Building an Inner Compass
to navigate the past, present, and future.
Dear Friends,
When I was little, still young enough to be picked up under the arms, my mom placed me outside one night on our dark front porch, told me not to come home, and locked the door behind me. I cried until she let me back in. I don’t remember why she did this. Maybe I was throwing a tantrum, the way young children do, but I don’t remember that part.
I do remember all the times she threatened to give me up for adoption, or put me in foster care, claiming the only reason she didn’t was because no one would want me. Throughout my childhood she reminded me that without her, I would be an orphan.
In contrast, she could be effusively affectionate at times. Especially when I was “good.” But sometimes “good” and “bad” were things I had no control over. At age eight, when the optometrist prescribed me glasses, my mom flew into a rage and screamed that I had ruined my body.
So, on some internal level I came to understand love as conditional. My worth fluctuated and my existence was either a burden or a gift, depending on the day.
In most regards I consider myself extremely lucky. I never went hungry and always had a roof over my head. I developed an imaginative and rich inner world to escape into. And I had clean clothes to wear and piano lessons, all thanks to mom. She was a single parent in a foreign country, thousands of miles away from her own family, doing everything by herself.
Because I felt that love had to be earned, and because I observed the only other member of the household working nonstop, I developed a relentless and all-consuming, self-punishing work ethic. I’d take on projects at the expense of my sleep, my health, and my sanity.
The upside is that all the work I’ve done has taken me to some interesting places over the years. I’ve worked with dementia patients who were dying. I moved to another country where I didn’t know anyone. I’ve done a wide variety of things to pay rent, which includes (but is not limited to) shoveling horse manure, pickling thousands of peppers, painting murals, and teaching color theory to the C-suite of Gap Inc.
Sometimes life has felt like a rambling amalgamation of completely random, disparate elements, and it’s been hard to determine if there’s ever going to be a bigger picture or if this is it. A collection of bits and pieces.