Falling in love with myself again

I’M WRITING THIS ON my brand new MacBook Air, oh boy! While I claim to be the least materialistic person on the block, I’ve gotta say, on those rare occasions when I buy myself a nice little gift, I really appreciate it. I appreciate the kindness and thoughtfulness of myself.

Being kind to oneself is the subject of this post, but it isn’t about buying nice things to make ourselves feel better. That can be part of it, I suppose, but really, the idea for this post has been stewing for a while and came from looking at how I’ve been treating myself mentally.

In general, I’m pretty self-loving, but I am prone to beating myself up when I feel like I’m just not measuring up to my own expectations. I’ve noticed the behavior of late, and it occurs to me that I have been living my whole life in an almost constant state of pushing myself — hard, at times — and feeling like I’m never doing enough.

Does this happen to you? Do you feel inadequate, like you’ll never get to everything on your to-do list, and that by not accomplishing it all you’re somehow lazy, or at least not living up to your full potential? Honestly, I’ve felt like that for at least 45 years. I’m a little tired of it.

I’ve become extra conscious of how much I’m getting done since going on a reduced work schedule a little over 2 months ago. As I’ve talked about, I had a great fear of wasting my precious time. I saw this as an opportunity to do great things. People keep asking me what I’ve been doing with my extra time, and I have a hard time figuring out what to say. I’m keeping busy and having a good time, I’m pretty sure, but am unsure what I have to show for it. When I perceived that I was doing things not any greater than what I’d been doing before, I felt a little bad.

But I didn’t get stuck in the bad feeling. Instead, I did what I always do when I don’t like where my thoughts are taking me: I changed my mind. Yes, I think I’m falling in love with myself again.

I’d been thinking for a long time I need to get to the gym more often, do more yoga, eat better, shed those 5 extra pounds that came from god-knows-where…and it just wasn’t happening. I was feeling a kind of low-grade dissatisfaction with my exercise regimen and my body, until one day I entertained the idea, what if I just stopped feeling bad about any of this? What if I decide my body is fine, my nutrition is good enough, I’m exercising plenty?

I then realized I do this with my whole life: I’m not meditating or reading or cooking or socializing enough. I need to be a better activist, do more housework, or have more sex. What if I decide it’s all just fine?

And then I went to a teaching about compassion and got a good lesson: It all starts with self-compassion. If we don’t love ourselves, we cannot love anyone else. I was challenged to negate negativity, to just not go there. It sounds simple because it is. I’ve been trying it out for the past few days, and it’s been nice. I recommend it.

That’s not to say one shouldn’t have any goals, or that you should give up trying to live a healthy lifestyle. Do all of that, expend some effort, but don’t judge yourself harshly. Just try — I won’t even say “do your best” or “try hard”; no, just try. Stop being your own worst enemy. Love yourself. Your mind will thank you.

That was gay?

IT’S KIND OF FUN to look back at songs I knew growing up and to find the hidden gay subtext. Oh sure, one can argue that the songs aren’t really gay — and, believe me, there are a lot of people on the Internet investing a whole lot of energy in the argument: Oh, those horrible, pathetic gays think everything’s gay! — but the point is not the songwriter’s intention so much as that some of these hits can be interpreted as gay without any stretch of the imagination…at least no stretch of a creative, gay imagination.

To me, the more interesting examples of this aren’t the obvious ones, but those that flew under the gaydar, as it were. The Holland-Dozier-Holland classic “Band of Gold” (1970) by Freda Payne is a perfect example. Give it a listen and tell me it doesn’t sound like it’s just dawning on Freda that she accidentally married a gay man.

We kissed after taking vows
But that night on our honeymoon
We stayed in separate rooms

I wait in the darkness of my lonely room
Filled with sadness, filled with gloom
Hoping soon
That you’ll walk back through that door
And love me like you tried before

Right? “Band of Gold” came out when I was 10, so I not only missed the gay subtext; I didn’t know what that meant, or that there even was such a thing. Gay? What’s that? Seriously. I had no idea. (Still not convinced? Sylvester covered the song in 1983, oh-kayyy?)

A few years later, I had lived through some David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, and Lou Reed, and so I was at least familiar with the concept when Steely Dan came out with “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” (1974). Was I aware of the gay storyline? I honestly can’t remember, but I do remember liking the song a lot, listening to it over and over, and wondering about what it meant.

We hear you’re leaving, that’s okay
I thought our little wild time had just begun
I guess you kind of scared yourself, you turned and run
But if you have a change of heart
…
You tell yourself you’re not my kind
But you don’t even know your mind
And you could have a change of heart

The rumor is that the song is about a woman named Rikki that Donald Fagen went to college with, but really, I don’t care. I think the Steely Dan boys deliberately chose a gender-ambiguous name so that the song could be read either way. It certainly works as the story of a gay (or closeted or straight) guy scared off by the singer’s advances. Big time. (Check out all the crazy theories about this song here.)

In researching this blog post, it came to my attention that “The Way of Love” (1972) by Cher is a totally gay song. I know, I didn’t get it for the first 41 years either, but check out the evidence. She’s addressing her song to someone, giving advice:

When you meet a boy | that you like a lot
And you fall in love | but he loves you not

…and so on. At the end of the song, she reveals she’s singing to a lover who’s left her — just the way that you | said goodbye to me — so, wait a minute, that can only mean one thing: Cher’s lover left her for another man. The lover could have been a man or could have been a lesbian who went back to men. Either way: gay!

Elton John famously danced around the issue for a couple of years before busting out of the closet. His early repertoire is filled with love songs between himself and songwriter Bernie Taupin, but it wasn’t until the release of Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in 1975 that I finally put it all together. “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” indeed.

It’s one of those cases where, looking back, you don’t know how you missed it — damn if he doesn’t look like Liberace on the cover of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road…but then, a lot of people in my parents’ generation were oblivious to Mr. Showmanship’s sexuality (and pretty much everyone else’s, too, come to think of it).

By the time the Village People came on the scene with their thinly veiled (and that’s being generous to those who didn’t get it) gay anthems — “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” and “YMCA” among them — the jig was pretty much up. Gay was in.

In the 1980s, we started getting gay music by gay artists who were out about it: The Smiths and Bronski Beat made Boy George look kind of closety for a little while there. I’ll write a post about ’80s gay music another time. The 1970s’ gay music was kind of fun because it was hidden — it could be fun to crack the code. But am I glad we’ve moved beyond all that? Hell, yeah.

That’s not the way it feels

PLAYING JIM CROCE’S greatest hits album, Photographs and Memories (1974), the other day conjured up some potent memories for me. Jim Croce stands out for a few reasons, not the least of which is that he tragically died in a plane crash at the height of his popularity 40 years ago.

His death the month I started high school was the first such loss that had a real effect on me. I cried. I’d been around and dimly aware when Jimi, Janis, and Jim Morrison all died at the age of 27 a few years before, but those were the icons of a generation just slightly older than me. Jim Croce was my own.

His first hit, “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” had come out the summer before. His last posthumous hit exited the charts almost exactly 2 years later. In all, he had 8 top-40 hits–including the #1s “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” a ripoff of his own first (and better) hit song; and “Time in a Bottle,” featured in the TV movie She Lives and released as a single from his first album soon after his death–and just 3 albums in his short career. I liked his music.

My favorite Jim Croce song, “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels),” also moved me to tears. (I was a very sensitive child.) It tells the sad story of a guy trying to contact an old girlfriend who had moved to LA with his best old ex-friend. Somehow I could relate to the lyrics–I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn’t real, but that’s not the way it feels–despite the fact that I had not yet lived anything even remotely resembling such heartbreak.

Which just goes to show, I think, what a good songwriter Jim was. He was able to telegraph to me what it would feel like decades later to experience something pretty similar. We’ve all had that feeling, haven’t we? Missing, wondering about, and trying to make sense of the love that we were sure had been there, that we were convinced was real, despite how it looks now. It felt real.

And guess what? That love was real. Things change. People get scared. They find other people. They shut down. Relationships end. But the love you felt? That was real. I think Jim Croce would agree.

What have I been doing?

THERE’S A CERTAIN IRONY to the fact that I have a lot more free time now and am blogging less. I’ve not posted as frequently of late, even though I’ve cut back my main job to 3 days a week. So, what have I been doing?

Well, I’ve actually been keeping pretty busy and making, I think, good use of my time–writing, even! Since I’ve last posted on here, I’ve kept up with the “morning pages” habit I cemented while doing The Artist’s Way, writing around 1000 words almost every day (though not necessarily in the morning). I went to a nice little poetry workshop followed by an open mic program I performed at. I went to a class on writing and selling erotica. I researched blog promotion, got some ideas, and found some good new blogs in the process. I worked on the novella.

And I’ve done a whole lot of other, non-writing-related cool things I seemed never to have enough time for, from spending more time at the gym to reading to lolling in bed all day with a sexy boy. I’ve so enjoyed having the extra day off! It has made a bigger impact on my life than I had expected. I now have more days off than normal work days, so as soon as I’ve worked a day, the next weekend is close enough to start thinking about. Wow.

I officially spend a little less than half of my total time sleeping and working now, for the first time this millennium. That’s right, the pie chart of my life is now 52% free time. Well, that’s not really true. I have to eat. I have to use the bathroom and shower and get dressed and get to work and back. And some of that “free” time is, as planned, spent doing freelance editing work and giving massages. But, still, you get the idea.

I was so worried I would not use my new free time wisely–knowing how I can be–I rather obsessively logged all of my time for the first 2 weeks on the new schedule. I had been thinking of doing something like that since reading about it on Raptitude, a great blog with the tag line Getting better at being human written by a wise and slightly obsessive (in a good way I can relate to) young Canadian fellow named David.

Two weeks was a bit much. One week would have been plenty. But the insights I gleaned were so valuable! The best finding of the experiment was something I noticed almost right away: the simple act of logging my time made me stop and think about what to do next every time I finished doing something. Rather than just wander aimlessly through my day, I would consciously decide what to do with a purpose. That felt great!

That was a more valuable insight than knowing how much time I spend on every little thing I do…though the obsessive in me loved calculating that, too: 5 hours and 2 minutes riding my bike in a week (I only did the calculations for week #1), 56 and a half hours sleeping, 54 minutes to do 2 loads of laundry from start to finish (not counting the time I did other things while it was washing and drying).

Which brings me to multitasking, which we should all know by now is a load of crap. The only times multitasking works are when one of the tasks is completely mindless or involves waiting. So, I meditate while I wait for the pasta water to boil; write in my journal while my mud mask dries.

I try to do things while I brush my teeth, but always have to stop brushing when the other thing gets even the slightest bit complicated, like moving the clean silverware from the drying rack to the drawer. I guess toothbrushing is not quite entirely mindless for me. You’d think it would be by now, but it is not.

But all of this focus on using my time wisely doesn’t mean every minute has to be jam-packed and goal-oriented. Remembering the lesson of lazy-busyness, I actually think it would be a good exercise in mindfulness to learn to do nothing else while brushing my teeth. Check in with me on that in a few weeks, will you?

Three little words

SO, HERE’S SOMETHING: What if you love someone unconditionally, like I’m always telling you to, and you rejoice in their popularity with others rather than get jealous, and that feels to them like you just don’t care? See, this is just the kind of craziness I think we need to get away from: the kind that says, If there’s no jealousy, it must not be love; or, more commonly (and more crazily), I’m crazy with jealously because I love you too much.

The quickest way to cut through that kind of drama is to just be real. If you’re scared or insecure, say so. There’s no shame in it. You’re human. Your love interest is there to support you. Hopefully. If it turns out they’re not, then at least you’ve learned something important.

If you love someone, tell them. It’s not that hard, really. People love to make a big deal out of those three little words. Saying them leaves you vulnerable, maybe, but isn’t that a good thing? If we can’t be vulnerable with each other, what is the point and where is the love? It’s natural to want to hear those words back. And that’s what we fear, right? That we won’t hear them back from the person we’ve just told “I love you.” Say it anyway. We shouldn’t care about getting something back.

But even if we do care, isn’t putting it out there worth it? Whether or not we get the reply we want, we get valuable information in return. As Olivia Newton-John famously sang, If you love me, let me know | If you don’t, then let me go. Of course, unless you are literally needing to take the chains away (which would usually indicate you have bigger problems than deciding what to say), you can always go…but it’s good to know what you are leaving.

Another fear that comes up around expressions of love is the fear of making the other person uncomfortable, especially if you’re not at all sure they feel the same way. (But isn’t this usually our own fear masquerading as consideration for the other person’s feelings?) Rather than making them uncomfortable, it’s much more likely you’ll make the person you tell feel really good. Who doesn’t want to hear they are loved?

What do you gain by keeping love hidden? What do you risk? Again, Olivia provides wisdom:

I’m not trying to make you feel uncomfortable
I’m not trying to make you anything at all
But this feeling doesn’t come along everyday
And you shouldn’t blow the chance
When you’ve got the chance to say
I love you
I honestly love you

So, get out there and tell someone you love them. Now! I dare you. If Olivia Newton-John can do it, so can you.

Rejoice!

I PROMISED A BLOG post about rejoicing, and here it is. Whenever I hear the word rejoice, I think of the Emotions and their album by that title (1977). They’ve got a song called “Rejoice” on the album, but the big hit we all know is “Best of My Love.” Was there ever a more joyful song? (The Eagles also had a mid-70s #1 hit by the same name, but it’s a real downer. Funny, isn’t it?)

Rejoicing is celebrating. It’s finding the good all around us and wanting others to be happy. As an added bonus, celebrating the good fortune of others results in the causes of our own rejoicing. I think we all know this on an intuitive level: happiness breeds happiness. I dedicate this post to Javi, one of the most joyful people I know.

I got a good teaching on rejoicing not long ago. It’s such a simple concept, it seems funny to have to teach it, but isn’t that the way with a lot of these things? Every negative state of mind has an antidote to it, an opponent force — for anger, it’s patience; for miserliness, it’s giving; for jealousy, we have rejoicing.

What is jealousy, really, but wanting something for ourselves? That describes jealousy over another’s success or wealth; it also describes the jealousy we feel in romantic relationships. When love is about wanting something from the other person — even if it’s just wanting to feel secure in knowing they aren’t going away — that’s our self-cherishing kicking in. We’re grasping. As I’ve talked about before, that’s not pure love.

Pure love is about wanting the other person to be happy, not about trying to control them. Just as it harms our mind to envy others’ success or beauty or talent, jealousy in the romantic context causes nothing but suffering. Seriously, has anything good ever come out of jealousy? It’s a powerful emotion, and it comes to us naturally when we feel threatened. But we can learn to recognize and control it.

The antidote to jealousy is rejoicing, which takes us out of our self-absorption to celebrate others’ happiness. (We should rejoice in our own good fortune as well, but don’t have to overcome jealousy to do that.) If a coworker gets the promotion you wanted, be happy for them. If an artist wins the prize you thought you deserved, rejoice in their accomplishment. If your romantic interest turns heads, celebrate that. Yes, really. If they find someone else who makes them happy, celebrate that too.

I am reminded of a yoga class I was in years ago where the instructor said, “If this is your favorite pose, rejoice in it. If it’s not, change your mind.” If rejoicing sounds easy, that’s because it is. You can do it lying in bed (in fact, it can be easier to rejoice if you’re in bed with the right person). But you’ll need to get over a whole lifetime of self-cherishing and instead direct your love outwards, or it won’t really work. That’s the hard part.

We are all conditioned to look out for ourselves first. It’s built in to our culture and hard to break free of. But try. It’s worth it. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that putting ourselves above others is the cause of all conflict in the world. And it’s the cause of all our own mental suffering. If you don’t like where your thoughts and emotions are taking you, the first step is to notice that. The second is to free your mind.

The Ides and vicinity

THE BLOG TURNS 2 today. I hesitate to make too much of it, since it seems like I’ve written a lot about the blog lately, and who wants to read a blog that’s only about itself? No, I just want to take a moment and say thank you. Thanks for coming by, for reading, and especially for giving me feedback. I love the conversations that I’ve had with you over the past 2 years, and I look forward to continuing them together.

The Ides of March is, apart from being a group that had one top-40 hit in 1970 and sounded a lot like Blood, Sweat & Tears, the day both Julius Caesar and my friend Marsha died, the latter in 2008. I said it 2 years ago, and I still think Marsha would have enjoyed the blog. She certainly would have enjoyed debating me on some of what I’ve written.

March 16, 2008, is cause for a happier reflection, the day I released an atypical, long Craigslist ad out into the world and made a connection so unexpectedly, magically great, it still brings me joy to think of it (and that we’re still connected is icing on the cake). That reminds me, I need to do a blog post on rejoicing. Don’t let me forget!

And then comes March 17. I know I’m always talking about how I love all holidays, but it occurred to me today, St. Patrick’s Day is pretty awful. I’m 3/8 Irish, I get to say that. I want to like it. Maybe there are ways to celebrate the day that have nothing to do with getting completely wasted and I just haven’t heard of them. (When I lived with my sister years ago, I’d use food coloring to dye the milk, orange juice, and water in the toilet bowl green, but I think that was just me. Does McDonald’s still do those Shamrock Shakes?) I would be happy to be corrected on this point. I’d prefer to rejoice in all holidays.