Resilience – Hugh's Blog

Dead Things

When I was in high school, I read the novel First Blood, which is the novel that the Rambo movies were based on. As is often the case, the movies were very unlike the book.

In the novel, John Rambo, a homeless Vietnam vet, is passing through a small town when the local sheriff tags him as trouble. Keep in mind this is in 1972. The novel talks about Rambo’s beard and unkempt appearance. The war was just ending, and many folks returned to broken dreams and brought their nightmares with them.

One thing the author, David Morrell, does well is we are privy to the inner thoughts of John Rambo, a homeless trained killer. Early in the novel, he sees a dead cat on the side of the road. It seems like it was a nice cat, he thinks, and wonders what series of events caused its demise.

Then he thinks that that is one thing that has changed for him after the war. He notices dead things more.

Trauma changes your brain like that.

On the other side of my burnout, my brain changed, and then after the trauma of 2020 and 2021, it changed some more. I, too, notice dead things more than I did before. I, too, wonder about the stories that led to their destruction and empathize with the people who experienced the loss.

And I crave predictability. Routine. Safety. I love to read, but I bet I have reread every novel by Rex Stout and Agatha Christie at least three times in the last five years. I’m currently on my 5th marathon of Murder She Wrote. Formulaic fiction is my comfort food, where I won’t be surprised, and there is no real tension, and I’m not emotionally involved. I bet I haven’t read any new literary fiction in 5 years. I miss it so.

I hadn’t read any John Grisham in a decade, and on a lark, borrowed an audiobook of one of his novels to listen to on my walk. It was not amazing, but OK, and I was into the story, and there was a moment when one of the characters was about to do something self-destructive, and I had to turn it off. I still don’t know if they got arrested for drinking and driving.

I get tired much easier than I used to, despite my being in much better shape than I was then, and getting much more sleep than I did then. My temper is shorter than it was, and yet I’m less eager to fight. Not because I am afraid of confrontation, but because I know it’s not good for me. Or them, honestly.

Crowds freak me out a bit. I’m thinking that I will stand six feet from people until I die. Every single ambition I had in early 2015 is gone. My life changed, and then the world changed. A lot of people died. And we all acted like they didn’t.

I no longer desire to “go viral” or write sharable content. Viral content is mostly content that evokes strong reactions, and I don’t really want to do that.

I want to write my stories, go for my walks, feed my chickens, plant my flowers, worship at my little church, and work to improve my city and state. I just want to have an ordinary, boring life. I just want us all to make it.

Trauma changes your brain like that.

The Cat with Magic Ears

It was the middle of July in 2016. I had just walked in the door from work. Renee was 11 months out from her heart transplant, and I was running a day shelter I had founded. It had been a particularly bad day. I had a lot of them that year. I was getting something to drink in the kitchen when she called me into her studio.

“I want you to hear me out before you say no,” she said.

Over the winter, our orange tabby Tony had caught a blood clot in his legs, and we had to take him to the vet in the middle of the night and have him put down. Tony had been Renee’s cat – they even shared the same heart disease, called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is very common in cats and very rare in humans. In the days after her coming home from transplant, Tony had laid in the bed next to Renee as if he knew she needed more comfort than normal. His loss had been felt very keenly.

So she had been crawling the pages of the local no-kill shelter, looking at orange tabbies. It was just window shopping – we knew we lived in a small house, and the two cats we had were already pushing our limits.

She showed me a picture of the most bedraggled orange cat ever. He had deformed ears and terror in his eyes, and his hair was thin. He looked like a stuffed cat that had lost half his stuffing. She told me his name was Pepe, and he had been at the no-kill shelter for more than a year. Because he was ancient and ugly, nobody wanted him. He also had a healthy dose of anti-social behavior.

I reminded her that we had said we were a two-cat house, and we already had two cats. Since he had been there a year, she asked me if we didn’t adopt him, who would? I think he might be a lost cause, I said. That has never scared you off before, she said.

I asked what the fees were. She told me that she had already reached out to the shelter, and since Pepe had been so hard to rehome, they would waive all the fees if we came up that Friday.

So that Friday, we went to pick up Pepe, the cat with the magic ears.

If anything, he looked worse in person. He was so skinny, and his fur was patchy. He and several other cats had been dropped off at the shelter the year before. At some point, Pepe had a horrible ear infection that ate away at his ears and damaged his hearing. He had been covered in fleas when they left him at the shelter. He was afraid of people – the shelter folks believed he had been beaten in his past.

He lived in a giant walk-in cage with other cats but was cowered under some boxes, hiding. He looked virtually catatonic. He didn’t want to be held or petted or played with. He came out of the boxes long enough to eat the snacks we gave him, and then he went back into hiding.

The shelter tried to be realistic with us.

“He has been horribly abused. He doesn’t like to cuddle, and he isn’t really affectionate. But he is special and needs a home where people will love him.”

So we signed the papers and agreed to take care of him for the rest of his life. Our first clue to how hard this was going to be was fighting to put him in the cat carrier and his screaming once we shut the door. We had to wrap the carrier in a towel to calm him down, and while most families have pictures of the adoptive parents holding their new kitty, we have one of us holding a towel-covered pet carrier with dazed looks on our faces.

We gave Pepe his own room at the house, with a closed door so he could be comfortable before we introduced him to the other cats. He promptly found every hiding place in that room and spent much time just staring into space. If you tried to pet him, he would attack your hand and then go hide again.

It went like that for about four months. But in the mornings, we would find his toys scattered, and his food had been eaten, so apparently, he was having a ball when we weren’t looking.

Eventually, things changed. He began to come out of the room, began to play with the other cats, and even would sit on the couch with us. He was our very introverted kitty – he wanted to be near us, but not actually touch us. As introverts ourselves, we understood this.

He was still very shy when we loaded all the cats into cat carriers two years later and moved 12 hours away. But I swear Pepe in Mississippi was a whole new cat. He was no longer the tentative, shy cat. He was full of confidence in our new home. Instead of hiding in the corners, he would lay in the sun on the rug in the middle of the floor. Our vet suggested that moving had put all the cats on an equal footing n the new house. Literally, the pecking order had changed.

In any event, for the next year, Pepe thrived. He gained weight, his coat filled out, and he would even climb in your lap and purr. The cat they warned might never love us back was affectionate and loving. It was the best year.

Things started to go downhill in the fourth year he was with us. His personality was still the same, but he wasn’t eating. The vet told us he had a horrible infection in his teeth and gums, and because of his FIV, he didn’t have the resources to fight it off. They gave him antibiotics and hoped for the best.

He recovered – for about six weeks. Then we had to go back for another round of shots. Each round, he had lost more weight, become more lethargic, and ate less and less. In the summer of 2020, it became obvious we were fighting a losing battle.

We had a foster son living with us at the time. He identified heavily with Pepe, and while the other cats would run and hide from him, Pepe tolerated his hugs. The night before Pepe died, we all sat with Pepe on the floor of the living room, and we petted him and told him we loved him; and that night, when I tucked the boy in bed, we talked about how when you love something or someone, you have responsibilities as a result. We had promised to take care of Pepe, and helping him die well was part of that.

I told the boy that you have to do the right thing for those you love, even when that is not something you want to do.

The next day a neighbor watched the boy while we went to the vet for Pepe’s last visit. He was purring in our arms when he got the shot. At that point, he was skin and bones, less than half his body weight when we had gotten him.

That was 23 months ago. A few months after Pepe died, the Boy went back to his family. Pepe is buried in the backyard, under a headstone Renee and the Boy made together.

I think about Pepe a lot. This cat that they told us would never have the tools to love us ended up loving us after all and taught us a lot about love along the way. He taught a hardened, traumatized boy in the foster system how to love, and he purred in our arms as we watched him die.

Shortly after we got him, when he was having such a hard time adjusting, we decided that if all he gets is to spend his remaining years in a loving home filled with kitty treats and toys and with people committed to loving him even when he doesn’t have the resources to love us back, that is a lot more than he would have had in the first place, and a lot more than any of us deserve. But for a few years, we got a lot more than that, and so did he.

The Giddiness of God

Tony is a Black man who lives on the edge of homelessness, with occasional bouts of sheltered living. Tony is also a gay man, but not completely out, largely due to concerns about his safety in the world he lives in. And Tony is also Christian in a very intense and Evangelical way, mostly, I suspect, as a way of dealing with his shame around his sexuality.

So when Tony came into my office and asked if he could talk to me, I knew this was going to be interesting.

I want to say upfront that while I know that there is no single Black Church Experience and that there are many positive manifestations of the Black male-led church, Tony is involved in none of those. Instead, he regularly attends a storefront Pentecostal church led by a power-hungry man who preaches prosperity theology with a side dish of shaming, who demands that people refer to him as “Pastor”. Like it’s his name.

One of Tony’s friends is Jimmy, and Jimmy is very gay and very out. Jimmy had been going to Tony’s church, and was recently “convicted” about his sexuality, and had recently been, at the encouragement of the pastor over there, committed to praying that God will take away his “homosexual desires”.

Earlier in the week, Jimmy had confessed to the pastor that it wasn’t working. Despite all his praying, Jimmy was still just a big old gay man, and this made Jimmy feel ashamed and made the pastor angry.

So at the Wednesday night prayer meeting, and at the leadership meeting afterward (that Tony was a part of), Pastor doubled down. They had a ‘Come to Jesus” meeting, Tony told me, where Pastor let it be known in no uncertain terms that being gay was a sin, against the law of God, and to prove it, they had a verse by verse reading of Romans chapter one.

Everybody in the room was supposed to read two verses out loud, and when it got to Tony, he was supposed to read verses 26 and 27 out loud.

For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

There was a long pause while they waited for Tony to read.

“I can’t do it. I won’t do it.” Tony said. And then he left.

Pastor was upset, obviously. He isn’t used to being defied. He sent Tony several texts, basically threatening his eternal salvation if he didn’t repent and come back to church.

So Tony thought about it and came to see me. Because that’s sort of what I do. I’m the pastor you come to when you don’t have anyone else to talk to. The conversation went like this:

Tony: Pastor told me last night that my being gay was a sin, and that God was angry at me.

Me: Well, what do you think?

Tony: I really don’t think it is a sin. I think God made me this way. What do you think, Hugh?

Me: I think you’re right Tony. I don’t think it is, either, and I think God made you this way.

Tony: You do? (This two-word phrase was so filled with hope, tears, and pain that it almost broke my heart.)

Me: I really do. God made you, and God doesn’t make mistakes. You are exactly the way God meant for you to be, and God loves you, and God loves that you are gay. You being gay is exactly what God wanted, and it makes God happy.

Tony, thru tears: No pastor has ever told me that before. I wish they had.

Me: I really wish they had, too.

We talked a bit after that about what Romans chapter one was actually talking about, and I lent him a couple of books that would be helpful to someone from an Evangelical background. But mainly, I let him know he was loved, by both me and by God.

As he was getting ready to leave, I asked him if he would let me read another Bible verse to him. He agreed.

So I read Romans 8:38 and 39 to him.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Him: That sounds like it’s saying that nothing can come between me and God.

Me: That’s exactly what it’s saying.

He hugged me, and then, heading to the door, stopped and turned to look back at me.

“No pastor has ever told me that before, either.”

And he walked out the door.

# # #

If you are gay, and like Tony, you have never had a minister tell you that God is happy you are gay, then please, allow me to be the one to say it.

You are made, the book of Genesis tells us, in the very image of God. You are not an afterthought or a mistake. You are not defective. Your being gay was part of the plan, and has been all along.

And because every creator delights in seeing their creation being fully utilized, God is delighted that you are gay. Not just delighted that you are attracted to other people, but your expressing your sexuality makes God happy. In exactly the same way that it makes God happy that you like to paint, or that you like to run, or that you enjoy singing songs or making music.

Your being gay, realizing you are gay, seeking to express your gayness – all of that makes God giddy with joy.

And as to what can separate you from the love of God?

Not a damned thing. Not a single damned thing.

Grief Groceries

Hi Hugh,

A friend died, and I want to be helpful to his wife, but I’m not sure what to do. I told her that if she needed anything to let me know. Of course, she thanked me, but it’s been a few days now and she hasn’t asked for anything. I don’t think she will. I feel so helpless. What should I do?

[Redacted]

Hey there, [Redacted]. Thanks for writing. I’m really glad your friend has you in her life.

I get it. Grief is a funny thing. It’s the time in our life when we most need help, and also the time when asking for help is so hard. Not because we are ashamed to ask for help, although that happens sometimes too. But mostly because our brain just sort of shuts down.

When my Dad died, I looked functional. But I wasn’t OK. Not at all. And when the news got out, the ton of people flooding me with calls, texts, and DM’s was overwhelming. I really couldn’t function. I sat on the swing in our yard and just stared into space. People called and asked what they could do to help. I had no idea.

“Well, anything you need at all, let me know, OK?”

“OK”.

They hung up. I stared into space some more.

I had no idea what to do. What I needed. I didn’t even know what to ask for.

Then a friend sent a text. This friend had met Dad once but didn’t really know him. But still, she knew I was hurting. I saw who it was and almost put the phone down without reading the text, but I saw the message and it stopped me:

Will you be home at 8:30 tonight?

What’s weird is this friend lives 12 hours away from me.

Yes, I replied.

“K.”

10 minutes later, she said, “Instacart will be there at 8:30. Open the door for them.”

“What?”

“Grief Groceries.”

When Instacart showed up, they put two large bags of groceries on my porch. Frozen pizzas. Ice cream. Oreo cookies. Tinned soup. Stouffer’s lasagna. A gallon of milk. Like that. Things I could heat up if I needed a meal, or pig out on if I needed fat and sugar. Sometimes, you just need to eat half a box of Oreos.

Notice she didn’t ask if I needed any food. I would have said no. She just asked if I would be home.

Grief groceries.

Another friend, who lives out of town, asked Renee to name a restaurant near our house where we like to eat. There is a local chain near our house that is sort of a deli. When we eat supper there, we spend about $25. Renee told her the name of the place.

An hour later, there was a gift card in my inbox for $250. Yes, that is a lot of money, and I understand not everyone can do that. But the wonderful thing was that because it was enough for multiple meals, we didn’t try to save it for “the right time”. We ate there that night, and take out from there several times a week for the next month on nights when I just didn’t have the spoons to cook.

Both of those gift-givers knew something I didn’t know – that when you are grieving, you don’t want to make decisions. No, that’s not quite it: You can’t make decisions. You hit decision fatigue really fast.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, don’t ask grieving people to make big choices or decisions. “How can I help” is a big choice. But “Can I take the kids this afternoon so you can have some time to yourself” is a much smaller one. “Will you be home tonight?” is a small choice. “What restaurant do you like” is a small decision. Just showing up to cut their grass because you noticed it needed cutting is loads better than asking, “Do you want me to cut the grass?” Or, “I’m going to Target. What can I get you while I’m there?” is better than “Can I run any errands for you?”

It won’t always be like this. If you stick around, eventually they will surface and ways to be helpful will make themselves known. But in the first few days, especially, it helps to remove as many decisions from their plate as possible.

Take care,

Note: I wrote this several years ago now, in the aftermath of my father’s death. I needed to write it – grief shared is always lessened. It means a lot to me that it has resonated with so many people. If you want to thank me, you can buy me a cup of coffee, or share it from this site with a friend. – HH

A Dark and Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

I’ve always wanted to start a piece that way. Of course, I’m stealing it from Snoopy, who in his guise as a World Famous Author always began the story he was writing with those words.

In a more serious vein, Madeline L’Engle began A Wrinkle in Time with that line, although it is generally agreed that she was somewhat winking at the audience as she did it. It had already been a cliche for a long time by then.

But yet, right now, it IS a dark and stormy night. At least, it is here, as I sit down to write this.

Some days, the words just don’t come. As I sat down to write this, I just learned that there has been yet another school shooting, where 14 students and their teacher are dead. I don’t have anything to say about that. Even the standard platitude of “thoughts and prayers” is hollow, as there is something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem you are unwilling to solve.

And that is just one example. A week ago there was a racially inspired shooting, where 10 folks died in the grocery store. And COVID has killed a million of us here in the US alone. And inflation is pinching us and lots of folks are barely making it and meanwhile, billionaires travel in space for fun.

I want to write an angry post right now. I would feel better, and you would share it and nothing would change except that my blood pressure would be higher. That sor t of anger almost killed me onc e, and I’m no longer willing to sacrifice myself or my health to make people on the internet like me.

* * *

The air conditioner went out in my house yesterday. AC repairs always scare me, because most AC work requires specialized tools, and the repairs tend to be expensive and so when I need AC work done it stirs up fears around money and career choices I have made and drags up all of the old anxieties I had hidden away when life was going well.

Last night I sat on my deck (because it was hot and stuffy in my house) and heard frogs having a party in the new frog pond I’m building, and the sounds of frogs singing and the water bubbling soothed my anxieties and I slept a hard 7 hours, and woke up this morning to find frog eggs in my pond.

And then I went for my walk before it got hot, and I saw the flowers abloom and the neighbors waved and I came home and drank a cup of coffee made exactly the way I like it, and I sat on my deck and watched the water splash in the frog pond and I thought how fortunate I was, even if my AC didn’t work.

But then I called a man that someone in my network recommended, and he came out and fixed it quickly and it cost a mere $100 and I recognize that my community saved my bacon once again and I can leave my anxieties about money and careers and productivity on the shelf for now, to be examined later.

And that is where I am right now, on this dark and stormy night, enveloped by the pain of the world.

I believe it’s bad. I believe that our community can save us from all of this. And I believe we have to find the beauty and the joy that exists in the midst of it all if we intend to survive until it does.

Hey there

Hey there.

Yes, you.

How’s it going? I mean, for real?

Yeah. Me too.

It’s exhausting. All of it. Like, so many good things are happening, and new possibilities are opening up, and also the world is a damned dumpster fire, and the rights we have fought for are being rolled back and democracy seems so fragile and COVID numbers are rising again and people I love keep dying and … it all seems too much.

I feel constantly behind right now. Like, there are so many things I need to be doing and I have no energy for any of them because I am just watching the world collapse around me and I told someone the other day it was like the collapse of Rome, but with Wi-Fi and Netflix.

I’m not sleeping well. I mean, I fall asleep OK, but I wake up at 4 AM and about half the time can’t go back to sleep. I just lay there and think about all the ways I am behind and the despair of it all and finally, I just get up and make breakfast because at least that is something I can focus on and accomplish.

The world is opening back up, but that doesn’t mean it’s wise to do it – people like my wife who don’t have functioning immune systems and kids under 5 who aren’t vaccinated, and oh, by the way, lots of folks still aren’t vaccinated and I guess they’ve just decided to hell with those vulnerable people.

So yeah. I get it.

What’s keeping you going these days?

For me, it’s nature. Every morning I make my coffee and go outside and walk around my yard. I look at what’s blooming and take pictures and watch the birds play at the feeder and I make gardens in my head. Later I will probably go for a walk – I like doing that more than swimming, now that it’s warm again. I love strolling through the neighborhood, checking in on my favorite trees and flowers, getting harassed by a tiny, but very vocal dog at the end of my street, and waving at people I do not know in their cars who wave at me first. It all makes me feel connected to the world, a part of something bigger than myself.

Oh yeah – I’m building a pond. Can you believe that? I mean, it’s a small pond, 6×10, but it is shallow – more of a huge birdbath, really, The birds love moving water – hell, so do I, when it comes to that. I am looking forward to watching the water splash on the rocks in the evening, after supper, when the sun is going down and the birds are singing. It won’t be long now.

Anyway. That’s what gets me through. Birds. Water features. Building gardens in my mind.

It’s my birthday in a few weeks – June 5th. I’ll be 50. That doesn’t make sense to me at all. But that’s probably a whole other letter.

But basically, I just wanted to check-in. To let you know that I know it’s hard right now. I see you, doing the best you can. I see you, hanging on.

I wish I knew something pastoral to say when it feels like the world is crumbling around you, but I don’t. At least not anything I haven’t said before.

Stay hydrated. Get plenty of sleep. No, more sleep than that. Eat good food, and preferably with people you care about.

Don’t let them steal your humanity – look for opportunities to help others, even if on the smallest of scales. Find humor where you can, and laugh as much as you can.

In the midst of powerlessness, search for things you can still control, and do that.

And remember that love always wins in the end. Always.

And if it seems like love didn’t win, it’s only because it isn’t yet the end.

Don’t give up, and don’t give in. And love really, really hard.

I Know.

Hi there.

Can we talk? I just wanted to check in.

For some of you reading this right now, I know the stories about your decision to terminate your pregnancy.

I know, because I was the person you called when you were assaulted, and I waited in the ER while they did the rape kit.

I know, because I was the person you talked it over with when you saw no way forward, and the dad no longer returned your calls.

I know, because you trusted me enough to tell me about the shady guy who date-raped you.

I know, because I drove you to the clinic, then sat in the clinic waiting room, then walked with you through the mob of protestors afterward, and then drove you back to your house because no one else would.

I know, because when you had nightmares about the so-called Christians who called you a slut and a murderer, you wanted to scream and yell at a preacher and I was willing to let it be me.

And I know because you wrote me long emails after hearing me speak somewhere, and you wanted someone, somewhere, to know why you did it.

I know all those stories and more.

There are others of you, reading this right now, whose stories I do not know. But I know you are out there because almost 1 in four women in the US has had an abortion by age 45. And I know that the recent uptick in anti-abortion conversation on social media must be triggering.

I know that the people who are calling people who chose to end their pregnancy “sluts”, “murderers”, and “whores” don’t realize that they are actually talking about people they know. That they are talking about people like you. Because they don’t know your story.

I don’t blame you for not telling them, by the way. They obviously aren’t safe people to share it with. It’s always you who gets to decide who you share that with.

But even though they don’t know your story, and you know they didn’t mean you, specifically, when they said those things, I know how much it hurts to hear those things from people you love. I know it brings up all the old wounds and makes you ask all the old questions.

Whether I know your story or not, please know this: You are loved by God, without condition, and without exception. The mere fact of your existence makes you valuable, and there is nothing you could do to separate you from the love of God.

Not a single goddamned thing.

There is much in this world I am unsure of, but I am certain of that.

I know how hard that decision was, and I know how brave you were for making it. So if all of the recent news has drug stuff up and you want someone to talk it over with, someone to yell at, someone to just listen and hold space for you, if you don’t have anyone else, I am willing to hold your story.

I will listen. I will not judge you. And I will never tell a soul.

But mostly, I just wanted you to know that God does not judge you, and neither do I.

Your friend,

Hugh

Children and Ancestors

When I was doing homeless work, there were children everywhere.

I knew children that lived in cars, who got cleaned up in gas station restrooms, and who wrote their school papers on old cellphones that were submitted using the wifi stolen from a Mcdonald’s parking lot. There were children abandoned on literal church doorsteps. Children who ate cold hotdogs for supper, while watching porn with their Dad. Children who had multiple diagnoses, but no services. Children on a rash of medications. And children who had executive function skills off the charts. The latter were often the oldest child, who had to step in as surrogate parents for their younger siblings because their parents were dysfunctional.

So many children.

And then there were the pregnant people. Many of whom were, in fact, still children themselves, having ran away (or were kicked out) when they told their parents they were pregnant. The women I took to the gynecologist’s office. The women I took over to Chapel Hill to the Planned Parenthood office after they made difficult choices. The women I was the only person there when they came out of labor. The women I stood with when the state took their babies away.

There were children everywhere.

One of the biggest populations of people who were experiencing homelessness I came across was people who were anywhere from 18-25, who had been children in foster care, and who had aged out. This means that they had turned 18 and, being adults in the eyes of the law, their foster parents would no longer receive stipends toward their care, so they got kicked out. So many people I knew who were homeless had aged out of the system.

A coworker was pregnant with her first child, and I asked if she was nervous.

“Absolutely”, she said. “There are so many ways to screw this up, it feels like. However, working here makes me feel better, ironically. You see this many babies and you realize there is a wide range of conditions under which humans can grow and develop.”

It’s true.

I am incredibly lucky in so many ways. My parents were just children themselves, having had me when they were but 20. My grandparents either died or were hundreds of miles away when I was very small. We had very little money. And yet I had parents that taught me to love books, encouraged my creativity and curiosity, gave me independence and that loved me without question. It truly was like winning the genetic lottery, without buying a ticket.

A critique of my writing is that I romanticize things about the past. But I don’t see it as romanticizing as much as I do curation. I am really clear I am who I am because of who I come from – because of who my people are. Had I been born under different circumstances, in a different place, to different people, I would be different. Heck, my two brothers and I are all very different, despite having grown up in the same house, with the same parents, and gone to the same schools.

Last week, while in the mountains, some friends were talking about my writing, and they said the thing they connected with the most was my hopefulness that doesn’t attempt to minimize the very real horrors of the world.

There are so many ways people maintain their resilience in the light of the chaos of the world. Some focus on self-care. Some drink. Some become jaded and hard.

I have, on various occasions, done all of those, and more.

But the sustaining belief I hold onto – that allows me to be hopeful in spite of the facts – really comes down to children and ancestors.

When I say children, I recognize that not all of us are bio-parents, nor can we be. But we can all put creative effort into the world, we can all leave legacies behind, and we can all be generative and supportive of people that will outlive us. Many of us have raised babies we did not give birth to. What are children but an investment in the world after we are gone? And all of us can make such an investment – not just those of us who have biological children.

If there is such a thing as a chosen family – and there is – then I can have chosen children.

But if we can all have children, then we are all ancestors. And more and more I resonate with the words of Jonas Salk, who said that our greatest responsibility was to be good ancestors. I am who I am because they were who they were. I am because of them.

Much like the quote credited to Gandhi about being the change we want to see in the world, I believe we have a responsibility to be the person for young people that the younger version of us needed. Even if we didn’t get it ourselves. Probably especially if we didn’t get it ourselves.

By doing that, we are bullish on the future. We are rolling the dice in favor of a better world, we are modeling the world we want to see, and living in such a way that is a defiance of the present darkness that surrounds us. By focusing on being the best ancestor I can be, I deprive the bleak reality of oxygen.

So that’s it, really. The source of any hope I can muster is that I have a responsibility to my ancestors as well as to my chosen children to be an ancestor, and what’s more, to be a good one.

The Happiness of Lower Standards

A gift that ADHD brings is that, if it interests you (and granted, that is a huge precondition), you can bring near super-human powers of research to the table. And if it interests you, you can fall deep into a hole where you want to know everything about a subject.

Everything.

I currently own at least 200 books on gardening and horticulture. More than 150 on woodcraft. Perhaps 800 theology texts. Yes, I have read all of them. Many of them multiple times. Because it’s hard for me to explain to you how much more I want to know when I’m really interested in something.

It doesn’t always look like books – that’s just my particular poison. I know kids who will watch literally every TikTok on a given subject. A niece went through a Japanese phase and watched Japanese movies, ate sushi, learned to eat with chopsticks, and even ordered Japanese socks and pencils off eBay. I will say that socks take up much less space than books do.

But my point is that there is the desire – an overwhelming desire, to know literally everything you can on a subject in which you are interested. The list of subjects I can have an intelligent conversation with an enthusiast is large and unwieldy: Knights, dinosaurs, electricity, carpentry, horticulture, permaculture, aquaculture, southern culture, native plants. Asian plants, the military, pacifism, religious cults, religious orthodoxy, brick making, bricklaying, martial arts, and climate change have all grabbed my attention at various times, and that was a list generated by not even trying.

If you ever eat a piece of wagyu beef, it will forever ruin your beef eating experience, because what you previously thought was an excellent piece of meat is now just ordinary. Your standard for “good beef ” is now much higher because you know better. And if you compare every piece of beef to the wagyu beef, you will forever be unhappy.

Likewise, when you spend a deep dive into, say, karate, and you learn that much of modern karate is less than 110 years old and owes its origins to a man named Gichin Funakoshi who founded and systematized Shotokan Karate, but he was actually trained in Shorin-Ryu karate, which is much older but less formatted, and thus less easily teachable, and that much of what passes for karate today is really just people ripping off Funakoshi, then you don’t want to go take karate at the Y, or in the storefront school. You want to take Shorin-Ryu karate, where the modern karate movement started.

But if you didn’t know any of that, you would most likely be happy at Uncle George’s Karate Dojo and Storm Door Company. Which you might as well be because nobody in your state teaches Shorin-Ryu anyway. Instead, 19-year-old Hugh searches for the real true karate instead of, actually, you know, studying any karate at all.

Or in my 20’s when I was weightlifting, I didn’t just want to lift weights – I wanted to do it the “best” way. I read at least 100 books. Got countless magazines. Tried literally hundreds of workout routines. Totally wrecked my shoulders along the way.

So, those are examples of how ADHD makes you unhappy. Because you know too much. And because you do, your standards are impossibly high. The inverse is also true, of course – there are huge sections of human endeavors about which you know nothing because they did not interest you at all. But that’s another story, for another time.

One thing I’m trying to do these days is to lower my standards as a source of happiness. Or try to care less about doing it the “right” way or the “pure” way, and just do it at all. Like when I began walking regularly last year, I literally bought books on walking – a thing I have been doing most of my life, quite well. But I only began to get real enjoyment out of it when I gave up trying to do it well and just focused on doing it.

And recently, my back and shoulders seem a bit stiff, and I have considered going to Yoga classes. Of course, I read a lot of books, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and learned about the various lineages, but this time I just bit the bullet and went to the free “yoga” class my gym has on Monday during lunch.

Other than the teacher, I was the youngest person there by a good 10 years. The moves were slow and graceful, and only one pose was recognizable. I think there is a 50/50 chance that the soft background music was Kenny G. Really, it was more of a stretching class than anything else. It would have met no purity test at all. And I had a blast.

The little old ladies ooohed and ahhed over my being there. An older gentleman advised me to take an aspirin before I went to bed tonight. The lady to my right said she hopes I come back because they need “younger people” (I’ll be 50 in about six weeks). But still. It was great.

And most important is that I did it. I stretched. And Thursday, I’ll do it again. Not because it’s pure, or because it’s the best, or because from it I can learn to be the best. But when the choice was to do nothing or to do something, I did something.

Imposter Syndrome

Once upon a time, I was considered a subject matter expert on issues surrounding homelessness.

I would lecture at universities. I’ve spoken to crowds of 10,000 people, taught police departments, consulted with denominations, and had waged war with a mid-sized city over homeless policy, and won.

There were articles about my work in Time magazine. The Christian Century. The Huffington Post. I had been interviewed on NPR Morning Edition. Al Jazeera. Fox News. My words had appeared in The Washington Post, as well as Ethics Daily and Sojourners, and other places I forget.

And I had years of front-line experience working with and among people experiencing homelessness. I’m not telling you any of this to impress you, but rather to impress upon you that when it came to issues around homelessness, I had ample evidence that I knew what I was talking about.

But none of that would stop the dream.

The dream was a recurring one that began to show up sometime in my sixth year of that work. I was getting invitations to write and speak at ever-larger events and platforms. I was invited that year to lecture at the NC Episcopalian Diocese Clergy Retreat. Basically, the then-Bishop of NC (who, incidentally, is now the Presiding Bishop of the whole freakin’ Episcopal Church) pulled every Episcopalian Priest in the state into a room and made them listen to me for three days.

Every person in that room knew more than I did about everything except homelessness. I am a very informal Mennonite, and they were all very formal and highly educated Episcopalians. They wouldn’t even let me be the guy who handed out their bulletins at the back of the church without some additional training.

The dreams began about six weeks before the retreat, and they still show up from time to time. The scene is always the same: The boardroom at the Episcopal Church across the street from the Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh, NC.

It’s a beautiful room – I’ve been in it many times – and there is dark furniture and a long polished table and book-lined walls and large windows and heavy paneled double doors. And in the dream, I am standing at one end of the table, on the end furthest from the doors, and all around the table are folks – men, women, Black, white – wearing clerical collars, and I’m presenting… something. Whatever it is, they are listening and taking notes, and it seems to be going well.

Suddenly, the door bursts open, and a silver-haired white man in full clerical regalia strides two steps into the room, points at me, and roars, “Get him out of here!”. Suddenly, the people who had been listening to me leap up and drag me out in the hall, and then they go back into the room and shut the door.

Subtle, huh?

That feeling – the one that says despite all the evidence that says you actually do know what you are doing, you still feel like you are in over your head, and surely someone will notice and point it out to the world? They call that imposter syndrome. And I don’t think it ever goes away. At least, it never has for me.

There is probably a lot of social conditioning that goes into this. I do happen to know many silver-haired white men who wear clerical garb, and they seldom seem to exhibit signs of imposter syndrome. We should all pray to have the confidence of a mediocre white man. Having grown up economically poor, I absolutely have unresolved issues around class and status that things like wealthy churches exacerbate.

When we show up, we bring more than ourselves with us. I bring generations of working-class stigma and prejudice into any room I show up in, and no amount of outside praise takes that away.

These days, I write. A lot. Around 30,000 words most months. I have thousands of newsletter and blog subscribers. People pay money to make sure I can keep doing that. In addition to my writing for the web, I’ve been published in magazines, newspapers, and in books. I’m pretty good at this.

And yet, the other day when a friend introduced me to someone as a writer, I found myself self-deprecating, minimizing, doing the Zoom-equivalent of kicking the ground and saying “aww shucks”.

“I have a little blog”, I told them. Gone were the newsletter subscribers. Gone were the publishing clips. Gone were the books, the newspaper articles. Gone were the 20 years of effort that led to any of this.

I have a little blog.

My friend corrected me, said I have an amazing blog, and that she reads it daily.

Imposter syndrome. I just couldn’t even let her call me a writer.

Despite the fact that I, you know, write. A lot. And pretty well. (I wasn’t going to put that last sentence, because it felt braggy. Imposter syndrome even here.)

I don’t know what you do about it, but I know I’m not the only one. I still have the dream, but less often now – probably because I’m dealing with fewer old white dudes in positions of power. But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten over it. Because I haven’t.

But I have gotten better at being willing to believe I’m wrong. That the evidence might be right. That I may actually be as good at something as other people say I am.

And that maybe I belong at that damned table after all.