A Beautiful Thing Will Grow Out of This Very Hard Thing

Sometimes beautiful things live inside the very hardest of things.



Yesterday, for the first time in a very long while, I ventured outside alone to go to the corner store. I wanted to see if it was open so that I could buy something cheap and sweet, but the store was closed. It was only a short block I had to walk to get there, but I felt so exposed, so far from my nest of safety, that my collar bones ached with the tightness in my throat and chest.

I am sometimes afraid to leave my home.



This fear happens when I am shifting, when I am changing my patterns of thought or behaviour. I panic, and my panic turns inward, where I question all the good of which I am capable. I have spent a week sure that I cannot write or make or do valuable things, that my faultiness far outweighs my abilities.

This insecurity is usually followed by the hatred of my own appearance, and this week was no exception. I became convinced that my own appearance was so terrible, so below acceptable standards, that I did not want to be seen by strangers who did not already love me.

"I can't go out," I sometimes say. "Strangers will see my face, and I can't have that."



I came home from my harrowing trip to the corner store with that familiar burn of shame running up the back of my neck while I tried to catch my breath, and I immediately asked the Palinode to come for another, slightly longer walk with me. I knew that my well-being depended on killing this thing in the moment.

I know my mind. If I let leaving be so terrible that it scares me back, and then rest into my safe spot on the couch again, I will more deeply train a pathway in my brain that confirms the messages that Leaving Is Bad and Staying Is Good. I imagined myself in the future on a talk show saying "I don't know how it happened, but one day I just stopped leaving, and now it's been 17 years since I walked out my front door."



The Palinode and I walked to another drugstore further away, and as we chatted about things like whether grease is wet or dry¹ and what the actual elements of moisture are, my chest loosened. The stuck feeling in my throat eased up.

That pathway in my brain, one that could have so easily become a deeper groove, unkinked itself a little bit. I bought myself some more time with freedom.



I haven't said much about my depression, anxiety, or addiction issues over recent months. As much as I've written about them before and talked about them in front of audiences across two countries, I am afraid to write about them here.

I am afraid that no one will believe me anymore that shame can be used to see rather than punish yourself, that your courage is bigger than you know, and that fear is surmountable. I am afraid that I don't have what it takes to stay on this path I have fought so hard to find and bushwhack my way through. I am afraid that people will second-guess hiring me, thinking that I am not up to the job.

Part of my job on this earth, though, and I deeply hold this to be true, is to be very publicly human.

I do have the strength, though. We all do. This is a bones deep knowledge I can't shake.

I'm just experiencing retreat after battle, or, as Brené Brown calls it in I Thought It Was Just Me, a "vulnerability hangover". You shouldn't trust someone who hasn't lived their subject, and so I'm treating this phase of change as intensive study. I'm diving in.

In the end, Ghandi said it most succinctly²:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

This course I take repeatedly through anxiety, depression, and the hard work of sobriety is difficult and terrible at times, but the most beautiful parts of my whole life grow out of the soil it helps me to turn over.

Fear is gripping, but love and belief birth hope, growing capital-c Courage larger than the self.

And, so, a beautiful thing will grow out of this very hard thing, and you will not see me on a show in 17 years wondering why I never left my home again in all that time. This, I can promise you.

---

<sup>1. It turns out that grease is a non-Newtonian fluid that can be both wet and dry. Thanks goes to brainiac @jannymarie for the information. ↩

2. This paragraph is often paraphrased as "be the change you want to see in the world", which is an unverified misquote that Ghandi never actually said, because he didn't speak Bumper Sticker. ↩</sup>

40 Things That Are Brave To Do

This list goes well with a couple of other fear and bravery lists I've written before. Check out 25 Things of Which I Am Afraid and 25 Things That Make Me Feel Brave.

the Palinode over lunch

1. Stand alone in front of people and sing, act, be funny, or deliver a talk


2. Have a dissenting opinion and voice it


3. Share your smallest, everyday fears


4. Ask for help


5. Go to the dentist


6. Quit a comfortable job


7. Have faith in something


8. Tell someone you love them


9. Stand up for someone else


10. Defend the rights of someone you dislike


11. Face a review of your work


12. Risk your own life to save another


13. Be ordinary


14. Stop talking and listen


15. Eat unfamiliar food


16. Tell people what you are good at


17. Forgive someone...


18. ...and, even more difficult, forgive yourself


19. Admit when you are wrong


20. Walk away from something that hurts you


21. Parent a child


22. Feel afraid but take the next step anyway


23. Move to a new city


24. Confront the person who has hurt you the most


25. Ask for what you want


26. Give up something you love


27. Volunteer to help people in hard situations such as palliative care or homeless shelters


28. Get married


29. Go out by yourself in public


30. Audition


31. Learn to live through, and sometimes beyond, grief


32. Come out of the closet


33. Spend time on a nudist colony


34. Accept criticism without shooting the messenger


35. Set out your boundaries and be firm about them


36. Let go of anger and resentment


37. Admit that you don't know how to do something


38. Cry


39. Be satisfied with what you have


40. Live mindfully

I need to acknowledge that this list has about a hundred co-authors, because after I'd worked on it for a while, I asked the fine people of Twitter what they had to add, and they had a lot to say.

And you? What do you think are brave things to do?

That Novocain Smile Says I DID IT

I know that I've become one of those bloggers over the last year since I quit drinking, the kind who seems to turn every event into a deeply meaningful experience that changes my whole life, but I'm telling the truth when I do it. Getting sober means waking up, and waking up means that I am seeing things with a degree of clarity for the first time in my adult life. It all feels so big and meaningful. In a way, I'm a teenager again, and life itself has become this consciousness raising experience.

Anyway, this is all just apologetics for what I'm going to write about going to the dentist, which I will keep short, because it's late, and I still have to pack for Blissdom Canada, and the final episodes of my Thirtysomething binge aren't going to watch themselves.



I had years of being beaten down by an abusive work environment and depression and health issues and alcohol abuse and not doing what in my heart I knew I should be doing because it meant making grand life changes like quitting drinking, so when I finally had the courage to quit drinking, I knew that staying sober meant not just being courageous about that one thing but being courageous about lots of things, because part of my habit of drinking was my habit of living under the thumb of my fear. On top of quitting drinking, I had to do things like come out as a blogger and speak in public and own up to my part in difficult situations and go to the dentist.

I did my best to put off going to the dentist, but then my filling fell out the other day, and the jig was up. Fucking jigs. They're always up.

So, I had to climb another of my Everests, only this time I almost believed I could do it before I did it. All of my other Everests have been leaps out into abysses I wasn't quite sure wouldn't consume me whole, but this one I kind of thought I could do.

It's an interesting thing, this starting to believe in myself. I don't know what to make of it yet, but it's interesting. I'm almost starting to think that I might be ready to knock the training wheels off, but I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. I mean, I haven't even figured what my training wheels are yet in this metaphor.



But I went to the dentist! And I lived! And not only that, but I knew I would follow through with it, and I kind thought I would make it through right from the beginning, and now I get to eat chocolate again without electric fire ripping along my nerves for minutes on end, and all for the low, low price of 584 dollars. Why my dentist isn't dripping in furs and diamonds, I have no idea.