Right?
Okay. Add to that:
Low rise skinny jeans.
Any TV playing cable news.
All of my diet books & all seven, three of my vegan/paleo cookbooks.
All of my shoes except flip flops.
What are you getting rid of this weekend that doesn’t bring you joy?
Carry on,
xox
“What if your intuition was your future informing your present?”
~ Me
After waking up at 4 am to catch a 7 am flight back to LA, I braved a dark and frigid Vancouver morning
Once through security and my full body scan, (you can’t be too careful when it comes to us pasty, gray-haired fifty-something jihadists), I hurried up and waited. That gave me a chance to get all caught up on the breaking news in the US (of which I have been blissfully unaware of for three days), thanks to a giant TV screen every three feet.
That’s when I saw it.
The Senate, led by the majority leader Mitch McConnell had shushed Elizabeth Warren!
Fueled by a profound lack of sleep, too much airport coffee, and a red-hot rage, I may have yelled back at the TV, “Oh, now you’ve done it! You don’t ever shush a woman!”
No crowd gathered. No one shouted their agreement (because it was before five in the morning and the only ones who heard it were a janitor cleaning the carpets…and a potted plant. Still! You guys! Seriously?
EVERY man knows that if he wants to live to see his next birthday—you don’t tell a woman she is overreacting —and you never try to shush her—in public. EVER! Most especially Senator Elizabeth Warren.
“What is wrong with you fools!” I may have sneered under my breath but still loud enough for the carpet cleaner to hear it over his machine and jerk his head in my direction. Soon there were hand gestures and some fist waving. “Don’t cite some archaic rule and twist it into a mandate fitting your agenda. Jesus on a cracker! Do you not have wives? Daughters? Someone you love who has a vagina and was born in the 20th century? I KNOW you don’t get away with this at home!”
In reality, they shushed two women when they forbid her to speak. She was reading a letter penned by Coretta Scott King back in the 1980’s in which she was criticizing Jeff Sessions who was then a nominee to become a federal judge.
No big deal. Just the widow of civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It seemed apropos to read it aloud seeing that now he’s nominated to become the Attorney General. Right? I mean are we so far through the looking glass…? Let’s see…too racially biased to be a judge…perhaps not fit to…you get the picture.
Sadly, they are trying to shush us all.
Oh, brother, this gets my hackles up. This boils my blood. Big Time.
Luckily for the gathering crowd at gate 82, I was obligated to hurl through the air at five hundred miles per hour in a metal tube for three hours. It gave me a chance to cool off. I hadn’t planned on writing anything but I have two plus hours up here with no internet and I’ve finished my People magazine–so here goes.
Here is me cooled off:
Dear House and Senate,
If you think you can shush us women into submission—you have another thing coming you silly, silly men. Weren’t our marches on Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Rome…just adorable? With our knitted caps and cardboard signs? Aren’t our phone campaigns that fill your inboxes to capacity just darling?
You ain’t seen nothing yet. You will hear our voices in every way imaginable.
You may have won the battle but you will not win this war.
Okay. I’m beyond tired. I’m going to bed.
Who’s with me? Not in bed…in outrage?
xox
Love. This.
Carry on
xox
A lot of us are experiencing our own personal pain AND tapping into global, collective pain at the same time.
We’re marching, or emphatically not marching.
We’re crying in the kitchen, out of the blue. We’re heavy with emotion by noon.
My loves, it’s critical that you let the pain move through you. You have to keep letting it go. And like, there’s no need to worry about being too detached from what’s going on. Because there’s new pain arriving daily. If you’re awake you will hurt. I’m with you…in profound agony over the state of the world. And, my faith and resolve are brighter than my doubt and stronger than my grief.
It’s an hourly practice to find that balance.
Feel it, fully, but don’t grip the pain and use it to bolster your position or identity. Holding on to pain is how you get bitter and brittle, and incidentally, much less effective.
It’s a feminine skill to process other people’s pain. Empathy. Whole humans feel things. Deeply. And then the heart wants to make something with the pain — to run it through its ventricles and transmute it into goodness. It’s a beautiful inclination. But we’ve got to keep our “pain processing for other people” in check or it will bring us down.
We might tell ourselves that taking on the collective pain is a form of being of service.
And it is — we’re in this together. But too much of that is martyrdom. And when you’re a martyr you become a burden on the system.
The pathway to the conscious management of psychic pain:
1. Feel your own pain. Analyze why YOU are personally affected.
Observe other people’s pain. Seek to understand it. Relate or sympathize.
And if you’re able, let it go by the end of the day if not sooner. Very difficult to do, but NOT impossible. And then…return to your personal gratitude and power. Because… you must be in touch with your own blessings in order to be of service.
This is a daily practice because we’re all in pain. Humans, animals, Mother Earth…all hurting, badly. We have to let go of the pain on a regular basis so that it doesn’t backlog and turn into inflammation, depression, confusion. Or worse, blind rage.
Everyday, let it go. Give it up to Life, to God, to the cosmos and trust that we have the strength to heal. Speak out. Get a therapist for the sole reason of talking about world events and your rage and feelings of helplessness — and empowerment. Please, move. Get to a yoga class, or run your ass off a few times a week — for emotional reasons, not just for your ass. Dance! You’ve got to move the pain out of your body and psyche so that you can keep going. And we need to keep going.
If each of us made the effort to let go of pain and return to trust then there would be less pain in the atmosphere.
And with less pain in the atmosphere not only can we see more clearly and make more of an impact, but the low vibration stuff and fear-mongers have nothing to feed on and nowhere to hide. (Negative energies can turn a cloud of fear into a shit storm. So let’s not feed the cloud.)
Confront the pain with your unwavering trust and gratitude for being alive. This is where the limitless power is. Pain release and faith are a very effective way to serve. Every day. Over and over again… so we are free to rise.
Yessss. Press share to all the deep feelers in your life. xo
“Boredom is the basement in the house of change.”
This post throws us all the way back to the end of 2015 but it feels more timely now than ever. Do we as women wait for things to implode in our lives before we make a change? Do we march our butts down to the basement where the dryer drowns out the whisper of discontent and fold socks, or do we pay attention to this soft whisper from the basement and make it our clarion call to change?
I would urge you to listen for the call.
xox
I just spent the day writing an article about getting divorced at twenty-six for a series on divorce at all ages.
I called it I Was A Twenty-Six Year Old Divorced Unicorn because that was how…um…unusual I felt at the time.
You see, my ex-husband wasn’t a troll. He wasn’t a bad guy in any way. We just weren’t a good match. But you need more than that as grounds for divorce. Right? I mean, how was I to know we weren’t a match that could pass the test of time when I married him at the tender age of twenty?
By twenty-six I was desperately unhappy. Like can’t eat, can’t sleep unhappy.
Today I searched for the one word to describe how I felt at the time. At twenty-six I was not able to articulate exactly what I wanted and what I felt was missing. All I knew was that in my heart of hearts—I wanted more.
More than this relationship.
More than this husband.
More than this “until death do us part” commitment that was feeling more like a prison sentence than a wedding vow.
That’s when it suddenly hit me. Greedy. I felt greedy. On paper, I had so much. Everything. What all my girlfriends were clamoring for.
Greed instead of gratitude one friend scolded.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
“You want more? More than what?” my dad had asked barely hiding his disgust upon hearing that I wanted a divorce. “He’s a great guy and a good provider. What more could you possibly want? It doesn’t seem like anyone can make you happy!”
He was right about that. That was my job, only I didn’t know it at the time.
I only knew that something profoundly wonderful was missing and that I wasn’t able or willing to settle.
So that made me feel greedy. And greedy felt wrong.
Other people settle. Why can’t I?
Believe me, when I say, it would have been so much easier to just stay married!
“I’m a freakin’ unicorn! An anomaly; and NO ONE understands or knows what to make of me!”
Once I was single, I found out guys didn’t want to date a twenty-six-year-old divorcee. Used goods. High maintenance.
Typical First Date Conversation:
“So, you ever been married?”
“Yeah.”
“Really? He die?”
“Uh, no, we’re divorced.”
“He cheat on you?”
“Nope.”
“He left you?”
“Nope. I left him.”
(Beat) “Waiter, check please!”
Obviously, I needed to set my bar higher.
What I eventually discovered, after a whole lot of sleepless nights, and years of pain was that there were benefits to divorce; to asking more from life; to refusing to settle; to being greedy.
I also forgot that a Unicorn is a mystical, rare and beautiful creature.
So I’m curious…
This being what it is, more of a stream of consciousness, I want to turn the tables and ask you guys:
Q- What does it mean to you to settle? When have you done it and when could you not?
Q- Do you agree with the word greedy? What word would you choose when things look good but you want more?
Q- Are you a Unicorn? Why?
I love you all madly, carry on,
xox
I’ve been thinking about the state of things lately because, well, they’re inescapable. Those darn things. And their twisty state.
What has been so curious to me are people’s reactions—my own included.
When I don’t stay high, as Michelle Obama in her infinite wisdom advised us all to do, and instead go low, like subterranean, send a search party, “where are your pants?” low—I am NOT my best self.
I know that’s shocking but it’s true!
After I find my way back into the vicinity of common sense, (no thanks to GPS, you useless piece of shit), I have begun to reflect on the familiarity of these feelings that have left me all feely and not in a good way.
I remember these feelings of acute frustration!
I remember this rage!
I remember feeling completely disempowered, gutted and left for dead.
Most of all I have the clearest sense of Deja Vu when “alternative facts” are used. That’s because we had a very similar parallel universe in my house when I was growing up.
Up was down.
Day was night.
Cats were fish.
Dogs had more value than actual human children.
And A’s on your report card were mandatory but being smart, or a “smart-ass”, (as it was called if you questioned ANYTHING) was discouraged and by discouraged I mean cause for punishment.
Sound familiar?
We kids coined the phrase “Koo-Koo talk” because, well, nothing our step-mother said ever made sense except to her, her dog, and occasionally our dad. She was a Kellyanne Conway doppelgänger, a decade younger than our father, a man who had ended up on the sad, lonely and desperate side of our parents 1970 divorce. When she came along with her platinum over-teased hair, thick black Carol Channing false eyelashes (not the good kind like I wear), and age inappropriate mini skirts, he was…let’s see…the word grateful comes to mind.
She hated kids and was nuts (maybe not in that order). And not charming or funny nuts. She didn’t wear silly hats or knit sweaters for hamsters. She was mean nuts. Infuriating nuts. She was a giant windbag of salty, mean nuts. And she was fluent in Koo-Koo talk or as we’re calling it all these decades later—alternative facts.
Or lies. Let’s all call them what they really are—lies.
I suspect that one of the reasons I get a bit twitchy when people lie is because of my childhood. And I also suspect the reason you all might be feeling like strung out wacko is for the same reason.
We’re all smart people whose stock has recently been devalued and we have finely tuned bullshit meters. Can you blame us?!
I don’t know about you, but when I go low I want them all to choke on their lying lies. I want karma to make a speedy round trip, like a boomerang thrown by Thor to dispense justice. I want heads to roll.
Then I pull back, find the stairs and make the long and arduous climb back up to the land where I’m in charge of how I feel.
That is what the Koo-Koo talking, mean-as-hell nut-job taught me four decades ago. That I can stay in the fight, pointing out all of the injustice and lies which just bounced off the Teflon bitch—or I can rise above it, intellect intact (because all that Koo-Koo talk kills brain cells), pick my battles and stay sane.
Because as we’ve all witnessed, you cannot reason with crazy. It will drive YOU crazy!
If you can relate—I advise you to try to do the same.
Carry on,
xox
Tomorrow I’m having an organ removed.
The organ is my uterus.
I’d like to say it’s nonessential but that’s not altogether true.
It’s a decision that’s weighed on me for years. I’ve held onto it at the urging of doctors and well because I don’t like invasive anything, regardless of how much trouble something is causing me. Some people run courageously toward surgery. I run like a scared little girl in the opposite direction—which is not always the smartest decision.
What I do is I holistic it to death. I acupuncture it, tincture, and energy work it until it’s no longer a bother.
That has worked for me with everything. But this organ has given me a run for my money. It’s wanted my unwavering attention for the past twenty-something years.
Fuck. I’m fifty-eight. I’m tired of the fight. I’m waving the white flag. I’m over it.
Due to the fact that I chose NOT to have children, this organ has been as useful to me as an oven is to someone who doesn’t enjoy cooking. Oh, again, I guess that would be me, so… the oven gets it next.
Anyhow, it has been a long time coming and I won’t bore you with the gory details. I’m only telling you about it because:
1. I may not feel up to writing this weekend.
2. You SO wish you could be a fly on the wall in post-op. I’m told I’m hilarious in post-op. That I need to stay under the influence of the copious amount of chemicals (anesthesia I’m guessing), and take it on the road. Seriously. Hey, maybe Facebook Live?
3. I’m not sure how I feel about yanking out one of the only organs that make me different than a man.
Thoughts: I’ve grown things in my uterus my entire life. Just not people.
I’ve never professed to be maternal. Nurturing, yes. Maternal, not so much.
Maternal involves self-sacrifice. The kind that is not convenient. The kind that pays dividends that are not always obvious. It has been my observation that you must possess a certain amount of altruism to be maternal. High levels that replace all of the blood in your veins, influencing every decision you make.
That cause you to miss a hair appointment that took you months to get in order to pick up a sick kid. Stuff like that.
I’d like to say I’m that person—but we all know I’m not.
More thoughts: Maybe some of us stand in line for the standard issue female body even though we have an inkling we may never use it to its full potential.
I feel sorry for my uterus. It drew the short straw. Maybe next time it can be a Duggar womb.
But ultimately I get the last say so I’m saying a very grateful, heartfelt but emphatic…goodbye.
Carry on,
xox
This is a post from waaaaay the hell back in the summer of 2013. Do you even remember the summer of 2013? Yeah, me either!
Anyhow…it felt timely due to the fact that we all have this fresh, new year to work with so I thought I’d share it with y’all.
If you were one of the oh, I don’t know, fifteen readers I had back then and you can’t be bothered with a flashback—go make yourself a sandwich!
And Carry on, xox
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”~ Henry David Thoreau
You frequently hear the saying: Make your dream a reality.
But let’s flip it around, shall we?
You often hear someone who has accomplished something monumental say
“This feels like a dream”
or
“This is more than I could have ever dreamed of”.
That happens when the Universe takes a desire and runs with it!
When you put something out there and then you only feed it with feelings of accomplishment,
you feel assured that it will come to pass.
Like the athlete who after practice envisions crossing the finish line first, over and over and over again.
How about the actor who feels so prepared, so perfect for a part that he is relaxed and confident at the audition?
They know what they want and they stay out of their own way! Their reality then reinforces this by giving them feedback that they’re on the right track.
The athlete starts winning all his competitions,
The actor gets his parts.
This is where it gets interesting.
Even when things “seem” to go awry, we are being guided to our dreams.
The Universe now has taken the reins and is running the show.
When you can take these detours in stride and maintain your resolve by not getting discouraged;
not listen to the negative voices—both internal and external,
THAT is when…
The athlete gets the last place on the team to the Olympics and WINS A MEDAL!
The actor gets not the lead, but a supporting role and then wins an Academy Award!
Their achievements surpass even their wildest dreams!
And THAT ladies and gentlemen is how you make your reality a dream.
“They say that anger is just love disappointed.” ~ Lyrics from “A Hole In the World” by The Eagles
You know its funny; and not in the haha way, more the ironic variety, that the times when I’m in emotional pain, when I should be writing—I can’t.
My friend the Book Mama says: write when you’re bleeding.
I find myself too busy at triage, what with the tourniquets and numbing agents to have anything at all coherent, let alone pithy to say and I know you all expect yourselves some pith from me.
How do these other folks do it?
Some people are great at it. Brilliant really.
Liz phucking Gilbert got rich off of it for chrissakes.
Glennon Doyle Melton, hello?
Hemingway was in constant emotional turmoil while he crafted his gorgeous prose.
Nora Ephron cried the entire time she wrote the hysterically funny book about her cheating husband who fell in love with her friend—while she was pregnant.
My trials and tribulations are not nearly as epic as any of theirs — yet I find myself uncharacteristically silent.
December was the cruelest of bitches as months go and like any good bitch she pulled at my hair and held my face underwater during our wet t-shirt catfight.
All bets were off. Nothing was fair. I was caught off guard—blindsided. And just to make matters worse the timing sucked because, well, you know, Christmas…
I hate feeling bad at Christmas and will do almost anything to fa la la my way out of it. This year there weren’t enough fa la la’s on the planet to keep my head above water.
I know many of you guys felt the same.
I’ve talked to a few of my friends, the ones who have a high tolerance for uncontrolled sobbing, and they’ve shared their stories of various friends and family members who seem to have been possessed by an intolerant, angry, asshole who blamed them for all of their angst. Lots and lots of disappointed love.
Did any of you experience this phenomenon?
This December I lost my shine. Someone I love held me solely responsible for everything that went wrong for them in 2016.—and in a fit of rage they became my judge, jury and executioner.
Oh yeah, and Happy Holidays!
My friend Kim suffered the same fate. Her best friend stopped speaking to her for no apparent reason and then that friend’s husband publicly shamed Kim on social media where, at the end of a Facebook diatribe, he actually said Happy Holidays. Can you even believe that? “We are morbidly disgusted and disappointed in you and we can no longer bring ourselves to speak to you. Happy Holidays!”
WTF people?
I don’t know about you all but I have my own fallen expectations and disappointments I don’t need anybody to pile theirs on top—thank you very much. Besides that, I think there should be ground rules for raging. Stick with the “I feels” and stay away from the “You ares” because later on, when the dust has settled, no matter how much you try to walk back the things you said—they cannot be unheard or unfelt.
Words are powerful things. They are the first weapons drawn in a battle. And if they’re aimed just right (and they always are by the people who know us the best), they find all of the tender spots and in the process—they kill love.
I felt sliced and diced in December which left me at a loss for words. Maybe they seeped out of all the little holes left behind. Maybe I’ll still be sweeping up consonants and vowels from the cracks of my floor in July. I don’t know. What I DO know is that I will do what I always do—what WE always do—right ladies?
I’ll lick my wounds, pull up my big-girl panties, find my words, and eventually look for the miracle in the mess. A big juicy one lives there I’m sure.
Until then you can find me scarfing down anything chocolate that isn’t nailed down and plotting my revenge (kidding. Maybe…).
Here’s hoping this finds you all happily eating salad.
Carry on,
xox
I should be ashamed I love these things. But I’m not.
Not really. I suppose I should be because they’re not the usual suspects like spring in Paris, babies and puppies but hey, how boring would that be? We all love those things.
No, these are specific to my twisted brain. What I feel the least bit of a tinge of shame over is the ferocity with which I love these things. It’s the way I love them. The love is mad and runs deep. So, even though I know you weren’t wondering, without further ado, here they are:
So…what do you love with a fiery intensity that you might never admit except here, as an anonymous reader in front of tens of my other readers?
Carry on,
xox
