The Anne Show

Dance

I first heard, “Dance, dance, wherever you may be…” when I was a child at what’s now considered a classic 1960s gathering of adults and children, singing, hoping to change the world.

I found this on No Impact Man.  I was moved beyond words.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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'."

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.

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.