Today smells like a day I can't remember

It's an absolutely gorgeous day in Lunenburg, NS, and I decided to take a break from my work and chores to sit out on the deck and look at the water for 15 minutes. 

I feel a little overwhelmed by how much this day smells like another day that I can't quite put my finger on. I think it was a March or April day in Toronto years and years ago. 

I feel melancholy and nostalgic, even though I can't remember why. 

Isn't memory a funny thing?

Austerity measures (aka Living Within One's Means)

I started budgeting almost a year ago, using YNAB. (The chain of events that led to my decision to start budgeting are described in this earlier post).

At first, it didn't make much difference, to be honest. I started tracking what I spent. I developed a better sense of how much money was in my bank accounts and what was racked up on my credit cards, which made a change from my usual frantic checking and hoping. 

But for a long time, my spending behaviours did not alter. Not in the least. I still spent more than I was taking in. I didn't save up for coming expenditures, like the quarterly misery of filing my HST, money that I had collected from clients but which was mysteriously spent rather than reserved. 

Then, somewhere in the last month of 2016, I had a few epiphanies: 

• It's actually better for me not to spend money I don't have. 
• Many of the things I think of as necessities are actually luxuries.
• I want to get my home set up this year more than I want to do most other things.
• Getting my home set up without a lot of debt is going to mean saving every cent I can.

As a result, I have stopped spending money. Almost entirely. This makes me think of Augusten Burrows' wonderful "self-help" book: This is How. In it, there is a chapter about how to lose weight that basically says: All you have to do is want to be skinny more than you want to eat pastries and chocolate bars.

That may never happen for me, but something has clicked in my head and I actually want to create a home for myself more than I want to go out and have a good time or go on a trip or even help someone else out (which is not to say that I didn't give to charity this year. I did, I just did it within my budget).

And so, the booze budget is struck to zero. The entertainment budget, the junk food budget, the restaurant budget likewise (well, after a couple of mandatory post-holiday get-togethers with friends this week). The grocery budget is leaner – no treats, no shortcuts, just good, wholesome, prepare-from-scratch food. If I want sweets, I have to bake them.

It's been an absolute revelation. It used to be that when I wanted a restaurant or fast food meal, I just bought one. Now, when I think to myself, I don't want to cook, I want to grab a slice of pizza, the next thought comes into my head is I don't have that in my budget. When I want to grab a Coke and a chocolate bar, same thing. It hasn't even been that difficult. It's weird. It's like I suddenly grew up and the little bratty kid who wants everything right away is being reasonable and quietly nodding her head while I explain: You're going to have to wait, darling. Right now we can't afford it. She's not even being pout-y about it (at least, not often).

I think it helps that I know I don't have much money coming in this month or next. These are lean times.

But, wonder of wonders, I actually have my money ready to pay my HST at the end of the month. And I'm working on saving for my income tax. I've stopped using one of my three credit cards entirely. The other two are at about one-tenth of the amount they were this time last year.

This all feels like good progress in the right direction.

And every cent I can scrape together will go toward my house fund.

30 Days of Hustle

A family member invited me to do the 30 Days of Hustle with her (and a few thousand other people) this January.

The 30 Days of Hustle is a motivational challenge in which each participant sets a goal and takes steps (hustles) towards its completion for 30 days.

Along the way, the program teaches productivity and motivation skills that can be used to accomplish other goals.

I have a pretty quiet month ahead in terms of work. And I know the temptation might be to slip into a Netflix coma. Which would be fine if I needed to rest. But truthfully, I just spent the past six weeks chilled out on Netflix. It was great, but here, in the new year, I feel like getting some stuff DONE.

Tying up a big loose end

Although I'm planning to focus on more than one thing in this month's hustle, the structure of the hustle encourages selecting one main goal, so, my Official Hustle is going to be finishing off a number of my UFOs – which is quilting slang for UnFinished Objects.

You see, for about ten years, I was an avid quilter. I made quilts for people I loved, quilts for friends' babies, quilts for myself, art quilts, etc. I took classes, belonged to a quilt guild and gleefully fed my fabric addiction. I started countless projects — and to give myself credit, finished many of them.

But then, about eight years ago, I lost my quilting mojo. I moved from a 3-bedroom home to a 500-square-foot apartment, so I didn't have much space to work in. I became a performing musician and I became much busier in my life. Instead of just going to work and coming home to my quilting studio, suddenly I was leaving work to run around to gigs and voice lessons. My former "hobby" time was re-allocated to recording and producing three independent CDs.

The past 8 years have been an exciting time, but it's a time that feels like it is winding down for the present. I don't feel like performing shows very often these days. I certainly can't afford to create another independent record and can't even foresee a time when I will next be able to do so!

Right now, my focus is on getting settled on the piece of land that I bought last spring and creating a permanent home for myself. My current home is a tiny house on wheels. I'm thinking about building a permanent home – which will also be tiny, or perhaps micro. And that means that the six or seven boxes of fabric from my quilting "hangover" pose a problem. I can't bring myself to throw them out, but I also don't want to keep them in my space.

A small portion of my fabric "stash",
this is probably about one-eighth of it.

Worse still, there are a number of half-complete projects in those boxes, some of which are unfulfilled presents/commitments from 10 or 11 years ago.

The thought of those unfinished quilts has been weighing me down.

When I moved into my winter accommodation in Lunenburg, I got a membership at The Lunenburg Makery, thinking I would take the opportunity to work on some quilts this winter. I've been over a few times and have probably made three or four quilt blocks of my barely-started New York Beauty quilt. 

It's not that I didn't have plenty of spare time in the fall. What I lacked was motivation.

And so, this project seems perfect for the 30 days of Hustle. I have set my goal: complete four quilt tops in the next 30 days – two singles, one double and one baby quilt.

Here's the "baby" quilt to be –
a partly-finished colourwheel quilt.

I'm getting my hustle on!

My 2016 word of the year

For a few years now, I've had the habit of assigning a word – a theme – for the coming year.

2014 was: right-size
2015 was: replenish

I obviously have a real love affair with the letter R because the word I have selected for 2016 is: ROOTS.

Here's a link to the complete definition

There are a number of different ways that I plan to apply my focus on roots:

Metaphorically:

• developing my land 
• building a permanent home (hopefully)
• being able to stay put next winter (hopefully)
• becoming more rooted in the reality of my finances and starting to build a better financial foundation for myself
• working on being more grounded in my emotions
• feeling more rooted in my sense of self

Literally:

• plant a garden
• plant a small fruit and nut orchard

I believe choosing a word for the year can be a powerful tool.

I entered 2015 depleted and depressed. I chose to focus on replenishment. I did a lot of jigsaws, cut back on my volunteer commitments, and took things easy. I made a creative commitment and stuck to it. I focused on learning things that would help me figure out how the well had gotten so dry and how to be more sensible about how I choose to use my resources in the future. The rain came again and I was there to welcome it. I built myself back up and am coming out of 2015 feeling juicy and replete once again.

I have great hopes that my 2016 focus on ROOTS will be just as successful as my 2015 focus on  REPLENISHMENT.

Solar Noon

Well, Christmas is over for another year – Phew! I am not a fan, though I must say that this year has been way better for me than most. I usually experience something that I think of as H-SAD – Holiday Season(al) Affective Disorder, which manifests as low mood and general crankiness that lasts from early December to December 26.

In recent years, I have become resigned to this yearly visitation of misery. But this year, I decided to take a different tack. I essentially pretended that Christmas wasn't happening. I stayed away from stores, crowded parking lots, canned Christmas music and the rest of it. It was a very effective strategy. I felt much more cheerful than I usually do in December and Christmas was over almost before I knew it.

Awesome.

And now that Christmas is over, things are back to normal, which means that I am back doing work to develop my land.

I have been reading up on passive solar heating and had a plan to visit my land to locate "Solar South" so I will know how to orient my tiny house – and also any eventual permanent dwelling on my land.

I was planning to visit on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. But December 22 was severely overcast. Today, on the other hand, was sunny and +8 degrees Celsius – a perfect day to do a little on-site work.

The clearing on the knoll: December 26, 2015

Solar South at Solar Noon

Solar south is slightly different from magnetic south (as indicated on a compass), and solar noon is slightly different from noon on the clock. Solar south is the direction that points toward the sun at solar noon, which is the exact middle of the day, the halfway point between dawn and dusk.

Solar noon can be calculated by figuring out the number of hours between sunrise and sunset and dividing them by two. Or, one can just leverage the power of the Internet and look solar noon up on a chart like this one.

Today, solar noon was at 12:16 pm.

To identify solar south, all I needed to do was go to my land, pound a stake into the ground and look at the direction of the shadow at 12:16 pm.

Then, pound a second stake in where the shadow fell. The line formed by the two stakes points to solar south.

Easy-peasy! Especially on a December day that was so warm that I could do the work in my shirtsleeves.

After I was finished at my land, I went to visit "my" beach.

And then I visited some friends. And then had a ferry ride back to my winter home.

Needless to say, this was a very good day.

Local Shopping by Proxy

Here's a fun idea for holiday gift-giving – Shopping Local by Proxy.

I got an email last week from a good friend, with a proposition for me.

She lives more than 1,500 km away from her mom, while I live about 20 km away from her mom. And there is an awesome, new, independent bookstore, Lexicon Books, in the town where I am living this winter.

So, rather than order books online from one of the big conglomerates, my friend asked if I would be willing to pick up some books she would order at Lexicon and take them over to her mom the next time I was going that way.

This sounded like an excellent idea to me. I happily agreed.

I picked the books up yesterday and delivered them today.

My friend added a gift certificate for me to her order – which she totally didn't need to do, but which I will gleefully spend – I want to get one of Rebecca Roher's adult calendar/colouring books: Hot Babes Wash Dirty Dogs while I'll put the remainder toward Brené Brown's book Daring Greatly (which I have on order and which should be coming in later this week).

So have a think about friends who live near your loved ones and figure out if you can replace the faceless convenience of online shopping with friendly connections and support of local businesses.

Shame and vulnerability

A dear friend recently sent me a link to watch this long-format (90-minute) interview with Dr. Brené Brown:

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2015/09/brene-brown-rising-strong/

I've been a fan of Dr. Brown and her work for a number of years. She's a researcher-storyteller who studies human connection, shame, vulnerability and wholeheartedness. I've written about her on my blog before because her work was the inspiration for me giving my tiny house its name: Wholehearted House.

I've mostly come in contact with Dr. Brown's work on-line, in the form of TED talks and podcasts, but watching the long-form interview with Chase Jarvis inspired me dig deeper into her work by reading the books she has written. So, I put in requests for all four of them at the library.

Her books, in order of publication, are 1. I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't), 2. The Gifts of Imperfection, 3. Daring Greatly and 4. Rising Strong. The first book is about shame, the second about vulnerability, the third about courage and connection and the fourth is about the process of using shame resilience strategies to work through shame triggers and build greater connection.

My personal journey with shame

I grew up with a legacy of shame in my family that came down from my very staunchly Victorian, Methodist great-great-grandparents on one side and equally staunch Roman Catholic great-great-grandparents on the other side (all of whom were no doubt only bringing their beliefs forward from their parents and they from theirs, etc.) Expectations were high in my family – for intelligence, achievement, post-secondary education, morality, etc. And the punishment for failing to always conform to those high ideals (i.e. being human), was often shame.

I'm not pointing any fingers here. I don't think the shame in my family was malicious in its intent, it was just the way things were, the way they have been for generations. As Brené Brown points out, shame is a universal phenomenon, experienced by every human who isn't a sociopath. In North American culture, I would say that shame has grown to be a basic operating principle in a majority of contexts. I have definitely worked in offices/for clients and had friendships and intimate relationships that functioned predominantly in a culture of shame.

Shame is a fear of disconnection, of not being worthy of love and belonging, and as such it strikes at the core of us. Love and belonging are two of our most basic human needs.

The cultures of shame I have experienced have included messages and feelings like the following.

You're no good/not good enough and therefore:

• this is all your fault, or 
• you should feel ashamed of making this mistake, or
• I am better/more important/more powerful/more entitled than you are, or
• you're not getting a raise/not worth the same salary as your equivalent colleagues, or 
• I'm not going to talk to you anymore, or 
• I'm going to say bad things about you behind your back, or 
• I am telling you on your Facebook wall that I despise you/your beliefs, or
• I am withholding love/sex/connection from you.

Shame tends to get around.

Sometimes I have been the one shaming (I include judging and feeling contemptuous here) other people and sometimes other people have been the ones shaming me.

I have often found myself in "shame loops" – where my shame has gotten stirred up and my response is self-righteousness or judgment which I hope will trigger someone else's shame and protect me from my own. The loop part happens when the other person in the dynamic turns around and shames me right back. And so on. And so on.

Shame – and the vulnerability it stirs up – are deeply painful and difficult to bear. Because of this, they are highly transferable. Too painful to accept and process, we tend to act them out and try to get them off our plates – like hot potatoes. It seems easier to pass shame on than to work shame and vulnerability through.

When I am not successful passing shame and vulnerability on, I tend to armour up against them in an attempt to wall them off. Brené Brown outlines three main forms of armour that people put on to protect against the vulnerability of shame: foreboding joy, perfectionism and numbing.

The booby prize of perfectionism

For roughly the first three-quarters of my life, I lived very deep in the realm of perfectionism. For me, the thinking was: only perfect people are worthy of love and connection. Of course, I knew I wasn't perfect, but I sure was trying. (Very trying, as we sometimes joke in my family). I wanted to be worthy of love and connection – and I thought that being perfect was the only way to achieve that.

After a whole lot of therapy, at some point in my thirties I was able to gradually let go of trying to be perfect, most of the time. I learned how to cut myself some slack, but I think I simultaneously gave up on the hope that I would ever be worthy of love and belonging. I changed my behaviour, but I didn't change my thinking. I still believed that only perfect people are worthy of love and belonging. And since I finally understood that perfection is impossible, that I was not perfect and never would be, I did not deserve love and belonging. Plain and simple.

With that kind of thinking at my core, it is no surprise that the relationship I had been in for a many years collapsed. Looking back now through this lens of Dr. Brown's shame research, I can see how that relationship fell apart largely because of shaming and blaming. Brené has a great line: "If blame is driving, shame is riding shotgun." (Daring Greatly, p. 195) I can see how I wasn't happy and couldn't accept that that was my own responsibility. I needed to work through my own vulnerability and make my own peace with myself and my life. I needed to believe that I was worthy of love and belonging. And I believe my partner needed to figure out similar things for himself. Because we weren't yet able to work through the things we needed to, we resorted to passing shame back and forth between us, stomping on one other's vulnerability, and getting angry and frustrated with each other for not being able to solve/remove each others' difficult feelings. Shame and blame were fundamental to the way we related to ourselves and to one another. And that dynamic went from uncomfortable to intolerable to impossible.

The difference between shame and guilt

Perfectionism is a both an armour against feeling shame and a major re-enforcer of shame. The thinking runs like this: If I am not perfect, I am a flawed/bad person. This is where Dr. Brown's distinction between shame and guilt – between one's essence and one's behaviour – comes in. Brené Brown distinguishes shame from guilt by explaining that shame is experienced as I AM bad in contrast to guilt which is experienced as I DID something bad.

Guilt holds the possibility of change, hope, agency. If I have done something bad, I can make amends, seek forgiveness and strive not to do that bad thing again.

Shame, on the other hand, robs us of agency. If I am a bad person, there is no point in trying to make amends and seek forgiveness. I am simply doomed to a life of being bad, and therefore unacceptable,  unworthy of love and connection.

Framing an incident as I DID a bad thing and am still WORTHY of love and belonging creates a very different experience from I AM a bad person and am fundamentally UNWORTHY of love and belonging. (In the language of perfectionism, this can translate to I MADE A MISTAKE and am still WORTHY of love and belonging versus I AM A MISTAKE and am fundamentally UNWORTHY of love and belonging.)

When people frame their experiences through the lens of guilt, there is hope for a positive outcome. An experience can be turned around.  Something "bad" that threatened disconnection can transform into closer connection.

When people frame their experiences through the lens of shame, the opportunity to transform disconnection to connection is lost. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, eating disorders, and a number of other behaviours that can cause a great deal of damage to individuals and their connections with others. It seems to me that these are essentially manifestations of the main armour tactics Brené Brown lays out: foreboding joy, perfectionism and numbing.

Shame resilience

Since shame is a universal experience, it is not something that can be eliminated or "cured". However, what we can do is develop shame resilience – ways of using courage, critical awareness, reality-checking and vulnerability to work with the shame we experience and move through it more smoothly. We can transform shame from a weapon we use against ourselves and others to a tool/educator that we use to grow into greater connection with ourselves and others.

Dr. Brown lays out a number of tools for building shame resilience that she has identified through her research. These are ways in which people go from thinking I am flawed and therefore unworthy of love and connection to I am flawed and also worthy of love and connection — and not worthy despite being flawed, but because of being flawed and because of finding the courage to accept being flawed and the vulnerability that comes with that.

In our culture of blaming and shaming, we are all faced with the struggle of shame and "shame hangovers". We can deflect, we can wallow, we can resist. Or we can lean in with our vulnerability, accept ourselves, learn how to be ourselves and to have more grace around our humanness and our shame.

I am not going to try to explain Dr. Brown's tools for shame resilience here. I couldn't possibly do them justice in a blog post. If you are interested in knowing more, I urge you to read Daring Greatly. After getting this book from the library, I've decided that I want to own a copy so I can have it on hand while I continue to do work developing greater shame resilience (I feel the need to give a shout-out here to my awesome local booksellers at Lexicon Books – thank you for ordering a copy of Daring Greatly for me to buy).

A postcript about parenting:

I am not a parent, but I have been parented. And so while I hesitate to put this forward because I fear that some people might tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about and that this is none of my business, I'm going to put this forward anyway: I think Dr. Brown's writing about parenting is amazing. She doesn't give specific advice about how to parent – she describes a path to becoming an engaged and vulnerable parent raising children in a family that is committed to creating shame resilience in every member of the family. Even if shame is not a major issue inside a given family, it is so prevalent in North American culture that it is very often an issue from a very young age in schools, on sports teams and on playgrounds (manifesting as bullying, clique-y-ness, shaming power trips – yes, with that last I am thinking of one of my junior high school gym teachers). With this in mind, having an eye to shame-resilience as a parent strikes me as a very valuable thing for children, parents and our culture as a whole. If you want a quick sample to see if Brené Brown's approach to parenting appeals to you, check this out: http://brenebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/DaringGreatly-ParentingManifesto-dark-8x10.pdf