The Gun

August 30, 2015August 30, 2015 ~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

The kids unearthed the gun on an ordinary Thursday. Digging in the sand with their feet and hands like little crabs with toes calloused from a summer spent barefoot at the lake, they hit pay dirt. The gun revealed itself shyly. The intricate designs of the barrel emerged first, and the oldest child dusted away the dirt with eager fingers. This was no delicate dig but an urgent uncovering, a need waiting to be satisfied. They used plastic shovels to scrape around the edges, and more silver became exposed with each swipe.

The barrel of the cap gun was broken, half the tip eroded away either by time, sand, or rough twentieth-century play. The design imprinted on the silver barrel read, Buffalo Bill, and the parents could only deduce that the gun was old and the children who played with it had been children when they were children. The youngest boy loved the gun. He had never been allowed a gun to play with, but this toy was different. This was a relic, his mother said, and somehow that made all the difference. He could cock the lever, pull the trigger, point the gun at his big sister and not get yelled at once.

The gun was unlike anything he saw in his cartoons: laser weaponry that decimated whole planets. This gun was heavy and metal and old. Being nine, old was something to be behold. His mother, his grandmother, they were old. His sister, she wanted to be old. The villains in his cartoons were mostly old. And ugly. But not this gun. This gun despite it’s broken barrel and useless trigger was beautiful, so he held it in his palm when he could, and he hid it in his plastic fishing box below the few lures and weights his father allowed him to call his when he was called in for dinner.

By the end of the summer, he will have forgotten about the gun. At some point he will have quickly put it down on a shelf in the shed he’d been investigating to run down the dock toward his father’s boat and the opportunity to go fishing across the lake. Maybe he’d catch a big one. When his grandfather dies, and his grandmother, who can no longer navigate the many stairs from house to lake, sells and moves into a home where women in colorful smocks and hard-soled clogs will help her dress and clean, he will find the gun again. His sister won’t remember having ever played with it, even says she didn’t remember where it had come from, but he doesn’t believe her.

The gun will be smaller than he remembers. At fifteen, he goes hunting with his father, has just graduated from using a .22 to a rifle, though he prefers a bow. More challenge, and somehow more honest. The gun’s barrel is in his palm, he pulls back the lever, and pulls the trigger. The gun lets off a resonant but purposeless click echoing in the now emptied shed. He knows then that he will toss the gun into the rented garbage bin now parked between the shed and the house as he walks away. But he wishes for a moment he might bury it, bury it in the hard, hard dirt below the sand, so he can stumble upon it again as when he digs his calloused toes into the cool sand.

Being Seen

August 28, 2015August 31, 2015 ~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

A Louis Vuitton bag. An iPhone holder in the shape of brass knuckles. Her iPad cover is pink and tan. Stiff beige work boots, the kind that were in style in the 90’s. Her shirt cut off short, the unhemmed edge curling up, a picture of Tupac entreating us to “Trust Nobody” above her flat belly. A black trucker hat pulled low over her curling extensions, white earphone cords dripping down. She has a beautiful smile as she listens in silent appreciation to what streams—maybe YouTube—on her phone. I’m surprised her fingernails are cut short and may or may not have a light pink glaze over them. I expect her to sport intricate designs on the ends of her fingers, maybe leopard print to match the face on her watch.

There is a man in a Packer jersey and long tan pants over Adidas sneakers. It is 90 degrees, humid, and July. He must have gotten dressed in air conditioning. Sunglasses like those worn by Tom Cruise in Risky Business hang from his hand as he waits for his beverage at the coffee bar. There is a self-seriousness to his face that bespeaks business, maybe investments, but also there is a lingering frat-boy insouciance that keeps the other people in the queue from getting too close to him. When he leaves he weaves his way through the people coming in rather than going around them.

My accessories consist of a pair of crutches and a bead of sweat racing from my forehead to my cheek. The woman at the table next to me, a stack of notecards and an egg biscuit in front of her, offers to help me settle in, but only after I’ve settled in to my seat and I can decline her offer graciously. A cute hipster girl brings me my breakfast, and the only woman working at the café who does not wear her youth culture on her sleeve and could rightly be described as a ‘plain Jane’ brings me my latte. I get the hefty black boot that guards my broken foot from further damage settled on the chair across from me. From this vantage point, I can see the entire room.

I marvel at the slim 50-something woman with the tightly curling hair listen intently, with a kind of melting sincerity, to the man in the yellow shirt and khaki pants and lengthy grey-brown hair who sits next to her, his legs crossed at the knee, youthful brown tennis shoe on his dangling foot. A man in dark-framed glasses, grey pants rolled up just below his knees like how my husband used to wear his when we first started dating, catches me looking at him. I turn away rather than smile like I see people do in movies. Why do we feel so guilty looking at one another?

In 1st grade, I wore a full cast on my left leg and walked with crutches for six weeks following knee surgery. In 3rd grade, I wore a similar cast on the same leg after breaking a bone in my lower leg. Soon after, I wore a body cast from the tip of my left toes to around my rib cage, after another surgery on my upper leg and hip, replete with rods and pins to hold the bone together. There were other surgeries as I grew, and I became adept at using those same wooden crutches each time, racing other kids with two functioning legs down the hallways of our school.

But I never got used to the stares, the curiosity I provoked in people as I moved awkwardly through the mall or at a sporting event. I recoiled when that curiosity compelled strangers to ask me what had happened. I found their blatant interest in my misery self-serving and not at all innocent. I preferred not to be noticed. When I arrived at my college campus for the first time, again on crutches and struggling to participate in the freshman orientation activities, I was conflicted with my need to ask for help from these strangers and my desire to go unnoticed. I preferred to be lonely rather than be perceived as needy.

My son, who is none, now draws those same stares. Small children corkscrew themselves to watch as my son walks awkwardly past them, his hand in mine, his staggering gait mimics that of an actor miming drunkenness. Adults sometimes stare too, but are better at hiding it. They glance over at us, once, twice, three times. You can see the wheels turning: isn’t that child too big for a stroller? Isn’t that stroller bigger than most? Is there something about the drop in his chin, his unfocused eyes, the bend in his wrists? And once they realize their suspicions are true, they look away, self-conscious. Sometimes they smile. Sometimes that smile is warm.

In this cafe, there is the constant sound of coffee roasters spinning the beans, like sitting next to a waterfall and its constant rushing. The sound drowns out the specifics of any conversation, but the collection of voices blends into a drone in my ears. There is a surprising sense of privacy to this coffee shop—each table or booth an island from the rest–despite the activity and the nearly full number of chairs. As I maneuver my way through the tables to get a glass of water, my metal crutches click and creak, lead the way, but to my surprise hardly anyone notices. One man slides his chair closer to his table to give me more room. A woman at the condiment counter asks, “Don’t you just love your boot? I love mine. I still have it for any time I turn my ankle.” I want to say no, but I just smile, lips closed. I’ve never been good with hollow agreement. When I leave, backpack with laptop slung over my back, a man vacates his spot in the order line to hold the door for me as I leave, asks if I can manage. I say I can, this time with honest gratitude because the hot sun of a summer day awaits me and I am already tired at ten in the morning.

It has been over twenty years since I was last on crutches. It’s harder now. I’m heavier. I’m older. After five days, the palms of my hands hurt so much I dread needing to move anywhere. I expect to have highly defined deltoids by the end of these six weeks. Now, I find the “What happened?” not only tolerable but kind. My boot a badge of courage that people can plainly see, something that labels me “soldier” rather than “victim.” I have to work harder to do the kinds of ordinary things that the people around me can do without effort or thought. I sense a kind of respect emanating from them. Why could I not sense that same admiration when I was a child? Why did I feel apologetic and ‘other’ rather than proud and singular?

I might never know the answer to that most important question of my childhood: why was I not able to accept my individuality as a person as not only inevitable, but to be lauded? Why did I hide rather than shine? How is it that I remained unaware of my near-celebrity; I, like the biggest movie stars, couldn’t hide from being seen? Now, I suppose being hobbled and on crutches at forty offers me a chance to re-label myself, a new measuring stick with which to mark my growth. Instead of hiding, I free myself by being seen. Perhaps I can teach my son to feel included by the stares of strangers, rather than excluded? The idiosyncrasies of character, worn on the outside for all to see—from brass knuckle phone cases to achingly hip sunglasses to a big ugly supportive boot to an obvious, intractable disability— are what imprints our existence upon the world.

Brene Brown’s Rising Strong

August 28, 2015August 30, 2015 ~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

(This review appeared on 800-CEO-READ’s In the Books here.)

I was an enthusiastic supporter of Brene Brown’s previous book, Daring Greatly, touting it as one of the best business and personal development books of 2012. And I also found myself sharing ideas from the book with friends. It seemed to me that encouraging leaders to be vulnerable was a daring endeavor in and of itself. It’s tempting, as a leader or manager of a business, of a household, of a life, to believe you must be invincible, unwavering. But when those qualities are just protective coatings like so much Teflon, we miss out on tapping into real strength, which Brown says is sourced in vulnerability. Just as it is said that a broken bone weaves itself back together more strongly than prior to the break, being vulnerable is scary and painful, but we become stronger when we live as “wholehearted” people.

Coinciding with the publishing of Daring Greatly, Brown participated in Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday, expanding her reach to an enormous audience even beyond her 2010 TED Talk that has garnered over 21 million views. In Rising Strong, there is a tendency for some “Oprah-speak” to bleed into the text which was somewhat refreshingly absent in her earlier work. Here you will hear Brown refer to “standing in your truth” or “living your best life,” but if you are either drawn to that language, or able to skim through it, you’ll find many valuable insights within. In other words, don’t let her current mainstream appeal distract you from the fact that Brene Brown is a research professor—an academic first and a public figure second.

In her 12 years of study of social theory, she says in her more recent 2012 TED Talk on shame, that she has learned that vulnerability is the most “accurate measurement of courage” there is. And what we believe to be weakness in ourselves (terrified of getting up to speak at a public speaking event) is most often seen as courage by other people (the attendees of said public speaking event who are too terrified to get up and speak themselves). Doing “it”—whatever it is that scares you, or makes you uncomfortable—regardless of the fear of vulnerability or shame is the bravest thing you can do to reach deeper into what you are truly capable of in this one life. That’s pretty convincing and motivating stuff and why I thought Daring Greatly was a game changing book, especially for the workplace. Brown advocates:

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.

Which brings us to Rising Strong. In the years between books, Brown realized that just advising people to get their emotional hands dirty wasn’t the whole picture, so here she is instructing us on how to survive during and thrive after our forays into vulnerability. Opening yourself up to plumb the previously untapped depths both within yourself and within your life sounds great, but there is a reason we resist: failure hurts. That seems obvious, but Brown makes the wise observation that if we don’t take that risk, we risk all the more because when we put up walls we don’t just protect ourselves, we tend to hurt others when they run (or we push them) headlong into those walls.

There are too many people today who instead of feeling hurt are acting out their hurt; instead of acknowledging pain, they’re inflicting pain on others. Rather than risking feeling disappointed, they’re choosing to live disappointed. Emotional stoicism is not badassery. Blustery posturing is not badassery. Swagger is not badassery. Perfection is about the furthest thing in the world from badassery.

(Side note: I love when Brown drops the Oprah-speak and embraces instead her Texas-talk.)

Certainly the self-help messaging will find its audience of people who are instinctively curious about their inner life. But Rising Strong has a universality—everyone is going to fall (i.e., be struck down by disappointments and losses in life) so how you get up matters. What you learn from the struggle matters. For Brown, rising strong is all about finding your vulnerability first, and instead of running from it, experiencing your emotions instead of acting in reaction to them. That’s what she terms the “reckoning.” And she makes clear that all people are, by design, feeling people, and so this work can happen in every facet of your life. In other words, you can’t leave this work at home.

Just because you’re standing in your office or your classroom or your studio doesn’t mean that you can take the emotion out of the process. You cannot. … The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common: First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships, and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.

Because Brown focuses her work on qualitative research, it can seem like her work is more anecdotal than scientific (despite her frequent references to her research); however, that is an approach that makes this particular message most effective. The stories of how other people have learned to work with instead of against their emotions makes the practice seem substantially more doable. While this book is definitely for those people going through grave life struggles, it is also for people who are struggling to find their way in relationships or at work. In fact, it is with the small instances that it is best to practice accessing your vulnerability and the process of Rising Strong.

Brown gives her own example of this small scale struggle and revelation within her own marriage. (She might disagree with the idea of this instance being small scale because each small incident adds up to big bad life habits.) She recounts a story about taking a risk to share a tender emotional moment with her husband, only to be rebuffed. Her instinct, as is typically ours, is to shut down, create stories in her head for why he refused to be engaged, and prime herself to lash out. Instead, she encourages them both to reflect back on that moment, dig deep into both their vulnerabilities for why he rebuffed her (he was fearful of looking weak in a frightening situation.)

This is what Brown refers to as “the rumble.” When we feel something, instead of running from it, we should turn around face it, and engage with it. A friend of mine, many years ago, taught me the idea of “sitting with” emotions. At the time, because I hadn’t done much of that practice, let me tell you, I didn’t really get it. I thought I was really good at hanging out with my emotions simply because I was an emotional person who reflected on those emotions an awful lot. But over time, I’ve realized what that means. As Brown says, when we do feel emotions, we tend to jump a la hopscotch to other ones, rationalizing or controlling them through story, rather than really spending time with ourselves. Whether you “sit” or “rumble” with your emotional response, the trick is to stay with it in its most basic form.

In each chapter, Brown presents a story about how someone (often herself) has rumbled with emotions, including, in Chapter 9, called “Composting Failure” which deals with “rumbling with fear, shame, perfectionism, blame, accountability, trust, failure, and regret.” That’s a lot, but a lot that I’m familiar with too. In 2004, after receiving a stack of rejections from publishers and agents, Brown decided to self-publish her first book, then titled Women and Shame. That doesn’t seem like such a big risk now, but self-publishing was definitely not the norm a decade ago, and she became ashamed of having asserted herself (I wrote a book, and it’s worth reading!) without the backing of a powerhouse publisher endorsing it. Even after getting enough word of mouth and republishing more traditionally, as I Thought It Was Only Me, the book fell flat.

In a moment of desperation, I scrambled to put together a book reading in Chicago, where I was already doing a lecture for mental health professionals. It was the coldest February day on record. Five people came to the reading. One woman was drunk, and two of them were there because they thought I was a mystery writer.

(From my experience working in the bookstore world, readings are the ultimate in vulnerability.)

Finally, her books were remaindered (she calls it “composted”) and the entire process filled her with shame and feelings of failure. Considering her current successes, it’s easy to see that she successfully rumbled with those emotions. “As I would learn, the hardest part of coming out from hiding is facing the painful work of rumbling with the real story. And the real story was that I had set myself up for failure.” Given her massive successes following that experience, clearly Brown figured out how to leverage the realization that, next time, she “wasn’t going to … wait for someone to knock on my door and ask me about my work. I’d put on my shit-kickers and start knocking on doors myself.” And that realization becomes what Brown calls a “revolution” in thinking. And in this case, she embraced the lesson:

Failure can become nourishment if we are willing to get curious, show up vulnerable and human, and put rising strong into practice.

I’m writing this review of Brene Brown’s latest book, Rising Strong, on the very day that it’s due to be published here. My coworkers in the marketing department are expecting me to produce this piece, as I committed to it several months ago. Several months ago, I was pretty pumped to read this book since, as I mention above, I was a big fan of Daring Greatly. And back in May at Book Expo America I came very close to meeting Brown in person at an evening cocktail party put on by Penguin Random House. Just as I moved to approach her, she was spirited away to have her picture taken with Gloria Steinem. I ended up leaving the party without speaking to Brown about her work and new book, sad that I’d missed the opportunity, but still giddy about having worked up the nerve to approach Gloria Steinem and introduce myself earlier in the evening.

But things change quickly in life, and having nothing to do with Brene Brown and her book, I got sidetracked. My husband was diagnosed with leukemia over the summer, and this event and the following treatments left us feeling like we’d been either hit by a train, or that we were pawns in some kind of practical joke. Many times over the past two months, I’ve looked at the cover of Rising Strong on my desk, thinking how ironic it is that this book likely speaks directly to how I can better deal with my family’s current circumstances, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up and read it. It felt a little too on the nose. My instinct was to coil away from the book, thinking, I don’t need anyone telling me to keep my head up.

Despite the heavy distractions weighing on me from home, I am committed to doing my best work at the office when I possibly can. I love this company, and my coworkers are such a comfort and support to me, that it’s often with great peace that I spend some time at my desk plotting strategy, brushing up on upcoming titles, answering emails… or writing book reviews. So it is that the deadline for writing a review of Rising Strong arrived and I’d not written a single word. (You can imagine what Brown would say to this: that I was refusing to rumble.)

But, when my son woke up at 3am this morning and I had some time on my hands, I knew what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about how Rising Strong has indeed influenced my understanding of events and reactions in my own life. Having finally opened the covers over the past two days and reading the words I found myself afraid to read—I don’t just get to gloss over my feelings while my husband fights this cancer, but I’m going to have to deal with them??—well, I felt reassured that it was something I would be able to do. I could reckon with my fear and my inconvenience (because let me tell you, cancer turns your well-planned life upside down); I could rumble with my emotions instead of tamping them down in an effort to contain them, to be stoic, and to present myself as in control (since that’s pretty much impossible); and I could find within myself the ability to keeping “choosing curiosity and connection rather than walking away or shutting down,” a revolution in and of itself.

As you can imagine, it is easier to create stories around my husband’s diagnosis, stories that include blame and anger and jumping far into of the future, than to accept this random happening as…random and outside my control. It’s also easier to create a role to play so that you needn’t show people the extent of your fear, your hurt, your burden. In her chapter “Easy Mark,” Brown describes what happens when someone puts on a suit of emotional armor, or “learned behaviors for getting out from under fear and uncertainty” when confronted by the loss or potential loss of a loved one:

Over-functioning: I won’t feel, I will do. I don’t need help, I help.

Under-functioning: I won’t function, I will fall apart. I don’t help, I need help.

Upon the news of my husband’s illness, I definitely dove head-first into over-functioning. I told a coworker in defiance, yes I can do it all! I can work, I can parent, I can support my husband, and I can have a life, all at the same time. Damn it, I was going to cope like no one had ever coped before! Super Woman has nothing on me. And then I looked at the long view. I looked at what this illness would cost us, both in time and in money. I realized how aged I was already feeling when trying to do it “all.” I realized that it was going to be a long road despite the many friends offering help. Not only was it completely out of my norm to ask for help; I didn’t know how people could help me in real time. It would have been tremendously easier, if lonelier, to put people off and contain our struggles within the walls of our house instead of sharing them with others. This was going to be hard.

Brown, in her first chapter on “The Physics of Vulnerability” lists some basic laws. And the one that struck me the most intimately was this:

This journey belongs to no one but you; however, no one successfully goes it alone. Since the beginning of time, people have found a way to rise after falling, yet there is no well-worn path leading the way. All of us must make our own way, exploring some of the most universally shared experiences while also navigating a solitude that makes us feel as if we are the first to set foot in uncharted regions. And to add to the complexity, in lieu of the sense of safety to be found in a well-traveled path or a constant companion, we must learn to depend for brief moments on fellow travelers for sanctuary, support and an occasional willingness to walk side by side. … For those of us who prefer to cordon ourselves off from the world and heal alone, the requirement for connection—of asking for and receiving help—becomes the challenge.

After some initial waffling, over the past two months, I have made myself more vulnerable than I have ever been comfortable with in the past. While my husband was in the hospital, I accepted daily dinners dropped off on my porch by local friends. My dog has received more walks than he has come to expect all his life due to my willingness to say yes to friends who are willing to take him through the neighborhood (and trust me, that’s not an easy job because he’s not an easy dog). And, successfully working my way through my pride and shame, I created a gofundme campaign to ask our friends and family to help me fund childcare for my son as my husband will be unemployed and unable to care for our child during his illness and lengthy recovery. The process and response was humbling. And, if I’m honest, I know I will need to continue rumbling with my feelings of shame. I will need to continue rumbling with the fear of lost friendships; that the burden of helping will drive people away. And I will need to continue rumbling with feeling unworthy.

So as I read Rising Strong, instead of feeling like I was being lectured on how to master my emotions, I found an ability to reframe the experience of putting myself out there: I feel the helping hands of a hundred people reaching out because I was willing to be vulnerable and reach out to them. The circle of strength that flows through that circle of hands will get us through the upcoming challenges. And I suppose, by telling this story here, spreading the word even further, gives me more practice in vulnerability, and wholeheartedness.

When I first became the general manager at 800-CEO-READ, we held a meeting at which I tried to explain to everyone why I was confident I could do this job. At the time, even before my husband’s cancer, I’d had plenty of challenges in my life that have ‘knit my emotional bones” together, making me strong. I shared these challenges, these losses and disappointments and hoped that this would help them understand why they could trust me to lead. And now, in the face of this new personal mountain to climb, I hope that as I continue to offer my story and lead with my (very human) super powers that include effort and attention, rather than perfection and control, our staff at 800-CEO-READ is made more comfortable leading their own whole lives in the workplace, knowing that we establish team trust through vulnerability and strength through support.

And perhaps an introduction to Brown-speak will give us some common language with which to improve:

Curiosity, clean communication, circling back, and rumbling become part of the culture. Just like people, when organizations own their stories and take responsibility for their actions, they get to write the new endings.

Brene Brown’s work in social theory, which is an engaging mixture of qualitative storytelling and quantitative research, has some valuable skills to teach us, whether our struggles are small-scale or life-altering. Learning to partner with our emotions as opposed to making them the enemy—which is exactly what Rising Strong will help you do if you are willing to invest the effort—can lead to what Brown calls “wholehearted living,” and what I would call survival.