Angela Kelsey

Author Archives: Angela Kelsey

1. Love Yourself So Matcha!

   May 10, 2018 11:31 am Comments Off on Love Yourself So Matcha!

   

   Maybe you’re a biological mother or an adoptive mother or a step-mother or a mother to people you work with or for. Maybe you play the role of mother to animals or a business or your parents.

   Regardless of the way you mother, I hope these words that I shared with my step-daughter will help you during this Mother’s Day week to remember to love yourself as well as others. Other women, from my mother to Jen Louden and Bridget Pilloud, shared some of them with me, and I’m passing them on.

   • “Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future; therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important, it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.”– John O’Donohue, Anam Cara. This “kindness of rhythm” is probably my big overarching goal right now–all of the rest of the thoughts below should be in service not only to getting things done, but more importantly, to the goal of being kind to myself and respecting my own very personal rhythm and speed. If I get things done by beating myself up, that really defeats the whole purpose.

    

   • I am not Mary Poppins, as much as I might like to be. I cannot solve every problem anyone might have. My purse is not infinitely big.

    

   • Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. A gym lesson that applies everywhere–nothing happens faster because I rush and get rattled.

    

   • Just say no. Don’t let other people set your priorities (which of course means you have to get clear in your own mind about what your priorities are but remember that they are yours to set).

    

   • Routine is key. For you all this may be different (as in, you may have to do your sanity-essential routines late at night, whereas I do them early in the morning) but I wake up early enough to do the things that are most important to the overall sanity of the day: meditate, journal, work on book, exercise. If occasionally I only have a short time for each of these, I try to scale them all down. 5 minutes of meditation, 5 minutes of journaling, 5 minutes of work on book, 5 minutes of stretching. Doing these in the morning before I go to work means that no matter how many interruptions I have, the things most important to me, the things that really no one on the planet but me cares whether I do, will actually get done before other people start pulling at my time and energy.

    

   • Lists are also key. I don’t know if you have the energy to explore anything new right now, but for quite a while I’ve been “bullet journaling,” which means to me that I keep all my lists, my calendar, my journal, pretty much everything, in one notebook, and I always keep it with me. When I feel that paralysis of overwhelm that you described last night, I look at my list and just pick something, just one next thing that will give me progress toward one of the things that’s causing stress and needs to get done. I also use list making to clear my mind of what I worry I will forget. Put it on the list, and forget it while you do what’s really important right now. If it’s not worth writing down, it’s either not worth doing at all or can be done in less time than it takes to write it down, in which case I just do it.

    

   • Resist the tyranny of the urgent. This is easier for me since “urgent” rarely involves anyone’s safety or health. But sometimes I find that urgent things, especially other peoples’ urgent things, can take up the whole day and despite my feeling of complete depletion, I haven’t gotten anything done that’s important to me. Make the distinction between urgent and important.

    

   • Be lazy/efficient. This is small, but I try to never walk from Place A to Place B, at home or office, without something in my hand(s) that needs to be moved from A to B. I let things stack up until I have to go from A to B for more than one reason.

    

   • Keep clear surfaces. I am a little bit of a fanatic about this, but visual clutter makes it really difficult for me to sort out what needs to be done, what needs to go with me when I leave, what is just sitting around, what is mine, what needs to be thrown away. I have “staging areas” at home and at work that are always clear, except for what needs to be taken with me when I leave, or what needs to be done imminently. When I have too much clutter, sometimes the only next right thing is to take a moment and clean it up. Otherwise I can’t function, can’t see the forest for the trees, can’t find my bullet journal ;).

    

   • Back to the beginning: be kind to yourself. I find that I am most grouchy and resentful when I do not give myself kindness and space, when I feel like I’ve been running around in other peoples’ urgent matters, not keeping my routines and practices, not remembering what is really important to me.

2. What I Learned Before, During, and After Hurricane Irma

   September 25, 2017 10:00 am Comments Off on What I Learned Before, During, and After Hurricane Irma

   

   My stuff that matters a lot to me fits in a small carry-on.

   My stuff that matters a little less to me fits in a small car.

   Electricity and air conditioning are luxurious necessities.

   Order is calming.

   Waiting is hard.

   My sister is brave.

   Afternoon bourbon is helpful.

   Ribs can be cooked on Sterno.

   No one wants to leave home, even when a Category 5 storm is coming, even when there is no electricity.

   Little kindnesses like cleaning-out-my-freezer casserole shared with a neighbor are appreciated more than usual.

   Imminently restored electricity makes a woman want to hug a lineman from Indiana.

   Adrenaline crash will kick your ass.

   From Mary Oliver’s Upstream:  “All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.”

3. One Story

   August 28, 2017 6:09 am Comments Off on One Story

   Sarah Payne is the exhausted writing teacher in Elizabeth Strout’s novel My Name Is Lucy Barton.

   Strout’s narrator says, “…recording this now I think of something Sarah Payne had said at the writing class in Arizona.  ‘You will have only one story,’ she had said. ‘You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.'”

   What is the one story you will always be telling?

    

4. Reading Magic and Loss

   July 30, 2017 4:17 pm Comments Off on Reading Magic and Loss

   Over the past few years, I’ve read fewer books than ever before, and of those books, even less fiction.

   I’ve said that the internet has melted my brain, wrecked my attention span. Or maybe the problem is my 50-something vision, or my glasses, or the quality of the light by my bed.

   I listen to podcasts while walking Sadie and getting ready for work and washing dishes; I read everything from news to email to long articles to social media to forums to product reviews on the internet from waking to sleeping, on my desktop, laptop, and phone.

   I listen to audio books on long drives; the music that calls me is still the music with lyrics I care about.

   There is no shortage of words in my life; only a shortage of (the reading of) books.

   But still rising from all those words is a longing to be immersed in another person’s thought processes, as well as the ability to make notes and reread, that comes a weekend with a physical book. And I was determined to finish reading a book.

   On the top of my stack was Magic and Loss by Virginia Heffernan. I’d heard her interviewed on Dan Harris’s 10% Happier podcast and I was intrigued by her story and the possibility that the internet is “among humankind’s great masterpieces,” as the blurb on the back of the book suggests.

   Part philosophical deep dive, part history, part memoir, Magic and Loss touches on many of my preoccupations: technology (and the way it’s changing my brain every day), one person’s story, religion, writing and story telling.

   And Heffernan wouldn’t judge my 2017 reading habits: As she says, “Codices, scrolls, leisure, work, epic poetry, tweets: let’s call it all real reading.”

5. The Abuser’s Knack

   July 23, 2017 4:09 pm Comments Off on The Abuser’s Knack

   Batterers and abusers have an uncanny knack for sizing up others’ vulnerabilities–one of the reasons we stay too long is that they underscore doubts that are already in our own heads. The most powerful ones, those most ready for the abuser’s exploitation, are the ones we worry about with private shame.

   A little insecurity about your nose? Let’s talk about plastic surgery. Your thighs? Can you hear the “thunder”?

   Since childhood, my vulnerable spot has been my body image (today it is less tender, but still not the bulletproof vest I’d like it to be).

   On my second date with Lee, he made a negative comment about a friend’s wife’s weight. I should have argued in defense of the other woman, but instead I cringed inwardly–did he know that I worried about my weight nearly all the time?

   We were off, and eventually my weight becoming his go-too topic for verbal abuse.

   It took me a long time to realize that only I have the right to decide what I should eat and weigh and wear. No one else. So simple. And easier said than done.

   If you meet someone who seems to want to exploit what you worry about, whatever it might be, rather than support you through it, I recommend that you show that person the door.

   Knowing that you’re not alone, that you’re not the only person who has experienced exploitation and abuse, will help. Knowing that others have survived trauma and come out the other side, will help.

   Read Hunger by Roxane Gay, or listen to the audiobook because Gay is a wonderful narrator. Whatever the trauma you’ve experienced, her story–the violence, the weight gained and lost and gained–will move you.  She writes,

   But I am a lucky girl. I think most of my sad stories are behind me. there are things I will no longer tolerate. Being alone sucks, but I would rather be alone than be with someone who makes me feel that terrible. I am realizing I am not worthless. Knowing that feels good. My sad stories will always be there. I am going to keep telling them even though I hate having the stories to tell. These sad stories will always weigh on me, though that burden lessens the more I realize who I am and what I am worth.

   You’re worth far, far more than any abuser wants you think.

    

    

    

6. And here we are.

   July 17, 2017 10:40 am Comments Off on And here we are.

   

   I started blogging right after President Obama’s inauguration, participating in optimism and a sense of community here and in my little corner of the early days of Twitter. Vice President Biden championed victims of domestic violence and sexual assault and the Violence Against Women Act was strong and enforced.

   But life–my life, your life, the life of the country–goes on, gets in the way, changes everything. And here we are.

   My brother-in-law’s cancer fight over; my sister’s grief is a little bit less fresh.

   Mr. Z and the dogs and I have moved house and reshuffled priorities.

   My book  is still in revision. I’m back to it now.

   It’s time for me to start talking again, with anyone who will listen.

    

    

7. Grey Area

   July 6, 2017 9:26 am Comments Off on Grey Area

   

   Life is easier, in some ways, when things are neatly divided into them/us, bad/good, never/always boxes.

   When those boxes crumble, when the lines between certainties blur, our assumptions and givens shake. Things get trickier and more interesting.

   A few box-crumbling events have happened in my world over the past few years:

   • a friend’s husband was accused of molesting their granddaughter. I believe that he did not do it.
   • another friend was attacked in her home and brutally beaten. She found her way to deep forgiveness.
   • a trusted employee was arrested for domestic violence. I decided to pay for his bail.

   In an either/or world, I believe in accusers/victims no matter what; I want my friend’s attacker to go to prison for as long as the law allows; I draw a hard line and fire the batterer.

   In the grey zone, I can be open to the possibilities of believing in the accused, marveling at forgiveness, and hoping for the batterer’s change.

   My bias remains toward accusers and victims. I believe there is no justification, ever, for emotional or physical violence and also that it is very, very difficult to stop learned behaviors like battering.

   Living a little bit more in the grey helps me better understand my own story. Living in the grey is expansive.  Challenging my assumptions makes my ultimate conclusions–or what will be my interim conclusions–more nuanced, more complex, more allowing of further refined understanding.

   Living in the grey allows the possibility of telling and hearing all the stories.

    

8. A Pinch of Salt

   January 13, 2015 4:35 am Comments Off on A Pinch of Salt

   When Mr. Z. and I were in Paris last month, our hosts, the Scotts, took us to one of their favorite restaurants, Chez Denise. Even though my own lunch was delicious and satisfying, I openly coveted the os á moelle that the French couple next to us ordered.  My companions, veterans of French food and committed to their low-fat diet, declined to order it with me, Mr. Z wasn’t game, and I wasn’t quite ready to commit to eating a plate of roasted beef marrow bones by myself.

   When the woman caught me watching her prepare her next bite–scooping marrow out of the bone and spreading it onto grilled bread with a butter knife, then sprinkling it with salt from a bowl with her fingers–she gestured that she would be happy to share.  Our friends  accepted in French on my behalf, and we watched as she made me a bone marrow toast. I gratefully took the toast from her hand and ate it all. She would have continued to feed me from her plate if I had not been too full already.

   

   I remember that lunch as my favorite meal of the trip not because of the bone marrow’s rich, buttery deliciousness (and its benefits), but because of the unexpected intimacy of taking food from a stranger’s plate and hand. 

   Where were the rubber gloves, the hand sanitizer, the caution and fear, the reminders of the woman’s otherness and separation and the potential danger of her body? Erased as I accepted her offer and ate her food.

   When I think about the terror attacks at the Charlie Hebdo office and Kosher market last week, and I see the pictures of people holding the “Je Suis Charlie” and “Je Suis Juif” signs and posting under those hashtags on social media, I remember the woman in the restaurant, and her willingness to share and my willingness to take and eat her food, and I think of the ways “Je Suis” the Parisian woman. I feel warm solidarity with the people of the world, standing up and speaking out against violence and fear.

   But at the same time that I say to myself, yes, Je Suis Parisians,  Je Suis Charlie and Je Suis Juif, I have to acknowledge that (more subtly and without obvious violence–I add disclaimers to be able to bear to write this–see below) I also must say Je Suis the silent, and  Je Suis the terrorists, and Je Suis the fearful censors of public speech and private thought, and on and on and on.

   I wish I could say or write “Not Afraid” with honest confidence, but I am frequently afraid–of offending, of overstepping, of being factually or morally or (most ridiculously) socially “wrong.” I censor my words and even thoughts every day. I could say that “no one dies” as a result of my desire to censor, but how do I know? What if my failure to speak out about, say, domestic violence, does in fact indirectly lead to someone’s death?

   Maybe saying  “Je Suis” about each other also requires saying “Je Suis” about the other. Sharing responsibility as well as food, blame as well as credit. Speaking out, using the space created by satirists like the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo (whose work often makes me cringe) to tell the truth of our own lives.

    

    

    

9. Pet and Women Safety Act

   October 8, 2014 3:36 pm Comments Off on Pet and Women Safety Act

   When you live with an abusive partner, it’s hard to imagine leaving your pets with him if you move out, even temporarily.

   Congresswomen Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Katherine M. Clark (D-MA) have cosponsored The Pet and Women Safety Act.

   Here’s Ros-Lehtinin with her office dog, Maya.

   

10. Talk, talk

    September 23, 2014 10:40 am Comments Off on Talk, talk

    

    The Ray Rice “story” and (thanks in part to the NFL’s clumsy, clueless handling of its role) the media’s continued coverage of it is strange in a “wow” kind of way: people are talking about a sometimes taboo subject that I raise whenever I can.

    Sometimes talk is only gossip, or herd mentality, or meaningless Facebook likes and shares and Twitter hashtag frenzy.

    But talk where there used to be silence can lead to real change: according to Mary Riedel, President and CEO of Women in Distress, “In the week following the release of the video showing Ray Rice striking his then-fiancee Janay Palmer, calls to the Women in Distress 24-hour crisis line increased by 60%.” 60%!

    Why?

    Maybe some of the #whyIstayed reasons are shifted by the national conversation. Maybe women are calling crisis lines because they are reassured that the abuse they’re experiencing is not okay. Or that they will be believed. Maybe their friends and family are more supportive after seeing the video.

    Let’s keep talking about this long after the gossip machine moves on. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. We have a perfect opportunity for more awareness, more help, and less abuse.