How to Find Serenity
When I was newly sober, a long time ago, I did a bunch of stupid things. I went on a date with a guy who plied me with coffee in his condo in Jersey City until I actually overdosed on caffeine and had an anxiety attack that sent me into the street having a panic attack like I’d not experienced since my sister had died. I called my sponsor and she asked me a question, “How much coffee have you had?” My answer, ”Too much.” And, “Why are you dating?” which was an important question as I’d recently left a physically and mentally abusive marriage and ten minutes into any date, no matter how much I liked the guy, his face morphed into my ex-husband’s and I frequently fled after ordering something I didn’t really want or like or need. I felt like I had to do something to justify my right to be alive.
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My Warrior Mother
Women’s History Month celebrates the vital role of women in America. This year the focus is on the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. My mother was born into a country where suffrage was universal, but she was also born into a nation filled with misogyny, racism, and fear of anything connected with the unknown. And boy, was she the unknown. A graduate of Harvard Design School with colleagues who ended up with work designing the skyline of cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago, she worked in a firm with men who saw this long-legged beauty and felt it appropriate to ask her to make the coffee and on several occasions made remarks and physical advances that in our current climate would be regarded as assault. Rather than complain about these incidents, she preferred to focus on the positive, her family, her friends, her limitless curiosity, her belief that all human beings deserved to be treated equally.
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Keep Moving
“A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” —Alvy Singer, Annie Hall, Woody Allen. Yes, Woody Allen has made his mistakes, but his characters often say things in his movies that stay with me forever. Or, in the case of the poorly reviewed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), the sight of a rather fetching sheep wearing fancy lingerie and Gene Wilder drinking Woolite after that sheep leaves him. Anyway, let’s talk about the shark otherwise known as a creative project that has risk attached, a novel, a film script, a poem, an unsolicited article. This shark is going to need to keep moving or it will not survive—in fact, it may not survive anyway—or maybe you are the shark. Anyway, keep moving.
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