Sometimes Life Sucks…
Life At the Intersection of Yesterday and Tomorrow
My new book is now available on Amazon!
I’m really excited about this one! As my mom recently said, “I feel like all of the writing you’ve been doing the past several years was for this purpose.” And I have to agree.
Here is the introduction:
Life is meant to be lived in the present. But there are those times when it feels as though the present is a holding cell between the memories of yesterday and the dreams and fears of tomorrow. Those days or weeks or months when one wave hits after another and you feel as though you’re being beaten down by life itself. And you can’t imagine how you’re ever going to get back up again.
I occupied this state of limbo for several months after a tsunami divorce robbed me of life as I knew it in the summer of 2009. It began with a surprise text, from my partner of sixteen years, stating that he was leaving the marriage and leaving the state. That was followed by the discovery of fraud, marital embezzlement and bigamy.
That confusing and grueling period is one I hope to never repeat. Yet at the same time, I am now immensely grateful for its lessons. That experience has made me more compassionate towards myself and others and more understanding about why we respond to stress the way we do. It’s made me more grateful for what I have and less critical of what I don’t. And most importantly, it’s motivated me to help others move through their own challenges.
The difficult times in life both reveal who we are and shape us into what we can become. In the struggle, there is opportunity. In the challenge, there is growth.
Even though this book shares essays about my own personal experience, it isn’t about me. In fact, as I learned when facing my own trials, the details of our situations really don’t matter as much as we think and the broad strokes of our experiences all share certain common truths.
These selections address the challenges that we all, regardless of our circumstances, face throughout life – love, loss, fear, isolation, hope, and the challenge of getting back up when life has repeatedly kicked us down. You will laugh. You will cry. You will shake your head in recognition. And then you’ll be ready to get back up and begin living again.
Sometimes life sucks. But you don’t have to let it suck the life out of you.
Disclosure: This book contains some of the essays that have been published on my blog throughout the last five and a half years. They have been edited and organized in order to provide a “how to” guide for moving through trauma of any kind.
15 Ways Fear Hides in Plain Sight
It’s one of the few times my mom ever screamed at me. Because of that, the memory is seared into my mind.
I was six years old and ecstatic to visit the “Happiest Place on Earth” for the first time. We were standing at one of the monorail stations, waiting to board the next high-speed train. Curious about the way the unique system functioned, I darted off through the crowd to peer down into the track.
My mom’s angry shriek brought me back from the edge.
But it wasn’t really anger she was expressing, was it?
It was fear.
Fear is a strange emotion. Sometimes it’s easily visible – the shaking hands, the trembling voice, the widened eyes. It can be expressed as worry or anxiety. Or marked with the words, “I’m scared” or “I’m nervous.”
But even more frequently, fear masquerades as something else, especially in people who have been taught that it’s “weak” to show fear or, like with watching your child about to be hit by a train, the fear completely overrides the system. Additionally, fear is not a pleasant emotion and we often allow it to morph into other forms in an attempt to distance ourselves from the discomfort.
So the fear manifests as anger or control or dependency. And if we can learn to recognize – and respond to – the fear behind the mask, we can improve the communication and the interaction.
The following are fifteen common ways that fear hides in plain sight:
1 – Anger
“You’re never going to see the sun again!” the mom angrily threatens when her teenager shows up three hours after curfew. “You’re grounded for the rest of your life!” The parent certainly comes across as furious, with their reddened face and raised voice. But their slight tremble reveals the true emotion – fear that their child wasn’t returning home at all.
2 – Rejection
“I’ve realized I always seem to break up with guys right when we’re getting close,” my friend revealed to me one day. To the men, this behavior read as surprise rejection. Upon further consideration, my friend determined that she ended things out of a fear of growing closer and getting hurt.
3 – Isolation
I am fascinated with the people on the show Life Below Zero, especially Sue, who lives in an extremely isolated camp near the arctic circle. She never reveals much of life story, but her drive to be alone speaks to a deep-seated fear of being close to people.
4 – Irritability
“Why isn’t he picking up his phone,” I grumbled to myself, feeling my annoyance build. On the surface, my irritation stemmed from not having an immediate answer to my benign question. But beneath that impatience was a burgeoning fear that the call went unanswered due to some tragic accident.
5 – Stubbornness
Teaching me to ride a bike was a true exercise in my patience for my parents. Even though I was physically capable of mastering the technique by the age of 7 or so, it took an additional 3 years (and plenty of banana split bribes) for me to lose the training wheels for good. On the outside, I exhibited stubbornness, a resistance to practicing or to removing the supports. On the inside, I was afraid of falling.
6 – Control
Upon hearing about her daughter’s plans to marry before obtaining a college degree, a mother begins to try to dissuade the daughter and the intended husband through manipulation. It comes across as controlling, yet it stems from the mother’s fear that her daughter will not be able to look after herself.
7 – Meanness
The new girl showed up at my school in the middle of eighth grade. She was tall, blond, beautiful and had the best style any of us had ever seen. As the boys tripped over themselves in an attempt to get to know her, the popular girls began immediately to slander her reputation and make her life miserable. This “mean girl” routine was performed out of fear, the popular girls afraid that this interloper would steal their top spot and move them down the (very important in middle school) social ladder.
8 – Delusion
“I won the computer in a raffle at that networking thing I went to today,” explained my then-husband as he placed the new MacBook Pro on the kitchen island. The claim didn’t resonate as true, yet I still accepted his alibi. Because seeing the truth – that my husband was capable of extreme deceit, was too scary to face.
9 – Clowning
I had one student that would become disruptive towards the end of every unit of study. He would interrupt, annoy other students and basically treat the classroom like his own personal stage. Once I became aware of the cyclical nature of the behavior, it became apparent that the clowning was an attempt for him to manage his anxiety about not being prepared for the upcoming assessment.
10 – Distraction
I stood in line for the extreme roller coaster that advertised the steepest drop in the country. As people approached the start of the line, where the view of the first plummet jutted out at a sickening angle, they began to pull their phones out of their pockets and turn their attentions to something less frightening.
11 – Overly Cautious
“I don’t want to get a driver’s license,” the seventeen-year-old revealed to me. I don’t want that responsibility. The former student was one of the more mature ones that I have taught and was more than capable of safely handling a motor vehicle. Although she never admitted that she was afraid of the liability that comes with a license, it was clear that she was holding back out of fear.
12 – Judgmental
“I would NEVER get divorced,” a person on Twitter announced to me. “I would stay and fight for my marriage.” At first, I grew defensive, reacting to the subtext that I too-easily quit on my marriage. Then, it registered that this person’s judgment was really just a veil over their fear of losing their own marriage.
13 – Barriers
“Hi, I’m Lisa. I’m moving out of state within the next few months.” This was basically how I started my first several dates after divorce. I was afraid of getting hurt again, so I basically refused to allow anyone entry.
14 – Dependency
The eighth grader felt more like a preschooler, with his lack of maturity and independence. Once I met his mom and heard her story of a string of miscarriages and years of infertility finally leading to one successful birth, I understood. She was so afraid of losing another child, that she was determined to keep her surviving one a child forever.
15 – Overcompensation
He was easily the largest man in the gym, his biceps roughly the size of my head. Yet although he looked the part of confident bodybuilder, his physique was born of insecurity, a fear that he wasn’t quite enough.
How to Audit Your Personal Energy Budget (And Why It’s Critical That You Do)
When it comes to your money, I expect that you have some sort of budget or at least a sense of what is coming in (and where those dollars are coming from) as well as what is going out (and some idea of what that money is being spent on). Additionally, you have learned that spending more than you’re earning will eventually lead to trouble and that to avoid this you either have to spend less or somehow earn more.
We have an understanding and acceptance that there has to be a balance between money in and money out. Yet when it comes to something arguably even more important – our own energy – we are often much more careless and frequently operating in the red.
And just like financial debt is stressful and unsustainable, energy debt causes us to operate below our ideal and can even lead to an energy crisis and total breakdown. When we’re drained, we’re irritable, easily overwhelmed and have trouble making good decisions. And when we’re not at our best, we struggle to take care of others, so balancing energy in with energy out is especially critical for those in a caregiving role.
Self-care isn’t selfish. It’s imperative.
A personal energy audit is about becoming aware of where you’re allocating your limited energy and how you’re reviving yourself. Once you’ve taken these simple steps, you’ll be well on your way to a balanced energy budget.
The 7 Steps of a Personal Energy Audit
1 – Make a list of all of the things you do that require energy. The big-ticket items will probably come easily. To help think of the others, scan through a typical day and consider if each activity leaves you more or less energized than before. Pay special attention to your “plugged-in” activities such as television and social media. We think of these as restorative, but are they for you?
Build this list over a period of several days. Are you spending energy thinking about a loss in your life? Giving energy to a toxic person? Delivering energy to something or someone where there is nothing to show for it? Be honest with yourself. After all, you have to recognize it before you can change it.
Instead of a list, you can create a simple pie chart that illustrates what percentage of your energy is currently being allocated in each direction. This visual can be helpful to highlight any possible imbalance.
2 – Make a list of all of the things you do that provide you with energy. To help you think of ideas, reflect back on a day when you felt especially energized or contemplate what you would do with a full day by yourself. Add things to the list even if you’re not currently utilizing them. Don’t get confused between physical energy and emotional energy. You may find that something like a walk leaves you energized even though it requires the burning of calories. If you prefer a visual, this information can be displayed in a frequency chart.
3 – Start by looking for overlapping items. These are key because they operate at close to a zero sum game, both requiring and providing energy. Make note of these. If you’re so inclined, the information up to this point can even take the form of a Venn diagram.
4 – Next, consider your expenditure list and rough percentages dedicated to each item. Are these areas where you want to spend energy? Is there energy being wasted? Are their items you can eliminate or reduce? Can you shift some energy from an area that is only an expenditure to one of those that overlaps with the deposit column? You only have a finite amount. Don’t waste it.
5 – Look at the list of things that give you energy. Are there more areas that you can add? Are there any you can increase in frequency or duration? Strangely, we are often resistant to the very things that restore our energy. Try adding structure in the form of a schedule. Or, promise yourself that you’ll do five minutes of the activity (this works great with exercise) and then give yourself permission to stop at that point. You’ll probably find that you wish to continue. Additionnally, simply being conscious that these activities help to restore your energy balance may lower the initial resistance to action.
6 – Be mindful of the “Starbucks Effect.” Just like small expenditures of money can slip through our fingers without much conscious thought, small amounts of energy can be allocated other directions without our intent. And these small leaks can add up. Before you spend energy on someone or something, ask yourself if it is a worthwhile investment.
7 – Aim for an energy surplus or balance. If you add something to your expenditure list, either cut something else out or add find a way to “earn” more energy. Build your reserves in the easier times so that you can pull from your reserves during the difficult periods. And when the hard times do come, make a conscious effort to rebuild your energy at every available opportunity. Think of it like uncovering the coins beneath the couch cushions. Every little bit helps.
Over time, this conscious spending of your energy becomes habit and the periods of total exhaustion will be fewer and further between. And once your energy is going towards the things that directly benefit yourself, others or the world, you’ll find a sense of peace and well-being that comes from being your authentic self.
Why Building a Life After Divorce Is Like Starting a New Company
Lessons From the End of a Marriage 