Victim-hood

This is a very interesting topic for me, predominately because it is just so loaded. Nobody wants to be called, let alone ‘made’, a victim. Yet so many of us cling to our victim-hood.

I can see why we cling to our victim identity. Here are a few usual suspects;

• It’s easier to be a victim than to take responsibility.
• We don’t know how to do something different.
• Its safer to be a victim. We can’t fail at it.
• Better the devil you know; being a victim of something else could be worse.
• It’s a great excuse not to achieve what you want.
• We think moving on or taking responsibility gives the perpetrator a free pass.

Victim means powerless, effected by outside circumstances. Whilst it is true that we may be a victim on the initial event [read crime, retrenchment, breakup, discrimination, stock market falls, even traffic jams] that’s where the authentic victim-hood ends. There is no rule dictating that we must remain a victim days, weeks or months later.

I don’t mean to sound harsh. I am not without empathy and experience in this arena. I spent two years hiding the pain and physical scars of an assault, before I had the courage to talk and to heal. Whilst healing takes time, unless you are merely a victim of a traffic jam, the moment you make the decision (to heal) you are no longer a victim.

What you were a victim of does not define who you are. Your reactions to such situations do. How long must we perpetuate the event in our minds? When will we realise that continuing with our victim status only hurts us, often more than the initial event did? Become the survivor, star, diva, entrepeneur, beauty, healer, director, leading-lady of your life and ditch the victim.

What have you triumphed over?

The power of humility

So many people, not just young people, are thwarted by their desire to ‘do good’ in the world. At the heart of the matter is the concept that in order to have a positive impact on the world they must be important, well known, powerful and highly influential. The belief often goes that in order to ‘do good’ we must first be a CEO, a millionaire, found a charity, be Oprah, have articles written about us and have 1000′s of fans and admirers of our work.

Yes this is one blueprint of how to have a positive impact on the world, but only one. The ways to positively affect the world are as individual as you are. Literally. Doctors heal the sick. Charities help those in need, raise awareness of issues we don’t want to look at and lobby governments. Research scientists work to eradicate diseases and to prevent the often deadly spread of those we can’t yet squash. Other researchers help us understand ourselves more, our communities better and lay the foundation for the way forward. Inventors create new ways of doing things – safer, better ways. Builders, well, build… houses, schools, hospitals and ramps for wheelchair access.

But the essence of doing good is that it brings joy, peace, happiness, compassion or mercy to the world. Doing good reduces violence and intolerance, prejudice and ignorance. Doing good can be raising a child, baking a pie, making music, playing, or inventing something so useful it is revolutionary, like this. Doing good has absolutely nothing to do with age; Louis Braille had developed and refined his ingenious code by the time he was just fifteen. Doing good has everything to do with the intention and willingness to give of yourself in an authentic way.

Stop trying to change the world. Stop believing that the only truly worthwhile life is one lived in the spotlight. Stop being so afraid that you will amount to nothing that you miss the opportunity to make a difference, however small today. Humility has the power to change the world.

Why sweet gets you no where

Sweet gets you nowhere, because life takes guts.

Love, real love takes courage. The kind of love where you would crawl over broken glass for your beloved isn’t the result of sickly sweet SMS’s and bedroom eyes. Love is the result of accepting each other warts, skeletons, flaws and all. Warts and skeletons are gory things to witness and overwhelm sweet dispositions.

The career of your dreams won’t be granted to you with the puff of glittery Jeanie smoke. The career of your dreams stems from you being good at what you do. Natural talent or not, being really good takes practice and work.

Family, like everything else takes work. Ideally they will support you through think and thin and presumably you will do the same for them. This is work. Thin ain’t much fun. Sweet just won’t cut it.

Don’t misunderstand. Grace, being personable, being compassionate and composure are all qualities I aspire to. But unless our sweetness is based in a foundation of strength, tenacity and courage it is mearely a glamour. So if where you are going involves love, family or career sweet will get you no where,

Your heroes are fallible

Your heroes are fallible. Be they mythical, fiction or human they are flawed. Despite their flaws you saw something in them worth admiring. Herein lies the lesson. You too are flawed and you too are worth admiring.

One of the greatest influences in my life is just under 4 feet tall. Yet more than once she stared down (up) fully grown men, and won. She buried more boyfriends in the war (WW2) than I care to recall. She dared to date a black man when it was an excommunicable taboo. She raised 4 children and miscarried 2. She buried her husband after watching lung cancer steal his very breath. She did ‘men’s work’ during the week while the men were fighting WW2 and was chastised for wearing pants to church on Sunday.

I love her humility.

Her utter fearlessness.

Her bottomless compassion.

Her selflessness.

Her ability to be stronger than iron in the face of adversity and gentle as a lamb when some needs a soft place to fall.

Only she was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer Dementia yesterday. Her humility and selflessness have evaporated she is always anxious and even curt. She barely registers the emotions of those around her and is oblivious to the needs of anybody but herself.

The tears streaming down my face now feel like a burning betrayal to the woman she used to be. Who would have told me not to waste my tears over something I can’t change. I am struggling to find the lesson in all of this:

Am I to understand what who we are and what we do is to some extent out of our control?

Am I to understand that there is inherent balance in the universe and we must all be selfless and selfish?

Am I to learn to love this new incarnation of her personality despite it all?

The best I can come up with is that our heros are fallible.

The perfect storm…

I have been described as kaleidoscopic before. And I tend to agree with the description. I have many facets and in isolation it would be easy to see nothing but a bag of contradictions. For example:

• I am good at setting and enforcing boundaries but I will move mountains for the benefit of my family (even if means I encroach my boundaries a little, or a lot.)
• I have no problem pissing people off and upsetting them standing up for myself but more and more I can justify less and less occasions where I pissing others off
• I give no weight to convention, just because others have done it before me doesn’t make it right, necessary or better but I am getting married, at least in part, for conventions sake
• I am a super calm person who handles stress well yet I break down into borderline panic attacks when I go to plan my wedding
• I am not materialistic and competitive but I fear I may have a bridezilla lurking inside of me that is

Can you see a pattern emerging? Let me spell it out for you. I am a normal, healthy, happy, reasonable, capable, compassionate, down to earth, confident woman except when it comes to all things wedding planning.

Just writing this post has me biting my nails. Is it any wonder that I have been engaged for 4 years without so much as throwing an engagement party or setting a wedding date?

What crazy thing is your Achilles heel?

Fuel

I have long suspected that I am at my most effective when I am emotional. It is a phenomena that works in my favour because I am far more emotional than analytical. In fact in a job I had a few years ago the whole team was personality tested. I got 25 out of 25 for ‘makes decisions emotionally’ the next highest score in that category was a 3. When I say ‘emotional’ I don’t mean throwing vases at the wall, sobbing breathlessly or rocking in the foetal position I mean fueled by deep feeling.

If a task, person or goal doesn’t have meaning for me I struggle to even pretend to care. Something either makes me feel something or it is purely a fact that may, or may not be, useful to the analytical side of my brain. My friends and my poor partner know when I have deemed something merely an analytical fact because I (rather rudely) interject with a comment along the lines of “The point. Can we get to the point?” On the collorary, if I have attached meaning and emotion to something, even something as mundane as stuffing envelopes, I will give myself fully to the task and attack it with zeal.

So imagine how validated I felt when I read that a study by Dr Gary Macpherson concluded that it is emotional reaction not innate skill that makes a person learn faster.

Fantastic, now I have scientific studies illustrating that learning Portuguese now that I have a baby really is easier than when I was childless, because now I am emotionally invested in talking to him in his Daddy’s native tongue. Pity the study also proves that the reason I haven’t made any headway in learning about rock climbing is because I couldn’t give a toss about it, not just because I have no skill in it.

*image credit Ottoman42

Secret desires

We don’t often admit (to ourselves) what we really want. If knowing what you want doesn’t terrify you and exhilarate you at the same time, then you don’t really want it.

We tell ourselves lies about what we want and justify them to others. We settle for lesser goals. We try to satisfy our appetite with more palatable pursuits. We compromise. We play it safe.

There is a popular, and flawed, theory about why we avoid our true desires. The theory suggests that we avoid what we really want because we are afraid of failure. Yes, failure sucks. I am yet to meet anybody who enjoys it. But I do know, and know of, plenty of people who relish in the memory of failure experienced and overcome. Failure is a situation, an event, an opinion, a belief. We aren’t deeply afraid of failure.

We are utterly petrified of anguish. We fear the heartbreak & the pain of watching our dreams perish before our eyes.

So often we don’t surrender to what we really wanted until we are on the brink of losing it. The aversion to the agony is stronger than the desire for the sublime reward of realising your deepest secret dream.

Don’t bite your tongue. Don’t doubt your gut. Don’t be afraid of knowing and chasing what you really want. Listen to the quiet voice within or else you might find that you started to fight way too late and only ended up with a front row seat to watch it slip away.

There will never be a right time. There will never be a perfect situation. It will never get easier, safer. Surrendering to your deepest wants will always be fraught with risk, the risk of being hurt in the deepest possible way.

Truth: I want another baby*. I realised this when the doctor told me the test was negative.

*Note – It is now a goal of mine for the next 5 years to have another baby. I won’t be trying for a baby in the immediate future though. Mum and Dad please don’t freak out.

Spring Clean

So today is September 1; officially Spring. The time if renewal, anticipation of the fun, heat and festivities of Summer and the beginning of the end of the current year. There is nothing better than starting Spring afresh, (that goes for Autumn too, if you reside in the Northern Hemisphere) using this transitory season to get things sorted, ordered, cleaned, organised and lined up in a row.

I’m not talking just about cleaning the junk out of old cupboards, but spring cleaning your loose ends, relationships, projects and goals. For me, knowing that I am on track and that I wont end up on New Years Eve making the resolution to sort out this years messes is liberating and leaves me feeling positive. Leaving it to the start of Summer and I always feel like I am playing catch up.

So without further ado, my internal Spring Clean.

• Tick the completed items off your someday list*
• Add any new items to your someday list*
• Delete anything that has been sitting on your ‘to-do’ list for longer than a month – its not that important. Or move it to your someday list* f it is.
• Scroll through the contacts on your mobile/email/Facebook. Message anyone you have been meaning to catch up with.
• Delete any old contacts on your mobile/email/Facebook that you no longer need.
• Review your 2009 goals. Amend them if they aren’t relevant. Action plan them if they are.
• Think of your close friends. Are there any rifts, favours, borrowed items etc that can be repaired or returned? If so, do it.
• If you haven’t spoken to you Mum/Grandmother for longer than a month, call them already!

Now to the hard part. For this you need to be honest with yourself.

• Think of all the things that make you genuinely sad. Make a list. For each of the items decide if there is something you can do to make the situation any better, if so do it. If there is nothing you can do then pray/meditate or whatever you do to make peace with the situation.
• Repeat for Angry, Depressed, Hurt, Guilty, Fearful, Lonely, Rejected, Jealous & Frustrated.

I’d love to hear how you go with this, or what you like to do at the turn of the seasons.

* A Someday list is an adaptation of the ‘Someday/Maybe’ items in David Allens’s How To Get Things Done organisational system. A book I highly recommend. In essence anything that you would like to do some day & any project you would like to begin but don’t currently have the time, resources or inclination to begin belong on this list.

Innocence

They say that our times have lost their innocence. Granted, we are no longer living in a society that could be described as naive, unworldly or inoffensive but all innocence is not lost. I think it is time for innocence to make a comeback. Sophistication and her sisters jaded and skeptical have had their day in the sun and I for one am ready for something, well nicer.

Though the world has long lost its innocence I don’t believe that innocence is extinct. Our relationships can be innocent. Innocence can also be described as; freedom of cunning and deceit, simplicity and harmlessness. I don’t know about you but those adjectives also describe the way I’d like to interact with my friends and family.

It is so damned easy these days to shoot first and ask questions later. It is standard practice to assume everybody is out to get you. We jump to conclusions every day and more often than not those conclusions are of the unfavourable variety. We defend ourselves all the time in anticipation of an attack and as a result keep people at a distance. Relationship status on Facebook even offers the option ‘its complicated’. I am in no way suggesting that its wise to walk down a dark alley at night or to assume multinational companies are playing fairly, just that we could be nicer to the girl at the checkout, the guy on the bus, the crazy neighbour and our colleagues.

If you too would like more innocence in your life try these on for size:

• Everybody is doing the very best they can with what they have
• Nobody makes a decision, that at the time, they think is a bad one
• Most people respond well to honesty and honest feedback
• Most people blossom when given the benefit of the doubt
• Most people don’t realise they are being offensive
• Most times if you bring a transgression to someones attention you will get a full apology

So next time the service isn’t great, your friends cancels at the last minute or a colleague is frosty presume innocence. The alternative jaded negative view hurts no-one more than you.

The female connection

When I moved back to Sydney I had a dream about a kitchen table. And a couch. But the table was the important part. I desperately wanted a table that people [read female friends] would gather around and share, connect, eat and laugh.

It didn’t quite happen that way.

I am persistant and determined, some may even say stubborn. So I tried to artifically create my dream by holding ‘women’s circles’. It didn’t work becase it wasn’t the spontaneous, authentic connection I (I’d like to think we) wanted. So I gave up for a while.

I believe there is something immesurably powerful in women connecting with other women. Sharing, teaching, supporting eachother. In times gone by this kind of connection and support was inherent in the way our societies were organised. The gathering of women was vital to the passing down of wisdom; about womens bodies, cycles, birthing, childraising, relationships. Femininity was respected, honoured, revered and even feared. It was fear that drove the religious aristocracy to foster competition amoung women  & stamp out  women’s gatherings.

We may have been out in the wilderness for hundreds of years, but we are coming back. Instead of gathering in ceremony we attned conferences and womens networking events. Instead of cooking over the hearth we are meeting for coffee. We are bringing birth back into our homes and entursting our babies to midwives. We gather. We connect. We harness the power of Web 2.0.

Yes we are women of a new millennium, but we have ancient bones. We still deeply yearn for female connection and the power we generate when together is a force to be reckoned with.

What I learned about myself playing Chess…

1. Safety first. I take risks, but only calculated ones.
2. I am only happy when I can anticipate my opponent.
3. Unless I have a strategy I feel vulnerable (even when my King is safe and sound).
4. Tactics are the natural love child of strategy and methodology.
5. I don’t like to feel controlled.
6. I dislike being reactive.
7. If the ship is sinking I look for ways to jump. If I think it’s a lost cause I wont flog a dead horse.
8. I underestimate myself.
9. I find it easier to see the pros of another and the cons of myself.
10. I don’t have a poker face.
11. I care way too much about pawns (Compassion or stupidity? You tell me.)
12. I’m not comfortable with the ethos the end justifies the means.
13. Once I have a strategy, I am like a dog with a bone.
14. Once a piece has a role it pains me to have it multi-task.
15. I avoid direct competition for a reason (its not good for the soul).
16. I can be spiteful.
17. I strongly dislike not being skillful in an area.
18. I can turn anything into an exercise in self awareness.

Solid ground

Getting your footing is a double edged sword. It is a beginning and an end. A life raft & a trap. It is a welcome reprieve from running in shifting sand, the earth crumbling beneath you, keeping you moving constantly searching out something firmer, safer. Ironically, as soon as we feel solid ground beneath our weary feet and calm breathing replaces our panicked panting we begin to move again. Even if we are taking a well trodden path there is no telling when the earth beneath our feet will give way again. Or else we stay here too long, clinging to the relative safety until the wind and weather erodes our rock and the earth shifts beneath us yet again.

For the longest part of my teenage years I never wanted the house in the suburbs, the husband or the kids. The prospect of my life revolving around nappy changes, bills and constant compromising of my wants and needs crushed my burgeoning spirit. Yet here I am. The perfect lesson of ‘you become what you most fear’. But I’m happy none the less. Proof that when you release your judgements you can learn to love anything.

I took a few Big risks around 19-20, they blew a massive hole in my life plan – the solid ground gave way to shifting sand. I found safe ground when the first risk paid off with a solid career in banking. I ran head long into shifting sand when I moved interstate, abandoning my career, to begin life with my boyfriend of 4 months (my second risk). I found solid ground again and really enjoyed our time in self imposed exile together. Since then the earth has fallen away and I have ran to and from solid ground many times.

Something I know for sure is that if you get too comfortable somewhere your rock will turn to sand and force you to move on, to grow.

I feel like I have been on solid ground for a little while now and I am feeling the gentle warning tremors on the earth readying itself to move. In the past I have been the one to run into the next challenge. From the outside looking in I’m told it appears fearless (or stupid). In reality it is a compulsion to grow & develop.

This time I find myself wanting to cling to now; to watch my son at this beautiful age forever, to live by the beach, to continue to have family as our focus as we quietly build the foundations of our lives. But alas, the winds of change are rustling in the leaves. I don’t know what they will bring.