Let Your Life Speak

There was an inexplicable pipe sticking out of the ground in my best friend Elizabeth Stein’s backyard. We decided there were little people living underground just below. We proclaimed ourselves their rulers, and as their rulers, it was our job to inform them about the state of the world above ground. We would dress up for our co-queenly duties and then spend endless afternoons yelling down into the pipe, mostly about the weather, as if it were make-or-break for tiny people living underground to know whether the sun was shining.

Thus began my lifelong effort to develop my voice. I’m still working on it. I’m not quite as cute as I was then, and wear significantly fewer sequins, but I still often manufacture imaginary people in my head to talk to about the state of things in my world. I find it helps me make sense of myself.

Writers, whether they write fiction or non-fiction, are always in the process of developing their voice, or they should be. When I read, even if it’s a type of story I’ve read a thousand times, I am hooked knowing I’ve never, ever heard the story told quite the way that author tells it. Sure, there’s something to be said for being well-read, having an expansive vocabulary, and a talent for turning a phrase, but all of the word acrobatics that anyone has been trained to perform are nothing without that ring of authentic voice, the embrace of perspective and particularity layered on top of a meaty core of emotional presence and honesty.

Even if you’re not a writer, developing your voice is a necessary part of your integrity practice. By your voice, I mean your own particular, authentic perspective. Have you ever encountered someone who only seems to be capable of parroting the perspectives of others? It might be political, or social, or even emotional, but you can feel when someone is simply marching in step to someone else’s drum. There’s no self-reflection. There’s no complexity. There’s no there there.

Some might argue that integrity is simply the willingness to act in accordance with your beliefs, and whether or not you’ve ever reflected deeply on those beliefs is beside the point. I disagree. Integrity demands not just discernment about what is right based on your beliefs, but also deep reflection on who you are. Integrity is the integration of self, beliefs, and behavior. It involves an ongoing assessment regarding how your life speaks to who you are and the values you hold dear.

There are plenty of ways to engage in this sort of reflection. Journaling is a reliable one. Talk therapy has been my primary go-to since my early twenties. Long conversations with good friends can often do the trick. I also often interview myself. Let me explain…

I am a fan of long-form, audio interviews. Before the explosion of podcasts, I was a huge fan of Fresh Air, the classic radio interview show with Teri Gross. How many hours did I spend in my car listening to that one over the years? Now, I listen to OnBeing, Armchair Expert, Unlocking Us, and any number of other interview podcasts. Basically, if there are two people sitting in a studio somewhere recording a conversation in which they dive into the complications of being a human trying to make sense of the world, I am rapt with attention.

Increasingly, however, what I find I’m also doing is inserting myself into the conversation. As they discuss, I discuss with them. When the host asks the guest a question, I find myself answering it. Often the questions are ones I’ve never had anyone ask me before, and formulating an answer to them forces me to reflect on my life in unexpected and thought-provoking ways.

Technically, the host and guest aren’t imaginary people, but they might as well be. I’m never likely to meet them. Inserting myself into the conversation in my mind is not unlike yelling down into the pipe when I was a kid. I imagine there are people that need me to tell them what’s going on in my world, what the emotional, or psychological, or political weather is like. In my mind, they wait with rapt attention to hear my thoughts and feelings on it all.

The whole exercise, albeit imaginary, is more conversational than therapy, but still largely about someone giving me their undivided attention. How often do you actually get someone’s undivided attention for longer than a few moments?

Since no one is actually listening in on these imaginary interviews I can be honest and vulnerable. I can say all the things I’ve always wanted to say and admit all the things I’m not sure about or don’t know. I also can be, since it’s my imagination, consistently funny and charming, never awkward or prone to tripping over my words. Let me tell you, in my mind, I’m a great interview.

In reality, I’m less charming, though reliably thoughtful. I’ve only been interviewed once, for a local public radio show called Made of Clay. Maybe I’ll get to do something similar again someday.

I’d encourage you to give this exercise a try. Imagine your favorite interviewer. What would they ask you that you’ve always wanted to be asked? What might they ask you that scares you just a bit to answer? Now, answer. This is all inside your head. You don’t have to tell your answers to anyone. You can be honest and thoughtful, vulnerable and brave. And if you’re like me, feel free to pretend that you are delightful, inspiring, and funny as well. No one will tell.

What is one question you’ve always wanted someone to ask you?

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I’ve been thinking about trust the last few days— what it means and what it feels like. Do you have people in your life that you trust completely? Why? Did you trust them immediately or did you build that trust over time? What does being with them feel like in your body?

Have you had your trust betrayed before? Did that change the way you think about trust?

One of the primary motivators for me in pursuing my integrity practice is wanting to be trustworthy. I want folks in my life to be utterly confident that I will be honest, reliable, and steadfast. If I say I’m going to do something, I’ll do it (or I’ll have a damn good reason why not). If I make a mistake, I’ll own it. If they need me, they can count on me to come through in some kind of way. No one I care about will ever have to watch their back with me because I will be watching it for them.

In his book, Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality, Dr. Henry Cloud defines trust as the ability to be careless with someone, as opposed to careful. He writes:

It means that you do not have to worry about how to “take care” of yourself with that person, because he is going to be worried about that too. It means that you do not have to “guard” yourself with her, because she is going to be concerned with what is good for you and what is not good for you. You do not have to “watch your back” with him, because he is going to be watching it for you.

This seems so simple to me— care for people, watch out for them, be honest with them— but it so often isn’t. We juggle competing priorities. We struggle to know what we want or who we are. We fear vulnerability, discomfort, and conflict.

Having someone’s back can mean standing up for them to someone else. Having someone’s back can mean calling them out lovingly on their s**t. It always means being honest, but also kind. It means being unwavering, but also flexible. It means being strong, but also tender. It means listening and paying attention and showing up.

This past Friday I got an unexpected lesson in trust. I was out with my partner, meeting some of his friends for the first time, and I fainted. Like, dead away, unresponsive for about 10 seconds. This was, understandably, very stressful for everyone, and deeply embarrassing for me, honestly. Especially because, out of an abundance of caution, they called an ambulance, which proceeded to take me to the hospital. At the hospital, they took all my clothes off, ran tests, and determined that I was totally fine. I just had a dip in blood pressure and we know why and it shouldn’t happen again.

There was a point, though, when I was in the ambulance and I was overwhelmed by the most unexpected feeling. Three different people were bustling around me, placing things and attaching things, all very solicitously. I trusted I was safe, and I felt so deeply and completely cared for. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt that way.

When we got to the hospital, there was my partner, waiting when the ambulance doors opened. He sat with me through it all, even though he hates hospitals. He looked discreetly away when they had to strip me and manhandle me to place EKG monitors; not because he hasn’t seen it all before, but simply because he knew I felt vulnerable and exposed enough already. He held my hand, hugged me, and cracked silly jokes that made me laugh while we waited to be released. Despite the number of times I insisted that he should break up with me because I had completely tanked Game Night and the first meeting with his friends, he told me he wasn’t leaving. Again, and at a terribly vulnerable moment, I felt deeply and completely cared for.

I am not generally careless, in the sense of not giving sufficient attention to avoiding harm or errors, but I am even less often careless, as in not watching my back with other people. Often that mistrust is warranted. I have not always chosen wisely, whether it was friends or lovers. But the thing I’m coming to appreciate for the first time is how that lack of trust in others, and that choosing of the untrustworthy, is born out of deep mistrust of myself.

I don’t always trust my instincts. I don’t always have my own back. I farm that need out to other people instead of always depending on myself first and foremost.

I’m not talking about never needing anyone. We are social creatures. We need community and connection and interdependence. Rabid self-reliance is generally a coping strategy in response to trauma. Coping strategies are never long-term, healthy life strategies. But it is also true that no one knows us as we know ourselves. No one else knows what we most truly need and when those needs aren’t being met. No one else knows when things feel off, or when we are pulled too far outside of ourselves. No one else knows when the ground beneath our feet feels unstable and treacherous.

If we cannot trust ourselves to be steadfast on our own behalf then there is an essential piece of our integrity that is missing. We deserve our integrity as much as anyone else does. We need it.

I have not always chosen poorly. I have within my circles some of the most trustworthy and integrous people. Maybe I have been very, very lucky, and maybe the best, truest parts of me have often led the way. But I know for sure that when I am with them I am able to be all of myself. My shoulders release from the attempts to make earrings of themselves. My guts unclench and I actually hear my stomach gurgle delightedly.

My people, my dear, trustworthy people, hold me so faithfully and so tenderly. They believe in me so utterly that I am forced to consider that maybe they are right, and maybe the only really important person who has ever betrayed me is me.

What happens from here then is largely up to me, is it not?

Do you trust yourself? What helps, and what gets in the way?

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Because of the time change, I found myself awake at an ungodly hour, but too close to dawn to fall asleep again. So, I’m laying there in the dark, resisting getting up because my bed is warm and my house is cold, and all of a sudden the word infrastructure pops into my head.

The issue of infrastructure has been all over the news in recent months as the Democrats negotiate (mostly with each other) over the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF), which just passed fully through Congress this last week, and the Build Back Better Act (BBB), which is still being haggled over. The White House, despite progressive concerns that investments in childcare, health care, climate change, education, and tax reform will be left behind, still seems fully invested in the BBB. Biden is so self-identified with “compromise”, however, the burden of which seems to always fall disproportionately on the disadvantaged, that the Progressive Caucus has every right to hold his feet to the fire, it seems to me.

The interesting bit for me, though, as I dug into the whole notion of infrastructure, was finding out that the vocabulary only entered popular usage and political debate in the 1980s. Before that, the sorts of underlying structures and systems that many political conservatives still want to insist are the only rightful components of conversations about infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, electrical grids, sewage works, etc.) were referred to as “public works”.

But on the heels of Ronald Reagan’s cowboy individualism, which kicked off the last forty years of conservative efforts to drastically slim down the federal government, it’s no wonder that the notion of public works wasn’t going to fit the narrative anymore. It smacked too much of the perennial bogeyman of “socialism”, which isn’t socialism at all, of course, but the social expectation that the government exists to accomplish collective uplift for all citizens.

Socialism is the idea that the government owns and runs everything. Public works, in contrast, simply exist because the community has the collective resources to accomplish for the public good those things that would be 1) out of the reach of a smaller group of individuals, and 2) shouldn’t be a profit-platform because everyone needs them.

Transitioning to use of the word infrastructure accomplishes two things. One, it focuses entirely on the concrete, material nature of the systems that undergird society and removes the inherent reminder that they exist for the public good. Instead, it’s just stuff. Why shouldn’t we outsource the creation and management of stuff to private corporations? The private sector is best suited to optimizing the creation and distribution of stuff, right?

But once those systems become simply stuff, farmed out to the private sector to build, maintain, and distribute, they also enter the realm of profit-motivation. Once you enter the realm of profit-motivation then you have to control for access and benefit. That system becomes a resource that people have to pay to have access to, and if you can’t pay then too bad for you, buddy.

Governments are not-for-profit enterprises. They are based on the premise that not everything is supposed to be done to make dollars rain down for anybody. Which is anathema to private business, wealth-loving politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The second thing about transitioning to use of the term infrastructure as opposed to public works is that it plays into the values of the patriarchy. Now, we’re talking about “hard” infrastructure and “soft” infrastructure, and guess which one both centrist Democrats and all of the GOP take issue with? They’re willing to discuss (at least the centrist Democrats sort of are) the “hard” stuff— the manly stuff, the stuff that’s serious. They’re not interested in how the “soft” stuff, the systems that are about care and nurture (childcare, homecare, healthcare, education, sustainability), are also essential to the holistic support of society. That’s just namby-pamby, personal-type stuff that women do.

Individuals and families and local communities will take care of those personal needs, or not. But it’s not the government’s job to take care of people, to even out the inequities of capitalism, or ensure that everyone has the opportunity to access resources necessary to thrive. In patriarchy the government is our stern, resource-controlling archetypal Father, not our sustaining, concerned, nurturing archetypal Mother.

Ijeoma Oluo, a writer I greatly admire, recently started a Substack newsletter, Behind the Book. In her most recent edition, she argued against self-care as the answer to all of our ills and pointed to the necessity of community care to address our individual burdens.

Oluo writes:

Self-care is not only action to aspire to, it’s a financial status to aspire to. It is one more goal to reach, or fail to reach. It is something you can be better at than other people. It is one more reminder that safety and care is only for the wealthy. It is also a reminder that safety and care are things we must be able to provide for ourselves alone.

This is simply an extension of the capitalist idea that we rise or fall on our own. That we are alone in the world, always in competition with others, and singularly responsible for our success and failure. It is another tie to bind us to our jobs, to hustle culture, to all the exploitative trappings of capitalism.

Isn’t that exactly the ethos we’re embracing when we also buy into binaries like “hard” (necessary, public) and “soft” (unnecessary, private) infrastructure? We are implicitly making safety and care a private, individual issue outside of the onus of the decision-making and resource-distribution powers of the collective community.

Oluo writes further about the myriad manifestations of community care, including Mutual Aid. In the wake of natural disasters, starting with Hurricane Katrina and lasting well into this Covid pandemic, many folks have written about the necessity of Mutual Aid efforts— local communities coming together to take care of each other. What seems to me to be at the heart of this latest public conversation around infrastructure is the larger philosophical question of whether or not the federal government is a Mutual Aid effort writ large, or simply a vehicle for shunting resources upwards towards those that are already doing just fine, thank you.

We get to decide, my friends.

What does all of this have to do with integrity? I would argue it has everything to do with integrity, and not just because, clearly, this kind of patriarchal, capitalist, individualistic nonsense just pisses me right the hell off.

Integrity is about integration and wholeness, both individually and societally. Within an integrous society, we actually have to think critically about the entirety of people’s needs and how they will be provided for. We have to think about our own needs and how our perception of them is colored by existing paradigms, which may serve us but don’t necessarily serve the collective whole, of which we are apart.

Rampant individualism decontextualizes everyone. It removes us from each other, from the vast web of relationships and resources that necessarily sustain us. It is a hyper-partial understanding of the nature of being human, and so lacks integrity.

Furthermore, patriarchy, white supremacy, and any other system that is built on a hierarchy of human value is going, over time, to tend towards a lack of integrity. It’s barely a hop, skip, and a jump from this human is less valuable to this aspect of human experience associated with this human is less valuable to this aspect of human experience isn’t society’s problem. Where is the integrity in that?

Way back at the beginning of this newsletter I wrote, “Integrity is the only thing that holds communities and societies together in a way that promotes trust, inclusion, justice, and joy.” I still believe that. Do you? What are you going to do about it? What are we going to do about it?

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Earlier this week I received the latest newsletter from Courtney Martin of the examined family. In it, she shared a poem she had written in response to a gorgeous poem, “Love”, by Alex Dimitrov.

I was so affected by both poems that I wrote my own. You can read it below, or listen to me read it above [Sorry for the hard stop on the audio. Still working out the kinks of production].

I love

I love walking

I love when I’ve been walking, staring at the ground, and I lift my head suddenly to the sky and my heart releases something clenched inside it.

I love the faithfulness of the sky, always hanging there, watching.

I love swings, but specifically, a single, wooden swing hanging from a large, sturdy tree branch on a fall day.

I love basmati rice.

I love the memory of my mother’s chicken curry feasts with all the little bowls of toppings.

I love my mother.

I love that my mother often doesn’t really understand me, but she loves me regardless.

I love that I often don’t understand my mother, but I love her regardless.

I love slipping into a freshly made bed.

I love waking just as the day is lightening and not before.

I love knowing my bed is my own to occupy or share as I choose.

I love coffee, though I no longer drink it.

I love cresting a rise, on foot or in a car, and seeing the miles spooled out before me.

I love Meg from A Wrinkle in Time, and Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, as much as I have ever loved any other friend, living or dead.

I love Pecola Breedlove from The Bluest Eye even though I know she wasn’t made for me. But neither was anyone else, so my love claims her as I claim myself— fiercely and tenderly.

I love sex.

I love that I’m old enough to say that and really, finally, mean it.

I love redheads. All of them.

I love singing loud, alone, in a car.

I love singing with other people.

I love silence.

I love sitting in silence with other people.

I love reading on the couch while someone else reads happily at the other end.

I love sitting in the woods and not seeing another soul for hours.

I love to be alone.

I love the memory of Maine in the summertime— the endless hours noodling around in tide pools by myself, the scary slip and slide of the seaweed over the rocks, picking mussels for fresh chowder for lunch, and the mile walk with my father carrying our rickety lobster crates to the boats to collect dinner.

I love watching the day fade to night without turning on the lights.

I love mountains, how they make me feel the weight of time.

I love the way the mist lifts off of them in the mornings, like a woman slowly lifting her skirts.

I love rivers, how they remind me that everything inexorably is carried out to sea.

I love believing that when I die that’s it for this me, so I have to make the most of this life while I’ve got it.

I love my children.

I love how the one word, “love”, feels inadequate to encompass the wonder of watching them be themselves, so I am forced to look for more.

I love old friends, knowing they know all the stories.

I love being known.

I love peanut butter and apples.

I love the crabapple tree that blooms a deep, dark pink outside my window every spring.

I love knowing spring is coming.

I love when I hear a true thing and it clangs like a bell.

I love clanging the bell.

I love old words, formal words, words that remind me of books I read long ago.

I love that inside every acorn is an entire tree.

I love that we found a tiny doll chair in the wall of my kitchen.

I love imagining the little people living in the walls who were using it.

I love leaving it on the kitchen windowsill in case they need a sit-down at night while I’m sleeping.

I love sleeping.

I love spooning.

I love telling stories.

I love listening to stories.

I love that you are still reading this and thinking of what you love.

I love plants. There are never enough of them.

I love stained glass and how it always makes me feel holy. Always.

I love getting breakfast out and watching the people shamble by on a sunny day.

I love going to new places.

I love meeting new people.

I love coming home again.

I love getting older. I do not miss any age I’ve ever been.

I love that I wouldn’t go back.

I love that I don’t have to.

I love God.

I love that God is unknowable, so I don’t have to know.

I love loving.

I love laughing.

I love saying yes.

I love saying no.

I love the fierceness of summer thunderstorms in the South.

I love the pristine snow of a Northeast morning.

I love fireflies and bonfires.

I love being naked.

I love soft lips.

I love kissing.

I love eating, always, and cooking, for special occasions.

I love cold water after working on a hot, sweaty summer day.

I love fried egg sandwiches on crusty sourdough bread.

I love the way morning glories turn so insistently towards the light.

I love being surrounded by beauty.

I love making things beautiful.

I love that things that I made exist in the hands and homes of people I have loved.

I love that I’ve written more words than I can ever recall.

I love that I am scattered across time and space already.

I love knowing that death will be just another scattering.

I love that all the things and people I love will continue on long after anyone living’s memory in a billion pieces of matter and light and knowledge.

I love the chair and the window and the afternoon sun slanting through for the cats to sleep in.

I love all the things I don’t yet know and all the things I know now that I didn’t know before.

I love here.

I love now.

If integrity is going to be a joyful practice, then we have to know what we love, what we’re standing up for, not just what we’re standing against.

What do you love?

Please tell us in the comments (just a few lines???). The idea of a whole string of poems about what we love spooling out across time and space makes my heart so happy.

If you’ve made it this far and you’re not yet on the free email list for this newsletter, why don’t you join us? I’d also love to welcome you as a paying subscriber, but free or paid I’m just so glad you’re here. 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