Category Archives: Belette in Psychotherapy

A navy camisole covered with ants

Unknown-1 Which, lovely you, would you prefer to move into your home—ants or a tiger? Okay, don’t be so quick to answer. Take your time. Sure, a tiger could kill you, eat your furniture and, yes, it bares repeating, it could kill you. But have you ever been inundated by ants? Do you know the torment of not being able to leave out a cup of coffee, or even water, for a moment without risking your entire counter being overtaken. And then once you manage to kill all of them ( and do you ever feel satisfied that you really and truly got them all?) then there is that horrible ants in your pants feeling in which you feel they are crawling all over you even if they aren’t. If a tiger came into my house I would simply leave and call the authorities and wait for them to remove Tony to the nearest zoo. But with ants you are on your own, lady. No gamekeeper is helping you with these And they are so small, so plentiful and there seems to be an endless supply of them just ready to pounce on every surface should you dare to leave a single crumb on the counter.

Okay, not really talking about ants…I am talking A.N.T.s which is an acronym for Automatic Negative Thoughts. You know the thoughts that you don’t even realize you are thinking? The sneaky insidious and almost silent negative judgements you have about yourself that show up and stop you without your even realizing they have. I wish we could get a download everyday of all the thoughts we had in a single day. I’m sure there would be more ANTS in our transcript than there would be if we left a bottle of Aunt Jemima open on the counter.

The ANTs pop up and tell us things like:.

I always..

I never…

I can’t…

And those are just what I like to call “Black ANTs’. Black ANTs are a nuisance and cause a mess and can stop us, but they aren’t quite as pernicious, biting and stinging as the “Red ANTs”. Red ANTs are the kind that are self-esteem attacking and come from a serious case of self-loathing, these thoughts are filled with things we would never say out loud to another( okay, most of us wouldn’t most of the time)—things like “You are so_________( chose from the following uninspiring adjectives with which to harangue yourself) stupid, fat, lazy, worthless, ugly, etc. To have your day covered with red ANTs in which we are assaulted by predictions of failure, judgement, attack and loathing is the kind of thing that could cause depression or anxiety or at the very least a psyche that is overtaken by cruel and biting commentary. I have been in a psyche covered with red ANTs and it simply no fun. Red ANTs weren’t however all bad…it was all of my red ANTs that tipped me off to the fact that I didn’t love myself and that I had introjected some serious self-attacks that I had learned from childhood and that I better seek out an expert in discovering where all these ANTs were coming from, how they came to be and that maybe I deserved more than there relentless and sadistic attacks that were infesting my life from ever being picnic like.

Years of therapy has happily removed the red ANTs out of my life—for the most part. However, I might, on a good day have only two or three of these unpleasant or unwelcome reflexive thoughts from the past that bite,sting and leave me feeling wrong. That may sound like a lot to you lovelies who have an internal monologue that sounds like one part self-help-motivational lecture and one part Snow White. Mine however, thanks to growing up in a home with a poisonous pedagogy that was in the business of shame inducing set my default tone to an internal drone of dread. Even to this day, after all that therapy, when things go to hell and I feel weak and tired and am experiencing a trigger from my past, well, that is the ant equivalent of laying down a coat of Karo syrup, powdered sugar and, to top it off, a big gob of marshmallow goo and then I just watch those red ANTs go marching in and they are fat and happy and are at their most powerful and potent to take me down.

The trouble with black ANTs is that they can be so small and sneaky that we almost don’t notice them, they can hide in my psyche and go undetected. They hide in the cracks between the neutral thoughts, happy thoughts and down right giddy and positively predicting thoughts ( these last ones were once thought to be extinct. However in the last three-years I have discovered a rare breed of them that does particularly well in my psyche these days. Even still, the blacks ones sneak through my filter by not being loud and obnoxious or alarm activating the way they were when they are the red kind. Thanks be to God the years of therapy and clearing out my internalized voices from childhood has made red ants few and far between and there is enough self love that should a red ANT sneak in there is a neutralizing blast of self-love that interrupts and says,”Um, excuse me…but that ain’t called for and you aren’t welcome here.” And the self-love will tell me why it isn’t nice to talk to me like that and how I deserve better and it takes the red ANT out. Ain’t self-love grand?

Let me boil down the events of the week into a more ego syntonic euphemism( which is a short and elegant way of saying that I had a crappy week that I want to spare you the details of). It was the kind of week in which I could have gotten over taken by a colony of red-fire-death ants that could have taken me down. However, the inoculations of self love, the support of dear friends who love me and kindness of strangers who barely know me yet resounded to my pain in the way we would hope from people and all of this love managed to get the red ants out of my psyche.

I was, up until yesterday, feeling good and cocky about surviving this humdinger of a week with nary a red ANT bite to show for it. It was then that I became aware of a sneaky batch of black ants that had moved in. It went like this,( we are now in Tracey thought land: Ooh, this camisole hurts. I should throw it out. No, you shouldn’t. You just bought. You should keep it. But it hurts. I know it does. Take some Advil, that will make the pain go away. Okay, I will. Silence as I take the pills. Then the thoughts return. That’s stupid to have a camisole that is so ill-fitting that it causes your shoulders pain. You should throw it away. No, seriously, you just bought it. Yeah, but it was only $5 at Nordstrom Rack. It’s now worth the money. But its $5. Okay, so ends the transcript of my thoughts. First off as I look at it the conflict seems absurd and there seems only one right choice. I can also see the automatic reaction and acceptance to my suffering for money. As hard as that is to see it gives me something to look at and see if I make massochistic moves out of economy. If I do that then I need to reevaluate my personal economy system.

The good thing about ANTs is that if you pay attention to what you are thinking they will allow you into the rules you make, schemas to which you are attacked for no good reason, and maybe how you have internalized the rules of family members and they are acting as ANTs in your head. ANTs leave clues about where they came from and what they want, you just have to engage with them to find out about them.

I am keeping my eyes open for other ways I self-loathe when it comes to my self-care. The messages that these sneaky and subtle ANTs tell me are: “It doesn’t matter that you are tired, cold, overwhelmed, hungry, thirsty or in pain. Your needs don’t matter.” These are some destructive ANTs that would advise me to take Advil before they would advise me to take off the stupid top.These are a bread of ANTs that came from lack of care I got as a kiddo and it made me take crappy care of my physical being. The message of those ANTs is “you don’t matter.” Only I do. So I am throwing away that stupid $5 camisole from Nordstrom.

Having said all this, do you think you’d prefer the tiger now?

The psychological significance of your purse, phone, and other seemingly ordinary objects

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Life is one big Rorschach test, as far as I am concerned. When out in the world I may look like I am shopping or doing chores, but in fact, what I am doing while I do those things is reading ordinary objects as a way to understand the unconscious aspects of people that I see in line at Trader Joe’s. Going to Costco for me is more like attending one big Sandplay convention, each person’s cart is a story that is so much for than just jumbo size Cheerios and a 48-pack of toilet paper, it is a container symbolizing the opposites—holding they life they have and, also, the life they want to have. Outfits are much the same, how we dress says a lot about our psyches— our sartorial signifiers reveal more about us than we might like them to and certainly more than we are willing to say out loud. Truly, everywhere you go there are symbols that surrounds us that look like mere ordinary objects and choices—ol;y they are more. If I could be known for a quote I might like it to be, ‘there are no small choices only small awarenesses of those choices.” I know it’s not as catchy as “don’t worry be happy” and even less likely to be made into a song by Bobby McFarren.

The question of “what’s in your bag” was a magazine and blogging phenomenon. It was so big that I actually think a psychological paper ought to be written about the meaning of our interest about “what’s in the bag?”. There is, me thinks, a kind of voyeurism and, to some degree, exhibitionism in it. LeAnn Melat wrote a PhD dissertation on “The mythical and psychological meaning of a woman’s purse”. I haven’t read it yet but I wonder if LeAnn might give is insight into why we are so curious about what goes on inside all those purses.

Melat gives us some clues : “Modern women almost always take their valuables and essentials with them in purses when they leave their homes, but psychologically, what are they actually reenacting with such ritualistic consistency? One theory of this hermeneutical discussion is that earlier historical feminine rituals are unconsciously reflected in today’s purse behavior. Because Western culture has devalued and underrated characteristics of the archetypal feminine, the repressed, but not lost, archaic traits of the feminine just may be symbolically stuffed away in the shadowy recesses of the purse, waiting to be reintegrated into feminine consciousness. Hestia was primarily the contained essence of each Greek home, and perhaps the modern purse as a psychic vessel of the feminine is related to this goddess’s archetypal realm. Through the purse’s Hermetic connection, the Hestian vessel is able to leave the home and be carried into the world, even though mythically, Hestia never wanted to leave the protected interior under any condition. Even when Dionysos wanted to be admitted to the Greek Pantheon, Hestia gladly relinquished her royal position because she simply did not want to be out, known, or exposed. In many ways, this act put the Goddess Hestia in the role of the thirteenth fairy, the uninvited, unacknowledged guest. We must ask ourselves when Hestia retired herself from view, what became unrecognized in the essential feminine nature? Through the patriarchy’s steady devaluation of the feminine, the contemporary woman has lost her quintessential, central core, which should be carried inside of her soul, unseen, like Hestia’s ember. Instead, she carries something representative of her sacred nature on the outside, on her shoulder or in her hand, as she leaves home gripping her purse. The authentic feminine essence of the modern her lost powers, an aberrant behavior, which manifests from the patriarchal culture’s pathology. Because her interior world has been so dishonored, today’s woman has extroverted what’s left of her value by carrying her essence in her symbolic sacred container, her purse, in much the same way as she dresses for success by attempting to measure up to the patriarchal values.”

Pamela Poole, writer and blogger , and cofounder of Cowgirl App!,” the app review site that doesn’t smell like Doritos and armpits”, wanted to know the deep and dark secrets of my iPhone. She kindly invited me to share “What is on my iPhone“. Not surprisingly these questions led to some significant psychological insight, which is not surprising as, to my mind, the phone is the Transitional Object of our time. If Freud was alive today I feel sure he would want to analyze his patients phone use ( you can’t imagine how often iPhones come up in session) and he would say, “Sometimes( actually most of the time) a phone is not just a phone.” An iPhone or a Blackberry is not just a phone, rather it is a container loaded with psychological significance. And, I think, that it serves as a kind of long-distance umbilical cord that allows us to feel connected and not-alone, no matter where we are. All you have to do is look at people’s relationship to their phone, and see how it is serves as an ever-present binkey for some, to see what a powerful symbol it it.

I am not going to give away the insights that I uncovered in the interview…as I do hope that you go over to Pamela’ and check it out. I do warn you that a good part of the interview reveals a good deal of my shadowy-silly self, as I even admit my most embarrassing app. Please check out the interview here.

Also, here is a great post about the psychoanalytic symbolism of ordinary objects.

Fork U: Choice, cheesecake, adulthood and the importance of anxiety

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Fork-in-the-Road The day I enrolled in Fork U was a bad day. I was in a bad mood, a really bad mood. I might, to you, seem like a nice-enough person who is incapable of channeling Beelzebub or any other lower-level deities that might or might not inhabit Dante’s Inferno, however, on this day that I speak of I was a flat out bitch. Why, you ask? Well, it was a combination of PMS, Christmas stress, exhaustion, disappointment about having to cancel a trip to Hawaii and infertility grief that all came together and made me an irritable and unhappy person who should have had a sign around her neck, “Stay 500-feet away from this woman unless you want to get your head bit off.” Sadly, I didn’t have such a sign on and my good friend made the mistake of going to lunch with me. As I picked at my Cheesecake Factory salmon, I tried to smile and hide my acrimonious attitude and ornery and somewhat hormonal inner-life from my friend, only I couldn’t. I was, you see, a two-year old trapped in the body of a 40-something. And the two-year old me was in the midst of the kind of tantrum that would draw a crowd, that is if I actually threw myself to the ground and started kicking and screaming the way I wanted to do.

Even as I tried to maintain the persona of an adult, all I could think of was how pissed off I was and how unfair life was. And when I wasn’t thinking that then an intrusive thought would enter my mind, it was the subtitle of a book that kept interfering with my inner-tantrum. The unwanted and unwelcome thought was, “How to finally, really grow up.” “Grrrrr…”, Beelzebub growled at that line. Once we paid the check and I tipped the waitress inspire of how annoyingly chipper and chirpy she was ( remember, I was in quite the state), I asked my friend if she minded if we stopped at Barnes and Noble.

I was sure they wouldn’t have the book, after all who would want to read a book about how to grow up? I certainly didn’t. And yet there I was in the self-help section looking for a book that I didn’t want to read. On that day especially, the last thing I wanted to do was to grow up and be responsible for my life. I wanted to throw myself on the ground and have a temper tantrum and for someone else to be the adult for me for a while. I was tired of being an adult. I was tired of responsibility. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else, and certainly NOT for myself. And yet, with mixed emotions, I picked up the book and walked to the cashier.

Strangely, I was embarrassed to buy the book, Finding the Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally Really Grow Up. You see, I knew that I looked like an adult. I even, on that day, likely looked like a professional adult who knew how to dress themselves and present like they knew what they were doing. Yet, on that day, it all felt like an enormous ruse. Only I didn’t want the cashier to know that I was in fact faking it. I would have only been a little more embarrassed if I had been buying a book about sex. I distracted the cashier from looking at the title by engaging her in chit-chat, and happily it worked. I don’t think she had any idea that I was buying a book on how to grow up. And, if she did, I would have told her that I was buying it for my brother (and there is no way for her to know that I don’t actually have a brother).

Let me explain something here, I didn’t at the time know why I was buying the book. I wasn’t feeling especially immature, I was feeling bitchy. And under the surface of the bitchy I was feeling like collapsing and even, strangely, feeling like I might want to collapse into a depression. I know that sounds strange, but there is a familiar comfort zone to depression for me. When I am in a depression I don’t feel that I have to be responsible or have a persona or do anything I don’t want to do. I could climb into bed and surrender to the feelings and not have to do anything about them. And, on that day, that is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to go home and I didn’t know where home was, it certainly wasn’t where I lived and it more certainly was not the house that my mother lives in as that is not my home.

When I got home from the bookstore I crawled into bed with James Hollis. I attempted to surrender to my sadness as I read his wise words, “When the desire to “go home” prevails, we will choose not to choose, rest easy in the saddle, remain amid the familiar and comfortable, even when its stultifying and soul-denying. Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our conventional rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings. To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. On the other front, lethargy seduces us with sibilant whispers: kick back, chill out, numb out, take it easy for a while…sometimes for a long while, sometimes for a lifetime, sometimes a spiritual oblivion. Yet the way forward threatens death—at the very least, the death of what has been familiar, the death of whomever we have been.” All that was well and good but as I read it I found that I didn’t want to read it and my thoughts began to wonder back to the Cheesecake Factory and wonder why I didn’t get dessert. But something in me required me to read on:

“The daily confrontation with these gremlins of fear and lethargy oblige us to choose between anxiety and depression, for each is aroused by the dilemma of daily choice. Anxiety will be our companion if we risk.., and depression our companion if we do not.” Okay, this was starting to make sense. I was not wanting to make choices, I was surrendering to what was and seeing myself as a victim of circumstances. There had been such much change and choice in the last two-years that I was wanting to crawl back into what had been even though there was absolutely nothing good about feeling dependent and helpless. However, something about the longing to be dependent and helpless was familiar and comfortable and sort of childlike, like I was wanting to regress.

It was the following line that caused me to fully enroll and invest in Fork-in-the-road University, ” Not to consciously chose a path guarantees that our psyche will choose for us, and depression or illness of one form or another will result. Yet to move into unfamiliar territory activates anxiety as our constant comrade. Clearly, psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity in is for the toleration of anxiety and ambiguity. The capacity to accept this troubled state, abide it, and commit to life, is the moral measure of our maturity.”

That last paragraph is why I needed the book. When I came to a fork in the road I didn’t always take it. Old territory, and even depression, were more comfortable than the unknown and the ambiguity that came with choosing uncertainty. Only not really. Hollis continues, “In every decisive moment of personal life, faced with such a choices, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression is a sedative. The former keeps us on edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.” Reading that last line I couldn’t’ stay in bed another minute; I felt a bolt of energy that usually only comes after drinking a triple espresso. I felt like I had been given an emotional GPS, when choosing if there is fear then I need to move forward, and not backwards, and experience the fear as a challenge. Something about Hollis’ emphatic instruction allowed me to embrace the anxiety as a normal sign of development.

It is normal, Hollis’ words, assured me that at crossroad moments to feel a regressive pull to home, depression, helplessness and despair. Yet, he advises me and you and anyone who struggles with facing the fork in the road to take the action that makes us anxious. Let me repeat Hollis again: “In every decisive moment of personal life, faced with such a choices, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression is a sedative. The former keeps us on edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.”

Once a friend was trying to teach me to drive a stick shift car and I was terrified. I was almost hyperventilating as she instructed me on the feel of the clutch. I panicked. I breathlessly told her, “I CANNOT DO THIS!!!”. My friend looked at me totally puzzled and she said to me calmly, “Your mother never taught you that bad things pass and that scary feelings don’t last.” She didn’t pose it as a question, she saw it in my behavior—-and she was right. My mother did not teach me that. I learned that anxiety was something to avoid and that if I felt something now that I would always feel it and that I should avoid any action that might activate anxiety.

My friend, a gifted psychotherapist, gave me in that moment a huge gift, even though she didn’t manage to teach me to drive a stick. I learned from her that I had missed an important life lesson, anxiety passes. You may have learned that from your mother or your therapist, but I didn’t know it until my friend taught me that. And until I read Hollis I didn’t learn to expect anxiety at any fork in the road that I might face. Now, thanks to Hollis, I have learned to expect it and thanks to my friend, I can remind myself that even if it doesn’t feel like it now— and even if I am totally scared as I make the choice that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Shopping for Change: Transformational Objects

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One of the first essays I ever published was a piece called “The Search for Sacred Accessories”. The editors at Mode Magazine sadly did not get how clever the title was and they changed the name of the piece to “Practical Magic”, which was a pretty lame title if you ask me. My essay was about an experience in which I found of pair of feathered gloves that I felt convinced would transform me into the person I had always wanted to be. I would, I believed, with the purchase of these Holly-Go-Lightly gloves become my ideal self. Alas, I did not. What in fact happened is that I wore the gloves to a party and when I reached for an appetizer the ostrich feathers caught on fire and they went up in smoke as did my dreams of their being the vehicle to a more perfect manifestation of myself.

Even though the feathered gloves did not allow me to live up to my full potential, I have continued to seek ordinary items that promised to transform me. There have been shoes, dresses, and handbags that all, in their pre-purchase state, promised a new and improved me. However once I purchased the said item, I found that I had a sort of anti-Midsas touch and turned the numinous object into an ordinary one that left me exactly as I was before and turned the object into something much more ordinary than I imagined it to be.

Christopher Bollas, the psychoanalyst and author, would describe what I was doing as an attempt to create a “transformational object”. A “transformational object” gived us the potential for a “transformational experience”. According to Bollas the mother creates for their babies a “transformational process”. Mothers change the internal and external environment to meet the infants needs, but babies do not know that a separate person is performing these functions and so they experience the transformation as a process and not coming from a person. Bollas explains: “We see how hope invested in various objects ( a new job, a move to another country, a vacation, a change of relationship) may both represent a request for a transformational experience and at the same time, continue the ‘relationship’ to an object that signifies the experience of transformation. We know that the advertising world makes its living on the trace of this object.: the advertised product usually promises to alter the subject’s external environment and hence change internal mood. The search for such an experience may generate hope, even a sense of confidence and vision, but although it seems to be grounded in the future tense, in finding something in the future to transform the present.”

Very often, when we want something we are actually wanting the transformational experience. We want the shoes or the trip or the house to give us a different experience of ourselves. Or at least that is something I experienced. I have imagined that when I had the new car, new furniture or that Ferragamo bag that I would be transformed in some permanent way. Only, it has been my experience that objects rarely, if ever, give us the imagined character qualities that we believed they would.

Here is the equation of the transformational object prior to the purchase :

Me+Desired Object=Me as more.

Here is the equation of me after the purchase:

Me+Possessed Object= Me as the same as before, with some initial and temporary excitement and, perhaps, some grief and depression that said object did not make me more than I was before.

That said, there are some shoes in my closet that do have a “Ruby Slipper” quality, in that they remind me in someway of my essence. But, like Dorothy, I had the essence all along and the shoes just reminded me of who I am—they didn’t turn me into something I wasn’t.

Thanks to Bollas, and YEARS of therapy, I now deconstruct my desire. Each time a desire is born I ask myself, “What qualities do I believe that these Black Jimmy Choo Verdict Cutout Sandal’s will give me?” If I am clear that I will be the same once I acquire them then I am feel free to go on longing them, which is not necessarily a good thing as they are ridiculously expensive and, perhaps more importantly, they don’t have them in my size.

This is the Christopher Bollas article that inspired this post.

Intentions 2013, the Spice Girl Edition

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Last night Keith and I were going to dinner and I was driving there, only I didn’t know where there was. I asked him where we were going. “I don’t know,” he answered. “Well,” I said somewhat seriously, “then I will just keep driving until we figure it out.” Keith tried to be helpful by telling me all the places that we could go. He named all the places that we usually go to. As he listed the options I was dissatisfied with all of them. I didn’t want to go to Glendale or Pasadena. And I certainly I didn’t want to go to Zen Sushi for the ten-millionth time. “You knew last night what you wanted. It was easy when you knew what you wanted.It was easy.” The other night I knew I wanted a baked potato and a salad for dinner. It was easy. I wanted it and we went and got it.

This little experience of ‘destination unknown’ got me thinking about the bigger experience of knowing where I’m going and how it is a whole lot easier to get there if I know what I want. I know that sounds extraordinarily obvious and I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to leave my post and going off to see what Justin Bieber is Tweeting. But before you do, let me try to make my case in more than 140 characters that even if you don’t think you know what you want that you actually really do. I know that knowing what we want isn’t always so easy. There are a plethora of reasons we don’t let ourselves know what we want. Wanting can be uncomfortable. If we feel the want then we feel the lack. That lack can create uncomfortable feelings( grief, depression and despair) and so we deny the wanting. Also, if we feel like we can’t have it because we are “too” something ( too old or too lazy or whatever too-too you turn to) or that someone will stop us from having it, then again, we press down the desire into our unconscious. And, there are somethings that no matter how hard we try we can’t have them( in my story that would be baby)….but there is a value to looking at that we can’t have and discover if there is a deeper want that can actually be met.

I am a big advocate of asking my patients what they want, or for that matter asking friends, family and people I get in conversations with in the nail salon, as knowing what we want most tells us so much about us. As -Arsène Houssaye. said,”Dites moi qui vous aimez et je vous dirai qui vows etes.”( “Tell me who you love and I will tell you who you are.”). Our desires inform us of so very much about us, they reveal our wounds, insecurities, and our deepest soul desires that we might not dare to say. Even the seemingly most insignificant desires can be loaded with meaning. My desire for shoes, skincare and lipsticks are NOT just about those things. There is a story that goes with the desire. I have a narrative about who I will be with each and every object I desire. As does everyone, a cigar is never a cigar and a desire for a new handbag is never JUST about the handbag.

If I asked you for a list of what you wanted most, could you tell me? Do you know what you want most? I believe, whether you can name it or not, that you do. I believe that you know exactly what you want. Forgive my inflation, but I feel sure that if we were sitting across from each other and I asked you the right questions that I could get you to tell me what you really-really-really wanted( that is, if you trusted me and KNEW that I would not malign you for your wants, which I assure you I wouldn’t). Maybe you wouldn’t admit them right away, but just having the conversation about what you want most would likely make you aware of your top two unspoken desires.

If you did tell me, perhaps you’d write off what you really want as silly or ridiculous and implausible, as a sort of disclaimer of your deepest dreams, and tell me that you know that what you want is unattainable, but I bet you know it. Knowing what you want is a really good first step. Truly, it is easier to know I want a potato for dinner than it is to drive around saying no to every suggestion I am given. And, yeah, it is easier to know that I want a potato than it is to admit I want something that is going to take hard work, determination and risk in order to achieve.

In January, after reading, Dorothea’s post, “Ready or not—Intentions 2013“, that I had a bit of break through about what I wanted. Yes, I have a long and, to my mind, an impressive list of accomplishments that I achieved in 2012.I almost always know what I want to do, be an have, even if I ignore that wanting. However I wasn’t focused on what I really-really-want. After reading Dorothea’s post and her previous post Intentions check in 2012 I was a bit unsettled, I took a new list of my goals for 2013 and I found them too broad and too unfocused. In wanting all of those things I felt sure that I was diluting my focus. I wanted a list like Dorothea’s. I wanted 2013 to be used in a way that felt meaningful and significant and as nice of a goal as redecorating the kitchen is it is not what I really, really want—that is not a goal that enlivens me or gives me purpose. So after reading Dorothea’s inspiring post I wrote a new list.

My post-Dorothea-post list was very different. It was mean and lean and clean, only 25 objectives versus the 250 item list I had pre-Dorothea. One thing significantly different about the new list was that all the items on the list feel hard to claim. They feel scary and too much and, I think, that is exactly how I know they are right for me. What we want most almost always feels ‘too much’, we dare not dream it. I had a good friend who was incredible at doing makeup. One day she whispered to me her greatest hope, “I wish I could be a makeup artist.” “Are you kidding?,” I replied. My friend immediately inferred from my gobsmacked reaction that I was saying that there was no way that she could make that dream a reality, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. She wore her dream on her face and all she had to do was to march herself down to the MAC counter and she would be one big step closer to making her dream a reality. But for her it felt impossible. She didn’t see how close she was to making her dream happen. I assured her that she could and that she would be amazing at it. Sadly my assurances weren’t enough. She was too scared to risk having her dream not come true and so she chose not to try. Today she is an office manager. I see this over and over again in my work and in my life, people’s dreams are so close they can touch them and yet they dare not make the call, take the step, or ask their friend in “the business” about “how to break in”. Just that one question could open the doorway to their dreams and they don’t dare. And it isn’t just about “them”, I do it too.

Part of my anxiety about naming one of my intentions is that I feel like I have had this goal so many times before, in different forms, and that something in me has stopped me each and every year. Even as reminders of previous failures to produce paraded through my mind, I knew I wanted it just the same. I wanted it more clearly and strongly than I did that stupid baked potato that I was willing to drive cross town for. The intention was, ” I will complete the book proposal for my self-help/memoir ,”What happens when dreams don’t come true and how to live happily ever after anyway” and submit it to agents.” Even to write that here on the blog, where I know I am among friends, makes my heart race a little as I wonder if you will judge me for daring to write it down. And even as I type that I know I am projecting my self-judgement onto you. What do you care? You, lovely you, likely want to see me succeed. Your not judging me, are you? If you are, could you not tell me. I think I ‘d rather not know.

The other scary thing about really getting clear about what you want and where you want to go is that you have to do stuff in order to make it happen. That wasn’t always obvious to me. There was a time that I thought that writing it on a list and saying a few affirmations was enough, happily that was a long time ago. Now, happily, I understand that it takes work to actualize intentions. Everyday I ask myself, “what small action can I take towards this goal, no matter how small.” And when I have gone two days without taking an action I think of what I tough-love writing teacher I had taught her students about goal setting, “Write all of your goals on an index cards, a goal for each card. Go through the cards everyday and write down one action you took towards the goal. If at the end of the week you have not taken an action on a goal then say out loud: “I don’t want to achieve this goal” and then tear up the card.” Okay, her advice is a bit tough. I haven’t actually written any of my intentions on index cards. But everyday when I review my intentions and I find myself procrastinating on sitting down and working on my proposal, I do think of the index cards and I ask myself if,with my lack of action, I am actually telling myself that I don’t want to achieve this goal. This thought, especially if it happens two-days in a row, almost always gets me moving.

With hindsight and eight-hours of sleep, I think that I actually did know what I wanted last night when we were driving around. I was extremely tired when I got home. I don’t think I really wanted to go out. I didn’t know it then. I just knew that when I asked myself where I wanted to go for dinner that “nowhere” is the only answer I got. And, I can see, again with hindsight, that “nowhere” is actually an answer. I didn’t really want to go to dinner. I wanted to put on flannel pajamas and watch Downton Abbey( again). I was actually too tired to eat or to chew or even to get undressed( I may or may not have slept in the sweater that I wore to dinner). Yes, I know I needed nourishment. But I also needed to not sit at a table and look at a menu and talk to a waitress.

So, lovely you, what do you really, really want?