The Wall

This morning, a friend wrote this to me:

"...powerful is your default state, you just let the CRAP overtake you, like vines creeping up a wall. You're the wall. The vines are your insecurities..." 

It's been a tumultuous week with several notable minor but annoying meltdowns to enhance the overall drama level. I've shed some tears, fought outright panic and lived with a sense of complete anxiety in the span of about six days. Nothing overly dramatic or out of the ordinary but enough to cause me a heightened sense of angst.

It's not the meltdowns, tears or panic that really infuriate me. It's the propensity I have for defensively reverting back to something I used to liken to putting up walls. The reality is, I am the wall. I immediately allow the stress and question to define me. The vines can grow within 24 hours and I am then expending energy to get rid of them instead of learning to keep the walls down. I panic. I forget that I really am defying life's challenges by taking all that is adverse and creating something fabulous. And throughout my life, that's really what I do.

The reality, again, is that I have done tremendous work in my life, on many levels, and to allow myself to return to a state where I am paralyzed by my past is just plain ridiculous. We all deserve to be happy. We deserve to live as fully as possible. We all deserve the ability to rid ourselves of the "crap".

This morning, I vented. Cried like a baby. Rolled over and played dead. I gave my friend every reason why I could not possibly knock down this heavily guarded wall in which I have both allowed myself to hide behind and incorporated into my being. He kept egging on my fight instinct. Pointed out the objective. Wrote out the OBVIOUS. And after much argument, I re-read the words. He was right, I am defiant. I am powerful. And I have moments of complete insecurity. It happens.

We move on, persevere through life and hope that we've learned from our mistakes. I made a mistake this week (okay, I've made several as I am just generally like that) by allowing anything to stand in the way of who I am and why I'm here.

And now, I've furiously pulled down the weeds and remembered that my insecurities will never define me, they just annoy me. And life moves on.

Ambiguity

"If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it's quite conscious."
-Kingman Brewster

Many years ago, I used to retreat into this deep and very dark hole when I felt insecure or immensely stressed about a situation. If there was a question, I'd hide. If faced with doubt, I'd dig and dig until buried deep within self-involvement. I'd drag myself into a very uncomfortable place because that is where I felt the most at home. No rationalization. Little insight. Just a deep hole that required little from me. Blinders on. Heart closed. Life stopped. When faced with any possibility other than what I considered manageable, the only solution would be to block out any kind of emotional response. Not so good for the soul. And definitely not conducive to communicating or learning about anything emotional.

I attribute this to being a very black and white thinker at times. When faced with ambiguity, run like hell, crawl into the hole and shut out any possibility of gray. It was really that simple. To do anything less would mean being open and vulnerable. To allow one moment of stepping OVER the hole would be blasphemy to the self-imposed code I had painfully instilled. Again, this thinking and subsequent Alice in Wonderland like fall down a slippery slope really never yielded any positive results. But boy it was a place I gravitated to consistently for the majority of my life.

At this moment, I feel ambiguity. I have been feeling it in some larger sense since we began our lovely economic roller coaster as has the rest of the world. It's unsettling. Scary. Lately, in the wake of changes that have been both amazing and frustrating, the need to run from the unknown has been overwhelming. I feel open. I feel incredibly vulnerable and scared. The gray has been splattered EVERYWHERE. The voice in my heart keeps encouraging me to RUN LIKE HELL AND JUMP into that "safe" place.

My choice: Run and crawl back in, digging deeper and deeper into the safety of a place I no longer consider healthy. Or learn to appreciate and accept ambiguity for what it is.

First option...not happening at this point in my life, unless I feel like undoing almost a decade of serious work and this would likely lead to a three year bender.

Second option. Define ambiguity as it applies to the moment and embrace the hell out of it. Learn to live with it and maintain an open-mind (or as open-minded as one who regularly sees things in black and white terms can be). Look beyond what makes me uncomfortable. Be prepared to fail. Be aware that no proven model has yet to be developed for life, particularly my own. Expect the unexpected and maybe ambiguity will turn into superb clarity. Or perhaps not.

I do know one thing, I am no longer comfortable retreating. No longer complacent with running away from the elements in life I fear the most. If I have to live an ambiguous life, I accept and get that.

There's some strange beauty in the unknown. Some prolific grace that I find much more enticing than no growth at all. And for that, I'll gladly give up the big shovel I've been carrying around.

Humility

Several months ago, someone gave me this sage advice: "You don't need to oversell yourself in life, you just need to practice a little humility".

Interesting advice for someone whose basic definition of humility had rarely expanded from the thought that humble meant weak.

This particular advice was referenced to my professional life, but I do believe it carries over into everything personal. As a child, I don't think I would have been able to be humble, as most children are not. I was the youngest of three with divorced parents and subsequently a deceased father. I held close a constant fear that if I did not put myself out there ALL the time (I believe that's the overselling part in the aforementioned advice), I would simply be put back on the shelf to collect large amounts of dust. I garnered attention for being quirky, wild-minded and seriously smart. I acted on impulse in order to capture the largest percentage of an audience. I could command attention, positive or not.

As an adult, this process simply evolved rather than abating completely. I drank to become more emboldened. I became the "best" at everything so I could simply say that was so. And in this process, the word "humility" never passed through my transom. One of the reasons I began a career in advertising was likely to learn the true art of selling everything, including myself.

The reality is, this bravado that I created actually allowed me to keep the packaging sealed well. And the package, in my own perception, was damaged goods trying to be passed off at full sale. I was trying to sell someone that I hadn't quite become comfortable with and thus the bravado could seem at times contrived. Instead of learning about my surroundings and the people in them, I quickly jumped to the benefit of knowing and loving me. I would assume that I could just use my inherent gift for leadership and intellect to skate through the motions and get to the immediate gratification. I simply listened less and talked more. After I stopped drinking, I think this defense mechanism that I had cultivated for years became much more prominent. Now, I had a soapbox of sorts to actually allow my bravado to scream. I took my sobriety and ran to the top of the hill. I blogged, I lectured, I have been writing a book. I infiltrated this into my everyday life with gusto and rarely stopped to think about the core reasons for my decisions.

When I received this advice, I sat for hours. I looked up the definition. I researched humility like crazy. What a concept, I thought. I truly had never thought of adding this definition to my list of characteristics. The more I thought about this, the more I realized how much humility was missing from my life. The soapboxes I had carefully crafted suddenly seemed too big and too high. In my quest to sell everything I believed and conjured, I lost something in translation. I had been talking way too much in my life and not listening. The bravado was no longer empowerment but a hindrance to my ability to really understand who I wanted to be and how I would project that in my life.

I sat longer. I again thought about this advice on many levels. I came up with theories. I stopped writing altogether again, because I couldn't project the honesty I needed. I reassessed where I was...again.

Fast forward to the last months. This advice comes into my head every single day of my life. Being a media director in advertising, I know that to gain the greatest share of voice, advertising needs to be direct and greatly targeted while paying attention to WHERE and HOW people want to consume this message. Meaning, instead of overselling, it should be done with finesse and grace. And you have to believe in WHAT you are selling.

I get it. I get humility. The bravado I walked out of my last job with never entered the new one. The boisterousness in which I have lived the majority of my life has significantly eased. I understand now that I am not damaged by any means, I am a remarkably strong woman as a result of all the events that have transpired. And humility simply embodies this as strength, not weakness.

It's finding the balance between the two that is now the objective. Listening, while understanding who I am and what I want in my life. In believing who I am is worth gold and after some digging, you'll find it. Difficult, yes, but absolutely attainable. Believe me, I'm still ready to turn cartwheels at any point in my life, but I now sit back and wait for someone to ask me to. It's such an immense and incredible concept. And probably one of the biggest life lessons that I am learning.

And for this gift, I am humbled.