Oprah

“You belong in every room you enter.”

I don’t know where to attribute this quote. I’ve heard it more in the past three weeks than I’ve heard my own name.
That must mean something? Right?

Shonda Rhimes, the magnificent writer of all things twisty on Thursday nights, attributes it to Oprah.

I vaguely remember hearing Oprah give Maya Angelou the credit.

I read somewhere that Jesus said it to Maya when they walked into the wedding at Cana because Maya was feeling a little underdressed.

In any case, I love the reminder. Don’t you?

Who hasn’t felt out-of-their-depth at one time or another?
I can recall an embarrassing amount of situations (like walking into the Ritz in Paris for the first time) where I was convinced that the wallpaper and drapes were better qualified to be there than I was. (Which actually makes sense if you think about it because they were there first—and somebody picked them— but you know what I mean.)

Underqualified.
Underdressed.
Underinvited.
Undersmart.
Underrich.
Underpretty.

I’ve felt all of that, haven’t you? But wouldn’t it have helped so much to remember these words from Shonda/Oprah/Maya/Jesus as you stood outside the door, contemplating going in?
YOU BELONG IN ANY ROOM YOU ENTER.
It sure would have helped me! Maybe it would have kept me from inhaling all of the little smokie sausages at the last cocktail party I attended where I felt out-of-place.
Or maybe not.

Have a great week and carry on,
xox

Um, Yeah, what he said.

Since Donald Trump landed with a giant, orange thud on my radar two-ish years ago, I have watched him traverse the political landscape with a mix of slack-jawed awe and mild nausea.

Who is this guy and how in the hell did this happen?

Previous to running for the office of President of The United States he was just another self-aggrandizing blowhard who lived in a golden tower, cheated on his wives, called himself a billionaire, starred in a cheesy reality show and had something to say about everyone and everything.

Not necessarily an educated opinion—just something to say.

He assumed he had an audience. I guess he thought people cared…Right? Someone must have said that to him once, “Hey, Don, I’d love to hear what you have to say about Roe V Wade!”

He slithered his way through his preferred method of communication—a Howard Stern interview, waffling back and forth on his opinions of the Clintons, Barack Obama, abortion, and the Iraq war on a regular basis.
It was all in good fun back then.

Just a couple of douches talking nonsense.

New Yorkers couldn’t stand the guy and yet, without ever holding public office or participating in any kind of community organizing besides building skyscrapers with his name emblazoned on them in thirty-foot high gold lettering—he gained some traction.

And in 2015 after some consideration (I can’t write that it was careful because that word can never be used in the same sentence as his name), Trump decided to you know, run for Leader of the Free World.

After the most wtf campaign on record and the most wtf win in the history of winning—he now sits behind the big desk in the Oval Office.

“Nothing like this has remotely happened!” has been echoing around the globe since November and I for one have just GOT to put some kind of positive spin on this…this…this anomaly.

What is an anomaly anyway?

Webster defines it as “something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.”

An oddity. A peculiarity. 

A quirk. A rarity.

Something inconsistent with the norm.

Yes, yup, uh huh and bingo.

It seems to me we are now living in the Age of Absurdity. I can resist (which believe me, on the things that matter I am) but on one point in particular, I say, if you can’t beat ‘um—join ‘um. Do you wanna know what the tipping point was for me?

One word. Oprah.

She voiced in a recent interview exactly what I’ve been thinking.

When asked if she was interested in running for President she responded saying that Mr. Trump’s election had made her re-evaluate her previous skepticism about running for President.

“I never considered the question even a possibility,” she told David Rubenstein on his Bloomberg Television program when pressed about whether she might consider running in 2020. “I just thought, ‘Oh… oh?'”
Referring to Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubenstein said: “It’s clear you don’t need government experience to be elected president of the United States”.

“That’s what I thought,” she continued. “I thought, ‘Oh, gee, I don’t have the experience, I don’t know enough.’ And now I’m thinking, ‘Oh.'”

That’s crazy, right? …CRAZY GOOD!

Will Oprah run? Probably not. But that’s not the point.

How many of us think we’re “unqualified” for a promotion because of the way things have always been done?
How many of us never even try things we know nothing about like writing books, screenplays or musicals?

What if we could accept this new normal and have the kind of faith in ourselves that Trump apparently has? We don’t have to go all dark and twisty narcissistic. What about supremely, peculiarly and unexpectedly confident?

You know what I mean.

If you’re like me you reconsider opportunities because of your age (too young or too old), your inexperience, the fact that you’re unfamiliar with the “system”, and the knowledge that certain things Just aren’t done that way.

I think we can all agree that time is over.

All bets are off.

The rules have all been broken. They are scattered at our feet. That can either be a bad thing—or a good thing.

I say if the idea occurs to you and you think you’d be good at it—go for it!

Who knows, you may end up President of The United States.

Carry on
xox

Remember permission slips?

Those signed (or forged) whichever the case may be; pieces of paper that granted us access to off the grid childhood activities?
Weekend trips with Girl Scouts, grade school field trips to museums or the Observatory, Wednesday McDonald’s hamburger lunches in sixth grade?

Proudly, I had my dad’s signature down pat, the giant R of Roy with the straight tail of the Y, ending downward, no curling back up, no frills at all, very masculine, completely unlike my own girly sixth grade cursive; so occasionally, even though I had brought my delicious Spam with mustard on Wonder Bread sandwich in my Partridge Family lunch box for lunch that Wednesday, I’d permission slip myself a burger.

Forging (not to be confused with foraging) for food……hmmmmmm I’m sure there’s some deep hidden meaning in there.

Anyway…….
Brene Brown talks about writing HERSELF permission slips.

I LOVE that idea.

When she was on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday, she had one tucked inside the pocket of her jean jacket.

It read: I give you permission to be excited, goofy and uncool.
Just show up and be seen.

From what I observed she didn’t get too giggly or over stare, she had her occasional “Holy Shit, I’m sitting with Oprah” moments and they felt completely authentic and actually a bit brave.
She didn’t pretend “Oh hey, no big deal, I’m fine, I’m cool.”

As the story goes, after the show she heard that Maya Angelou was in another part of the building recording some audio poems. So instead of nonchalantly replying: “Oh, that’s nice” she abandoned cool once again and told Oprah how much she admired Dr Angelou.
After all, she still had the permission slip in her pocket; and as is often the case, the Universe rewards genuineness.
Oprah asked if she’d like to meet Dr. Angelou.

Hell yeah! (My words – just guessing)

Here are her feelings about the encounter in her own words:
“So grateful that I got to meet Dr. Angelou, look her in the eye, and tell her what her work means to me. When I told her that I love playing her reading of “I shall not be moved” for my students and children, she grabbed my hand and sang, “Like a tree planted by the river, I shall not be moved.” It was a sacred moment.”

Just imagine if she’d brushed off the mention of Maya Angelou with a Too Cool For School attitude, she would have missed that once in a lifetime moment.

How many wonderful, sacred, ridiculously epic moments do we circumvent due to our habit of playing it cool?

How many beautiful creations do we talk ourselves out of?

How many people do we meet and feel a connection with……and do nothing?

How many books are unwritten, paintings un painted, businesses un started and plans unhatched because we lack the courage?

Maybe all we need is PERMISSION.

I for one, have started her practice of the permission slip.

Here are some I’ve written lately:

I give myself permission to not always know what I’m doing.
I give myself permission to play more.
I give myself permission to suck while writing the book.
I give myself permission to be happy even though I don’t have a “job”
I give myself permission to not like everyone

If you Google BRENE BROWN PERMISSION SLIPS and look at images, there are hundreds of ideas if you have trouble getting started.

I’d LOVE it if you’d write at least one thing in the comments. Tell me, share, you’ll give other people the courage to do it and maybe give them a few ideas too.

Go ahead –
I give myself permission to__________________.

I give myself permission to adore you guys,
Xox

Hi Loves,

I was lucky enough to be in San Jose this weekend for the last stop of the Life You Want Tour and I gotta say; it was a privilege to breathe the same air as Oprah and all the great teachers that spoke, told stories and brought us to tears…every time.
I’m still processing. I’m sure I’ll write some take-aways soon.

Below is what Elizabeth Gilbert (my new BFF) wrote about her incredible journey. I’m sure if you’d have told this author a few years ago that she would be giving 45 minute inspirational talks to auditoriums of over 10,000 people in 8 different cites across the US she would have thought you were crazy!
Yet, that’s become her latest accomplishment – touring with Oprah.

Dream big, then surrender, because the Universe has even bigger dreams for you than you could ever imagine.
xoxJ

*Thank you to my beloved sister Susan for making this weekend happen and keeping me laughing the ENTIRE time…even through tears. I love you.

Take it away Liz-

DON’T WASTE THE TEACHINGS…

ONWARD!
LG

Another God wink
My sister took this picture of Liz and me in the lobby of our hotel on Friday afternoon while everyone was milling around waiting for the event to start. I, as usual, was foraging for food…and then there she was. We hugged – a lot (she’s a hugger) and talked, and I must say, she is as incredibly kind and down to earth a person as you will EVER meet.

xox

“When are you going to start a family?”
The ink wasn’t even dry on the marriage license, I still had rice in my hair, for cryin’ out loud. Really?

How the hell did I know? I was barely twenty, my husband twenty-three. WE were the babies in the room.

It’s the rare individual who is introspective enough to ask him or herself at a young age: What kind of life do I see for myself? Will I have children?

Some people just KNOW. The rest of us, we just go with the proverbial flow.
We date, fall in love, have the wedding, the picket fence and….screech! (sound of a needle being dragged across a record) hey, not so fast.

Your early twenties are times of impetuous, risk taking behavior – not the picket fence and most definitely not parenthood – at least not for me.
I could back it up with SCIENCE:
There have been recent studies and in fact, research from the National Institutes of Health has shown, the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with inhibition of risky behavior, and decision-making, doesn’t get fully developed until age 25.
Being a late bloomer, I think my prefrontal cortex finally matured at around thirty-five, sadly, it still wasn’t screaming “make a baby!”

What was wrong with me? All my friends were doing it. Even my little sister.
Hello?! Where was my maternal gene?
At the time it felt like it had been replaced by the much more irresponsible (red hair dye, wine drinking, spend every dime on shoes, travel around Europe) gene.

It wasn’t a calling for me. I know a calling. I move heaven and earth when something calls me. Motherhood? Meh, not so much. It’s not that I don’t love kids, I do. Just never enough to make my own.

There was also the fact that the stars just never aligned.
It didn’t occur to me to start a family when I was married, it always felt like a decision for another day; and when it finally did cross my mind I was epically, tragically, single. Not a man in sight, let alone “father material.” By the time I married my second husband, as fate would have it, my eggs were all dried up.

Sooooo, I gave single motherhood some serious thought, only to be discouraged by a very wise, older woman friend, a “crone” who asked me, “the maiden”, why I wanted to have a child?
I stammered on for a good five minutes, never coming up with anything better than
“Everyone’s doing it.”

“It’s the MOST important job, being a mama. Come talk to me when you have a better reason.” This maiden could never come up with one.

“To make the decision to have a child – is momentous.
It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body”
~Elizabeth Stone

By my mid thirties, when I answered “no” to the kid inquiry, a sad, concerned look would wash over women’s faces; until I assured them that I was biologically able – it was a conscious choice of mine not to.

UNLEASH THE KRAKEN! 

Many women got angry, really angry; especially at baby showers. You know the ones where you bring your babies? THOSE were the worst.
There was even some name calling.

Selfish.
I’ve been called that many times in my life.
It’s code for: why aren’t you doing what I’m doing?
It’s been hurled my way in anger, hitting me like a dagger in the back.
It’s happened so many times, I have a callouses there – these days the dagger just bounces off.

Is it selfish not to have children? Probably. Can selfish be a good thing? Yes, yes it can.

Call it what you want. I just knew I wasn’t wired for that level of self-sacrifice, and my unborn children are better off because of that.

Up until then, my life had seemed like a series of accidents, not premeditated in any way.
But soon I recognized that I had made a choice, that I had decided “my supreme and risky fate” and that I didn’t need to hide in a cave; then, and only then, did the name calling stop.
Isn’t that always the way?

Now I’m over fifty, and the question is: How many grandchildren?

What I know for sure is this: I’m so incredibly grateful to be born at a time in history when we’re not put in stockades in the town square, with villagers throwing eggs at our childless faces.
We decided it wasn’t for us…and that’s okay.
Luckily, times have changed, women are so much more accepting and supportive of different life choices. These days I feel anything but ostracized, some woman actually applaud my decision.

Childless women.
As Liz Gilbert and O talked about on Sunday, we get to be the spectacular aunties.
Mamas need the aunties.
We play a very important supporting role, we get to teach selfishness – which is thankfully something most mamas know NOTHING about.

Tell me about you. I’d love to hear YOUR story. When did you decide not to have children?

much love,
xox

There’s a lot in the media lately around the subject of loneliness, and it got me to thinking: When in my life have I felt real loneliness?

Not to be confused with spending Saturday night without a date.
That is an appointment with Ben and Jerry’s and “The Way We Were.”

Loneliness is so much bigger, darker and deeper than that.

By definition loneliness is a feeling of isolation, of feeling alone and separate.

I’ll talk about my friend’s loneliness first…because I felt such empathy for her, I can still feel it today.

I’ve known TT since high school. We became fast friends the first day of ninth grade, when I told her I thought she was beautiful. I know, great opening line! Right?
But she is and I really meant it.

In the late 80’s, she married Andy ( I love him too, truly; I used him as my husband template for years, but that’s another story).

They moved to Santa Barbara to do their post grad studies, and since I live in LA, I drove up every other weekend. We nicknamed it a JJ (Janet jaunt).
They lived on campus, had a huge circle of friends, and since everyone was financing their tuition cooking in restaurants, we ate incredibly well, and since they were all so smart, the conversation wasn’t bad either. A few years in, TT had a baby. I was in the room, again, another story for another day.

Let me just say…A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!

Three months later they moved lock, stock and baby to Italy.

To Trento, for an actual paying research gig at the University there, were Andy could move further toward his doctorate.
Neither spoke Italian, so communication was…interesting, and after they got there, it was revealed that the money would be paid at the end of their 9 month stay. So, in about a month, they were stone broke.

Since Andy was at the University all day, TT was left at their small apartment, or to her own devices. The first few weeks of enthusiastic exploring, turned into aimless walks around a foreign town, where, even when she eavesdropped on other people’s conversations, she could only make out a couple of words.

I’ve been there, it’s like you’re invisible, and she really was!
All the Italian women saw was “Bambina”! Except, they couldn’t tell her what to get for the diaper rash, or the teething, or share her frustration about the fact that the hot water literally shut off at 9pm…in the whole town!

I could feel her deep isolation and sadness come right through the paper of her letters and faxes. I swear, there were tear stains. My vibrant, beautiful, friend was dying of loneliness, and it made my heart actually HURT.
So…I gathered the troupes, and one by one, we staggered our JJ’s throughout that summer and fall, so she wasn’t alone as she learned how to be a mom in a small medieval town in northern Italy.

I have felt the MOST profound loneliness on two separate occasions in my life, and they both caused me great sadness, even despair. I’m sure there were more, I’m 55 for God’s sake, but these two have burned their memory into my brain, so as not to be forgotten.

One was in my first marriage.
I was about 23, way too young to be married, and I remember lying next to my husband and trying to identify this deep pit in my stomach. It was like a dull ache. I can remember the night it finally hit me: Shit. I married the wrong person, because he’s right here and I’m lonely as hell.
Great! Now what? I smoked a joint, ate a box of cookies and suffered months of anxiety attacks. Then I filed for divorce.

The second one that just about killed me, was when my store was dying.

Many a day toward the end it was “crickets”. By that I mean, days of no phone calls, no deliveries, no people coming in at all! I am WAY too social for that kind of day-to-day isolation. I NEED to talk to people to live, it’s like breathing to me!
Often when I got home at night, I realized I hadn’t spoken a single word THE ENTIRE DAY!
I had never felt loneliness so deep. I would watch people walking to their cars and I wanted to yell out, “Hello, I’m in here, come talk to me!”

I just knew somehow, in my gut, that if something didn’t happen fast, the loneliness would start to affect my health. There have been recent studies that back that up.
Luckily, the flood came, and saved my life!

Oprah has recently started a new campaign to help alleviate social isolation, and potentially some loneliness. “Just say Hello” It’s a simple greeting, but it’s power is profound.
What it is, is a connection, and that connection can help someone feel less isolated, not as solitary in the world.

Let’s smile and say Hello to everyone, to strangers, we could make someone’s day.
It would have made mine!

XoxJanet