not treacly. Instead, it’s a book full of heartfelt and thought-provoking meditations on the things that leap to the forefront of our conscious awareness in the midst of moving through our days. That fill us with delight, wonder, sometimes awe, often unexpected enthusiasm, and tender connection. They also tend to send us, or certainly Ross, since he tends to digression like me, down rabbit holes full of cascading, related delights, sorrows, and wonderings.

Delight is childish in a certain way, but a good one. To feel delighted is to allow for the sincere, present, wide-eyed attention that being young and somewhat unencumbered entails. The ability to walk down a street, look around a room, or putter about the yard and just be taken, suddenly, by something out of nowhere. And then to have the time, and to offer that time without pause or guilt or regret, to ponder the fascinating, surprising, delightful aspects of that thing or person, or thought, or feeling. Ross is really good at delight and seems to be getting better at it as he moves along.Ross’s most recent book of essays, Inciting Joy, is another iteration of his developing body of work around an idea, or a set of ideas, that he is chasing (we are alike in this way) which in a recent interview he reflected is centered around joy, ultimately, and how joy and sorrow are so inextricably entangled. And how they inextricably entangle all of us together. All our joy, Ross insists, is predicated on the reality that we’re all going to die. The inevitability of our death connects us, as does our capacity to step into joy even so, to be enlightened maybe, if you tend towards that sort of language, which is to say, in light, infused with it.

Through both books of essays, and his poems, Ross ponders and explicates his joys and sorrows, his dismays and delights. Gardening, basketball, community, connection, racism, capitalism, DeBarge, Luther Vandross, De La Soul, family, grief, death, skateboarding, hugging, ethics of care and attention, and the particular, yet universal, and poignant experience of sorrow all fall under his gaze. It feels like all of it, everything, is held carefully, thoughtfully, tenderly in his remarkably enormous hands.

I noticed Ross’s hands, which match the rest of his raw-boned physicality when I met him recently at a reading and signing he did at the university where I work. Dude is big. Tall and large-boned, his wrist bones protruding and enormous, maybe the size of quarters. He shares that with my brother David, who was also tall, lanky, and big-boned all at once. Ross’s smile is also enormous, wide, and often erupts, along with his laughter. For as commanding of a presence as he is, which might suggest a certain weightedness or heaviness, he is surprisingly effervescent, playful, and tender. Even as he is delivering deep wisdom and hard truths. How he does this, I’m not quite sure. It’s not like anything, anyone, I’ve ever encountered.

And here is where I must confess that I have a horrible crush on Ross, but not in the romantic sense. It is more like the girl-crushes of high school, which, for me anyway, were an odd mix of eroticism and mostly aspiration. Like, you couldn’t quite tell if you wanted to kiss her or be her. In Ross’s case, it’s not that I want to be him but to be related to him. I want him to be my brother, which is, of course, somewhat absurd, but also deeply poignant for me. And I realize that this poignant yearning for a brother who might be able to be for me what my brothers were not has informed every friendship I’ve ever had with a Black man since I left home nearly thirty years ago.

I also realize, within the context of white supremacy and me as a White woman, that this is a complicated thing for me to yearn for, and to write. But it’s also true that my life, my relationship to race and to Black men in particular, is more complicated, or perhaps differently complicated, than most other White people. There are Black men, two of them, who are family to me. Not even chosen family, like friends or romantic partners might be. But like “I woke up on this planet and there they were” kind of family. Like, “my world is foundationally built around my love for and historically painful connection to them” family. Like, “there is no me without them” family.

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This doesn’t give me any particular insight into race relations or any pass on racism, but it does put me in an unusual position that has probably caused frustration and confusion for the Black men who I’ve been close to over the years. Because I’m sure they can sense the projection of my complicated feelings about my siblings onto them, which is never entirely fair. Though are we ever entirely free of our projections in any relationship? I suspect where it gets really unfair is when it’s unconscious, so the projector isn’t taking any ownership over the difference between now and then, between you and them. I’ve done that before, I must admit. Been that projector just rolling away, reel after reel of old stories, so old there’re spots on the film and it flames out at the end. And some poor guy is just sitting there, minding his business, with the fractured glare of my broken heart-light shining in his eyes.

However, in this case, I am fully aware of the yearning that I feel when I read Ross’s work and felt when I met him in person. He inhabits a physicality, both in terms of his skin color, his size, and the sheer force of his presence, that echoes both my brothers in various ways. But he also evinces a tenderness, a thoughtfulness, a vulnerability, and a softness that I never experienced from either of them and which I hungered for quite desperately. 

It is a gift, honestly, to sit in this stew of joy and sorrow that overwhelms me when I read Ross’s work. It is exactly the sort of inextricable entanglement of feeling and relationship that I think he is pointing to continually, as if to say, “Look! Look around! It’s all here and we are all the way in it, always, but also together. How great is that?!?”

After the reading the other night I went to the signing to get Ross to sign two books for me. I had brought with me one of my few pictures of the three of us because the two of them are so with me whenever I read Ross’s work and I wanted them with me when I was actually with him. It felt right to have them, or at least a physical representation of them, there with me.

I showed the picture to Ross at the signing. I told him that they are always with me when I read his work, all the love I feel for them, and also all of the incredible sorrow because he, Ross, is able to express and inhabit a tenderness and a gentleness that I always yearned for from them and never got. To love them, I said, has felt like loving a knife, or a landmine. At the same time, as Ross has written about his own father after his passing, my relationship to my brother David, who died in 2020, has deepened and softened since he’s been gone. Once he was no longer an active landmine, since I have no particular beliefs about the afterlife that would dictate what the nature of our relationship might be, or where he might be, now that David is dead, I told Ross, we are simply free to love each other. Finally.

Paul and I are stumbling toward each other slowly these days, too. Texts on birthdays and holidays. The occasional meal when I make it down to D.C. His wife and I share back and forth on Facebook. It’s sad and also beautiful to be getting to it all so late in the game, after so much and so long.

The first book I had Ross sign was for Paul, whose birthday is this next week. He seemed delighted to know, after all of this explanation of my complicated love for my siblings and the significance of his work for me, that the book could function as a bridge. That he could move from projection to connection. He wrote on the title page:

Paul–

Whose heart is enormous. In joy together.

Ross Gay

The other book, Inciting Joy, I asked him to sign for David. Even though he is dead. I told Ross that David is always with me when I read his work and with the book signed for him, he can be with me further, again, another layer of being with. He asked me how David died, and I told him, He was a lifelong addict who died of cirrhosis of the liver at 53. And he looked at me with recognition, like Yeah, it happens like that, doesn’t it? But also with sympathy. With exactly the tenderness which is why I am, and will probably always be, brother-crushed on him so hard, and wrote the following:

David–

It is so beautiful to watch you change, and soften.

Thank you.

Ross Gay

Oh, my heart! My joyful, broken heart.

So, I’ve waxed on about this for a long while, and it’s probably time to wrap it up. What do I want to say about Ross Gay in the end? I want to tell you to read his work, which is tremendous and delightful, and moving. I think he offers a model for introspection and discernment, both of which are essential aspects of integrity, infused with a degree of delight and joy that is enlivening and necessary. And I think the way he shows up in the world, as a big, Black man who loves basketball and poetry and music and gardening and young people and hugging and laughter and tenderness and vulnerability and eccentricity, who never, ever enters into debate about whether he gets to love all of those things or be exactly the one he is as a Black man in America, is so important. 

His work is important and his personhood is important and I’m just so damn glad he exists, right now, on this planet with us. As Ross would say, emphatically, God DAMN. Thank you.

Previously…

One year ago:

Two years ago:

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I have never understood people’s misapprehension that integrity is solely a matter of how we show up in public spaces. Certainly, integrity comes into play in our public lives, whether at work or worship, in politics or in the parking lot, but for me, the true proving ground for integrity is in my private life, particularly with my family.

When I was younger I used to think that the complications of family were attributable to not having chosen my family. I do, in fact, believe now that our souls have some hand in choosing our family of origin, but the me that I recognize as myself did not feel, at least when I was younger, that I had any choice in the matter. However, I was convinced that, given the choice, I would build a family that was different.

I wasn’t entirely wrong. My chosen family is different in some respects. There’s less trauma, for one, especially since I exited my marriage, for which I couldn’t be more grateful. But it is still rife with complications and conundrums despite my best, or at least most willful, efforts. I admit now that it’s just the nature of the beast.

In part, it’s because my whole self shows up with my family. I am capable of my best and worst and everything in between. Whereas I expect to manage myself– my emotions, communication, and behavior– constantly in public spaces, in the privacy of my home my guard comes down. My deepest yearnings, hottest anger, and most transcendent love all come rushing up, right under the surface of my skin. Before I know it, sometimes, they are pouring out of my mouth, guiding my steps, and I am in the thick of my own complications in the company of others. Others who I love, with whom it feels like the stakes are the highest. 

If I f**k up a job or flub a conversation with someone at the grocery store I can more readily imagine there will be other chances to do things better. But if I screw things up with my chosen family, with my children? I don’t get to just go out in search of the next family with whom I can, miraculously, be better.

And it’s not just me, and managing myself, that makes family a hotbed of complication. The other people involved are also, hopefully, trying to show up in the fullness of themselves, which seems to be as confounding for them as it is for me. This begs the question: how do we each exist authentically, while simultaneously spanning the bridge between our respective truths to honor each other? 

If everyone is given space and encouragement to live with fullness and integrity, the intimacy is richer, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

It’s 11 o’clock on a school night and I am standing in my underwear crying in the doorway to my daughter’s room. I told her to turn the lights off and go to sleep an hour ago, but she is still up. Crying with frustration because my kids won’t go to bed was a not infrequent feature of their toddler years, but we're more than a decade beyond those days. However, this moment is just the latest in a long line of small defiances and disconnections between us of late and I have surpassed my capacity to contain my frustration and sadness. They leak out of my eyes, my mouth, tears and words tumbling over each other.

I don’t just want Ruby to go to bed. I want her to come back to me. My goofy, playful, smiling, occasionally snarky kid has been replaced by someone withdrawn and disengaged. Whose friends come into my house and do not acknowledge me, simply trudging up the stairs to disappear behind her bedroom door. When I go into the room to speak to her they do not even look up from their phones.

It’s a small town. I know some of them are hanging out in the park downtown, smoking pot. Given my own experience as a teen, I will be less tweaked out by this in two or three years, but some of these children are still in middle school. I have queried Ruby as gently as I can about whether she, too, is starting to smoke. She swears she is not. Perhaps, that is true. Perhaps, like me at her age, she lies to preserve some sense of autonomy.

I don’t know if crying in the doorway is the “right” thing to do. It is, at least, the true thing. I miss my girl. I hate not knowing what’s going on in her life. And I hate having these friends of hers coming in and out of my home, sullen and silent, seemingly lacking in any gratitude that I keep letting them in the door.

Wrung out, I dry my tears with the back of my hand and tell her I love her. She promises to go to bed, and not to drag the entire horde of teenagers into the house this weekend. Only the ones who are actually capable of saying hello, please, and thank you, which we have now established is the baseline expectation.

The next morning she smiles at me in the car on the way to school and even laughs a little. I smile and laugh, too. I tell her I love her as she climbs out of the car. She responds that she loves me, too. 

It is something, maybe even everything.

Saturday afternoon she calls me. “Jane can’t come to sleep over, so can Nikki come instead?”, she asks.

“We discussed expectations. If you’re willing to talk to her about how to conduct herself in our house and she’s willing to try, then she’s welcome. If you’re not willing to have that conversation or she’s not willing to try, then no”, I respond.

“Okay”

“Okay… So, I’ll see you all at 8?”

“Yup”

They troop in right on time. Nikki greets me and even smiles. She also lines up to hug me when I come in to say good night, which is beyond my expectations, but sweet.

In the car on the way to pick up breakfast Sunday morning, I take note of the change in Nikki’s behavior and thank Ruby for her part in that transformation. “I think she didn’t understand she was being rude”, she muses. “She’s shy and awkward around adults.”

“Sure”, I deadpan. “At fourteen, super emo is way easier than shy and awkward.”

She chuckles as we head into the store, and then we wander around, chattering and giggling. Have I broken through the wall between us with my vulnerability, or is this just a momentary reprieve in our stand-off? Not knowing, I simply savor the moment, my arm looped through hers, her body pressed to mine. 

She carries the boxes of pastries to the car and smiles at me in the sunshine. It is something. Maybe even everything.

It’s the raw vulnerability, isn’t it? Whether in public or private, anytime we are raw and vulnerable, our emotions surging forward to grab the wheel, it is harder to show up with care and kindness, with some eye for where we stop and other people begin. It is harder to bridge the gap between our truths and honor each other.

But that is part of our practice, is it not? Not just to live into our own integrity, but to honor and encourage the integrity of others everywhere we go. Not everyone will rise to the occasion. We will not always rise to the occasion. We just keep practicing anyway. No matter how skilled we get, we never stop adjusting, stretching, and trying again. To actively participate in life, which is always changing and evolving around us, what other choice do we have?

How do you practice your own integrity while also honoring the integrity of those you love? What helps? What gets in your way?

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My dad died on September 8, 2014. He collapsed on the 6th and was rushed to the hospital. My mom and I were trading emails back and forth about his condition all day on the 7th. When it was clear it wasn’t going to improve I swiftly piled my kids in the car and hit the road, driving into the night, praying we would get there in time to say goodbye.

It wasn’t like my dad and I were close, really. He frustrated and enraged me more often than he inspired tenderness in me. But, at the same time, he loomed so large in my sense of myself. So much of who I was was in relationship to him— often in opposition, and sometimes in reluctant admission that I was more like him than was comfortable for me to acknowledge.

Whether or not it made any sense, I just needed to get there, so I drove and sang the spiritual Precious Lord (a favorite of both of ours), over and over, as my children slept in the back.

When we got there he was still alive, but not conscious. An enormous man, he filled the whole hospital bed, like a whale stranded on a beach or a small island broken away from the mainland, jutting up out of the water, just that small bit too far away to reach.

Still, I trusted that some part of him would hear me, so I leaned in and spoke into his ear, “Hey, Dad. I made it. I just wanted to tell you…You and I both know that you haven’t always been the best dad. Some of your decisions have been absolute s**t. But, now, you and mom have set the girls and me up to have a home of our own, where we will be safe for the rest of our lives. You took care of me when I needed you. Protected me. I couldn’t ask for anything more. It’s enough, Dad. You’ve done enough. It’s okay to go. I love you.”

He slipped away, with my mom at his side, less than 12 hours later.

I’ve been scrolling past all the posts in my newsfeed over the last several days, reading people’s tributes to their dads for Fathers Day and it has felt heavier than I expected. I don’t miss my dad, exactly. But I feel the weight of his absence, and, conversely, the way the weight of his presence still inhabits my life. The African proverb, I am because we are (or were), feels alive under my skin.

My father did not always manage to stay in his integrity, but he was always trying. My unwavering commitment to practice my own integrity is, to some extent, to honor him, but also an attempt to surpass him. Still, I am in relationship with him. Still, we are in conversation somehow.

My generation was raised to surpass our parents economically, and it’s unlikely that will happen, but in this, I can do it, I think. At least, I can try. I hope it’s enough for him, in whatever form he may exist now, as his imperfection and striving, in the end, was enough for me.

Driving back to Upstate from D.C. on the day of my father’s death I wrote his eulogy in my head. I built it, sentence by sentence, reciting it to myself after each addition to fix it in my memory. Entranced, somehow driving yet not in my body, I was trying to conjure the truth of him for me, to capture the weight of him in words before it slipped out of my grasp firmly enough to balance the anticipated loss of his weight in my life.

How to Die

I have spent the last three years of my life learning how to die.  Our lives are full to the brim with dyings, large and small.  I do not mean endings, though perhaps they could be called small deaths if they are approached with mindfulness for their significance in the larger scheme.  But I am talking about Deaths, those endings that come out of nowhere seemingly, and after which nothing is the same.  Nothing.

I thought I was becoming quite adept at death, and perhaps at the very least I have come to recognize it and accept it when it comes.  The profound absence, the sense of lack, the whistling as the wind blows through the hole in my chest that Death has blown threw me as she passed.

I will confess that I did not expect the size of the hole, the insistent roar of the wind as it whips through, at the death of my father.  I am 42 years old and my father and I have not been close since I was about five.  Until I was about five my father was pure magic.  He played and laughed and held me in the force of his gravity and that was good.  It was different after that, more complicated, more fraught with the tensions of two strong egos pulling and pushing against each other.

But perhaps I should not have been surprised at the enormity of his absence.  My father was a big man. He had a big body, a big voice, a big heart, a big Spirit, a big ego and big wounds ( I come by all that I am honestly, as they say).  He was beautiful and horrible, as I believe we all are, but not tending to do anything by halves my father's Light and Dark were impressive in their scope.

It is the nature of things, I believe, that we never truly know who our parents are, but only who they are to us. My father was a man of deep conviction and hope who wanted to see the best in everyone and build it up.  But few people are always, or perhaps even often, their best selves, and so my father left me to the wolves more times than are worth mentioning.  When your father does not have your back, when he does not protect you at certain crucial moments in your life you either become any number of unsavory and self-destructive things or you learn to be your own father and become a warrior.  I do not think my father planned to raise a warrior, but he did.  So thank you, Dad, for laying that ground.  I know I was not easy for you, but the alternatives would have been much worse.

But my father also taught me how to cry because, god bless him, he was a sentimental fool.  He cried at weddings, funerals, commercials, movies, sports games, every single musical performance of mine he ever attended, reading poems, listening to the radio.  If I had a penny for every tear my father shed I would be a rich woman indeed.  But I inherited that from him, that tendency to be pierced through by the world because the skin barrier between us and everything else is so thin.  I cry all the time, enough that it seems the world should surely be washed clean by now, but it is not.  But even my father would agree that if the world creates warriors they should know how to cry.  Otherwise we are truly lost.

The passion that I have for storytelling comes to me from both the rivers that converged to make me, but certainly from my father I inherited the urge to fix those stories in time.  To write them down so they could be passed more clearly, to last longer.

My father was great with his hands, full of ideas of all the things he would build and make and do.  Because of him I am more comfortable with a circular saw than a sewing machine and have complete confidence that if I can conceive of it I can make it.  This is no small thing for a woman in our culture.

My father was also his father's son, and he expected the women in his life, particularly my mother, to care for him and attend to his needs.  If you know me you can imagine how that worked out between us.  But to his endless karmic credit my father adored my mother, perhaps even from the first moment.  They were engaged three weeks after their first date and were married for 52 years. Did they stay together because they were people of duty and honor and so co-dependently enmeshed that they couldn't conceive of life apart? It could be argued that this is true.  But they were also, from the first moment, completely and shockingly in love.  And my father never waivered, never strayed, never strove for another.  When my mother was preparing to send me off to college she told me, "I want you to find someone who adores you" and I understand now that she was not just speaking from her love for me, but also from experience.  She knew what it was to be adored and she wanted that for me.

My dad did adore me.  Which doesn't mean he understood me often or even probably liked me all the time, but I cannot remember a single time that I saw him in the last 10 years that he didn't grab my hand or pat my hip and say, no matter how I looked, "I have never seen you look so beautiful".  So many times I could not hear it, because reality is more present for me than perhaps it was for my father, but I appreciate now that for him I was a shining thing.  All he could see was the Light, and maybe my tired, skeptical heart could have heard that better.

In the end my father died well.  He did not, as far as we can tell, suffer.  Yet he held on long enough that everyone got a chance to say goodbye.  And he did not linger so long that it was a torture to anyone.  Everyone has to die.  It is the nature of life.  And I cannot imagine how it could have happened better. There is sadness in it, but there is not tragedy.

When my father died the world lost a particular rendition of a principled, striving seeker.  A man who was perfect and enormous in his imperfection.  A man who loved deeply and long and will be loved deeply and long in return.  But I do not, for myself, believe that all that he was is lost.  He will return, as we all do, to the vast ocean of Spirit and whatever wisdom he accrued will live on in we who loved him and those who are apportioned some piece of his Light to carry forward.  No piece of matter ever dies, it just changes form.  And my father, as big as he was, will live on in infinite forms forever.

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I always sleep on the left side of the bed. With every lover back to the beginning. It’s not a conscious plan I made, a stated rule I issue from the first, like, never leave wet towels in a forgotten heap on the bedroom floor or don’t put my bras in the dryer. My body just knows never to turn my left shoulder away from the possibility of danger.

On a Christmas visit to my grandparents' house in Redlands, California just shy of my thirteenth birthday was the last time I turned my left shoulder. My brother and I were sharing the guest room at the end of the hall down from the living room, kitty-corner to the bathroom where my grandmother hoarded personal care supplies like the apocalypse was coming and there’d be nowhere to get sea breeze-scented hand soap or Q-tips, and across from the door to their bedroom. Our parents were sleeping on the fold-out in the den next to the plastic Christmas tree, or maybe they were in my grandparents’ room and my grandparents were on the fold-out, but I doubt it.

The twin beds in the guest room looked like every 50s tv show I watched growing up, just in 70s technicolor, despite the fact that this was 1984. The bedspreads were quilted polyester in shades of olive green and mustard. They had seams down the corners to hold them in place just so, the pillows at the head of each plump yet unyielding, just like my grandmother.

I slept on the bed furthest from the door, curled on my right side like a question mark, dreaming of presents and stockings and Disneyland. Until I wasn’t sleeping anymore because my brother was spooned up behind me, his left arm snaked around me like a strangling vine, pelvis pushing rhythmically, hand rubbing my belly in small circles, fingers grazing under the top edge of my underwear.

Turning a corner to find a rabid dog in your path, what do you do? Get perfectly still. Speak in low, calming tones. Back away slowly. But what if they’re at your back?

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him.

“Don’t you want to?” he wheedled in my ear.

“No”, I insisted. “Get out.” 

“Aw, Asha. Don’t be like that. Don’t worry. You’ll like it.” he responded, pulling me tighter.

“If you don’t get out of my bed right now I will scream bloody murder. I swear to God.”

I didn’t soften. I didn’t relent. I held my breath, pulled my knees tighter to my chest. He slipped away, fell to sleep nearly instantly, and I lay there, vigilant, for the remainder of that night and all the rest until we flew home, only falling asleep when I couldn’t stay awake any longer.

It was not the first time my brother touched me in that seeking, oily way, but it turned out to be the last.

Driving home from the grocery store, turning the corner at the light, I find myself flashing to that line by African-American, NOLA visual artist Brandan “BMike” Odums, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” He wasn’t, of course, talking about me, nor do I think the concept applies in my case. I come from long lines of preachers and church ladies. Divorced, tattooed, sexual, exuberant and uncompromising, prone to drink, and fond of the word f**k, I am likely the opposite of their dreams. Still, in that moment, frozen and vulnerable, I suspect at least one of my ancestors was with me.

Why? Because my people weren’t just preachers and church ladies. They were also storytellers. Some were even writers. In the opening chapter of my grandmother’s first book, published in 1977, she told the story of my Great-grandmother Alberta. Impoverished, and desperate, she held off the husband of the family providing her room and board in exchange for housework with a letter opener, then ran to the pastor’s wife in the morning and received sanctuary.

I am not Alberta’s wildest dream, but some of her fire and defiance burned through my veins that night. Thirty-eight years later it still fuels me, as does her daughter Grayce’s drive to write. The well runs deep and, whether they would have claimed me or not, they can’t take away my bucket.

When we talk about integrity we talk about our deepest held beliefs as our anchor and reference, but we’ve never talked about the source from which we draw our strength and commitment to our practice. Where do we draw from to stand firm when all eyes are on us? Where do we draw from to stay true when no one else will ever know? Where do we draw from to sustain ourselves when what we know is denied or dangerous?

We aren’t isolated beings, untethered from the influence of community or lineage, conjured out of nothing. We don’t come to our practice empty-handed. We draw from a well of ancestors and teachers, spiritual traditions, and chosen family. I draw up Bertie’s defiance, Grayce’s ambition, Mary’s ability to spin a tale, Harold’s drive to find a ministry, June’s deep intelligence and faith, Carrie and Lisa’s love and laughter, and the strength of all the Quaker women who are not my blood– imprisoned, trapped in scold’s bridles for daring to publicly speak their truth, and yet unwavering.

Without all of them to draw from, I wouldn’t be here, today, writing. I wouldn’t have the strength, constancy, love, and courage to send to you through the wires. Without them, I wouldn’t be.

Who lives through you, deep down the well? What do you draw from them to fuel your integrity practice?

For those of you who’ve been with us a long time, remember when we used to do interviews? I miss them and finally have the space to make them happen again. A new interview will be out at the end of this month, and I’ve got another planned for this summer. I’ll do another one in the fall.

If you don’t remember interviews, here’s one of my all-time favorites, with the Grande Dame of Ridiculation, Angelina Blasich.

Paying subscribers are eligible to be interviewed— to share their own reflections about practicing integrity as a real, imperfect, complicated human.

If you want to be interviewed and are not yet a paying subscriber, consider it? If you are a paying subscriber, wanna share? Email me or let me know in the comments.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ashasanaker.substack.com/subscribe

So, I’ve been thinking about losing. Is there integrity to be found in losing?

I lost out recently on a host of opportunities I tried for. I applied for an artist’s residency this summer. Didn’t get it. I applied to give a TedX talk this fall. Not accepted. I applied to participate in a Universal Basic Income program for New York State artists. Didn’t get that either.

There was a time, and not too far in the distant past, when to get three rejections in rapid succession would have just about laid me out. I would have fallen into a spiky pit of self-doubt and despair and rolled around for a while. Who was I to think I could actually do what I love? Who was I to think I could find a way to support myself without being sucked dry by necessity and obligation? Who told me I could be fulfilled and satisfied and useful all at the same time?

Stop kidding yourself, Asha. That’s not reality.  Get a damn, proper job. And if you can eke out a tiny sliver of your headspace every once in a while to write, count yourself lucky. If you can’t? You just didn’t want it hard enough, did you?

As vividly as I can imagine that doubt and shame spiral, that’s actually not what happened. Actually, when I got each of those “We’re sorry to inform you” notifications in fairly rapid succession I thought, Huh. Damn. Alright, moving on…

I realized that, at this point? I’ve lost more times than I’ve won in this life. I’ve not been picked for parts or teams. I’ve applied for programs I didn’t get accepted to and jobs I didn’t get hired for. I’ve submitted pitches that got rejected and written things that were, quite honestly, bad.

I’ve loved any number of people who did not love me back. Or they did, maybe, but then they realized they didn’t anymore and I still loved them and it was all really, shockingly heartbreaking. 

But also? I’m fine now. Great, even. I’m sitting on my porch with my cats. The sun is shining and it’s a little chilly and I have this whole day to write to you. I wrote and wrote and wrote for other people until midnight last night just to make sure, and so here we are. I get to have this day, and it’s a really good day.

When my marriage fell apart ten years ago I felt like I had fallen off the face of the earth. It’s not that I was perfectly happy in my marriage or my life, but I had chosen it and was bound and determined to honor that commitment. That felt like integrity to me.

For all of my wild imagination, I really had no Plan B. I was going to be married and raise my kids and die in that house. My parents had been married for decades. His parents had been married for decades. We would just do what they did. It was the right thing to do.

Doing the right thing was really important to me. It was the currency to the Kingdom, my ticket to all the good things– for me, for my kids, for him. I just knew, knew, that’s what was supposed to happen, that that was how things should be, that that was how integrity worked.

That is not how integrity works, my friends.

I still think my ex-husband is an ass, but I will say for sure, I’m also so grateful to him for ending things because I’m not sure I ever would have. To fall off the face of the known world and be jettisoned into the unimagined with no map, no plan, no clue? I never would have willingly chosen that. It was terrifying. It felt like dying, like I had lost everything I was and had ever hoped to be. 

I would not recommend, necessarily, willfully clinging to any plan so hard that the Universe has to reach in, turn you upside down, and then shake all your messy business out in the street for everyone to see, just to figure out that sometimes losing is the best thing that can ever happen to you. But it works.

When I was in college Bill Clinton was elected. I was overseas at the time, in Kenya, and I remember waking that morning to hear that after years of Reagan and then the first Bush, a Democrat was finally going to be in the White House. Americans were wandering around the streets of Nairobi, utterly poleaxed. Smiling and stumbling like they were in a cartoon and had just been knocked sideways by a baseball bat.

I called home and my father, equally dazed, said to me wonderingly, “Asha, I’ve never voted for a candidate that won. Not once!” He was about the age I am now. Maybe a year older. Which means he’d been voting for decades, faithfully, and lost every time.

Now, no one, including my father, could have anticipated what was to come. The booming economy or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Welfare Reform, the 1994 Crime Bill, or Monica Lewinsky. At the time, it just felt like winning.

I still make plans these days. I try things and throw my hat in the ring. But I don’t get so attached to outcomes anymore. I trust that what needs to happen will probably happen, that my capacity to conceive of it is limited by my ego (which is willful and easily fixated) so I probably can’t entirely imagine what it will look like. But my inability to map out all the complex contours of the future doesn’t mean anything, really. Other than that I'm not omnipotent, which wasn’t part of the deal anyway, as far as I can tell.

The important thing is that I listen really deeply to whatever the me is that’s underneath all of that planning and clinging and righteousness. She’s the one to ask the important questions, like

Who are you?

What do you want?

What do you need?

What do you believe?

What do you serve?

Everything beyond the answers to those questions– the winning, the losing, the trying and failing– is all unknown in its significance. Not only for the scope of my life, but for the scope of other people’s, for the world. We just don’t know, my dear ones. We don’t know what seeds we are planting and what trees will grow from our labor. Maybe we’ll rest under those branches someday. Maybe someone else will. If it’s them and not us, have we lost?

I have another couple of recommendations for you, my friends. First, I’ve mentioned it before, but if you’re not reading the newsletter Men Yell At Me, you should be. Author Lyz Lenz also wrote about losing this week. Read it!

In Defense of Losing

Also, a less well-known author on Substack is Lloyd Lemons (how great a name is that??). Lloyd writes a lovely newsletter called Curious Elder. It’s thoughtful and touching. I really appreciate his perspective. Check it out below!

The Circle of Life is a Circle of Learning

That’s it for today, my friends! So glad to have you here, however you came to be here. But, hey, if you aren’t yet a subscriber and now you think you might want to be, you can use the button below to do that. I’d love to have you join us.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ashasanaker.substack.com/subscribe

I spent most of the first 40 years of my life outside my body, and not just when I was having sex, though that was a habitual trigger to get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak. When I was in my body I got as far as my head, but below the neck was another country and I didn’t speak that language with any level of conversational fluency.

Just like with a language, in immersion situations, I could drop in and manage to get around passably well. In the woods as a kid, I could drop down and be entirely present for hours, and very occasionally for days at a time. But once I got back to the “real world” I was up and out again.

My disassociative tendencies were originally learned in response to childhood sexual trauma, but trauma was not the only factor that dug those grooves so deep in my psyche. We have this narrative in Western culture about the mind/body split. The mind and spirit, which are traditionally associated with the masculine, are ideal. The body, traditionally associated with the feminine, the wild, the animalistic, are base at best, sinful at worst.

Living in a finite body is often painful and bewildering, sometimes even terrifying. As a result, we have built religions and philosophies that work hard to transcend the body, elevate the mind, and denigrate anything and anyone considered “impure” or, more recently, “unenlightened”.

Women are allowed to be in their bodies as long as they are concerned with making themselves “attractive” in order to be appropriately objectified, which will then lead to them being reproductively useful to men. Men are allowed to be in their bodies in order to conquer, dominate, or seduce. No one is allowed to actually enjoy their bodies. No one is allowed to be disabled or fat or queer or trans or simply weird and wild and funky.

In rebellion against all of this personal and cultural disassociation training, I have been trying to climb back down inside my body for decades. Though I do still occasionally find myself ungrounded from what is happening, it’s rare (and deeply unsettling as opposed to unremarkable). How have I managed to do that?

Primarily, it’s been through a long, careful excavation of my emotional history and patterns. Some of that excavation has happened through talk therapy, but as much has happened through private study and conversation with my nearest and dearest. When I could afford it I’ve also used body-based practices, like massage and acupuncture. Moving outside as much as possible is, luckily, free.

Though I tend towards verbal and cerebral processing— thinking and talking about my emotions— which tend to encourage staying above the body, over the last ten years I’ve been steadily sinking down in. Now, when I feel a big emotion rising up I pay attention to what’s happening in and with my body. Do I feel it in my body? If I don’t, do I need to move my body (go for a walk, generally) to get down into what’s actually going on? Am I off-ramping in some way— overeating, craving a drink, or a cigarette? Can I stay in whatever I’m feeling and not run away, trusting that it will pass through and maybe lead me somewhere I need to go?

Committing to this long process of embodiment and emotional uncovering has helped me develop a certain degree of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence isn’t simply being able to put words to emotions, to bring the head to the heart. It’s actually becoming fluent in the language of the body and the way that emotions live in the body. It’s learning to pay attention to other people’s emotions and how they express them through their bodies and behavior, not just the words that come out of their mouths.

There are those who say that’s all there is to emotional intelligence— understanding the realm of emotions well enough to “read” yourself and others. That view allows for the use of emotional intelligence in pursuit of emotional manipulation, and you won’t be surprised to know I don’t believe we can leave it there. For me, emotional intelligence is grounded in a more caring and collective sense, a more feminine sense, and has an inherently ethical component. The emotionally intelligent person doesn’t subscribe to hierarchical evaluations of emotions or persons, any more than a lover of language might embrace notions that some words are “bad”.

Here’s what I wrote about emotional intelligence for my friend Rob Brezsny:

For me, emotional intelligence is personal, in that it connotes a person who has committed to understanding their own emotional history and tendencies in order to make more conscious choices about how to act, or not, out of their emotions. The emotionally intelligent person takes full responsibility, always, for their emotions and how the way they bring those emotions to the world impacts it.

Emotional intelligence is also relational, because it enables the individual to attend to patterns of emotional behavior in others and account for those emotions constructively in how they communicate and behave in response to what they sense, hopefully with an eye towards greater connection and deeper mutual respect and care.

Essential to this is a clear sense of "what is mine and what is yours." Folks who are emotionally intelligent can be empathic, but they work to be clear about what comes from them and what they are absorbing from others.

Finally, emotional intelligence is social. The emotionally intelligent person understands that institutions and systems encourage certain emotions and discourage others. These same institutions and systems often are based on power hierarchies, so they dictate who is "allowed" to feel what and when.

The emotionally intelligent person understands this and stands aside from it as much as possible, refusing to submit blindly to it or forcing others to submit blindly. The emotionally intelligent person wants everyone to own themselves, and not to be owned.

What does all of this have to do with integrity? Integrity is the practice through which we integrate our ideas and beliefs with our outer lives. Our emotions exist as the gateway between these two realms of experience. They filter what comes in and what goes out. And perhaps more importantly, how it goes out. The exact same words can be said with anger or contempt as with resolution or vulnerability, but the impact will be necessarily different.

All the grand ideas about people and how the world should be mean nothing if your emotional life is so stunted that you can’t actually connect with or see other people clearly as they are. Ideas and beliefs sequestered in the realm of the theoretical because you can’t translate them into real life and relationships aren’t worth very much.

When we ask ourselves, “How is this belief actually working for me? What world does it create for me? How is that world going to work for other people who aren’t me?” what we run into more often than not are the limits of our, and sometimes other people’s, emotional intelligence. Our integrity practice, the extent to which we can move through the world with our beliefs and our lives functioning as an integrated whole, interacting with others as if they are also whole people, is entirely dependent on our emotional intelligence. Is it easy to develop? Not particularly, in a culture that is so deeply disembodied. But there is no other way.

Are you emotionally intelligent? How did you develop that knowing?

This being the first newsletter out to my whole list since it was launched, I should let y’all know that Substack has launched an app for iPhone. You can find it in your app store. It’s free! An Android app is coming as well.

I am a bit of a curmudgeon, so I haven’t upgraded my iPhone in years. Therefore, I don’t have the necessary operating system and haven’t played around with it. But folks in the know say it’s a more streamlined experience. So, if you are the sort of person who prefers app notifications to emails and has a not-ancient iPhone, you can opt to read this newsletter in the app instead of getting it in your inbox. Enjoy!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ashasanaker.substack.com/subscribe

What is integrity? What does the word even mean? If you start looking for a single, consistent, and comprehensive narrative definition of integrity you won’t find it. Trust me, I’ve looked. There is a definition of integrity that I’ve been using here at Let Your Life Speak, which we’ll get to in a moment, but even it is only partial. For my own sense of integrity, and the integrity of this project, I need to come up with a better one— one that encapsulates all aspects of our striving to show up as whole, integrated people of conscience.

So, let’s walk through this together…

First, it must be acknowledged that integrity is historically associated with living rightly, or righteously, which has undeniable religious overtones. Not only does that mean integrity involves following God via the teachings of a particular faith, but there is also a connotation of purity, or pursuit of perfection. This is pretty well encapsulated in this definition of integrity offered by Joseph B. Wirthlin:

To me, integrity means always doing what is right and good, regardless of the immediate consequences. It means being righteous from the very depth of our soul, not only in our action but, more importantly, in our thoughts and in our hearts.

I appreciate the first bit of this, doing what is right with a willingness to bear the consequences, but the overall implication here is that integrity means never screwing up— never thinking an unkind thought, feeling rage, vengefulness, or envy. I don’t think that’s realistic, nor is it useful. And most importantly, it’s suggesting that in order to be in our integrity we must only manifest the parts of us that are shiny, positive, and civilized.

That’s not wholeness, and I believe that integrity demands wholeness. This doesn’t mean that we act on our destructive impulses or darkest feelings, but we don’t endeavor to eradicate them either, which is a fool’s errand in any case. We can’t remove our shadow like Peter Pan. It’s always with us. Part of our integrity work is recognizing it and working with it mindfully— healing our wounds as we can, mitigating the damage we do to ourselves and others, and developing emotional intelligence.

The discussion of thoughts and hearts, however, does bring us to an important part of integrity, which is the integration of our public and private selves. Or, as Joyce Meyer says, “Integrity means that you are the same in public as you are in private.” C.S. Lewis takes it a step farther, saying that “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”

This is the point where we loop back around to religion because people of faith often believe there is never a scenario where “no one” is watching. God is always watching, like an omnipotent, judgmental Santa Claus. If you step out of line, even if no one else knows, He will. This way of keeping people on the path of integrity works, I guess, as long as you subscribe to that sort of faith. Where does that leave the rest of us?

As I’ve said before, I don’t think you need to believe in God to practice integrity. You are, however, called to act in accordance with your beliefs even when “no one is watching” so having something transcendent you bow to is necessary. It can be religious or spiritual— the belief that we are all connected and, therefore, obligated to each other in some essential way. Without this sense of obligation to something that transcends you alone, however, those private, dark moments of reckoning are too lonely and subject to the whims of ego. Our egos don’t, ultimately, give a s**t about integrity.

In fact, our egos wish little more than for us to stay comfortable. When we are comfortable we know who we are. We rest in certainty. But life is unrelenting in its uncertainty. Integrity, therefore, also has an aspect of truth to it. Not just being honest, speaking our truth, but confronting the truth of the moment. What Dr. Henry Cloud refers to in his book on integrity as “the ability to meet the demands of reality.”

Dr. Brené Brown brings some of this together in her definition of integrity. She writes in Rising Strong:

Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.

She’s missing the public/private integration piece, as well as the transcendence piece, but she does bring in the word practice, which is another important aspect that so far we’ve been missing. I’ve said it so many times here and I’ll never stop saying it: integrity is not an immutable aspect of character, something you have, but instead something you do. You can act with integrity. You can live with integrity, but you have to work at it all the time. You’re never done.

Reality, in all of its changeability and complication, never stops and so our work to show up with integrity never stops either.

The definition that I’ve been using here at Let Your Life Speak from author Stephen L. Carter provides a template for how to actually “practice our values”, which is useful. Carter outlines integrity as a three-fold process:

* discerning what is right and what is wrong;

* acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; and

* saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right and wrong.

He further states, and I quite like this bit, “the word integrity comes from the same Latin root as integer and historically has been understood to carry much the same sense, the sense of wholeness: a person of integrity, like a whole number, is a whole person, a person somehow undivided. The word conveys not so much a single-mindedness as a completeness; not the frenzy of a fanatic who wants to remake all the world in a single mold but the serenity of a person who is confident in the knowledge that he or she is living rightly.”

In his book, Carter does a fairly good job of outlining the moral reflectiveness inherent in the practice of integrity, while allowing for a diversity of belief. Where he draws a hard line, though, is when it comes to dehumanization. As he says so beautifully, “It is far too late in the human day for any person of integrity to say with honesty, ‘I have thought the matter through and I have decided to hate those whose race is different than mine.’”

This brings me to the last aspect of integrity which needs to be included in a comprehensive definition. Integrity is relational. It is about the moral quality of our choices as we bump up against each other, which are inherently affected by the degree of our own integration, our own conscious wholeness. If we just stop at thinking integrity is about our own self-development and assume everything after that will just take care of itself, we are being willfully naive. This is why I take issue with the approach to integrity by self-help authors like Martha Beck. In her book, The Way of Integrity, she suggests that integrity is simply structural— having all your parts in working order like a well-functioning airplane. Then you will simply feel good and know what to do. She writes:

If you don’t know what to do next, the way of integrity will provide instructions, like a recipe. If you don’t know where to go next, the way of integrity will show you the next step, like a map. If you follow the directions, you’ll end up happy. Not because this path is virtuous, but because it aligns with reality, with truth. Your life will work for the same reason a well-built plane will fly. Not a reward for good behavior. Just physics.

She strips all of the morality, the question of how we relate to other people, out of the equation. Instead, she wants to encourage people to trust their own intuition as opposed to the mandates of culture. Given her biography— she was deeply traumatized by an upbringing in the Mormon church from which she had to escape entirely— I get why she might end up there. But it’s not enough to just work to become our best, truest, most authentic selves. We also have to engage with the world, which is full of people and systems that are not functioning the way we might like them to.

Not only can those interactions throw us off-kilter in our own integrity practice, but when it comes to systems— governmental, institutional, or communal— we might actually need to change things. Whether and how we do that is also part of our integrity practice.

So, where does all of this leave us? What are the essential pieces of a comprehensive definition of integrity? They are: wholeness and integration, bowing to the transcendent, discernment, right action, relational awareness, emotional intelligence, practice, a commitment to confront reality, and a willingness to face consequences. No wonder there’s no single definition out there! But let me take a stab at it.

Here’s my definition, which is definitely a work-in-progress:

Integrity is a lifelong practice of integration and alignment of the true self with right action in relationship to other people and the wider world, guided by an obligation to something larger than the individual. This integration and alignment are achieved through developing habits of discernment, emotional intelligence, and an acceptance of consequences, allowing for consistent, truthful interaction with self and others regardless of circumstance.

What do you think, my friends? Did I capture it or miss something? Is there something in there that you don’t think should be? I’d love for you to meditate on your own definition and then share it with me, or with all of us in the comments.

In my search for definitions of integrity, I came across the following quote, which sums up my motivation in bringing us all together beautifully. I didn’t want to end without sharing it with you.

It takes courage to create a meaningful life of integrity. It also requires good company. And practice. — Shelly Francis

Thanks so much for your good company.

XO, Asha

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ashasanaker.substack.com/subscribe

Do you have enemies? Have you ever had an enemy?

At this point in my life, I don’t feel I have any enemies but I do harbor tremendous resentments, which seems related somehow. I don’t think of the people I harbor resentments towards as my enemies, and yet I’m not inviting them over for tea. Hell, I don’t even want them walking up on my porch. When it comes to these folks, my tendency to eschew schadenfreude falls by the wayside.

We’re not at war. I don’t wish violence upon them, but really? If they’re not enemies, then they are something like the Diet Coke of enemies. Enemy-lite.

And the thing I realize is that they only continue to exist in this position because I continue to set that place for them at my psychic table. Gone are the days of having people actively in my life who treat me poorly— who betray or abuse me, manipulate or humiliate me for sport. So, none of the folks for whom I currently carry resentments are an active part of my daily life. And yet they maintain a treasured place at my right hand, should I ever need them.

What is that about?

Honestly, I think it originated from an understandable place. We talk about gaslighting in popular culture now. It’s a phenomenon that most folks understand the contours of, even if they themselves have never experienced it. But it hasn’t been that way for most of my life. Since childhood, I have had people profess to love me while denying the reality of the violation and pain being inflicted upon me, either by them or others, without the commonly understood vocabulary to name it.

The experience of having someone you love treat you horribly and in the next breath act as if they literally did not do or say the thing they just did or said. The experience of finally, finally speaking aloud the painful, violent truth around which so much of your self and reality have oriented in order to survive and being told it doesn’t matter.

Why are you being so dramatic?

It’s not like he raped you.

I was just angry. I didn’t mean to.

In the face of this chronic crazy-making, I clung to my resentments because they represented a truth about me— of what I have survived and how I have become the one that I am— that others refused to carry. In fact, actively denied even needed carrying because those truths did not exist.

Without those resentments, and the simmering, indignant anger that fueled them, I feared at best I would cease to make any sense at all. At worst, I would disappear, become just a smudge on a page where pencil marks had once been.

My resentments defiantly wrote my truths down in ink, bearing down into the page so that my life had an indelible texture and undeniable weight that would not be erased.

But, as I said, here I am. Fifty years old and, admittedly fairly recently, finally done with allowing the presence of people who treat me horribly in my day-to-day life. What sense do my resentments make within this virgin landscape? Do they define my boundaries, or do they create repetitive psychic paths that trick me into thinking I am moving forward while leading me around and around in fruitless circles?

Two things happened in the last few days that set me to the task of confronting the latter truth. I listened to the latest edition of the OnBeing podcast, an interview with prominent Western Buddhists Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman about their work to provide practical instruction on how to love your enemies. Then, on a walk with a friend I encountered this incredible pile-up of ice at the mouth of the inlet feeding into the lake and I thought, Yes, that’s how the inside of my mind feels these days. All jammed up and dirty.

Salzberg and Thurman pointed out that in the Theravada Buddhist tradition there is defined a middle point between loving your enemies and hating them. Before you advance to loving them, first you can simply work to not hate them. If for no other reason than that to take that step requires manifesting tremendous self-compassion. Self-compassion is the foundation of all other positive actions.

That. I could probably do that. That might get things flowing again.

So, for the last several days, every time one of those intrusive, repetitive, spinny thoughts ran across the page in my mind I forced myself to stop and, instead, recite these words to myself:

I release everything and everyone who is not good for me.

For my Soul and for my Spirit.

Without rancor or resentment.

Because I deserve to live in peace.

Over and over again I would recite them until a small channel of breath and freely running thought would cut through the jammed up resentment out into the wide-open water of possibility. The jam hadn’t completely disappeared, but I could get beyond it. Without the food of my attention it will melt, since it is only my attention that feeds it.

For all of my woo-woo tendencies, I am often skeptical that simple acts are enough to make measurable change. But, friends, this is working. My mind and heart feel lighter than they have, maybe in years. What a relief!

It is hard to practice integrity with your mind and heart all jammed up with resentment. It’s not impossible. I’ve managed it for years despite myself. But it is harder than it needs to be. The temptation to righteousness in order to assuage the discomfort of all that simmering anger looms constantly while cutting off access to joy. And I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry for some joy these days.

Do you carry resentments? How do you release them?

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I will confess what has always felt like a dirty secret to me: I believe really strongly in romantic love– its power to transform and to heal. Plus if, like me, you have ever been in love you know that it can be delicious– thrilling, intoxicating, and capable of inspiring hope even in dark places.

Given that I feel so strongly about romantic love, given that I have been raised all my life on all the romantic mythologies that run rife through our culture, you’d think that love would be a cakewalk for me. I believe in its power. I’m willing to commit myself to it. What else could be necessary for Love to welcome me as a dedicated supplicant?

But romantic love has not been an affirmation of my faith and commitment. It’s been more like one of those myths where the hero is assigned multiple deadly, painful labors. This confused me until, in the course of researching my book on the notion of soulmates, I came across a host of psychological studies which helped me understand what the hell was going on.

The soulmate mythology is a particular iteration of what researchers now call an Implicit Theory of Relationship. You might be familiar with the notion of mindsets when it comes to education. I’ve written about them before when talking about making mistakes. The fixed mindset holds that intelligence is fixed. Therefore, making mistakes in learning is indicative of an inherent lack of intellectual capacity. A growth mindset, in contrast, is based on the belief that intelligence is developed through learning and challenge. Mistakes are simply challenges to be overcome in pursuit of greater knowledge, rather than a sign of the learner’s inherent intellectual capabilities.

When you take the notion of mindsets and apply it to romantic love you get a spectrum of implicit theories about the nature of romantic relationships ranging from strong destiny beliefs on one end and strong growth beliefs on the other. Examples of destiny beliefs include: love at first sight; relationships only succeed if they are meant to; the goal is to find The One; there is a single person out there who is the other half of my soul and the love between us will eclipse all others. Growth beliefs include: relationships are developed and cultivated over time, and successful relationships evolve through the resolution of risks, challenges, and difficulties rather than their absence.

Implicit Theories of Relationship are best understood as a spectrum because it is absolutely possible to hold some measure of both beliefs at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive. But the further you get to the opposite ends of the spectrum the pitfalls of each perspective become clear.

If you’ve never thought of mystical notions of romantic love as systems of belief or ways of thinking as opposed to Ultimate Truth this may be hard to wrap your heart and mind around, but stick with me for a moment. Multiple psychological studies have looked at the impact of strong beliefs in romantic destiny and found they present challenges to actually experiencing lasting and satisfying love.

Strong destiny beliefs cause their proponents to constantly evaluate partners to see whether or not they fit an ideal. If they do, then destiny believers experience a very high level of relationship satisfaction. However, that satisfaction is dependent on their partner maintaining their ideal qualities unfailingly. In order to aid that maintenance, destiny believers can be extremely hostile to any suggestion that there are either a) discrepancies between their ideal and their partner, and b) that they and their partner have divergent ideas about the ideal nature of relationships generally or this specific relationship. Destiny believers will go to great lengths to avoid conflict, amplifying the qualities of their partner they perceive as ideal and consistent with their own while ignoring or downplaying any inconsistencies or qualities they perceive as less than ideal.

There are some benefits to this tendency towards thought distortion. Anyone who’s ever been in a long-term romantic commitment will tell you that the capacity to idealize your partner and not jump into conflict at any opportunity can be useful in surviving the day-to-day frustrations of partnership. Where strong destiny believers run into trouble is that their thoughts are not only distorted but highly polarized. As soon as anything strongly threatens their idealized sense of their partner as The One They Were Destined To Find the imbalance flips. They amplify their partner’s less ideal qualities and ignore their ideal qualities.

This can manifest as leaving relationships quite quickly, as soon as any quality that is less than ideal presents itself, or staying in relationships while withdrawing emotionally and looking for the next ideal option.

You’ll notice that nowhere in this scenario is the strong destiny believer engaging in attempts to actually work on the relationship. If it is destined then you don’t have to work on it, right? Strong destiny believers don’t take any responsibility for the ways in which their behavior contributes to the demise of a relationship because they do not believe it is in their power to alter Fate. Strong destiny believers can, in fact, be both utterly unethical and completely unrepentant. If that one great love is on the line then what does lying, cheating, emotional neglect, or even violence matter?

So, what about the far growth end of the spectrum? How do those folks operate? Though strong growth believers are not without standards, they don’t tend to engage in thought distortion when it comes to assessing their partner’s qualities because those qualities don’t exist as portents of doom, but simply as curiosities and challenges. They tend to view conflict as inevitable and potentially relationship-enhancing, rather than something to be avoided at all costs. And when relationships end they process that as an inability or unwillingness to do the work by the parties involved, rather than a sign of whether the relationship was meant to be.

Where do strong growth believers run into trouble? Since they tend to be taskmasters when it comes to growth, both in themselves and in the relationship, they can be judgmental and impatient when their partner offers to change something and then can’t seem to do it within the growth believer’s optimal timeframe. Instead of thinking about how difficult the change is, they tend to think that the lack of change, or the pace of change, is due to their partner just not trying hard enough. They also can tend to see every single discrepancy in belief or behavior between themselves and their partners as a growth opportunity, wanting to process, discuss, and hash out every single, blessed thing.

Beating a dead horse is when you keep pounding away at something that is way past done. Strong growth believers are prone to this, as well as to sticking with relationships that are not actually salvageable because they just can’t let go of the idea that we can work it out if we just try hard enough.

If you couldn’t have already guessed, I err towards the growth end of the spectrum, with all of the failings described above. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have any beliefs in destiny, for what it’s worth. My destiny beliefs mostly confine themselves, however, to the realm of familial relationships. I believe that my children chose me, just like I chose my own parents, in order to become the people we were best capable of being. But that doesn’t mean it’s all been rainbows and unicorns. We push each other’s buttons, get under each other’s skins, and challenge each other to evolve (hopefully). To the extent that destiny is involved in relationships beyond the familial, I believe that we draw the people to us that are going to teach us the lessons we need to learn. Sometimes those lessons are enjoyable and sometimes they aren’t, but we are meant to grow. Humans don’t tend to grow when they are totally comfortable, so destiny is as likely to hand us discomfort as anything else. It is up to us to develop wisdom in response so we can add it back into the collective when we go.

I struggle with romantic destiny beliefs because they strike me as disempowering and based on a desire not to learn anything. This is not to say that strong destiny believers reject any kind of learning. I’ve had multiple relationships with strong destiny believers who were incredibly smart and curious about acquiring knowledge and facts. Where their interest in learning stopped was where it concerned who they were as people and in relationships. They were intellectually impressive but emotionally stunted, and they didn’t think it mattered because someday they would find the perfect relationship where they would be unconditionally loved and accepted. There would be no conflict, no trouble, no need to constructively communicate across differences. It would all just be pure bliss.

And, you know what? If they manage to meet someone who strongly believes in romantic destiny and that they are also The One, they might be able to find that. Reality doesn’t tend toward constant pure bliss as far as I can tell so searching for it with singular dedication seems something of a fool’s errand, but who am I to say? What I will say is that approaching romantic love with some appreciation for the spectrum of Implicit Theories of Relationship– where you fall on it and where your partner (or potential partner) does– may save you a lot of heartache. If you fall too far apart on opposite ends of the spectrum what you each see as your best qualities will exacerbate each other’s worst tendencies. Trust me.

The most important takeaway, however, is this: studies have shown that a growth mindset in learning environments can be developed, which leads to greater confidence and educational success. Whether or not you think destiny has a part to play in romance, some development of a belief in growth can provide lasting satisfaction and deeper authenticity as partners evolve over time. Change is the only reliable aspect of life. Shouldn’t our theories about romantic love, therefore, embrace curiosity and learning as we all change together?

Where do you fall on the Implicit Theories of Relationship spectrum?

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I find myself thinking about the Christmas story. Not about Scrooge and Bob Cratchett and Tiny Tim, but about the story of the birth of Jesus.

Whether I am a Christian is an open question, but I love a good story. Over the course of my life, I’ve puzzled over various stories about Jesus, absorbing some and leaving others for those with different temperaments than I. The healing of the sick, the championing of the poor, and the defense of sex workers— I’m a fan of all those stories. The story of Jesus pleading with God to release him from the burden of his fate in the Garden of Gethsemane brings me to tears every time. Have you ever railed against the Universe for the role you seem to have been cast to play in this grand drama we call life? I have, for sure, so when I hear about Gethsemane I can imagine myself into Jesus’s despair. I can walk through his submission with him, and feel I am not alone in my own.

At different points in my life different aspects of the story of the birth of Jesus have struck me. This year I just keep thinking about that baby. Have you ever been at the birth of a baby?

Twenty years ago I trained to be a doula, or birthing assistant. I attended my first birth when I was newly pregnant with my oldest child. As an aside, that baby is now nineteen years old and a close friend of my kid. They’re planning to do a test run on having their own place in January. Nineteen! Living on their own! Life is so… weird.

But long before the present moment, he was born and I was there. The birth was long and difficult. His mom was beyond exhausted and couldn’t muster the strength to push anymore, so the doctor ended up using forceps to pull him out. He emerged as all babies do, bloody and wrinkly and remarkably small for all the trouble. His head was all squished and he had bruises on his temples. I remember being gobsmacked by his vulnerability and the deep sense of responsibility and tenderness that welled up in me.

Being in my first trimester, with all of its attendant nausea and aversions, I had recently given up cigarettes and bourbon. Even though I couldn’t abide the smell of either, I’d been feeling weirdly resentful about it until that moment. But when I looked at him, curled up on his side on the mattress between her legs, I remember the thought rushing in: “I would never, ever blow smoke in this baby’s face! Nothing of this broken world should ever touch him.”

Of course, the broken world has touched him, just as it has touched my own kids. Just as it has touched each of us. We don’t get out of that part. The story tells us that God knew that and sent Jesus anyway, his only son. I don’t really subscribe to that bit about the only son. It doesn’t resonate with my experience of the way that Spirit lives in each and every one of us. But I do think about the choice to bring a child into this broken world, offering up their life in its utter vulnerability with some measure of hope.

I struggle with softness. I have become marginally better over time at allowing for my own vulnerability. Some would even argue, and have, that through my writing I am excessively naked. Staking a claim to defining the terms of my own vulnerability and refusing any shame for it, however, has been an essential part of living into my integrity, so I make no apologies for it.

Where I stumble, though, is in finding compassion for other people’s imperfections, missteps, the willful damage they inflict. The child in me wants people to be better than they are, to be more careful, more protective, and tender with others. The child in me doesn’t, and maybe even can’t, understand the choices that people make— when they are unfair, unjust, careless, malicious, and cruel.

The adult in me, however, knows how easy it is to hurt people without meaning to, to be selfish and intentionally vicious. Adult me knows what it is to feel a pain so deep that all you want to do is inflict it on someone else. Let them share that burden.

That is the world we were all born into. It is beautiful and savage. What measure of each we experience, on balance, is not entirely in our hands. And the story tells us that God knew that and sent Jesus anyway. Maybe not to redeem us, as if we owe an inevitable debt for being human, but to remind us that we each carry that blessed and sacred child within us. We each emerged, bloody and vulnerable and utterly perfect, another chance for hope to assert itself anew.

I am not much of one for setting New Year’s resolutions in time with the Roman calendar. I hope on December 31st to be fast asleep when the clock strikes twelve. My heart recognizes the pagan calendar, and how the new year enters with the return of the light following the Winter Solstice. That is the time for me to offer prayers and make commitments.

Here is my prayer:

Please, All That Is Holy, help me be softer. Help me find ways to stand firm against harm without harming, without dehumanizing, without forgetting the perfect child that was the beginning of everyone. In the face of all that is broken, help me mend what I can. Help me be careful. Help me be tender. Help me be kind.

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