Tag Archive for: relationship

Love Post for Valentine’s Day (but not Romantic or Partnered Love)

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photo of a beach with a strand of seaweed forming a heart shape

A few months ago, I was talking with a friend and I whispered, “I don’t have a felt sense of being loved. Is that weird?” I whispered it because it felt weird. It felt wrong somehow. Like there was something wrong with me.

Before she could say anything, I quickly spoke again – this time a little louder. “I mean, cognitively, I know I am loved. I have amazing people in my life who I know love me. But I don’t have a trusted, grounded sense of it in my body. In my ‘Self,’ if that makes sense.”

“Oh, Kar. Honey. I’m sorry.”

It was a low point. But also, if you know me, this won’t come as a surprise, it was a bit of a call to action. Because I’ve spent so much time in the last few years developing the Grief and Rage work and tuning into my body to reconnect my brain, body, and spirit, I began to feel like it was important to pay more attention to that. Have I ever had a felt sense of love? Not that I recall. Have I always wanted one? Yes. But I don’t know if that is because it represents security to me or something else.

Most people I know would describe me as a loving person and I do work to let people know I care about them in a myriad of different ways. It used to be a frantic, ‘if I give you this thing (love), you’ll have to give it back to me’ sort of program, but when I had kids it shifted to a much more pure ‘I love you because you exist on the face of the planet’ thing. And the more I dove into community care and read things like bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, the more I exercised the muscle of extending unconditional love to everyone around me.

I recently experienced a relationship rupture with someone I cared about very deeply and it was a rich learning experience, for sure. I was hurt and sad and angry and very, very confused. I alternated between reliving some of the sweet, tender times we shared, the laughter and conversations, and being really busy so that my mind was filled with tasks and plans for work. But one night before bed, I began to wonder if I could really walk my talk on unconditional love. I asked myself whether I could simply hold this person in my heart in tenderness and care because of those lovely moments we shared without following threads of what might have come before or how the rupture occurred. Could I just purely open my heart and let this person be held there, period? I asked the question and then went to sleep.

I woke up once in the middle of the night to song lyrics playing in my head that made me smile, and when I woke up in the morning, I knew the answer was yes. It isn’t in my nature to not find a way to love people (is that a Libra thing? Maybe). It’s not an invitation to reconnect without repair, but that is the part where I show myself love, and in the past few weeks, my capacity for self-love has grown enormously. I might even say I am beginning to have a felt sense of my own self-love.

But the question that came to me this morning is whether I actually DO have a felt sense of love in my body and I just haven’t allowed myself to access it. What if it is there and I just have to open myself to the possibility of feeling it? It’s entirely possible that I closed myself off from it because, as a kid, adults would say the words “I love you” and pair them with behaviors and actions that didn’t match. It was confusing and likely easier for me as a child to ignore what I was feeling in my body. When someone says “I love you” and then they physically harm you, how is one supposed to interpret that? When someone says “I love you” and then they shame you or proceed to tell you all the ways you are actually unlovable, where does that land in the body?

Over the years, I have had friendships with people who said “I love you” and then hugged me or acknowledged my gifts or expressed gratitude for me. Is it possible that those things also landed in my body and I just didn’t recognize it or I haven’t discovered yet where they live in me? I know what it feels like to extend love, that warm rush of energy from my heart and belly to another. It is not outside of the realm of possibility that I just haven’t paid much attention to what it feels like coming back to me because it isn’t something I’ve cultivated.

This is probably the strangest Valentine’s Day post I’ve ever written, but in the interest of keeping it real, I wanted to share my belief that love isn’t as complicated as we think it is. It is a body thing, a spiritual thing, no matter how much we try to make it a head thing. Learning to open myself up to where love lives in my physical body, what it feels like as I send it out, where I am intuitively driven to love, and what that energy feels like without parsing it out or analyzing it in my head has given me the knowledge that love just flows. It just is. My attempts to explain it and qualify it (romantic love versus platonic love, love that is “right” or “enough”) and justify it actually interrupt that flow. If I just open myself to the possibility of love, it is there. And it is transformational.

I hope you are feeling loved, today and every day.

Whiteness Strikes Again

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For the last six months or so, I’ve watched with increasing discomfort as social media posts telling people to get vaccinated against Covid and vilifying people who are choosing not to vaccinate fill my feed. Some of them are brief and to the point “Wear your damn mask and get your shot!” and others are full-on rants about ignorant people or angry missives that are full of sarcasm and othering language. There are folks who post polls asking their followers and contacts whether or not they’ve been vaccinated and links to videos mocking the people who choose not to, and so far, I’ve mostly resisted commenting on any of them or posting anything I think might come off as me joining the fray. Frankly, it has meant that my social media use is vastly curtailed (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – just sayin’…)

I have remained curious about my level of discomfort, trying to tease out where it hits me and why. While it’s easy for me to agree with the observations that part of our downfall is our lack of collective consciousness, it has still been difficult to reconcile the nastiness and othering that comes with “yelling” at people to get vaccinated for “the greater good.”

This morning as I walked on the beach, part of the puzzle seemed to come together in my head, thanks to a text exchange I had with a dear friend about the horrific scenes unfolding in Afghanistan.

She texted that she feels overwhelmed with all of the crises in the world and yet she also believes that it isn’t ok to “look away.” It is so hard to know what we can do to help the people who are suffering right now in ways we can’t even imagine. I talked to her about a group I’m involved with who has spent the last seven days lighting candles, raising money, and holding vigil for an Afghani couple who is trying to flee the country. Within that group, as things got worse and worse, we had the conversation about whether what we were doing was enough. Helping one family versus an entire nation. Given that, last night, that one couple managed to get on a plane to safety, it seems that we are helping, even in some small way. But, it turns out, that isn’t even really the point, and this is where the puzzle pieces began to fall into place.

What we have done in the last seven days is build community. We have forged relationships – not only among ourselves (a group of people that are scattered across the Western world), but with this Afghani couple and their family members. We have created a space where we come together in solidarity to try and alleviate some suffering. We have helped each other when it became hard to hold that space because it triggered our own trauma and fear and, it turns out, we gave this couple hope as they sat in a hot, jam-packed airport with gunfire and violence playing out outside, not knowing whether they would manage to get on a plane or be sent back to their homes.

It is a very Western, white-people thing to want to find The Solution. To invoke power structures to identify The Problem, create Rules and Mandates, and use power to impose them to Fix It. And while this is somewhat effective, what it doesn’t do is create community. There will never be a set of mandates that will convince us that we belong to each other.

It is a very Western, white-people thing to want to find The Solution. To invoke power structures to identify The Problem, create Rules and Mandates, and use power to impose them to Fix It. And while this is somewhat effective, what it doesn’t do is create community. There will never be a set of mandates that will convince us that we belong to each other. There will never be laws or rules that teach us that we are safe with each other and that we matter to someone else. Those things don’t build relationship and they don’t cultivate safety in the way that human beings need to feel safe. We white folks like rules and power because it makes us feel safe, but that is an illusion. When we think we are in control of a situation, we tend to relax a bit, but only a bit, because there is always the chance that someone with more power will come along and knock us off kilter and take control.

When we build relationship, by truly creating spaces where we feel safe with one another, we create community and a sense of shared well-being. That is why the physicians who take the time to listen to each individual concern about vaccine risks and acknowledge the fears of their patients can often have an impact on their choices. Playing on someone’s fears can be an effective way to change their behavior short-term, but you risk another, bigger fear coming along to usurp that one you cultivated. And even if you can change someone’s behavior, you can’t change their values by scaring them or forcing them to do something they don’t want to do.

We all want to belong, to feel safe with others, and to be part of something bigger than ourselves, but you can’t mandate that. Focusing on enforcement rather than relationship is where we white Westerners have gone wrong for hundreds of years. The social media posts that mock or shame other people destroy the potential for connection, even as they rack up ‘likes’ from people who agree with them. Those likes can make you feel righteous, but they aren’t going to convince anyone to care about the collective. Caring about the collective comes from feeling as though you are an integral part of it, and that comes through kindness and curiosity and trust-building.

2020 Word of the Year

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image of a multicolored compass

Alvesgaspar, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Some people begin their year with a specific word in mind that grounds them and serves as a compass of sorts. It’s not something I’ve ever done with any regularity, and I doubt I’d have been able to really intuit one in January that would have been accurate in any way, but now that we are nearly at the end of this year, I can look back and see that most everything I did and thought about and experienced this year boils down to relationship.

It seems odd, given that most of my time has been spent without the physical presence of loved ones and the work I have done is remote and facilitated by technology. Neither of those things seems particularly conducive to creating relationship, but I have learned more about the power of connection this year and focused on the qualities of relationship that are most impactful more than I ever have in my life. I have spent time deepening my relationship to myself and trying to rebalance the wisdom I receive from my head with the wisdom held in my body through meditation and a rage ritual. I have created connection with local communities to offer assistance and I have witnessed the awesome power of mutual aid groups. I have considered how so many of our public systems are failing us and begun to realize that the only way to counter those failings is through relationship.

I joined with others across the globe every day at the same time for 30 minutes for 100 days in a row to say a lovingkindness meditation for all beings. I didn’t know the vast majority of the others at the beginning of the 100 days, but since then, we have formed virtual support groups to help each other with everything from motivation to get off the couch and shower to grieving the loss of loved ones with humor and grace. I joined a weekly Zoom meeting hosted by Charter for Compassion and Citizen Discourse that also gathers people from across the globe. Every Thursday we journal for a few minutes, have individual conversations about things like ritual, legacy, and what community means, and come together as a group to deepen our relationship to compassion and humanity. I have met people with whom I share text messages and emails and our connection is no less real and tangible because it was formed online.

The most recent conversation we had was around our own personal compass – what drives us, where are we headed. And while each of the individuals on the call had a different perspective and way of answering that question, we agreed in the end that the common thread for us all was connection of some sort. And because our conversations often delve into the philosophical, we also explored the notion of a compass. It occurred to me that it is important to note that a compass is useless in a vacuum – meaning that it only works within the context of the electromagnetic pull of something bigger, something grounding (in this case, the Earth). And so while each of us may have our own compass, the principle on which it exists is that we are all connected to something larger that helps guide us. We can, of course, choose to stick that compass in our pocket and go off on our own path, but the quality of guidance is always present and available to us. And because it is available to each and every one of us, we are necessarily connected, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I say often that human beings are designed to be in relationship. Our biological systems work more efficiently when we are in trusted relationships and suffer in isolation. Students who have supportive relationships with their teachers learn better. Elders who are ill heal faster and have less pain when they are surrounded by loved ones. So while I mourn the lack of physical contact with my beloveds and desperately miss the coffee dates and hiking adventures with friends, I have also deepened my definition of what relationship is – relationship to myself and my physical body, relationship with my community, relationship with people I’ve never met in person – and come to understand the power of letting those connections evolve over time. I have explored what it means to have healthy boundaries that are temporary in order to repair harms and what it looks like to shift my definition of a mother-child relationship as my daughters become young adults and want a different kind of bond with me that is no less elemental or meaningful than it ever was – it’s just different.

While there is much to be sad about this year – the loss of my mother and the missed adventures I had planned and the cancelled book tour among them – I can look back on the last 12 months and see what I have gained in stretching my understanding of this most basic need for connection and community in my life. Like the grounding of the Earth to my compass, relationship and connection are always available to me so long as I recognize them as an elemental part of my existence. Here’s to unexpected lessons that help us all thrive. May 2021 bring more wisdom and insight to us all.

Why Capitalism is Threatened by Relationship

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Picture of a tall, slender, lit Christmas tree in a living room

This time of year always means I think about capitalism more than I normally do. And this year has been one where I have been more acutely aware of capitalism than ever in my life, so you might imagine that my brain is pretty full right now.

I love this time of year because I often spend it poking through local shops for hours, hoping to find fun, quirky little things to tuck inside my kids’ Christmas stockings. For some reason, over the years, stockings have become my ‘thing,’ and it often means that the contents spill outside of the knitted socks and have to be carried to the girls with two hands. As a kid, our stockings were filled with walnuts and hazelnuts (that we took great delight in using the nutcracker to shell and then discarded shortly afterward), mandarin oranges, and, on a good year, an entire book of Life Savers rolls. I have strayed far from that tradition, to be sure.

Whether it was designed cleverly or just worked out that way, there is a reason capitalism has deep hooks in us that take effort to remove. But for me, the first step in that unhooking is an honest evaluation of how capitalism is antithetical to health and well-being.

Screen shot of the Cliffhanger game on The Price is Right

As a system, capitalism was sold to us as something sustainable, and it is ridiculous that we believed it. There is no way anything can grow and grow without ever hitting a wall – it will either consume all of the resources around it or collapse on itself or both, which is what I think we are experiencing right now. We are led to believe that the stock market can keep hitting higher highs, that businesses can increase their profits year over year, and that we can make more money every year if we just work hard enough. Like any system, growth can happen to a point, but there is nothing that can grow forever, and human beings weren’t designed to grow and grow and grow without rest.

Capitalism is the opposite of health and well-being because it forces us to value things that are external – more shoes and clothes, a bigger paycheck, a new car every few years. But external values are things over which we have no control – we could get downsized or fired tomorrow, those things we buy can fall apart quickly, the housing market can explode so that we’re not able to afford our home anymore. Capitalism taps into our basic human need for security, but it doesn’t provide it – in fact, it keeps us constantly searching and believing that we will never truly be secure unless we are earning more and spending more. Capitalism also taps into our basic human need for autonomy, but that, too, is an illusion. Sure, we get to make choices about where we work and live and the things we buy, but only to a point, because under this system, we are never truly in charge of our own lives – not if the things we value are external.

Capitalism is also something that keeps us in fear. It relies on workers being expendable and interchangeable, which means that we as workers are always competing with each other ever so slightly more than we are cooperating. And because fear is a barrier to relationship, it means that we can’t ever hope to truly build strong, sustainable networks or communities under capitalism. Capitalism is threatened by unions (read: relationship), and relies on workers believing that they need to constantly fight to do better, be more visible, climb over their co-workers. It sells us the illusion that it’s possible to continually make more money, achieve more success, get a better position, but the slots at the top narrow so rapidly that it’s impossible for that to be reality.

Capitalism gave us disposability because it relies on it. Single-use items mean that we are constantly needing to purchase replacements. It’s not an accident that Apple comes out with a new version of the iPhone every single year, each with a slightly new set of features. That’s by design – businesses need us to want the newest thing in order to make their sales goals. Capitalism is just another one of the systems that has successfully adapted to center itself over time so that the most important thing is capitalism. It’s why we talk about “the economy” in every political debate, it’s why we fight to send our kids to a “good college” so they can get a “good job” that pays well enough for them to buy cars and homes and trips and clothes. It is why boards of directors are fearful of poor sales and offer dividends to shareholders. It is why wages are kept artificially low and we have no universal healthcare. Capitalism is so all-encompassing that non-profit organizations have bent to its rules, insurance companies are not in the business of taking care of people’s health but are vitally interested in their own profits, school systems have formed their curricula around the kinds of things that will ensure kids get into four-year colleges rather than focusing on learning skills and cultivating passions. There are many systems in this country that are powerful and broken, but capitalism is the one steering the ship, and we all just keep shoveling coal into the steam engine.

Two people walking together on a cobblestone path

Like all systems, I am reminded that the antidote to capitalism is relationship. When we can fight the urge to live in fear and build strong, connected communities, we can begin to release ourselves from the grip of capitalism. Capitalism is the reason so many people in the US are going hungry, and new systems (food banks) won’t fix it. If they could, they would have done so already. But relationship helps. The dozens of small, community-based mutual aid groups in my area alone that have mobilized to cook meals, deliver food, raise cash, and source items for people in need are combating food insecurity better and faster than bureaucracy ever could (even as they fight bureaucracy in order to do the work they do).

Building authentic relationships rooted in trust and love takes time, to be certain. It takes effort and a willingness to examine our fears and biases and tendency to see other people as competitors. We have to be willing to be a little bit afraid or at least a little uncomfortable, and forge ahead, knowing that relationship and community are what truly meet our basic human needs for safety, security, feeling valued, and having an impact. When we build communities whose values are intrinsic, we are necessarily reinforcing the belief that all of us are important, none of us is disposable, and that there is enough to go around so long as we cooperate. Living under capitalism means that millions of people go hungry while billions of pounds of food goes to waste. It means that business executives make and hoard more money than they could ever use while other people live on pennies a day. It means that workers spend dozens of hours a week doing jobs they hate because it is the only way they can feed their families and keep their health insurance.

Unions don’t threaten the health and well-being of companies or executives, they threaten to upset the imbalance of wealth between workers and executives. When the biggest argument against any sort of pay increase or new benefit for people is that it “costs too much,” we have become far too focused on money. If we are more concerned with the stock market rising or falling than we are about people living on the streets in cardboard boxes and the hours’ long lines at food banks, we have succumbed to the lure of capitalism to our detriment. It is true that money is necessary to survive, but only because we made it that way. It is possible to do things differently.

When we are in relationship with one another and really rooted in the values of community, dignity, respect, and safety for all of us, the values of capitalism begin to fall away. I don’t have to fear you or be in competition with you if I trust that our connection is about both of us being well and cared for. Systems like capitalism rely on hierarchies – someone has to be “in charge” and then there are layers of folks beneath that, all with an assigned ‘worth’ in the form of pay. Relationships suffer under hierarchies. If I think that I am more important or worthy than you, we will never have an equal, honest, loving relationship. But when we can build communities that acknowledge that we all have things to offer the group and that we all deserve to ask for support where and when we need it, there is no scarcity, there is trust, and there is safety.

Capitalism falls apart when we aren’t competing with each other for jobs, for goods and services. Capitalism falls apart when we acknowledge abundance. Communities thrive with a belief in abundance. The truth is, there is enough to go around, but we have built a world view that doesn’t acknowledge that. We have built economies that rely on scarcity to drive up the cost of goods so that those at the top of the hierarchy benefit, and when the cultural values are about having an abundance for yourself, the notion that any one of us could find ourselves rolling in piles of money or sitting in a house whose garage is full of more cars than we can drive is seductive. Even though the vast majority of us will never attain that, because we’ve been taught that that ideal is achievable if we just work hard enough, we hold out hope. But we all know people who work hard every day and are nowhere near owning their own home.

Capitalism is rooted in individualism, which means not only that we have to compete with each other, but that we feel as though our failures are our own and not the way the system is designed. We blame ourselves for not working hard enough, for not finding the right mentor, for not having the right college degree. We resolve to try harder, get more financially literate, get more connections on LinkedIn.

Ultimately, it is only in relationship where our most basic psychological needs are met. And in a world where the material goods are plenty, it is relationship that threatens capitalism the most. Talking to each other about our respective rates of pay, our experiences with toxic workplace culture, and our ideas for how to band together to create more support for all workers begins to erode the scarcity mentality. When we come together in relationship and our psychosocial needs are met, we might discover that buying more things isn’t really all that soothing after all. We might discover that the system is set up for the sake of the system and that it doesn’t really care about us or the environment. We begin to acknowledge that capitalism is designed to make us believe that there will never be enough, and we begin to realize that human beings can’t thrive in a system where we are forced to always strive for more and compete with each other more than we cooperate.

So while I will continue to carefully select gifts for my beloveds this time of year (and probably spend more money than I ought to), I will also do my part to build community, to strengthen relationships, and to help those around me acknowledge their worth outside of their employment or the size of their paycheck. I will fight against the tendency to value things that the system tells me I should value and I will put my energy toward dismantling this broken system that holds so many hostage and erodes our connections to each other.

Learning, and then what?

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I am really struggling today.
And, it’s not about me.
But also, it is. There is a way in which I have to fit in to the community, be in relationship with others, and help push solutions forward.
Even saying the word “solutions” feels weird. As if there is a set of (elusive) criteria or steps out there to take that will make all of this turmoil and pain better once and for all. 
Bullshit.
I watch conversations ebb and flow online with interest. There are white women I know who are really digging in and learning; reading and talking with one another and exploring ideas they’ve never explored before. I heard a story the other night about a white woman at a protest who asked a Black woman what she should say to “get it Right.” 
I understand the desire, the question, and I also know somewhere deep down in my bones that this isn’t about “getting it Right.” There is no “it” and there is no “Right.” This isn’t some box we can check – yup, read these seven books, had these important discussions, watched this documentary, I get it now. 
Not that it’s not important to read and talk and watch the documentaries – it is. It is part of our unlearning, our acknowledgment that the education we received was whitewashed and carefully curated to present a particular viewpoint and make us all feel good about the trajectory of “history.”
But I think what it comes down to – what it always comes down to – is relationship. Doing your own work is vital, but not in the context of becoming woke or enlightened or saying you “get it.” It’s important so that you can show up and be better in community, be in relationships that are honest and evolutionary. Going to anger management courses as someone who is abusive to others isn’t useful as a philosophical exercise. You have to embed the learning in to your bones, commit to using it as a way to build connections and practice new ways of being in relationship. It isn’t enough to say you showed up and learned the things. You have to be willing to imagine a new way of being, and that requires shedding the old way, practicing over and over again until the new ways become more natural than the old ones, and doing it in the context of relationship. 
The consent decrees and DEI training and de-escalation trainings police officers adhere to aren’t meaningful unless on some human level they are changed and they show up in a different way. And that’s hard to do because relationships suffer under power differentials. Community isn’t built, doesn’t thrive when all parties aren’t accountable to the same set of principles. When the goal is power, the end result can never be a healthy relationship. And we have raised generations and generations of men to believe that what makes them men is the fact that they reside in power. All of the things we teach boys about being men are really about maintaining power – not showing emotions that seem vulnerable, not admitting to mistakes or being unsure of answers, the importance of being a “provider” … We even teach women and girls that the way to be treated better is to be more like men, to “Lean In”. Power destroys relationship. But when you’ve been taught that power is the thing you’re supposed to be seeking, that you deserve to possess, the notion that you might have to relinquish it in order to be part of a healthy community is a tough pill to swallow. This is why some (mostly men) in authority try to twist it to say that that healthy communities include power dynamics – someone has to be “in charge.” But that is a lie. When we set up systems where only certain people or groups get to have agency and they aren’t held accountable in relationship to those they wield power over, that isn’t being in charge. That is holding up supremacy. 
Watching what is happening in Portland is a powerful reminder that the desire for power is so much a part of who we are that it is destroying us. Not only are there armed militia men without identification grabbing citizens off the streets and detaining them without Miranda rights, or pressing charges, or due process of any kind, but the discussion online about who should be front and center in the protests, whose voices should be heard, who deserves to be featured in the stories is about power, too. 
Folks maintain power through fear and I’m sad to say I’m scared right now. I am scared that there are so many willing soldiers in Trump’s army that will show up, rescind their humanity, and brutalize and scare peaceful protestors with impunity. I am sad that our government is willing to spend vast sums of money on “crowd control” tactics that are classified as war crimes by the UN but not spend our resources to supply our hospitals with the things they need to keep people alive in a pandemic, give money to families to buy food and pay rent. 
I tend to be an optimist, and today I’m finding it hard to be optimistic. Being in relationship with one another is the one thing that keeps us alive and thriving, and we are destroying relationships every day. 
It’s not about being a “good person” and doing your own work. (I almost wrote “it’s not enough to be a ‘good person’ and do your own work” but I checked myself because that makes it sound like there is some “enough”. DAMN! Even our language is tailored toward the idea that there is some binary Right/Wrong, Enough/Not Enough.) We have to act and exist within relationships that are dynamic and evolutionary and messy. We have to learn better and then DO better, not by checking some box or posting something online, but by engaging, by talking to people and listening to them and really doing the messy interactive stuff of relationship. I wrote last time about boundaries and how I think we can use them as tools to further relationship, deepen accountability, and become more connected to other people. I’m really beginning to think that is the goal and the thing that will make all our lives better – a willingness to overcome our fear of fucking up, an acknowledgment that community is worth the uncertainty and messiness of really connecting with others, and a complete dismantling of the idea that there is some end goal that we all need to aspire to. It is so damn tempting to think that The Answer is out there and we just need to find it, check all the boxes and find all the little fruits along the way until we get “there.” But there is no there there. There is only right now, and the choice of whether or not to do the next thing that will strengthen our connections with those around us. Showing up to learn and have conversations and center the well-being of those connections is what will move us in to a place where we begin to feel as though we are all important. 
I listened to an interview with Resmaa Menakem yesterday and he implored us to talk to each other, build a culture of care, of learning, of acknowledging the trauma we carry and that we are inflicting on each other, and passing on to our children. I cringed when he said he thinks it will take a concerted effort to do this for “seven to ten years” before things will change significantly. But if we don’t start now, we are only continuing to do harm. If there is such a thing as “getting it right” that is where it starts: putting in the effort to learn and listen, showing up willing to make mistakes and relinquish power or authority, being in the chaos and mess of interacting with others for real, and doing it all from a place of love, grounded in the sincere belief that community is created when everyone is honored, respected, and cared for. 
I’m in. Are you? 

Relationships and “Healthy” Boundaries

Confession: I spent the first half of my life without any discernible personal boundaries. I have spent the last twenty years or so believing that boundaries are the holy grail of healthy relationships. And in the last few weeks, I am really beginning to question whether or not that is really true.

            Before you quit reading (or finish formulating your comeback comments in your head), hear me out. Because I’m not saying we shouldn’t have boundaries in relationship. I’m saying, what if we saw them as a tool instead of a permanent fixture (in most cases)? What if we could use boundaries as a way to press pause on harmful relationship dynamics while we go do some work in a protected way, with the hope that the barriers can be removed at some point to allow us to re-engage in that relationship with an eye toward deepening it and enriching it for the future?
            To be certain, boundaries are often necessary to keep us safe. Continuing to be in relationship with someone who harms us physically or abuses us emotionally, tries to control us or is a source of active pain, is unhealthy. But there are a myriad of ways in which we use boundaries to keep relationships stagnant, to effectively block people who challenge us and spur us to growth that can lead to more awareness.
 
            I recently had a disagreement with a friend I’ve known for nearly a decade. We have a lot in common and have had some really engaging conversations over the years as well as light-hearted, enjoyable times. This particular disagreement came about during the volatile time of COVID sequestering and the burgeoning protests in mid-May, and I think it took both of us by surprise, but it shook me and made me question what our friendship could possibly look like going forward.
            A week or so ago, I had another significant, painful exchange with a family member I’ve struggled to create and maintain healthy boundaries with for decades. Neither of these people are folks I want to cut out of my life entirely, but if I didn’t find a way to respond, I anticipated getting triggered over and over again in ways that felt painful and not productive, or at the very least, holding on to some resentment, because it wasn’t possible to dive in and resolve the issue in a timely way.
            In both cases, I pulled back and stopped engaging immediately, and I began to think about how to create new boundaries in response. It occurred to me at some point that often, we create boundaries in a punitive way – “you hurt me and as a result, I am going to stop sharing certain things with you” – and we generally think about those new boundaries as permanent. I’ve heard from lots of people who say that they’ve decided certain topics are off limits with individual family members, or that they will continue to be friends with someone on social media, but they will no longer follow them, meaning that their posts won’t show up in their regular feed. This is self-protective, but it also means that the relationship is stuck in a place where it won’t be able to grow. It occurred to me that relationships aren’t healthy unless they are dynamic, if both people aren’t allowed to grow together. And so I began to think about the possibility of using the new boundaries I was creating as temporary.
What if, during this time, I work to become more mindful of my own triggers, and really process where they come from, how I react, and what it would mean to move forward with this person in my life? In the past, I’ve created new walls and distanced myself from people and been content to interact with them from that place rather than seeing opportunities for each of us to work on our own stuff and then find a way to come back together and have a deeper, more accountable, more enlightened relationship.
            What if doing the work on my own stuff while I am safe within my temporary boundaries enables me to have a greater sense of compassion for the other person and enlarge my own container so that I can hold that compassion and the opposing ideas with more grace? What if I am able to strengthen my own sense of self, my ideas around what I value and how I move through the world, and then come back to the relationship clearer and more ready to engage on a different level? How would that create growth in myself and the relationship?
            This is, of course, predicated on the fact that the other person is doing work as well, that they are contemplating the nature of the disagreement and their own role in it. And it is my hope that if we are each doing this on our own, rather than continuing to trigger each other by trying to work through it together, we can eventually come to a place where we want to reconnect and deepen the relationship.
            All too often in my own life, I’ve used boundaries as a protective mechanism – a way to wall myself off from folks who trigger me in one way or another – and then I rest in my safe space and don’t do the work to understand how to learn and grow from the painful interaction. Sometimes, boundaries become my own personal ‘cancel culture’ and I write people off entirely. Sometimes, boundaries are a way to convince myself that I am “right” and the other person is at fault, and I don’t need them in my life at all, or that I get to define exactly how they exist in my life. But if I am a person who believes in community care and self-awareness and understands the importance of relationship for all human beings, and if I believe in the ability of each one of us to grow and evolve, and in the power of relationship to help us all grow and evolve, then permanent boundaries have no place in my relationships.
            I fully expect and understand the immediate, gut-level reactions of folks who will call to mind people who abuse others, who refuse to do the work, who don’t want the relationship to evolve because it serves them that it stays the same. I am not advocating for folks to toss all their rules about how they demand to be treated out the window in favor of compassion. I am not saying that it will be possible for every relationship to evolve in this way. I am saying that I hope that every person in my life knows, going forward, that I am working to deepen my capacity for compassion, for building accountability in relationship, and that I will attempt to keep myself available as I can. That doesn’t mean that you are free to treat me poorly without consequence. It means that I won’t use boundaries as a crutch to avoid doing my own work and keep myself small and safe and stagnant. It means that in order for me to be a vital, functioning part of a healthy community, I know that I can’t only surround myself with people who will always agree with me and make me feel good about myself.

Music and Memory

Hey  –
The Fixx are playing in Seattle on Aug 28th –  if you don’t have plans for that night, you should really take L to see them.   They’re in Portland the night before and I just got tickets for that show . . . 


My brother emailed me sometime in June to give me a heads up about this show. I’m incredibly grateful because there’s no way I would have found my way to it without his suggestion. I am notoriously horrible about names – band names, song names, celebrity’s names. In the moment, I couldn’t conjure up even one song The Fixx was known for, but I knew if my brother was cueing me, I’d know them when I heard them. 

I bought tickets that day. 

As a junior-high kid (we didn’t call it middle school in the 70s and early 80s), I went to a lot of concerts – most of them with my big brother. Mom went to a few with us, but eventually, I think she burned out and decided that if I tagged along with C, there would be no hijinks, even though the nearest big city for concerts was Portland, which was a two-hour drive from home. I was the happy recipient of that policy, although C has pretty eclectic taste in music. We went to see Debbie Gibson, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, as well as REO Speedwagon, ZZ Top, Metallica, and Judas Priest. He knew all the songs – A and B sides – and which albums they were featured on. He sang along with them all, knew when the drum solo or guitar solo would come, knew the names of each band member and which other bands they’d been in. He still does. He’s a walking encyclopedia of music, and I trust his taste. Every year he sends me a CD for my birthday and while sometimes it’s a performer or band I know (Tom Petty, Steely Dan), other times it is an entirely novel act, but I always love it. He knows what I’ll like and respond to. 

As a kid, I used to listen to the album for whichever band we were going to see next obsessively, reacquainting myself with the lyrics and the rhythms. I could remember songs really well, but I never knew their names or which album they were on or who was playing which instrument. I never really felt the need to catalog that or keep it in my brain. 

My big brother is 50 now and I can’t even begin to imagine the number of concerts he’s been to in his life. He goes to about two a month, at big venues and small, and he always has recommendations for me. On the day of The Fixx concert in Seattle, I woke up to a series of text messages from him, complete with photos of the show he’d just seen and a review of how great it was, which albums they played music off of, and which songs were the best. I smiled and got excited for my own experience. But unlike when I was younger, I didn’t seek out any of the music to refresh my memory. I went in cold, as did my daughter. She was definitely the youngest person in the crowd, but as a musician herself, she’s usually up for a concert (especially if I’m paying).

As the early strains of “Are We Ourselves” began to play, I felt a warmth in my belly. When the lead singer pointed his microphone out toward the audience, I knew exactly where to come in and what the tune was. It happened again with “Saved by Zero,” “Red Skies,” “Stand or Fall.” At one point, I leaned over to speak into L’s ear and tell her that I was reminded of sitting on C’s bedroom floor, playing cards and listening to music – these very songs. Had we not gone to this concert, I’m not sure I would have ever thought about The Fixx or been prompted to seek out their music. I simply hadn’t remembered they existed. 

There is a lot that I don’t remember about my childhood, a lot I dissociated from as I tried to find a way to survive emotionally in the firestorm of days after my brother disappeared and my parents divorced. I’ve been researching polyvagal theory lately as part of my work with adolescents and trauma and trying to understand how our bodies protect us by disconnecting from so much of what is going on around us. As I listened to the band play and felt the comforting memories of hanging out with C, listening to music, I wondered, is music the way in to those memories I want to have?

As I let my mind play with that thought, I realized that I was feeling calm and peaceful, that I was recalling the safety of being my big brother’s little sister, remembering a mundane, “normal” childhood activity that must have happened dozens of times in those frightening, sad days. I’m not so sure anymore that what I want is to use these memories to push my way in to other ones. For now, I’m simply basking in the reminder that my brother and I shared a connection through music, that it was his way of being in relationship with me and showing me the ropes, leading with his passion and inviting me in to share it. What a beautiful gesture, what an amazing, seemingly simple way to be part of each others’ lives, even though we haven’t gone to a concert together in decades. 

I’m so grateful to have these kinds of memories come back to me as I get older, to remind me that there are myriad ways to connect with others, and that the ones that come most easily, most naturally, are often the ones that endure. I hope that someday my big brother and I can go to another concert together, but in the meantime, I’m definitely listening for his advice on which ones I should buy tickets to myself.