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White Allies

It’s a beautiful thing to support someone suffering oppression, to be a self-less ally who steps into their own discomfort for the greater good…

But watch yourself, white people. Condemning other white people is the easy way out. Vilification is a selfish act, not a selfless one.

The hardest way, and our only hope, is not to place a thick chalky line between the so-called good ones and the bad ones, but to dip into your molten wellspring of empathy, just below the crust of self-righteousness and offer cupped hands flowing over as you tell your own story about what’s swirling around inside you.

And then to listen hard for something more than an echo.

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Kidsized Thoughts

I got to be small for 5 hours between San Francisco and D.C…

Sitting in a plane by the bathroom allows you to experience the world as a child sees it.

There is a continuous line of towering adults standing just inches from you, not paying attention to you, talking above you in some other language as you stare at their belt lines and midsections. You’re close enough to see the threading in their pants, the few lines in their corduroys that have worn down more than the others. You can see the outline of their keys in their pockets, but you’re not in the conversation.

Despite your proximity, you’re not the priority.

You can stare at them freely; you almost have to because they’re so close. They’re in the space of your breath and your thoughts.

They’re so tall.

Occasionally, one will bend down to speak to you and it will be intimidating. It’s simply the logistics of your respective positioning but you can’t help but feel like the student, the abiding child, with your neck craned, smiling up at them while their hands clutch the top of your headrest.

They’re probably not even reveling in their height. They’re not thinking of how tall they appear, at least not as much as you’re thinking about how small you feel.

You might have something to say; you might even know a little more than them, but all of those things seem to fall away simply because you’re looking up and they’re looking down, a heavy symbolism that has no place in determining the hierarchy of things, but often does.

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Beyonce, Belinda, & Me

A curious thing about me.

I’m a straight man and I love to sing female fight songs – ideally, anything of the “I Will Survive” variety. Songs like Madonna’s “Do You Know What it Feels Like for a Girl”, Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable,” Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” anything by the Indigo Girls or Pink. Most of Taylor Swift. I love that shit.

And I don’t just sing it. I own it. I belt it out. As if I know…

The first cassette I bought was Belinda Carlisle’s “Lost In Your Eyes”. It was either that or Erik B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend”, a close second.

But Belinda won out. I sang it all summer.

I’m not going to overanalyze this. It is what it is.

I like the soul of a woman, showing itself like a lightning bolt in contrast to everything and nothing, a sure-fire signal that the thunder is coming.

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Stress Dreams

I had a stress dream about being surrounded by skunks, hundreds of them closing in on my feet. I kept thinking, I should jump away, I should jump away, but I can’t jump away because then they’ll attack. So I just stood there, immobile and stressed, until I woke up.

Then I did what most of us do with our dreams. I laid in bed and analyzed the shit out of them. Maybe I’m stressed about not doing something at work or maybe I feel paralyzed about something, or perhaps I forgot something important and so I shouldn’t make any rash decisions…

I had a hundred ideas and I’m sure I could have come up with a hundred more. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t any of that.

I just had to pee.

The stress dreams were a symptom of body stress, not mind stress.

So now, in the morning, instead of analyzing my bad dreams, I go to the bathroom and empty them out.

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Finding Hope

I talk to a lot of people who have good reasons to give up, reasons I can’t (and don’t) challenge. Often they’re right. Things are dark, the doors have closed, and the hands have slipped into their sleeves. It’s hard to see, let alone walk.

But there is always a way out.

The key to starting up again is not to pretend the darkness isn’t there, nor to feel the walls for a switch.

The key is to search for that tiny light inside you and fan the flames.

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The Ache of the World

Perhaps it’s the work I do which requires the baring of souls, but I get this feeling that the whole world is aching, as if we’re all burnt and bloodied fragments from the same faraway explosion, a flash of light against the black, casting off descendants in pieces.

We build and we love but there is an emptiness in all of us because we can’t possibly gather up all the pieces and so when we have those moments between accomplishments where we’re sitting in silence, a whisper comes past our ear and asks us what’s next… and it hurts a little.

It hurts because we want to wrap ourselves up in the pieces we’ve found to take shelter, to be warm once and for all, but there are always cracks between the pieces, and there always will be.

These cracks give us room to grow but they also leave us exposed and unsheltered.

It’s not long before you feel the draft and are reminded once more by the incompleteness around you, that you are not whole, and that it’s time to build and love again.

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Waiting for the Win

(45 sec read)

I wonder.

How much of our mood and our self-efficacy is driven by the chemicals in our body? And how much does that powerful cocktail change during the day? And are we the ones changing it or does the weather have more power than we do, in terms of what we’re capable of?

And what’s the difference between changing our mood with something outside going in versus something inside getting bigger?

We seem to want the latter, to draw from our own reserves whenever possible. That’s the hero thing to do. Bringing in a relief pitcher is like giving up the game and handing over the win to someone or something else. We want that win for ourselves.

From this perspective, winning doesn’t seem to be about the end result. It’s more about counting on ourselves to pull us through the storm. To win is to succeed with what we started from – a noble belief but one that can surely wear us out and keep us losing.

Sometimes our own breath can’t move the clouds away, no matter how many times we exhale.

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Changing People

If you’re looking to change someone’s mind and by this, I mean their core beliefs, which are usually equivalent to their political views (dangerous turf these days!), I have a strategy for you:

Be patient.

Views honed through decades of experience don’t change with a single conversation. Your talking points, your statistics may seem impressive as hell to you but when they’re going up against emotion-driven beliefs resting deep in someone’s guts, they have as much impact as a crumpled up piece of paper.

Instead of pushing for change, share your experience, your lived experience, meaning what happened to you, the stories that shaped you. You’ll know you’re doing it right because you’ll be using the word “I” a lot more than “you” when you talk.

Although the change is not immediate, several things will happen when you do this.

Your body will relax a little.

You will leave an opening for this person to let you into their world.

You will be remembered, not discarded.

And, if you’re really speaking from the heart and not from strategy, your words will be ingested because they will not be perceived as poison because they are not poison; they are truth. We all crave truth way more than facts.

Small parts of your stories will go down the throat like a capsule because truth is irresistible when given in earnest and that capsule will silently open and spill into the stomach and the intestines and the liver until your words are spread out so much they’re undetectable.

Undetectable yet ever-present, like water molecules, like blood cells.

Deep and meaningful change happens from the inside out. The mistake we all make, when seeking to get someone to see our point of view is that we forget we have to get inside first.

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Doorknob Comments

(1 min read)

Ever notice when talking to someone the most important things come out right when you’re starting to leave, often right when one of you has your hand on the doorknob.

“Oh, I almost forgot… One last thing…”

It’s as if the mind, when placed under pressure, queries one’s entire Rolodex of life issues to land on what’s most important. It’s a time to be sentimental, to be brutally honest and vulnerable, perhaps because escape is at hand. No matter what is said, the safety of the car ride home is on the other side of the door. In some ways, this situational imperative to speak one’s heart is more powerful than any counseling technique.

In my coaching with clients, I can always see a doorknob comment coming because it’s camouflaged in caveats:

“I probably shouldn’t say this… Maybe I’m off topic here… This is is sort of a silly thing to mention… I doubt this is something you can help me with but…”

Oh yes. Bring it on.

Doorknob comments are the shortcut to the Holy Grail, the freeway overpass arching over the honking traffic down below and dropping you right at the entrance to the bridge.

If someone ever turns to you while their hand is on the doorknob, drop everything and listen up because the good stuff is coming. You’re about to find out the reason the both of you are there. You’re about to be lifted up and over the noise.

Someone who trusts you is about to share their heart. That’s worth being late for. That’s worth some awkwardness.

That’s worth a lot.

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How Journaling Saved My Life

I’ve been keeping a journal most of my life.

It started in 9th grade at the demand of Mr. V, my English teacher, who I thought I was fooling when I crammed in a week’s worth of journal entries during homeroom. But thinking is thinking and writing is writing; it doesn’t matter where or when, so I caught the bug, and I journaled throughout high school, which I now realize, saved me.

My journal was the most valuable thing I owned. I say “was” because I don’t care so much about the book itself anymore. Yes, I have every single one of them stored in my closet, and not in a box, but on the shelf. Easy access. It’s pretty rewarding to pull out a volume and see where my head was at and, most important, how much I’ve changed since then.

But as wonderful as it is to see my own words staring back at me, it doesn’t compare to the moment they come out and say hi for the first time.

As I said, my journal saved me, like a therapist, like fire sword, like the large brown eyes of a dog. So many times, confused, angry, torn to pieces, lost and hungry, I’d sit with that journal in my lap, putting words around my emotions, sketching big emotive faces and meandering psychedelic doodles in black ink, unknowingly solving my riddles simply by diving deeper into the eye of the storm and sitting in it as the winds swirled around and inevitably died down.

I’ve never closed a journal feeling worse than I did before I opened it. There has to be something to that, a medicine we all have access to.

I’m up to 2 shelves of journals, 2 rows deep. There’s a lot of healing documented in that closet, a lot of wandering and a lot of teetering. Those books are sacred. But only as a symbol because, after years of sitting down to scribble out my feelings, I can confirm with great excitement and encouragement that it’s not the pages that saved me. It’s the sitting.