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This is my missive to you, whoever you are. I’m calling in your support in an area of my life that I need guidance with – how’s this for vulnerable?

I would like to know how to do all that I want to do in life and not burn out, not exhaust myself, not end up with no time left for me.

What this would look like is I could say no to doing all I want to do because I don’t have time in my day to do all the things I would like to – and that is okay. It’s possible I will leave this earthly realm not having done all that I want to do, accomplish all that I want to accomplish, and create all that is inside of me.

We went around the room yesterday morning in our exercise class and named what our theme for the year would be. Mine, of course, is vulnerability. Others called out trust, love, appreciation, patience.

Not doing feels vulnerable to me.

Prioritizing myself feels vulnerable to me.

My schedule expands even though it is typed and printed and appears finite.

I’m asking for support to discern which sparks are for me.

I’m asking for clarity as to where to focus.

I’m open to new ways of looking at time, schedules, capacity, desire, validity, work, life balance.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, poet, social activist, and a mystic wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1960):

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes work fruitful.

I belong to so many support groups, it is mind blowing. I’m in a parent support group, a parent coaching group, an alumni parent support group, a two-hour adult children of alcoholics group, my own therapy and then there is the improv class.

The improv class is scary. Vulnerable scary. You get all your fears activated right up front – I’m not that smart, that clever, that quick, that creative – oh, the list is endless of what you are not and I am not. And yet we show up, this cohort of once ingenues and now in our nth season, we are seasoned – we show up, we take instruction from a pro, and we leave gutted from laughing so hard.

We belly laugh.

We laugh till we spit.

We laugh on the floor.

We laugh at each other, at ourselves, at all the crazy that comes out of each other’s mouths, brains, unconscious and subconscious minds – the therapeutic element of free forming stories, ideas, concepts, characters, scenes and even a simple sentence is proof that making yourself as vulnerable AF is alchemy for the soul.

Each week, I sit in a two-hour meeting where I unravel the carefully composed narrative I have created about my family. This is the story I have told myself, as well as others, for so long.

In the meeting, I’m asked to take a closer look and like any good story, there are stories hiding within the story, and none of the characters are truly who they seem at first gloss.

In the long held version of my story, my father is a hero, my mother is beautiful, and I’m the beloved baby girl in a family of eight. My family, my siblings, are all close knit. We have a shared history, culture, religion, timeline, and memories.

In this meeting, we list adaptive behaviors that helped us cope – me with a rageaholic father, an alcoholic mother, and a family unit so enmeshed and codependent that none of us knew where we began and my father ended.

Until my dad died, then the narrative pulled at our seams. My sister spun off from the family. My brothers’ children shot out in varied directions. Everyone coped in a different way. I seemed okay. I just kept adding coping mechanisms.

My laundry list of responses, reactions, and skills I now realize infected and affected every relationship I have had in my life. Who knew?

Nowhere are you more vulnerable than when you begin to unravel your origin story.

Last night, we were talking about shame and regret. I spoke about my son, how he needed to feel safe, and I did not feel safe enough to give him that space. It was only last night when I was able to say aloud, without flinching, “My son needed to feel safe (and then added) and so did I.“

I, being the young girl, who always showed up in me when my son was dysregulated. The little girl, scared and tired of chaos, who lives inside me and needs to be reparented. I try to give her as much love as I can now that I know what she needs.

Safety. It’s one of the biggest gaps in most of our recovery stories. It’s in my son’s story and mine. Lack of safety is what separates healthy families from the ones from which we need to recover.

Today is my father’s birthday. He would have been 99 years old. Thirty-seven years ago, my dad raged into an early grave at the young age of 62. He was everything to me for so long and yet, because I feared this bull of a man, I stayed clear of men like him my whole life. That was one of my coping skills.

The idea of a spiritual journey without a destination struck me as harsh. The journey is opening yourself up whether emotionally, spiritually, lovingly, whichever, or all together, with a destination in mind.

I look for signs of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual maturity in people. I look for it in myself. The destination is right at that point of connection – did we all move up to the same wrung? Or have I rounded the bend and met one of the charlatans and flying monkeys I thought I had left behind?

Muy importante.

If connection is not the destination than I don’t know. I’ve learned in the last year that the opposite of addiction is connection. That connection is where we have the potential to meet our truest self. And that is vulnerability.

Every experience I have had has opened me up to growth – the struggle, the knowing, the compassion, the growth. So it’s movement towards something – I’ll name it vulnerability. Because often my experiences have led me to dissociate, isolate, and have an adverse reaction to connection. The growth is what pushes me to stay open to the experience.

I’m growing towards staying open to uncertainty, to struggle, to weathering it all with compassion, and to staying the course on my spiritual journey even when the destination is opaque. It’s always the beginning of the world again where nothing has taken shape and I’m standing in the primeval waters, waiting to know.

One of my favorite meditation teachers offers this:

The invitation is to acknowledge the truth:
I am afraid of the unknown 
I don’t really know how this should go
I don’t really know what should happen
I don’t really know what’s best
I don’t really know what is expected of me
But something in me is open to find out 
I trust in life 

~Tiger Singleton 

Trust = Vulnerability.

“I’m going in” is what I told myself at Story Slam last night, but luckily so many people had signed up, I didn’t have to take my turn. While I was waiting, I thought about how my story was a tale of embarrassment very unlike the Christmas stories being told.

I felt ambivalent leaving, in one sense I didn’t have to tell my story, but on the other hand, I know sooner or later, I would tell one of my stories, most are embarrassing stories, and now I have to wait.

After Story Slam, I went to talk to the Alligator about our big outdoor event on Saturday. The weather has taken a turn for the blistering cold, and I believe it will work out.

“But Thursday and Friday will turn the place into a muddy mess.”

Me: It won’t be raining on Saturday.

“But the wind will be 20 MPH, this is going to be bad.”

Me: Yes, and all of the chefs have tents. We could put hay down if it rains. I believe it will all work out.

“I’m not into that woo woo stuff.”

That’s when I realized that in order for my magical thinking to work, I needed buy in. Instead, it was me buying in – to the big whopping tent, possibly multiple heaters, and suddenly I felt vulnerable to forces I had no control over – not weather, but man.

I spent three days with my teenage son in the desert and had a realization. I’m getting older.

I have been able to fake that I am 50 years older than him by keeping up with his energy level. I have a high energy level. A new realization set in when I was in a higher elevation, exhausted from waking up in the middle of the night to catch an early flight, and all the comings and goings of my normal life. There was no hiding my age.

I felt we were both too vulnerable to name it. Tin was experiencing a death in his life for the first time that wasn’t an animal. He felt vulnerable, scared that something might happen to me now. I couldn’t say with any assurance that he was wrong. And I couldn’t say to him in his vulnerable state on that day, that I needed to slow the pace, to rest, and to chill. These are not words he has ever heard from me, but it is what I wanted to say this time. I needed time.

I came home and after doing the things I needed to do, I woke sick. I stayed in bed for five days tending to this body and my health because I knew that I need rest. I needed time.

What does vulnerability look like? I was thinking of the idea of this new solar cycle I’ve entered which has 24 years in it. In 24 years, I would be 89 (ahem). I would be lucky to live a healthy life till I’m 89 years old given that both of my parents died young, my father at 62 and my mother at 74. My grandparents lived into their 90s though. There is no sugar coating turning 89 years old. You have earned the right to rest!

At 89 years old, my son would be 39 years old. I would love nothing more than to see him flourishing as an adult in his own way, in his own rhythm. Then I could quietly go on.

I am going to open myself up to the aging that is happening to me. It is slowing me down. It is opening me up. I’m growing wiser, more spiritually fit than before. I am telling the people I love how I feel about them. I’m getting my affairs in order – will, power of attorney, medical power of attorney – and I’m looking forward in my life, not backwards, because I intend to make use of these minutes, hours, days and weeks, months and years. Good use. A good life.

I went to the synagogue begrudgingly one year, because my son was studying for his bar mitzvah. I had taken to spending the high holidays in my own celebration for years – honeycakes, apples with honey on Rosh Hashanah, and a day of no screens, just meditation and journaling for Yom Kippur – this felt holy holy to me.

There I was sitting in a stiff chair in a synagogue listening to the chanting (and if it is not Sephardic, it still sounds alien to me), and I was looking through the prayer book and reading the margins. In the margins, are quotes and words of inspiration. On this page, there was a quote from Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was a holocaust survivor and an author as well a Nobel Laureate. The quote said, “The gift that God gave Adam in the garden was not how to begin, but how to begin again.”

I could hang my hat on that one quote.

The struggle is often how to begin again, not could I begin again. And the knowing is deep inside me. I know how, I struggle because I’ve gone astray, I’ve wound up in a place where I’m circling the drain of flying monkeys, irresponsible eating, drinking, smoking – read: indulging in nonsense, or my favorite drain – the one where I spiral into believing I’m not good enough for what I want, what I want to do, what I believe is true.

I’ve been sitting back and watching my son who is nearly 16 years old work on issues of feeling not good enough and I want to jump out of my seat and yell YOU’VE GOT THIS. I’m not going to lie, I have jumped out of my seat and yelled, whispered, written and text him this message over and over. Alas, I’m a fixer and I’m trying to fix his brokeness, and what do we know about fixers – they need to fix themselves, right?

So I grapple with the I’m not good enough when I say to myself I don’t know how. I don’t know how to do what I want to do. I don’t know how to begin again. I don’t think I’ll ever write a word again. I don’t think anyone reads blogs anymore. I’m not sure anyone reads at all anymore. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t think I’m good enough underlines each of these thoughts.

I saw the Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama) speak to a crowd in New Orleans. I was thrilled to be there – imagine the Dalai Lama had come to the United States! What he said that struck me the deepest was this: when he first came to the West he was surprised to experience that we don’t have a lot of self love. He talked about how important it is to love yourself. He didn’t say but I read between the lines that he decided to dumb down his message of spirituality to love yourself because he truly believed that is what we need to hear in this country.

I brought this up at a retreat with a man who said he didn’t believe in loving yourself. “You have to love God first.” I stared at him. Yes, and?

One of the steps into vulnerability is loving myself. When I am not taking care of my needs – my rest, my nourishment, my heart, my spiritual growth, my emotional connections – I wind up masking this fear of vulnerability by telling myself I am not enough to deserve this care.

Remember the eagle feathering the nest superficially so that the nest becomes a crown of thorns and the baby bird must fly away? The mama eagle sits there with empty nest syndrome – suffering from her own doing.

That didn’t really happen. The mama eagle did not suffer. Her job was done, and she let it go. Mary Oliver wrote: To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go …

I’ve been guilty of clinging. I cling to indignity, flying monkeys as well as the double bind of manipulators because I was raised up to be a fixer. You have a problem with me, with them, with life – let me fix that for you. Oof – it’s exhausting work.

I broke two teeth when I was 61 years old. The second one concerned me, and I asked the dentist what was going on, fearing a darker root cause. He said, “Your teeth are old.” Clinging gets old too. You wake up one day dragging the same old ball and chain of your insecurities and developed habits and you can’t move.

You hear people tell you they are doing the work. But for a fixer, the real work doesn’t start until the person you are fixing starts doing the work and suddenly you realize, you’re lagging way behind. You’ve come up with so many reasons and skills to deflect being vulnerable that you are a bad actor in your own show.

My son started doing the work, which held a glaring mirror up for me to look at myself and say, Rachel, you’ve got work to do.

No one hands out individual textbooks to you when you’re born, it’s all lived experience, and if you’re lucky, you get a son who comes into the world like a speedball – more alive than you – and he calls down into the vast cavern you have tucked yourself into and says, “You coming or what?”

So this is me being vulnerable.

photo by Marian Glaser – Marian lives in Bay Saint Louis, MS and is an artist and a friend. She has been capturing the eagles and birds that make their home here.

My dreams have been selective the last 15 years. This year so many of those dreams have come true that I’m ending 2024 feeling vulnerable AF.

The dark alley soothsayers warned that my son was headed down a path where charlatans (adult and child) were trying to take his power – I put all my energy into stopping that from happening and then miraculously, dark turned to light. Instead of lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my, it weighed in like puppies, and horses, and boys, hell yeah. All O.K. now at the O.K. Corral!

When I figured out what was going on at the 100 Men Hall, I had one dream, to protect it in perpetuity. To not let it fall into the hands of venal developers or the indifferent desks of bureaucrats. The Hall ends 2024 endowed and the dream is to build into sustainability and longevity. Ring the bells!

How vulnerable are you when real life turns out as good or better than you dreamed? I used to clutch to the laundry list of bad things that happened as a talisman against more bad things. One day, the list started getting heavy to carry around. In its place, magic, dreams, miracles. Why not?

The artist’s way shows that you start with Why is This Happening To Me? Then you move to, hold up, this is happening for me! Take a closer look, and you believe this is happening by me. Graduation day comes when you realize this is happening through me.

We are out here receiving miracles y’all – pay attention!

My friend Susie Bruce sent me this image – it’s perfect.

Tolstoy described a child as a sphere of vulnerability, another place the world can hurt you.

My journey into vulnerability came the moment I laid eyes on my son, when I knew with divine clarity that I was born to be his mother. I didn’t need a reading, medium, or Oracle to tell me this – I felt it inside my most profound sense of being.

They say you bring home a 10 pound baby then 500 pounds of crap trail in after them. Well, a baby also attaches itself to other things – people, places, past lives – and they bring this into your life as well.

Your ability to shake off what doesn’t serve you is compromised by not fully understanding what might be serving them.

The moment that baby enters your world, your world expands, and your vulnerability ignites. Charlatans, temporary people, friends and mentors clamor for attention, demand connection, and walk in your door as adults still lugging 500 pounds of crap that they have not been able to shed.

I didn’t want it – the vulnerability – or the crap – much less any connection to his things, people, past – I wanted to create the world we would live in. A place of beauty and music and art – and most of all L.O.V.E..

Divine hands were weaving furiously, creating a tapestry of joy and pain, grief and love, danger and decisions. And I felt I had to tap dance faster, faster, faster.

Until the bow broke, and it was no longer me rocking the cradle, the baby bird had already begun to spread his own wings, dart after flashes in his own landscape, he was pivoting and growing along his own path. I was running behind trying to catch up!

Mothering is a Mother Fucker.

Side Note: Do you know this about eagles? They feather their nest softly with down and feathers for the eggs, but underlying the softness are thorns and stickers, and as the baby bird emerges and grows, the soft downy feathers begin to fall away, and the nest becomes inhospitable and so the baby bird must leave.