As I forecast, my energy and ability to keep up with TAW while acclimating to my new job has been less than ideal. I wrote daily pages one day out of seven. I’m okay with that; I don’t feel guilty or as though I’m failing. I have missed handwriting in my journal, however — something I didn’t imagine I’d feel.

The artist date was last Saturday. It’s just going to have to count, even though I did it with a friend. We had lunch in San Jose and spent the afternoon at the San Jose Museum of Art. The exhibition was intense, featuring political work that was chock full of strong imagery. I also made a small craft (the eyeglass holder). Alas, no knitting occurred, nor did exercise happen. In good time…

I’ve been thinking about identity. My team did an exercise called What’s My Lens? We were instructed to write down five words we’d use to describe ourselves to someone we’ve never met before, someone perhaps from another country. After we did this, we each listed those words on a whiteboard and provided an explanation why we chose them. Then we also added other words we use in self-definition that we felt it important for each other to know. The exercise was confidential, so I’ll speak for my experience only. It was an amazing excercise; some very personal and rich information was shared. The facilitator said she was blown away. I think it really established the foundation of trust among us.

The point of the exercise is to remember that we each filter reality through our own lenses. For example, none of us noted our race in our top five words. The facilitator reported that the same exercise done with African-American women results in race being among the first five. Something to think about: we live unconsciously with some of our lenses. They are so woven into us that we forget they exist.

This exercise coincided with the first exercise in Maisel’s book on creativity, in which he suggests one write a 2,500 word autobiography. I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve written one in the past for a graduate class, and I will again. The five words I chose at first were: creative, woman, spiritual, learner, and writer. In telling the stories behind those words, I revealed a huge amount of myself. I also added cat lover, sexual assault survivor, bisexual, married, introvert, and homebody. You may ask, “Why would you tell your new coworkers that you are bisexual?” Well, it came up in the process of talking about my experience as a woman in this world and in my spiritual journey, and even though I’m married to a man, I do not negate my prior relationship with a woman two decades ago. In the circumstance, it was not too much information, nor was it scary to reveal it. It’s simply one facet of my life.

What I was struck by, later, was the fact that I did not list depression as a lens. There are many other lenses it didn’t occur to me to mention that my coworkers did (about birth order, where one grew up, age, economic class growing up). Depression has been integral to my life for so long, yet it simply didn’t occur to me in that exercise. I take this to mean that the illness is being managed well. It was an interesting “Aha!” moment.