Category Archives: family & culture

Aug6

a new religion called NOPE

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“STOP letting your mental health be damaged by systems that were never designed to protect it!” – Sheila Hammond

If someone asks you if you’ve heard the latest news, and you think, “Dear God, please let it be aliens,” you are not broken. Sheila Hammond has made the YouTube channel I wish I’d thought of. She is funny, and she is tellin’ it like it is! She’s done offering her sanity to systems that profit off her exhaustion. Amen, sister. Amen.

You can care about the world and you can set boundaries. You can opt out of chaos without opting out of your values. You can disengage without being in denial. You can scream into the void…and log off for a nap. Personally, I am done with risking participation in anything likely to jerk me around emotionally. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

In recent posts I have written about losing friends and family members because I won’t attend the protest march (what you resist persists) or join the group or contribute to the cause or watch the news. Don’t get me wrong, I respect them immeasurably. Their heart is in the right place. If I feel compelled to do so, I do know how. As far as I know I still have an FBI record from being arrested in the protests in Detroit during the 60’s and 70’s. Meanwhile that isn’t how I’m most effective. That does not mean I am sitting here doing nothing – but it is amazing the changes you can implement silently from your sofa once you get focused.

It’s scary at first to realize your personal power. However, you have to pull your spirit back into your body and listen. In order to overcome the addiction of culture you have learn to stop the performance art you called life for the past decades, otherwise you won’t know your authentic voice when it speaks. And it does. I hope you’ll join the me in the religion of NOPE. Because as Sheila says, sanity is trying to stage a comeback.

“I command my spirit into my body in full at this time.” – Carolyn Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit

May I suggest we nurture a song worm today:

Jul1

NO is a complete sentence.

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“I am not knowing,” my southern grandmother Mimi used to respond when she didn’t know the answer to our constant inquiries. You or I would say, “I don’t know.” Or more likely, “dunno.” Mimi was effortlessly – even accidentally, elegant. So she was not knowing.

Needing to know is a scam. Needing to know what’s next, what to be when we grow up, what to do with our life…our “purpose”……ONE BIG SCAM. It’s the invisible CULT mentality of BELONGING scam. It is the insidious, evil programming of the hustle culture; meant to keep us enslaved. It’s grooming us to identify ourselves with a job, a career, a political party, or even a marriage. To whittle ourselves down to fit. To value ourselves for what we do. If, in your infinite failure to be enough, you become an alcoholic or an addict, well…bonus for the cult.

Drop your beliefs. They’re chains. Find your true value within yourself. Value yourself as a verb, and trust your becoming. YOUR true value is in being you, right here, right now. You LITERALLY ARE a work in progress. That is your purpose, P E R I O D. Breathe. God does not make mistakes. You were born. You have every right to be you. End of story. Figure yourself out, don’t figure yourself out…all within your right. I’ve been saying this all my adult life – but not living the truth of it. Still trying to fit in. Still trying to figure out what to do with myself. Still trying.

And until I feel like I want to whisper “YES!” to something, I will practice saying NO to what I don’t want. “No” is a complete sentence. I am so over explaining myself. Find your own why; I am not knowing. I am, however, infinitely curious. Aren’t you? I’ve gone from the immaturity of wondering why I am here to asking better questions, like, what do I really want? I’m trusting God knows why I’m here and therefore I don’t need to know. I don’t owe anyone a version of myself that makes them comfortable. The only person I owe anything is myself. All my debts are paid, seen and unseen.

My darling, sweet Mother used to say to me, “Do something, Susan, even if it’s wrong.” She meant help with the housework, of course! That was her conditioning speaking. In truth, she would never feel like she was enough. She would busy herself to death. What I wouldn’t give for one more conversation, but how would I ever manage to convince her that she was so much more than enough?

Also when I was a bratty teenager, same said darling Mother used to say, “Learn how to spell GURU and you’ll never need one.” G-U-R-U.

Jan25

can you hear me now?…

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Well. Where to start…again. It has been a loooong January and dark night. But I am not finished here. I am she who shall not be defeated. Any one who has known me for any time has heard or read me say again and again: “Remember, it will be the artists who save us.” My soul knows it is true.

And so I shall return to my youth for inspiration. I was raised in a musical family, beginning with my grandparents and aunts and uncles. My father and sister played piano, my mother the guitar. My southern Mimi could shake the tambourine so fast you only saw a blur at her hip. They all sang and danced. I was the least talented musically, but I could draw and paint anything before I could write. I won a dictionary for my copy of Rembrandt’s Young Woman at an Open Half-Door in the Detroit News Scholastic Art Awards when I was in the fifth grade. This is not to brag, but to inform you that art and music run in my blood. And so when I am struggling in any way, it is art and music that inevitably pulls me out of the abyss. I believe that is a universal truth for us all.

I entered high school in 1968. By this time I was already sick with ulcers, depressed and fed up with the dysfunction of my family. I had no idea. No idea what I was dealing with; that would take a lifetime of undoing. It was the height of the British invasion in the music scene and Detroit was the center of it. Hollowed out historic old theaters soon became the Grande Ballroom and the Eastown, offering stage side seats for $5. every Friday and Saturday night. It was my salvation.

Unbeknownst to me I was so old so young. Retrospect being what it is, I now understand that I assumed the role of parent in my family somewhere around the age of 10. I was already functioning as caretaker of my four younger siblings. I was tucking my parents in when they got home from the bar in the early morning hours and making breakfast and doing the laundry and getting the kids off to school. I had no choice. Were you to look at any of my yearly school pictures from junior high on, they would scare you shitless. You would think you were looking at a woman in her 30’s. Perhaps like Benjamin Button I have aged backwards.

The Vietnam war was being televised nightly. I watched my beloved Detroit burn in the riots of 1967, school having been cancelled because of it. College students were being shot down by police. I remember well the day Kennedy was shot (I was in the 3rd grade). And then his brother. And Martin Luther King. My father kept loaded guns at the doors and we all had a bug out bag on the boat, ready to flee to Canada if the war outside came to our front door. The world was on fire.

There was no peace, no solace, no safety – at home, or in the world. I remember being eleven or twelve and thinking, “what is wrong with this planet?! Are these people insane?!” I am a product of chaos. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I was made for a time such as this. Day of judgement, God is calling…

Oct18

no cherished outcome

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“I need a God who thinks I’m funny.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

Me too, Liz, me too. Gilbert’s relationship with consciousness, or God, is very similar to mine. And only recently, through a Buddhist friend, have I realized that we also have much in common with some basic Buddhist tenets, mainly that a human incarnation is a rare and extraordinary occurrence. To be profoundly revered. That is not to say easy. As Liz also reminds me, “Even a good life is hard.”

I woke with a migraine a few days ago. I had blissfully forgotten how completely debilitating they are. I used to get migraines chronically. They stole days out of every week. The leading neurologist treating me began with new, cutting edge migraine treatments and eventually resorted to Dilaudid (generic morphine). Administered 20 minutes after Compazine for nausea, so that I didn’t waste the morphine. And it never once took away the migraine. My body was screaming at me.

Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk wrote The Body Keeps the Score, and he likewise knows, “the mind hides it.” When I was having chronic migraines in my 40’s and 50’s I was desperately trying to find something – anything – to relieve the pain. But there was something seriously wrong. As in, my life had gone flaming dumpster fire awry. I was dying.

Liz Gilbert is right about something else – the closer we get to living our true self imperfectly, the more displeasing we are to the world. I was this many years old before I didn’t care how the world finds me. Alive would be good.

Knowing this and doing it is much easier said than done. Those old childhood habits are deep and strong. I do so want you to like me. In fact, that inner child in me needs you to like me. My life depends on it. I think you must know something I don’t – and I’m waiting for you to share that with me so I can get on with life.

The task here is to become as generous with myself as I am with you. Maybe – just maybe – I know something. Maybe my body knows it even if my mind doesn’t grasp it yet. Maybe I have always known it. Maybe it is my core. And maybe the real issue – where the healing will occur – is in my being more greedy than needy. Greedy for my own company, my own council. Greedy with my solitude. Or as I used to tell my self-righteous, narcissistic, fundamentalist family when they would call me crazy: I choose MY crazy.

I choose MY crazy, not yours, nor anyone else’s I might momentarily assign authority over my wellbeing. I get to decide what it means to be sane and well. I get to choose peace. I’ve got this. No soliciting here. Go away. I’m finally becoming very greedy. I cannot wait for some other person I’ve deemed worthy to honor me; it isn’t in their best interest. It seems their God has no sense of humor. Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.

From this new practice of greed there are no longer many people I will give access to my time and attention. Maybe because I’m older now; being needy seems frivolous. If you are trustworthy, you will defend my solitude, and I yours. And Elizabeth Gilbert is our spirit animal.