Anne Giles Clelland

Timeline 2

• Get new mentor, December 15, 2011
• Write a 5-year timeline, December 16, 2011
• Turn 53, December 30, 2011
• When asked to propose a toast, am speechless, December 31, 2011
• Get seen by a photographer, January 18, 2012
• Cellar remodeled and ping pong table delivered, February 3, 2012
• Attend first political meeting since government teacher made us go in 1976. Government teacher is there. February 16, 2012
• Embarrassed to be from Virginia, Birthplace of Presidents, February 21, 2012
• Inspiring, uplifting, healing trip to New York City to visit Manisha and Vijay Singal, February 23 - February 26, 2012
• Sit in front row at Gotham Comedy Club with companions and get deliciously seen by comedian: "You look like you bake cookies all day long." Friday, February 23, 2012
• 5th Avenue walk and talk with Manisha, February 25, 2012
• Six months since mother died, February 27, 2012
• First bike ride in six months, March 3, 2012
• Make finals in VT KnowledgeWorks Entrepreneurship Challenge with Feel. Think. Choose.(TM)
• Retinal hemorrhage heals after 3 months, March 12, 2012
• Conversation initiated by my father about my mother frees me from the past, Wednesday, March 14, 2012
• Have dinner with government teacher, thirty-five years since we were together in her classroom, March 14, 2012
• Think of what my mother would say - "Corporate, schmorporate" - and create category for cats, March 18, 2012
• Get 7 machines with 1 mile warm-up, March 24, 2012
• Talk and laugh while playing one billionth game of ping pong in cellar with husband, March 24, 2012
• Write this timeline, March 25, 2012

Cats in Pink Beds

His Cat

Her Cat

My Cat

c. 1999 - November 20, 2010

I adopted my cat from the Humane Society of Tampa Bay on November 2, 2004.

Unburying Things

So many people suffer because they try to bury things or pretend they didn't happen or say it didn't affect them.
- Gail Billingsley, Comment on "I See You"

For me, too, Gail, yes and yes.

The challenge is that we often "bury things" because they cause us so much pain we think we can't bear them in the open.  For me, the "buried things" do affect me and they affect my relationship with myself and others.  In fact, counter-intuitively, they cause me more pain buried, not because I can't see them, but because I can't see - and therefore can't change - how they're operating in my life in ways that cause pain to me and those I love. 

Here are ways I have kept "things buried":

• Denying their presence: "You didn’t understand." "It wasn’t meant that way."
• Denying their importance: “It doesn’t matter." "I'm over it." "That was the past." "I'm fine." "It could have been worse."
• Giving myself orders about them: “Get over it.” “Stop being so serious.” “Move on.”
• Avoiding them: “Uh-oh, I’m having feelings and thoughts about things. Let me work more, drink more, eat more, force more, strain more, anything more not to feel these feelings or think these thoughts.”
• Speaking affirmations, making lists of things to be grateful for, personal altars with crystals and feathers, reiki. (For me, the truth breaks through the ritual: “I am grateful for this glorious day…but I still feel sad about that thing...”)
• Trying: "Try to see the humor in it." "Try not to think about it."
• Upon remembering being felled by the "thing," staying on my knees. (Contemplative introspection is a strength of mine, so strong that I can readily reach: “I have no hope” and “Life has no meaning.” Both may be true, but they’re immobilizing.)
• Dwelling or ruminating, turning the handle and grinding and grinding. (Although re-remembering can at first feel like continuing to uncover truth, it can be a way to stay with known pain and avoid the next, newly painful insight.)

Here is what helps me "unbury things" so that I not only survive the process, but thrive from it:

• Telling myself the truth about what happened, what I felt and thought then, and what I feel and think now.
• Self-acknowledgement and self-compassion: “Yes, it did happen, yes, that was hard and painful, and, yes, it makes sense that you feel and think as you do.”
• Swapping out dependence on uncertain other-regard for ever-available self-regard: “Yes, humans need the regard of others and comfort from others might feel important right now, but we can't be sure someone's available. Right here, right now, whether others see it or not, or value it or not, you are doing the best you can to live according to your principles and values. You mean well. That has merit. You can take comfort in that.”
• Swapping out absolutism for magnanimity: “Given your past, it makes sense that you would think that feeling pain now means you will feel pain forever.  Ah, it’s the human condition to think it's black or white, all-or-nothing.  Your thinking, in particular, tends toward the apocalyptic.  That's okay.  You make it through this process every time and you grow every time. Easy does it."
• Practicing self-care.  This is so individual and the proverbial warm bath with candles so doesn't work for me.  For many reasons, I am a being with high energy.  Intense exercise aligns the electricity of who I am with what I’m doing in a way that feels restorative to me.   

Buried in the dark, the "thing" has the power.  Unburied, in the light, I can take its measure and choose how much power I give it.

I have shovel in hand.

I See Me

 I see you.
- Navi people, Avatar

See me, feel me
Touch me, heal me.
- Go to the Mirror!, Tommy, The Who

My mother refused to take photographs of me.  She said she wasn’t good at taking pictures. I remember one exception when I was a child.  We were all in the yard, my father had his camera, and I urged her, as if she were the child, to try.  My father, sister and I became the audience to her show as she exaggerated awkwardness with the camera, laughed, snapped a few shots in my direction.  When the film was developed, I saw the photos before they were thrown away, one with my forehead, one of blue sky where I didn’t appear at all.

She did see me. She and I were sitting at the dining room table on a hot summer afternoon, drinking Coca-Cola from ice-filled glasses. I was about sixteen. Only as an adult did I learn that the expression that came upon her face was an alarm to change the subject determinedly, desperately. My mother assumed the look of a scholar, who, upon examination and discernment, was uttering an incisive, indisputable truth.

“You'd be pretty if you didn’t have such a big nose,” she said.

***

My mother died six months ago.

Her personal traits accompany me through genetics and choice.  Her iconoclasm?  Yes, please.

With regard to the traits of her relationship with me, I am practicing examination and discernment.  Some have left a troubling, dark, legacy.  I loved my mother passionately, devotedly, so earnestly, with my whole heart and soul, and would have given anything, perhaps my own life, to please her, to relieve her of any dissatisfaction, to make her happy, to earn a mother’s love from her.  A child, then a teenager, isn’t conscious, or dares not be, of any oddness in the nature of the behavior of the parent.  And the expanse of love a dependent child feels for a parent leaves no room for consciousness. 

As an adult, however, from the edge of the growing space between my mother's presence and her absence, I am becoming aware of beliefs from the past that leaped the gap and accompany me in the present. 

I have a face not even a mother could love.

I have been told enough times by enough mothers of other children that this is not true, that if I had been their child, they would have loved my face and me, no matter what. But a child sees a mother's actions and hears her words, waits for what a mother doesn't do and listens for what she doesn't say.

The short story:  The conflict I witnessed within myself between dark and light while being photographed for a book cover was epic. Light won, but gee. It took me three days to recover from a photo shoot. 

The long story:  Our noses continue to grow as we age, drooping at the tip so they appear even larger.  My grandmother lived to be 101, so I’ve had a glimpse of my future, mon panache.

My grandmother, who died three months ago, had a face a granddaughter could, and did, with all her heart, love.

My mother had a face a daughter could, and did, with her whole being, love.

Let me look in the mirror.

Well-Suited

My mother loved beautiful, stylish clothes, so when Jane Bonomo opened her own dress shop in 1973, my mother drove herself, me and my sister in the Impala to Bonomo's and began to shop.

When I had my first formal job interview in 1982, my mother took me to Bonomo's and Jane Bonomo selected a beige suit for me and added an Austin Hill lavender and beige blouse and a lavender cummerbund.  I would never have selected it for myself, yet I felt like myself. I felt New York chic.

Jane asked, "What about shoes?" 

For complex reasons, I had been an androgynous dresser, Levi's jeans central to my wardrobe.  I described to Jane the only pair of heels I had been able to find that I could walk in inexpertly with my wide feet:  black slings with light-toned, wooden heels.

Twenty-five years later, I can still remember how vulnerable I felt.  When Jane looks at you, she sees you.  I could tell that the black shoes, especially with straps, would do, but they would lessen, not increase, the beauty of the outfit. 

"No beige pumps, no taupe?" she asked. I shook my head no.

I could see in her face that she knew, at this time in my life, the black shoes were the very best I could do.  I can't remember exactly what she said, but I know she didn't say they would be fine. She let go. She didn't compromise the integrity of her sense of style or taste. But she let me keep as far as I had gotten.

My mother was known for grand visions, grand gestures and grand generosity.  She bought me a wedding trousseau at Bonomo's for a one-night honeymoon at the Hotel Roanoke - a red cotton blouse and matching skirt, white Austin Hill dress pants, and an Austin Hill pastel striped summer suit that I still have and keep in drycleaning plastic.  I remember feeling elated when Jane held the suit up for consideration.  I've been thin enough to wear the suit only just after my wedding and just after my divorce.  If it fit, I would wear it now.  I felt like my true self in that suit.

I moved away, but when I would come home to visit, my mother would take me to Bonomo's. For decades, I have been complimented on my clothes.  I have been seen and dressed as myself by Jane Bonomo.

When I moved back home, my mother was well enough to take me to Bonomo's only a few times.  The past few years have been difficult and when I went to Bonomo's on my own, I felt like I stumbled in, usually in Levi's and glasses, no make-up, my hair not fixed, or spike-haired and damp after a workout at The Weight Club.  "I have a gig," I would say. I said little else, as did they.  The grand one was dying, then died, and the daughter needed help dressing.  Jane and her staff knew one shirt was the best I could do.  They would find the needed shirt to go with a suit I already had from Bonomo's.  Shirt in signature Bonomo's green bag with handles, I would stumble out.

When designer Kelsey Sarles insisted I have a professional photograph taken for the cover of Work: It's Personal, I knew what suit I would wear.  Jane Bonomo and my mother both helped pick it for me probably ten years ago. In it, I feel like my true self.

Last week, I walked into Bonomo's, braving the memories of being there with my mother.  I said to Jane, "I have a gig.  It's in New York.  I need a new suit.  Will you help me be my true self in New York?"  I felt so vulnerable.  What I wanted to ask was, "Am I still myself? Can you still see me after all that's happened?" 

She saw me in a charcoal gray pants suit with a gray, black and taupe patterned shell.  I would never have picked it for myself.  But I felt New York chic.  And I have black shoes that go with the suit perfectly.

***

Work: It's Personal is a collection of the workplace advice columns I have written for Valley Business FRONT since December of 2008. In the latest two photographs for the magazine, I am wearing jackets from Bonomo's.

Work: It's Personal is described on Handshake 2.0 with reviews and all the book's details. These are links to Work: It's Personal on Amazon.com and Work: It's Personal for the Kindle.

I Can See

The mother died, I had a retinal hemorrhage, the grandmother died, the opthamologist said the retinal hemorrhage could be the start of macular degeneration. 

If the retina had cracked like an old tire because I was near-sighted, the leaking blood would stop, then reabsorb.  If a blood vessel bulged through the crack because I had eye disease, well, then I would starting gettings shots in the eye.

We would have to wait and see.

Much in the last five years of my life have called me to ask "What's it all about, Alfie?" 

The threat of losing my eyesight - that one scared me.  I tried to be matter-of-fact:  If I only have a short time left with my eyesight, what do I want to have seen before it's gone?

My answer was immediate:  I have already seen everything I need to.  I would be sad go blind, but I have seen what I needed to see.

I had many hours to imagine myself in my mother's and grandmother's places as they lay in their beds dying. They had regrets. I wish for fewer.

What do I want to have done with my vision before the lights go out?  Asking myself that question produced a surprising and sad answer.  I knew immediately what I most want to have done by the time I'm in my deathbed and can do no more, or before I lose my sight.  It calls as my deepest longing.  I have not listened.  

I have new time.  I learned Friday that my eyeball sprang a leak because it's been spinning half a century.  That's it.  Could happen again, will heal again.  Not going to lose my eyesight.  Not going to lose that longing, either.  I have begun.

Top Ten Sights I Have Seen in My Beautiful Little Life

(1) My sister's baby born

The list could start and end there.

(2) Alex Edelman playing the piano

Photo:  Piotr Edelman

(3) Alisha Jones Edwards performing in a play

(4) Gargoyle at the very top of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

(5) Botticelli's Birth of Venus in Florence

(6) Michelangelo's David in Florence

(7) Black, wet, pointed, leafless tree limbs against a gray winter sky in Blacksburg, Virginia

(8) Virginia Woolf's handwritten manuscript for Mrs. Dalloway at the British Library

(9) The Gem Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution

(10) My cat, my cat, my cat, anytime, anywhere, never, ever again

This Graph Thing

Several days after making a timeline of the last five years of my life, I extended it in a communiqué to myself to include my entire life.  I have had some very challenging times, especially in the last five years.  The occurrence of most of the excruciating points on the timeline were beyond my control and most people would have found them painful.  I found them devastating, however, traumatizing even, some of them almost annihilating. 

I respect the enormity of what happened to me, but I know objectively and rationally that worse could have happened and with greater frequency.  I have experienced only some of what the human condition can be.  That fact is of no comfort to me.  "It could have been worse" is one of the most patronizing, shaming statements one person can make to another. So I don't minimize the extent of my feelings about my life.  I wonder about them.  I am sorry about my on-going sorrow.  I wonder if I suffer unduly and what I might do about that.

Here's a whiteboard drawing of how I am visualizing ranges of feeling over time using three graphs.

In the top graph excerpted below, the dotted line represents to me what I would term a normal human range of a variety of human feelings, experienced as highs, mediums and lows, sometimes from internal and conscious and unconscious causes, sometimes in reponse to external events.  This, to me, represents a sound response to, and handling of, the human condition. 

I have described myself as living acutely.  What I perceive is my own range of feelings is represented with the green line, sometimes in the normal range, sometimes outside of it, with higher highs and lower lows.  The red scale on the left is my attempt to show that I think my range of feelings sits below that of the normal range.  The lows are deeper and, therefore, take more time and effort to scale to reach a medium point or a high one. When I look at my personal timeline of my first fifty-three years on the planet, I spent a lot of it sad.

My father defines "optimization" in a way I find meaningful: "Maximize, minimize or stabilize, within constraints."

Based on my temperament, genetics, life experience, even preferences, I don't expect the amplitude of my range of feelings to change much.  I will probably continue to live my green line of acuteness.  That's a constraint.  But I want to optimize my range of feelings.  I want to shift it up a tad so that my acuteness has highs and lows along that normal line, not below it.

I was born on December 30th so I'm always just hours older than the year.  I know that time is a human construct, that marking birthdays and the beginnings of new years is, at best, conventional and, at worst, arbitrary.  Whatever.  I feel inspired during this early start to what will be my 54th year of life on the next December 30th, and in these early days of a new year, to identify what interferes most profoundly with the quality of my life, especially in terms of my relationship with myself and others. 

It's this graph thing. 

When I study my timelines, seeking what caused the next point to be a bit higher, to be the beginning of what would become the way up from one of those lows, it was one thing and one thing only:  awareness.  I can only change of what I am aware.

About this graph thing, then, I've got this awareness thing started.

More Cake

"I read your blog post... So if there is no purpose to life...do we get to eat more cake?"
- Caprice, in an in-message to me on She Chooses, quoted with permission

"...kids, be free, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody."
- Tourist Lady, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

I continue to struggle with the inevitable questions about the meaning of life after seeing loved ones die.  Have "a higher purpose than self," "Make the world a better place, "Save the world," "Do good."  Ohh, I just feel so tired...

When I read the message from Caprice, a big fill-in-the-blank came to me:

If life had no purpose, I would ____________.

If life had no purpose, I would:

• Waste (radical!) the little dried bits in the Lipton French Onion Soup packet by sifting them out, add the hard-onion-bit-free powder to sour cream, and savor that delicious dip with Lay's potato chips.
• Do another sprint triathlon.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to take me to five sprint triathlons within a four-hour drive so I can qualify for placement in the Virginia Triathlon Series with a big, fat 54 inked on my calf (although I will only be 53; I am not a fan of age-up rules).
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to drive me around a lot.
• Get another cat.
• Without having opened their lids or gone piece-by-piece through their contents to remember and feel and think, hire someone to come to my house and haul the boxes and boxes of the meticulously selected, organized, archived paper record of my life to the recycling dump.
• Host salons and gatherings and talks and symposia and summits, something cool every week!
• Get a part-time gig as a group therapist.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to drive me to see the people instead of sending them email.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to pick up me and my friends for lunch at Our Daily Bread.
• Start a "$50K at 50 Foundation" and give $50K to people who start companies at 50 years old.
• Still think that attempting to answer "What's it all about, Alfie?" gives my life its deepest meaning.

Today, I am 53 years old.  That's a good list.

I always have to gather my strength to go to this video on YouTube to copy its embed code.  But a good list needs a good cat.  She was a very, very good cat.

What's Where

Mrs. Pollet asked her fifth grade students at Margaret Beeks Elementary School to make dolls of what they wanted to be when they grew up.  My doll was a writer.  With a scarf.

My writing is:

• handwritten on paper in many filing cabinets and white storage boxes.
• typewritten in manuscripts in white storage boxes.
• in print, as listed on my CV.
• on a blog I wrote from May, 2008 to April, 2009, The Anne Show
• in probably 1/2 of the almost 1000 posts on Inside VT KnowledgeWorks.
• in probably 3/4 of the 1500+ posts on Handshake 2.0.
• in a category on the She Chooses blog.
• in a workplace advice column for Valley Business FRONT, compiled in this category on Handshake 2.0.
• on this site, annegilesclelland.com