self-care – Hugh's Blog

Introversion at conferences

I used to spend a fair amount of my life at conferences. Back when I was regularly asked to speak or, more often, lead breakout sessions, I would be at maybe ten of these things a year.

But then I quit speaking about faith and homelessness and I moved to a new city and then COVID happened and suddenly it had been five years since I had been to much of anything like the conference I am at this week, put on by my denomination, Mennonite Church USA.

I don’t know how many people are here – they come and go, and other than the plenary sessions, you never see everyone at once, but maybe a few thousand?

Over the years, I adopted a series of practices to keep me sane at events like this. Mostly they were adopted in self defense, and were not planned. But this week I realized now they are muscle memory.

Most things like this love to offer communal meals, where you are expected to sit next to absolute strangers. I will only do one of those during the conference. If I need to eat, I try to latch onto someone I know, so at least the energy expenditure is low.
I always stay at the conference hotel, if it’s at all feasible. Being able to hide in your hotel room when you have 20 minutes of downtime is priceless.
I try to schedule one on one meals with people I want to talk to, or catch up with. It takes much less energy to have a one on one coffee or meal than it does to chat with a bunch of folks.
Grab snacks like individual yogurts, those water bottle juice powders, and some trail mix, and keep them in your room for when you need topping up. This also gives you an excuse to go back your room.
I accept I won’t go to everything I could. I have no FOMO.
I run on my home time zone – now Central Time. I’m currently in Eastern Time, but I’m waking up and going to bed based on CST. If the trip is less than a week, I just refuse to adjust.
Take advantage of serendipity. Tonight, my supper meeting cancelled, so I skipped the evening session and went to CookOut and had a strawberry milkshake and a chilidog for supper. Only God can judge me.

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.

Weeknotes

In my day job as a community organizer, we have a practice of writing a reflection each week to our supervisor. In it, we are encouraged to reflect on the week we had, and our plans for the upcoming week. To talk about what we are working on, what we are learning, and how we are thinking about our work.

It sounds sorta hokey, and I initially resisted it, but it works, in that it forces me to reflect and think strategically about what I’m doing. It moves me from inside the work to some point outside, to where I’m an observer of the ‘me’ that is doing the work.

My writing is a part-time job, funded by my Members who want me to put my work out in the world, and want it to be done so free of charge to everyone. That’s why there are no ads on my newsletter or on this website, no paywalls, nothing like that. Just me, writing, and anyone in the world with an internet connection or email can read it.

And so, as I was writing my morning pages this morning, I found myself wondering: If I think of my writing as a part-time job, what would it be like to write reflections on it? And would anyone find that interesting?

This made me remember that about this time last year, I said that I wanted to start showing my work – I wanted to do more of this work in public, so people could have a model for how to start their own blog, how to write their own newsletter, how to make their own cool thing.

So I’m going to start writing weekly notes every Friday. Some weeks will be more involved that others. Some weeks may be a little nerdy, as I explain the hours I spent looking for the right plug-in for a website, and other weeks may be introspective as I talk about the philosophy behind what I’m trying to do. And some weeks I may be so busy you just get bullet points. And because I try to be kind to myself, I don’t commit to doing this every week, but most weeks – just like I walk most days.

I don’t want fighting to be my default

From 2009 until 2018, I did a lot of work in what can best be described as the “Progressive Christian Influencer” arena. I wrote extensively, publishing articles in national publications and having chapters and essays published in books. I traveled a lot, speaking to audiences as small as seminary classrooms and as large as music festivals and youth conferences. It all seems surreal.

There is no such thing, really, as a “speaking circuit”. But, there is a small group of people who generally make a large portion of their living – directly or indirectly – from public speaking. They generally work in niches – like I was in the progressive Christian niche. And since there is a finite number of speaking opportunities in any given year, and since most events have multiple speakers, many of the folks who speak in a given niche know each other, if for no other reason than we share stages and events.

As I said, I pretty much quit that life in 2018. It wasn’t good for me – I actually think it isn’t good for anyone – and the healthiest thing for me to do was to walk away. But I still have a lot of friends I met on those stages. After all, when you are on the road, staying in a beige chain motel in a suburb of Toledo Ohio, having long conversations in the hotel bar (or, more likely, the motel doesn’t have a bar, so you end up in the Applebees in the parking lot) with other people who understand your life leads to lasting intimacies. Or, at least, it can.

So, a few weeks ago, someone I know well from that time was passing through Jackson. He lives on the other side of the country, and while we have stayed in touch, it had been years since we spent time together. So, we had lunch.

It was nice, catching up. Hearing the stories of his children, beyond what I had gleaned from Instagram. The work he is up to now, the new project he has started. His current interests and hobbies. Eventually, the conversation stalled a bit, and he looked at me. Like, really looked at me. Like he was actually seeing me, or rather, seeing inside me.

“Man, you’ve changed.”

“Oh? I have? How?”

“You’re… calmer? Less angry? Less intense? Something like that. That’s not quite it, but it’s close.”

I knew what he meant. I’ve felt it too. You can most tell it in my writing, I think. It’s not that I don’t have opinions – I assuredly do. And it’s not that I’m not passionate about the things that matter to me – I assuredly am. To be socially conscious and to live in a place like Mississippi is to be enraged nearly all the time.

But I’ve lost all stomach for fighting for the sake of fighting. And over the last few years, I’ve been doing a lot of self-work.

A thing I find helpful when examining a belief I hold is to ask myself what the world would be like if everyone held that belief.

If the answer is that things would be worse than they are now, I work to change that belief, because it doesn’t move me closer to the world I want to live in.

(This does require that you be willing to examine your beliefs in the first place.)

And I don’t want to live in a world where the default response to things that are wrong is that we fight.

Imagine

In the 7th chapter of the New Testament book of Matthew, there is a story about prayer where Jesus tries to tell people how much God wants good things for them. So, he asks the crowd some rhetorical questions.

“Imagine your kid asks for some bread. Would you give them a stone? If they asked for fish, would you hand them a snake?”

Then Jesus says that if even normal folks know how to give good things to their kids, then surely God is better than that. Surely, God wants to treat us better than we treat our kids.

Belief in a deity aside, I don’t think anyone of us would disagree that giving your hungry kid a rock instead of bread isn’t something you do for someone you love.

We all know how to treat someone we love. We strive for people we love. We make sacrifices for the people we love. We try hard to please the people we love and give them gifts we believe will excite them. We go to great lengths to show them how we feel, we try hard to show others how much we love the people we do.

We know how to love people. And we know how to show people we love them.

Right?

Now, imagine what would happen if you treated yourself the way you would treat someone you love.

I’m tired.

I’m whipped.

My job at the church has me running hard both last week and this week, and there is lots of detail work involved, and much extroversion involved, and while I love so much about my work there, neither of those two things are on the list. I swear I have spoken more in the last two weeks than I have in the last six months. It is at times like this that I am certain I am a social introvert.

And in the last three months or so, five people I care about have died – some from Covid and some from cancer, but regardless, they are still dead.

And then there is the lunacy that is the current Supreme Court, as we watch decades of civil rights work get rolled back. For folks like me – white, straight, Christian, male – we’re as safe as houses. But queer folk, women, people of color, and people of other faiths are considerably less safe than they were six weeks ago. But it shouldn’t have to affect you for it to matter to you.

And then there is the “mass shooting of the week” – most recently in Highland Park, Illinois. When Columbine happened, we were in shock for weeks. Now I can’t even keep up with which one is the most recent one.

It’s all too much.

As an introvert, I often take weeks to formulate my thoughts on something. I will process it in my head, turn it this way and that, argue for and against it, and then, having made up my mind, will want to write about it. But we will have had three new things to be outraged about by then. The internet is an outrage machine – it both generates it and rewards it – and I have no desire to participate in that game.

So, this is just a reminder that I don’t blog about current events. You shouldn’t mistake my silence on things for lack of care or concern – rather it’s that I only have so much energy, and I want to use my voice in places where those words are useful. We do not need my outrage – there is already plenty to go around. If you need me to tell you why you should be upset, you clearly are not paying attention.

I am a huge believer in the idea of modeling the world we wish to see, and I want to live in a world that rewards thoughtful writing, and intentional rest, and that recognizes that by telling the truth about our fears and struggles, we can reduce the amount of shame in the world.

So that’s what I try to model here. So, there will be no hot takes. No hashtags. No outrage. I probably won’t write anything that will go viral. I’ve done all that. It’s a lot like cheap sex – it feels good while it’s happening, but you won’t like yourself afterward. And like cheap sex, it’s hard to do it while caring about the other people involved. Or, honestly, yourself.

A Closet Full of Grief

In the Looney Tunes cartoons we watched on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, there was a recurring gag where there was too much stuff in the closet. Someone would open the closet and more things than should fit in a closet that size would fall out, burying the person who opened it.

Grief is like that, sometimes.

It’s overwhelming in the beginning. You give some of it away and learn to live with some of it and the rest you don’t actually deal with right now, but instead, in order to function, you put it in the closet and it won’t really fit so you stuff and punch and contort and finally, you get the door closed so you can keep going with your life because we live in a capitalist society and your mortgage doesn’t go away just because people you love died.

So it’s all stuffed in that closet. And because you stuffed it in there – I mean, it may have taken a few weeks or even months to get it in there, but it was in there, and you had to lean against the door to get it shut – but because it’s stuffed in there, it was hell to get it all to fit. But you did.

And life goes on and most days everything is fine and sometimes you are whistful and sometimes you miss them and sometimes you walk by the closet and see the door and remember what’s in there, but you know it’s going to be a mess if you open that door, so you keep on moving.

But the problem is that we don’t live in a vacuum. Other people are moving around in our life as well, and one day, with no ill intent at all, somebody or something is gonna open that door and it will all fall out, but instead of burying them, it buries you. And when that happens, you have no choice but to sit in the midst of it and pick it all up again, handling each piece, looking at it this way and that, as you put it all back in the closet.

This is why this afternoon I was driving down the Interstate, tears streaming down my face. An old song came on the radio about a child’s love for his father and, without warning, ripped that door off its hinges.

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.