Category Archives: Social Science

The Process of Change

This metaphor came my way when I was in graduate school. I don’t know whom to credit (if you know, please tell me). I’m posting it here as a way of managing my frustration. A good friend is repeating a self-destructive cycle of behavior, and yet she has the insight to stop and change. I’m worried she won’t. And I’ll need to make a decision. It’s difficult to watch someone abdicate responsibility and unhealthy, to some degree, to remain in relationship with that person. I wish she would learn the lessons below.

Chapter 1: I was walking down the street – there was a big hole in the sidewalk – I fell in. It wasn’t my fault, and it took me a long time to get out of it.

Chapter 2: I was walking down the street – there was a big hole in the sidewalk – I tried to avoid it but I fell in. It wasn’t my fault. It took me a long time to get out of it.

Chapter 3: I was walking down the street – I saw the big hole in the sidewalk, but I fell in it anyway. It was my fault, but I knew how to get out of it quickly by now.

Chapter 4: I was walking down the street. I saw the big hole in the sidewalk. I carefully walked around it.

Chapter 5: I chose a different street.

The Difficult One

His name was Jason*, and he was four feet of willful energy. He, his sister, and his parents were residents in the homeless family shelter where I volunteer. My job was to read to the children, or play with them, and then help make 65 bag lunches for the next day.

A recent arrival, this eight-year-old was the type of child whom it becomes easy to resent. He charged toward other children, grabbing crayons and markers away. He boisterously demanded his wishes be met. He threw small toys. He ran and shouted despite being asked, and then told, not to do so. He incited other children to misbehave or agitated them to the point of anger or tears. He pushed other kids. He was unruly and disrepectful. He his behavior was not, to my eyes, endearing.

One little girl had a temporary heart-shaped tattoo made of shiny sparkles on clear tape. Jason saw it and demanded to have one too. He wanted hers; she refused. I think he might have tried to take it if I hadn’t suggested we get him one of his own. We found the volunteer who had given out the others. She opened the box, revealing Jason’s choices. Did he want a star, a dragonfly, a zigzag? No! No! He wanted the tattoo made of pink sparkles that said: LOVE.

Each letter was separate. She asked Jason where he wanted them. He pointed to his left arm, and she affixed the L. She was about to put the O next to it, but he stopped her. He wanted it on his face. “Where?” she asked, “On your cheek?”

“No, put it on my chin,” was his reply. “Are you sure? It would look better on your cheek,” she offered. Jason insisted, and so the O went on his chin. The V was placed on the back of his right hand, with the E landing on his leg. He beamed.

Another girl came in and requested a tattoo. As Jason passed her to leave, he touched his hand to her back and said to me, “She loves me!” Her response was emphatic. “No I DO NOT LOVE HIM!” He ran and she chased him. I followed to supervise, and he raced toward me with a brown magic marker and a sheet of notebook paper. “How do you spell love?” he asked. Telling him he was wearing the word didn’t matter. He wanted me to write it, so I wrote in large block letters, LOVE.

He then ran around laughing and showing that piece of paper to everyone. He held it up to the nursery window where the very little children played with caregivers. He showed it to the older kids in the computer room. He ran up to the program supervisor and proudly thrust it at her, saying, “Look! Look what I’ve got!” She smiled indulgently.

And here I’d been steeled against him at the beginning, resenting his behavior. I’d been tempted to interpret his character by it. If anything, Jason especially needed love.

[*named changed to protect identity]

Ah, The Girl Crush

This is not a new phenomenon. Women, especially young women, have always had such feelings of adoration for each other. Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively. What’s new is the current generation’s willingness to express their ardor frankly.

–Stephanie Rosenbloom, She’s So Cool, So Smart, So Beautiful: Must Be a Girl Crush

I’ve been fortunate to experience this mutually in several friendships. When I meet a woman who is intelligent, curious, expressive, compassionate, with whom I connect, sometimes there is a synchronicity that sparks a lovely, intense regard. I believe I only learned the term “girl crush” in the past couple of years; it is quite apt.

[link via my brother, Tony, who often happens across cool articles that he knows I’ll enjoy]

Real Life Fairy Tales

I completed the first writing exercise from Your Life as Story. The author assigned a fairy tale — the writerÂ’s own. She said it could be three sentences or as long as one wanted. It simply needs to contain:

  1. A beginning in which something happened so that a person had a problem and a need.
  2. As the person pursued his or her desire a struggle ensued.
  3. And in the end the person changed with a realization.

She instructed not to overthink these, but to just start with “once upon a time” and to write in third person.

The second part of the exercise was to write a short letter to a grandchild or child sharing what it is I learned from my life. This letter should contain an important insight, vision of reality, or bit of wisdom I wish to pass on.

As I wrote my story, I realized all the details I left out, as well as the different perspectives from which this tale could be told. For example, within this story about my endeavor to get an education await the relationships I had that started and ended; these too had an effect on my goal, but to incorporate them would overwhelm the tale. As I wrote, I also saw other fairy tales I could tell about that time of my life offering other themes and lessons; and, of course, I detected a cache of narratives about other times of my life.

Mostly I had fun writing the story, and this in itself made the endeavor worthwhile.

I see what I created as raw material, pieces of which can be used as source for a poem, or re-worked for an article or essay. This book is amazing. IÂ’ve only just begun, but her premise is to teach how to use story structure in writing autobiography. IÂ’ve never been interested in writing fiction, though IÂ’ve felt as though I should be; I perceived nonfiction as the domain of published novelists — a prerequisite, I suppose. I hesitated to write seriously or consider myself a candidate for publication, because the most natural form is telling my own life stories; being an obscure person among billions, I thought it not worth pursuing. Then I discovered blogging, which provided a means of expression. But itÂ’s too rough — the result is not polished. It is also too immediate; it doesn’t encourage discretion. Others can be harmed in very real ways by self-revelation, especially on the Internet, and this awareness begets self-censorship. IÂ’ve been drawn to reading memoirs in recent years, almost more so than fiction. I think I have found my genre. I may never share what I write, but it now feels real and legitimate.

All At Once By Remote Control

Roads aren’t real anymore. All roads are now metaphors about the road. Most people would rather stay home. In their homes they feed on lots of clichés about the road so that they won’t feel as if they’ve stopped moving. Only the dead stop moving and most people don’t want to be dead. Every couch potato dreams himself or herself on the road, and they are, thanks to TV, which gives them the illusion that they are somewhere else. Everyone lives on TV now, which is everywhere and nowhere. People are in the Amazon, in the Arctic, on the streets of Detroit, in the Southwest, in San Francisco all at once, by remote control. When TV travelers do travel they go to places they’ve seen on TV, straight into the tourist postcards and never see what they haven’t already seen at home. If they stumble on something that’s never been on TV they shoot it with the video camera and then it’s on TV. They go from postcard to postcard by plane so they never touch the road.

–Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

The Breathing of Poetry

There is a sense in which poetry is not so much the writing of words as it is the movement of breath itself. To write it, you must pay attention to the breathing of poetry, to all speech as breath, to the relationship of our thoughts and emotions and the actual way they fill our bodies.

–Robert Hass, from The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets by Bill Moyers

Doldrums

I’m struggling.

Lately I’ve detected that I am supremely bored with blogging. I don’t read many blogs, I lack inspiration to comment, and I don’t feel much like posting or replying to comments. I am beholden to my habit, my readers, and even the layout of the blog. I pay attention to nit-picky, irrelevant details such as adding the books I’m reading and watching my stats. It doesn’t provide pleasure or release. It is a sham activity that yields the illusion of busy-ness and involvement while I remain disengaged.

I am on break for the summer, but the company I work for may not call me back to work until October. It’s a startup that provides supplemental education services, and my employment depends on the company securing contracts. This cannot occur until school starts and parents make their selection as to what company they want providing the service. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that will be a job. So this leaves me wondering what I want to do with my time.

The question of what job to seek is complicated by the fact that what I truly love to do is unavailable to me. Because I will not undergo a second, duplicate master’s program, 3000-hour internship, and state testing, I am not permitted to seek clinical jobs in mental health or general social services; nor can I have a private practice as a therapist. I’m a woman of diverse interests, skills, and talents, and I know I am quite capable of many types of work. I simply don’t know what I want. This knowledge is muddled by the ambivalence my husband and I feel about living here. We’ve begun discussing in earnest whether to return to Austin. Nothing is decided, but it’s under serious consideration. So what employment do I seek when I’m not invested in staying? However, leaving isn’t an option yet, and I need to do something.

I’m lonely. Oh, I’ve been volunteering — at the city library and Hands On Bay Area. I exercise at Curves and have become acquainted with women there. I chat with grocery store clerks and greet people I meet on my walks. But my closest friends are in Austin, and while we talk on the phone and email, it is disembodied community. I spend enough time with the ethereal community of cyberspace; I need flesh-and-blood friends. Seeds of friendship I planted when I arrived here didn’t take root, in part because my life was full of disruption for many months with family issues, and in part because the relationships simply didn’t click into place. I recently visited a UU church and enjoyed the experience, but then I miscarried. I have difficulty pulling energy together to foray into more of the uknown and lay groundwork for community. I would be doing this alone, since my husband and I have differing positions on spirituality and church.

In the 12 months I’ve lived here, the only original art I’ve created is a tiny collage that I used on my name badge when I worked at a bookstore. And writing? I’m wasting it. I’m piddling away my hours on blogging, which provides an outlet but also bleeds away my time, attention, and energy which could be applied to a more substantial writing endeavor. I’m reading prodigiously, but not with attentiveness.

I also feel the shadow of residual grief from both my father-in-law’s death four months ago and my miscarriage three weeks past. Oh, and I’m angry. At myself, for not filling my needs. At life, for continuously changing. About all the difficult transitions in my life in the past 18 months. About the fact that I am in control of very, very little.

I’m struggling with dislocation and disenchantment. I need purposeful employment. I need a muse. I need self-discipline. I am one bundle of confused, aimless need.

Ugh.

Identification, Please

on the road to somewhere

My life would have been much simpler, I think, if I had learned how to drive when I came to America. An American without a car is a sick creature, a snail that has lost its shell. Living without a car is the worst form of destitution, more shameful by far than not having a home. A carless person is a stationary object, a prisoner, not really a grownup. A homeless person, by contrast, may be an adventurer, a vagabond, a lover of the open sky. The only form of identification an American needs is a driver’s license.

Time and time again I stood humiliated before a bank clerk who would not admit to my existence because a passport meant nothing to her. Over and over I’ve had to prove my existence to petty clerks and policemen for whom there is only one valid form of ID. Driven to despair, I wrote my first autobiography, The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius, at age twenty-three for the sole reason of having my picture on the cover. Whenever a banker asked to see “some identification,” I pulled the book from my mirrored Peruvian bag and pointed to the cover. More often than not, it was not enough. “What we mean is,” the flustered interpreters of rules and upholders of reality would insist, “we want to see some proper ID!” Books have never been proper to those in charge of upholding the status quo.

–Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

Yes, I took this photo while I was driving. Slowly.

Also see: A driver’s license as national ID?

Why I Loved Counseling and Miss It So

Though this quote pertains to ministry, the work of psychotherapy was also rooted in what the words below describe.

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.

–Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

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