jakebe | Entries tagged with self-reflection

The principle we focus on today, this third day of Kwanzaa, is Ujima. It's a word that points to the idea of collective work and responsibility, which is a concept that I feel is missing from so many of our communities. One of the things that binds a society together is this very ideal, that the problems of one of us are the problems of all of us. If just one of our number is struggling to feed themselves, we are all impoverished. If one of our children is having a difficult time in school, we're all concerned with educating him. If one of our people is misunderstood, rejected, alone, then it's a failing of our community. Ujima, to me, means that we are our brother's keeper. His happiness is ours, his sorrows are ours. No one is alone; we're all in this together.

I think this principle is a little different for me because I've been on the outskirts of the black community pretty much all my life. I've never felt a sense of kinship with my family or my neighbors growing up, and even now, as I'm making the first tentative steps back towards the community, I feel hesitant about it. I am very different. What if those differences are too great and I find myself pushed to the outside again? One of our blind spots is the treatment of those who have a different sexual orientation or gender identity. Gender roles tend to be rigidly defined in our black communities, and transgressions of those roles are not looked upon favorably.

Personally, I struggle with the idea of being my brother's keeper when that brother has distanced himself from me because of who I love. I find it hard to be a part of a community that spends so much energy ostracizing people like me who don't "act like a man," or who still uses "faggot" and "gay" as one of the worst verbal attacks you can make on a guy. How do I take responsibility for the problems of my fellow man when I *am* their problem? How do I embody the concept of Ujima?

Like so many things in life, all we can do is the best we can do. Even though I may be on the fringes of my community -- even though I may never be fully accepted -- I'm still invested in the problems and issues that face it. I still want to see my fellow black Americans live in a country where they are treated equally, where the institutions of our government and society is working to remove the discriminations that were baked into their foundations, where economic and intellectual poverty is not a default and the full expanse of the American dream is available to us. I want what's best for my people; if that feeling is not returned, I have no control over that.

This year I've learned so much more about the myriad problems facing the black community. Our children tend to be disciplined more frequently and more harshly in our schools; we're taught from a very young age that the authority structure will come down harder on us than it will for other kids. Our women frequently don't have a place at any table but their own when it comes to issues of equal pay, sexual liberation and safety, the respect of their colleagues and inclusion in art and entertainment. Our men face the actions of a society that fears and hates them; we're less likely to get good jobs, more likely to be arrested, brutalized and killed by the police, only see ourselves on TV as criminals, toughs or stereotypical smoothies. There are issues we face in just about every aspect of American society, and even if those issues don't directly affect me it's my responsibility to help solve them.

The concept of Ujima can be taken outside of that context, too. In the broader geek space that I inhabit, it's difficult for us to band together to take care of problems that affect our spaces. So many fandoms have become toxic in-groups that violently reject anything that threatens the mono-culture people insist on maintaining. Women in gaming, sci-fi/fantasy entertainment, costuming and so many other areas have to face down so much bile just for trying to enjoy the same things we do, or demanding the same respect given to others. It's a serious problem, and as fellow geeks Ujima calls on us to make it ours and fix it already.

Our communities will not cohere unless we learn to have empathy for our own. I talked about how self-determination may lead us to a greater understanding of ourselves yesterday, but we must also understand how that carves out different paths for the people in our community. Not everyone in our group will like the same things, or like the same thing for the same reasons. We have to strive to understand and respect that, to acknowledge the challenges our brothers and sisters face, to reach out and help them overcome them when we can.

But how do we do that? I'm still figuring that part out, to be honest. I feel I've taken the first step just by being educated on the work to be done and shouldering some of the responsibility for it. Where do I go from here? Do I become more socially active? Do I join groups that have organized to advance solutions to these problems? Which problems do we focus on first? That requires a lot more thinking, and I'll do my best to come up with *something* to answer those questions.

For now, I'm in this with all of you. There's work to do. Let's pitch in to get it done, yeah? Have a joyous and wonderful Kwanzaa today, and I'll check in with you all tomorrow.

I am a gay black man. I am a Zen Buddhist. (Thank you, Kevin.) I am agnostic -- I don't know if there is a God, but I don't believe that being a good person should be dependent on that. I am a writer, gamer, geek, lover of animals, myths, and the intersection between them. I'm a morning person. I drink coffee. I believe that in order to be at my best I must be stripped down and simplified to my essence. That requires the very difficult work of scrubbing away decades of gunk that has been built to protect me from the hardships of life. (I'm stripping a cast-iron skillet over the holiday, so maybe my metaphors are going to be reflecting that today.)

I didn't always believe this, of course. When I was a child -- well, I was still called gay, and a nerd, but the connotations were negative. As I grew up, I was called a pussy, a weirdo, an Oreo -- black on the outside, but white on the inside. As a defense mechanism, I took all the terrible things people said about me and turned them into positives:

"Yeah, I'm a pussy -- but that means I don't get my ass kicked on the regular or have to worry about being shot."

"I'm a weirdo, sure, but that means I get to think about stuff that you never will."

"Oreos are fucking delicious, and everyone wants to have them nearby. I'm crunchy AND I'm sweet, you jackass."

These days, I don't even engage. Of course I care about what people think about me, but at the end of the day I know who I am and what I stand for. I've put in the time and the work to strip myself bare, see what lies beneath my face and put myself back together to try and be the best reflection of that. It's an ongoing process, and I will never be finished with it -- that's life, that's self-improvement. But it is one of the most important and worthwhile things you will ever do.

The principle we focus on today, the second day of Kwanzaa, is Kujichagulia -- self-determination. I love this concept; the Swahili word is so much fun to say, but it's also one of those things that tends to work in a spiral. There are always new ways to name and define yourself, and because you're a living being who exists in a complex and ever-evolving society, the relationship between who you are, who you want to be, and how that relates to other people demands that you constantly check yourself. But first, let's start with the basics.

Self-determination, at its most simple, is answering these three questions:

Who am I? No really, who am I? It's a simple question that is almost impossible to answer. You must seek and understand the core of yourself in order to do that...but is there a core there? Are we actually the tension that exists between the various aspects that make up who we are? Am I only myself because I am gay, black, Zen, geek, etc.? Am I only a series of definitions, a collection of names I have given myself? Or am I something beyond and beneath that, some unnamable, unknowable kernel? If I can't name it or know it, how can I define it or ensure its existence? What do I think about all of this? Who is the one that is doing the thinking?

Am I really who I say I am? Determining who you are is a process that I don't think you may ever get to the bottom of. You do the best you can with the information you can, and then you try to confirm it. I think this question forces you to take a look at your actions; if you really are who you say you are, then you would behave in ways consistent with that, correct? What are your beliefs, and how do your actions reflect them?

It can be a bit of a gut check to realize that you behave in ways that are inconsistent with what you believe. But it's also necessary to face that down and make the changes you need to in order to re-align yourself. For example, if I look within myself and find that I'm not actually following the Noble Eightfold Path, then it's on me to figure out what that means and how I can work my way back there. This may mean painful changes, or stepping outside of a comfort zone, but knowing yourself and being yourself is more important. This is a sacrifice that must be made for the right to self-determination.

Am I all that I ought to be? So we've worked out who we believe we are and determined that how we act accurately reflects that. But is that enough? Of course not. We could always strive to be something more, something better -- to embody our beliefs more closely and carefully. Could I be more than who I am? What do I need to do in order to get there? Self-determination is more than knowing who you are -- it's knowing where you are going and what it takes to get there.

It is vital to know ourselves, especially as black people. My ancestors came from western and southern Africa. Somehow, they were put on ships by men who took their destinies from them and replaced them with the Middle Passage. When they arrived, they were stripped of their clothing, their cultures, their families and their very names. They were given other names, other religions, other jobs and relationships. Even after they were freed, they were told that they were lesser than their fellow Americans, forced to confine themselves to the poorest neighborhoods and work the worst jobs. This is a process that continues down to this day.

In our media we are given a narrative, a single story. Our men are called thugs and criminals; even the "good guys" are tough and physical. Our women are crazy, loud, outspoken but unintelligible; they speak almost entirely in slang and are predominantly concerned about hair, makeup, clothes and men. Our children are told they don't have the intelligence to make it in American society, that the best they can hope for is to be athletes, drug dealers, or prisoners. Our communities are impoverished and intellectually stagnant, but the fight for better is called "disruptive," "obnoxious," and "unnecessary."

We must reject that story, and find our own. Black men are smart, courageous, confused, scared and just as soft as anyone else. Black women are incredible; tough, intelligent, beautiful, complicated. Our children are precious, each a kaleidoscope of possibilities -- they could be astronauts, scientists, businesspeople, politicians, artists and activists. We joined American society being told who we were and what we were, but there is no reason that needs to continue. We are who we are, and only we know what that is.

As individuals and as a culture, we must define ourselves to be active participants in our own destinies. We must fight the pressure to be defined or named by other people; we accept or reject terms based on our own principles. That is Kujichagulia. That is life.

Have a wonderful Kwanzaa today, everyone. Know yourselves. I'll check in with you tomorrow!

It's that time. Best of the year lists are popping up all over the pop-culture and entertainment blogs. Books, movies, TV shows, art installations, plays and musicals, even memes are being reviewed so we can try to make sense of the past twelve months. We spent how much time obsessed over that back in February? What really were the best things ever last year, now that we've had time to temper our breathless enthusiasm? What are we actually embarrassed for even liking at this point?

2015 was a big year for me, personally. I made the decision to speak up for causes that I'm passionate about in ways I never had before, and that opened up connections to folks online I'm so glad I got to make. I've shared my perspective as a gay black Buddhist who spends a lot of time pretending to be a jackalope online, my experience with my mental illness, my opinions and fears about telling stories. I've stepped into black geek, social justice and furry writer spaces, and I've found that those communities are homes I'd been searching for all my life. It's been a transformative time.

I've had to change, personally and professionally. At my day job changes in ownership and company structure forced a shift in my position, and I found myself learning technical skills that have always frightened the living shit out of me. Months later, that fear is still with me -- but I've learned how to make peace with it. I know how to use that discomfort to sharpen my focus, to be careful, to pay attention to what's necessary. The lessons I've learned from that experience I'm trying to apply to the rest of my life.

December is upon us, and we're all making one mad dash through the last holidays of the year. It feels like we're rushing through a time that we should be taking slow; the days are short, the nights are long and cold, well-built for silent contemplation. I've spent so much of my life letting my reflexes take over how I act on what I think and feel. If fear motivates my behavior, I've often let it with no questions asked. If anxiety demands comfort, I indulge in it. So many of my actions have roots in an automatic stimulus. I feel x, I do y. It didn't matter for a long time that these reflexes no longer serve a useful purpose, or worse, hold me back. I use them because I've always used them.

I've been making a persistent effort to live deliberately. I've become more consistent with my meditation, and taking the awareness cultivated on the bench throughout my day. I'm still new at this, though, so I fail quite often. When I'm overwhelmed force of habit reasserts itself and I fall back on those same ingrained behaviors. But I've gotten better at recognizing when I end up on those tracks, stopping for a minute to ask myself if I want to be there, and repositioning myself when I need to. As with everything, it's a work in progress. But progress is being made.

Everything we do throughout our lives is a choice that we've made. It can be difficult to take stock of our options and pick the best one, especially in the many moments that make up our days. Emotions demand action, we're often pressed for time, and our emotional reflexes have been well-honed. But it's helpful to double-check whether they're still useful after a certain point. We're often in situations where our first response -- our reflexive one -- doesn't fit, and it'd be better to go with something else. It's hard, slow work to do, but that awareness pays dividends sooner than I thought.

I've learned a lot more about myself this year. Learning about how my anxiety is on a fairly sensitive trigger helped me realize all the ways it influenced my decisions; I'm now working on consistently short-circuiting that system to make smarter choices. Learning that I have issues with ADHD has allowed me to recognize that there are certain things my brain will just never be good with. Far from simply letting myself off the hook with that, it encourages me to work harder (and more efficiently) by knowing I need to rely on something external instead of my own brain. Timers, to-do list and calendars have become essential; follow-through is not something I'm great with, so finding ways to make sure I finish what I start needs to be baked into every process. In this situation, knowing my limitations hasn't made me feel lesser; it's allowed me to work within and beyond them to do a lot more than I thought I could.

This year has been great. I've made a lot of progress, and I feel I see myself and the world around me a bit more clearly than before. But there's still work to do. I can be better still about how I manage my time. I could be more efficient with my projects, work through them more quickly by making sure I'm on task when I've set myself to be. Learning to be comfortable with my fear and anxiety is never something that will end. It's a project I'll be working on all of my life. But the work becomes more familiar with time and practice. Maybe it won't be easier, but I'll get better at it.

And working on the connections that I continue to make will be a big focus next year. Now that I've finally found and understand community, working hard to be a productive part of them is something I really want to do. I want to support my neighbors, both in the real world and online. What are the best ways of doing that? How can I help through my perspective and experience? What can I do to help us be better?

I'm so grateful for this year, even though it's been difficult at times. I'm thankful because it's brought me closer to so many of you. I'm really looking forward to the work of continuing what I've started here next year. I'm really looking forward to helping bring us all closer together.

My childhood was spent in a procession of hostile places. At home, I had a severe, distant mother and an alcoholic father to tend with; my sister got into trouble a lot and ran away from home several times, so there was always something terrible going on there. At school I was a poor, shy kid who had no social skills and a meek disposition. I got along with the teachers well enough, but that only made life worse with the students. At my church, I was a "spiritual orphan", more a pity project for elders in the congregation than a colleague and certainly one of the least popular kids there. I spent most of my life growing up with few friends and a certainty that I didn't fit in any of the places that surrounded me.

So, when I discovered the Internet and the furry community it was a lifeline for me. There was a whole community of people out there who shared my interests and mindset, no matter how strange it was. After I graduated high school, I worked two mall jobs and spent what little free time that gave me talking to people online. I would often get home after midnight, wake up at 6 or 7 AM and catch the bus to do it all again.

When I went to college, I accepted my sexuality. When I came out to my mother and she rejected me, I knew that was my last link to my community gone. I would absolutely be disfellowshipped from my congregation, and after that my mother would more than likely be encouraged not to speak to me. My sister and I weren't close at that point, and I hadn't developed a strong bond with anyone else in my family. I left home in the summer of 1999 and I haven't been back since.

For a long time, it was hard to think of myself as a black man. I felt thoroughly rejected by my tribe and just as wholeheartedly accepted by a new one. I'd rather think of myself as a geek and a furry because that was the community I had jumped in with. And they're still a huge part of my life -- I love the furry fandom, and I love geeking out with other people who love science-fiction, urban/modern fantasy and post-apocalyptic stories. This is still my tribe, and I feel more comfortable here than I ever have anywhere else.

But over the past year or so, with my discovery of the black geek community online and my slow but steady connection with black geeks through Twitter and the blogosphere, it's occurred to me that the black part of my identity is still there, will always be there, and continues to wield its influence over me. I'll see social dynamics differently than most people, and my experiences of being marginalized in both the dominant culture and my little minority tribe will continue to have some bearing on the way I see the world. To deny that would be dishonest to myself, and I can't do that any more.

I've been trying to absorb what that means for myself, but over the past year I've found myself making small and hesitant overtures back to at least the part of black culture that overlaps with the tribe I've chosen for myself since leaving home. And it's been a wonderful experience; learning that our shared history and experience can be used to create wildly different stories that are just as vital and interesting and imaginative as a Euro-centric tale is nothing short of a revelation. I've been so intrigued by the idea of it, and it's made me want to dig back into not only my own personal history, but the history of my people to better understand my place in the fringes of it.

So I've been dabbling in telling stories borne out of my experience and the way it's shaped my understanding of the culture I came from. I've been seeking out the voices of other intelligent black people who've been making a place at the table for themselves within the broader SFF community. I've been slowly trying on my blackness, but I've had trouble feeling it, had trouble feeling connected to the place where I've come from.

That was until I saw The Wiz Live.

For those of you who don't know, The Wiz is a musical re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz featuring an all-black cast. Most people know it as a somewhat campy 70s movie starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor but it was a surprise hit on Broadway before that, winning seven Tony Awards in its first year (including Best Musical). I had never seen the 70s movie up until now, when NBC decided to put on a live staging of The Wiz as part of its nascent Thanksgiving tradition.

I won't go into too much detail here, though I can spaz about The Wiz for a really long time. But the musical re-contextualizes everyone's desires through issues that affect the black community at large in really interesting ways. Dorothy finds herself stuck in a place she doesn't want to be, though it's the only home she's got and she can't go back to the one she had; the Scarecrow can't think of a way out of his situation, which is a losing game that he's forced to play; the Tin Man loved the wrong woman, and now she's stolen his heart and left him without the ability to feel anything; and the Lion struggles to muster the courage to deal with the very real difficulties he faces in life.

The performances were nothing short of amazing -- for the most part. But what really hit home for me were the songs; numbers like "You Can't Win" and "What I Would Do If I Could Feel" talk about the depression and bitterness that build up through a lifetime of feeling helpless, but "Be A Lion," the brand-new "We Got It" and "Everybody Rejoice/Brand New Day" acknowledges the difficulty of the black struggle while also encouraging us to live the virtues that have gotten us this far -- perseverance, fearlessness and compassion for the struggles of others. It's a uniquely black American story, steeped in our culture and concerns. I've never seen a story quite like that before, told so excellently, with such care and such pride, on some a big stage. It was a revelation.

It was the first time I felt connected to the community I had come from, or felt like I had a strong sense of its values, its struggles, its worries. It was the first time I ever saw a story that made me feel like this was something specifically told for me and mine. Seeing all of these immensely talented black people stepping up to tell a story to the best of their considerable abilities was….it made me realize what I could be. And it connected me to where I came from.

So now I feel I have a better grasp of my background -- not only of my personal history, but the social and emotional history of my people. I'm sure it wasn't just The Wiz that did it -- I've been digging around, learning more and pushing myself to interact more -- but it felt like a piece of the puzzle that clicked into place and allowed me to see a much more complete picture than I ever have before.

I'm going into my background and the storytelling around it with much more excitement and confidence now. I have a stronger sense of who I am, and an even greater desire to connect to my culture and its history. The specific troubles I went through are shared by a lot of black geeks like me, who find it difficult to be truly who they are while being a part of a community that encourages sameness for its own protection. I want to go back and rejoin it, while at the same time embracing my individuality. There's a place at that table for me, even if I have to make it myself. It's something that black geeks are used to doing at this point, right?

The story that I'm writing to put up on the blog this week is my first attempt at writing a furry story from a black perspective. I'm excited to share it, while at the same time I realize it's just the first step along a path. My understanding of my own history will continue to deepen and evolve, and hopefully my writing will reflect that over time. But for now, the first bit of that journey.

October was a pretty intense month. I went in for full training on changing my position at work, which means there are a LOT of holes in my technical knowledge that need to be filled. The shift also means that I'm down in the trenches with coworkers a bit more, and that means an opportunity to change the culture that I'd feel awful not taking. It's important to me that any community I'm a part of feels more like a community because I'm a part of it -- that may sound egotistical, but I like being a glue. I want to make people feel more connected, like someone has their back.

But that means paying attention to work in ways that I hadn't before, which also means that it has to get a lot more of my time and energy. Because things happened so suddenly, I had to drop any other plans I had made in order to make sure I had the emotional space for it. Now that there are a few weeks of this under my belt, I think I'm able to take a beat or two to see where my head's at and what I feel I can do.

I'll still need to set aside a chunk of time to learn more about the technical aspects of my job, like getting to know Linux from the command line and how to work with PostGreSQL and maybe even learning more about SOAP API. But I'd also really like to use whatever remaining time I have for writing and reading -- immersing myself in stories that matter to me and learning how to tell them better.

I won't be able to join NaNoWriMo this year; there's simply too much going on, and I'm too far behind on a few other things. Still, in the spirit of the month I'd like to set a few goals. They'll be a bit more modest than what I may have originally planned, but I think they're a good challenge for what I can handle right now.

WRITING

Ugh, I'm so far behind. On everything. But no worries! This month I'd like to focus on making writing a regular practice, so projects are geared towards that. In addition to making sure The Writing Desk is updated three times a week, I'd like to work on articles for other blogs like [adjective][species] and perhaps Claw & Quill. I'm not sure I'll have anything ready to show this month -- besides, at least with [a][s] they have a pretty solid line-up of posts to take us through the holiday season. Seriously you guys, I really think you'll like what they have planned.

But there are things about the culture of the fandom I'd really like to write about -- what we want out of an art/writing/music community portal, how the broader politics of other SFF fandoms influence our own, how the fandom treats mental illnesses, social maladjustments, and the expression of fetishes that aren't seen as acceptable or respectable by the society at large. It's interesting stuff to me and there are no easy answers for this, but it's all top of mind and I think we should be talking about it, at least in a high-level way.

Here at The Writing Desk, I'll try to tighten the focus to storytelling and the lessons I'm learning from it -- which means more reviews of the stuff I've been reading, more thoughts on the lessons we can take from our stories to the broader world, and how our experiences in the broader world are baked into our stories. I'll talk about the bricks of my Afro-Futurist philosophy as I discover places for them, and the ideas that are taking shape in my mind as I'm writing stories.

As for the stories themselves -- well, I've got three short stories that I'd really like to finish before I really dive into anything new. "A Stable Love" is a commission that a friend of mine has been waiting on for years, and while I've been marching towards completion it's well past time it was done. Another friend generously donated to my Clarion Write-A-Thon fundraiser, earning a commissioned story that I'll begin as soon as "A Stable Love" is draft-complete. And then there's a short story that I would love to submit for the People of Color Destroy Science Fiction anthology coming up next year. I have the idea and the outline for it in my head, and I'm really excited to get started on that.

I'll also be working on a collaborative project with a few friends called "A Changing Perspective". It's a choose-your-own-adventure story spun off from an interactive over on writing.com; since that website has issues with advertising for their interactive space, I can't ask friends to go read those chapters in good conscience. A group of four writers has made an informal pact to revisit the interactive through Twile, and cone we've got significant chunks of the story underway we'll find a way to host it.

So for November, I'd like to finish "A Stable Love" and write 12 chapters for "A Changing Perspective"; update The Writing Desk three times a week; and have at least one complete article for both [adjective][species] and Claw and Quill. It's an ambitious schedule, but I think I can do it if I keep my focus.

READING

I haven't been reading nearly as much as I should. I'll be honest -- I'm a slow reader, and I often spend time I could spend reading doing something else, like playing mobile games. Making an effort to read more means spending more of my downtime devoted to it, and that's something I'm very much in favor of.

This month, I'd like to finish two (I believe) short novels that I've been wanting to read for a very long time -- Kindred by Octavia Butler and Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. The former is a great introduction to one of the biggest black voices in science-fiction, and has been served to me as an Outlander-type story of the slavery South. It sounds like it'll be incredibly rough, but an illuminating read. The second is a good introduction to one of the best black intellectual voices from the Harlem Renaissance, and that alone has got me tremendously excited. Reading up on black literature -- not just sci-fi/fantasy, but novels, essays, and poetry -- is something that I want to feel better rooted to the tradition I'm coming out of. I'm hoping that it will help me better understand why my community is the way it is these days, and better imagine what my community will be like in the future, or how it would deal with magic, or how my personal experience fits in to an Afro-Futurist context.

I'll also be reading through the slush pile for New Fables, though we generally only have poetry to deal with at this point; short stories and novels from friends, of course; and the comics that are coming through the pike as part of All-New, All-Different Marvel. Exciting times, and as usual there is no shortage of reading material.

ELSEWHERE

There is no shortage of demands for attention these days -- it's tough to distill your life down to the essential things that you want to be doing. One of the things I've been trying to remind myself is that everything I do is a choice; if I spend a lot of time doing something that doesn't get me closer to being a writer or someone with good technical skills, that's a choice I've made. If I goof off instead of do something equally enjoyable but possibly more enriching, that's a choice I've made. At this point, it's important to make good choices about how I spend my time. There are only so many hours in the day, and it's in my best interests to make them count.

This is a bit of a tangent, but it's a bit like shaping your diet so that you eat better. If you're trying to make sure you only eat a certain number of Calories per day, then it becomes a lot more important to make sure those Calories are doing something for you -- either helping you with your exercise routine, or making sure you're full for longer, or helping out with your digestion. When your Calories become precious or finite, the impact of empty Calories -- those in say, candy or a milkshake -- becomes startlingly apparent. If I'm holding myself down to 2000 Calories in a day, I really can't afford to spend 650 of them on an Oreo milkshake, no matter how much I want to. It's either that, or dinner.

Bringing that awareness to my time is a lesson steadily, painfully being learned. There's only so much free time that I have on a weekday; an hour before work, if I wake up on time, and maybe two or three afterwards. What am I doing with those four precious hours? Am I playing Marvel Puzzle Quest on my phone? Am I looking at Facebook without actually absorbing any of the information I see there? What else could I have done that would help me get closer to the life I'd like to be living?

This month I'll try to make more responsible decisions about how I spend my time. Don't get me wrong -- I know that I'll need to blow off some steam, or do something inconsequential sometimes to relieve some stress. I'd like those activities to be a mindful choice, though, not the easiest option available, or some sort of default.

To those of you participating in NaNoWriMo, good luck! This will be a crazy and exciting month for you. I hope it's fulfilling as well. Let's get to work.

Another Rainfurrest has come and gone, and I really loved the convention this year. The panels were fun and interesting, but more importantly I got to hang and chat with a bunch of people I had only known online -- JM Horse, Phil Geusz, Makyo and others in the [adjective][species] crew. There were a lot of folks from the Furry Writers' Guild there as well, and they're almost always delightful! Mary and Daniel Lowd I like more and more every time I get to meet them, and seeing Munchkin, MrMandolino, Dwale and others (too numerous to name!) was really excellent. I'm so happy to see a community of writers forming and networking, talking about their craft and helping each other take their writing to the next level. These are really exciting times to be a furry writer, I feel, and I'm lucky to be a part of that.

Ryan's books debuted over the course of the convention, and he had his book launch party on Saturday. He read the first scene from Koa of the Drowned Kingdom, an action-packed encounter with a huge, hungry crocodile that also happens to be a wonderful introduction to the characters and the unique world. He also read a scene from Forest Gods, with Doto and Clay traveling through the savannah and reflecting on the situation they've found themselves in. Koa's scene was great, but this scene from Forest Gods is brilliant, and it just reminded me all over again how amazing this book is. I know that I'm his husband and I might be just a little biased, but please trust me when I say that the Fire-Bearers series is simply excellent work and I wholeheartedly, unreservedly recommend that you pick up both God of Clay and Forest Gods as soon as possible. I'm tremendously proud of my husband for what he's accomplished, and I'm so excited that people get to read what he's been pouring himself into for the past few years.

I also picked up the Coyotl Award-winning Huntress by Renee Carter Hall so I could introduce myself to her writing properly, as well as the new anthology Inhuman Acts. It's a set of furry noir stories that I'm rather excited about; I got to hear a snippet of one story from the FurPlanet book launch that made me buy it as soon as I could. Watts Martin, a member of my writing group, workshopped one of the stories with us, and I'm really glad to see it found a home in the anthology. It is so good, and I'm really glad to see Watts popping up in anthologies again, as well as working on novellas and his first novel. Which is going to be a doozy, you guys. I can't wait for you to read it!

The reason I love conventions these days is to immerse myself in the community of folks who love furry fandom as much as I do, to have conversations about their experiences and passions, to compare notes about our work and divide the burdens we feel amongst ourselves. I also get to settle in with old friends, renewing and deepening friendships that can be stretched thin over long distances; I get to put faces to names, and imagine tweets and blog posts spoken in the manner of their writers. I can geek out to folks I've admired from afar for a long time. I can buy drinks for folks in exchange for a few minutes of their time.

Typically, I get depressed BEFORE the convention. Usually I've offered to be on a panel or made plans to hook up with someone, and I always worry about the panel or the meeting going terribly. What if I'm awkward? What if what I have to say comes out as a jumbled and confusing mess? What if I don't hit it off with the people I really like? I almost never sleep well the night before a convention; making sure that I've remembered my clothes and my medication, worrying about how I will deal with my scatter-brain and anxiety, takes the place of a good night's rest.

Then I arrive, and almost always hit the ground running. I meet people. We talk. I laugh a lot. I connect and understand them a lot better. I feel myself becoming more entrenched in this community that I love. I feel a part of things. Happiness sinks into the core of my being, enriches into joy, grows roots that become contentment. I'm floating by the time the convention is over, excited and rejuvenated to go back into my daily life. There is so much I want to do. There's a certainty I feel, that I'm on the right track, I'm doing the right things, and I'm resolved to keep on keeping on.

I'm so excited about my writing, guys. I'm really looking forward to polishing my work and putting it out there. I can't wait to see my name in anthologies, to sit in on more panels, to connect with more people. By the time Rainfurrest 2016 rolls around, I sincerely hope that people will be able to talk about the stories I have for sale at the convention -- even if they have problems with them, or are curious about certain choices that I've made.

I've left this convention with the determination to write and submit short stories to various zines and anthologies; to really push on a few of the projects that have been progressing slowly -- to make sure my Patreon launches well and I'm well-positioned to make it a fun experience for everyone involved, to make sure New Fables is out as soon as possible and we have an idea for how to take the idea into the future, to become a more active contributor to [adjective][species]; to make sure that my writing is pointing me towards the person that I would like to be. Conventions are a launching pad for each of us, and it's up to each of us to make sure we use the momentum well.

I've got a good head of steam behind me to propel me through the end of the year. I'm going to fly straight and true.

I've been a little more quiet on the writing front than I feel comfortable with, but there's a reason for that. When I get deep into various projects, I tend to talk about them less because I guess I don't want to reveal how the sausage is made before it's presented. When I push a story out into the world, I want the story to stand on its own -- I don't think the audience should have any thoughts on the author and the trouble or decisions he made to have the story turn out the way it did.

Right now, I'm working on "A Stable Love" and having a lot of fun with it. The characters are surprising me, and that presents new challenges for me to think about, and the writing has been relatively smooth as I march towards its conclusion. I was having a lot of trouble with the first part, which I thought I needed for set-up, to establish the characters and the central issue, but when I got rid of it and moved the beginning of the story ahead, the world just opened up and things became a lot easier. I've shown the customer what I have so far and received an enthusiastic response, so that's incredibly encouraging.

I'm working on another story for MegaMorphics, an old-style APA, and its fall issue. I want my work appearing there to be a bit more polished and considered, which means working on it before the deadline! I have an idea for a Halloween story that I'm pretty excited about; I hammered down the idea with another contributor in hopes of a collaboration contribution -- I work the story, he works the art. I've never written a story like this before (it's horror), and I'm trying to do a few things that I'm not sure about. It's exciting but difficult work, and I'm looking forward to how it will turn out.

After that, working on a story for People of Color Destroy Science Fiction that I'm really excited to tuck into, and the prize story for a very generous fellow who donated the most towards my Clarion Write-A-Thon during week 6. I've given both of those some thought, and I think when I actually sit down to write them, the work will come relatively easy.

This is a completely new experience for me. As much as I love writing, it's always been extraordinarily difficult. I have perfectionist tendencies that have caused storms of anxiety, and that makes it hard to see anything but the mistakes. I've never been able to write shitty first drafts; I know writers who create such polished work right off the top of their head, and it's impossible not to compare yourself against that. My character work is never where I want it to be, and when the characters actually begin to live and breathe and deviate from the plot it legitimately freaks me out. I have no idea how to handle that.

But that's the state that I've always given lip service to wanting to go. Writing, for me, feels like being a conduit for something. When the ego drops away and I'm connected directly to the story, it feels like I'm possessed by something, transcribing an event as being dictated by someone "not me". When a story is really flowing, it's an out of body experience. And I know how crazy that sounds, but it's true.

For the longest time, I've never trusted myself to tap into that. Knowing the history of mental illness within my family, and dealing with my personal experience there, I've been very afraid of indulging any tendencies that could exacerbate those issues. Does writing make me crazier? Is it likely that one day, when working on a particularly intense story, I could have some kind of schizophrenic break? My life unfolded the way it did because my mother did not have any semblance of reality, was paranoid, unable to take care of me. I couldn't live with myself if I forced my husband and my friends to go through that.

I didn't even realize I was having that thought before doing the work I've been doing in my Anxiety group class. And realizing that writing, mental illness and anxiety had coalesced into this huge mental knot is ultimately freeing. I'm more willing to take risks with it, just because the feeling I have when writing is worth it. And that means I'm more willing to make mistakes and learn from them. I no longer catastrophize the consequences; if I fail, I can come back from that. With my mental illness, I trust my medication, I trust my self-care process, I trust my behavioral therapy, and I trust my support network.

For the first time, being a writer isn't some distant dream for me. It's who I am, and it's what I do. And I'm so very excited that I have an opportunity to do the things I've always wanted to do, that I get to be the person I've always wanted to be.

I have an idea for a serial story originally released on-line. It'll be furry stories, sci-fi and modern fantasy, adult. Right now, I would love to write about 1500 words a week, release that part in certain places, then collect three or four parts into a chapter that's released in a more polished form elsewhere. Once the story is finished (I'm thinking anywhere from 8 - 13 chapters per serial), hopefully I can polish it further, and release it as an ebook or self-published novel.

In order to work on this project, I'm launching a Patreon. Folks familiar with my furry work should know what to expect from the Jackalope Serial Company: stories about growth, personal and otherwise. When I'm ready to go live and work on the serials directly, I'll post a link with more information. But for now, I just wanted it out there. I'm expecting to be ready to go with it by the beginning of November.

I've also reached out to a few friends about the Furry Mental Health podcast; the person I know with the best equipment and knowledge for it suggested that I present a proof of concept to him for six shows, with subject matter, segments outlined, all of that. It's a solid recommendation, and I'm working on that. I would like to start recording THAT at the beginning of the new year, with episodes coming out in February or March.

So that's my plan for the rest of the year. Full steam ahead on short stories, getting the Jackalope Serial Company off the ground, putting together a first season of the Furry Mental Health podcast. I'm incredibly excited about all of this, and I can't wait to actually share finished stuff with you very soon.

There's a big disconnect in our society when we talk about bigotry. I think a lot of people in privileged groups believe that bigotry means something like "active discrimination and disrespect of a minority group" or maybe "active/vocal hate directed towards every single member of a minority group". There are a lot of people out there who believe that they aren't bigoted (or even behave in bigoted ways or have bigoted thoughts) because hey, they're not being Nazis or anything -- they really just have good times with people, without "seeing" the race, orientation, religion or gender identity that makes them different.

It's difficult to describe why that definition of bigotry is a misunderstanding, simply because our deepening ideas about what bigotry is don't neatly fit within the space of 140 characters. There isn't a good way to sum it up in a sound bite, or a metaphor that nails it perfectly. The fact of the matter is, an understanding of what I mean when I talk about bigotry requires an understanding of how I understand our society works, how bigotry is baked into the fabric of it in fundamental ways, and how we internalize and repeat those ideas.

OK, first, a definition of terms. Who is a bigot? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a bigot as "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own prejudices and opinions; especially one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance." Intolerance is defined as "a quality of being unable or unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression or grant or share social, political or professional rights".

So, a bigot is someone who treats members of a group as socially, politically or professionally inequal. A bigot is unwilling to allow members of a group equal expression or rights. A bigot is someone who is so devoted to their own ideas about the way the world works that they are unwilling to entertain the notion that it may work differently, that reality isn't the way they think it is. They have the truth; that truth is immutable, and anyone who doesn't believe the way they do is wrong and most importantly, intolerable.

The reason that the label of bigotry is such a hot one is it comes across as a value judgement. The subtext being spoken when you call someone a bigot is that "they are fixed to a particular way of thinking so firmly that they are unable to rethink it; they're uncritical, inflexible, intolerant and unchanging." And that you are, by definition, not any of those things. It often feels like two things are happening here. One, that the person designated as "bigot" is someone who is incapable of changing their beliefs. Two, that because this person is bigoted, anything they have to say can be completely ignored and there's no reason to engage with them at all.

Being accused of being a bigot really hurts. It means that someone out there thinks you are a dinosaur, incapable of change; stupid; part of a generation that will die out to make way for a new, more enlightened generation. Too often, the accusation of bigotry is used as a wall that divides one person from another, and gives both parties a reason to never attempt a connection again.

I think there might be cause to "soften" that label. I think that bigotry is taught to all of us on a subtle and societal level, and that each and every one of us internalizes those bigoted ideas. That internalization causes us to act on bigoted assumptions -- and by definition those actions are bigoted. Most of the time, we don't even think about it. We simply act on what we've been taught is true and have no reason to question.

Part of dismantling bigotry within ourselves and on a societal level is understanding how these are ideas are part of the dominant institutions within our societies, how they are transmitted to the people within those societies, how we accept and absorb them as members of those societies, and how we can rethink these basic ideas, test them to see if something feels right or it doesn't. It's a lot of work, but it's essential to understand not only how we work but how deeply these assumptions can be held. Once we're able to recognize the capacity within ourselves to hold these thoughts, we can more easily recognize why other people believe and behave the way that they do, and why it can be so extraordinarily difficult for them to change.

There are so many assumptions about various groups that are hard-baked into our society -- especially minority groups who tend to be under-privileged and don't have access to the kind of massive reach that the powerful use on a daily basis. This of course includes mass media -- not just news, but entertainment, marketing, education and more. All of it, either implicitly or explicitly, promotes and reinforces biases that need to be re-examined.

I don't think this is a situation that's necessarily borne from maliciousness, though malicious behavior has served to stifle and discourage attempts to change the status quo. Let's take an example to see how institutional bias contributes to personal bigotry, at least from my perspective.

I'm a black man, and if you look through mass media throughout history our culture doesn't have many positive examples for me. When we were brought to the United States, we were viewed as barely human, little more than savages who could understand basic commands and endure back-breaking labor that more genteel and enlightened races could not stomach. This myth of superhuman strength and physicality has been woven into the narrative of black men from that time on: in so many of our stories, black men fill the role of the "gentle giant" or a subset of the "noble savage". In our entertainment, we're presented as street-savvy toughs who are intimidating and dangerous. We join gangs, deal drugs, kill people. We go to prison (justly or unjustly), we father children and either die, abandon them or are taken from them. Three centuries of narrative on black men can be traced from slave owners selling their goods in the late-1700s to what policemen and news anchors say about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.

We're often seen as people who are prone to violence, have poor impulse control and limited (at best) intelligence -- when we are seen as smart, it's more of a cunning than an actual ability to learn complex concepts and make connections between them. There are, of course, exceptions to this -- especially recently. But the monolithic image of the black male as someone with a dangerous and animal strength, as someone unpredictable and tough, prevails. It informs how we're reflected in news reports and movies, TV shows and books. That image is disseminated in a hundred different ways, subtle and unsubtle, and absorbed by those of us who see those news reports and fictional accounts everywhere.

We internalize this idea, and we begin to act on it instinctively. Police officers are quicker to assume that black males have weapons, and more likely to interpret actions as aggressive or hostile. They're more likely to use deadly force as a result. We, as civilians, instinctively grow more nervous when we see one or more black males on the street. We begin to make assumptions about how they live, what they want, and who they are. Even when it's tinged with a positive sentiment, there are underlying traits that reflect centuries of basic, bigoted ideas handed down to us from the stories we've told ourselves over time.

This doesn't only happen with black men. This happens with women, other people of color, the disabled, the mentally ill, transgender and gender-fluid people, gay, lesbians, bisexuals, the poor and disadvantaged, the homeless...and the list goes on.

With the rise of the Internet and the resulting democratization of content available in our culture, we're seeing those minorities push back against these stories. Black men are standing up to say we're not all hulking athletes, or dangerous toughs, or cunning tricksters. We're not the stories you've heard about that are causing you to cross the street, assume we're up to no good, shoot us down in our neighborhoods. We're just people, as widely varied and scared and messed up as anyone else. We don't fit into these societal narratives.

What we're finding as we speak up is that there are many, many people who don't want to examine the stories they've been told, the ideas they hold because of them, or the prevalence of this false and in many ways dangerous information. They don't want to look at how this narrative has lead them to bigoted thoughts and actions -- because of it, black men can't gather in places without being harassed; we can't interact with the police in the same ways a white man could; we're far less likely to be considered for white-collar jobs or opportunities in STEM education; we're much more likely to be suspended and disciplined in schools. The stories we tell ourselves as a culture about black men lead directly to the unequal treatment of us as a group, at all levels of society.

That's bigotry in action. It's codified in our culture, repeated over and over again throughout our history until it becomes a sort of background radiation, something we simply accept. Most of us have assumptions about various groups because that's what we've been exposed to from an incredibly young age. Centuries of history and decades of personal absorption are incredibly hard to dislodge.

But it can happen. It does happen. It first takes realizing what's going on in the first place and challenging our assumptions about basic ideas. What does it mean to be black? What does it mean to be poor? What does it mean to identify with a gender that's different from your physical sex? What does it mean to believe in a non-Christian view of the universe? Who are all of these people who don't share your race, religion, orientation, socio-economic status? How do these differences affect their daily lives?

I'm learning an awful lot about this simply by listening to the people speak up about their own experiences. The plight of transgender people and women is something I haven't been aware of until only recently, but my eyes have been opened in so many ways. It's shocking to hear the things they've been through, the battles they continue to fight because of the ingrained, reflexive bigotry that we reflect unthinkingly.

I'll admit, I've done, said and thought things that were bigoted. I will probably do so in the future; this is not because I'm a bad person, or that I'm intractable. It's simply because I haven't gotten to the place where I'm challenging basic, incorrect assumptions I'm still holding on to. But I'm working on that, I'm learning more all the time. That's the burden we bear, the thing we must do to improve ourselves and the society we live in.

I ask sincerely that people have patience with me through this process. More importantly, have patience with other people who are still learning how to undo the education they've received; we're all members of a flawed society we didn't opt-in to, and some of us are going to have a more difficult time learning about those flaws, accepting the ways we've internalized them, and undoing that. Some people will be able to do this on their own; some people will need significant help that they may or may not ask for; some of us will never be able to do it. But I believe we're all in the same boat with this, and it would be a great thing to help each other make progress however we're able to do so.

Does this make sense? Do you agree, disagree? I look forward to the discussion in the comments.

One of the reasons I believe Rabbit is such a helpful totem for me is that fear is such a strong emotion within me. I'm afraid all the time, of various things real and imagined, and that fear drives a great deal of my behavior. One of the lessons Rabbit teaches is how to move through that fear to engage with a broader, brighter world where danger lurks unseen just in the peripheries of your vision. You have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to enjoy yourself sometime. There are moments of grace, quiet and contentment to be had in a scary and sometimes hostile world.

Over the summer I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder in conjunction with ADHD. That diagnosis was a bit of a surprise to me, especially since over the past several months I had been feeling more frustrated than frightened; I was unable to make headway on most of the projects I'd been working on and I was moving into a new position at work that I know I would have trouble with if I couldn't get my concentration issues under control.

Part of the treatment for the diagnosis is a group therapy class given by Kaiser Permanente every Thursday where we learn what Anxiety Disorder is, how it manifests in people, and what's going inside your brain to cause this behavior. It's been illuminating -- both in my own tendencies and how paralyzing anxiety can be for people. I've met so many people in class who have trouble with dealing with work, or keeping good relationships, or even leaving their houses due to their anxiety. Just coming to the group is a major victory for them, but they can't see it because they just want to be fixed, want to be normal.

From what I understand, Anxiety Disorder is kind of like an emotional allergic reaction. With allergies, your body has mechanisms to protect you from foreign bodies that go haywire on things that it should be desensitized to -- like pollen, or dust, or certain foods. And the best way to deal with that is to either avoid the trigger or take an antihistamine to block the effects.

With Anxiety Disorder, your mind is set up to deal with threats in a certain way. It releases hormones that prepare you to flee the threat or fight it, and those hormones do all kinds of stuff from elevating your heart rate to making you breathe faster to take in more oxygen, to hyper-focusing your brain to deal with what's in front of you. Only instead of the bear that's charging towards you or the really important test you have to study for, it's imagined scenarios about a presentation at work, or the story you're writing, or saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Most of the time we cannot avoid the triggers that cause this reaction, and most drugs that would lower our reaction have side effects that make us unable to do anything else -- so we have to find a new way to deal with it.

For me, my anxiety is wrapped up in any activity where I have to show a decent level of competence, requires sustained concentration and involve other people being affected by what I do. Writing stories is all I've wanted to do for my entire life, but I just can't bring myself to finish a story and put it out there. I'm so afraid of the process of writing -- knowing that I won't be able to provide the focus that the story deserves really stresses me out. Knowing that I'm not where I want to be with my writing prowess yet is so discouraging, because I'm 35 already and so many people write great novels in their 20s. Knowing that I would have to present my work to a world that is scary and sometimes hostile fills me with dread -- what if it's simply not good enough? What if people rip it to pieces? What if it's deeply offensive in a way that I hadn't anticipated? Or worst of all, what if something that means so much time and effort to me is just met with a gigantic figurative shrug and no one cares? It's better not to do anything than to risk all of the fears I have about myself proven right.

I work in Silicon Valley on a very technical and complicated suite of software. I was brought on in an administrative capacity, but for my career to advance there I'll need to move into a position with significantly more technical work. That terrifies me. I'm not tech-illiterate, but the amount of know-how that the job requires, the attention to detail and the ability to navigate thorny issues with angry customers is just paralyzing for me. My brain doesn't work that way; as much as I would like it to, I just can't remember a host of considerations to be effective with troubleshooting, and confrontation drains my social batteries almost immediately. The job would require me to learn a lot through doing in real-time, making mistakes and recovering from them, all while under pressure to perform at a level expected of world-class support. I'd be moving from dealing with mostly people (which, while draining, I'm more comfortable with) to dealing mostly with tech (where the consequences for a mistake can be catastrophic).

In these, two of the most important aspects of my life, my Anxiety Disorder has pushed me into a spiral I didn't even see but kept me from moving forward. The situation causes an anxious thought, which triggers an outsized emotional reaction, which triggers a *physical* reaction that triggers another anxious thought, which sustains and solidifies that emotional reaction, which ratchets up the physical reaction, which…you get the idea.

Without realizing it, my reaction to these stressors has been to flee; I'll get to work, take stock of what I should be doing that day and get freaked out enough by my workload that I retreat to something easier -- a mindless task that's more comfortable, Twitter or something else. The moment a story gets difficult or starts to diverge from where I had expected it to go, I'll bail on it. Or I'll muddle through it in fits and starts, unable to keep the story disciplined so it fulfills my worst fears and justifies me never trying it in the first place.

I've learned a lot through the Anxiety class about being mindful with my worries, knowing what kinds of thoughts send me into a spiral, and all the ways people with Anxiety Disorder tend to magnify or distort issues in order to justify the emotional/physical response. Catastrophizing the outcome, "fortune telling" about what terrible thing will most certain happen, "mind-reading" the reactions of those around us or what people are truly thinking all happen in varying ways, to various degrees.

Last week I learned how the fight/flight response tends to work in those of us who have trouble with anxiety, and what we can do about it. The fight response tends to be obsessive worry with a particular problem -- working through every possible angle and outcome until everything is accounted for, which is a problem. Sometimes, even after you've put an issue to bed with a solution that covers all your bases, your brain can be really good at chewing on the bones of it over and over again. The flight response most often manifests in procrastination, sometimes aggressively so. If I'm worried about a project, it often feels like there's a block in my brain that physically prevents me from working on it.

I've been taught that with Anxiety Disorder, the best thing to do is often the exact opposite of your initial impulse. If you're a compulsive worrier, it's best to try and take your mind off the problem (I don't know how that works, but I'll assume we'll learn about that next week); if you're a procrastinator, it's best to lean in with the issue and face the thing that's worrying you.

For example, with my job I'm worried that I will not be able to perform up to the standards of my managers and will face months of disappointed superiors, warnings and eventual termination. As an exercise, we were encouraged to visualize the worst-case scenario of that fear three times; each time, we would deconstruct our imaginations with an eye towards learning how we catastrophize.

I was surprised by just how awful my story was: because one of my superiors is also a friend, I imagined that the situation deteriorated our friendship to the point of dissolution. Because I was desperate and afraid, I'd lash out at work, and THAT put a strain on the relationship between my husband and I, and my superior and his partner. That put this strain on our entire social circle, and because I was so emotionally devastated I just could not deal with it. My world got smaller and smaller until I couldn't even get out of bed, and by association my husband's world got smaller -- between taking care of me and our strained relationship, he was becoming increasingly alienated. I couldn't get it together enough to do anything; I was too fragile to shoulder any of his problems, but he had to deal with all of mine. Our marriage suffered...and I had to bail on the rest of it. It became too painful.

When I was back in the room, I noticed how tight my chest was, how fast my heart was beating, how dry my mouth felt. Then I answered the questions: Is this likely to happen? Will thinking about it make it happen? If it *did* happen, what could I do to cope? What aspects of the situation had I misinterpreted that makes it less likely to happen? After that, I felt better, and the next visualization felt embarrassing for how melodramatic it was. I came out of it, refined the answers to my questions, and visualized a third time -- by then, it was boring and silly. I knew how impossible the worst-case scenario would be, and had a better appreciation of the strength of my relationships and the love of my husband.

The tools I'm developing to deal with my anxieties -- after learning how to clearly identify and understand them -- are allowing me to lean in towards the things that scare me the most. I was able to move through my discomfort talking about mental illness earlier, and I have a lot more patience with myself when it comes to my writing. The progress is steadier, faster than it's been for a long time. I can actually imagine a life in which I am capable of learning new things, becoming more competent with the things I want to do, actually reaching the goals I set for myself. It's so great to learn about myself and take those lessons into direct action.

I'm still afraid, of course, but now I have a much better time with that fear. It doesn't paralyze me the way it used to. And I have professional help to thank for that.

I understand that not everyone with Anxiety Disorder has this experience; there are so many people in my group who are affected a lot more strongly than I am, and will probably need furthere help over a longer period of time to deal with it. My heart goes out to them. I know how much my relatively mild version of it has hampered my life; it must be terrible to deal with much stronger fear day in, day out. Once you see how fear manifests through a broad swath of people, you notice it driving so many other behaviors -- especially the ones I've found antagonistic or particularly angering. That allows me to see myself in these people a lot better, which allows me to check my anger and better understand what they might be going through. Understanding myself helps me to connect better with others.

I'm curious if anyone else out there has issues with anxiety. What about it do you find particularly challenging? Are there ways you've learned to cope with it? Are there experiences you would like to share? I'm all ears!

Last Thursday I celebrated my 35th birthday. If I'm lucky, this puts me squarely in the territory of early middle age. That means that for the most part, I'm starting to have fewer days ahead of me than there are behind. It's a sobering thought, but not a depressing one.

Unlike most I really don't mind getting older. I think older people rule -- they have a depth of knowledge and experience that can only be obtained one way, have learned what's really important and what might not be worth paying attention to, have grown comfortable living in their own skin. I feel that happening to me as the days tick by; I keep learning new things, experiencing more things that I can compare to my previous experiences, and am more able to learn and accept my limitations. All of the regrets I have, instead of sending me into a paralyzing depression, are valuable lessons that help me strive for the ideals I treasure and the standards I've set for myself. I've made so many mistakes, and I continue to do so. But that is part of the imperfection that is my birthright.

I still have a long way to go before I feel like I'm where I want to be, but maybe it will always be that way. Maybe that's what life is; a constant running towards a set of moving goalposts. And I know how futile that might sound, but it's actually exciting -- the goalposts only move once you've reached them to find they're a signpost to the next thing. The idea that I'm standing in a place that was a goal somewhere in my 20s (stable job, self-confidence, a loving husband, a support network of smart, honest friends) is wonderful; and the idea that somewhere down the line, I'll be that much further along towards places I'm only beginning to think are possible now is simply wondrous.

I've learned a lot this year -- not only about myself, but about the world around me. I'm taking great strides in learning about my fear and overcoming it, and that is opening up an exciting range of new possibilities. I can sit with my discomfort far better than ever, which means I'm more willing to push through new experiences that make me feel stupid or uncertain (that means pretty much any new experience basically). I've learned that I probably have ADHD, and the treatment for that allows me to be focused and organized in ways I never thought I was capable of. I own a car, can drive all over town, and have (slowly and painfully) learned how to stop impulse buying. (Mostly.)

I've become more engaged with the world, both politically and personally. That engagement has pushed me further to the left at a time when it feels like my country is becoming more and more selfish, alienated and conservative. It's more important to me than ever to try and connect people, to value understanding and compassion, even as it feels more hopeless and certain that we're all going to die fighting for the few stunted scraps that will grow in polluted soil and poisoned water. I feel more passionate about the best of humanity even when I'm almost certain we will succumb to our own demons.

It reminds me of this parable: in the afterlife, all of us sit at a long table groaning under the weight of a tremendous feast. There are long forks attached to our left hand, long spoons fixed to our right. If we're in hell, we cannot possibly feed ourselves; the utensils are way too long to bring the food to our mouths. If we're in heaven, we're feeding each other; we're alleviating the suffering of our fellow man and accepting the charity of others. It's the same exact situation -- the only thing that changes is our reaction to it.

I want to devote my life to helping other people, however I can. I want to spend the time I have left helping people to understand themselves and one another, to feel less alone, to encourage them towards caring for themselves, their community and their world. I want to take all of the misery I've experienced and use it to ground myself in compassion for those who are having difficulty. I want to encourage active, positive change.

The personal is the political, of course, and vice versa. I believe that the best way to change the way our society operates is by reminding the people in it what their values are, and encouraging them to pursue that in a way that betters themselves and their fellow human beings. We can do this even if we hold different values in higher esteem. We can do this without judgment or hatred for our differences. We can feed our fellow humans whatever they want, and be glad to do it. That is what heaven looks like to me.

At the age of 35, these are my ideals. I know I will fail to live up to them; I know they might change by the time I reach 45, or 55, or 65. But that's fine. What I do today will be the foundation for what I will have built in the next decade or two, and it's taken me a while to realize just what that means. If I want to make sure that I'm one of those kick-ass old men who are smart and certain and passionate, then I'm going to have to build myself into that right now. One goal at a time, one day at a time, one small act at a time.

We're halfway through the Clarion Write-A-Thon, and I've been fairly remiss with hitting my goals consistently up until now. I'm up to 14,535 words now, 7K short of the 21,500 that I wanted to have by now. I'm still working on my second short story, but "Civil Engineering" should be done today or tomorrow. Still, what gives? Why am I having such consistently slow weeks?

There were a few personal things that made it difficult to be consistent with my writing practice. There are the social engagements, of course, but I can see those coming for the most part and plan around them. I think it mostly has to do with my preferred writing schedule and the incompatibility of that with my life right now.

I do my best work in the mornings, no question. I've always been a morning person; I love getting up early and getting a lot of stuff done before noon. If I were able to set my own schedule, it would probably look something like this -- wake up at 5 AM, meditate, coffee, writing, exercise, shower, breakfast, writing, lunch, then light organizational stuff through the afternoon. Work would become more social through the afternoon, until the evening where I'd hang with friends and/or read. That's the way I would live my life if I won the lottery.

Unfortunately, that just can't happen. I work for a living; I wake up at 6 AM needing to be out the door by 7. I have to meditate, groom, prepare breakfast and lunch before that happens. If I play my cards just right, I have maybe 20 minutes to get some writing in. Work is...work; I take 30 minute lunches so I can go home earlier and try to beat the traffic, so getting some words in there isn't really an option. And once I'm in there's a laundry list of things to be done -- cleaning the burrow, cooking dinner, getting some exercise in, and spending time with my beloved husband. I tend to start turning into a pumpkin at 9 PM; it gets more difficult to concentrate and my willpower is mostly spent.

That was before my ADHD diagnosis, though; with the medication and organizational skills I'll learn in a six-week course, things might be a bit easier. That'll take six weeks though, and the Write-A-Thon will be over by then. For now, it looks like I'll be doing my best to wake up early, prepare for the day as efficiently as possible and get in as much writing as I can in the mornings.

My preferred writing time tends to work much better during the weekends, so I'm finding that I do the bulk of my writing then. It might be that once this is over I'll focus on getting as much work done on the weekends as I can; writing every day just might not be possible for me, and the stress of trying to maintain that schedule would do more harm (as in, causes me stress) than good.

Anyway -- for the next three weeks I'll really need to step it up. The daily goal for the rest of the Write-A-Thon is around 1,700 words, and by gum I'll get them by hook or by crook! With that kind of output, I should be able to finish "Civil Engineering" fairly quickly and move right into "A Stable Love". I've been really itching to get started on my Beast (of the X-Men) fan-fiction as well, sketching out character profiles for Hank, his allies and rogue's gallery, determining the themes and stories I'd really like to play with, seeing where the arc is going to go for the first "year" of "issues".

So that's my plan, folks -- write my ass off through week 4, find a way to prioritize getting my words in over just about everything else in the time I have available. I've raised $380 for the Clarion Workshop so far; thanks so much to the ten people who have donated so far. You are amazing, and I really do appreciate your generosity!

My goal for this week is to write 12,000 words; that'll put me up to 26,500 by this time next week. I would love to have $450 raised for the Clarion Workshop by next Monday as well. "Civil Engineering" will be done with a quick editing pass being done, "A Stable Love" will be much closer to finished, and I'll be doing the preliminary work on Beast: Wild Genius.

To all of my friends coming back from Anthro-Con 2015, welcome back to the real world! I hope the convention was as amazing as it sounded on Twitter and there's no con crud this year. Fellow writers, what projects are you working on this week? I'm always curious about how others manage to juggle their writing practice with the rest of their lives. Any pointers for me?

Learning how to navigate the minefield of work in corporate America has been a fascinating learning process. I'm learning a lot more about how to deal with a wide variety of different personalities with different goals, while still trying to get things done. It's frustrating, confusing, but ultimately I've learned that I'm really interested in it. I try to bring in a Zen mindset by reminding myself that the person I'm speaking with has their own perspective, and they've arrived where they have through a set of circumstances and decisions that make sense to them. If a behavior is baffling or illogical to me, I try to remind myself that it's only because I don't have the information that they do. Even if someone has a bad reason for doing something, it's still a *reason*. Most people try to do the best they can with what they have. You have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Still, there are a lot of times where I find myself digging in my heels on something. I'm a bit of an idealist, which is one of the worst things you can be when you're in a position of working with others to get things done. I get it into my head that there's a certain way things should be, based on my limited perspective and experience, and I'll draw a line in the sand. Once that happens, my coworkers are no longer individuals with their own ideas; they're obstructions between me and my goal. They're not people who have the same desire to be understood that I do. They're deficient because they don't hold the same values that I do. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where a coworker stops being a collaborator and starts being an enemy, but that turning point is a subtle but fundamental shift. That perception inhabits everything you do from that point on.

In the day-to-day business of making sure my job gets done, it's easy for me to get so close to my perspective that it basically overcomes my way of thinking. I'm almost positive that this is something that happens to everyone: you believe a few things that should be fundamental, objectively true, and you're baffled that anyone else could think differently. What's best for the department/company/nation/planet is obvious, so much so that anyone who disagrees must simply not be looking out for the best interests of the collective you're thinking about.

It's a short jump from the personal to the political, here. It's easy to think that our fellow citizens across the aisle must not have America's best interests at heart because, well, how could they? For Republicans, it must seem that liberals just want to bankrupt the country giving everyone free rides. Maybe to them, programs like the ACA (and Medicare, and Social Security before that) only contributes to a culture of entitlement that leads to a lazy, soft-working society. And to folks like me, Republicans seem like heartless assholes who are only concerned about themselves and have no sense of compassion or responsibility to the society we're all engaged in.

I'm perfectly willing to admit the biases I have due to the limits of my perspective and personality. It's difficult to remember just how subjective a lot of my "objective truths" are. I think the one of the basic problems in our society, political and otherwise, is the lack of ability to step outside yourself and remember that the person at cross purposes with you is actually just like you; you have the same goals, but vastly different perspectives on what those goals look like and how to get there. If we could understand what those goals look like to someone else, maybe we could stand a better chance at communicating with them and coming to some sort of compromise that gets us both closer to where we want to be.

I'll be trying to recenter my perspective at work to remember that my coworkers are collaborators, not enemies. Maybe there's a way to make my perspective known and understood, and reach out to make sure I understand theirs, too. Once we know what we're looking at, we can start talking about how to get where we both want to be.

When I was 13 years old, I decided that I wanted to be a UFOlogist. I had discovered the existence of this profession by watching episodes of Sightings every Friday night and reading OMNI Magazine, and I thought it was the most awesome thing to get paid for studying phenomena related to UFO sightings and alien abductions. I had been reading various case files and "non-fiction" books about alien abductions for a year or so, and I knew that's what I wanted to do with my life.

Before that, I had vague designs of being a writer. My mother had an old electric typerwriter that I banged out stories on; one of my very first projects was a sequel to my favorite book, The Wind in the Willows. I'm so glad that we didn't have the Internet back then, or else I'm sure I would have been one of the first people rabidly arguing whether or not someone's fan-fiction was a worthy addition to some communal cannon that had been established.

My obsession with UFOs took a long time to die. But by the time I was 16 I had gotten a hold of All Creatures Great and Small, and a new feverish passion took hold. The heady promise of youth had already begun to fade for me; I went from being a 'gifted and talented' student to a distinctly mediocre one, and that loss of my identity of being "the smartest kid in the room" had yet to be replaced by something else. When I read Herriott's account of rural veterinary medicine, I began to rebuild myself in his image. I wanted to be dedicated to the well-being of animals and people, officially a vet but unofficially a therapist, a friend, this big community organizer. I couldn't believe that you could get paid to do that, either.

That dream died when I took my first biology lab course, and when I discovered how insanely competitive any sort of medical field would be. I interned for an actual vet over the summer, and he turned out to be a Dr. House-type; he had burned his left leg very badly in an accident, dependent on painkillers and snark to get him through the day. When I had to take my dog to him to have her put to sleep, that was the final straw. I knew I couldn't do that. I just didn't have the stomach for it.

So I thought I would be a playwright. I became a double major in Theatre and English, changed my wardrobe from flannel to black everything, painted my fingernails, wore a pentacle necklace. I wanted to be a voice from the wilderness, a conduit for the forest and wild places to enter civilization through art. Then I found out just how extroverted and gregarious you had to be to make it anywhere in the world of theatre; high art has plenty of egos, and if you're not putting on a show all the time it's almost impossible to stand out. The identities I had constructed for myself were crumbling faster and faster; after a couple years in college, I lost my religion, my idea of my sexuality, my family almost simultaneously. It was too much, so I dropped out.

It took several years in Arkansas to even begin rebuilding. I followed a relationship to Fayetteville, and that didn't work out. I tried reconstructing myself again and again, trying on different personalities, flailing around to see who I was. It wasn't until I met Ryan that I found an anchor, learned how to be still and stopped trying to become someone. I learned how to discover who I was, who I had been this whole time.

Tomorrow morning I'll have been on this planet for 33 years. I'm nowhere near who I expected I would be: at first I thought I would be someone brilliant, a multi-hyphenate who excelled at everything he touched. But the problem with folks who have things come easy to them is that they never learn to work at something, so the moment they come up against some resistance they fold because they've never developed stamina. It's something I'm still making up for, even after all this time.

I thought I would be a writer, a scientist, a UFOlogist, a playwright, a veterinarian, a missionary, a monk, a mystic. It turns out I'm just this rabbit. ;) And a husband, to a wonderful man. The pieces of every dream I've ever had still resides within me, repurposed for use with who I've come to be. I'm happy that my life hasn't turned out the way I thought it would. It's been so much better.

Now, I get to apply the lessons of over three decades of living towards the next year, just to see how good I can make it. I know how to take whatever comes, be grateful for what I have, be patient with myself as I continue to discover and refine myself. There's a lot more stamina and strength within me that I can use whenever I need it. And there's so much experience that I can use to be compassionate towards whomever I meet. That's why it's wonderful getting older. You get smarter, wiser, more experienced and comfortable. I still have a long, long way to go in my development, but I'm so happy with the progress I've made and the man who grounds me.

All in all, it's been a pretty great life. I'm really looking forward to seeing what it looks like a year from now.

When I'm not pretending to be a giant rabbit who writes fiction on the Internet, I work at a services company where I deal with customers all day. The nature of our business is such that people often mistakenly believe we're responsible for things that we aren't, so it's not uncommon for me to get calls from an irate stranger demanding that I change something I have no control over.

I would love to be able to say that my meditation and Buddhist practice enables me to respond in a calm and present manner to these calls, but I can't. It's times like these when the lizard brain takes over -- often, I'm confused about why I'm being screamed at, and that makes my chest tighten and my heart beat faster. I'll try to tell the caller why it's not my fault they're in this situation, which if I were thinking clearly I would realize is the wrong tack to take. Then an argument ensues, and all that matters is gaining the upper hand. For me, a 'win' would be getting the caller to drop their accusation of responsibility and go elsewhere. It doesn't matter whether or not they're frustrated or feel like they've been helped. As long as they stop being angry with me, specifically, that's what matters.

When I'm rational, I know that this isn't a personal thing. I'm merely the most convenient face for a problem that someone has, and since I'm on the front line as it were I'll bear the brunt of the negativity for some people. But it's really difficult to remember that as it's happening; that the person repeating "What are YOU going to do about it?" in your ear again and again isn't speaking of a literal 'you'. At that moment, you're a representation of your work place, an entire company given a voice.

I'm not sure if you would have guessed it or not, but I like to avoid conflicts whenever possible. Part of it is I don't like the stress that a conflict brings, but another part of it is the knowledge of my own temper. It's a quick one, and I've learned a while ago to disengage myself from a situation that sparks it -- chances are it'll die down quickly and I can come at it reasonably later. Obviously, this isn't an option when there's someone on the phone with you, refusing to give you space until you resolve a problem that you just can't solve.

But see, this is why you meditate. The feeling that you get on the bench, when you're just breathing, is meant to be carried with you through the rest of your life. If you can remember, all it takes is a few breaths to bring you back to mindfulness, to remember who you are and what you're doing, to take an approach to the situation that's less instinctive and more helpful.

I ended up raising my voice to the caller the last time it happened. He was especially pushy, demanding that something be done and using the time-honored "repeat yourself in a louder voice" to control the conversation. I admit, I was flustered. I took it personally and handled it poorly. At that moment, all of my meditation training went out the window. I played his game, and lost.

If I had taken just a few breaths, I would have realized the truth of the situation. He was painting me as an enemy, an obstacle to a desired outcome, but I'm really not. Instead of allowing myself to be placed into that role I could have side-stepped that relationship entirely. I could have said, "No, I'm a friend, let me help you any way I know how." While I don't have direct control over the situation, I could have come up with a somewhat workable solution with just a little thought. But it's hard to think straight when you're running on adrenaline.

One of the things that I've tried to do is tell a story of myself that runs closer to the person I would like to be. I suppose this is an advanced version of 'faking it until you make it,' but hopefully it will be useful. As I move through my day, I tell myself that I'm a friend to everyone, even the people that would rather not see me. I tell myself that I'm helpful, generous, kind, attentive, compassionate. I construct a myth of myself -- a rabbit who is an Avatar of Comfort, dedicated to putting everyone around him at ease. It doesn't always work, of course -- sometimes I forget myself and then I'm just David, grumpy and harried, who'd rather get back to whatever it was he was doing instead of being patient and helpful. But that's OK. People fail to live up to the myths about them from time to time, but it shouldn't stop them from striving for it.

That's one of the ways I 'access my totem', I suppose. I marry my vague, animist spirituality to my Buddhist practice, so that my idealized self, the picture of myself at enlightenment, is a rabbit that radiates calm and peace. I'm not sure if there's a name for that sort of thing (besides insanity), but it helps, when I remember to let it.

Does anyone else do this? What sort of stories do you tell yourself, about yourself, to encourage you to be a better person?

Today is the last day of my Whole 30 culinary "reset," and it's hard to argue with the results. In the past month I've lost nearly 15 pounds, my stomach no longer resembles a beach-ball, and -- I can't lie about this -- I feel better overall than I've felt in a little while. My energy levels are a bit lower, but they're more consistent, and I wake up feeling more rested in the morning.

But it hasn't been all sunshine and roses. Cooking, while fun, is a fairly large time sink even after I've gotten my act together in the kitchen. There are a lot of foods that I've missed -- even beyond the "This awful, bad-for-you food tastes too good to give up" stuff. Rice, beans, a slice of buttered toast, red wine...these are all things that I've been wishing I could have consistently through the month. Going on the Whole30 'reset' can be a bit of an isolating experience, as well -- I've had to put up with a bit of derision from folks about it, even though I haven't really bought into the principles behind it. It can be frustrating to make a decision to eat better (especially on a drastic program like this) and have people second-guessing you every time it's brought up. It's hard enough to deal with your own brain screaming at you to break the diet, and peer pressure certainly doesn't help.

Most of my friends have been pretty cool about it, though, and by two weeks in I had my "elevator pitch" for it down pat. The Whole30 operates on a simple -- but demanding -- principle; food should provoke healthy psychological and physiological responses, support a healthy gut, and prevent inflaming your digestive tract or suppressing your immune system. That's it. If it only does three of those things, you can't have it. And according to their research, that leaves you with meat, eggs, nuts, fruits, vegetables and a few oils. Dairy, grains, legumes, anything with processed or added sugar and alcohol does not pass this test. So it has to go, for at least thirty days.

It's been a bit of a roller coaster. The first week or two was the most difficult; your body has to adjust to a radically different diet, and then the rest of you has to catch up to the ramifications of your lifestyle choices. Eating out is suddenly far more hassle than simply staying home and cooking for yourself, and that's notably more involved than just popping something into the microwave and letting it go. It's very much a trial by fire -- at least it was for me. And now that it's over I have a new set of tools that I can sharpen moving forward.

I think the best way to tackle this look back would be to look at the positives, negatives, lessons learned and what I'll walk away with. This might be a bit of a long entry, folks.

THE POSITIVES

While you're on the Whole30, they strongly recommend that you don't look at the scale at all. You're supposed to focus on other things, like how you feel and how differently your clothes are fitting, or how your skin is clearing up. In theory, I agree with this -- learning to pay attention to your body is a vital thing if you want to have a good relationship with it. If something you're doing isn't making your body happy, you should learn to recognize the signs and pay attention. I think Whole30 aims to teach people to do this by positive reinforcement. See how much more energy you have? See how much better you're sleeping? Notice how your skin looks better? So forth and so on.

And I have to admit, by that measure this reset was a success. I can't boast more energy, but my energy levels are more consistent. I'm sleeping better in general, and when I wake up it requires far less time to get me up and running. A lot of the oily skin that I had on my forehead and nose has diminished, and my digestive tract has gotten a lot calmer. Before the Whole30, my stomach was bloated, I had pretty strong irritation in my bowels, I was constipated. For the most part, that's cleared up.

It's also worth noting that I lost 15 pounds in one month. That kind of weight loss is insane (and probably not healthy, but that's another story). I've spent the past few years with my weight creeping ever-upward, trying to get back to 170 - 175. I've counted calories, I've tried weight training and cardio, and nothing's worked. The Whole30 produced really surprising results that I can't deny. It's amazing to me that this one thing worked when nothing else did.

Beyond the physical, Whole30 forces you into a lifestyle change that I think is very beneficial. The program encourages you to know exactly what you're eating, and really pushes you to ask questions you wouldn't even think about otherwise. Since meat is such a vital part of the Whole30 diet, a lot of effort goes towards training you to make sure it's quality. Ideally, you should be eating meat from locally-sourced, humanely-raised animals. Antibiotics and additives are discouraged, and just trying to cut out those two things takes so much of what's on store shelves off the table. By hunting for the best meat you can find, you start to develop an eye for what's acceptable and what's not. It teaches you a totally different way to shop for food, and ties neatly into becoming a "locavore".

A brief aside -- being a locavore is something I highly encourage. It's something that you don't have to be a big hipster about, and you can do it in stages on your own pace. Find out about your local meat and dairy sources. Go to a farmer's market to see what's in season, what you can buy fresh from a farm. By choosing foods that are cultivated nearby, you're cutting down on a lot of the problems with an extensive, far-reaching supply chain. It also really gives you a sense of place; you become knowledgeable about what does well here, what's in season when, ties you to the cycle of the seasons and the personality of the land around you. Something as basic as food can be this gateway for connection to the world you live in, which is a really awesome thing.

Generally, you're going to be forced to buy your meat, fruit and vegetables with as little processing as possible. You end up going to a very specific zone of your store, and you quickly learn that most of it is useless for your purposes. At our neighborhood supermarket, we ended up spending all of our time in produce and the deli. Then we brought it home to cook, because trying to throw together a dish with a little bit of taste is way better than eating ingredients.

And that brings me to the next perk of Whole30: learning to make peace with your kitchen. Ryan and I tend to live more like bachelors than a truly domesticated couple. The kitchen holds the appliances that we use to make quick meals: the microwave, the toaster, the coffee pot. Prepackaged food that requires the use of our oven or stove was pretty much our idea of cooking in. Anything that took much more effort than that was hopelessly complicated. I exaggerate -- or do I? -- slightly. We weren't big cookers, and a month later, I have to say we still aren't. But we're a bit more savvy than we were before Whole30.

What's more, I discovered that I liked to cook. I like to follow recipes, that magic ritual where you put a bunch of things together in the right amount, at the right time, to create something wonderful. When you pull off something relatively complicated or involved, or when you do something that you haven't been able to manage yet for the first time (like, for example, cooking a perfect over-easy egg in an iron skillet), it makes you feel a bit like a wizard. Cooking is the closest I'm going to come to spellcasting, and as whimsical as that sounds the effect and reward is immediate and tangible. You create something delicious that you (or better yet, others) can appreciate.

The whole experience -- from sourcing my ingredients to cooking it to eating it -- was vastly different from the way I normally eat. I never really thought much about my food. It just comes from "somewhere", and ends up on my plate to scratch a particular itch. Now that I've spent a month really studying it, looking at where my food comes from and thinking about how my body reacts to it, I'm glad to feel more connected and invested in the things I eat. I still love food, and all kinds of food -- I'm never going to give up fried chicken, or waffles, or cheeseburgers -- but that love feels more mature, more well-rounded, more complex because of the knowledge I've gained. And that means a lot to me.

THE NEGATIVES

The reason I think we, as a society, have the diet we do is because it's cheap and fast. I forget who came up with this model, or where I heard it from first, but almost any commodity you can buy will have three costs: a material one (cheap vs. expensive), a temporal one (fast vs. slow) and a qualitative one (healthy vs. unhealthy). Obviously, what's best is something that's cheap, fast and healthy -- it's reasonably nutritious, doesn't take a lot of time to prepare or consume, and doesn't cost a lot. So much of our diet industry is based around chasing that holy grail. It's why we have Power Bars and protein supplements, Slim-Fast and pre-packaged salads. We want to eat food that has it all. But something cheap, fast and healthy probably isn't going to taste very good. But we don't have time or money to spare, so we sacrifice quality to eat food we like. At least it's cheap and fast!

In order to make food that tastes good, you're going to have to pony up for it somehow. It's either going to be expensive (think of the pre-packaged stuff you get at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods), take a lot of time to make (think of cooking your own healthy version of, well, anything) or it's not going to be good for you (think of any fast-food restaurant). Sometimes you'll have to pay in time AND money, and that's basically what Whole30 forces you to do.

Getting locally-sourced, humanely-raised meat takes time; you have to research what sort of conditions are important to you (Is it important for the animal to be free-range? What about no antibiotics? What about vegetarian-fed?), then you have to find sources that match those criteria, then you have to find out where the product is being sold. When you do find it, it's probably going to cost a lot. Our food production system is geared towards using factory farming methods, and anyone stepping out of that system will need to pay money to do it. In the end, you have to put your money where your mouth is and pay for your beliefs.

I don't think this is necessarily a negative. But it is something that impacted my life over the last 30 days, quite a bit. Ryan and I, as I said before, aren't big cookers -- we both have fairly busy lives and we sacrificed healthy eating for what was cheap, fast and available up until now. Whole30 puts quality above everything else, so it's difficult to do if you're not willing to put in the time and/or pay up the money for it.

My grocery bill shot up in February QUITE a bit, and most of my evenings were spent preparing food -- either for dinner that night or for breakfast and lunch the next day. As much as I appreciate discovering a love of cooking, other priorities were shoved aside to make room for this. While I'm glad I had the experience of living with an uncompromising set of ideals for thirty days, I miss having the time to focus on writing.

Whole30 itself is also ridiculously prohibitive, and while their philosophy is sound regarding why they demand those restrictions, it's actually really freaking difficult to live that philosophy out 'in the wild' without becoming kind of a fanatic about it. Going out to eat is a bit of a nightmare; even if you have a dish that looks 'safe', you have to ask what the chicken or steak is cooked in, whether that has any added sugar or butter, or ask for croutons or cheese to be taken out of your salad. If you don't have friends who are doing it with you, it can be kind of isolating. Nobody wants to be the guy with the ridiculously specific order at the table, but you have to in order to live up to Whole30's uncompromising philosophy.

Even with the drastic increase in money and time spent making sure our diet complied with the Whole30, we tended to rely on a few simple staples for breakfast and lunch. As a result, I'm burned out on turkey patties and canned tuna. It'll take me at least a year to get my enjoyment back for either of those! We didn't manage to get to specialty stores for ghee or clarified butter (two of the only oils/fats approved for cooking), so we went through a ton of olive oil.

The bottom line: the Whole30 is a fairly advanced-level diet, which makes it almost impossible to follow for someone who doesn't really know their way around a kitchen. A couple of friends who were doing it with us fared far better, but they like to cook and have quite a few years of experience on me. In fact, all of the best Whole30 meals I had during the month were cooked by other people; without them, it would have been a much blander experience.

So, despite the massive (for me) time and financial commitments to Whole30, it still didn't feel like enough to really fall into this alternate lifestyle. That was frustrating, but changes like that don't happen overnight. I can't imagine someone even busier than I am (or in a place that isn't quite as good with fresh produce and alternatively-sourced meats) could manage it. You can't do the Whole30 well if you're picky about your food, don't have a lot of time to devote to it, or financially strapped. And these are people who most often sacrifice healthy eating for cheap, fast food.

SO WHAT NOW?

Now that this whole experiment is over, I have to admit I'm looking forward to going back to 'normal' life. I'm not planning to fall directly back into my bad eating habits, but I now know that there's a place for carbs and starches on my plate. It's not nearly as large a place as it once was, but I'm glad to give it a little room.

Despite all of my griping about how time-consuming cooking was, I'm glad that I developed a habit of making meals in the kitchen and that's something I really want to do. With time and practice, I'll become more efficient with it so that there's room to cook healthy, fast meals and still have time to do other things. The next month or so will be finding that balance between cheap, fast and healthy -- I know that there's no magic bullet that will offer all three options, but surely I can come up with a "payment system" that I'm happy with.

From now on, I'll probably be cutting down on my carb and dairy intake. I'm lactose-intolerant, so I shouldn't be having nearly as much dairy as I do, and I have to admit I'm a bit of a believer in a lower-carb diet at this point. I mean, the results speak for themselves. What I do have will be of better quality and more nutritionally sound than before; if I'm going through the trouble to have cheese or rice, it had better do more than just taste good.

I'm still planning to indulge in things that are bad for me -- I love food far too much not to. But the difference here is that I'm choosing it for the sheer pleasure, not feeding a dependency on sugar or caffeine. For now, I can eat a cookie or have a cup of coffee and then...not have one for a while, and be fine. I don't want to give that up. When I do indulge, it won't be for crap. I don't have time or health to waste on unhealthy food that's also disappointing. The cheesecakes will be fine, and lo, the caramel shall be like spun gold.

All in all, it's difficult to call the Whole30 'cleanse' anything but a success right now. I lost weight, I feel better, reconnected with my food in a really awesome way and took baby steps towards having a small amount of culinary skill. Time will tell if I'll keep the progress I've made, but for now I feel pretty good about what I've done, and what I CAN do.

Now excuse me while I tear open this box of cookies.

One of the things I learned last month is that my writing practice hasn't developed enough that I can simply write through unusual circumstances. I'll need to plan around stretches of time where I know I'll have company or will need to travel. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll never learn to write when there's something else going on; it just means that I can't count on it right now.

Thankfully, there'll be fewer 'interruptions' of that nature this month. We've got the honor of having our last bit of Further Confusion 2013 company coming later this week, and Ryan and I will be cooking for each other and watching a movie for Valentine's Day. But beyond that, things should finally start to settle down.

I only managed to complete one short story last month, so even though this is a shorter month I'm going to try for completing three of them. I've already started short story #2 (The Tough Fit), and hopefully I can knock that out in a few more days. The other short story I was using to test my commission model has been moved to this month as well, and once I'm done with #2, I'll get in touch with my friend to see what he would like to do. Finally, I'd like to get an earlier jump on my short story for Megamorphics, so short story #4 will be the third part of "The Bite" for that

In addition to those short stories, I'll definitely be trying to update my notes from the writing desk three times a week -- one AFI top 100 movie review, one Thursday Prompt short fiction, and one "general" post about writing, reading, spirituality, or life. I'm curious about which entries people find the most interesting, actually -- is there anything you'd like to see me writing more about here? Ask, and you shall receive!

Finally, I'll be running my Pathfinder game once or twice this month, and that will take a certain measure of preparation. I have a great bunch of guys playing with me, and they demand me to bring my A game. I haven't spoken much about that, but it's hard to articulate the naked fear I have before every game and the relief and elation over what they're doing afterwards.

So that's that. The plan is: short stories #2 - #4 by the end of the month, the Writing Desk updated three times a week, and my Pathfinder game twice this month. It'll definitely be a full month and a good stretch to pull it off, but it's less ambitious than January. Wish me luck, folks; I'm going in.

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jakebe

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Page Summary

Kwanzaa 2015: Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
Kwanzaa 2015: Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)
(Personal) Choices
(Personal) Going Back to Go Forward
My Writing Guide to November 2015
Rainfurrest 2015 Wrap-Up
A Look Into The Future
When I Talk About Bigotry
The Anxious Rabbit
My 35th Year
The Clarion Write-A-Thon: Week 4
The Urge to Fundamentalism
33
Combatting Mindlessness with Personal Myth
30 Days of Plants and Animals
February 2013 - The Plan

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The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

A collection of words and fluff

Entries tagged with self-reflection

Kwanzaa 2015: Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)

Kwanzaa 2015: Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)

(Personal) Choices

(Personal) Going Back to Go Forward

My Writing Guide to November 2015

Rainfurrest 2015 Wrap-Up

A Look Into The Future

When I Talk About Bigotry

The Anxious Rabbit

My 35th Year

The Clarion Write-A-Thon: Week 4

The Urge to Fundamentalism

33

Combatting Mindlessness with Personal Myth

30 Days of Plants and Animals

February 2013 - The Plan