The Unbearable Rightness of Being [Me]

See, there’s this thing that I do. I wonder if some of you do it, too.

I’ve got this well-worn default groove in my head that there is A Right Way To Do Everything. There’s a Right Answer to every question, and if I was only smart/virtuous/disciplined/[insert judgment here] enough, I’d know exactly what it is and would implement it.

Now, if I stop to think about that, I know it’s hogwash.  But operationally, that’s the way my brain’s program typically runs. It’s like a template that I automatically put on situations, a way that I set up the gameboard. There’s a lot of cognitive and emotional muscle memory there.

I could guess at some origins. The Catholic catechism I was schooled in from an early age—the Ultimate Answer Manual if ever there was one. The seductive models of Platonic idealism and Aristotelian/Thomistic inquiry into the precise nature of things—with their promise of a path to Figuring It Out.  (Hi, I’m Chris. I’m a liberal arts nerd. But you knew that.)

I remember in university reading the novel Middlemarch about Rev. Casaubon’s quixotic quest to compile a Key to All Mythologies and thinking, “Wow, does George Eliot (AKA Mary Ann Evans) ever have my number.”

But, I suspect that it runs waaay deeper. That those modes of approaching the world found a primed and ready receptacle. A certain diffidence and self-mistrust that I picked up early in the game. A habit and pattern of second- and third-guessing, heavily peppered with shoulds and oughts and did-you-think-abouts. A concern with perfectionism, with roots in shame and insecure attachment.

I learned from an early age to be careful, and that mistakes have consequences, and that I carry a lot of responsibility for others’ reactions. Growing up gay in the period that I did (with a persistent sense of being one-of-these-things-that’s-not-like-the-others) no doubt also contributed to my vigilance.

I have adapted and it has served me reasonably well in certain respects. At my old corporate job, one of my typical roles was risk management—to think of the objections or pitfalls around the next couple of corners, two or three removes away. It makes me hyper-conscientious—a stickler for details, diligent to find an answer that makes the most sense and that accounts for the most variables.

But it has its downside, too.  A tendency to defer decisions in order to do more research or mulling. Occasional analysis paralysis. An innate risk aversion and concern about Making Mistakes. Not always--but enough that I’m sensitive to it and can tell when my conditioning is driving the car. I want to be aware so that I don’t project my own issues onto my clients and make them carry my water.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this needing-to-be-rightness. It’s just one way to do life. The question is, does it serve me? I’m always looking to get greater leverage and create more spaciousness around it. This means doing inquiry into my beliefs and assumptions, rewiring my neural pathways, making up exercises to stretch, letting shit go. (Once, on an airplane I got out of my seat to use the restroom while the seatbelt sign was on, just to force myself to do something Wrong, to color outside the lines.)

I realize that I’m “spilling my tea” a bit here, but that doesn’t concern me. I don’t want to project a false shiny veneer and pretend like I’ve Got It All Together. Every one of us—including the most laser-focused coaches and the most attuned therapists--has their own flavor of tea. Even my most gifted teachers had their blind spots, scars from old wounds, curious reflexes. Face it: everyone of us has been through a whole lot just to get to this point.

Oh, here’s a good one. Sometimes, when I mull on the wisdom of embracing imperfection, I fall into this conundrum of assuming there’s a right way to do that—in other words, there’s a perfect way to be imperfect. See the dilemma? That, my friends, is a prime example of trying to solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

It’s actually kind of funny to me, and laughter is one of the best correctives I’ve found. More laughter, less rigidity, more sloppiness, less rumination, more generosity, less self-attack, and more love and tenderness for myself—always, always, more love. Continually asking how in this moment can I stretch my capacity to relax / let go / ease up and be a better friend to myself.

So, that’s some of what goes behind this curtain.  How about you? What are some of the features and bugs of your operating system?  What’s in your teacup?

Tainted Love: Using Shame and Unhappiness as a Motivator

In recent weeks, two different clients described hard situations to me in strikingly similar terms. It went something like this: "Well, I guess I just don't love myself enough to accomplish X, and so because of that I'm filled with self-loathing." 

Let that sink in for a moment. Essentially, what both of these people were saying was, “I don't LOVE myself enough, and so the penalty for that is to HATE myself.” 

In both cases, the X was a personal goal they had set for themselves, and their failure to achieve it triggered immense shame. Actually, let me rephrase that. It was not so much a goal they had set for themselves as a standard they were comparing themselves to. (As you may have guessed, in both cases, this was a body-image issue.)

And the pain they both felt at that lack of "love" was not just the absence of positive self-regard. It was out-and-out self-attack.

Talk about tainted love. What a vicious, insidious loop. It’s one of the by-products of using shame-based unhappiness as a motivator.

Mind you, neither of them had been inspired to make a valiant attempt. It’s not like they had waged a mighty campaign and just failed to take the hill. No, they were so overwhelmed by all the negative messaging that they were spewing at themselves, they were lucky even to be able to get out of bed, much less look in a mirror. Their initiative was sapped. They didn’t have the energy to do much of anything besides sit around hating themselves and assuming that everyone else was just as repulsed as they were. Their approach actually made them less likely to achieve their goal.

This super-conditional and high-stakes transaction doesn’t sound anything like love to me. It’s more like a trophy to be earned, in a bloody deathmatch against yourself. 

Imagine telling your child, “Sweetie, if you will achieve this goal, you will prove beyond doubt that you truly love me and I will be sooooo happy and sooooo proud of you. And if, for whatever reason, you fail, I WILL BE COMPLETELY DISGUSTED BY YOU.” 

Yet, it’s troubling how often a version of that very conversation happens between two people who supposedly share a bond of love, including parents and children. And while these clients threw the issue into stark relief for me, it's not at all an uncommon conversation for many of us to have with ourselves. (Yep, my hand's up, too.) Frequently, it's a pattern learned and repeated from generation to generation--one of those unquestioned assumptions about how stuff works: "This means that."

Be careful that what you’re calling love is not actually a wolf in a heap of loathing. 

Love is not a stick to beat yourself with. It’s the reason to do anything and everything, so let the loving precede the doing. Let it be the wind beneath your wings and not a sword dangling over your head. 

How Our Parents Shape Us

Quaker Oatmeal Squares: five boxes in a row on a shelf in my utility room, above the elliptical. (The pantry cupboard wasn’t big enough.) They were on sale at Albertson’s and I knew I would eat them eventually, so I loaded up as many as would fit in my basket.

But still.

I caught sight of them the other day and thought, “Wow. You really are Gerry Kisling’s son.” (Note: This is something my long-suffering partner, Michael, could have told you, especially in Costco.) My mother, who left us three years ago, was a big believer in buying the things in bulk, particularly if they were tied to maintenance of a routine.

When she found something she liked, she stuck with it. A full 97% of her calories during her last two years came from eggs and toast from Robert’s taquito place, garlic mashed potatoes from the Chinese buffet, pasta with marinara from Bellino’s Restaurant, Dove ice cream bars, and communion wafers from daily mass.

Once, on a cross-country road trip, we stopped at a little grocery store in Montana to see if they had Mom’s favorite flavor of Snapple. (I think she was down to just a few six-packs.) As it turned out, they carried it. I can still clearly see the look on Dad’s face when the stock clerk brought them out to the car--through the warehouse door. On a dolly. Fortunately, there was still room in the back of the SUV, next to the cooler loaded with a month’s supply of her go-to flavor of Yoplait yogurt (key lime pie, if you’re interested).

I guess it’s a kind of control freakiness. Hedging bets against uncertainty. A habit she probably learned in part from her own parents, growing up as a child in the Depression. (Grandpa used to save used plastic sandwich bags--cleaned, neatly folded, and bound together with a rubber band in his desk drawer.)

As I surveyed the cereal boxes, I started thinking about how we as tots hitchhike on the nervous systems of our primary caregivers until our own come fully online. About how, from before I could speak, I was adapting to subtle changes in her energy, expression, volume, and mood as she reacted to the stimuli in her environment, according to her own internal compass. Without trying, I learned to monitor and predict her shifts as a strategy for getting my needs met. Hedging my own bets against uncertainty.

That’s pattern-making and personality-building in progress. That’s where I learned one set of encoded rules that I still bring, at some level, to every round I play in this game of life. And some of them are painful. If I pay close attention, they’ll surface and I can work on consciously changing them if they’re not serving me.

But, it *is* work. There’s a lot of deep muscle memory involved. And even now there are many subtle and sometimes arbitrary assumptions that I bring to every interaction--about myself, and the other, and how a situation may unfold, and what sorts of things could go wrong and what I need to be wary of. Things I learned from her without realizing it.

Of course, I learned many other things from her, too. Love of reading and art. A good punch line. The miraculous powers of Scotch tape and contact paper. The importance of education and having a job WITH HEALTH INSURANCE. The central role that religion has played in so much of my life--sometimes as a devotee, more often (lately) as a skeptic.

In addition, I’ve been shaped by my father and siblings and the many other people I’ve lived with and met, and the adventures I’ve gone on or that have come to me. But, without doubt, I’ve brought to each encounter the boy and the man marked indelibly by this woman. I am most definitely Gerry Kisling’s son.

This week, on her birthday (it would have been her 92nd), I placed some flowers from my garden in front of the Mary statue in the little grotto that I received from her. A couple of years before she died, she asked if there was anything from the house that I wanted. It was the first thing I thought of, and she promptly put my name on it. It was always there, wherever we lived, a comforting presence. I think of her with affection every time I see it--and, more recently, the boxes of cereal.

Oh, and the stash of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate-dipped peppermint JoJos I have stockpiled in the cabinet. You know, *just in case* they don’t have them next year.

Happy Birthday, Mommy.

Our Laughter and Our Tears

The call came early last Saturday. Michael groggily fumbled for the phone in our dark hotel room. “Hello? Oh, no. . . . I’m so sorry. Hold on, I’ll get him.” He handed me the receiver.

A few minutes later, I was in the rental car, a cup of steaming black coffee in hand, driving to my sister’s house. I quietly let myself in and surveyed the tangle of bodies in the living room slumber party. I picked out my two nieces, both in their early twenties. A gentle touch to the shoulder, whispered words, then tears and hugs. Soon, the three of us were back in my car, en route to the one-story hospice nestled in a stand of trees, to say a last good-bye to their father. After years of suffering and decline, he had left his body 30 minutes before, with my sister, his wife, by his side.

And then, eight hours later, I stood in front of another canopy of tall moss-draped trees and welcomed my niece and her fiancé (along with assembled family and friends) to their wedding. And while the evening truly was both lovely and celebratory, we did not sidestep its peculiar juxtaposition with her father's death. In fact, I made it the focus of my remarks to the bride and groom before they said their vows. About how this seemingly incongruous timing is just a reminder of the way things are. The continual comings and the goings—of people, phases of life, and parts of ourselves. Change is one of the few constants that we can count on during this brief ride, and if a marriage is going to survive, it has to be built for that kind of change. All in all, it was a beautiful and relaxed evening, full of smiles and laughter, along with some tenderness and tears. It would have felt incomplete without both.

Laughter and tears. They really are so close. Both of them are channels that our nervous systems can use to regulate and discharge a sudden surge of energy. It’s not surprising that a fit of laughing can leave you in tears. If you listen closely, deep sobs and hearty belly laughs can sound very similar. I find lately that I move very easily between the two camps. One of the side-benefits of my work is that I'm usually pretty comfortable with expressions of strong emotion, including my own. I’m grateful: it’s a useful skill to have. (Often, when we rush to comfort someone who is in tears, we’re really managing our own discomfort–not theirs—about the rawness of the emotion.) It’s one of the reasons that I wasn’t flustered by the close timing of these two events.

I live in Louisiana, where we are now in the process of taking down our trees and other festoons of the winter holidays to make room for our Mardi Gras decorations. While the rest of the nation is mired in post-Christmas depression, the party is just getting started in this neck of the woods. It’s my favorite season. And one of the primary symbols of Mardi Gras (or Carnival) in Louisiana is the twin masks of comedy and tragedy. I think there’s some deep wisdom in that choice. The combination resonates so strongly for me that I’ve marked my body with it, in the form of a shoulder tattoo that incorporates the two faces of laughter and tears. 

I spend the majority of Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans with the St. Anne walking parade, a raucous street party of costumed revelers. It traverses the Marigny neighborhood and French Quarter, ending with a ceremony on the banks of the Mississippi River. Many of the attendees use that closing time to make intentions or release some burden of pain from the year before, like ashes or mementos from those who have passed or messages to them. 

In recent years, the parade’s leader has been an exuberant jester who changes the route on a whim and pulls off outlandish high jinks along the way—climbing fences, balconies, and traffic light poles, and committing unspeakable acts with random objects he encounters. Last year, he was in particularly fine form. And yet, at the end, after the ceremony by the river, I spied him sitting alone on the pier’s edge, sobbing. And I thought, “Of course.” It was a profoundly sacred moment. Actually, both elements were sacred to me—his joy and his tears, and they moved in rhythm with each other. 

The coaching/self-improvement industry often promotes a suspect standard of unshakable positivity—unremitting confidence and joyful self-actualization. I think that’s only half the story. It’s important for us to feel ALL our feelings, to deepen our relationships with all aspects of our being, and lean into the hard parts when necessary. There are messages and lessons in both our joys and our sorrows. As you move through your hours and days and weeks, I hope you find well-traveled pathways between your laughter and your tears, and that you flow between them with familiar ease and deep respect for both. 

The Rich and Potent Blessings of Darkness

I love the dark. 

For me, it evokes mystery, possibility, fecundity, creativity, and depth. In my church-going days, I was definitely in the Midnight Mass and Saturday night Easter Vigil camp. 

Darkness also is a powerful symbol for me of how I move through my life—not knowing, stumbling, trying to discern shadowy forms and contours, feeling my way, lighting one small match or candle of understanding after another. 

And so it seems fitting to me that each year we welcome in the New Year at night. Wishing you the many rich and potent blessings of darkness in 2019.