blog – Page 4 – Hugh's Blog

Dealing with transitions

I hate transitions. ADHD brains need routine, and transitions kill them.

I’m in a very liminal space on a big project.

Liminality is the idea that you are passing from one thing into another. You know that feeling – like the last week of a job where you have turned in notice. Your brain is already on the new job, but your body is still in the old one. It’s a time of transition.

Apparently, the word liminal comes from the same root that the word lintel does – the bar that sits over the door in a brick wall, that keeps the doorway open and prevents the brick from crashing down on your head.

Huh.

Words are cool. Even so, I still hate them. Not words. I love words.

I mean transitions. I hate them.

Hate. Them.

I have attention deficit disorder – ADHD is the official diagnosis. I’ve written about it quite a bit.

And people who have brains like mine need routine. (That’s not the same thing as saying we are good at making routines – that is another type of brain. But we need them.)

Transitions always kill your routines. Take away your hard-fought coping mechanisms and accommodations. And you have to make new ones.

But there is this period of time in a transition- that liminal time, when you are still in the old world, but your brain is in the new one, where you are just a mess.

And that is where I am right now. A big mess.

Luckily, this has happened to me enough that I have a liminal space routine.

Make a big pot of coffee.
Get out your favorite pen and a yellow legal pad. (Must be yellow – brains are weird)
Make a list. A long list.
Don’t censor. It all goes on the list. Everything pending, everything you want to do, everything you need to do. No categories, no priorities.
Then get up and go for a walk.

I’ve learned it really doesn’t matter what you do when you come back from the walk – the act of list making seems to be where the magic is. Even so, I find that I get clarity on what I ought to be doing, and even have energy for it after this exercise.

But your mileage may vary. Because brains are weird.

You don’t simplify by adding things.

The urge to complicate things is almost endless.

There is always the hope that adding another layer will make it cleaner, easier, smoother. That if only you did this other thing, it would all magically work. We want there to be a shortcut. There has to be a shortcut.

There is no shortcut.

The urge to complicate things is almost endless.

Sadly, I have not found this to be true. I wish it were true, dear reader. But sadly, as my father used to remind me often, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Or, as my less poetic but much more pragmatic neighbor would later say: Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up the fastest.

I need a hack – a trick – a secret technique or program or app that, if added to my routine, will simplify my life.

But the hard reality is that adding things almost never simplifies them. Adding only increases the complexity.

These days I’m trying to reduce the complexities in my life. One website instead of three. Two email accounts instead of a separate email account for each project. Two checking accounts – one business, one personal – instead of various subaccounts and complicated transfer regimens. A few social media outlets – One primary, another secondary, and a third to experiment with – is plenty, and maybe even two too many.

As I grow older, I find myself craving simplicity. Maybe it’s that I am more aware of the finite number of hours remaining, the limited number of mornings left for me to sit in front of the computer and actually do the work. The siren call of a YouTuber – let’s call them “Bookpreneur” – and their tempting video “7 Things You Should Buy to Make Writing Easier” – complete with affiliate links in the description! – goes unviewed, and I know that all the killer apps in the world won’t help you write if you don’t put your ass in the chair, and your fingers on the keyboard.

A lot of complication is ultimately just an avoidance activity. It’s more fun to shop for gym shoes than it is to go to the gym, more fun to search for and set up productivity apps than it is to be productive, and more fun to shop for notebooks than it is to write in them.

Simplify

February is the most expensive month in my little publishing empire. My hosting all comes due. My domains renew. My bookkeeping subscription renews. My Evernote subscription renews. My Microsoft 365 subscription comes due. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. (Edit: I was! My PO Box comes due.)

I did not plan this – not at all. But when it is cold and damp and grey outside (like, say, February here in the Southland), I tend to curl up by the fireplace in the evenings and feel the irresistible urge to putter around these digital halls and ~~fix~~ change things on my website, or change business things like bookkeeping software, or try a new system, like Evernote or Microsoft 365.

I’ve been writing on the web for 21 years now, and it’s astonishing to me how much change always happens in February.

So, in related news – I’m making some changes around here.

In the early ought’s, when I was cutting my internet teeth, it was somewhat fashionable to have subdomains for different websites. Then, as domains got easier to buy and branding got involved and everything was getting optimized for search, we started buying new domains for everything. At one point, I was using something like 8 domains to run a personal website and a blog and a newsletter.

But now I’ve reverted – there is strength that comes from not chasing clicks and Google – and so I’m bringing everything back to subdomains, and not renewing most of my URLs. This means just one hosting bill, and just one URL. This is also much easier for my ADHD brain to keep track of.

My current setup is:

My personal site – hughhollowell.org

My blog – blog.hughhollowell.org

My newsletter – lisb.hughhollowell.org

I still own and will keep hughlh.com – it was the first URL I ever bought, and it is my social media handle on most sites, and it’s short, so I will keep it, even if I’m unsure what I’m going to do with it.

Not everything has to make sense.

Self-Compassion

Sometimes, you do everything right.

You exercise. No caffeine after 3PM. Have a hard end of the work day at 5PM. Eat a leisurely supper with your spouse, followed by a quiet night of reading a physical book on the couch, next to a fat tabby cat who snores as he sleeps. Finally, at 9:30, you take melatonin, and begin to get ready for bed. By 10:15, you are sound asleep. The end of the day couldn’t have gone more perfectly.

Which is why it’s frustrating that you are staring at the dark ceiling in your bedroom at 2AM later that night, and have been doing so for the last 30 minutes. Your brain is racing, creating worse case scenarios. Sleep is nowhere in sight. Eventually you surrender and get up, eat a bowl of cereal and read more of your book, waiting for any signal at all that you will be able to sleep again.

Finally, around 4:30, less than an hour before your alarm is set to go off, you pad back through the dark house and climb in bed, and your brain begins to shut down. But before it does, you move the alarm from 5 AM, which is the time you normally get up and write, to 7:30 AM, which is the latest you can get up and be on time for your commitments.

This was me this morning. My life is pretty chaotic right now, and if I don’t write at 5AM, it just won’t happen. (I’m only able to write this because a lunch meeting was canceled). In the old days, I would have gotten up at 5 anyway, and just gutted through it. Or maybe 6, if I was feeling particularly generous.

But instead, I gave myself permission to sleep in. These days, I’m wanting to be who younger versions of me needed, and what that younger version of me needed the most was someone who looked out for him, who told him it was OK to put his needs first, that advocated for him when he was afraid, or unable, to do so.

These days, I’m working on embodying the truth that if my compassion for the world does not include me, then it is incomplete.

So, I slept in. I got the rest I need. And the writing didn’t happen. My goal slipped a bit. But I’m OK with that, because when I had the chance to sacrifice myself and my health in order to be productive, I chose to rest instead.

Thirty year old Hugh would not have done that. Truth be told, Fifty one year old Hugh almost didn’t do it. It seemed wrong. It seemed lazy. It seemed slothful.

But I did it – kicking and screaming, but I did it. And in the end, we are judged not by our thoughts, but by our actions. And this time, I chose to be kind to me.

Rain

It’s raining.

Not a thunderstorm, not the edge of a hurricane or tropical storm, nothing to get The Weather Channel interested, but just a good, old-fashioned rain, the sort of rain that happened when I was a child, before the various types of rain had been invented and you had either rain or storms.

The sort of rain that meant you had to come inside, so you would curl up on the couch under the picture window in the living room with a large Tupperware tumbler of Kool-Aid and a Three Investigators book and the rain would beat on the tin roof of the porch and maybe the cat would curl up beside you and you could just disappear for a while, inside your head.

I always loved rain as a kid. As an adult, it has been more complicated.

There were the years when I didn’t own a car, but lived downtown and either walked or took the bus or drove my little 35CC scooter everywhere. Serious rain would cause you to rewrite your whole schedule, and there were almost always damp clothes hanging on hooks by my back door, drying out.

There was the more than a decade when I ran an agency that worked with people experiencing chronic homelessness, and rain would destroy their belongings, ruin their essential papers, and bring sickness to their already compromised immune systems. Inclement weather meant death and destruction to people I cared about.

And then there was the house. It was the first house we owned, a small square house with one tiny bathroom and a roof that leaked. A lot. We bought the house cheap because it needed a lot of work, and roofs are expensive, so we put off the new roof as long as we could. But it rains a lot in Raleigh, NC, so we had an assortment of buckets and pans that came out whenever it rained, to catch the numerous drips and drops. Which worked, more or less, until that time there came a huge, long rain the week we were out of town and the ceiling collapsed in the guest bedroom. That was special.

We eventually replaced the roof, and then it didn’t leak anymore, but I still would get anxious when it rained, walking around, looking for leaks, afraid the envelope of the house had been breached.

We haven’t lived in that house for more than five years, and I have a good, safe fully enclosed car now, and while there are still people who live outside and who are caused great inconvenience and pain by inclement weather, years of therapy and boundary setting mean that I no longer believe that solving all of that depends on me alone.

But I still get anxious when it rains. And it’s raining today.

This is just one of those vestigial stories that once were valuable – that rain is bad – that sticks in my head long after its usefulness has passed. I have a lot of those – stories that once kept me safe but now keep me hostage.

Part of the work I am doing to make myself a better human is noticing the stories that no longer serve me, and trying to write new ones that serve me better. Or, in this case, trying to remember the story you knew before you replaced it with the bad one.

So it’s raining today. And after the thunder woke me up at 4AM, I got up and spent the pre-dawn hours curled up on the couch, with a large mug of coffee, in front of the picture window in our living room with a cat curled up beside me, and I could hear the rain pattering on the tin roof over the grill shelter on the back deck, and just for a while, I just disappeared inside my head.

Change

When you are 21, your head is full of ideals. Your future is unlimited. Your options seem open-ended. You can change the world!

But 30 years later, things have changed. If nothing else, you have changed. Your back hurts for no reason, for one thing. You’ve got a mortgage, and a car note, and health insurance, which is nice, because your doctor is on you to get your numbers down. AARP writes articles in their magazine that are pertinent to your interests, and friends are discussing how their 401K is doing. You choose shoes based on arch support rather than fashion sense. You are more Dr. Scholls and less Dr. Marten these days.

You are not all that has changed.

People you love are dying now. Some of them did that to themselves when depression took over, and some of them were accident victims, and some of them had random medical things happen, where they drop dead in a Wal-Mart while pushing a cart. Luckily, it doesn’t happen every day, but often enough that you are no longer shocked when it does. Every death reduces your footing in the world. Every time, you feel more and more unmoored, less attached. Every death makes a new world for you to learn how to live in – a world without them in it.

Your Senior prom date who was a genuine freak back in the day is now a grandmother who posts saccharine Bible verses on Facebook, and your Junior high prom date died unexpectedly during a global pandemic. The people with whom you ran from the cops through cornfields after the homecoming game afterparty was raided, now scream on Social Media that Blue Lives Matter and compliance with the law is the proof of virtue. They have lots of quote art on their walls when they post pictures of their grandkids.

Live. Laugh. Love.

Indeed.

Time no longer seems unlimited. Every tick of the clock is another moment gone, another lost opportunity, another unfinished project, another chance untaken. Based on actuarial tables, you have about 1800 Sundays left on this planet. That doesn’t seem like a lot.

While statistically, it is true that the world is less violent now than it was back then, that surely isn’t how it feels. Social media, a 24 hour news cycle, and the constant pinging of our devices remind us constantly of the pain the rest of the world experiences. It is relentless, persistent, and unending.

Surely we were never meant to be exposed to so much pain. To be clear, life on this planet for any species has always been a struggle for survival, and humans have not been the exception. Like the ladder in a henhouse, life for most people throughout history has been both short and shitty.

But also historically, we only knew of our pain. Or the pain of the people in our family or clan or village. Now, we know it all. It too seems relentless, persistent, and unending.

A stranger berates you on Instagram for sharing pictures of the flower you saw on your walk. After all, don’t you know people are dying in [The Inner City/Ukraine/ Palestine]!

You don’t know what to do about [The Inner City/Ukraine/ Palestine], but that doesn’t shock you, because you still struggle to balance your checkbook and you can’t figure out peace with your family at Thanksgiving, let alone how peace should happen in a culture and country and language that is foreign to you.

You don’t answer them. You have been yelled at by so many people over the years that disagree with you that you become reluctant to open the floodgates again. There are people in this world who like to argue with strangers, but none of those people are you.

And so you sit down at the keyboard and you wait for the words to come out, but they mostly don’t. You wish you had something brilliant to say, but would settle for something sensical. You worry that you will say the wrong thing, or that you will soft-peddle things, or that you need that health insurance a bit too much, and thus are reluctant to risk it by truth telling.

At different times, you feel like you are either sane or a sellout.

Once you wanted to change the world. Now you are worried about the world changing you.

The stories we know

“I don’t know how you live in such a shithole state”, they said.

I was sitting at a sidewalk table in a college town in New England a few years ago. I had been invited up because this church thought I knew something about building relationships between their congregation and the unhoused folks who slept on their porch at night, and were willing to pay me to talk to them about it.

Typically when I go and consult somewhere, the host organization furnishes a liaison person, who picks me up at the airport, answers my questions, and can help if something goes wrong. This time, the liaison person wanted to buy me lunch before they took me back to the airport.

It was then that they told me I lived in a shithole state. I’m sure they meant it in the nicest possible way.

I must have looked some kind of way because they quickly began to backtrack. But they were sincere, if rude – in light of the history of civil rights atrocities, the history of slavery, the Christian nationalism, the economic devastation, and so on, why on earth do I, an educated, articulate, white cis-gendered male with every kind of opportunity insist on living somewhere like Mississippi.

I was feeling particularly generous that day, and I explained that I knew those stories about Mississippi better than they did and that the reality of those stories is far more horrible than they could know from such a distance.

“But the thing is,” I said, “I know other stories, too.”

I know stories about Fannie Lou Hammer, who rose from sharecropping and eventually took on the Democratic Party and insisted she be seen. I know stories about Will Campbell, a white Baptist Minister who insisted that God loves everybody, even when we wish God didn’t. I know stories about snuff-dipping old white ladies who baked cakes to sell to buy poor black kids some school clothes. I know that the first lung transplant in the whole world was done in 1963 in Jackson, MS, and then in 1972, they mapped the human cardiovascular system for the first time in that same building.

I know stories of resistance, and hope, and resilience, and perseverance. I know stories of people who risked it all on a dream and rose to great heights and then came back to lift others up, too. I know of our storytellers and writers and poets. I know the sounds the gurgling creek that runs near my house makes, the song of the barred rock owl, the rudeness of the bluejay, and the cry of the mockingbird.

And mostly, I know the stories of our people, because I listen for them as I move around this state. On a recent day, I had lunch with farmhands in the Mississippi Delta and then ate supper in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. The week before I was on the Gulf Coast where I saw dolphins at play. I live in the middle of it all on top of an extinct volcano, next to a river where alligators swim.

I know of our diversity – not a corporate buzzword for us but our lived reality. I know of the Chinese folks who live in the Delta and brought us their gifts and taught us new ways to cook the foods we have eaten forever, and the brown-skinned folks who took our foods and made them their own. (A Delta tamale doesn’t taste like any tamale you ever had in any Tex-Mex restaurant – it’s far better than that.) I live among and am known by descendants of the indigenous people who cared for this land in civilized societies when my ancestors were naked and living in caves.

And I know that the people here – Black, white, Brown, Queer, straight, rich, poor – all of us – have been played, and made afraid by powerful people who profit from their fear, and who will do anything to keep us apart, lest we recognize our common cause. And because the people here are afraid, they don’t make wise decisions all the time. None of us are our best selves when we are afraid.

I know all those stories. And those stories are also Mississippi.

My host that day, while rude, wasn’t wrong. They knew a story about Mississippi. But they only knew one story. I know hundreds. Which is why I stay.

It’s also why I tell the stories I do. The job of the storyteller is curation – to decide which stories are told. That is as it should be. But we never want to only tell a story because it just happens to be the only story we know.

The blinking cursor

Sometimes, you do everything right, and it still doesn’t work.

You get 7.5 hours of sleep.

You eat a high protein breakfast.

You drink your large cup of coffee.

And you sit at the desk, turn on the classical music channel on the stereo, fire up Microsoft Word, and you begin to write.

Well, that’s not quite true. You have prepared to begin to write. But there is the blank page. The blinking cursor.

But the problem is that not only is the page blank, so is your mind.

Well, maybe that’s not quite true. Your mind is never quite blank. As your therapist is fond of saying, it’s not that you have a deficiency of attention as much as you have a surplus of it. Your brain is overflowing with ideas, with stories, with plans, with things you want to try and to test out and it is all just swirling in there. How do you pick just one of them to focus on for the next two hours to write an 800-word essay?

Some days it’s easy. You have an idea or a story that has been in your mind for days or, sometimes, weeks. You can’t shake it. You just turn it over and over, looking at it this way and that way, so that when you do sit down in front of the blinking cursor, it really writes itself. You are just the medium, and you understand, briefly, why the authors of scripture thought they were inspired by God. It’s as if you are just the hands that type it, while the ideas come from elsewhere. Those are the best days.

Other days you agreed to write a particular thing – an article for a newspaper, or a review of a friend’s book, or something. And because this is for someone else, there is a deadline. You try to put it off, hoping clarity will come, hoping that it will rise through the swirl of ideas in your brain to the surface. Sometimes it does, but not on these days. No, on these days it is the day before it is due and you simply must write something, and so you apply ass to chair and you begin typing, and sometimes what you write is amazing, and sometimes it’s serviceable and sometimes legible is all you can hope for. But regardless, you did the thing, and after all, fed is best.

And then there are the days like this one.

The cursor blinks. Your ass is in the chair.

And nothing swirls up. Nothing stands out.

But the cursor blinks.

Tales From The Vault

My life changed forever in late 2003 when I set up an account on Blogger and decided to share my thoughts in public. Writing in the public sphere – literally thinking out loud in front of the entire world – changed how I think. It turned my private musings into a conversation with the world.

I’ve now been writing publicly for more than 20 years. It’s so strange when I come across people who knew me before those days, who only knew the Hugh that was informed by people he had met in real life and the one-sided conversations he had with people who wrote on paper. It’s like they knew a beta version of me.

I have written publicly in many places – Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, and MySpace to name the main ones, as well as the sites I have owned, and the many sermons I have written that do not exist anywhere online, but that are still public conversations because I performed them live.

As I have closed sites and accounts, some of that stuff was orphaned. Whenever possible, I have archived it, so it still exists in a file on my hard drive, but not in public. It’s as if they are safe in a vault.

As I come across things I have written elsewhere, I’m going to open the vault and post them here – both to archive them publicly, but also to be able to enter into a conversation with them, to link to them in the future, and to be able to recognize the ways I have grown as a writer and a thinker.

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Dictating How People Show Up

I’m republishing things I have written elsewhere in the past to archive them here. I think of them as tales from the vault. This is one of them.

I recently observed something that suddenly made me understand something I have struggled to understand for years: That people who want more diversity to happen in their groups also want to dictate how the diverse people act, and would put limits on those people.

Who the hell do they think they are to do that? And then I realized that for older folks especially, that is how they have observed change, and then they assume all people in that group should act that way.

A thing I see *a lot* – especially in people and groups that have seen themselves as historically progressive, that fought early battles for inclusion of people previously excluded – is how they point to the non-combativeness of the first person from that group they included and then expect that will be the way all people from that group will behave.

Example: I have had a personal conversation with a famous minister who personally knew William Stringfellow. For you who do not know, Stringfellow was an Episcopal layman who was incredibly influential in the 1960’s, and was a major influence on Walter Wink. Stringfellow was also gay, and lived with his partner.

This famous minister held Stringfellow (who was not officially out, but it was known to his friends) as the model for how gay people should act. I.E. They should leave all of their sexual identity in the closet.

Because Stringfellow had to (and let’s be honest: chose to) act straight in order to get published and to have a lecture career, because he chose to diminish himself in order to overcome prejudice that would have otherwise silenced him, that is seen by people who knew him as the model for how Queer people should act.

Or the woman minister I know in my denomination, who was the first woman minister in her regional body, who is praised by her contemporaries as “knowing how to not be confrontational” and “knowing how to meet the group where they were”. They praise this as if it is the model for how a woman minister should be, rather than acknowledging that this woman had to diminish herself in order to be seen as non-threatening, OR recognizing that this particular woman had the choice, personality, and support structure that allowed her to do this.

Some people who are members of oppressed peoples have the desire, giftedness, support structure, and mental health to purposefully choose to diminish themselves in order to advance the group they represent. Bless those people. But that doesn’t mean it should be normative for us in the dominant culture to expect that, nor does it obligate them to perform in ways that do not threaten our dominance.

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Thank you for reading. This website is free and ad-free because of the support of my members. Or, if you want to say thanks for this post, you can just buy me a cup of coffee.