Category: blog

The Man in Gray

When I was five, we built a new house, just 20 yards in front of the house in which my father was raised. Eventually, it would get torn down – some family friends tore it down in exchange for the wood, but for a few months, we lived sort of in both of them, as we slowly moved things from one house to the other.

I had watched them build it – we basically paid someone to dry it in, and then we completed the inside ourselves. I say we, like I played a part, but believe that 5-year-old me was always in the middle of whatever was going on. And Mom and I would walk around the house, being built, and she would tell me that this was the kitchen and that was the bathroom. And this one? This is your room.

And when we get moved in, we will paint it whatever color you want.

I told her I wanted it painted red. You see, red was my favorite color. But we ended up compromising. Instead of the whole room, my bed frame was painted red, Dad painted the door to my room red, and I had red pajamas and red sheets. If it stood still long enough, it ended up red.

But somewhere along the way, I shifted, and suddenly, my favorite color was now blue.

Blue is a good color – non-controversial and can be professional or fun, can be the color of swim trunks or a tuxedo, and, perhaps most importantly, somewhere around the age of 14 or so, a girl told me that blue accentuates my eyes. I had no idea what that meant, exactly, but she seemed to think it was a positive thing.

I wore blue almost exclusively through my twenties. Blue suits. Blue shirts. Blue accents in my ties and show hankies. I owned three different blue cars.

But increasingly, blue didn’t make sense. It felt way too festive, too bright, too colorful. The best way I can think of to describe it is that when I wore blue, my insides didn’t match my outsides. And in my mid 30’s, as I began to become more and more aware of the pain in the world, I started to wear more muted tones.

And one day, I woke up and realized that I was now the sort of person who not only didn’t wear bright colors – I was known as someone who wore gray.

This week I was at the courthouse, wearing a black polo shirt and khakis. A colleague said I looked dressed up, as he rarely ever saw me not wearing a gray t-shirt. I just checked, and I actually own 9 gray t-shirts, and three different shades of gray are represented in the drawer.

The people who bought our house in North Carolina are bright color people. When they walked through, they remarked that they had never lived in a gray house before. I informed them it was a bright gray, though. They laughed nervously.

It’s not that I don’t like bright colors – I do. They just don’t feel right when I’m wearing them. They are no longer me. In a world that’s gone crazy, it feels almost crass to wear bright colors. Like I’m not paying attention to the despair and pain around me. Like having Harlequin perform your funeral – it feels disrespectful, somehow.

Johnny Cash famously sang that he wore black because:

I’d love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything’s okay

But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

‘Til things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

I still own some blue shirts – if I preach at your funeral or wedding, I will probably wear one, because it’s more muted than white, and there aren’t a lot of other good options. But it’s always brighter than I feel.

Until things are better, I guess I’ll be the man in gray.

Someone To Call

Two stories, perhaps 10 years apart:

Her name was Peggy. She was in her early forties when I knew her, but I only knew that because I had helped her get her birth certificate. She looked like she was in her late 50s, but life on the street makes you hard that way.

She was a Survival Sex Worker, which just means she sold sex to people – generally men – for money in order for her to have the resources to survive. There are lots of different sorts of sex work, from pole dancer to cover model to call girl to streetwalker, and all of it is actual work, but the distinction is important to the story.

As one might expect, the sort of people who pay people like Peggy for sex are sometimes not nice people. She also had a drug addiction – if I had her life, I would not have wanted to be sober for it either – and sometimes she traded sex in exchange for drugs. Those people tended to be even less nice, and would often refuse payment after services had been rendered, and Peggy, who had a mouth on her, would protest, and more than once she ended up in the hospital as a result.

Perhaps six months or so after I had met her for the first time, my phone rang at 5:30 AM. The caller ID said it was from the Trauma Center, so I answered.

“Hey Hugh!” she said. “It’s Peggy!”

Peggy tended to talk in exclamation marks.

In my groggy, barely alive state, I asked what was going on.

She said, “I’m at the emergency room, I’m getting stitches. I was on a date last night and he beat me up.”

Now, you should know that I knew she was a sex worker, and she knew I knew she was a sex worker, but we maintained the fiction that I didn’t know. It helped her maintain dignity, and I respect that.

So, I knew she hadn’t been at the steakhouse, sipping red wine over dinner when the “date” went south, but anyway, here we are.

I told her I was so sorry, and that I would be up there in about 20 minutes to sit with her. That was a big part of my life in those days – sitting with people.

She said, “Oh, no, You don’t have to do that. They’re about to release me.”

So, I said, “Well, no offense, but why are you calling me then? You could have just let me know when you see me later today.”

And that’s when she told me that the last time this had happened, the nurse in admission had asked her if she wanted to call anyone.

“And Hugh – I didn’t have anyone I could call. But this time, I did. I could call you.”

# # #

Earlier this week, a teenager who was once one of our foster children sent me a text. We had been in touch several times last year, but then her number changed and we didn’t have a way to find her, and so she disappeared. We hadn’t heard from her in perhaps six months.

“Hey, Mr. Hugh. It’s me!” the text said, but also gave her name, which I’m not sharing with you because of boundaries.

“I was afraid we had lost you,” I told her.

“Haha. No chance.”

When she and her sibling had left our care, we made them a scrapbook of their time with us, and she had one of my business cards taped to the inside.

“I’m sorry I changed my number and didn’t tell you. You told me when you gave me your card that now I always had someone I could call, no matter what. So I wanted to make sure you had my number. So you had somebody, too. ”

 

 

 

Shame Spirals

This past weekend, we went out of town. We went to the mountains of North Carolina, one of my happy places. But we almost didn’t make it.

The plan was to rent a car for the trip. Our car is fine, but it was going to be more than 1,000 miles round trip, and our Escape is great for short trips but not extremely comfortable for long ones, so getting something more comfortable and new sounded good. I went on Priceline and found a full-sized car with unlimited miles for $45 a day, and jumped at it.

We were heading out Friday morning, so at 6:30 AM I was at the end of our driveway, waiting for Tony the Lyft driver to take me to the airport. Tony was a big man, with lots of jokes and way too happy for it to be that early in the morning, but he got me there safe and sound.

When I walked in the door of the airport, there was a moderate line, but it moved quickly, and then it was my turn.

“I’m here to pick up a car. My last name is Hollowell,” I said.

She clicked lots of keys on her computer and made a face.

“Can you spell that?”

I did.

That was when she told me that I did indeed have a car reserved, but for next Friday, not this one. I had booked the car for the wrong date. And my rental was non-refundable because it was such a good deal. And they had no cars now.

We had friends meeting us there that afternoon. We had a room reserved. We were supposed to be leaving any minute now. I had screwed all of this up. And wasted $200 on top of everything else. I swear I almost burst into tears, right there at the counter.

It must have shown on my face.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” the kindly Black woman working the counter told me. “But you have to step aside now.”

“Next.”

I was in shock. I had screwed this up. I didn’t know how I did it. I was at the airport, with no way home, no rental car, and I had to call my wife and tell her we had no rental car, had wasted $200, and also, I needed her to come and get me.

While I waited for her, a nice man named Reggie with Priceline informed me that I had chosen the cheaper, non-refundable rental, and had not paid for travel insurance, so while I couldn’t get a refund, I could certainly come back next Friday and get the car then.

Thanks, Reggie.

We ended up taking our car after all. And it was fine. I mean, more or less.

We were three hours later than we had planned, and out $200, and most of all, I felt crushing shame, for not the first time in my life, that I sometimes can’t manage to do something so simple that it seems everyone else on the planet does OK.

This sort of shame is a common thing that those of us with ADHD deal with. I wish I could explain the shame I felt in that line on Friday. Shame that I had cost us money, shame that we would be late, shame that I looked foolish to the lady at the rental agency, shame I had to admit to my wife what I had done.

The worst is when my failures to executive function affects others. I go into a shame spiral.

On the way home from the airport, Renee, who read my mood perfectly, told me that everyone makes mistakes.

This is true. But most people don’t make them all the damn time.

No matter how often you repeat to yourself, “It was an honest mistake, it could have happened to anyone”, you never believe it. I have been living like this for nearly 50 years. And while it doesn’t happen as much as it once did, it will still keep happening. It’s safe to assume I won’t get better. It is what it is.

And what it is is exasperating.

Current Events

I really dislike blogging about current events. There are a number of reasons for this: One is that these posts take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours to write, and I don’t want to invest that effort in something that will have a short self-life. Another is that I don’t have the staff or resources to do it well, and with the exception of a very few subjects, I don’t have the knowledge. And that shallow sort of posting that would result just encourages hot-takes, which provokes much more heat than light, which is sorta the opposite of what I want to do.

As I write this, there is a news story that has the attention of a lot of people. A lot of people are commenting on it – all people who don’t know any of the participants, and largely are people who don’t share any major identities with the participants. And I have resisted saying anything of substance about it, and I have had some people message me and ask why.

So, I thought I would take this time to tell you a story.

On Sunday, June the 12th of 2016, I was at the beach. I had snagged a weekend away and had turned off my phone, and we were enjoying the small town of Carolina Beach, which was our happy place when we lived in North Carolina.

It had been a rough year, and we were thankful for the weekend away. That Saturday night, after a day at the beach, soaking up the sun, we ate at our favorite restaurant and I ate popcorn shrimp. It’s funny the things you remember.

The next morning we lounged around the hotel room, moving slowly. We went out for coffee and donuts and then headed towards Fort Fisher, to take the Ferry to Southport, a cute little marina town and home to perhaps a dozen antique shops and flea market operations. Once there, we intended to grab lunch before spending the afternoon antiquing before slowly edging ourselves toward the 3-hour drive home. It was a trip we had made many times.

We stopped at the Fort Fisher Park gift shop – I was looking for a particular gift for a friend, and I had seen something similar at the gift shop before, so I stopped there, to see if they still had it. They did not. Renee and I hit the bathroom before heading to the ferry, and when I was done, I went to the car to wait for her.

While I waited, I turned on my phone for the first time in nearly 36 hours. It was around noon, and I got a bunch of texts from friends – all of whom were LGBT. All of them mentioned a nightclub shooting.

It turned out the night before, a madman had shot up a nightclub in Orlando, deliberately targeting members of the LGBT community. He killed 49 people and wounded 53. I called Kelly, who was the assistant director at the LGBT Center in Raleigh at the time.

She was in tears.

That night they were planning a vigil in Raleigh. They wanted me to be there. Could I do it?

Yes. When Renee came back from the restroom, we changed plans, grabbed a quick bite, and headed home.

That night I sat in a parking lot, holding a candle and listening to Trans folx and Queer folx and Gay folx and Non-Binary folx cry and confess their fears, their anger, and their rage. I hunted out the folk I knew, hugged them and prayed with the ones who wanted it, and listened to the ones that didn’t.

The next day I wrote a post that went sorta viral, with a title like, 6 Things Straight Christian Folks Can Do In the Aftermath of the Pulse Shooting. It got lost in a site redesign, but it wasn’t brilliant. It did things like asked us to listen, to offer help as defined by the people who needed it, and to curate and amplify and prioritize the voices of people with less power than we had. It was the most shared thing I wrote that year.

Then on Tuesday, I got a call from the LGBT Center. They had a group of people who were grieving hard, and they wanted a clergy person to be there to help them process, and would I be willing to do that?

I reminded them that I was straight, and questioned if I was the right person to do it. They laughed and said yes, but that the Ven diagram of clergy folks and people they trusted pretty much only had me in the overlap.

So I said that of course I would.

That Thursday night, I sat in a room, surrounded by people who had been persecuted by people who looked a lot like me and had held exactly the same credentials I held, and together we talked about the things that scared us, and the things that gave us hope, and mostly, I just listened and held space. And after that was done, there was hugging and crying and for not the last time in my life, I felt honored that I got invited to sit with hurting people in the midst of their pain.

I don’t tell you that story to highlight my role. I wasn’t any sort of hero or star at all. But I did want to tell it to make a little room to talk about something else: How to use our platform.

Historically, only movie stars and politicians had platforms. But now, we all do. And the whole world is listening. Even people like my great-aunt, who has 222 Facebook friends and is a retired librarian, have a platform these days. I mean, imagine the length a retired librarian would have had to go in 1995 to get her message out to 222 people. Now, she need only hit enter on a post on Facebook.

So, since we all have an audience, I think we all have an obligation to use it wisely.

When something happens, I do a sort of internal algorithm. It starts with something like, am I more identified with the victim or the oppressor in this? When the Pulse nightclub shooting happened, the victims were largely Latinx and LGBT, neither an identity I hold. However, both of those identities have been persecuted by Straight Christian people, which ARE two identities I hold. So I identified, in this case, more closely with the oppressor.

Another question is, “What can I do?”. Where can I bring my gifts to bear? I can show up, in a way that doesn’t center me. I can ask the people affected how I can be helpful and then do that thing. I can use my assets (like a social media following) to speak to people who look like me and tell them what I had learned.

And the last thing I consider is, “What is mine to do?”. In that case, I made myself available, and then as I was asked, I showed up in ways they deemed helpful.

But I had, at that point, worked with and among the LGBT community in Raleigh for a decade. I had a deep well of trust built up. I didn’t just show up with my hot take on what they should do, or ought to feel, or how to move on. They didn’t need my words – they could speak for themselves. They needed my solidarity. So, based on trust acquired over a long period of relationship, they asked for what they needed. And I said yes.

So, that is how I handle contemporary events. I don’t do hot takes. I don’t rush to have a position on controversial issues. I don’t use my platform to incite anger. And I don’t ever want to tell people who have been harmed how they ought to feel, or what they ought to be doing.

Instead, I ask myself: Am I the victim or the oppressor? What can I do? What is mine to do? What needs to be said? Who needs to hear it? And, perhaps most importantly, am I the person who needs to be saying it?

Sometimes, that means I’m just amplifying minority reports and voices. And sometimes, it’s calling out people who look like me and asking them to do better. And sometimes, that looks like being silent.

Transition Rituals

A while back I wrote a post that was almost entirely a list of things you could do to take better care of yourself, especially if you were in a helping profession. Two of the items on that list involved transition rituals.

A transition ritual is when you change state or context – like, going from work to not work – and you have some way to mark the occasion, to tell your brain that the transition has happened. I would argue these are always important, but if you are neuro-atypical – such as you, like me, have ADHD – they are vital.

Because while neurotypical people may be able to zip in and out of states and contexts, multi-tasking to beat the band, those of us who are neuro-atypical assuredly cannot.

For example – if you stop by your local every day on the way home and grab a beer – that’s a transition ritual. There are healthier ones, for sure, but it’s a ritual all the same. When I used to work in an office, I would pull up in the driveway of my house and walk around my yard, checking out the flowers and looking to see what was in bloom before I went into the house after getting home from work. It was a way to tell my brain I was home.

These days I work a lot from home (I mean, don’t we all?), and so it’s harder to demarcate what’s home and what’s work. So a thing I will often do is go for a walk around my block when I’m done for the day, as a way to tell myself I’m “walking home.”

But there are other transitions that have rituals, too. In the morning, I make myself coffee with a reverence that approaches that of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. When I go into my workshop to work, I always spend the first 10 minutes or so straightening up and sharpening the tools I will use that day. At night, I turn my phone to do not disturb before I put it on the charger.

When I sit at my desk in the morning, I open my upper right-hand desk drawer, take out the Mead 80 Page Composition Notebook that lives there, uncap my Pilot Metropolitan rollerball pen, turn off the monitor on my computer so I won’t be distracted, and set my cup of coffee on the upper right-hand side of my blotter. Then I’m ready to write my Daily Pages.

Lots of transition rituals. I’m not alone in this. David Sedaris once said something to the effect that he always goes swimming while on the road for his speaking engagements, not because he likes to swim, but because he likes the rituals involved in getting ready to swim and after he has swum.

These sorts of rituals may sound fussy, but especially for those of us who are not neurotypical, they can be lifesaving. Because for folks like us, transitions can be hard. A disadvantage of hyperfocus we ADHD folks have is that pulling us out of that zone can be incredibly disorienting and can feel almost violent at times. So, I have found that having distinct rituals to mark the transitions can be helpful in changing states or contexts.

The two solutions I have developed in my own life to deal with this are A) transition rituals and B) to state your needs. It often feels super-fussy to prioritize what you need to be your best self. But telling people what you need is a way to love them.

It also helps people love me better, because when I tell them what I need (like, a soft landing when I walk into the office, instead of being hit with a list of decisions I need to make when I walk into the door) they will absolutely get a better interaction with me, and whatever I bring to the table will be better thought out and more useful.

The New Bike

My first bicycle was yellow, with swooping handlebars and a banana seat, and coaster brakes.

I got it the Christmas I was six years old, but wouldn’t learn to ride it for another three years. In the meantime, it would lean against the shed behind the house, while I was content to stay in the house and read my books. I had no particular place I would rather be than on the couch, reading.

Now, I should also point out that I lived on 30 something acres, with a long gravel driveway and no sidewalks or pavement anywhere. Riding a bike on grass is not a fun experience. Riding a bike on gravel is painful, but not as painful as falling on gravel. I was the oldest child by five years. My closest friend lived miles away. I had nowhere to ride, no place to go, and no one to go with.

But once I did learn, I burned up the road. I would ride to the neighbors, I would ride to the corner store, ride to my friends. Ride to the church. I loved riding my bike – right up until I got my license.

I probably didn’t touch a bike again for 15 years. I got one when I lived near downtown Memphis, as it was easier to bike places than to bother with parking, and when I lived in Raleigh, I had several different bikes over the years. I like biking, but I really don’t like bike culture.

While there are exceptions, I don’t like the way people here in the US treat biking as a sport, rather than as transportation. This means that there is little infrastructure for bikers, and it pushes the prices of bikes higher and higher, and because of that, there are gatekeepers and snobbery around the whole thing.

Compared to cars, bikes are cheap, they are easy to maintain, they provide low-level physical activity – the sort doctors recommend as particularly healthy – and particularly important right now, they don’t require any gasoline. We should incentivize them, not make them harder to use or acquire or drive.

I had bought a bike just before the beginning of the pandemic, but it got stolen shortly after the pandemic began. Bikes were hot items in those days. But recently I’ve been looking again, and the used marketplace is a hot mess still, but I found a commuter style bike, new, at a local sporting goods store for what seemed like a reasonable price. I went and got it this morning.

It’s nobody’s idea of fancy. It has a wide saddle seat. Wide handlebars. It’s a 7 speed. You sit upright on it, rather than lean over the handlebars. It has both a chain guard and a kickstand. It looks like something an old man would drive, and something nobody in spandex would look twice at.

In other words, I love it.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m trying to prioritize my health these days. And we live in a part of town that is a short way from grocery stores, coffee shops, bakeries, the pool I belong to, and an independent bookstore. Most days, I drive less than 3 miles. There’s no reason I need to use a car for any of that.

Today I drove it to the pool – what took 5 minutes by car was 12 by bike, but it wasn’t harder. And I saw things I don’t see when zooming along at 45 miles an hour, and got to use muscles I don’t normally use, and used a little less gas, and made the world a little less warm than it would be otherwise.

It started to sprinkle on me as I made my way home from the pool, so I guess I will have to start paying closer attention to the weather. But that’s not a bad thing, either.

Boundaries

Someone unsubscribed from one of my newsletters the other day. When you unsubscribe, you are given the option to say why. Here is what he wrote in the box:

I had thought that we were friends until your Twitter unfollow showed that you do not reciprocate. I wish you well.

So many layers in just 21 words.

What had happened was that he was someone I had met at a conference once. At the time, I was really active on Twitter, and he followed me there. But these days Twitter is a dumpster fire, and it’s been years since I truly enjoyed it – in fact, I barely have a presence there at all anymore. But recently I have been trimming it down, weeding out the noise, to see if there is still value there for me. And that has meant unfollowing some people I used to follow there.

Including this guy. Who I have not spoken directly to, or been spoken directly to, for at least five years. Like, nothing. He hasn’t interacted with me, on social media or in real life either, at all. But because I unfollowed him, he took it personally.

I could spend hours talking about the ways in which Social Media deludes us into the appearance of connection without the reality of it. But the bigger point I want to make is this:

Nobody has a right to all of you.

As a friend once said about me, my life is well documented. I have an Instagram account, open to the public. I have a Twitter feed, open to the public, that he still could follow – I was just choosing to not follow him. I have a couple of Facebook pages, open to the public. I have two newsletters that go out every week where I share very personal things.

All of that is open to him, but because he did not have access to this one part of my life, he got mad.

Nope, nope, nope.

You have a right to boundaries, a right to decide how much of you is available, to decide how much of your life, your time, your story, your pictures, your memories you wish to put out into the world. You get to decide how much of your life you want to share with people, and you get to decide that on a person-by-person and event-by-event basis.

Every relationship has boundaries. Every single one. It is the boundaries I have around my relationship with my wife that make her my wife and not my roommate. And in every single interaction we have with anybody, we are teaching them how we want to be treated.

If you answer a text from a client on Saturday, you just taught them to text you on Saturday. If you let your coworker talk to you like you are trash, you just taught them that is OK. We have to teach people how to be in a relationship with us.

As Prentiss Hemphill says, boundaries are the distance at which I can love both you and me at the same time.

But if I have to choose, I will choose me.

Connection

I spent this past weekend in one of my happy places – the mountains of North Carolina. I love it there, even if it is not home in the way the hills of my native North Mississippi are home to me. But it feels in some ways closer to home than the subtropical prairie of Central Mississippi where I live now. Geography is a funny thing.

But the thing that drew me back there this time was not geography, but people. This pandemic has been hard on this sociable introvert, and my experience of the pandemic has been a conservative one: Because of Renee’s heart transplant, which renders her severely immunocompromised, we have been more careful than most careful people, which means lots and lots of distancing ourselves from others.

I drove the 9 hours – I’m not ready to risk getting on a plane yet – and got in late at night, and was warmly greeted by an old friend. He’s the sort of friend with whom you sit until long in the night, catching up and sharing stories from your lives that are too granular to include in the periodic phone calls, the sorts of things that don’t make the curated feeds of social media. The conversation ebbs and flows, the silence is comfortable when it happens, the topics are wide-ranging, and suddenly you realize it is two AM.

Over the next few days, I spent time with several old friends – people I knew from the Before Times. Not just before-the-pandemic times, although that is true, but also from the before-my-life-was-what-it-is-now times. They knew the angry Hugh, the impulsive Hugh, the Hugh that burned out. They knew him and his faults and loved him anyway. And it was delightful to be back among people who truly knew me, in a way I have not been known by anyone since moving back to Mississippi.

That is no reflection on the people here – it’s mostly about time: The people in the mountains have known me for more than a decade. We worked together on various projects together, we made things together, and together we traversed tragedy and joy -divorces, deaths, weddings, and babies, all together. When I fell, they picked me up and loved me – hard. In short, we had opportunities for connection I have not had here, where ⅔ of my time has been spent trying to survive a pandemic in front of a Zoom screen while wearing sweatpants. It’s not the same thing at all.

An old friend who has drifted out of my life would say, when I would do or say something that indicated I truly knew her likes and dislikes, her fears, her quirky guilty pleasures, that it felt good to be known.

And that’s truly it, isn’t it? The desire to be known fully, to be understood, to be seen and heard, to be acknowledged and remembered. This is, at its core, why I write.

* * *

I find myself these days craving connection. My old friends are laughing at this, as I am horrible at staying in touch with people I love. Some of this is my ADHD, as a common thing people with my type of brain do is find that the thinking about a thing feels to our brain as if we did it, so my remembering my friend Kim and thinking fondly of her elicits the same feeling in my brain it would if I had sent her a text or note, so having had the memory, I no longer feel the drive to act on it. Of course, this does nothing to let Kim know that I was thinking of her, but here we are.

I also wonder though, how much my paralysis around reaching out to people isn’t so much my paralysis, but unreasonable expectations set up by technologies that are less than a generation old. As late as the 1990s, most of us had a relatively small group of people about whom we knew what their day-to-day life was really like. In 1998, one might know from an email – or a decade earlier, from a phone call or letter – that a cousin in a distant town took their family to the amusement park, but now we know that their eight-year-old threw up on the roller-coaster, that the six-year-old hates corndogs, that they lost their car in the parking lot, and everyone got sunburned.

And we know that level of detail about hundreds of people, regularly.

There is a phenomenon on social media where, although I am writing a public post, which theoretically can be seen and read by anyone on earth with an internet connection and a browser, in my mind, it is actually only intended to be read by a select few. I don’t parse my words as if it is a broadcast to the planet, but rather as if it is more like a Christmas Newsletter, going out to people I love.

But the inverse is also true – when we read other people’s posts, it is perceived by our brain as if it is written to us specifically, which is one reason we take it all so personally. I saw a post from someone I don’t really know where he was complaining that people were shoving their love for the 2022 Superbowl Halftime Show down his throat, when in reality nobody had addressed him specifically at all – they just had opinions that they posted on their own wall, which he could see. But to his mind, they were all addressed to him.

Because of this, my brain tells me that all my friends are sharing many details of their lives with me, and I am not reciprocating at their level, so the relationship feels imbalanced in my head. But they are many, and I am one, and so their collective flood of sharing is naturally dwarfed by my own output. In other words, it is an ever-escalating race that is unwinnable.

The people I saw this weekend in the mountains – some of them I have not seen in the three years since I have been gone, but we did not lack connection. The sporadic emails, texts, and glimpses into their life on Instagram were enough to sustain the relationship until we could sip tea together in the same room, rehash the old stories, and tell new ones.

The truth is, I could be better about calling and writing, but the bigger problem is my definition of connection is probably skewed by unrealistic expectations because of stories I tell myself about myself.

* * *

None of that diminishes the very real longing I have for the deeper connections here, where I currently live. The additional friction created by the pandemic – the uncertainty of who is safe and who is not, the difficulty finding a place to meet where one feels safe, the second-guessing and cultural gaslighting – are all real factors that make this really hard.

But I find myself these days eager to do the work it will take. I have lunch and coffee meetings (on patios, in places that require masks, with vaccinated and boosted people) scheduled. I’m trying to regulate my social media usage in a way that makes it a servant instead of a master.

And I’m trying to be honest about what I need and to state my needs. And what I find myself needing these days, more than anything else, is connection.

What We Leave Behind

I bought some life insurance last week. I’ve been putting it off for ages, ostensibly because I wanted to research my options, but the long list of other things I have procrastinated on speaks to the lie in that scenario. In reality, it just wasn’t much of a priority, but finally, I got there.

In my 20s, I used to sell life insurance, and Past Me would tell Current Me that I am under-insured, but perfection is the enemy of done, and some is always better than none. I bought breathing room until I can get it all figured out.

One reason – the worst reason, actually – for delaying the purchase was my reluctance to think much about death. I mean, that isn’t completely true: I feel like I have been thinking about nothing but death and people dying for the last two years.

Of course, there is the massive casualty toll from COVID 19: Right now we stand at just under a million dead in the US alone. And none of those people exist in isolation: They are all someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s aunt, sister, mother. They were our co-workers, our server at our favorite restaurant, the mechanic who worked on our car, the doctor who looked after our children. The ripples from those million deaths are strong and wide-ranging.

But even putting aside deaths from Covid-19, there is just so much death right now, literal and metaphorical. I know people right now reeling from unexpected deaths of loved ones, friends, partners, and parents. I know people dealing with the death of beloved pets, and those who are planning the end of life for their pets. And then there is the death of dreams, relationships, and livelihoods brought on by this pandemic.

So much dying, all around me. Thinking about it has been overwhelming.

I’m not afraid of dying – that’s not it. I mean, I like living, and intend to stick around as long as I can, but I don’t fear death itself, because I don’t think there is anything to fear. I have preached at dozens of funerals in my career, and I can tell you what the various traditions, including mine, believe about what happens after we die, but the reality is, nobody knows. I mean, really knows. In my experience, people who are insistent that they do know either want to sell you something or sell themselves on something they already bought.

The rational part of my brain says that our species existed 300,000 years before I was born, and I have no firsthand knowledge of any of it, so it would be irrational to suppose that I will have first-hand knowledge of it going forward after my death. To be more concise: The rational choice is that my consciousness will be the same place after I die that it was before I was born: Non-existent. That when I die, I just turn off, like a light switch.

But I believe in humanity and community, and for most of those 300,000 years, there has been some belief in most cultures that we persist in some way. Perhaps it is delusional to think that I may be reunited with my loved ones in some way after I am gone, and it is not the most rational belief system by far, but it is a beautiful one, nonetheless.

I tend to be ruthlessly pragmatic when it comes to things like spirituality. Since I do not know what will happen after my death, I don’t spend much time thinking about it, preferring instead to focus on what I can know. I know what happens when I feed hungry people, when I ease someone’s burden, or when I look for who is missing and work to get them found. I know what happens when I do the work in front of me and so I leave speculation about rewards in the afterlife to other people.

But I also know that I will live in the memories of those who love me, and as long as there are stories I am in, as long as my influence is still felt, as long as any change I worked to make happen can exist and be built upon, in some sense, I am never really gone. We all leave legacies behind us, and it is up to us to decide if they are to be worthy ones.

No, any hesitancy I have around death doesn’t involve me at all, but the people I will leave here, who will miss me when I am gone, who will have to find a way to move on, who will have to clean up whatever mess I leave behind, and who will be left to pick up the pieces – because no matter how well I plan, there will be pieces. Every death breaks things, and there is always a mess to be dealt with. And now my death – which is inevitable, if hopefully a long way away – will be slightly less messy than it would have been before.

 

 

Love and Attention

I recently came across a description of a scene from a movie I have not seen – Ladybird.

The scene description goes like this:

Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the principal, has read Lady Bird’s college application essay. “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah remarks. This comes as a surprise, both to Lady Bird and the viewer, who is by now aware of Lady Bird’s frustration with her hometown.

“I guess I pay attention,” she says, not wanting to be contrary.

“Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the wise sister asks.

The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight.

I really want to like this. I do. I even want to believe it – that the things we pay attention to are the things we love. And it may even be true – if you happen to be neurotypical. But I’m not.

And because I’m not, my attention is not rationed out in proportion to my love for things, but in a haphazard spray of chaos, driven by random neurons in my brain that follow their own path. As a result, there are people I passionately care for and would die for that I routinely neglect to call or text, and instead find myself reading articles or watching YouTube videos from someone whose ideas I abhor.

No, ideas like this – that love is attention – just make room for more shame in my already shame-filled mind, one that makes me convinced that my brain sabotages all that is good in my life, that is secretly convinced the teacher in 8th grade that said my diagnosis wasn’t real and was just an excuse to not pay attention in math class was right, that my absolute inability to focus on things that do not interest me is just my own inherent laziness and that, if I wanted to, I could keep my checkbook balanced, my tires rotated on schedule, and never miss a deadline, no matter how arbitrary.

Of course, my rational mind knows that none of these things are true.

My ADHD means I work harder and more than most folks to do seemingly ordinary tasks, not less. What’s more, my ADHD brings gifts that make some things in my life possible that neurotypical people struggle with. If you are neurotypical, I guarantee you I can out imagine you, I can come up with more out-of-the-box ideas than you, I can learn in ways you cannot, and I see things that are invisible to you.

I have super-powers of which you can only dream.

What I probably can’t do, at least in ways you recognize, is pay attention to you. At least, not without some help.

So I set notifications on my calendar so I remember to text people that matter to me.

Other attention=love hacks:

  • I have a list of people on Facebook, so theoretically I see the things those people post more often, and these are people I just default “like” everything they post. If my friend J, with whom I was in love with in elementary school, posted her favorite recipe for a bowl of Cheerios, I am going to *like* that thing. Because in our social media driven world, things like that show we are paying attention, and she is one of the people in this world I love, even if I have not seen her in years. (Actually, there are two women whose name starts with J who fit in this category, and I love them both dearly, so if you are reading this, J, yes, I mean you).
  • Set up a Google alert for their name or company.
  • Find out their birthday and put a reminder in your calendar app.
  • Set an appointment time in your calendar, and during that hour, text or message everyone you can think of you love.
  • Set standing dates: For 8 years I had a weekly lunch date with a friend. I miss that a lot.
  • Have a “drop everything” rule: When someone you love pops in your mind, give yourself permission to drop whatever you are working on and text or call them.

There are more, but you get the point – if you have a brain like mine, you have to remind yourself to pay attention to the people you love.

Not because you need it, but because they do.