Label Me Elmo

I used to love those label-makers when I was a kid.  You know the ones, the big plastic doohickeys with the wheel you spun around to find the letter you wanted.  You spun, squeezed the trigger, spun, squeezed the trigger, and on and on until you had a lovely little embossed strip of thick tape-stuff.  Peel off the backing, and voila!  A label you could stick anywhere!

Turns out, adults love labels too.  But instead of squeezing out tape strips to put on our lunch boxes, we turn to labeling ourselves and each-other.  Married.  Single.  Doctor.  Writer.  Smart.  Dumb.  How convenient it is to know which box to put people in.  The first question out of most people's mouths when they meet a stranger at a party is, "what do you do?"  The person's occupation provides a handy label, by which we think we can tell a great deal about them.  Ooo, they're a teacher so they must be dedicated and poor.  They're a physician so they must be arrogant and rich.  They're a writer so they must live in their pajamas and eat a lot of Hot Pockets.

But what if we are not defined by labels, but by our essence.  This becomes trickier for cocktail-party conversation.  "What is your essence" is a tricky question, and I would wager that most people have not done enough soul-searching to be able to answer it.  Or maybe we can never really answer it, not in words.  In deeds, perhaps, but maybe not even then.  In intention.  In our wishes and thoughts and dreams. In how we treat our partners, our friends, strangers, animals.

I've been told that people let go of labels when they are close to death.  The man who was a cattle farmer and could talk about nothing but livestock his entire life, loses interest in this topic at the end.  He moves beyond the labels and into his essence.  I haven't spent enough time with the dying to tell you whether I've observed this for myself, but it makes sense.  No-one really cares, at the end, how you made your money.  They care who you are. People stop identifying with their labels, and find out what's really inside.

Labels are powerful things.  If you let go of one, another comes right in to replace it.  I discovered this when I was getting ready to leave my career as a physician.  I knew I had to make a change, but my label said "Doctor", and what was I going to do with that?  Every time I tried to peel it off and let go of that label, a huge wave of fear swept in.  What are you going to do?  Who are you going to be? What makes you think you can change your life?  Haven't you read your label?  It took several months (years?) before I summoned up enough courage to rip off that label and actually make a change.  I tried very hard not to put a new label on while the wound from the old one was still so fresh, but that was a challenge.  An exercise in letting go, in just "being". Not easy for a type A who is used to jumping through all the hoops set up in her path. 

Making it even more challenging, I found that people like to project their labels onto us, even as we try to let go of our own.  When I announced I was leaving medicine, every single person wanted to know what I was going to do instead.  Now, I know this is natural human curiosity, but people had a really hard time with the answer, "I don't know".  My mantra became, "I'm going to take some time off to figure that out," but I could see the new labels forming even as the words were leaving my lips.  Unemployed.  Lazy.  Quitter.  Crazy.  Maybe they didn't want to think these things about me - but since I didn't give them another label to take the place of the old one, they gave me whichever one came first to mind.

Now, this isn't entirely true, or fair to the people in my life, or to me for that matter!  I had just as hard of a time refusing a new label.  So usually the second sentence, after I completed my mantra, was, "well, I am going to a conference on medical writing so we'll see...".  I just couldn't leave it at, "I don't know", and I could see the sigh of relief in my listeners too.  "At least she has a plan..."  As it turns out, my "plan" has shifted and changed and I'm now doing something I never thought I would be doing...  but that's how life goes.  I'll leave my new career a mystery for another blog post, just to avoid giving my readers a comfortable label.  Ha!

So the next time I visit my hometown, I'll have to see if my mom still has that old label-maker lying around.  Maybe I can make all-new labels.  Just so I can cut them into bits and scatter them to the wind...

Cutthroat Yoga

Do you go to Yoga classes?  If you do, you know how wonderful it makes you feel.  How blissed-out, stretched-out, and strengthened it makes you feel, no matter how crummy or fat you felt when you walked into that room.  You also, if I'm not mistaken, have probably run up against the Aggressive Yoga Ladies. 

You know the ones.  The ones who will cut your throat if you dare to place your mat on "their spot".  On an average week, I go to three yoga classes, at three different branches of my gym, with two different instructors.  Every class has its regulars, and people gravitate toward their favorite spots.  I'm no exception - I admit to having "my spot" and to being bummed if someone beats me to it.  I will even try to "scootch in" with other people, so that I can get something close to my spot (for the record:  the front row so I can correct my posture in the mirror, but not on the crack between mirror panels, on the side of the room closest to the door but a couple spots over from the instructor.  Yeah, I'm not particular at all...).  In two of my three regular classes, this isn't usually a problem.  I'm usually able to get my spot, and people are willing to scoot around so that everyone can see the mirror and no-one's bumping arms when we swan dive into forward fold.  Maybe some of the people in those classes even classify me as one of the AYLs, (I will admit it - that which bugs me about others is probably something I don't like in myself) but I really do try to work with other people in a friendly manner so we can all have a spot that makes us happy.

What I am not:  one of those people who likes to barge into the room and unfurl their mat before the preceding class has had a chance to put away their equipment.  One of those people who will actually ask someone to move out of their spot.  One of those people who will refuse to "scootch" when asked.  Those are the ladies at my wednesday yoga class.  They actually had to install a guard at the door (a hapless gym employee) so that the frontrunner AYL would stop barrelling into the room the second the music ended in the class before ours.  With the herd mentality that overcomes humans in such situations, once one person enters that room, the rest immediately surge forward so as not to be left behind.  I was even shoved once, I kid you not.  After a few weeks of the guard, the frontrunner cooled her jets a bit and would let the prior class - mostly - put away their weights and mats, and our class was no longer guarded.  Still, you can feel the energy shift the second the weightlifting class ends - sometimes even before.  People start scooting closer and closer to the door, the natives becoming restless.  Once the frontrunner breaks the barrier of the door jamb, all bets are off.  The frontrunner runs to the front of the room and stakes her claim, and that of her slightly slower friend, by throwing both mats down.  My problem is not with the frontrunner as such (although she is the one that asked me to move out of her spot the first time I attended this particular class and didn't know the dealio - she must have been late that day).  No, I'm willing to breathe, let it go, and let her have the spot if it means that much to her.  My problem is with her friend.  The friend usually nabs the spot I'm after (I'm just not willing to give in to the aggression and race her for it).    I used to naively try to share space with AYL #2.  I put a smile on my face and asked if we could share the mirror panel (necessitating her to move a little to the left - she was planted in the center of the panel) so that I wouldn't be staring at the crack (it throws off your balance, in case you're wondering why the big deal).  She told me that she didn't want to be on a crack either and moved her mat about an eighth of an inch.  She was about a foot from the crack - there was plenty of room to share.  I kept smiling and thanked her for her accomodation.  She suggested I move to a spot on the other side of the room.  Oh, now it's on!  Passive-aggressive doesn't work when it comes up against plain old aggressive!

I am trying to be the nicer, bigger person here without being a total doormat.  I still try for that spot on the mirror, but I set up a little bit staggered behind AYL #2.  I'm a little close to her mat for both of our comfort, but since I'm staggered back we don't bump into each-other.  If she just scooted a little to the left, she would still be nowhere near the mirror crack and we'd both have plenty of room, but apparently to suggest this is anathema.  I've given up.  I refuse to move to the other side of the room (it's just as crowded, the spot she was suggesting was even more cramped than the one I was trying to occupy, and who knows what kinds of AYLs are over there?).  I am letting the bullies win, but only up to a point.  They will just have to deal with me sharing their mirror panels.  If I am a fly in their ointment, so be it.  It's good for them.  :)

It's good practice for me - I have a tendency to get too attached to things, including "my" yoga spot.  This class is a weekly reminder that I can let that go, that I can be in a spot slightly more cramped and slightly behind where I'd like to be, and it's okay - I still get a great yoga session.  I feel myself getting anxious about the weekly encounter with these ladies, and I practice letting go of that anxiety.  Neither AYL #1 or #2 will budge an inch on where they want to be, so that forces inflexible me to be the flexible one and adjust what I want to fit what I can get.  It's good for me, I suppose.  I could always throw an elbow or sprint ahead of those ladies, but it's not worth it.  I don't want to become one of them, and encountering them each week is a good reminder of that. 

I'm sure they don't see themselves as AYLs, just as I don't see myself as one.  I'm sure they don't think they're being at all unreasonable.  I don't know if they see the irony in racing to stake out their spot for a class that's supposed to be about calm, and about letting go of competition.  I need to stop being an AYL for long enough to realize that I can't teach them that lesson.  I can just angle for my spot and hope for the best!

See?  I'm smiling!  Not aggressive at all.

Fear

I'm back!  I haven't posted for a couple weeks - partly because of the holiday weekend coinciding with my wedding anniversary, and partly (okay, mostly) because I hit a wall of fear.  Kinda like this:

photo:  Wickpedia.  The Scream by Edvard Munch

I think it's a common human experience... We overcome fear in order to take steps toward happiness, then all of a sudden, fear rears its head again.  "I thought I was over you," we say.  "Nope," fear replies, "I'm always here, waiting for you". 

There are many types of fear, but the one I've been dealing with, in many areas of my life, is fear of success.  It sounds bizarre, but fear of success is a very real, albeit oddly self-defeating, entity.  I thought I had dealt with the fear when I made the decision to leave my career and embark in a new direction.  Naturally, there are day-to-day fears (financial being the number-one when one leaves a physician's salary but still has a physician's mortgage).  Those are normal, healthy fears.  It keeps us safe to be afraid of disease, ax-murderers, and telemarketers.  But fear of success?  How is that helpful?

Our minds, those whirling, busy maelstroms of thought, really resist change.  Even if the status-quo is painful and hurtful, at least it is a known quantity, and our minds will always choose the known over the scary unknown.  Unless we set the intention that we are going to try something new.  Even then, the mind balks.  "What do you mean, something new?" it cries.  "We don't want new!"  If you've ever wondered why people don't leave abusive relationships, why people lose (or gain) weight only to relapse to their former selves once they're achieved their goals, this fear of change has everything to do with it.  We'd always rather fight the battle we know, than take on a new one and have to change the way we see ourselves.  Even if we see ourselves as helpless, fat, ugly, weak, or any of the other perjoratives we hurl inward, at least these are known battles to us.  If we shift our worldview, our perception of ourselves in that world must shift and the mind recoils.  You'd think the mind would want to feel better - isn't it "better" to think of oneself as beautiful rather than ugly?  But if "beautiful" requires the mind to reset its go-to patterns, it will resist mightily.  It will think of (and shout at you) every possible reason that the new view cannot be true.  It can take a herculean effort to reset those automatic thoughts. 

This is fear of success, in a nutshell.  I've mentioned that I'm writing a book, and using this blog to explore some ideas and concepts for that book.  You'd think I'd want the book to be successful, and for this blog to become a worldwide phenomenon, right?  Apparently not!  Success opens one up to criticism, which is always scary.  And so, as I thought about what to write next, I got overwhelmed with the magnitude of the project and just shut down.  Ideas dried up.  I found other things to do with my time (not difficult when one is a master procrastinator!) 

How does one overcome this fear?  With faith.  It can be faith in a higher power or the support of the universe.  It can be faith that one's self-preservation instinct will not let one make a deadly mistake. It can be faith that you can take whatever criticism (or praise) that comes your way and keep your self-esteem intact.  Faith that people (or even just one person) will like what you have to say, will get something out of it.  Faith that there is a happier version of you, just waiting for you to take that leap, make that change.

It's not called a Leap of Faith for nothing.  You just have to jump, without knowing where the safety net is, or if one even exists.  The fear will always be there, waiting for you.  The fear will always take you back if the leap of faith doesn't work out... but what if it does?  What if?