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For Days of Self-Loathing

Oct 21, 2022 | Hope & Encouragement, Sovereignty, Women's Voice & Power

I came across a poem a few weeks back by Nikita Gill. The corner of the page was folded down — evidence that I’d read it before. I have no memory of such, which surprises me — given how worth-remembering it is. I’m pretty sure you’ll agree…

Affirmation for Days of Self-Loathing

On the days you find the mirror hard to look at,
remember there is a myth which says<

the face you have in this life
is the face of the person you loved most

in your last.
I know it’s just a myth

but think of how much more love
you would give yourself if it were true.

No matter how much has changed in my life over the years, how much I have changed, one thing has remained the same: my highly-honed and quick-to-activate self-critique. It’s caustic, harsh, and sadly, seemingly endless. “Self-loathing” is an accurate naming.

I don’t like admitting this.

It’s not all of me, of course. It’s only one voice I hear. Sometimes I can completely ignore it and other times dismiss it out-of-hand. I don’t even agree with it most of the time, but still, it remains — sitting in some dark recess of my mind, waiting for a moment to spring, and muttering under its breath in the meantime.

I sometimes hear myself say, “Oh, what I’d give to weigh what I did when I was 20, 30, 40, even 50…” Or I look closely at my 61-year-old face and wish for the skin I had during those same decades. But here’s what is true: I was just as critical of what I saw even then! I was just as unsatisfied. I was just as self-loathing. By sake of comparison, there was nothing to complain about! So, here’s what is even more true:

Self-loathing has nothing to do with our weight or our skin or any manner of things we might wish were different; it has nothing to do with the mirror at all!

We have internalized the belief that we are not acceptable as-is. We always want something to be different, something to change, something to be altered or adjusted or improved. Always! It doesn’t seem to matter if we’re 16 or 61, the pattern persists.

There has to be a better way, a braver way, a way to finally-and-at-last see ourselves as beautiful and whole no matter what.

A few mornings back, I woke up to this question:

What if I WAS the person I loved the most?

What would that mean?
What would that require?
What would I start doing?
What would I stop doing?
How would that feel?
Who would I be?

There are a million more questions that flow from these. I hope you’ll give yourself the time and space to ask them, that you’ll let yourself hear your most honest and vulnerable answers. Not the ones that rise up, unbidden, from the self-loathing voice that natters on. Instead, the ones that barely whisper from deep within. Harder to hear, to be sure; far more reliable and true.

It’s hard to imagine, given how familiar we’ve become with self-loathing, but were we to love ourselves the most, all the voices (and demons) within would be silenced — forever and ever, amen.

Underneath self-love (and an end to self-loathing) is something even more primary:

We must believe we are worthy of love in the first place. Others’, yes; our own, even more.

I wish there was some simple formula for this, some mantra we could repeat, some genie in a magic lamp, some potion to drink, some switch to flip. There’s no such thing. (But oh, the efforts of Capitalism to convince us that there is! We are bombarded by formulas and mantras and magic and potions and switches the instant we open Instagram or Facebook.)

No simple formula, *just* a life. This life. Your life. And mine.

A lifetime to let go of self-loathing. A lifetime to disbelieve and unlearn the lies. A lifetime to hear and trust our heart. A lifetime to allow, even welcome self-love. And maybe, if Nikita Gill is right, other lifetimes, as well.

3 Ways to Step into Gratitude

Mar 4, 2022 | Hope & Encouragement, Women's Wisdom

There’s a very old Hebrew Psalm that’s been circling in my mind lately. It’s an ancient prayer that is definitely not filled with praise or thanksgiving, instead, lament:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” (from Psalm 137)

In other words: How are we to be grateful or express thanksgiving when it is demanded of us? Or, maybe even more true, when we demand it of ourselves?

The list is long of things that can make gratitude feel arduous and disingenuous:

  • Racism, sexism, ableism, capitalism, colonialism, consumerism — an endless list of “isms.”
  • Family dynamics so tense that silence feels like your wisest choice — but also the most frustrating one.
  • Fears about money.
  • Fears about global warming.
  • A growing awareness about the ways in which the subconscious belief that you are “too much” is impacting, well, pretty much everything.
  • A resurfaced, painful memory from your childhood that keeps playing itself like a tape in your head, endlessly looping.
  • Hard parenting moments (if not full-on seasons, even years).
  • Political strife.
  • Uh, a pandemic!
  • Too many unspoken thoughts and feelings in your most important relationship(s).
  • A general feeling of anxiety and lostness; an internal swirling/churning that doesn’t seem to let up no matter what you try and frankly, doesn’t make a bit of sense to you.
  • Feeling like your life is in parts and pieces — disjointed, disparate, unhooked.
  • No matter how big, even loving, the group of people is, you still feel alone.

I could go on.

Asking the Hebrew people to sing songs when in captivity? You trying to feel grateful with this list? Impossible. Ridiculous. Unreasonable. Beyond capacity.

You feel the pressure to express, even feel gratitude when really, somedays, the best you can do is get out of bed.

To pretend like all of these things (and so many more) don’t actually exist — or to sweep them into some dusty corner for the day — so that you can smile and say the right things and feign gratitude is exhausting.

Feigned gratitude is also nearly-always demanded of us. Especially as women.

  • Just keep smiling (like Dori in Finding Nemo — “just keep swimming…”)
  • Make sure things are OK for everyone else.
  • Don’t upset the apple cart.
  • Keep your feelings to yourself.
  • Don’t complain.
  • And be grateful, will you? After all, things could be worse!

This last bullet point is a very slippery slope. I hear it often from clients (and even within myself at times). “Who am I to complain, compared to the problems that other people have?” “I hate to even talk about this; it feels so insignificant in the scheme of things.” “Really, I’m lucky; I’ve no right to not be grateful.”

Here’s the thing: all of those things can be true, may be true, but so are your struggles, your fears, your anxieties,  your family dynamics, your challenges, and your exhaustion!

You are not all good or all bad, all happy or all sad, all grateful or completely ungrateful. You are a complex and amazing woman who holds a multitude of realities and emotions and experiences and roles and responsibilities and heartbreaks and hopes — all at the same time!

This, my friend, is where gratitude can at least begin: acknowledge just how vast and deep all of you actually is — not only the “acceptable” parts but also (and maybe even more) those parts that you have the tendency to sweep into those dusty corners.

Gratitude has to be, gets to be, inclusive: the hard stuff as well as the beautiful, the ache as well as the celebration, the failure as well as the success, the loneliness as well as the love, the reality as well as the hope.

I hate to be too reductionist, but here’s what I believe:

Acknowledging what is true is gratitude.

Honestly name the reality of who you are,
and what you feel,
and all that you experience,
and all that makes you crazy,
and all that you wish you could change,
and every single thing you wish for, hope for, desire, and deserve.

That list? Those things? All of them? They are you!

When I consider you? All of you? Well, all I feel is grateful. Yes — you are conflicted and confused and complicated. Yes — you are generous and genuine and gracious. Yes — you get angry and frustrated and irritable. Yes — you feel afraid and worried and anxious. Yes — you are trusting and optimistic and willing to try yet again. Amazing!

The ability to take in, see, hold, and honor all of you is what generates gratitude. Acknowledging what is true. Not forced. Not demanded. And maybe even somewhat unexpected. It’s grace, really.

*****

So, 3 ways to step more deeply into gratitude?

  1. Acknowledge the complexity and beauty and conflictedness of all of you. Then you can better allow the same in others.
  2. Allow the pain of the world and its beauty. Then you can feel into just how deep and vast and infinite your emotions truly are. (One of them might just be gratitude.) YOU are that deep and vast and infinite!
  3. Begin to name the parts of you that you’ve worked so hard to overcome or at least keep hidden. Yes, it can feel overwhelming and scary; but it is the very thing that invites you to step into a story (and life) that is honest and expansive and true and real and raw and vulnerable and tender and fierce. And that? Mmmm. Definitely gratitude!

It is true: there is MUCH that gives us cause to be ungrateful — as it should! Endless internal and external messages that deny our value and worth. Patriarchy. Objectification. Sexual trafficking. Domestic violence. Pay and leadership inequity. Misogyny. The list is l o n g.

But this is also true: in the midst of all this, still, YOU are you!

Mysteriously, amazingly, serendipitously, incomprehensibly — you survive, your story endures, your wisdom persists, your heart loves.

I don’t know how else to respond, but to say thank you.

I’m hopeful that you can say the same — to yourself and for yourself, in grateful response to all of who you are — even now, even still, in the midst.

May it be so.

*****

Every week I write a letter to my subscribers. There’s no skimming the surface; instead, it’s filled with truth-telling and diving deep. I’d love for you to have it. And I’d be super-grateful. Every Monday morning — your inbox — from my heart to yours. SUBSCRIBE.

On hope (via Emily Dickinson)

Nov 5, 2021 | Hope & Encouragement, Spirituality

I have always loved these stanzas by Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops-at all

I’ve repeated them multiple times to myself. They speak to me. They make sense. They somehow “explain” the unexplainable nature of hope itself.

I’ve been asked, more than once, why I remain a hopeful person — often despite circumstances that would be more logically explained by desolation or despair. I never have a very good answer.

There was a time, decades ago, when I would have attributed it to my religious tradition — a fruit or quality or characteristic that was inherently mine to hold on to, to grip, to cling to no matter what. But that is not what I’d say today.

I’ve left religion, but hope has not left me.

Hope is a given, a truth, a “thing” that just is. Not a choice or some kind of mood that I fall into, hope is gritty and raw and fierce. Ever present. Mine to claim, stand in, and trust.

It is highly possible that you don’t see or experience hope this way at all, that it is far more often fleeting and distant than stable and felt. It is also highly possible that you have lived through (or do still) circumstances that have caused any hope you might have once known to dissipate and disappear — at least to wane. Believe me, I understand.

If either/both of these are the case, I’d invite you to consider the possibility that maybe hope is nothing you have to hold on to, or try to find again; maybe it was never lost in the first place. I’d love for you, like Emily Dickinson, to at least entertain the idea, even if just for a moment, that your hope has never stopped — at all — ever.

There are two more stanza’s to Dickinson’s poem…that I often forget about:

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.

Sometimes, a moment, a glimpse, a crumb, is all we need to return to hope — as our steadiest and most enduring companion along the way.

May it be so.

In tribute to Mary Oliver

Jan 21, 2019 | Sacred Stories, Writing

At the end of last week, in reflecting on Mary Oliver’s life – small respite in the wake of her death – I ran a search through my previous 12+ years of blog posts to see what I’d written of her before, where her poetry and prose have inspired my own words (and heart).

I’ve chosen one of those many posts as remembrance; more, as tribute.

**********

An edited version of writing from March, 2007.

Though I know unfruitful, even unanswerable, I sometimes find myself asking questions like, Can’t things be easier? Can’t my life go the way I want it to? Does it so-often have to feel like a struggle?

And then I begin to wonder: if the divine were to answer these questions the way I subliminally desire (translate: a tame, sedate, even predictable life) who would that god be?

Surely not the one that Sacred Text portrays.

That god, that understanding of the divine, is one who falls asleep in storms – not one who prevents them from happening at all.

A case in point:

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:35-41)

This is no tame, sedate, predictable story. For this is no tame, sedate, predictable god.

So, a better question to be asking is: Why would I ever anticipate, let alone desire, my life to be such?

If I choose to reflect on, and even believe in this god (not to mention being created in the image of such) – one who is nonplussed in a treacherous storm – how then shall I live?

Ahhh, yes. Dangerous. Risky. Unafraid. Hardly tame, sedate, and predictable.

Mary Oliver speaks of this better than me:

Maybe
Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry.

So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is
when something
different crosses
the threshold—the uncles
mutter together,
the women walk away,
the younger brother begins
to sharpen his knife.

Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes
Like wind over the water—
Sometimes, for days,
you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them
miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails;
before he rose and talked to it—
tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was—
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer sea.

This understanding of, conception of the divine is one I find myself far more able to believe in; a thousand times more frightening than the killer sea.

Then choosing the storm (vs. demanding the tame, the sedate, the predictable) feels right; more, sacred.

**********

Rest well, Mary Oliver – in the arms of the divine you named. In your absence we feel and know what you did: tender, luminous, and oh, so demanding, to be sure.

Sweet Sixteen

Oct 7, 2014 | Mothers and Daughters

As you well know, Abby, my words seem to know no end. In the midst, I hope you hear those that express my love for you in addition to those that make you nearly insane. I believe and trust that somewhere in the middle, between the two poles, you know my heart. But just to be sure, know this:

I have never loved you more than I do this day.

Every part of you – seen and unseen.
Every emotion – expressed and hidden.
Every sadness – revealed and withheld.
Every joy – known and secreted away.
Every hope – yours to hold, mine to marvel.

Though I do not begin to know everything – even most – of what goes on in your brilliant mind and beautiful soul, I do know that another’s words speak profoundly and poignantly to both. Instead of my voice, his – expressing my heart:

Protect Your Magic
the problem is you think
you are not magic.
from any distance you
appear as all things stunning
do; they force us to forfeit
all we knew before.

you are exploding stars
and tragically forgotten truths
the way the ocean sways
and ever so illuminating
moons.
you are as magic
as magic gets,
as brilliant as brilliance
is,
as unexplainably
beautiful as anything
has ever been.
to think you are not magic,
well, darling,
i guess even our thoughts
can betray us
and be fools.
protect your magic.
~ Christopher Poindexter

You are magic, Abby. In so many ways you cannot begin to fathom, imagine, understand, or dream. And an obvious, but severe understatement: your presence in my life, from the moment I knew of your existence to this very day, can be described as nothing else:

“you are as magic as magic gets…”

Happy 16th Birthday, sweet girl.

I love you.

Always.