Winners quit

Maybe I’m a quitter, I said.

Maybe it’s my purpose: to start things, try things, quit.

Maybe this is how some of us learn, move in the world.

Experience is the best teacher. No matter how much imagining, planning, or projecting you do, you can never really know what life has in store. You can never really know what will happen.

I always see the good in situations in the beginning. This can become my achilles heel. I hold on to the good like a life raft, gripping harder and harder. There has to be something good here, I say to myself, sinking deeper and deeper into the water until I’m gasping for breath.

Sometimes you have to let go of the raft so you can swim to the shore. It’s not that far, you can make it. You have to save yourself.

Imagine a ribbon connecting you, she said. And imagine a giant pair of scissors cutting the ribbon. It’s over! It’s done!

Seth Godin calls it the dip:

Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out fun…then gets really hard, and not much fun at all. You might be in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac—a total dead end. What really sets superstars apart is the ability to tell the two apart.

Ask yourself: is this something that will respond to guts, effort and investment?

Asking this helps you decide what to do next.

The Light is You

I’ve lost my voice. Or maybe I’m finding it again. It used to come so easily and then came one slap on the wrist, followed by another, and I knew what to be. Silent. When you were little we only had to look at you a certain way and you would cry, my mom says. Now I double check every time I send a text. Is this okay? Does this make sense? Am I allowed?

I’m sensitive, I hear myself say over the phone the other day. She was trying to bully me. She thought I was up to something. Up to what? I said. She thought my silence was something other than self-protection. I have ADHD, I forget, I said, throwing excuses out like candy from a parade float.

I’m incredibly uncomfortable, I finally say, body pinned down for count. 3,2… I reveal the truth of the matter. That I don’t like the way you’re speaking to me. That my whole body is shaking. And that this is so, so unnecessary. Then, a shift. She softens. She apologizes. We end the phone call as if we’re old friends.

You’re a saint, he said when I told him what happened. I would have screamed at her. It would have been a blood bath.

Honesty is tool and it’s a good one. It cuts through like a knife because most are afraid to say, I’m scared, I’m upset, this hurts. They’re also afraid to say I’m sorry, I love you, you delight me. We’d rather shroud ourselves in anger or stay hidden in fear than say what’s true.

It’s human to feel. Human to hurt. Human to be affected by other people. Your words affect me. The way you look at me affects me. Your anger affects me. Your preception of me affects me. It affects you, too.

When I touched you, I saw an eclipse, she said. She held her arms out in front of her like she was holding a beach ball, rotating it in the air. I saw an exchange of light and dark and the dark was heavy and the light was barely shining through, she said. Her face looked pained. She went on. What's so heavy? What’s all this darkness? Because the light, the light is you.

I’d rather watch the mourning doves

I’d rather watch them preen

I’d rather watch them peck at each others necks, grasp beaks, bob back and forth

I’d rather watch one soft, gray feather float to the earth against the backdrop of a foggy morning sky and then disappear behind an olive tree — mint green leaves

I’d rather watch that tree sway gently in the quiet breeze, its motion almost imperceptible, not old enough yet to hold the weight of a dove but branches that reach for the sky anyway

Only one dove remains now, the male, perched on the electrical line that hangs over my front yard, over the olive tree

He turns his head to the side, the bird, I see him looking. Does he see the swirl and ache of the tree? The swirl and ache of me?