Anxiety is a writer’s ailment

The process of personification aids catharsis; it makes palpable the otherwise abstract, sharpens the blurred grooves of consciousness into focused, delineated rows ready for observation and intricate deconstruction. It takes the otherwise non-human or illusory and gives it signs of life with the God-like audacity of the imagination, transforming everyday encounters, both unique and mundane, into moments of worth. Noteworthy. Book-worthy. Mental-delicacy consumption inviting.

A writer is, in effect, taking part in an imaginative degustation. But after the 10th course, the inevitable happens: you become overfull, slightly sickened with yourself, and begin experiencing the first pangs of regret. You realize you never savoured the flavor of the moment that you’ll never have again. You have a reconstruction of how you’ve idealized the entrée, with only a shard of original perception. Stuck somewhere in your cerebrum, bleeding out with the intolerable pain of not knowing if you’ll ever really find what you were looking for, but never found, in your memory…

To that effect, we’re all writers-some of us just choose to take on a passive role. The active ones, however, become skilled in personifying the unordinary to inconceivable heights, until anxiety becomes a host of unhealthy persons in your life.

Often it resembles the overbearing and toxic boyfriend, limiting your comfort with personal expression and growth. Magnifying mishaps into irreversible, catastrophic failures. Reminding you that you are NOT good enough; forcing you to question the weight of your worth at the cost of cheap metals, instead of gold.

Write when you feel stupid. Write when you think your idea is cliché. Write when you are embarrassed to place the words on paper. Write on despite the grammar and punctuation errors. WRITE. WRITE. WRITE.

It becomes the unattached lover, that doesn’t really want you. The one that leads you to stand in front of the mirror and feel a slight, growing disgust with yourself. A repulsion by the touch of your own fingertips against your skin, for want of a type of coarseness to reflect the callous you feel for yourself.

Sometimes, your anxiety is akin to a loner’s only friend. The one that concedes that you are everything awful and then some, but that that’s okay. That you’ll always have each other, and you’ll find your own way.

When you’re feeling better, it’s just a dishonest neighbor, which most of the time you ignore, and other times you reiterate the clear boundaries between your properties. This is my consciousness, my happiness, my existence, my framework within which I function, prosper and grow, if even with setbacks at several junctions, and then there’s yours. You can’t fathom its existence beyond the vision of it and its unsmug, but vain, face. It’s somewhere in the fabric of the being you perceive, but only from afar.

Other times anxiety is a dancer, mockingly swaying in both the shadows and the light. A ballerina that moves with distractingly exquisite grace, leaving a slowly-developing destructive trace where she has twirled around. Dancing to a timeless melody granting calm and serenity, divulged to none. Never tiring, never sinking, swaying, moving, breathing in a lightness you can never hope to achieve.

And sometimes anxiety is exactly what you think it is-a problem that isn’t really there. You know it’s a non-issue; you can pinpoint the moment you decided to personify it to something you are fully aware it is not. But you are a writer, and you have given life-not a murderer. And sometimes that anxiety, in whatever form it has taken on, simply needs to die a natural death. 

Run away with me

Pack your bags and leave your reservations behind. Unpack your hopes and your fears and every dream that you let drop by the wayside over the years. Pick up your wildest childhood fantasies and let’s steal away in the night. We’ll leave this wasteland, ditch this city, let the lights flicker off and burn out in our wake because we’re going somewhere where the sun burns long into the night.

Leave it all behind with me. We’ll run from our failures and misgivings, drench ourselves in sweet possibilities, dip our toes into the oceans of regret and dry our souls out in the sunlight of forgiveness. Forget about what was ever meant to come next. Forget the 9-5s, the wasted lives, the eventual decay of wasting away under someone else’s ideal of who you were meant to become. We’ll leave it all. We’ll pack up in the dead of night and find ourselves a world away by morning, with the wind at our backs and the sunrise on our skin.

Leave your pride and cynicism. Leave your bitterness and pain. We have no use for such things where we’re going; we’ll run straight out of the forest of our fears and strip ourselves of every limitation we’ve clung onto through the years. Take me to the dawn of all your passions, to the heart of your hopes, to the child that still lives on inside of you, with your dreams and understandings clasped between his tiny hands.

Don’t worry about right and wrong. Forget about all of the ought to’s and the maybes and the shoulds. There is a world that exists outside the land of right and wrong and together we can go and we can live there. We’ll worship compassion like religion and we’ll wash away our sins between the sheets. Let me see all of the best and all the worst of you. I’ll relish in the sunshine of your virtue. I’ll traverse the badlands of your heart.

We don’t have to live the way that we were meant to. There’s a secret I know about living and it’s written in the pattern of your skin, in the space that stretches in between your ribcage, in every breath you take that brings you one step closer to the life you should be living – beckoning you closer, calling you home. There’s a place out there for people like you and like me. There’s a world that I know we can take hold of, if you’ll leave your fears behind and come find it with me, agree to resign with me and walk into that bleary unknown of all your deepest desires and wildest dreams.

Please don’t give me excuses.

I am tired of being the one who hesitates, the one who deliberates, the one who is always being asked to stay, to stop, to settle down and think things over, when the desire to run is pulsating through my bloodstream with a strength and ferocity that I can no longer fail to give into.

I’m tired of making excuses, of crafting solutions, of taming and hiding and extinguishing this flame because the others cannot take the light. Let’s go somewhere where these fires can roar. We’ll fan the flame of every lust, light all of our longings on fire and watch our passion blaze into the night.

I see a flicker in your eyes and destruction in your smile. Together, we can burn this whole world down. 

Dallas Stars Casino Night 2016

This is the third year I've gone to the annual Dallas Stars Casino Night. As always, it was an absolutely amazing night with some great friends. I can't wait until next year (and to pick out next year's dress...)

My captain is prettier than yours

Sharpy makes me thank Chicago constantly 

Did I expect to fall for another goalie? Yeah, I guess I did

Spezza has humor and style and is a beast on the ice, can you ask for anything more?

Yes, I really enjoyed being able to see Oleksiak, he's a doll

Hemsky is just gorgeous, we all know his backup plan is in modeling 

Anyone that tries to say Goose isn't important to this team will answer to me (ง'̀-'́)ง

Demers was heartbroken I was more excited to see Tom than I was to see him... Ooops

It's okay, we made it up to Demers by making him the center of attention

Two jews and a redhead 

Growing up is learning to swim

“When you’re older, dear,” my mother said.

“When will I be older?” I asked.

“When you’re all grown up. Like us,” said my father.

So I wondered. What does it mean to grow up?

At age 5, I thought it was having a job. At age 10, I thought it was wearing a bra. At age 12, I believed that it was being in love.

And so, at age 13, when I couldn’t come up with anything else more… concrete, I tried. Even though I couldn’t – not really, not then – I tried. I tried for years. Sometimes, every now and then, I still feel like I’m only trying.

Because sometimes we do pretend. We spend all that energy trying to grow up, and grow up fast, that, just for a while, we pretend to know what it’s all about. We cry for ourselves and pretend that it was for someone else. We laugh because we want to and claim it’s because they made us. We refuse to recognize the power of the individual, the power we have over ourselves, so much and over and over again.

And yet...

And yet, during those years of in-between, of growing-up-but-not-quite, those feelings are our sanctuary. If we didn’t feel like we’ve got our lives figured out at 15 or if we didn’t assume our feelings to be unchanging at 16, we wouldn’t have felt safe.

Self-rationalization is the teenagers’ home base.

And then comes a stage where we look around us, more than we’ve ever looked before. Its like being older has suddenly opened our eyes and filled our heads with this chronic need to relate. To someone, some thing, a story, a song. We look at other people, other stories besides ours, and we see them so clearly, down to the smallest details. ‘I must have grown up,’ you think, ‘To be able to see so well.’

Sometimes, their stories influence you. Influence you to the point where you crave that idea, their idea, with a desperation akin to escapism. It’s thinking that, if only you had something like that, your life would just be copacetic. You crave that idea more than anything of real substance and emotion. Sometimes, you let go fast; if you’re lucky. Sometimes you latch on so tightly that it drags you down.

Sometimes, some of us have to fight harder to grow up and realize that it doesn’t work that way. Not really.

It took me many, many years to finally understand the meaning of growing up. And I was surprised to find out that wasn’t nearly as complicated as I once thought it was.

Growing up is learning to swim. Not just staying afloat, but to swim. To move your limbs and pump your lungs and feel the strain in your muscles. It’s learning to learn how to move your body from the little ripples in the water. It’s going the distance without fear and going under when you feel like it.

Swimming.

I’m still learning how to swim. I think I will be for a good couple years. But this I can say: I won’t rest till I’ve perfected my technique. I’m finally out of my home base.

Hugs for the holidays

The seasons are changing, and it’s that time of year when we have to start being extra-careful about our immunity.

And I’m not just talking about the flu–I’m talking about body image issues.

In case you weren’t aware, disordered eating is a communicable disease–or, perhaps I should say it’s a communicatable disease. It’s not the kind of disease that’s spread by hugging–on the contrary, hugs are an essential daily vitamin that can help you build your immunity. It’s the kind of disease that spreads from person to person through negative self-talk, marketing ploys, and cultural habits.

Every year during this time our attention turns to America’s favorite past time: coming up with an excuse for eating and then coming up with an excuse for punishing ourselves for eating.

And every year during this time, our TVs, radios, blog feeds, and social media networks turn into a giant discussion about how to binge, how to stop bingeing, and how to make up for bingeing once the season is over. This is the time of year when it seems like you can’t have a conversation about anything without bringing up who’s eating what, where, and when, and how you’ll be doing penance for it.

It’s in the national media, and it’s also close to home. For example, just two days ago, during the closing minutes at my dance studio, one of the newer teachers said in her soothing voice (and I’m loosely quoting, because I wasn’t taking notes while stretching), “The holidays are coming. And you’re going to eat a lot. But you will come back, and you will get back in shape.”

[Insert sound of a record scratching here.]

Um, what?

How about, “The holidays are coming, and you’re going to spend lots of quality time with people you love. Food and exercise may be involved, but they’re not all that important in the grand scheme of things?”

Or, “The holidays are coming, and if you do choose to fixate on food, know that you’re not alone, and that you don’t have to punish yourself with exercise to make up for it. Throw away your scale and do yoga because it feels good?”

Or even, “The holidays are coming, and it can be difficult to be around food and family members and stressful situations. Keep coming back to ballet because it will give you the tools you need to stay mind-full and avoid stuffing yourself belly-full out of frustration or stress?”

Look, I know that there’s little I can say in this one blog that’s going to get the Today Show to stop showing you segments about how to cook a 5000 calorie Thanksgiving and then burn off a 5000 calorie Thanksgiving, or TV commercials to stop glorifying disordered eating behaviors (like fixating on or sneaking food), or the inevitable “January 1 is coming so eat while you can but save your money for a gym membership” magazine ads.

That said, change has to start somewhere–and it can start with YOU.

If you want to have a happy and healthy holiday season, then it’s up to YOU to start changing the way YOU talk about food with family and friends.

When the ladies in the locker room are talking about how fat they already feel because they’re anticipating the holiday binge, you can choose not to participate–and, even better, change the subject by asking them who they’ll be celebrating with or where they’ll be traveling.

As soon as food or exercise comes up as the topic of conversation, YOU have a choice to change the channel, leave the room, or redirect the conversation. And if you’re stuck on your yoga mat, you can choose not to listen–or, do what I did, and focus instead on the upcoming port de bras (or yoga poses), which you want to try to work on.

Whatever you do: Don’t feed the negativity about feeding!

Even if you don’t have an eating disorder, if you’re a member of the western culture and even marginally exposed to our cultural practices around the fall/winter holiday season, then you have plenty of opportunities to be exposed to the communicatable disease that is disordered eating.

Just as you can spread a cold when you forget to cover your mouth when you cough, so can you spread disordered eating and exercise behaviors when you choose to indulge in the negative body talk about indulging during the holidays.

Build up your immunity now by practicing the following:

Worried about bingeing on once-a-year foods? Cook a dish or two now, and enjoy it on a random week night so you can remember that Thanksgiving or Christmas (or whatever holiday you’re celebrating) is not the only time you’ll have access to that food.

Make a list of non-food or gym-based activities that you’re looking forward to participating in from now through January. Use that list to redirect the conversation when friends or family (or you!) start fixating on food.

Get a notebook or a piece of paper, and put a check mark every time you catch yourself saying something negative about your body in anticipation of the holiday season. About the chime in on that “I can eat less and exercise more” conversation with your girlfriends? Check it off. Mind racing with anxiety when a stuffing commercial comes on? Check it off. The benefits are two fold: over time, you’ll be able to start unconsciously making the catches, AND you’ll be able to mindfully redirect your thought process with positive self-talk.

Be honest with friends and family: ask them not to make a big deal about food and exercise in conversation. You’re allowed to set healthy boundaries, and as long as you’re being respectful in how you ask (i.e. don’t attack them for bringing up the leftover situation), you can help condition those with whom you spend your time to notice when they’re engaging in triggering conversation as well.
Remind yourself that a holiday feast is just another meal. Allow yourself to savor the foods you don’t normally eat, but remember to spend time savoring the company you’re in as well. You’ll spend less time gorging (or restricting but fixating) on the sweet potatoes if you’re having a great conversation with your family and friends.

You don’t have to worry yourself sick over your food and exercise situation this holiday season. Change the way you communicate, and in turn, those around you might follow suit.
And, just in case, make sure you’re getting plenty of vitamin H* in the meantime.

*Hugs, obviously.