The Anne Show

The Anne Show ran from May, 2008 to April 2009, then closed in December, 2011.

I loved the vision I had for the blog and I loved writing for it.  I don't need a show anymore, just a place to write.  So I'm doing that here, at annegilesclelland.com.  I let go of theanneshow.com in case another Anne needs a show.

Here are posts from the blog that were meaningful to me, listed from most recent to first.  It is not lost on me that the last act was no longer The Anne Show.

December 28, 2008
Traits 

Traits of My Mother Which I Most Admire
Mary Wilson Burnette Giles
 
Intelligence
I don’t think she knows her I.Q score.  If the number were uttered aloud, a tsunami would rise. 

Audacity
Interjections of non-social norm sentences or actions into an interaction can be funny.  They can provoke cognitive dissonance which invites enlightenment.  It walks the talk of “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
 
Iconoclasm
Even if “it’s always been done that way,” if a ritual or institution cannot bear the scrutiny of measurement on an integrity scale, my mother states openly and firmly, “The emperor wears no clothes.”
 
Generosity
Simply put, my mother senses need and gives unstintingly of her resources.
 
Traits of My Father Which I Most Admire
Robert Hayes Giles, Junior
 
Creativity
His ability to view situations and problems from heretofore unimaginable angles – as if he used a Dr. Seuss Whoville periscope – and to generate scrolling lists of possibilities is legendary.
 
Acuteness
Whether it’s noticing how cream stirs into coffee, laughing in celebration at the way a little kid wears a hat, or wincing at what the buzz of power lines might mean, my father thinks, feels, and senses life keenly.
 
Passion
Although the projects evolve, the theme is the same:  a life deeply lived.
 
Tenacity
Even after ten years of retirement, even on weekends, alarm set for 6:10 AM.  ‘Nough said.

December 12, 2008
You Are Perfect 

I say this to my cat most days.
 
I said it the first time without forethought. 

I saw the curl of her self on the ottoman in front of me, leaned irresistibly to stroke her, and whispered, in awe, “You are perfect.”
 
I have made myself insane for years seeking absolute truths, debating the presence or achievability of perfection.
 
Then here’s a cat, an older stray from the Humane Society at that, not an ardently reared purebred, asleep in my office, and what I seek is here.
 
I wouldn’t change the mismatched tints of her eyes, the body-and-a-half length of her tail, the circle of her protruding lower lip.
 
I wouldn’t change her inner workings.  I am sorry she suffers.  Most cats run.  She and I have a system.  She sits up in discomfort, I lean over her, my hands opening as if from prayer.  I catch her upset.  I rinse my hands, she grooms, we settle back into our lives.

She is herself.  Therefore, she is perfect.
 
Having never had a child, I cannot know if human parents see their human children as perfect, if they accept the who and how of a child’s existence as the wholeness of the child’s occurrence on the planet.
 
I might have wanted to change a human child, to wish the child were different in some way, to urge the child to be other than he or she was in order to serve me in some way, to reflect well on me, or to gain some advantage in the world.
 
I think that might be natural in a parent, or at least natural in a contemporary American parent.
 
By wanting to change the child, I would have missed the perfection of the child.

December 10, 2008
Five Four-Drawer Filing Cabinets 

“Kids, be free.  Be who you are, be whatever you want to be.  Just don’t hurt anybody.”
--From memory, lyrics to a song from the rock opera Hair, the score to which was one of my first record albums
 
“Like sand in the something of an hourglass, so go the days of our lives.”
--From memory, tagline to soap opera “Days of Our Lives” I watched with my mother and sister when I was a child
 
As my one-year quest to answer all of life’s questions before I turn 50 becomes sand in the something of an hourglass, I am having some insights.
 
I have not enjoyed my life as I could have.
 
Much, much of it was spent straining to intuit what others wanted and needed in order to rescue them from their sorrows or disappointments, or to launch them into new heights of growth.
 
I have five, four-drawer filing cabinets full of meticulously researched, thoughtfully expressed, carefully crafted, artfully presented handouts, proposals, letters, articles, short stories, poems, and plans representing effort after effort to lift and inspire.
 
One filing cabinet for each decade.
 
I found some of my efforts deeply moving and others have said that I helped them along the way.  Good.
 
But I find I have not been so much who I am, but more who I perceived others needed and wanted me to be.
 
At 50, I contemplate a life spent largely other-focused and chronically self-depleted.
 
I wonder, if like 40 years of television, 50 years of striving might be enough.

December 09, 2008
Television 

The last decade of my fifty years of life, I have spent without television.
 
The few times I have watched it at someone else’s place, I have enjoyed it.  If someone else picks a movie on DVD, I’ll watch it.  I don't begrudge others their pleasure in television.  I'm sure I would find some programs of great value to me.
 
My television-less life is not from a moral or political decision. 

I find I have so many more interesting things to do.
 
For me, forty years with television is enough.

December 09, 2008
Energy 

Several people have described me recently as “energetic.”  I would prefer “catalytic,” since that would mean the energy helped make something happen, rather than dispersed like a downed powerline in a hurricane, snaking and sizzling ineffectually.
 
However, that I would be described as energetic makes sense to me.  As I count down the days until I turn 50 (21 left), I realize I have practiced energy for half a century.
 
I think hard, feel hard, exercise hard.  I eat well, I sleep okay, I nap great.
 
After fifty years of disciplined, intentional energy training, how would I not be full of ideas, passion, and strength?

November 16, 2008
Absolutes

An excerpt from There, Anne's Triathlon Training:
 
Insights I have had as a result of a one-year quest to resolve all personal issues before turning 50 so that the next how-ever-many could be error-free:
 
Despite my creativity, my intent, my will, my earnest, intense effort, I am hard to change.  As much as I might wish to be different, other, or more, after 50 years of a practiced pattern, the pattern probably will not be subject to much altering, despite my best efforts.  There’s a “this is it” finality to that which saddens me somewhat. 

My striving and seeking to find the one truth is a quest I must relinquish.  My striving and seeking to find, in any situation, which is black and which is white, which is good and which is evil, must be relinquished.  My yearning to always, always follow the high road is admirable and sweet, but ultimately naïve.  “Always” is much rarer than I thought.  What is right and what is wrong in any situation is so often unclear and the choices seem to array themselves on a continuum of sort of right or sort of wrong.  Judgment calls must be made and uncertainty must be tolerated.
 
I think I believed I would find peace in absolute certainty.  All I had to do was determine that absolute and I would be free of the unquiet of doubt.
 
Probably peace, although I still find myself resisting this, is found in accepting the ever-presence of uncertainty.

October 08, 2008
Vital

This review appeared in the November 2008 issue of Valley Business FRONT:

Staring at the Sun:  Overcoming the Terror of Death, Irvin D. Yalom, Jossey-Bass, 2008
 
Ah, death.  Not a common topic of conversation at cocktail parties.  Yet Irvin Yalom, 75, internationally regarded psychotherapist, asserts that not confronting death--not staring at death as it if were the sun--limits our lives.

Yalom urges us to focus on the here-and-now to experience our full humanity.  He writes, “Staring into the face of death…renders life more poignant, more precious, more vital.”  Applying Yalom’s wisdom, at [almost] 50 I expect my life to end in my beloved Southwest Virginia, but right here, right now, my days feel vitally full of ideas, passion, and precious people.

October 04, 2008
About Relationships

1.You will break each other’s hearts.  Many times.
2.Together, define “I,” “You,” and “We.”  Consult prior to acting on what affects “We.”  If in doubt, choose “We.”
3.Risk everything--even the destruction of the relationship--over and over again by asking everything, saying everything, sharing everything.  Practice being someone who can speak all; practice being someone who can hear all.
4.Cultivate the heart, mind, self-knowledge, and self-awareness of "I" in order to show up as your best self in "We."

If the thought of #1 evokes feelings of poignancy and bravery rather than fear, if the thought of #2 fills you with resolve rather than defiance, if #3 lifts you with an odd mix of excitement and trepidation rather than resistance, and #4 feels like a priority rather than "Yeah, yeah, I'll get to that later," you may well be paired with someone with whom you can share deepening knowledge of, and intimacy with, yourself, your other, even humanity as a whole, over a lifetime.

What's the worst that can happen if one doesn't risk all? 

A partially-lived and partially-loved life.

September 17, 2008
Middle

An excerpt from Anne's Triathlon Training:

What I treasure most from my first season of triathlon training is during the last race of the season in Culpeper, at the start of the open water swim for my age group, I positioned myself front and center. 

Not carefully on the periphery of the group--as cautious veterans had warned me and I had obediently done in my previous races--to avoid being jostled or kicked or hit.  I moved to the front, joining the other women as we lifted our arms full of weeds and laughed at our slimy adornments, but still to the front, one half-step ahead of every other swimmer.

I did this knowing that seven-eighths of them would pass me.

When the horn sounded, I stroked straight for the buoy.  I didn’t spot because from all those workouts and previous edge-swimmings, I know I swim straight.

I got my breathing set, cupped my hands firmly to keep my fingers together so they wouldn’t get jammed, and waited for the experience.

And it came.  All those strong bodies, elemental, wet and suspended, slicking on, against, and by me.  It felt how a school of sharks looks. 

If I got hit or kicked, it would be because I was in the middle of living, not on the edge of it. 

September 03, 2008
Scar

So when the student pushed me in the morning, I taught the rest of the day, holding on with fingertips until, alone, I would fall end over end into whatever chasm of feeling awaited me. 

As I headed toward my car, I passed behind a van parked in the bus lane, shuddered, staggered, kept walking.  Into the unmarked metal wheelchair lift on the back of the van, I had walked full stride.

Yesterday, I had the scar removed that replaced the part of me taken that day.

The scar ended up, after two leg-swelling infections, ill-healed, a small, thick continent below my knee, white, icy, numb.

Today it aches as it should have a year and a half ago, as if I had taken myself to the emergency room, had the wide-open wound bathed, then stitched closed.  As if a normal woman, having received an injury--however it occurred--sought care.

My pattern is to believe I must protect others from my feelings of weakness, fear, and pain, and protect myself from what they might do, feel, or think as a result of learning that I have these feelings.  When The Anne Show isn’t what others want, need, or expect, I have seen the tomatoes of disappointment, contempt, even rage skid across the stage.

I got in my car, drove home, rinsed the oozing opening in my leg with hot, soapy water, trembled, waited.

My doctor said he couldn’t recreate my shin as if the injury had never happened.  He said, “We can change it.”

A mentor in Tampa talked often of transforming experience.  He was a proponent of the importance of self-candor with regard to experience, particularly troubling experience.  He believed that one’s truth, if kept in the dark, stayed ominously without shape, preying on the very human fear of the unknown.  When brought to the light, however painfully, the truth could be seen for what it was.  Its dimensions could be measured.  Then it could be transformed and integrated into one’s life.  Otherwise, the truth would operate threateningly on the edge of one’s life, requiring constant vigilance, requiring energy-sapping arm’s-length wariness and rejection.

While I am not enjoying the ache in my shin, I am at peace with it.  It’s for a reason.  It’s for transformation.

Yesterday was my first experience with out-patient surgery, but not my first experience with anesthetizing a part of my life while the rest of me is conscious, of sensing something hard and sharp happening, of an arms-length stretching and pulling that nobody could take and not be distressed by, but not being able to feel it.  And of knowing the future would be pain.

Just like the day the student pushed me.  Just like the day I didn’t see the van.

While I lay on the surgery table, the nurse reached out and stroked the back of my hand.  I was doing the strong, optimistic side of The Anne Show.  I wasn’t crying.  Still, I wanted to turn my hand into hers and grip it.  But I feared my clammy, sweaty palm would be unwelcome in hers.  So I didn’t.

***

But I thought about it.

For me, that’s transformation.  Even if scar-sized.

August 14, 2008
To Try

"It was his habit to try for private truthfulness."
--from The Lost Dog, Michelle de Ketser, 2007 

July 30, 2008
Soft

Does one pick up a baby when it’s crying?

As a childless woman, I have had an observer’s view of the anguish mothers feel as they ask this question, and as they question their choices.  One mother with a grown son said her grandmother had warned her not to pick up her son when he cried in the crib.  “You’ll make him soft,” the grandmother said.  By letting him cry, uncomforted, the mother feared she had actually made him hard.

In The Other, David Guterson’s work of fiction, a mother’s decision to allow her son to cry has harrowing results.

My cat was turned into the Humane Society as a stray after a hurricane and spent six weeks unclaimed in a cage before I adopted her. 

John Havran, the man who cares for her when we are out of town, noted that my cat's eyes are different colors.  It’s a trait of cats with viral infections as kittens.

She finds kitchen cupboards with doors that swing closed and safe harbors herself within them.

My cat cries in her sleep.

If I pick her up, will I make her soft?

July 28, 2008
Self-Soothing

When I adopted my then five-year-old cat, I awoke in the night, enchanted to find her asleep on my chest.

Her choice of me, her presence on my heart, my consciousness of her with every breath of my own, eased my soul.

Recently my husband’s cat, with whom I have co-habitated one year and is technically not allowed on furniture, has sought my chest during afternoon naps.  A heavier, wigglier cat than my own, she nonetheless creates in me that same awed sense of being comforted.

Over and over again, I have observed in troubled people the inability to self-soothe.

Harville Hendrix, author of Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, posits that, in the womb, each of us receives what we need even before we’re aware of desire for it.  We’re fed before we’re hungry, we sleep before we’re tired.

Once born, we must immediately address delayed gratification.  Even if we’re blanketed in seconds, put to the breast in moments, we still feel some kind of terrifying awareness that what needs to be present is not.

Hendrix theorizes that separation from the womb might be the original trauma of human life from which we never fully recover, for which we seek reconnection our entire lives.

Other theorists argue (the universal phrase for “I don’t remember where I read it”) that this fundamental human truth begins to be addressed when infants learn in the arms of attentive mothers how to handle life’s hardships.

When an infant is hungry, tired, uncomfortable, in pain, or afraid, in the gap between those distressed feelings and relief, the mother soothes the baby.  Whether through holding, rocking, speaking, singing, playing, or some combination thereof, the mother comforts the baby during its distress.

From the mother soothing the baby, the baby learns that it can be soothed, that it can tolerate the gap between distress and relief.

Just as we first have our shoes tied by others, then learn how to do it ourselves, from others we, too, learn the skill of self-soothing.

If there’s no mother, if there’s a neglectful, detached, emotionally unavailable, unskilled or impaired mother, if there’s an intrusive or abusive mother, if there’s repeated neglect or trauma in a young life, if there’s some cosmic mismatch between what the infant needs and what the mother can provide--if what should happen doesn’t, or what shouldn’t happen does--the infant is not soothed and does not learn to self-soothe.

In adulthood, when problems beyond hunger or fatigue arise--handling the expectations of others in school, at work, and in society, finding a job and paying bills, coping with illness and death, relationships at home and work--what’s a non-self-soother to do? 

What does one do with an infant’s instinct that these feelings are so dire that, if not relieved, might truly lead to death?

Anything that blunts, extinguishes, dulls, or obliterates this sense of imminent demise.

Over-work, over-eat, under-eat, over-exercise, have sex, shop, drink, use drugs, gamble, have serial relationships, have dramatic relationships, anything that provokes high enough feelings to counter the heights of distress. 

These paths are fraught with peril.  Yet a non-self-soother’s choice of them makes perfect sense.  They look like ways to survive.

Some thoughts, some feelings, some jagged mix of the two, seem beyond bearing.

At the times I can self-soothe, it feels like a cat on the chest, a presence on the heart.

July 22, 2008
Money

From The Other by David Guterson:

"Your friend Barry," he answered.  "He named you in his will."

I didn't answer.  I sat there thinking, like an English teacher, that even $440 million didn't stand between me and annihilation. (p. 205)

I have been thinking a lot about money these days.

I have become a member of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks and am tracking what it's like in The Accelerated Entrepreneur.

I think the business plan I have written at age 49 1/2 is different from the one I would have written at age 25. 

At 25, I believed all things were possible.  At 49 1/2, I know that annihilation--or getting hit by a bus--could happen at any moment.  No amount of money can change that.

I sometimes misstep at being present in the moment, but I nodded my head when I read those lines from Guterson.

Ironically, thoughts of annihilation or getting hit by a bus or making money or not making money don't upset me much.

It's because I love my life.

July 21, 2008
Yes, But...

An acquaintance devised this interesting acronym:

J - Justifying
A - Arguing
D - Defending
E - Explaining
 
She said, “When I find myself ‘JADE-ing’--justifying, arguing, defending, or explaining--I know I am trying to control the thoughts, feelings, or actions of others.  I am either attempting to make them do something, or not do something.  In either case, I’m trying to make them responsible for doing or not doing what I want, rather than taking responsibility for what I want and asking for it directly.  I know I attempt to control others based on past experience.  To my direct requests, I anticipate a very negative reaction."

I have found myself mentally “JADE-ing” recently, preparing lists of reasons why I think and feel the way I do. 

To change old patterns, to discover new ones, I must practice that all-important self-awareness:  What am I feeling and thinking?  What am I trying to control?

In my mind, I am preparing a defense of why I am not, or don’t want, to do or be what someone else wants me to do or be.

To my justifications, arguments, defenses, and explanations, I anticipate, “Yes, but…”

Others want me to be and do what they want.

Ah, it’s such a human wish:  Please.  Dance about who I am and what I do.

July 10, 2008
My Work to Do

The greatest gift I can give to the world--and to the beloved people in my life--is my own constantly evolving, constantly sought, self-awareness. 

June 26, 2008
Secrets

My father helped us clear and mulch space for a small garden. He planted flowers and I added basil and rosemary. Days later, as I bent to water the new bed, I noticed a weed. I pulled it.

I noticed another weed. Then another.

I didn't see the next weed until I saw the first.

So secrets seem to me as I undertake this self-awareness journey, these awkward, stumbling steps towards enlightenment.

His mind of man, a secret makes
I meet him with a start
He carries a circumference
In which I have no part
--Emily Dickinson

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
--Robert Frost

But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.
--John Milton

At support group meetings, one hears, "You're only as sick as your secrets."

If that is true, then if I tell my secrets, I am more well, less sick.

The person to whom I must first tell my secrets is myself.

When I told myself the first secret I worked so, so hard not to be true--that I was unable to conceive a child--grief felled me and I rolled on our dining room floor as if I were on fire.

I can respect people who choose to keep their secrets, even from themselves.

I respect the wise man who advised the young man seeking the path of enlightenemnt, "Don't start."

Once I saw the first secret, I saw another. Then another.

June 24, 2008
You-Statement Antidote

When someone uses a you-statement, consciously or unconsciously, the intent is usually to control the other person. Attempting to control another person inadvertently creates a conflict, an I vs. you situation.

Conflict resolution techniques can be of value when one is either attempting to examine one's own use of you-statements or relating to someone else who uses them.

One conflict resolution technique involves rewording you-statements into "I-statements"--statements that use "I" as the subject. This lets the speaker take responsibility for his or her feelings rather than assigning them to another or attributing their cause to another.

This is a form that has worked for me:

"I feel _____ when you _____, I need _____, and I would like to request that you _____."

To fill in the blanks: "I feel this feeling when you do or say this specific thing, I need this condition to exist to continue to feel related to you or okay about myself, and I would like to request that you do this one specific thing that would help meet my needs."

Here are some examples:

You-statement: "You'll love it!"

Simple rewording as an I-statement: "I will love it if you end up liking how we've painted our walls!"

You-statement: "You make me angry!"

Reworded as an I-statement using the conflict resolution form: "I feel angry when you shout at me, I need to feel that you are trying to work with me rather than overpower me, and I would like to request that you use a speaking voice when talking with me."

You-statement: "You shouldn't think that."

Reworded as an I-statement: "I feel uneasy when you express thoughts like that. I need to know that we're still connected even when you're telling me your thoughts, and I would like to request that you reassure me that we're still together as you tell me these things."

And, finally:

You-statement: "You shouldn't use you-statements."

Reworded as an I-statement: "I feel wary when you use you-statements, I need to feel that you respect me as an equal, and I'd like to request that you use I-statements to tell me what you're thinking and feeling, rather than you-statements that feel like you're trying to tell me what to think and feel."

June 23, 2008
Invitation

I offer the contents of this blog--written with heart and thought and the best insights I could muster at the time--as my story. 

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, what I most want to have done is sought meaning in my life today.

When I hear the stories of others, it helps me make sense of my own story.

I have been asked why I am writing The Anne Show Blog.

I could quote a billion famous writers now and the message would be the same.  Writers have no choice.  They must write.  I am a writer.

And as a writer, I have things I can't talk about.  I write them.

You're invited to The Anne Show.  As I wrote in About The Anne Show, the curtains are open.

If you find anything in my story disagreeable, I would like to offer what I have heard in support group meetings:  "Please take what you like and leave the rest."

If anything in my story helps you with your story, I will have passed on the gift others have given to me. 

June 22, 2008
You-Statements

"You'll love it!"

The speaker usually believes this sentence is uttered with the best of intentions.

But it's a direct order.

The motivation behind a "you-statement"--a statement using "you" as the subject such as "You make me angry!" or "You shouldn't think that way"--is almost always control. 

Translation of a you-statement is often this simple:  "I want you to _______," where the blank is filled in by the action the speaker perceives will meet a need or want, or relieve an uncomfortable feeling.  By using a you-statement, the speaker attempts to control what another thinks, feels, or does.

I used a you-statement yesterday. I'm not proud of it, but here goes:

I briefly visited a woman with whom I was very close in my teenage and young adult years. She has many challenges in her life. I visit her--or anyone--rarely these days because I am so engrossed in my own precious life, but also because our conversations center primarily on her challenges, most of which are heavy, over most of which she has little control.

When she said she'd like to come over and see my newly painted house, I said, "You'll love it!"

Translation:

I want you to love it.

I want you to feel delight when you see the orange, blue, and raspberry walls because I want you to feel some joy.

I feel so sad about your challenges and so helpless to do anything for you or about them.

Part of my self-measure of self-worth, unhealthily, is based on my perception of my value to you. If I can do something you value, then I am of value.

I know you want me to just listen. I know if you talk you'll feel unburdened.

But I feel burdened and distressed by listening.

I want you to want what I want to offer--bright walls--rather than what you want to receive--time to be heard.

I feel guilty that I don't want to give you what you want to receive.

I feel diminished self-worth that I can't be of value to you in the way I have to offer.

To relieve me of that feeling about your feelings, I want you to feel what I would feel more comfortable with--pleasure in my new house--rather than what I sense you do feel--disappointment that I won't sit and listen.

"You'll love it."

Please feel that instead of what you do feel so I won't have to feel the uncomfortable feelings I feel.

June 19, 2008
The Truest Act of a Life Lived Well

For the past six months, I have volunteered one afternoon a week as a group counselor at a small, local residential treatment facility for substance abuse.

What I so appreciate about residential treatment is that the clients and I sit in a circle and pause.  I listen and facilitate clients' moments to just be there and reflect on how they feel, what they think, and which actions have worked for them and which ones haven't.

It seems the truest act of a life lived well--to take a few moments to be in it.

One of the traits I most admire in people in substance abuse treatment is, if invited, in general, they will probe the deepest truths with awing courage to discover their most profound wisdom.

They seek what will save their lives.

From the power of witnessing this, I am shaken and strengthened.

That's what happens to me one afternoon per week.

June 13, 2008
Quarters

I feel an imperative, an urgency, for a reckoning.

I have 6 months until I turn 50.  My parents just turned 75.  My grandmothers are almost 100.

I feel constrained by a sense of dishevelment in my first half century.  If I have another quarter century to live, and perhaps another quarter after that, I want it to be less past-bound and more moment-present.

To quote Snuffy Smith, "Time's awastin'."

June 12, 2008
Words

When I was around sixteen, my mother showed me a newspaper clipping a friend of hers had sent of a story describing a missing young woman.  The missing young woman was the friend’s daughter.  All that was written on the article was this in black pen:  “No words.”

I accepted “No words” as the way to express the inexpressible.

No.

Not for me. 

June 11, 2008
Open

I heard a story about a student who visited a wise man and said, "I want to begin the path to enlightenment.  What is your advice?"  The wise man answered, "Don't start."

I have to ease into speaking.

***

I drove to a chain bookstore that wasn’t here when I left, found the fiction section in a location similar to the location of the chain bookstore in Tampa, looked in Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, scanned either the introduction or the first few pages--I don't remember what I read--and closed it.

That’s how I lived my first one year and ten months after returning to my hometown in the mountains after twenty-three years in the subtropics.  To the truth of what happened or of what I felt about it, I closed.

I had not known I followed the closed rule here when I was a kid, too--closing down, closing off, closed closet doors, bedroom doors, front doors.  Sometimes closed hearts and closed minds.  I thought that was normal, the way everyone lived.

I carried the closed rule through the marriage that started in my hometown and ended seventeen years later in divorce in Tampa.  For the next six years there, I practiced opening.  By the time I left, I thought open was the rule.  I thought I could carry my open self to my hometown with me.

Not only is closing a cultural norm in my hometown, and the-don’t-tell-silence that comes with it, but closing is a norm in my family.  We had sit-down family dinners and frequent, lengthy, meandering living room conversations.  About ideas, about information, about thoughts.  Never, ever about feelings.  That subject was closed.

What I, and most people under a be-closed, don’t-feel rule do is dissociate.  The human self separates--dissociates—itself from the human function.  It’s a natural human trait considered to have evolved to separate the head from the heart so that action can be taken even in the midst of, even especially in the midst of, the fear that screams when life is threatened.

With a life-time’s worth of practice, I became adept and skilled at separating what I felt from what I did so automatically that I even became unaware I had a self that felt.  I was all function, all doing.  Only in guerrilla bursts--watching a student in a play, seeing a work of art, driving to work, jogging in the rain--did my feeling self emit a single sob, then re-flee.

My mother got a master’s degree in counseling when I was thirteen; I remember one of the lines she quoted from a case study:  “She ran out of script.”  When I found I was unable to conceive a child, I didn't know what to do.  I left my marriage, not because I didn’t love my husband, but because the lights were on, the audience was leaving, and I didn’t have a new role.  The play was over.

Four decades of containerhood spilled.  The newspapers stacked to a man’s height in my new apartment as I slogged and slipped and wept. 

Sometimes, while driving in Tampa, the dark clouds would be heavy on the horizon, with bright sky above them.  For a moment, my breath would catch.  Was I held in the hands of mountains again?  No, I was living the song’s cloud’s illusions.  Then I would cry.

My husband and I separated in 1999.  By the time I left Tampa in July, 2006 to return to the mountains, my feeling self and my doing self were no longer dissociated, but side-by-side.  One felt.  The other, informed by feeling, did stuff.  I was open.

In July, 2006, I returned to my complex hometown, my complex family, to the longed for hands of the mountains.

I fell unconsciously into closure.  I followed the unspoken, unbroken rule of silence.

In September 2006, a guy who graduated from the same high school I did gunned down first a security officer, then a policeman on the Huckleberry Trail where the leaves were just starting to turn.  A few weeks later, the guy who was the manager at the swim club where I tanned every summer in my bikini was revealed to have a thirty-year history of sexual abuse of children.  In February 2007, my own student, in my own classroom, pushed me.  In April 2007, a guy who went to the same college I did killed thirty-two people and then himself.  Five months later, in September, my own student, in my own classroom, threatened to shoot me.

How does one do what seems cannot be done?
•Go home again.
•Watch parents age on their way to death.
•Lose a calling.
•Bear rape of those one knows.
•Bear a mass murder.
•Live a life of meaning, no matter where, no matter what.

I have always sought the one true thing.  I have been warned a thousand times about the peril of absolutes, instructed a thousand times about the continuum of this or that, about ambivalence, about greyness over black and whitehood.  My yearning remains unchecked.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I want to say that I think there’s one true thing.

Open.

Not closed.

June 06, 2008
Energy

I have been noted for my energy.

A recent boss asked one afternoon, "How many cups of coffee have you had today?"

None. A pot of tea in the morning. It's not about caffeine.

When I was in graduate school working on a master's degree in counseling, one of my instructors described temperament in this way: If a thunderstorm passes over a hospital nursery full of infants, some will scream, some will listen, and some will sleep right through it.

That's temperament, then, the tendency one is born with to react to stimulation in one's environment in a particular way.

I think I was born with a reactive temperament.

I add to that being conceived and carried in a womb awash in caffeine, nicotine, and adrenalin.

I can imagine my central nervous system forming in a bath of stimulants as a sort of electrical channel that variably chugs along like the electrons in the cord to my desk lamp, collects voltage like a van de Graaff generator, or fires like a storm-severed power line.

What it's mostly felt like to be me is a hair dryer. When I'm on, my inner structure feels set on high, hot, noisy, dangerously close to dropping in the filled bathtub and electrocuting everybody, capable of creating warm, luxuriant beauty.

When the switch is flipped or the plug is pulled, either by my inner power plant or by external forces, I'm full of potential energy. But I'm off.

One of my early bosses said, "Would you please sit down!"

At this point in my life, the nature vs. nurture question is important to me: What was I born with and can't change, and what resulted from my experience that I can change?

To me, answers to that question, even partial answers, help me answer this question: "I want to live a life that works for me, for my loved ones, for my community, for the world. What is unchangeable that becomes my responsibility to manage, and what is changeable that I truly can alter such that I can do things in ways that work better?"

I heard a man at a workshop say that people most want to know and be known, to love and be loved, to touch and be touched.

That's an exquisite summary of what I want, too.

Some of my traits, like energy--whether of nature or nurture--have interfered with my ability to meet those deepest longings.

Managing unruly traits asks me to
•become aware of what I do and what the consequences are
•identify skills that manage the traits, thus potentially limiting the unsavory consequences
•practice the skills
•soothe myself when my skills aren't what I needed or wanted them to be.

The soul-searching required to "become aware" is tough and continues to be. Negotiating the inner dialogue that begins with "Things shouldn't be this way!" and follows with "People should love me just the way I am!" has required patience. Figuring out what skills will work and practicing them is like anything new--it requires the courage to be and look awkward.

I have had spectacular help from individuals and groups and books on all these things.

An example of my energy? I think of one billion things to say per nanosecond.

Shockingly, not all of it is fascinating. And if I speak it, people I want to be close to experience it as a barrage, as an overwhelming wave in which they could drown. I want to share who I am and be close, but what I do is drive people away. They want a turn to speak, too.

How do I manage this? I become aware of the love and regard I feel for the person I'm with and I observe silence.

What do I do with what I didn't say? I ask myself what Ernest Hemingway reportedly asked himself in front of each blank page: What's the most important thing in the whole world for me to write about? And then I write it. 

June 04, 2008
Tools

What are the tools with which I seek meaning?
•Acuteness, born of temperament, rearing, and training
•A liberal arts and sciences education
•Conscious reading
•Observation while traveling
•Upholding a family value inspired by Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living."
•Upholding another family value, inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi: "Know thyself."
•Relentless self-reflection, self-scrutiny, self-analysis, both self-undertaken and guided by others
•Openness to insights of others, whether kindly or brutally offered
•Insights gained from personal, intimate interactions with thousands through having been a teacher, a confidante, then a counselor
•A late-life master’s degree in mental health counseling (2006)
•List-making
•Hope

June 03, 2008
If I Got Hit by a Bus Tomorrow...

In many ways, The Anne Show is my answer to The Question.

The Question is modified for more delicate stomachs from the original one I have asked myself and others for years:  "If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, what would I most want to have done today?"

What I most want to have done most days is to have made sense of my life in words.

I seek to understand my experience.

May 28, 2008
The Question

My dream for The Question?  365 days of answers from all over the world.

May 27, 2008
The Anne Show Opens Today

The Anne Show is my attempt to reveal what has and does make meaning in my life, to make meaning in the process of creating the show, and to seek ways to continue to make and live a meaningful life.

I so hope that what I and others explore, display, and reveal in The Anne Show will be of value to readers and viewers.

The Anne Show opens with The Question.

***

The Question

If your voice were to be taken away from you two minutes from now for an unspecified time--perhaps for moments, perhaps forever--what would you most need and want to say before your time to speak was up?

“In the eighth grade I wrote a credo and while…”

I so hope to feature you as a star on The Anne Show.

As in the example above, please share your answer to The Question in a two-minute video recording and upload it to a video upload site. 

E-mail the first 10 words of what you say, plus the link to your answer on the video upload site, with the subject line "The Question," to anne@handshake20.com.  If your video works for The Anne Show, I’ll post the first ten words, the link to the video, and embed the video on the site.

What will make your video “work” for The Anne Show?  Truth, sincerity, genuineness.  Mind-thought-ness, heartfelt-ness.  Speaking from the essence of who you are.  Originality and quirkiness of the you-ness of what you share.

Apply Coleridge’s definition of poetry:  “The best words in the best order.” 

Please use your best words.

No swearing, no slang, no scatological references.  Avoid drugs and sexual references, although either might be acceptable as a topic if you have wisdom to share.  No ethnic, religious, racial, ability-related slurs.  Don’t settle for the way others have used words.  Use them your way.

What I want is to be overwhelmed with the beauty, power, art—or some inexplicable quality beyond description—of what you say and how you say it. 

I reserve the sole right to choose which videos I post. 

The two-minute limit is strict.  If the length of your video is listed as 02:01, I won’t post it, even if it’s brilliant.

And if I don’t use your video, thank you very much for honoring me by sharing your answer to The Question.