Tag: loneliness

Focus On What You Can Do

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Being a new mom is suddenly, urgently grounding.

It’s hard to leave the house because, well, there’s a baby right there. He needs me. Unless I get a babysitter, daycare, or my husband is home, I’m here, and it’s me and the baby.

This makes so many things infinitely harder. Leaving the house? That’s pretty difficult to do with a brand new baby. Exercising? Hard to do solo, especially when the kid is too young to hold his head up, so we can’t do a jog together yet. Nevermind the fact that leaving the house to go exercising is far less appealing than, say, eating a pint of ice cream. For breakfast.

(This is a real craving I’ve had, and I just dissected this craving with The Cravings Whisperer Alex Jamieson on her podcast, and she says it’s totally okay as a new mom for me to eat a pint of ice cream daily. I’m going with it.)

But back to the present: there is a real baby in the house, and he’s made it far more challenging to get things done.

There is a temptation to focus on all of the things I can’t do right now.

But instead, I’m trying to figure out everything I can do instead.

When I can’t leave the house to go visit people? I can call them instead. I can text them, send cards, or host hangouts for my favorite people on the interwebs.

When I can’t call someone? I text them instead. I drop them an audio text (a voice memo sent via text, like a voicemail. But better.)

When I can’t run, I can walk instead.

If I can’t get outside to a class to exercise (boy, do I wish!), I can do a Seven Minute Workout in my house instead. My neighbor, who also has a new baby boy, says he does the 7-minute workout twice in the mornings, and that’s all he does for exercise.

I try to do the 7-minute workout twice each week. So there we go.

When you don’t have time for the 7-minute workout, you can practice deep breathing.

Meditate, even just for a moment.

Stretch while you’re waiting in line for something.

If you can’t walk, enjoy the time that you can sit.

When you can’t take a vacation, you can absolutely find a patch of grass to lie down in for ten minutes. A micro-vacation.

Lie down in the sunshine, close your eyes, and feel the late warmth of the summer sunshine. Let the grass tickle your elbows, let a dog lick your feet furiously. Kick off your sandals.

Focus on what you can do.

P.S. I’m opening up applications for my Fall 2016 Mastermind. There is space for 8 to 12 people. I’m looking for the right mix of ambitious, intelligent, quirky, creative people to bring together for accelerated success. We’ll start in September. Sign up for program details here. Applications close Sunday, August 14th.

Record It While It’s Happening: Rachel Cusk on Emotions, Mamahood, and Becoming a Parent

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Even though dragging myself out of bed and dealing with morning sickness does not make it fun to keep up with my writing habit, I also know that these feelings are fleeting. They won’t last forever, and I want to capture them while they’re here, so I can remember what it’s like.

I have no idea how many kids we’ll end up having. Alex and I have ideas for what we think we want, but then there’s what happens in reality. Knowing that the future is always uncertain makes me recognize that despite our best plans — there’s a possibility this may be the only time I’m ever pregnant. For whatever reason, I may only have this one time. I use this realization to remember to cherish right now, however many extra hormones it includes.

It seems like time is moving so slowly, like I’m muddling through a vague fog of fatigue and barfing, and yet everything is moving so quickly. I’ll be a hormonal messy pregnant mama-to-be for about four more months, and then… I’ll be a mama. And I will have crossed the threshold from independent lady to parent and the rest of my life will be different. Time moves forward.

As Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work, a documentation of the gravity of pregnancy and becoming a mother, these thoughts and feelings around pregnancy only last for a brief moment, and then they disappear.

“My desire to express myself on the subject of motherhood was from the beginning strong, [but]… a few months after the birth of my daughter Albertine, it vanished entirely,” she explained, and while she had the urge to write this book, she lost it after she gave birth for the first time. And so, “I wrote this book during the pregnancy and early months of my second daughter, Jessye, before it could get away again.”

She writes in a manner I find refreshing and real. I tend to prefer books that are honest about depression, loneliness, philosophy, and struggle — a book that says pregnancy and motherhood are miracles and the best thing on the planet would be chucked out the window as fast as I could waddle over to the window to throw it.

In her cataloging of the process, she talks about the dark side of pregnancy and how having children affects your identity, your ability to work, and your relationships with people around you. As a novelist, she confesses that this type of open disclosure is often too much for her: “I have merely written down what I thought of the experience of having a child in a way that I hope other people can identify with. As a novelist, I admit that I find this candid type of writing slightly alarming.”

The book is not a tribute to the glory days of motherhood, but a frank assessment of what might be to come.

“I am certain my own reaction, three years ago, to the book I have now written would have been to wonder why the author had bothered to have children in the first place if she thought it was so awful,” she confides, and I find myself feeling a wash of relief to hear that someone else has catalogued and documented the array of complexity around how it feels to enter into parenthood.

For parenting and motherhood is not always easy. And the burden is largely on women, despite how much our society is changing, we will still hold the biological accountability for bearing and bringing to life new human beings.

“Women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth: some dread it, some long for it, and some manage it so successfully as to give other people the impression that they never even think about it. My own strategy was to deny it, and so I arrived at the fact of motherhood shocked and unprepared, ignorant of what the consequences of this arrival would be, and with the unfounded but distinct impression that my journey there had been at once so random and so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all.”

Across the experience, as my life shifts, I am reminded from Cusk to write, write, write.

Don’t stop writing. Document what I’m feeling and thinking, and explore inside of the feelings that shift and grow across my time becoming a parent. Watch as this landscape of emotions shifts and moves month over month, minute over minute. Capture the range of expressions and they come and go. Explore what it means to be this person, in this moment, right now.

To write about what is happening is to validate your own thoughts and emotions. I attempt not to layer judgment on top of it all, but rather, to examine what arises. What fears do I have about what’s to come? What societal rules and norms do I feel guilty about breaking? What decisions am I making and how are we embracing (and deciding) who we want to become next? What is it like to be this person, in this time, in this body, right now?

The masks we wear–how we hide who we are.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

We all wear masks from time to time: in our words, our habits, and our practices. We have an arsenal of crutches and shortcuts that slowly but surely hide who we are. They are things that prop us up and help us hide. We hide from our feelings and our desires. We hide from who we might become.

We drink coffee as a mask for how tired we are, or to replace what is really a lack of motivation for a certain project we’re involved in.

It masks how tired you are of caring for a newborn infant, or how miserable your boss’s cutting remarks make you.

The alcohol that you drink at night masks the fear and the stress feel from not having control during your day. Perhaps it helps to cover up the loneliness of your cubicle or help you get  through another night.

We project false smiles of protection to hide our fears, to be desirable. We wear high heels and new clothes and carry certain bags and advertisements to show a sense of self, a projection, an idea. We use extroversion to be well liked. We chase busy to mask our fear of not leaving an impact.

We cover a lot of things up. Scars we carry, stories we hold, work we’re afraid of doing.

Our selves, deep inside.

It’s not always bad to have a mask…

It’s not terrible to have masks, but they can’t be our only way of dealing with the world. If we spend the entire time warding off the world and hiding from ourselves, we’ll miss the best parts. By hiding from the world, we hide ourselves, and we lose a piece of our souls.

Many of us have lost touch with ourselves, our souls, with the tender, tired, scared part of itself.

Here’s the catch…

Releasing a mask requires feeling. It requires having a real, honest, scary, less-than-desirable feeling. Letting go of your mask means you might need to say,

By golly, I’m tired.

And no, I don’t want to do this.

Or, I’m scared. I’m scared of messing up. I’m scared of doing a bad job. I’m worried that I won’t be liked. I’m worried that I might try and I won’t be good at it.

Letting the barrier down requires Guts. Honesty. Softness.

Looking at the impulse before we rush to snatch a cover, and breathing in recognition:

Your feelings are clues.

These feelings inside? They aren’t enemies. They are clues. Feelings are way points in an uncertain world, direction markers that guide us back into the brilliance of ourselves, if we’ll allow it. The trouble is it can be uncomfortable and downright painful. Feelings you haven’t had in years might surface to remind you of areas of internal work you still have to do.

And your masks were protection, once.

The masks aren’t all bad. Sometimes pulling down the mask and showing your face requires gentleness and slowness. Your mask might have served you at some point. A therapist in my yoga training reminded me that these coping mechanisms shouldn’t always be disarmed quickly. Children of abuse who learned how to harden and deaden their senses built masks in order to survive those times. These mechanisms and masks were useful–they helped you survive. They got you here. They protected. Unlocking them too quickly without new ways of being can also be damaging.

But at some point, perhaps you might notice you’re still wearing one.

What masks are you wearing?

What masks do you carry?

What do you hide?

Can you lower it for a bit?

With love,

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Looking for a place of love and kindness? Join our upcoming Grace & Gratitude micro-workshop, a two-week journey to cultivate grace and gratitude in your life. Two weeks of daily stories and exercises designed to bring light, love, and joy into your life–one photograph, project, and quote at a time. Sign up here (or give as a gift this holiday). We begin December 1. 

2013: Lessons to Take With Me

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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Part two of my annual round-up. For part one, check out my annual review for 2012. 

The last year, or two, weren’t easy–and full of lots of mistakes–but incredible and far better than the first half of my twenties. I’ve mused lately, in my 29th year, what this decade will add up to. What have I done? What does my daily life look like? How have I changed? Have I made a mark on the world? 

By and large, the latter half of the decade was far more psychologically and personally satisfying–coming into stride with many of my quirks and idiosyncracies, delighting in saying no in order to stay at home and work on a project purely because my soul wanted to, and deciding to skip, sing, hold hands and lie on the floor when I felt like it–all of this slowly built a foundation of happiness and glee I wasn’t accustomed to after coming off of years of teenage (and early twenty-something) angst. It’s worth saying, however, that much of the groundwork for many of my leaps and bounds between age 25-29 came through several years of dedicated, isolated, and non-public personal and professional efforts in my younger years.

In short: it gets better. For those who work hard, and who are exploring and taking chances, it adds up. Keep going. Learning compounds, (the right) friendships deepen, people stop caring if you have acne or armpit sweat or if you spit a little when you talk (or they tell you, directly and kindly) and generally they care more that you’re passionately geeky about something, that you take your energy and focus it on making things happen, that you’re crafting both an identity and a legacy in the world, albeit through trial and error. If you’re in a slough–and I’ve had years of undulations, so I understand the melancholy that can come from not understanding just-quite-what-to-do-next–stick it out another season, and keep experimenting.

In the meantime, here’s what I’ve gleaned along the way, particularly lessons that have solidified over the last year. In looking back through the essays on this site and musing over what I’d like to take with me, here’s what I’d like to carry with me for this next spin around the sun.

Almost everything is far easier said than done.

It can take a year or a decade to learn a lesson and build a practice or a habit I joke that it takes me a year to learn a habit because I’ve got twelve months to try 30 days over again, and by the 8th or 9th time, I’m almost there. Yoga took me four years to get into. Running took me three years. Blogging, two years (or ten, depending on how you count and whether copious emails and live journal count as blogging). Every lesson I’ve learned I had to learn personally. reading other’s wisdom didn’t cement the idea into my soul, my being.

So for everything below, I’ll write the lessons–but in all probability, you’ll also have to learn them yourself. Continue reading “2013: Lessons to Take With Me”