Living with the Frenemy: Two Weeks into Quarantine for COVID-19

Some experts predict a mini baby-boom in nine months. If you are one of the fortunate who is enjoying lots of delicious couple time while sequestered, bless you.

But even the most connected may begin to feel strain - especially since we just found out yesterday the quarantine in the Bay Area has been extended from 2 weeks to 6. Oy vey.

For a lot of people - especially the introverts who now have people inside their houses 24-7 - all the togetherness is a bit much. As one of my clients put it,

"It's not that they're doing anything wrong; it's that they're breathing."

Other irritations I'm hearing:

• I'm working from home, and people keep coming into my space to see if I want anything. What I want is for them to stay the f@ck out of my room!
• My kids are bouncing off the walls. Literally. I was working, and I hear this loud crash. My youngest thought he could use the back of the couch like a tightrope. Of course, the couch fell over. Luckily no one was hurt. I was so furious though. I told them, I will not take either of you to the ER until the virus is under control. If you break a bone, it's just going to heal crooked (of course, I would take them to the doctor if anything happened). Now I feel terrible. Am I a bad mother?
• I have taken my dog for so many walks, she hides now when I get the leash. I just need a break from everyone. As soon as this ends, I'm taking a vacation by myself!

It's so hard to be human. We like to think we're tough and can handle anything. But the truth is, we are exquisitely sensitive creatures. We like our routines. For all the talk of needing relationships to be happy, what we really need is the right balance of connection and alone time. And each of us falls on a spectrum, so what feels balanced for me, might be torture for you.

If you are one of those who is getting a little fed up with hearing other people breathe, know you're not alone. If you're a parent and you want to get away from your kids, you're not a terrible mom or dad.

Alone time is essential to our sense of well-being - especially for adults. It's when we process the events of the day and make sense of our lives. It's when we check-in with ourselves, noting our emotional temperature and stress level, so we can practice self-care. Alone time is when we can finally hear ourselves think, so we can plan, dream, and find the flow of our creativity.

So it's important to set kind boundaries with the people who love us, who want our attention, who are very loud breathers.

Some tips to remember:

1. Don't shame or blame, after all, they need to breathe.
2. Do explain that "I am the kind of person that..." Fill in the blank with your need, for example, "I'm the kind of person that needs a good hour of quiet time first thing in the morning and again around 4pm to hear myself think."
3. Do ask for help instead of demanding or complaining. "Would you guys help me?"
4. Do ask them for their ideas, "Can you help me come up with some ways I can get that alone time while we're all in the same house?"
5. Do thank them for helping, for remembering, for reminding you. Let them see that their help is making a difference. 

Remember that boundaries can feel like rejection to others, so using the steps above, the goal is to protect the connection and love while getting some much needed space.

Hopefully this will help my fellow introverts get some breathing room!

May you and the ones you love stay safe and healthy through this bizarre moment in history!

Gossip, Snark and other Relationship Poisons

In my family, we talked about other people all the time. My mom complained about my dad to each of us kids. My dad did the same about my mom. We kids complained to our parents about the other parent or a sibling. We complained to our siblings about our parents. An unspoken but deeply held family rule: don’t be direct.

When one or more people in a family are insecure, avoidance (especially conflict avoidance) is bound to show up. I brought this behavior pattern into my professional, social, and romantic relationships because, for me, it was normal. I complained to my friends about my love interests. I complained about one friend to another.

I didn’t think of my behavior as gossip. I didn't think about how I was “poisoning the well,” manipulating other people's opinions, and contaminating feelings between other people. Like a fish who doesn't know she is wet, I didn’t know my family pattern was contaminated. It seemed normal that one ever really trusted each other, and each of us knew that we were being judged when we weren’t there.

I also never learned to be direct, to express my true feelings, or to set effective boundaries. The really big loss, though, is that I never learned how to reestablish love and trust when I hurt someone’s feelings. I didn’t learn that relationships become stronger, intimacy deepens and trust grows when people can openly talk about hurt feelings, jealousy, bad moods and all the other normal reactions we have as humans.

I had no idea how healing and connecting a heartfelt apology could be when given sincerely and accepted with love. In psychobabble, we call this "repair," and when done well, it is the superglue of relationships.

It took a lot of therapy, some great friends, and a very patient husband to teach me how to be direct and kind, to say, “this isn’t working for me,” without shaming or blaming others. It took the blessing of a dear friend letting me know I had hurt her feelings and giving me the chance to tell her how much sorrow (the root of the words, “I’m sorry”) I felt, learning I had hurt her, to experience the sweetness and relief of her forgiveness. To this day, she is one of my most cherished friends.

There is another gift in being direct. It’s more subtle, but equally powerful. It’s the gift of realizing that when we talk about others, labeling, criticizing, or analyzing, we are really projecting (talking about ourselves without realizing it). When my mother complained that my father never helped, she was implying he was a jerk. But what she never said was that she had always felt alone and unappreciated, not just by him, but in every relationship she ever had.

I know this feeling because I learned to behave like my mom in my own relationships. I did everything around the house, hoping my husband would notice and understand the secret code: do for me as I am doing for you. He wasn’t raised with the code and didn’t know it. With the help of my therapist, I learned to ask for help directly, without any of the irritation or frustration that was my own projection:

If I have to ask, it means you don’t really care. This confirms my belief that I am not lovable. Now I feel shame, and I am mad at you for "making" me feel shitty.

Of course, the craziest thing happened. When I asked, “Can you vacuum today or tomorrow?” he cheerfully said, “Sure.” That was it. There was no drama. It was my fuming, my irritation, my assumption he was a jerk, and my unconscious belief that I was unlovable that led to our previous fights about chores.

He didn’t mind helping. He minded being treated like he was a jerk.

The deeper lesson for me was that my being lovable was separate from him being helpful. This is key for those of us who were loved conditionally. Growing up, I was loved when I pleased my parents. Anticipating their wishes and fulfilling them without them having to ask was a survival tool. If I hadn’t mastered that, I would have been shamed and blamed.

If you were raised in a family with insecure attachment patterns, it might be difficult to be direct. You may find yourself shaming and blaming others when they disappoint you (maybe just in your head). This is a rich opportunity to look for the underlying belief you might be holding about yourself. It might be a chance to practice being honest and kind, asking for what you need or want without snark. It might be an opportunity to express hurt or disappointment and see if the other person can offer you a genuine apology.

Of course, this is difficult, even scary when being direct was against an unspoken family rule. It may be easier to take this risk with support, or to try in smaller, easier ways with people you suspect are more secure and more able to manage direct communication. Maybe it’s not so much what you do differently, but just a shift in awareness. If you are talking (or thinking) negatively about someone else, what’s really happening inside of you?

Worth, Deserving, and Self Love

How do we learn (earn) our worth?

Innate need to belong for security and safety + family, peers, culture, media.

People are born relatively helpless. We need adults to feed us, change us, protect us from dangers big and small. There is a biological imperative to bond that’s both emotional and chemical. 

When the bond is healthy, parents love their kids for no other reason than that they are theirs. When the bond is unhealthy, the parents project their unmet needs onto the kids. This can be a need to be special or important, as with narcissism. In this dynamic, kids may feel pressured to perform to certain standards to earn love. They may feel pressure to be attractive or athletic or whatever compensates for the parent’s insecurity. 

Parents might have other unmet needs, especially when they’ve experienced trauma or trouble in their own early bonding. Parents that don’t feel capable of adulting often “parentify” their children, relying on the child to feel soothed, cherished, or safe. The child becomes a little adult, equating their worth with their ability to support and nurture others. This is a recipe for codependence (dependency on being needed).

About half the people over the globe are estimated to have insecure bonds, regardless of any other socio-economic factor. So we are constantly interacting with people who don’t feel secure. Insecure thinking, behavior and emotion is interwoven into the fabric of peer relationships and culture, and it is delivered to us through the media in a steady stream.

In this paradigm, what gives any one person value is determined by this mix of family, peers, and culture. For example, I grew up in LA in the 1970s. My family is Jewish, but not religious. My mother is narcissistic, codependent, and eating disordered. My dad has early childhood trauma and lifelong addiction. My parents and peers were all affected by the LA lens on looks. 

I learned that to be valued, I had to be thin, sexually attractive to men, subservient, and stoic. I was supposed to marry well and have money. And I was supposed to anticipate the emotional and physical needs of others and provide for those needs. In essence, my value lay in my ability to withstand indentured servitude and unpaid prostitution without complaint - like most straight, white women of that era.

Who determines/enforces the value of a person?

Whoever holds power

First, it’s family. We learn early who is in charge of the food, the care, the comfort, and the punishment, and we adapt, mostly without awareness, because we assume our experience is normal. We don’t question until we are exposed to something different.

Later, it’s peers (sometimes teachers). We learn the pecking order at school, which kids are cool, which are losers. We do what we can to be in group 1 and avoid group 2. If we grow up in secure families, we are afforded a buffer against the insecurity of other kids. If our families are insecure, we might be more susceptible to the judgments and meanness of social stratification.

As we get older, we usually have some opportunity to confront these artificial distinctions as we are exposed to different people with different values. The more we can identify that conditional worth is always relative, the more likely we are to reject values that don’t serve us.

The more insular a family or community, the fewer these opportunities. Also, the more deeply ingrained the values (through trauma or repetition), the more difficult it is to register that these values are all relative, even when we are exposed to alternative values.

This is why therapy can be so helpful, especially therapy that is holistic and considers how culture, family, and social status impact mental health. Therapy is often the first time clients get to explore and question their basic assumptions about their value.

It’s a powerful and deeply healing experience to realize that our value is not dependent on what anyone else thinks of us.

Why are some people valued more than others?

Narcissism, sociopathy, dependency needs...

An analogy:Homer and Bart walk into an ice cream shop. Homer orders beer flavored ice cream. Bart says, “Ew! Beer ice cream is gross.” And he orders rocky road. Homer says, “Rocky road is for losers who want to break their teeth on stale almonds.” And then they choke each other till their eyes pop out. 

In this story, it is neither beer flavored ice cream nor rocky road that is gross or for losers. What is true is that some people enjoy and value ice cream that tastes like beer, while others don’t. 

The ice cream itself is neutral, and so are you. Some people will love you exactly as you are. Others will not, no matter how hard you work or how much you twist yourself into a pretzel to win their admiration or approval. 

If you try to win over a narcissist, you will have to make them feel wonderful about themselves all the time, no matter the cost to yourself. Hopefully you never find yourself romantically involved with one. You can never be enough to satisfy someone with this personality type. They live with an emptiness inside that can never be filled. And sooner or later they will let you know you are gross and a loser because your love hasn’t filled the hole. 

What they can’t and won’t accept (so don’t bother trying to enlighten them) is that the hole can’t be filled by anyone or anything but their own love. Narcissism is not an over-abundance of self love. It’s arrogance and swagger trying to compensate for shame and self hatred.

The same is true for sociopaths (both types lacking empathy for others). But with a sociopath, the end goal is not to fill a shame void with admiration. It is to abate a feeling of shameful powerlessness with power over others. A narcissist will undermine your worth for failing to make them feel good enough. A sociopath with undermine your worth to keep you under their thumb.

Unfortunately, narcissists and sociopaths tend to gravitate to positions of power in the world. They run companies and newspapers, ad agencies and boardrooms. The power dynamics in many companies are built on a foundation of vasselism. Work is structured so that employee compensation is kept at the minimum possible in order to maximize profit for shareholders. Job insecurity is the tool used to keep compensation low. Job insecurity undermines worth.

Narcissists and sociopaths also control a great deal of the information that filters through our screens regularly. Billions of dollars are made by selling insecurity.

The best way to counter these undermining factors is to look at your own dependency needs and insecurities and shore them up. Emotionally, you do this through repeated, daily acts of unconditional self love. 

Financially you do this by empowering yourself in whatever ways you can. This might mean more education, developing a side hustle, saving your pennies, working for yourself… whatever you can do to lessen your dependency on anyone who would take advantage of you. 

What power dynamics affect people we see in therapy?

Racism, sexism (gender and sexuality), bi-directional ageism, classism, ableism (mental illness stigma), looksism/sizeism.

All the systemic stratifications that are part of culture harm all of us - even those at the top of the ladder. They foster insecurity and paranoia in everyone. Case in point, the current US President.

All of these hierarchies rely on dependency and power/powerlessness to exist. This is another reason why good therapy is holistic. I have been treated as less-than based on my gender, my religious status, my weight, my height, my age when I was under 30, my age when I was over 40, and my financial status. And I consider myself part of a privileged and protected class because I’m white, educated, and middle class. My clients have shared stories of oppression based on these factors plus sexual orientation, gender identity, immigration status, skin color, accent, physical or mental health diagnosis, even hair color. 

It's important to recognize and call out systemic oppression in whatever form. In itself, this act of saying, “This is wrong,” is empowering and restores worth. It’s also important not to rent out too much head-space to fighting with people who are committed to being assholes. Sometimes the best way to honor our worth is to walk away. Strong boundaries are key to owning your power and demonstrating your value through self-respect.

What does this stratification do to people?

Subtle, chronic, trauma; depression; anxiety; low self esteem

When we are devalued, especially in childhood, when our self concept is forming, we experience that devaluation as trauma. It goes back to that innate need to belong. Ostracism feels dangerous because when we are little we can’t survive alone. Even when we are big, we survive predators and disasters better in a group. We hunt and gather better together. Feeling unwanted and devalued creates anxiety, depression, addiction and low self esteem.

Every single person I have ever seen in therapy has this exact core problem, no matter what the diagnosis.

What can we do to change how we value ourselves?

1. Stop trying to make others value us and look for those who do without condition.
2. Treat ourselves with respect and kindness all the time, without having to do or be anything to earn that care. Monitor your inner critic and listen for what it is afraid of. Then gently remind it to tell you about the fear instead of yelling at you.
3. Notice (co)dependency relationships and work on leveling power dynamics. Resentment is a good clue you are over-giving. Practice letting go of the need to please. Practice saying no without shaming, blaming or justifying. Seek out education, training and support to become financially self-sufficient over time.
4. Become aware of cultural dysfunction and create/rehearse your own counter-narratives. In the fat community, we do this by using the word fat as a neutral descriptor instead of a pejorative term. As a woman, I call out use of the words pussy, wuss, and girl meant as put downs. I actively look for role models who look like me. And I question my own learned fears and assumptions about people different from me.
5. Refuse to participate in gossip. I cannot emphasize this one enough. When you gossip, you implicitly condone it when people undermine your worth by talking shit about you behind your back. Practice saying, “I don’t gossip because I want people to know they can trust me to be kind, even when they’re not here.”

Feel is a Four Letter Word (When You're Insecure)

Insecure parents tend to get overwhelmed or irritated by feelings. They ignore them, shame them or misread them. How often have we all seen a parent tell their child, Stop crying. Nothing‘s wrong. You’re just being (a baby, cranky, difficult, etc.). This leaves kids feeling alone, overwhelmed, misunderstood, angry, and unable to tolerate distress. As you can imagine, as teens or adults, they often turn to food, drugs or distracting/numbing activities to avoid feelings. There may be one permissible emotion like anger or joy, but that feeling becomes over-used.

When clients come to therapy, one of the first things we do is name feelings. You seem worried, lonely, hurt, scared, etc. For insecure people, having feelings named accurately and kindly is a revelation. It feels like they are being seen and understood, maybe for the first time. The experience is deeply relieving, soothing, sustaining. It's a drink of water when you didn't realize you were dehydrated.

By seeing how the therapist responds, clients also learn the skill of recognizing and responding to their own feelings compassionately. This is what happens naturally in securely attached families. We insecures have to learn to fill this gap.
Secure parents notice facial expressions and body language, accurately naming feelings. You usually can't see your own face, but you can feel the muscles of your face as they move into a smile, a grimace, or a frown. You can feel your brow rise in surprise. You can feel your mouth tremble in fear or sadness.
You can also feel emotions in your body. The cliches we use to describe feelings can be a useful guide.

• When you're angry, you might notice your head or ears get hot. You might feel pressure like blowing your top. You might feel heat or energy in your arms or chest. This is adrenaline, a gift of your fight-or-flight response, gearing you up for battle.
• Shame, embarrassment and humiliation might leave you feeling like you want to shrink, to go full turtle and pull into your shell, to be swallowed up by the earth.
• Fear might leave you "yellow bellied," with a sick feeling in your gut. Or the hairs on you neck might stand up. Fear's cousin, anxiety, might make you edgy or fidgety, itching to run.
• Sadness may leave you choked up with tears that get stuck in your throat - especially if you've learned not to let them show. Sadness's bigger sister, depression might flatten you with the "why bother" blahs.

If you are on the reparenting road, seeking greater security from yourself, then your mission is to gentle yourself toward compassion, curiosity and acceptance. Naming your feelings without judgment conveys understanding and compassion. As you gain comfort with feelings, sitting with them in a friendly way feels soothing, safe and relieving (which you may notice in a deep breath or sigh).

Recognizing your feelings and accepting them with curiosity and self-compassion will also, in time, show you that you can tolerate and soothe your distress or disappointment. Taking the time to ease yourself through the distress will allow you to make better decisions about the messages your feelings are sending.

• When something doesn't feel right for you, you might set a different boundary.
• You might ask for more of what you want or need.

Allowing yourself to hear the messages your feelings are sending ultimately empowers you to take better care of yourself.

The Life Sucking Tragedy of Too Much Access

Something miraculous happened while I was on vacation. After several days of using phone GPS to get around in our rental car, streaming music, and uploading photos to our social media accounts, we got a text from our carrier saying we were nearly out of data. Did we want to buy more? Text Yes or No.



As if we shared a brain, we both knew the answer would be No. And for the rest of the trip, we chilled the f@ck out. We stopped going everywhere and doing all the things. We went to the beach and swam. We took long walks at dusk. We ate leisurely meals. We read books. It was like vacation used to be - relaxing.


For about a year now, I've been having conversations with clients about how much we have to track now, from multiple different passwords to which texts and emails need a response, to the milestones and deadlines of work projects, to the likes and follows we give (or hope to receive) online, to managing our children's activities and assignments, to tending to our friends and romantic partners, to (especially if you are over, say, 45) tending our own bodies.

Are you exhausted reading that last paragraph? I just re-read it, and I am!

There is also another fear you may not be aware of. A great many of us have a fear of down time. Because if we really do unplug and breathe, we might feel. We might feel how exhausted and overwhelmed we are. We might feel that underlying discontent about something (or someone) that feels so scary to address.

All the busy-ness becomes a way we ignore or tune out from our emotional world - and the needs that our emotions are designed to signal. By tuning out, we may be abandoning ourselves emotionally. We may be unconsciously re-creating the emotional abandonment or neglect we felt as kids. Ouch.

If you are on the road to practicing Healthy Secure Adulting, it may be time for your inner parent to some set limits. Because this can be scary and painful, you might not want to dive into the deep end. I don't recommend two weeks of silent meditation as a first step. But maybe you can designate an hour or even 30 minutes one day a week to unplug and listen inward.

It may help to remind yourself that you don't have to do anything but listen. You don't have to fix anything. Your main mission, at least for now, is to keep yourself company while you feel how you feel. Nice company. Kind, friendly, compassionate company. Your inner critic is not needed for this task.

Notice how it feels to offer yourself company without any other agenda. If sadness, fear, pain or anger come up, practice breathing into them. Imagine putting an arm around yourself. See how it feels to just validate the feeling - "Given my history/circumstances, it makes so much sense I feel this way."

When you get in touch with your feelings, a soreness may linger for hours or days after. See if you can just let it happen. When you notice it, be that kind, supportive company for a moment or two. In this way, you may build tolerance for your own emotions and ease yourself out of the feeling-phobia endemic in our culture.

Gradually, over time, you may listen and just be with your feelings more often. As you do this, the abandonment/neglect end. Eventually, you may want to address the messages your feelings are sending - in gentle and kind ways.

It may just be that in limiting the access you have to tech (and the access tech gives the world to your time), you discover more opportunities to relax, to slow down, to enjoy the moment. That's good too. It's really good.

Need practical tools/ideas for reducing access?

• Filter all your email accounts through gmail to reduce spam.
• Take 10 minutes each week to unsubscribe from all the things.
• Set up an auto-responder on your email and an outgoing voicemail telling the world you are unplugged and will respond in X days. 
• Turn off your phone, all the way off!
• If anyone complains they can't reach you, practice saying, "I unplug from X day/time to X day/time every week. I will respond when I'm back online." People will adapt.
• Designate certain days or hours "screen free."
• Spend time outside if the weather permits and look at the world instead of a screen.
• Lay down with your eyes closed for ten minutes or more and just let your mind wander. If you wander into work thoughts, planning, or fixing, gently nudge yourself into something else. You might take the time to feel your feelings. Or you might fantasize about the perfect vacation, or meal, or who you would want to visit if you had a time machine.

We are not built to be "on" all the time. Down time is essential to restore our energy and creativity. Out of doing lots of nothing come some of the best ideas. Trust that doing less will create more richness in your relationship with yourself. And as you become more available to your own feelings and needs, your inner children will come to trust you (and like you) more and more.

Deep Gratitude

Part of self care is discovering what makes us feel good. Providing what feels good is a key factor in building trust and security from within. Knowing you care about yourself and are looking out for your own happiness builds that trust.

In the convergence of science and spirituality, we are learning that certain practices like gratitude foster good feelings (and increased happy neurotransmitters like serotonin). But here's the thing. I get a bit irritated by positive thinking and affirmations. And a daily gratitude list can feel like one more chore.

But I absolutely love unplanned, unforced moments of deep gratitude - like when you realize you have stumbled into paradise after hiking a bit too long for your knees. Even more, I love deep gratitude for the seemingly mundane. Today's breakfast, for example...

Barley flakes (less gooey than oats), cooked with fresh blackberries from our local farm and mango. Mango. In California. In June. Vanilla. Himalayan pink salt. Palm sugar.

Given the state of the world, it's easy to focus on what's wrong. But I look at my breakfast, the stunning violet streaks of berry juice contrasted with the orange-yellow of mango, the Italian pan with its mottled, BPA free, long lasting nonstick surface -

- and I feel like I am looking at love.

I think about the care, kindness and attention that went into my breakfast from strangers, many who died hundreds of years ago. The slow, steady steps that led to the technologies of flight, refrigeration, agriculture. The scientists and designers who kept working and tweaking to make a lightweight pan for my arthritic elbows that will not give me cancer. I think about the people in India who planted, tended and harvested this mango. I think about the people who hand pollinate vanilla plants. I think about the people who collect the salt crystals. I think about the ancestors who learned, step by step, generation by generation, to make all of this possible.

For me, the miracle is the tenacity, the perseverance, and most of all, the love and care, that make humans all over the world work on creating safety, pleasure, comfort, easy, and joy on behalf of other humans they will never meet.

When I think of miracles in this way, just noticing how wonderful people can be (even though all those same people through the centuries have probably said something terrible about their spouses' foot odor from time to time), something happens in my heart. I soften. I breathe more deeply. For a moment, I fall in love with humanity, with all of its flaws and grumpiness. Today, hundreds of people, over generations, conspired to give me the ingredients and tools I needed to make a gorgeous, delicious breakfast. Thanks everyone!

And I take a moment to notice, to give myself that feeling of being cared for, loved - by others, but also by the parent within me, who wants nothing more than to treasure me. And I feel that love, for which, I am deeply grateful.

Please DON'T Suck it Up, Buttercup

April 5, 2019...

We live in a kind of a crazy (and crazy-making) culture - one that encourages us to be productive all the time, at any cost. Tired? Drink coffee or Red Bull, take a shower, hit the gym. Don’t rest! For god's sake, don’t nap!

Hitting a wall with work? Take a course on motivation. Meet with a coach. Push through. Suck it up, buttercup.

Procrastination is a sign of weakness. Lazy is a four letter word.

We are so indoctrinated into this way of thinking, we may not stop to question the truth of these notions - or their effectiveness - or their sustainability.

I used to be an over-doer. Fueled by fears I was barely aware of, I worked all the time. I didn’t realize I was working myself into exhaustion or repetitive stress injuries until my body finally screamed (in pain), STOP!

I was so lucky to be working with my beloved therapist and mentor, Robyn, who had walked a similar path herself. She helped me understand that it doesn’t have to be this way (quote on going slowly).

Over time, I have learned to trust my body’s rhythms. If work isn’t coming easily, it usually means I need to rest - even if I’ve been resting! I might just need more.

I’ve learned that procrastination is about getting ready, something good is percolating, and I can trust that it will emerge at the right time.

Lazy doesn’t exist. It’s a negative label we give to fatigue, lack of interest, or the need to take a break and just play or putter.

Over the last few months, I haven’t felt engaged with the work of writing my course on Healthy Secure Adulting. I had one deadline to meet, and I made it. But it wasn’t fun. I am taking classes to learn how to create engaging, effective online training. But it’s been feeling like a slog to get through the work. I began to worry that I’ve forgotten how to teach - something I have loved and done well for nearly 17 years!

So I have given myself permission to put it all down for a while. I’ve been walking in nature, enjoying the wildflower show courtesy of a rainy spring. I’ve been writing poems with my friend, Wendy, in what is now an annual tradition for us - national poetry writing month, in which we each write a poem a day for thirty days. I’ve been napping and watching my favorite old TV shows.

And this morning, all the tiredness and too-busyness and brain fog I’d been having completely lifted. I wrote the first four sections of my course on boundaries in less than an hour. It came easily. I was able to integrate the information I’ve learned about online course development. And it was fun.

All this to say, if you’re tired, rest. If you’re bored, do something that feeds you. If you’re feeling unproductive, stop trying to push through. Play. Read a book. Watch TV. Do nothing. Fully give yourself over to letting go. Trust that as your body and psyche receive the care they need, they will revive. And you will return to anything you feel a true desire to create or accomplish from a place of excitement and energy - instead of stress or obligation.