I Wrote A Book. (And I owe you all so much).

photo by Sam Shorey

NOTE: Places I Stopped on the Way Home can be purchased by clicking here or by clicking above on the "ebook" tab just under the blog title.

I didn’t think I could do it. It feels important to say that now.

Perhaps that sounds ridiculous. It’s just about sixty pages. I didn’t reinvent the wheel. And yet I didn’t think I could do it.

For a good long while there I’d have to sort of trick myself into opening the word document. And then opening the word document became a habit. And finally a pleasure. And here we are.

It was like chipping away at stone. That was the experience. It all seems so obvious now, but for much of the process I hadn’t a clue what I was doing.

And then the process became the thing. The most magnificent, difficult, wonderful daily struggle.

It was worth it for that alone. It was worth it because doing things you don’t think you can do may very well be the most exceptional feeling in the world. It was worth it because moving through fear is a thing that no one can take away from you.

I walked to work yesterday without a stitch of makeup on my face, my hair pulled into a messy ponytail, two very real (and large) blemishes on my cheeks, but I felt like the most beautiful girl in the world. About this a friend said, the-happy-girl-strut is the best. And yes, I do believe she is right. The happy-girl-strut is the best.

If no one had ever read it, it still would have been worth it. If no one had ever bought it, it still would have been worth it.

I was listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lessons podcast (episode 12) a few weeks ago. In it, she and Brene Brown speak about creativity and the process of making things. About Art (yes, with a capital A) Brene Brown says, “Without it, I am not okay. And without everyone else’s we are not okay.”

Much of the work Brene Brown does--and so what they discuss in the episode--has to do with redefining success. The victory is in the attempt--the leap, it has little to do with the result. Liz Gilbert says, “When did inspiration promise us that it owes us anything? It owes you nothing, except the transcendent experience of working with it at all.”

Sixteen essays. Sixty pages. Not so much. And yet, at times, a transcendent experience.

It was worth it for the process alone, and yet each time a person buys it--each time one of you tweets or instagrams or sends me a wonderfully encouraging email, I am buoyed by that action. Life is hard and the leap is worth it, but landing on the soft ground of your encouragement is an experience unlike any I’ve ever known. And so I offer you my humble thanks--my deepest gratitude.

Purchase Places I Stopped on the Way Home here!

Bearer of Goodness

Occasionally you meet a person and you think, this person is touched by divinity. Elizabeth and I met five years ago now--and only once--but I have marveled from afar, all the time since, as her life has tumbled forward. She has an exceptional mind (in that I think it works in a way that very few do), and an exceptional heart. And if I am very honest, her writing often causes me to set down my pen for fear that I'll never write anything as good. (But it also drives me to write more in the hope that I will). 

And, as is evident, from the photos above, she is a visual artist of some small amount of talent (those are paper crowns). 

In her nearly perfect corner of the internet she posted about her sixth grade class and their birthday tradition. I emailed her today to ask if I could share it here because what follows puffed my chest full of hope this morning:

"Before we collect our crowns one final afternoon in May, I gather my subjects to me in semi-circle. By luck my birthday fell last in the school year, and I wield my queenship to keep a captive audience for one final address. The room is quiet, hushed and still, and there is a sacred sweetness to our parting that floods my whole being in what feels like pulsing, radiant light. You are kings and queens, I tell them, and every day you establish your kingdom. I hope it is a good and a peaceable one, I hope it is a stronghold to you and a place of refuge for others. I hope you reign long, and well. I hope you rule with a sense of wonder, an abiding joy, and the unyielding banner of kindness."  

I believe in self-love. I believe in honesty. I believe that the most profound thing we can do is cultivate a meaningful wholeness within ourselves. I think the greatest successes are often deeply personal. I worry sometimes that as a country--as a culture--we think self-care is selfish, unnecessary. That we believe to spend too much time thinking about ourselves is inherently egotistical or narcissistic. But what if as sixth graders every last one of us was taught that we are a kingdom unto ourselves? And with that great privilege comes great responsibility. To govern well, to till the soil and improve the land, to create a safe harbor for others. What if the idea of a "kingdom" creates just enough distance from ourselves that we can actually get behind caring for and bettering ourselves? We believe monarchs and leaders to have agency. What if all sixth graders were asked to cultivate their own agency? What if we were taught that caring for ourselves (our kingdom) is actually how we care for others? 

Last year Agapi Stassinopoulos wrote the following: "The Greek word for the state of happiness is 'euphoria,' and the noun 'euphoros' means the bearer of goodness. One of the fundamental elements to finding euphoria is to be that euphoros -- bearer of goodness -- for yourself and for others. This means radical generosity, starting with yourself. 

If we see ourselves as the bearers of good, wherever we go we will create an atmosphere of goodness around us, and we will spread a sense of well-being to others. We will start to do good things for ourselves without thinking about it, and we will start having good thoughts about ourselves. We will experience positive emotions and produce positive outcomes because we will be connecting to our innate goodness. And from that place we will bring it to others."

"I hope you rule with a sense of wonder, an abiding joy, and the unyielding banner of kindness."

What good might happen if we all approached our lives in this way?

A List for a New Decade

Eat kale when so inclined. Carry a purse that is half good-sense, half whimsy. Invest in well constructed bras (game-changer) and shoes. Say hello to the cute guy you end up sitting next to on the airplane. Be generous in how you care for your body, but not rigid. Take your mother’s advice. Hike with your father, only if you are prepared to do so at a breakneck pace. But--you know--hike with your father. Keep a valid passport. Do the hard things. Adapt. Go again. Admit fault. Do the hard things you don’t think you can do. Prove yourself wrong. Believe in your own worth. Wear heels. Criticize only insofar as you are invested in helping the person change. Reframe your idea of failure. Throw kindness around like confetti. Do that very terrifying thing that will inch your life forward. Try. Try again. Forgive. Send the email. Trust in a bigger something. Send the book, gift the cookies, bake the cake. Write, write, write. Chip, chip, chip away at the immovable stone. Go to Paris. And when given the chance, saber the champagne.

*image source

On turning thirty, sticker-shock, and sabering a bottle of champagne

I wasn't terribly excited about thirty. I spent quite a lot of time not being excited about turning thirty. 

A good long while ago someone left a comment somewhere that was either to me or about me (in that way that people occasionally discuss you as though you aren't there) and it was something along the lines of: She seems great, but god I hope I don't end up in her position: nearing thirty and... (insert any number of things here). And oof. That stung. Because, well, yeah. Me neither. This is not the life I chose for myself. This is not the life I imagined or planned or dreamt of. But it's the life I have. 

I flew to Chicago in the middle of August because I thought, If not New York, somewhere else. But it didn't feel quite right. Or, well, I didn't.

A guy from work told me that thirty would be great, but--in relation to dating--men would experience some sticker shock. This did not sound ideal.

And then a dear friend told me I had to figure out a way to make peace with the city. No, no, I just don't like New York, I said. It's no more complicated than that. And she smiled at me, sipped the drink in front of her, and said, Yeah, I get that, I totally do. But still, she said, there's more to it. 

I don't know what actually happened, but three weeks before thirty something something clicked and I turned a corner. 

And so this is what I want to say:

Fear isn't so large anymore. Which means faith doesn't feel like a leap, so much as the soft earth beneath my feet--grounding and fertile and boundless.

I remember turning twenty and sitting in my tiny dorm room at Juilliard, sadness creeping in for the first time. Thank God I didn't know what was in store for me. 

The twenties are hard. The twenties are so, so hard. Everyone who is not in their twenties says this. And everyone who is in their twenties knows this. But when you are in the middle of that decade, hearing people who are not in the middle of it say, Yeah, it's rough isn't terribly helpful. But then you start to crest upon a new decade and you think, Holy shit! The twenties are so, so, so, so hard, but the view from up here is incredible! 

And suddenly it is all worth it. 

I have never felt more beautiful. I have never felt smarter. I have never felt more valuable. I have never been so sure of what I have to offer. I have never been so at peace with my body, so safe in my own skin. I have never cared less, what people I don't care about, think of me. Everything feels lighter, easier. What was never personal is--for the first time--actually not personal.

But I think more than anything, the real change is this: I'm no longer afraid of what comes next (or doesn't). In so many ways my twenties were defined by a fear of the future--a fear that the future did not exist to me. Not that time would stop, or that I wouldn't get a crack at it, but that nothing would ever change; that good things were impossible. And that very real terror caused me to clench down hard on EVERYTHING.

But then, three weeks from thirty, I looked around at the innumerable blessings in my life and I marveled at their ability to multiply. And I thought about the possibility of a few different specific somethings and I took a breath and thought, If not this, something else. A perpetual something-else.

Because good things do happen. Because there is a grace to the chaos of the universe. Because string theory is a thing. Because I am human--flawed and imperfect and made of flesh--which is to say soft and mutable. Because we've got one crack at a this--so far as I know--and I'll be damned if I don't swing for the fences. Because there is no such thing as perfection.  And very often the things we fear most are not only bearable, but transformative. 

We will all, many times over, have to reconcile the life we planned with the life we've got. And usually the life we've got is better.

The night before my birthday a dear friend brought a bottle of champagne over. You are going to saber this, he said to me. I gave him a look. It's a particular sort of thrill, his fiancee assured me. Sabering a bottle of champagne (sabrage is the technical term) is a way a fancy (and fun way) to uncork a champagne bottle. The long and short of it is this (and please don't attempt to do this based on my description): you find the very faint seam on the backside of a cold bottle and you take the blunt edge of a hefty kitchen knife (assuming you don't have a saber; I don't) and with a good dose of force you hit under the lip at the base of the neck. And if you get it right, you cleanly take off the top part of the bottle, cork and glass in one. It is a terrifying thing to attempt the first go round, but holy heck, it really is a particular sort of thrill--the sound and feel, deeply satisfying. What occurs to me, is that it seems impossible. Having never done it before, it seems impossible! But the science is such that the bubbles within actually make it pretty easy. The trick is you can't do it half-heartedly. You have go full force and follow through. And you have to trust what you can't see: that the bubbles are actually in there. That they'll do their job. 

The view from up here is incredible.

I don't know what thirty will bring, but I do know this: there will be plenty. And my job is to trust the work of my twenties and to hit the lip as hard as I can when given the chance. So I'm okay with the sticker shock because--the thing is--at thirty, I'm worth more. A better brand, a better model, a finer bottle of champagne. 

And New York is ever so much easier. Not because it is, but because I am. 

instagram. twitter. tumblr

Not looking back.