Angela Kelsey

Tell the Story

Category Archive: Stories

  1. Love Yourself So Matcha!

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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. Grey Area

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    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.

     

  6. A Pinch of Salt

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    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.

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    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.

     

     

     

  7. Life is Long

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    I repeat the mantra “lifeisshort lifeisshort lifeisshort.” Sometimes I add “getbusy hurryup domore lifeisshort ticktock.” I check an online calculator again—254 days until my 50th birthday.

    Lifeisshort, I chant as I rush from my office to the Women of Tomorrow event before heading back to the office again. I talk with a group of high school girls about dating violence.  I want to make a difference in their lives. Lifeisshort lifeisshort.

    I tell my story of being in an abusive relationship, and the girls share theirs. One girl feels pressure to continue her relationship with her controlling boyfriend, and one of the other women in the room says, “Girls, you can take your time to find the right relationship, the right career, the right life. It may not seem like it now, but life is long.”

    “Life is long”? Hmmm. Maybe for 16-year-olds. I am nearly 50.

    Two days later, I sit at my dining room table, coffee within easy reach, Sunday’s New York Times spread out in front of me. Frank Bruni’s op-ed about maturity and Peyton Manning, the Denver Broncos’ 37-year-old quarterback, is a celebration of experience: “With a bit of age has come a better grip on the fact that a game, like a life, is long.  Stay calm. Hang in. Wait for the inevitable break. Trust your training.”

    Now we know that the inevitable break never came for Manning on Sunday night, but I remember  Bruni’s column. “A game, like a life, is long.”

    I google “Frank Bruni age” and smile. Of course. He’s 49 and he’ll turn 50 fourteen days after I do. 268 to go, Frank. Do you really think lifeislong?

    The next day I read, as I do most days, Andrew Sullivan’s Dish blog, which linked to a story about Janet Yellen, who, at 67, has just become the Chairwoman? Chairman? Chair? of the Federal Reserve.  “Life is long,” says the article, which continues, “It’s a liberating notion, really, to think that you don’t have to accomplish everything in your life – or ‘have it all’ – simultaneously; that leaning back during one life stage doesn’t preclude leaning in later.”

    I haven’t had it all, at least not in any conventional sense or in any conventional order, but I notice that phrase again. Lifeislong. And Janet Yellen, at the top of her game, the beginning of the peak of her professional life, at 67, inspires.

    Okay, if Anyone is coordinating this onslaught of “lifeislong,” I’m listening. I’m thinking.

    But maybe this is mere coincidence; maybe everyone is saying “lifeislong” now and I’m just noticing. Is this the new YouOnlyLiveOnce?

    I google again. The search leads me not to urbandictionary.com but to this quote from a Chris Rock movie, I Think I Love My Wife: “You know, some people say life is short and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment and that you have to live each day like it’s your last. Bullshit. Life is long. You’re probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you’re gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years.”

    And then I click on stanza V of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

    Between the conception

    And the creation

    Between the emotion

    And the response

    Falls the Shadow

                                    Life is very long

    Between the desire

    And the spasm

    Between the potency

    And the existence

    Between the essence

    And the descent

    Falls the Shadow

    So. A woman advises girls. A man praises  Manning’s long game. Janet Yellen has it all, in her own time. Chris Rock calls “bullshit.” I shake my head at  the beauty of Eliot’s words. I pay attention.

    Lifeislong invites exploration, slowing down, mixing in at least a  little rest and reflection with the urgent drumbeat of “getbusy hurryup domore lifeisshort ticktock.”

    Over the next 254 days, I’ll write a series of 50 posts. 50 posts before 50. They’ll be less “lifeisshort” bucket list and more “lifeislong” what’s next?

    I hope to have some guest posts, too, maybe even 50 of them, from women who have already looked 50 in the eye, as well as women who still look forward to it 500, 1000, 2000  or more days from now.

    Is life short or long? I don’t know yet. I hope to have a better idea by my birthday.

    What do you think?

     

     

  8. Feminist

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    Things get weird pretty quickly when your search term on a stock photo site is “feminist.” Women with ropes, women with boxing gloves, women with their stiletto’d feet on the throats of men. Try it and see. Here’s a strange one. What does it mean?

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    To me the word has meant something simple and basic: pro woman. Women can or cannot be feminists. Men have the same options.

    I am a feminist; I happily take the label.

    When the pop singer Katy Perry said last year that she wasn’t a feminist, she elicited reactions ranging from “Katy Perry is an idiot” to “maybe if feminists didn’t think Katy Perry was an idiot she would be more likely to identify as one.”

    I rely on the recommendations of Mr. Z (who calls himself a feminist, by the way) to read a tiny fraction of the articles in the issues of The New Yorker that pile up on the coffee table. A couple of days ago, he suggested that I read an article by Susan Faludi about Shulamith Firestone.  I recommend that you read it, too.

    Firestone’s name is familiar to me, but by the time I was reading feminist theory in the 1990s, she and other “second-wave” feminists (Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, for example), no matter how influential, were already sort of “vintage.” I didn’t know her ideas and I didn’t know her story.

    Firestone’s ideas are still radical and fresh and needed forty years after she first wrote them.

    Firestone’s story is tragic and compelling and all too familiar.

    If more women and men knew about the feminists on whose shoulders we climb, would more people be honored and humbled to share their label, identify as members of their tribe?

    I think so.

  9. Marathon

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    Where does one begin to write about what happened in Boston yesterday?

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    Should I even try? Maybe it’s better to stay silent.

    This morning I read this post by Caitlin at Fit and Feminist and this one by Susan Orlean at the New Yorker.

    Yes, of course. I know this. The only way for me to write about this is to write what I know. Tell my stories.

    I ran  Grandma’s Marathon in 2001.

    I spent most of the 26.2 miles by myself, and at my five-hours-plus marathon pace, my place was toward the back of the pack.  But the crowds along Lake Superior were still there for me.

    Contrary to what I was experiencing at home at the time, I was lifted up by support and exuberance and, well, the  love of complete strangers.

    Somewhere around the 25-mile point, a woman spectator offered me a piece of orange jelly candy. I gratefully accepted it, and with that slice of sugar for fuel, I went on to cross the finish line.

    I cried this morning when I thought of the spectators in Boston yesterday, injured in body and spirit.

    The marathon depends not only on the runners, but also on the spectators, there to cheer people they loved and people they would never meet.

    I probably will never qualify to run in the Boston Marathon, but someday I will go to watch and cheer. And I will take orange jelly candy.

     

  10. Transformations

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    I met Alana Sheeren via my friend Jeanne, that great connector, and for the past couple of years I’ve followed Alana on her blog and social media.

    She’s doing a series of interviews called “Transformation Talk.” Here’s what she writes about them:

    Every Thursday for a year, starting in September 2012, I’ll post an interview with someone who is a force for good in the world. These men and women have either deepened their passion or found their calling after experiencing a loss, trauma or diagnosis

    I want to broaden the conversation around grief and its transformative power. My hope is that in their words you’ll find echoes of your story. In their inspired actions, you’ll see yourself and your immense possibility.

    About a week ago, I had the pleasure of being the “someone” she interviewed. Here is our conversation.

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    I realized this morning that today is April 11, a day that for me has become a day of unexpected transformations.

    April 11, 2007 was the day my ex-husband was arrested. April 11, 2011 was the day I gave my first public talk to a group. And now April 11, 2013, through no foresight or planning on my part, is the day of my first  interview.

    I really appreciate the work Alana is doing with respect to grief and loss and their transformative power. Thank you, Alana, for being part of my ongoing transformation.