Volunteerism

Sympathy for the Devil

/ Michelle at The Green Study / 13 Comments
A red fuzzy monster with devil horns.

I grew up one of those earnest, scrunch-browed kids who always wanted to be “good”. I’ve volunteered for one group or another since I was in my teens. I’d like to believe it was for purely altruistic reasons, but I’m human and psychologically speaking, I was often doing good to be seen as good. Carrying the never-good-enough gene means that one hopes actions can redeem what feels unlovable at the core. Now organizations being what they are, they don’t give a rat’s ass about what broken down esteem made you show up, they’re just glad you did. They need you – a body to fill booths or rosters or boards. If they need me, maybe I’m worth something.

Cut to 40 years later. I’ve continued to volunteer off-an-on with bouts of resentment and the sneaking suspicion that I’ve got it all wrong. In most organizations, women continue to do the bulk of labor and volunteering. In most organizations, the women are white, middle-class, and educated. My demographic – which means that I will automatically feel uncomfortable – a gift of introversion and growing up in dysfunction that makes you wait for the other shoe to drop. So I reach in and pull at the thread. Racism and classicism. Why is an organization filled with all white middle-class women? Finding both a cause and a reason to feel like an outsider – it’s the perfect frisson for the not-good-enough person, because the catch is, when it comes to being white and confronting racism, you will never be enough. Here’s a hanky for those white lady tears. And unless you plan on giving up a penchant for running shoes and grocery delivery, middle class is firmly where your not-so-firm ass will remain.

I have begun to realize how wrong I’ve been about a lot of things. Being good and doing good does not necessarily equate to feeling good for me. Is it supposed to? I’m not really sure, but I look around at my friends and family and acquaintances and I’m confused. Why aren’t they tortured by thoughts of how to be a good ally or trying hard to balance volunteerism with just living their life? What does being good even mean? Most people genuinely believe they are good people. I try to be and sometimes delude myself into thinking that I am, but mostly what I am is someone who is constantly trying to be good and often misplacing those energies.

Green fuzzy monster with horns and black eyebrows peeking over edge of wall.

I laugh at the efforts people put into trying to make others feel shame or fear or disgust or self-loathing on social media. Already there, jackwagons. Self-sufficient monster generator right here. I turned 55 last month and I have skills, baby. Any situation, any interaction, I can turn it into a reflection about what an awful person I am, never one to miss out on a narcissistic, depressive bout of self-flagellation. I go into shutdown mode and I try to figure out how I can quit EVERYTHING. My mind works the rationalizations. Well, I really need to focus on writing. The organization will be fine without me. Some other body will come along. I’m too old to be in situations that make me this miserable. My monsters come with ready-made excuses.

One hopes that a perpetual lack of self-confidence and self-denigration comes across as humble or endearing, but I suspect it is exhausting for others to parry with. You’re fine, Michelle. You’re a good person. That was a great thing you did. It takes an immense amount of self-control to not scream at them: I’m a monster! OPEN YOUR EYES!

Blue fuzzy monster looking surprised with an open mouth of sharp teeth.

Therapy, you say? Oh no, my friends, because you have no idea what else resides inside. Nothing wastes therapy more than…the people-pleaser monster. Just be confessional enough to make them think they’re getting somewhere with you. Shed a few tears. Have a brilliant insight or two into your own psyche. They settle back into their chair and think: god, I’m really great at this. This makes that 100K in school debt all worth it. You think: Maybe I am a good person, I even made the therapist happy.

One of my favorite writers, Anna Quindlen, wrote a column for the New York Times for many years called “Public and Private”. She wrote columns that connected the personal with social commentary. One critic derisively referred to her as a “monster of empathy”. Sometimes I think that’s one of my monsters, too. Empathy is the ability to imagine someone else’s life or perspective. That’s a necessary tool for a fiction writer, but in reality, it conflates your own perspectives with what you imagine to be someone else’s and 50% of the time you are off by a wide mile. It interferes with really hearing what someone else is saying about their lived experience.

Round fuzzy green monster with no mouth.

Last night I listened to the wind in the maple tree outside as I tried to settle my mind. It is amazing to me what a giant mess one can fit into a single, small, unimportant human brain. A gnat on the windshield. Perspective is good, but the thought is never far away – how easy it must be to be bad, to not care, to not get hooked into a moralistic world view of right and wrong, good and evil, to do what only feels good or comfortable. But I’d be deluding myself if I thought I could live that way. I’d be worried that I wasn’t bad enough.

Vulnerability and the Spin

/ Michelle at The Green Study / 43 Comments

It’s been a long few weeks. This morning, as I watched my daughter walk down the street to high school, I felt the tears well up. It seem like only moments ago, we were holding hands, walking to her preschool and my parenting classes while she bounced up and down off the curb chatting away. Time. Sometimes it seems endless, like a languid, humid summer. And suddenly, it’s autumn.

canstockphoto12404837I packed a whole summer of experiences in the last few weeks. I went to the Minnesota State Fair for the first and last time in my life. I boated down the St. Croix with a friend who has known me for over 30 years. I did the absolute worst interview in my life, which gave me insomnia and crushed my ego into dust. I tried to register voters (the least popular table at a school open house) and wrote pithy comments on a zillion ACLU voter postcards. I frequented bookstores and often fell asleep in my reading chair, book in hand.

I’m a slow processor. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to superglue the pieces of my fragile ego together, after interviewing for a vacant city council seat. There were mitigating factors – it was more like a military board, where there was a prescribed set of questions, no interaction, and a bunch of white guys staring at me grim-faced. 30 years ago, I would have probably aced it. Too many years of learning how to develop rapport and human connection had me little prepared to be interviewed by a room of stenographers, who were literally writing down and grading my answers as I spoke.

canstockphoto7656534I drove away from city hall with the Talking Heads playing in my brain “How did I get here?” I’d tried to prepare for this interview in the way I try to prepare for everything. But I was not prepared to feel simultaneously angry and embarrassed that I had pushed myself to do this thing my heart wasn’t really in – that I’d allowed my ego to speak louder than my gut.

It’s hard to come back from failure and mistakes. But I am my own Spin Master. And my efforts to be an activist, to be engaged in politics, had taken over a good portion of my life. I’d been getting progressively miserable over the last couple of years and while the President would be delighted to take credit for this, as he does all things, I’m not giving it to him. Because we are, no matter what the state of the world, ultimately responsible for the state of our selves. It’s easy to shelve that responsibility when larger causes are on the horizon and to become a mini-martyr in the course of things.

There is an argument that to make a difference, you have to put some real skin in the game. We see the costs throughout history – those who died and suffered or the famous humans who ignored their children, cheated on their spouses, had secret fetishes and addictions of every ilk, yet who made a difference, who went down in history for the one thing that they did really well, whatever it was. But that’s not the path for most of us.

canstockphoto17610549I remember being very irritated by something Brené Brown wrote in her book, Rising Strong. “The ego has a shame-based fear of being ordinary.” She went on to say that this was how she defined narcissism. Nobody wants to think of themselves as being narcissistic, albeit there is a huge difference in degree. But some of us, most of us, are quite ordinary. We’re not building bridges, curing illnesses, climbing whatever tall things we can find. Most of us will never write literature that will be read into the next century or be called the greatest anything (except by those we love, on t-shirts and coffee mugs).

I’m at the age where I know who I am – that I will never enjoy huge crowds of people, I am prone to/revel in saying the wrong thing when I’m irritated, I am never in the moment more than when I am writing, I need shitloads of solitude, I adore my family, and I want to perpetually learn. But then there is my ego. Martyrdom? Sign me up. Hard labor? Tell me where to dig. Endless devotion? Here – have an organ. These are not sacrifices for me. This is business-as-usual, not altruism.

canstockphoto5313640.jpgDespite all the jokes about men and their vehicles and overcompensation, I’ve realized that I have my own Hummvee – doing good in order to make up for not feeling good enough. This is ego. This is thinking that it be critically important I be seen as being good – that appearances are more important than the infrastructure. I let my ego take me to a place where I would not thrive, because it sounded important. More than ordinary.

It’s been a messy, messy epiphany – one that I’ve experienced before in varying degrees, but at this stage in life, it really needs to stick. The outcome is that I’ve put some limits on activism and volunteerism and I’m working to change my time to reflect activities that feed me. I joined a local writers’ group, pulled out the many unfinished writing projects, and am getting down to the business of being ordinary.

That’s how I wrapped up my summer. How was yours?

A Change in Enthalpy…Good to See You

/ Michelle at The Green Study / 37 Comments

canstockphoto0201754I inexplicably dropped out of the blogosphere this week. Apparently, it only takes 5 days to destroy a habit of writing and exercise and you know, getting dressed for life. I’m constantly juggling priorities and this week I just lay down on the floor and let them pummel the hell out of me. Entropy has settled in and for any consistent reader of this blog, it’s obviously a constant battle to pull myself out of it.

Enthalpy is the sum of energy in a thermodynamic process. It is described as useful energy. My scientist friends will have to forgive me my liberal education, as I inexpertly adopt this for a metaphor. A change in enthalpy signals a change in one’s state of being. And I need a truckload of it now.

I frequently hit a point where I’ve given into the chaos of life and am just riding it out. I have no sense of control – just letting life happen until I end up very tired, extremely depressed or feeling like I’m having an out-of-body experience in my daily life. Like most people, I have a lot of external responsibilities, so it becomes very easy to neglect my inner life.

I’ve read all the self-care articles. I know that I’m supposed to put my own oxygen mask on before I put it on others, but it doesn’t come naturally. I’m not some self-sacrificing prig, but I believe in doing what needs to be done. It’s my radar readings that are off – what constitutes need? Did I need to take my bosses’ call on Friday night at 5:05pm? Does my daughter really need to have PB & J sandwiches with the crusts cut off? Do I really need to answer phone calls, emails or texts right away?

I grew up the oldest of four kids. Like the stereotypical first born, I was responsible, take charge and a problem solver. On top of that, I learned to read people. It was necessary in a household with alcoholism and domestic violence, to sense a shift in the wind, to understand what the buttons were, to know when to take cover.

In many ways, this skill benefited me in accurately navigating the world as an adult. The downside is that I have this childlike sense that I know more than I do. I have often attributed need where there is none and taken even the slightest negative emotion as a cry for me, Super Problem Solver, to swoosh in and save the day. People have been startled by my generosity, not realizing that expression of even the most trivial needs will have me bringing in the troops.

This last week, I wanted to solve problems for a lot of people, but part of me knew that I needed to tap out, cry “uncle” or handcuff myself to a fence in passive resistance. What I did, instead, was go through the motions. I did work that needed to be done, all the while thinking dully :”‘When this is over, I’m going to do XYZ…”

Last September, I made the enthusiastic announcement that I was leaving a job of 12 years to dedicate my time to writing. That morphed into a six-month delay in conjunction with the company’s fiscal year, so I’m still in transition. I promised myself that I’d scale back a bit on volunteering, only to find myself sitting for 2 hours straight, doing nothing but feeling slightly resentful at a school event this week.

canstockphoto9355218Entropy got me here, to this state of disordered chaos, but my holy grail is balance. It’s an unending, constantly shifting quest. I wonder, at times, that my expectations are unrealistic. I imagine balance to be this serene, meditative handling of life’s daily trials and tribulations. Maybe balance is more like being adept at juggling on a unicycle, constantly in motion, shifting this way or that, sometimes frantically, sometimes rhythmically. Is balance a Buddhist nuns’ retreat or a circus?

What does balance look like to you?