The Year of Living Shamelessly

Why shamelessly?

So, I was thinking earlier this month about the start of a new year, 2013.  And I was thinking about how I'm still not making resolutions, because resolutions never really work out, and yet I still wanted to set some goals for myself this year.  I wanted, in some ways, to make this year different and the start of maybe even the second half of my adult life.  I started running this year, despite what my good sense told me, and I thought, "maybe I should call this my year of living dangerously."  But, then, I'm not a dangerous kind of girl.  So, I thought of shamelessly, and that fits for me.

I've lived so much of my life based on what was shameful.  With the idea that being shameless was a bad thing.  But, see, if we're not ashamed of who we are, then we can shamelessly enjoy ourselves and our lives.  That's the year that I want - a year to enjoy life, friends, good wine, good books, movies, moments with my children, moments - good ones - with my job.  A year to shamelessly stand up and say, "yup, I'm a big old nerd with a quirky sense of humor, and you know what?  none of you would love me quite as much if I were anything else."  Or something like that.  Maybe I won't broadcast that just yet - needs some work.

So I'm shamelessly embracing the fact that I am a gigantic, card-carrying dork.  I speak Latin.  I force my children to learn Latin.  I shove it down the throats of those in the near vicinity.  I listen to music from the 1980's - the best decade so far.  I dance, in public, shamelessly.  My children have shame for that last one, I'm sorry to say.  But it's my job to embarrass them just a little bit.  I love science, and often ponder things that no one else cares about.  It's the little things in life - why are there hairs on raspberries, anyway?  They're delicious, but seriously, shave.    I love Star Wars, and can quote it line and verse.  At least the original Star Wars - yeah, I'm that kind of Star Wars dork.  Still not ashamed.  I can quote the Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.  I wear bunny slippers.  I am a certified, mom-please-don't-talk-to-my-friends-about-that, geek.  It's OK...I'm not ashamed of that.  Nor of the fact  that, at this moment, I'm wearing DNA double helix earrings.  They're awesome - nothing to feel shameful about there.

I'm an awkward geek, too.  I can dance, I mean seriously, I can salsa, waltz, and swing.  But I can't walk across a floor without falling flat on my nose.  I'm that kind of awkward dork.  I run awkwardly - like a wounded badger.  It's why I started to run at night.  Now, I've decided I have nothing to be ashamed of.  Certainly those well toned men and women jogging past me with ease were once puffing along like me, though they probably looked a little more graceful.  I jog at night now, because I like it.  I like the peace.  I like the stars and the moon, and the quiet of my shoes hitting the trail.  I'm shameless about it now, and about the fact that I mostly like it.  Maybe not the feeling like I might throw up sometimes - I mean, I hate to throw up.  I'm going to be shameless.

I'm shameless now about my four decade old body.  I've had two children, fed them both, and put a lot of wear and tear on this body.  It's mine.  Scars, saggy parts, and all.  I still hear the voice in my head telling me "you're too old to wear that."  "No one should wear dresses like that unless they have a modeling worthy backside."  But this year I'm telling the voice to shut up.  My body has taken me a lot of places.  My beat up hands, with the unpainted nails, have held a lot of babies, dried a lot of tears, played music, written poems, done some hitting and some hugging.  My beat up feet with the deformed toe nails?  They've taken me all over the world.  I'm rather fond of the callused things.  I'm not ashamed of those either - I earned the calluses.  The lady who does a pedicure for me once every decade or so would disagree about the calluses - they're bad enough she calls other beauticians over to "tsk, tsk" over the state of my feet and talk bad about me in Korean.  That's OK...I'm not ashamed of  my feet.  They take me where I want to go.

I'm being shameless in what I eat, and in what I feed my families.  It's unlikely I'll impact an industry, but the way that animals are treated in the farming industry in our country is wrong.  I don't eat those animals, and now I don't eat their unhatched babies or the milk for their young either.  I'm shamelessly crunching my way through fruits and vegetables and rediscovering how awesome the perfectly ripe tomatoes can be, or a perfectly steamed spear of asparagus, or even some crunch lettuce.  So, I am shameless as I sit and eat my huge pile of greens and fruit every day at lunch, despite jokes from family and friends.  And I'm marching forward with feeding my family this way.  Maybe someday they'll thank me.  Or not.  But they'll live through the experience anyway.  No one ever died from eating fresh produce.  At least, not as long as e coli wasn't involved.

The goal I'm still working on is shamelessly telling people "no."  I have always felt that maybe people won't like me if I don't help them out.  Or maybe I'm only being worthwhile if I do everything I can to make their lives easier.  I spend my whole life in service to others, and it's not a bad thing to be.  Except the one person I have never served is myself.  So, this year I will shamelessly tell people no, I won't run their errands, drive them on pointless skirmishes, write their reports under a ridiculous deadline, or make last minute shopping trips for them.  I'll tell them no, without remorse, because I will want that time to read a book, take a run, play with my kids, or talk to a friend.  I will not feel guilty, or at least I'll ignore that guilt, at letting my kids fend for themselves, or telling their dad to feed them dinner, so I can fit in some exercise.  I'll be shameless in my need to have a few days a year to myself, and I will tell those who attempt to throw monkeys my way, "no," in a loud clear voice.  Shamelessly.

So, this one is harder.  It's easy to write on a blog, where a few friends and a lot of anonymous strangers might read my words.  I write, have always written, all the time.  I have written novels.  I have written a lot of novels.  Novels that virtually no one  has read, that I have done nothing with, because I was convinced that no one wants to read what I write or is interested in what I say.  I will be shameless this year, throw caution to the wind, and clean up one of these novels and submit it for publishing.  I don't care if it's rejected with great laughter or disdain, I will do it.  Shamelessly.  And if someone doesn't like what I write, then don't read it.  I promise, I won't be hurt.

I will, this year, and perhaps from now on, shamelessly do as I like, not as I should do - barring that it might hurt someone, including myself.  I will take those chances and not worry what it looks like, sounds like, might look like to someone else.   I will learn those things I want to learn, and I will enjoy it.  Without shame, and without worry.  I will tell those I care about that I do, despite a lifetime of being taught that it's wrong to be that openly affectionate.  It's not vulgar, it's not tacky.  It's what people do.  Shamelessly, for hundreds of thousands of years.  Our lives are short, often much too short, and we should tell people we care about them, without shame.  What could be wrong in having affection for another person?  I love my friends.  I love my kids. I love some of my family members.

And I will shamelessly accept that I have failed in some areas of my life.  I have failed with my birth family.  Fear and shame have kept me from admitting that.  I can't fix what was broken before I was born, and I will not allow shame any longer keep me from closing that door.  My birth family is a train wreck.  I am shameless in saying,  I didn't cause it.  I can't fix it.  I won't be responsible for it any longer.  I will shamelessly say how badly I have screwed up some parts of my life, and I can't undo or fix those either.  I can move forward and try not to repeat all my old mistakes.  And I can be shameless about saying I will screw up again.  It's who I am.

I am shameless in saying I'm not the world's best housekeeper.  I will have friends and family over and not apologize for books lying about, a basket of laundry waiting to be put away, or dishes drying on my counter.  If they are my friends, they will not care about those things. And I will be shameless about taking the time and effort that could be put into rectifying those things and enjoy time with people instead.  "Pardon my home, but you know, people LIVE here."  I will say it shamelessly. 

I am a woman in my early 40's, with the scars and the bags under my eyes to say I've had a lot of living.  I'm a workaholic, neurotic, sometimes psychotically energetic, dorky kind of woman.  I sometimes am sarcastic, and even occasionally witty.  Sometimes I hurt peoples feelings without meaning to, because I went for the easy joke.  I am sometimes serious, and occasionally moody, or even maudlin.  I am an insomniac who loves the quiet of the night and hears the call of adventure in a book.  I'm the most impulsive organizational control freak you'll ever meet. I'm sometimes out of control, and often hyped on caffeine.  I'm awkward and geeky and on a rare day sentimental (but don't tell anyone).  I like music and laughter and a good drink.  Sometimes I drink more than I might think I should, if I were acknowledging shame.  But I'm not.   I am passionate about music and stories and words.  I am passionate about my job and doing it well. I'm shameless about all of it too.  Just as I should be.

It's the year of living shamelessly.  What will you do when you let go of your shame too?

And So Life Goes On

As 2012 drew to a close, and everyone waited to see if the world might really end, I just wanted to know where a new year might be going.  My daughter decided that there wasn't a high enough probability that they were right and she studied for her finals anyway.  Good decisions, since her high school was still standing on December the 21st.  And so life goes on.

There's always a prediction that the world is going to end.  There's always someone who believes that they know the exact moment we are all going to cease to exist.  What I know is that someday I will cease to exist, and I don't really care to know the how or when.  Life goes on.

2012 was a weird kind of year.  I don't believe in karma per se, but I started 2012 so angry, so confused, so fed up with life in general, it's little wonder I had the start to the year I did.  In January, I got hit by a car.  That sounds so momentous, but really, it was just a car backing up in a parking lot - they didn't see me, the bumper clipped me, and I got knocked onto the sidewalk.  Once I regained my bearings I even thought, "that was it?  I thought being hit by a car would be more serious than that."  I walked around sore for a couple of days.  And then life went on.

And on, and on, and on.  And I didn't enjoy a single moment of it.  I was racing around preparing for Katie to graduate from middle school and move into high school.  I moved out of my house and brought my girls to a townhouse across town.  I lightened my life.  A lot.  I threw away, gave away, stored away all of the stuff that has been weighing us down.   We spent so many years accumulating stuff.  We don't need it - it just makes it too hard to clean the house anyway.  I got rid of cable and made our television a "for DVD only" zone.  We cleared out computers and extra furniture.  I bought a new bed - first piece of furniture that I really bought on my own, for myself.  I learned how to do things for myself.  Some nights last spring I was so tired, I felt half dead.  But I didn't die, and life went on.

I watched Katie graduate, and not being a person to bawl in public much, I still teared up a little bit quietly.  Life does, indeed, move on - faster and faster every year.  It doesn't seem all that long ago that I brought her to St. Francis for the first day of school.  She was 18 months old.  So cute.  So tiny.  I watched her grow up on that campus, and watched her learn and change and make friends - and lose them.  I watched her learn some painful lessons.  And suddenly, that phase in her life was over, and I have a student in high school.  I used to roll my eyes when my grandmother warned me it would happen this way - time going faster and faster.  But it does.  And I felt like somehow my 30's had gone by without my even noticing.

I'm not one to be hung up on age.  It's just a number, after all, and some of my best friends are 20 years older than I am, or ten years younger.  And I don't think a thing about it.  But what did really hit me was the way that number snuck up, and the feeling that I hadn't had enough joy or experiences or...anything...to show for it.  Life goes on.  And we should enjoy it.

So, I started some new things.  I took a road trip by myself across country.  I allowed myself a few hours to really cry, and then told myself that I was done with that.  I saw some things I had always wanted to see, and some things I hadn't planned on seeing.  I met people and talked with strangers.  Danced with an elderly Zuni man in a convenience store in New Mexico.  I walked in the rain and nearly drove my car off a mountain in a wild summer storm.  But I didn't, and as frightening as the twenty minutes or so of driving through that storm were, there was a feeling of great satisfaction in having safely negotiated my way through it and seeing that dark mass of clouds in my rearview mirror as I pulled through Santa Rosa.  I spray painted a car in the middle of a cow field, watched fireworks over the Amarillo sky, and watched the sun come up over a desert.  And I could have cried because I have wasted some time over the last decade.  Oh, not on the important things I do - like my kids, or my job - but on worrying, or choosing easy over adventure, or choosing staying in over friends sometimes.  Anything worthwhile generally takes some effort.  I am not much one for resolutions, but I resolved to make some effort.  To do the things I've always said I wanted to do, but never get around to doing.  To let go of some fear, and to try new things in life.

I started with one thing I have always wanted, but never had the nerve to do.  I got a tattoo.  Now, I'm still me and I did some research on where was the best place to go, didn't get a tattoo I couldn't cover when I want (or need) to, and followed all the care tips carefully.  But I decided fear was not a reason to not go through with it.  All of that, to find that it really doesn't hurt so much after all - as the artist said, "you wouldn't see all these big tough guys walking around with them if it really hurt that much.  women are tougher than men about pain."  I think he's right.  We have to be, afterall, to bear and care for children.  So, cliche aside, I got the tattoo I had always wanted - a dragon - on my back.  It's not huge, but I know it's there.  Sometimes now when I get nervous, I think of that, and remember I can do anything I want or need to do, as in "heck with that, I've got a dragon on MY side."  Life moves on.

Katie started high school.  I started putting together another phase of my life.  I've thrown caution to the wind a few times in 2012, and I've had some wonderful experiences.  I've made new friends.  I've had some moments of which I am less proud, but I value the experiences just the same. Sometimes because they taught me something about myself, sometimes because they helped me get closer to another person, and sometimes because it was fun as hell - even if I should have had my head examined.  2012 was weird.   But it was a good start to a new decade in my life.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions.  But I did resolve to start 2013 in the spirit of my life going on - in the best, most fun and still safe and responsible (because I'm still me) way as possible.  Life doesn't end because you get hurt, lose a friend, fall out of love, have someone you love die, or just become unhappy.  Life moves on.  You can move with it, or be carried by it.  I started 2013 by getting another tattoo (and no, most of you will never see this one either).  This one is a compass - to remind me to always know which direction I'm headed and make good choices along the way.   But to keep moving.  Life goes on - go with it.