Stream of consciousness writing is an interesting form of writing, isn’t it? You’d think it would be completely honest one given that you’re supposed to just vomit on paper for the most part, right? But honesty is in the eye and the heart of the author, not the reader. I get to decide which thoughts to share with you and where you go as you wander the maze in my head. Which means I get to keep certain parts behind heavy locked doors.
Privacy. It matters.
To whom?
To all of us, really.
Even those who say they are completely open. You know there is a door somewhere deep inside which remains locked tightly. We all lock different doors for different people, don’t we? Open doors for people we care about and don’t mind being close to – close doors for people we don’t feel a tight connection with or think have the potential to harm us.
Which is why it hurts so much more when someone who has managed to get through all of your doors turns out to be someone who hurts you. And that, getting hurt by someone you have let in, hurts worst of all.
It’s a lot like what I imagine getting punched in the kidney by Mike Tyson would feel like. All the air exits your lungs as you swirl toward the ground, clutching your side. Stars pepper the back of your eyelids as drool flings itself through the air. Another punch lands on your jaw, causing blood to spatter on the ground around you as darkness swoops in to steal the sparkling stars.
Thing is, you will heal from the inside out. You’ll get better, you’ll get back up, and you will live your life. Even if you are currently hugging the ground, unconscious, barely breathing, and vomiting.
Falling down is never about the fall. Ever. It is always about the art and grace involved in getting back up. Art and grace? What about ferocity? Tenacity? Those too. But art and grace make it look good. Falling is also about discovering who will be there to pick you up.
Get.BACK.UP.
Inhale. Put your hands on the ground, and push, dammit. Fight for every centimeter.
Get up on your knees, then get up on your feet even though your legs are shaking and your lungs are burning. YOU GOT THIS.
GET UP.
Dust yourself off, inhale, and put one foot in front of the other.
Repeat.
One foot. In front of the other. Ignore the sweat, tears, and blood streaming down your face.
GET.UP. Walk. Move.
Stare your opponent in the eye, and let them know they will not, under any circumstances, win. You got this.
If you don’t get up on the first try? Start over again. Hands on the floor, push up, on your knees. Then your feet. One foot in front of the other.
When life knocks you down, you learn to live again. If you’re lucky, you learn to love to live.
September 11, 2001 changed everything in my generation’s world and for those generations after me. Our parents grew up with Vietnam, Korea, witnessed a Presidential assassination, the blatant murder of several civil rights leaders, lived in fear of the Cold War, and more. Their parents grew up with World War II and some even with World War I. Our generation knew peace. Well, we knew peace as well as one could know peace, comparatively speaking. We knew peace until September 11, 2001 when it chaos flew home to roost in one of our biggest metropolitan areas.
With planes grounded, the backdrop hum they provided to our everyday lives disappeared. People stayed home watching the horror unfold on TV, our hearts ripped open and bleeding before the world, a country brought to her knees in riveting plumes of technicolor.
The silence of the day still haunts me.
That day, there were those among us who felt called to duty. There were those who fought on the front lines in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania as they rescued survivors and recovered the wreckage of our freedom now buried beneath the rubble. But there were more to follow – those who would find themselves in the midst of foreign lands, holding a weapon pointed at men who did not speak our language and preferred our deaths over their own lives.
These people who were called to duty are still over there. Perhaps not physically, but they are still there, echoing across the mountainsides and deserts, their souls entrenched in the hillsides on which they fought. For it is in these foreign lands that many of them finally found their brothers, and for many, it is where they lost their brothers.
The Lone Survivor is a tale of brothers who fought like hell on a mountainside in Afghanistan during a reconnaissance mission gone horribly wrong. It’s a major motion picture now, one I sat in a comfortable theatre today and watched. I saw “Murph, The Protector” last year, a film about Michael Murphy, one of the brothers lost on that mountainside as he called for help for the others knowing he was sacrificing his own for their safety. According to the documentary, that’s just the way Michael Murphy operated. He was the protector.
Luttrell, the lone survivor, made it out alive thanks to a small Afghan village’s code of honor known as Pashtunwali, which requires them to protect the weak and provide asylum to those in need, defending them against their enemies at all cost. Luttrell was confused as to why these Afghans were helping him but when he was rescued, he took the time to thank them (in the movie, at least – I have not read the book).
As I drove home after watching the most intense military movie I have ever seen, I was numb. I finally cried after I arrived home and pulled the car into the garage. Then, I gathered my things, sighed, and got out of the car. I needed funny. Comedy Warriors was on Showtime and for that, I was grateful. Balance.
Two hours and one minute in a movie theatre.
Not even in the same ballpark (or hell, solar system) as what today’s active duty military go through on a daily basis as they continue to flush out the enemy who landed chaos on our soil on September 11, 2001. These brave men and women push their bodies and minds beyond their limits so that we may be free, so that others may be free. They fight so that those who are weaker may live to see another day. For that, I am eternally grateful and they will always have my respect.
Many of us stand frozen in our paths because we are afraid of disappointing someone or being called out as a hypocrite when what we do does not back up what we say. Here’s the thing – how people react to you is not your gig. It’s theirs. They choose how to judge you and nothing you do or say will change how their judgement of you. You cannot repack or carry their emotional baggage. The only baggage you are responsible for is yours.
I read a great post today about a minimalistic approach to life. Of course, it focused on the minimalistic approach to material things but what if we took this approach and applied to to our emotional life as well and set free all the baggage from the past and refused to carry it for one second longer?
One of my earliest favourite movies is The Mission with Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro. Irons plays a Jesuit Priest in the Amazon. DeNiro is a plantation owner who has some society debts to pay. He appeals to Irons and follows him into the wilderness, carrying a large load of items on his back as they trek through the jungle. Despite falling multiple times as they struggle up a particularly steep hill, DeNiro refuses to cut the load off. Finally, after a fall when DeNiro is almost at the top, Irons cuts the load from DeNiro’s back. DeNiro looks at Irons in disbelief, almost angry that he has taken his penance from him. Then, DeNiro sits down and cries in the jungle, mourning the loss of the load and, it seemed, his gratefulness for having been relieved of by a priest. (Disclaimer – it has been quite some time since I have seen the movie and this is how I remember the basic scene/storyline of this aspect of the movie. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong)
What if we were able to do that for someone? For ourselves? Lighten the load a little by refusing to carry emotional baggage with us? Imagine if we could truly start each day anew with no baggage whatsoever on our hearts or our minds? A sort of blank slate, if you will.
But wouldn’t you have to be emotionally frigid to do that?
No. What you need to be is mindful of how you allow things to ebb and flow into and out of your life, ensuring a balance of positive and negative – not allowing either to outdo the other. (For I believe that if we do not know sorrow and pain we cannot be truly grateful for the wonderful and amazing).
So how does one achieve this minimalistic state of a baggage free emotional life?
Here are a few steps I have discovered to living a (mostly) baggage free emotional life:
1) Deal with things as they happen – Don’t hold things in. Process events as they occur. Talk about them, write about them, get it out of your system. The longer things sit, the more they fester and you don’t want that creepy Uncle from The Adams Family perched on your back, do you? No. Of course you don’t. So before your problems sprout arms, legs, start wearing a holocaust cloak and go bald, deal with them before you turn into the Hunchback of Notre Dame because Uncle Fester is camped out on your back.
2) Do not let experiences jade you – Just because one situation with one person turned out a particular way one time, do not let that be the standard by which you judge similar situations with different people in the future. People are all different and sometimes, they might surprise you with their reactions. We all know what “assume” breaks down into, right? And we are not asses. Well, not all of us.
3) Listen to what the other party is saying – Don’t sit there hearing them as if they were the teacher on Charlie Brown while you formulate what you want to say to defend yourself. Actually listen to their concerns. When they are done, take a few minutes to respond, beginning your response with a rephrasing of what they said so they know you heard them. Validation goes a long way and repeating what they said helps you better understand what they’re feeling as well because you’re saying it in your voice.
4) Do not have conversations about important situations when you are angry – Trust me on this one. Wait until you have calmed down and then talk. Discussing things when you are both angry never ends well. It is wiser to wait until you have both calmed down and are capable of having a rational discussion. Otherwise, you just end up having a talk that looks like this (I don’t really like the parenting in this video as they delay dealing with the child’s outburst but it is a perfect example of what an angry conversation will accomplish – nothing):
5) Be brave enough to admit when you are wrong. We are not always on the side of right in a discussion, behaviour, or life. We screw up because we are human. (To be human is to err, correct?) It takes a lot of chutzpah to admit you are wrong. Don’t admit you’re wrong if you know you’re not – that’s not cool either. But when you are wrong, admit it, and ask at the same time how you can fix the damage that has been done. Accountability goes a LONG way.
6) When you feel wronged, say something. Staying silent harms everyone, especially you. This is reminiscent of the first step, yes. But I also want to encourage you to phrase things like this, “When X happened, it made me feel like Y. How can we work to improve how we do this so no one has to feel like Y again?” This way, you are not being accusatory and offering to form a partnership to improve how things are managed in the future. (There are certain situations in which it is best, of course, to say something to someone other than the person who wronged you such as cases of abuse, etc, but still – say something to someone who can help you work through it or escape the situation. Do not continue to suffer in silence.)
7) Remember that how people react to you is absolutely not your gig – it is theirs. This is the best piece of advice a therapist ever gave me. Living by it is difficult at first but once you start to do so, you realize that as long as you do your very best to resolve a situation or to share how you feel, how people choose to react to that is their gig. You absolutely positively do not own how anyone chooses to react to you. That’s all them. End of story.
Do I guarantee these steps will lead to a minimalistic emotional lifestyle free of all that baggage you have been lugging around? No.
But it’s a damn good start.
What changes will you make in your life this week to move toward a more minimalistic emotional lifestyle? What do you think would be the most difficult thing for you to let go of emotionally? Share below!
Ever sit in front of your computer, arched like a cat, ready to strike at the keyboard, ideas at the ready and then…they sprout wings and fly out of your head as if they have been summoned by the Wicked Witch of the West to go fight Dorothy and friends as they cross Oz on their journey to see the Wizard?
I am so there. *screams at the fleeing monkeys*
In the past couple of months, I had a brief conversation with @schmutzie on Twitter about poetry and writer’s block. She casually mentioned she did not believe in writer’s block which struck me as interesting as it is something I have struggled with from time to time – heck, all of us writers have, have we not?
Then I seriously considered her idea. Why would we willingly believe in something which only serves as a roadblock to something we so desperately want to do? By doing so, are we giving ourselves permission to daydream instead of dive into the task at hand? The only thing blocking the writer is well, the writer.
What if we refused to believe in writer’s block? Mind over matter and all that. For example, right now? I’m channeling my inner Charles Bukowski and putting his words “writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all” into practice.
Let’s say you go into the kitchen to cook a batch of muffins. You want these muffins more than anything in the world. You preheat the oven, gather your equipment, and put all the ingredients on the counter. But you realize you are out of eggs, a very necessary ingredient. Do you give up on making the muffins? No. If you’re like me, you Google for egg substitutions or you run to the store for eggs. You mix up the recipe, accepting that while it may not be exactly right, it’s better than no muffins at all.
The same is true for writing.
Even if you sit there and write about not being able to write, it is better than not writing at all. For that matter, you could simply copy another text. The method is to get you thinking and following the patterns of language and imaginative thinking. Granted, what you are currently writing may not be the most allegorically amazing thing to ever hit the page but it is writing nonetheless.
I am currently on Day 11 of author Jeff Goins’ My 500 Words Challenge. Some days I have put the keyboard to the metal and zoomed by 500 words (like yesterday when I wrote over 1k words) and other days, I have barely managed to crank out the 500 minimum words. Right now, I am eying the word count because frankly, I would rather be doing anything other than writing. Sleep sounds good, actually.
One of the things I have really appreciated about the FB group for Jeff’s challenge is the motivation. Particularly Jeff’s motivation. He has constantly encouraged us every day through example and challenges. Just yesterday he told all of us to stop doubting ourselves – that we were indeed, enough. If I am stuck, I pop into the group and scan through some of the threads for inspiration. Sometimes it works, other times, it doesn’t.
I am noticing, however, that my brain is working differently. Instead of just experiencing things and dismissing them, the most mundane things are turning into potential pieces. In fact, my most liked post from the past week was about the dinner I cooked that evening. Until I cooked that dinner, I had no idea what I would write about that day. Then, boom.
Being a writer is not about contracts. It is not about publication. It is not about writing a perfect piece every time your fingers hit the keyboard or wrap themselves around a pen hovering over paper. Being a writer is about writing when you just don’t want to but you have a deadline to meet or a challenge to fulfill. Being a writer is about seeing everything around you as a potential story. It is about digging deeper and challenging yourself to fill in the gaps.
Tonight, and always, I am a writer. A sleepy writer, but a writer. Are you a writer?
Even though we are 11 days in, you can still join Jeff’s challenge. Go here for more information. If you decide to join, I’m going to toss in an extra challenge (which is implied in Jeff’s challenge but not explicitly stated, I dare you to say to hell with Writer’s Block and write whether you feel like it or not. Use this awesome quote as inspiration:
“Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch.”
― Lili St. Crow
Go forth and squeeze every single drop out of your Muse. Drain her dry. What you find inside may just surprise the hell out of you. Remember, according to Hemingway, ““There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy realizes that all she has to do is click her ruby red slippers together and say, “There’s no place like home” in order to get back to Kansas. All you have to do as a writer is click your keyboard and whisper “There’s nothing like writing” to defeat your writer’s block. (Even if it’s angry pecking and frustrated whispers or shouting). You got this, right? Good.
It was…phenomenal. Fantastic. Deliriously and deliciously divine. Scrumptiously swoon-worthy.
Oh.mah.gawd.
I am sitting here, in shock, to be honest. Why? Because I made dinner without a recipe. Hell, I even went to the store for this without a real plan and ended up grabbing stuff on the fly. I often cook from scratch using just my imagination and it usually turns out absolutely delicious but tonight’s dinner stretched me beyond my comfort zone a bit in using an ingredient in a standard recipe. It was daring and I prayed like hell it would work out. It did – obviously. I had to stop at just one serving because it is the kind of dish in which you could easily over-indulge.
For additional nutritional value, I tossed in a can of quartered artichoke hearts which actually worked quite nicely to balance the dish.
I did not keep track of exact measurements of ingredients but I will do my best in recreating the recipe below because you HAVE TO MAKE THIS and then bask in the heaven that is Baked Gnocchi & Cheese (OH SO MUCH CHEESE). You HAVE TO…it’s a food coma-inducing meal.
Baked Gnocchi & Cheese (OH SO MUCH CHEESE)
DeCecco Potato Gnocchi (1 pkg made a 9×13 pan)
3 cups 2% milk
8 tablespoons of butter
1 lb Peppercorn crusted Center Cut Bacon (Or any Center Cut/Thick cut bacon will do)
1/2 finely chopped/diced red onion
5 cloves garlic
1 tsp Paprika
1 tsp Kosher Salt
Fresh ground pepper as needed
Pinch Cayenne Pepper
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups Sharp Cheddar Cheese, Shredded
2 cups Swiss Cheese, Shredded
Sargento’s Cheddar Blend, 2 cups
Panko Bread Crumbs
Preheat oven to 375.
Cut 1lbs of bacon into quarters. Cook in large deep saute pan over medium heat until crispy, place in a bowl lined with a paper towel to absorb fat. Let drain. Set pan aside. (If you’re the drinking sort – you can save the bacon fat, put it in a clean mason jar, add 1 cup of Vodka, cover, then let it sit overnight in the cabinet. Then put it in the freezer, let the fat freeze. Remove fat. Strain through tea filter, then coffee filter, then cheesecloth. Bacon Vodka. Boom.) Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes.
Large pot – fill with water, add a couple tablespoons of sea salt (kosher will do too), bring to a boil. Add Gnocchi. Once it starts floating, strain it. Put strainer (if you can) over the large pot to let the Gnocchi continue to drain while you start on the cheese sauce.
Chop garlic into fine pieces. Dice/chop onion as well.
Drain the bacon fat from large saute pan. Discard if you want or use it as recommended above. Add 3 tablespoons of butter to pan. Then add garlic. Let it saute for a few minutes before adding onion. Once onion starts to get translucent, add half of the gnocchi, place the other half on a clean plate. Pan fry gnocchi until it is golden brown, 4-5 minutes if you leave it alone and don’t stir it a lot. (Live and learn!) Remove pan fried gnocchi to colander you used to drain the gnocchi after boiling it. Add other half of gnocchi and pan fry until golden as well, removing to colander once complete. While you’re waiting for the gnocchi to pan fry, put 2 cups of milk in the microwave for 2 minutes.
Add 3 tablespoons of butter to pan. As it melts, add all spices – Cayenne, Paprika, Salt, (1/2 tsp or so), few turns of the pepper grinder. Using a wooden spoon, stir until spices and butter combine and turn a light caramel colour. Add flour. Stir until combined. Add slowly (and I mean SLOWLY), warmed milk. Whisk constantly as you’re adding it in order to avoid any creepy lumpage. You don’t want lumpy cheese sauce. Seriously. Trust me. EWWW. Stir constantly, and lower heat to low medium. Get your cheeses.
Add 2 cups of mixed cheddar, 1 cup of swiss, 1 cup sharp cheddar. Stir until melted. Lower heat and add additional milk to thin, up to 1 additional cup. Let simmer for a few minutes.
Open can of artichoke hearts, drain, and squeeze until no more liquid releases. Toss into cheese sauce along with bacon and pan fried gnocchi. Stir until combined and turn off burner, letting it gently simmer in remaining heat.
Spray 9×13 pan with non-stick spray. (We use Misto so we don’t use propellant chemicals). Pour cheesey deliciousness into pan. Top with remaining swiss cheese, then with remaining sharp cheddar cheese. Sprinkle lightly with 1/4 cup panko bread crumbs.
Bake for 25 minutes at 375 degrees.
Melt remaining butter in small bowl.
Remove pan, sprinkle with additional panko, maybe 1/2 cup. Drizzle with melted butter.
Adjust oven temperature to 400. Bake for an additional 10 minutes or until top is golden.
Remove from oven and let sit for 10 minutes before serving to let cheese settle & cool. We want to enjoy the cheese, not have it sear our taste buds off. Warm gooey cheese is good. Molten searing cheese is bad.
Eat intentionally, savoring every single bit, wishing time would stop so you could eat this forever.
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