Parsing Regret

There is a common inclination—particularly in American culture, I think—to live without regrets. The argument goes something like the following: Incident X led you to this, which led you to that, which made you the person you are today—and aren’t you glad you are the person you are today? You couldn’t be that person without Incident X having happened. Regret is thus turned into appreciation, even celebration of the unfortunate incidents in our past, and we can sleep well knowing that our missteps worked out for the best. And the argument does have a visceral appeal; after all, we are wired to identify signal from noise, to see patterns, to create a narrative arc from the random chaos of our lives.

But I hate that argument.

There are a few things I have done in my life (thankfully not many nor recently) that I truly regret, and I don’t want to forget that feeling, or turn the feeling into something more palatable. How can I grow as a person if I do not acknowledge that, if somehow given the chance, I would make some different choices? What’s the point of simply rationalizing everything as part of the journey? I want to constantly be holding myself to the highest standards possible; this means, on occasion, holding my past self up to a standard and recognizing that I fell short.

I was having this conversation recently with someone, and shared a specific regret—a pretty cliche little number involving my first “boyfriend”, and love, and sex—but a real regret nonetheless. “I wish I hadn’t done that,” I said. “If I could do things differently, I would.”

“Those are two very different things,” the person I was talking to replied. I didn’t understand at first, and he clarified. Walking around wishing you had done something differently is much less constructive than knowing that you would act differently today given the chance. It’s not healthy lugging that wishing around in our day-to-day experience. We cannot change the past.

I hadn’t previously thought about the distinction between living in our present wishing something in the past were different, or simply learning from the past and acknowledging we would act otherwise if given the chance. It was interesting to parse regret. It also added nuance to my resistance to the argument of “live without regrets”. Live without being dragged down daily by futile wishes. Live without unhealthy attachment to the impossible dream of reliving your past. Maybe that’s what they all meant.

Soon after, a friend added a further wrinkle to the conversation: but what if you did something truly terrible? Something larger than twenty-something angst. What if you killed someone? Is it unhealthy then to wish you hadn’t, to spend your present days (hopefully in jail) wishing and wishing and wishing you had acted differently? It seemed clear that in that case, no, of course not. I knew what he was doing; he was going to an extreme to test the internal logic of what I was saying.

So now… now I just don’t know. I don’t want to live without regrets. I want to live with them! I think regrets are important. I suppose I’m just still figuring out how to live well with them.

“Shame is the gremlin who says, ‘Uh uh, you’re not good enough.’”

I wrote a few months ago about a remarkable TED talk by Brené Brown on vulnerability and telling the story of who you are with your whole heart. Her newest TED talk was recently posted, and she zeroes in on shame—the keystone to her research and her path to understanding vulnerability. I said it before, about her previous talk, and I’ll say it again: watch it, watch it, watch it right now.

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If we’re going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy’s the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgement. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive. The two most powerful words when we’re in struggle: me too.

- Brené Brown

“Be Nice to Yourself” is Large and Contains Multitudes

A few weeks ago, after I had given notice but before I left my last job, I was having lunch with a few of my colleagues. We became friends over the two and a half years I worked with them, and we would speak about our personal lives from time to time. Health and fitness came up in this particular conversation.

“Now that I got a new job, I just need to find a boyfriend,” I proclaimed half-jokingly. “Then the second tier of the to-do list starts with eating better and working out.”

“You may want to re-examine your priorities,” gently replied one of my coworkers, smiling.

She’s right. Of course she’s right. Health and fitness deserve first-tier attention. A challenge, though, is that I have a lot of mottos and resolutions and they don’t always work together very well. For instance, one of my most potent mottos since the fall has been “be nice to yourself.” I am the only person living in my head… it ought to at least be a pleasant place to live. I’ve been trying to do less would’ve-could’ve-should’ve thinking; I want to stop constantly beating myself up mentally. In the same vein, I have been treating myself to, honestly, anything I want. Sweets, clothes, cravings of all kinds. We only have one pool of willpower, I learned in the book of the same name (which, hilariously enough, I have yet to finish), and we can’t work on everything difficult at once. So I have stopped trying.

But as lovely as it has been to give myself a break from simultaneously juggling every single self-improvement project possible, I can’t ignore the fact that I now, once again, have to unbutton my jeans when I sit down. I am only a few pounds away from where I was last winter when my weight peaked, which isn’t problematic so much because of a poor body image or because of the weight itself, but because the gain is symptomatic of unhealthy eating habits and zero exercise.

Perhaps “be nice to yourself” is large and contains multitudes, as Whitman would say. Yes, if the spirit moves me, I can have a candy bar purchased on a subway platform with nickels and dimes from the bottom of my purse. The not-having is not worth an ensuing mental battle; I should be nice to myself. Yet being nice to myself may also mean: going home straight after work and cooking a full, delicious meal. Working out in the privacy of my cozy room. (I bought a kettle-bell yesterday.) Having healthy snacks around my new office. Reinstating my curfew. In fact—never mind, it’s late and I’m going to bed.

Two Poems By Izzy Gold

Last night there was a small table read of my full-length play in progress, “Stranded”. I worked on this play, formerly known as “Izzy Gold Drops Dead” between 2005 and 2007, and only very recently picked it back up again. The play is about a young woman named Eddie who works at a used bookstore and is secretly sleeping there at night. Amidst the romantic and sexual shenanigans of and with her coworkers, Eddie falls in love with the poetry of an older Jewish poet and writer named Izzy Gold. (She is also Jewish and a writer—I’ve previously shared some of her rabbi stories.)

During the talk-back after the reading, Izzy Gold’s poems came up; the audience hears so much about them, but never hears the poems themselves. I did actually write a couple of poems as Izzy Gold, years ago, but they were chucked in my workshop at school. Their effect was simply less magical if we heard the words.

Still, I was curious to read them again. Here they are—two poems by the one and only Izzy Gold:

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swirling memory milked from fingertips
drips, dances… this morning, shifts.
the days are long, swimming in your arms.
smile slow, and stretch.
brush your teeth and leave the sheets,
sweaty and tangled in sultry untruths.

—sometimes I would rather be outside,
in the sun, picking fruit. …don’t be hurt.

—tell me that one story, you remember.
god how we laughed, our young mouths filled
with blueberries, and prayers.

And the other:

the day of rest; everything is
what it already is—but honey, explain this hunger.
we breathe in together….
and only you breathe out.

I am still holding it in
I am still holding on
I am still holding you
as you breathe full, and deep.

what shadow of love will we set the table with today?

Hebrew

Say something personal. Say something from the heart. The Hebrew aleph bet shares the keys beneath my fingertips.

I am wearing jeans. I packed only skirts, and I am wearing jeans. … I am a Jew in pants or in shorts or in skirts or in denim overalls, beseder?

- journal entry from the first time I came to Israel, eight years ago

What strikes me here is the love for Hebrew. The way “beseder?”—“okay?”—fits so naturally, the reverence for the Hebrew alphabet, the aleph bet, beneath my fingers. This journal entry was written long before I ever knew Yiddish. To be honest, I would have laughed then if you told me I would speak Yiddish one day but not Hebrew. It’s not that I had any of that cynicism I hear so often towards Yiddish (“Why learn a dying language?”, “But you’re not Chassidic”, “How weird”, “How cute”, “How funny”); learning Yiddish was simply not in the picture; it would seem just as unlikely a language for me to learn as, say, Dutch or Hawaiian.

I am now in Israel again, the aleph bet sharing the keys beneath my fingertips again. I feel incredibly privileged and grateful to be traveling here for the third winter in a row through my work. Today as I walked off the plane and headed to passport control, I felt a new surge of affection for this wacky and lovely country, and for the language that I always felt I could almost, almost understand.

Because you know that feeling of being so absorbed in something, words around you register as being spoken, and you can’t quite catch them unless you switch your attention? That’s how I felt about Hebrew, particularly with songs: if only I paid closer attention, I would understand. I did take Hebrew classes in college and Biblical Hebrew classes afterwards, and I can follow (and even sing) along in services at shul. But I am not really much closer to understanding than I was before… which makes sense, as I haven’t really taken serious time to study and speak it.

Still… the yearning is back, which is a start. Listening but not hearing. Wanting to get inside the words. I know learning a language is not like focusing a lens, or switching my attention like a window on my computer. But I don’t want to be surprised for the rest of my life that I know Yiddish and not Hebrew; I want to know both.

לַיְלָה טוֹב, layla tov, good night.

Shabbos key

Cleaning my desk in my bedroom. I want to stop using my laptop in bed, one of a few habits which have been keeping me from getting to bed on time. Just found a poem from a reflective writing workshop I led on Shabbos morning during Hillel Institute—a huge gathering of Hillel professionals and students—this summer. 

(A Shabbos key, by the way, is for people who do not use electricity on Shabbos; participants were staying in rooms that typically are opened with electronic key cards. For Shabbos, those who requested it in advance were given a manual, metal key instead of the card.)

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Who was the girl who asked for a Shabbos key—
and who was the girl who returned it?
“I don’t need this,” I said.
“I am not as observant as I was.”

A nullification of vows.
Once you give up the structure, you are in freefall.
And when you don’t believe in a god
who will catch you before you hit the bottom,
you might just lose it all.

The Person I Want to Be: Resolution Round-Up

When people ask me what this blog is about, I generally hem and haw and eventually say something along the lines of “um, self-improvement?” It is, as I wrote last year, a bit of an ongoing resolution machine, a place to share how I am challenging myself, and where I am growing.

This will be the end of the first full calendar year since relaunching the blog. Once again, in the spirit of accountability and follow-through, let’s take a look back at my everyday resolutions:

“I want to spend my 15 minutes a day getting my heart pumping [jump roping] and chipping away at that gnawing feeling that I’m not using my body nearly as effectively as I use my head.” - 15 Minutes

And while I’m still embarrassed [about liking country music], I’m trying to own it. - “I guess that’s just the cowboy in us all.”

I am going to try to work out regularly with a friend who has a gym in her building. - The One-Month Crunch

I know there is music inside these strings, but I haven’t found it yet. Still, I am learning, slowly. – One More Time, with Feeling

But to give passion to a lot of things? I think it’s better to pick a few at a time. And once you’ve got them—I’ve got mine—move your feet. – Passion, Action, and Being Seen

I cannot wait to see myself reflected in someone else’s eyes. I have to do, create, act. Be. The day I stop relying on how others see me is the day I begin relying on myself. – Crowdsourcing My Self

I recently gave myself a curfew. I try to unplug by 11pm, and be in bed by midnight. – I Dream of Sleeping

It’s a little overwhelming to think that one conversation with a friend and one two-minute video will probably change how I shop for, well, everything going forward. - Slave Labor for Dummies

Okay, let’s see. I didn’t once go to the gym with my friend. I did jump rope for a while, but after the weight came off I pretty much stopped (and I have to replace the batteries in my scale, so I don’t really know where I’m at right now). I took two ukulele lessons and then quit because I felt too overwhelmed to really take the time to practice. I do try to own liking country music—and, actually, writing that post was a big first step. I was very involved in helping to make the space and larger community where I work more LGBTQ inclusive; I’m very proud of that. The curfew was successful for a little while, and I definitely have been valuing my sleep more in general, but I need to get back to being strict about unplugging at 11pm (she says as she writes this at 1:06am). I purposefully have been thrifting more instead of buying new, in part thanks to some of the conversations I’ve been having about slave labor.

Not great, perhaps, in terms of follow-through. Not bad, though, either.

And—most importantly and all the while—I really have been working on being the person I want to be, and not simply waiting to be seen a certain way. I can’t say that this has always been easy or that I’ve always been successful; certainly I still care too much sometimes about what others think. But I am ready to be, to act, to do, to create, to write. And I am… bit by bit. As my blog promised, I am becoming the person I might have been.

Looking forward to all of the beautiful, dynamic, inspiring people we will be in 2012.