Lipstick…

A rewrite on finding joy which was a bit sad and not quite right….I hope you like this “jump” better – XO

“Shout out to all those who tell you when you have lipstick on your teeth and toilet paper stuck to your shoe”

A sensible woman

When I walk out into the world, I always wear lipstick. Also pearl earrings. I keep my hair short because I can’t be bothered with a brush but lipstick, it’s non-negotiable. It’s my armor and I feel that no matter what happens once I leave the house, at least if I get hit by a bus the paramedics might say “that’s a good shade of lipstick”.

But what happens when I head out into the world with toilet paper stuck to my shoe or even worse, hanging out of pants? Trust me, no one is looking at my lipstick. They are fixated on the toilet paper.

When this happens, I need my people. The people who will show up and cut through my denial and call out and say “hey, I think you have toilet paper on your shoe”. And maybe it’s not toilet paper they see, maybe it’s the stress lines on my face or the worry in my eyes. They look past the lacquer of lipstick and ignore my response of “great” and ask again. “how are you really doing?”. Ugh. Is that vulnerability ringing the doorbell?

Life throws curve balls and sometimes tomatoes and when that happens, we need people. Friends don’t let friends show up with toilet paper on their shoe or lettuce in their teeth. We need our friends to do the double check and say “are you you ok. Let me check your shoes; let me check your teeth”. It’s just that simple. And in exchange, when people who care ask the hard questions, it’s only fair to be honest with our answers.

This week I wanted to write about happy endings. You know the kind. Someone has faced great challenge, is in total despair and finds way to rise and we all cheer. I love those stories. I wanted to write that today except that things haven’t totally settled yet. If it wasn’t one thing, it’s another and our latest “thing” is the government has decided that of all the people that live in our great country, they wanted to audit me to the tune of several thousand dollars. If my life was an adventure novel, this is the part where the hero wonders if he (or she) is going to be attacked by wolves and left for dead while the crows pick at my eyes. I can only hope that they leave my lipstick alone so that my remains will have some semblance of dignity.

Thinking that life is a merry go round without challenge or pain is naive. Life has serious moments that can only be described as a “shit storm”.

LIFE WILL BRING YOU PAIN ALL BY ITSELF. YOUR RESPONSIBILITY IS TO CREATE JOY.

Unknown (but smart) Author

Just this past week, I have a friend who has already gone through cancer with her husband and came out on the other side. Life was good until their business suffered a huge loss that will take time to recover. Shit storm. Another friend is in the process of opening their third store and by all accounts they are super successful except that her daughter has chosen to live on the streets and her lifestyle choices are heartbreaking. There is also a third friend who just shared that after a long career at a work place, her husband was let go. No reason provided. Just gone. It’s the randomness that makes it feel unfair and unjust.

“Why is this happening?” and “why me?” are common questions in the face of adversity and can’t easily be answered and are as bewildering as why my son can’t clean up his room or put away his dishes. It’s a mystery.

Have you ever played with a yo-yo or watched someone learn? It’s so cool when the string releases the yoyo and is falls to the ground and then whips back up. If you are really good with a yoyo, you can do amazing tricks with the right momentum. Get a yoyo going and there is this wonderful symphony of a melody that is completely fluid. It looks so easy but of course, it takes practice. It takes time to get the right rhythm of up and down. Often, in the learning, one spends more time on the ground, hoping to get back into the upward motion. OMG. This is bad. I just saw my life as a yoyo metaphor.

Watching someone do anything well is very special and gives room for applause and admiration. I admit that when I am feeling a bit discouraged about things, I find it hard to applaud because I’m envious. This is not a place I like to be; it’s dark and I lose my lipstick. When I am in “envy”, I find myself wanting things that others have which takes me out of a feeling of gratitude. Gratitude is joy. Envy is heavy and ugly.

I can see the pattern of the yoyo. I’m trying to get up but when I am down, I move to anxiety. This is the vacation spot where I sweat, panic and indulge in thinking about a million things that may never happen. I think small when I could actually change my thinking and widen my lens of possibility. Thinking small is where I get envious of others who can not only wield a yoyo but look awesome in stripes and triangles and take fabulous trips while doing what they love. Envy is not a five star resort; it’s more like a haunted motel. When I start to be “envious” of others, it means that I am not using my gifts. Worry, anxiety and panic are my kryptonite and suck me of my super powers to be who I am.

I can think wide or narrow. It is a choice. If I want to go on an exotic holiday, I can make that happen. Just because what is happening is hard, doesn’t mean that I can’t create the magic of amazing. It’s up to me. It’s a mindset.

My husband Wayne is a gentle inspiration. He has taken some difficulties and used it to better his life. His cancer diagnosis and job loss have given him pause to consider what comes next. Wayne didn’t love his job. I loved his job. I loved the benefit package, the pension and the security but I stopped seeing the cost which was the demise of his spirit and the loss of his feelings of joy. With this forced pause in life, he is reinventing himself and committed to not making further trade offs. He’s eating well and ensuring his health is in the best possible shape. He exercises and has lost 15 pounds. He watches our son play ball and he is happy. A kind of happy that I haven’t seen for a long time. He is reinventing himself. He is living without regret, deciding what he wants out of life and making it happen. This didn’t just happen over night by the way. It’s taken some time and it got messy but then it got better.

When it was messy, I got overwhelmed. We live on a small piece of acreage with a fair number of trees. Wayne felt, with his new found time, that he should take down four trees that he deemed potentially hazardous in a windstorm. Four trees. That seemed manageable until four trees multiplied. Does this look like four trees? No. This looks like chaos over which I had no control.

I don’t want chaos. I want to sit by the pool and drink margarita’s while the pool boy fluffs my pillows and changes the towels. Leaning into anything that is uncomfortable is awful. Who chooses pain? Ice cream, wine and chocolate along with a first class seats in denial are so much nicer than pain. When my yard was dramatically landscaped, it was too much for me. The outside looked awful which really just depicted the chaos I felt inside. I didn’t know how to control cancer or what our financial future might hold. I didn’t feel that I had control over anything.

Cue the music…….

“you are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control but you never had control, you only had anxiety”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Writer

Control does not like chaos but through the chaos comes clarity. Moving through chaos could only be done if I learned to surrender my need for control. And when I did and do (still practicing), I find I release my stress and my tension and sense of anxiety subside. When I find the space to surrender, I feel the kinetic energy of the yoyo that has synthesis and harmony. This sense of surrender is helping me find the path I am supposed to be on as opposed to being on the one I “think” I should be on. That doesn’t mean I don’t slip because I do but I climb back up.

There is no denying that when awful things happen, there is pain. A sudden death of a loved one, tragedy, unexpected diagnosis, career changes and fails, economic cycles that are out of our control and more. I do not want to minimize anyone’s feelings when they come against moments that feel so insurmountable that you feel that you will break. They are real. It causes deep searing pain and hurt and often brings us to our knees. It is the unrelenting ruthlessness of living and in many cases, it feels incredibly unfair and unjust.

I haven’t ever been able to find the “why” when hard things happen to good people. I just know it does and it hurts to watch. I guess that is the answer. I shouldn’t be watching. I need to be reaching out and leaning in.

LIFE WILL BRING YOU PAIN ALL BY ITSELF. YOUR RESPONSIBILITY IS TO CREATE JOY.

The shit storm is real and can happen at any time. It feels bad in the moment and there is no denying that it takes hard work to get over the shame and embarrassment of why this happened. I am having to deflect feeling that somehow “I did something”. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t or maybe this is a blessing that is leading us towards something better. To quote Scott Galloway, “nothing is a good or as bad as it seems”. We can do hard things; we can move through. Life brings pain, I want to find joy like what Wayne is doing. Something happened that altered his life and he has decided to build his own pool and make his own margarita’s. Full disclosure, I draw the line at being the pool boy.

Wayne’s job represented security which meant that I got to hide and not live out loud. The sense of safety was actually a net that got me tangled up. Feeling “secure” didn’t encourage me to think wider, I just played smaller. I wonder if this has happened to wake me up to ensure I live a life without regret?

So how to start? I feel better when I give gratitude. My heart feels bigger and it’s a much nice place than anxiety, worry and envy. Feeling grateful leads to feeling joy. That sense of appreciation and feeling that I am connected to something bigger than I could ever imagine. When I choose joy, I am choosing to give up control and surrender to things that light up my life. The challenge is to not give into worry but embrace that which helps me find joy.

“All those things things you are worried about are not important. You’re going to be OK. Better than OK. You’re going to be great. Spend less time tearing yourself apart, worrying if you are good enough. You are good enough. And you’re going to meeting amazing people in your life who will help you and love you”

REECE WITHERSPOON

In Brene Brown’s book, Atlas of the Heart, she summarizes the emotion “joy” with an excerpt from researcher Matthew Kuan Johnson and she writes “Johnson shares that while experiencing joy, we don’t lose ourselves, we become more truly ourselves”. He suggests that with joy, colours seem brighter, physical movements feel freer and easier, and smiling happens involuntarily.” To further articulate this emotion, Brown describes joy as “the good mood of the soul”. I want to choose more joy.

Given the choice of worry and anxiety over gratitude and joy, I’m working to choose more joy. I had been thinking that joy was a destination and when I couldn’t get there, I tried to escape and find joy with my vices. My vices are fair weather friends, forms of temporary happiness and can’t withstand challenge. They disguise themselves as help when actually they hinder. Also, they give bad directions and send me to places I don’t want to visit. With real friends and family, I find places where joy is a connection to gratitude; moments where I close my eyes and inhale the beauty of the moment.

One of the reasons that this current set back has felt like such a shock is because last year we were on an upswing. We had the kinetic energy of the yoyo and I felt we had found momentum and were on top of the mountain. I didn’t realize that the mountain only accepted visitors and not permanent residents. When our stay was over, we were politely shown the back door to face the storm. Oh. Had I known, I would have packed a parka and probably a hat.

Life is ebbs and flows. When we hit our next upswing, I vow to take more time to up at the sky and really give thanks like I never have before. I will not take good things or good people for granted and assume that everything lasts forever because it doesn’t.

When Wayne took down the trees, I thought he created chaos but what he actually created was opportunity. We have more sunlight, small saplings have room to grow, the grass can thrive and it feels like we have a new yard. The metaphor is not lost on me. Yes, Wayne, you were right. Change is good and we’re going to be alright.

My next steps are to keep practicing the state of surrender; this isn’t to say that surrender means doing nothing. More, it is the practice of not holding onto things so tight that I can’t breathe and don’t allow space for other opportunities. Surrender feels like being open to what might come next like throwing seeds out into the garden to see what might grow. I am also packing the phrase “I should” into a trunk and sending it with my vices to the haunted motel . Should is a word that seems kind but it’s actually just synonymous with guilt. I’m letting that one go for sure.

I have been wearing lipstick in hopes that no one noticed the toilet paper on my shoe but you can’t hide toilet paper. It just sticks out in its own unique way. Is it a little embarrassing? Yes. No one wants to be out in public with their zipper down, lettuce in their teeth or toilet paper peeking out of their pants but let’s be honest….. it can happen to anyone. The worst thing we can do is look away and pretend it isn’t there. How you can pretend that there isn’t lettuce stuck in the teeth is beyond me but people do. Real friends gently pass a napkin.

If I could make a wish it would be that we have the courage to open ourselves up to talk more about the things that cause us pain, create challenges and chaos without feeling “less than”. Wear lipstick not as armour but rather a statement of courage when things are hard but we are still showing up.

So stay tuned! Do I wish that I could be that inspirational story with the magnificent ending? Yes. It’s coming but not yet. I got comfortable and now it’s time to make another jump.

Here’s to being brave while feeling scared. Here’s to choosing joy and sitting by the pool with those we love,

With love,

Shelley