Category Archives: Woman of a Certain Age

Tornadoes (redux) and Tulips

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On this exquisite first real day of spring when my tulips are blooming brazenly, scandalously, lacking all shame in front of my house, I want to make sure that no one is concerned about my inner or outer welfare. (Some of you have written.) The last thing I want to do is use my blog as a cri de coeur, especially when I’m not feeling any need to cri.

 

Excuse the silly little dip into French, it’s the flowers everywhere. That is, my heart is not crying. (Well, yes, it does for the  injured and dispossessed in our world.)

So, while I may feel unmoored and whirling from a voluntary process of stripping down to the essential me under decades of doing and being this, that, and most everything in-between, it is a process and goal that I have chosen. NOTE: the blog tag line “my fierce freedom.”

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To those of you who have written to me, concerned, I say “I am happy, amazed, welcoming. Life is beyond our comprehension, and isn’t that the way it should be?” Living within one’s essential self of full feeling, of touching and being touched, whether at age 7 or 70, or 80, or more, that is the cry of our hearts.

May I suggest enlarging the photos and looking at them close up and personal?

 

 

Naked in a Tornado

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In striving to return to some essential self, to blank sheets of the “Book of Me,” pre disasters, pre more than a decade of peace work through women, pre marriages and divorces, and rich and poor, and social and anti-social, pre entrepreneurship and playwriting and photography, pre vanity, pre personas, pre successes and failures . . .

In striving to come to baseline Me, I have held close to the memory-feeling of myself as a seven-year-old in summer cotton dresses or shorts and little tops with midriffs when I stood on the Midwest front lawn challenging the vast and troubling sky to send a tornado my way. Seven, when I found secret places for wild whirling when the first warm breezes came after winter, when I knew what every adult was thinking, and knew I was utterly alone and it was okay. Seven, when I entered an abandoned house and looked a white owl in the eye and saw mystery.

In striving to return to that knowing, before the cleverness of learning . . .

. . . because I have shifted from irrational invulnerability to rational knowing that I will die because it is the trend around me . . .

. . . because I want my last decades to be tasted with a cleansed palate . . .

. . . I have found it is impossible to be seven again.

Simplifying my life, leaving daily peace work, having time for lunches, processing and discarding crap, sleeping in some mornings, daring to love and meld, even gardening, have taken down the walls between myself and the Vastness of Everything – from the stock market to species of blooming trees, from kinds of wine to how my grandchildren’s minds work, from the cosmos to sewer systems, from artists and poets to cooking. Life cannot be simplified, it is overwhelming. I have simply cleared the way to experience the infinite order and chaos a teeny bit more. It is the tornado.

I chose to simplify, thinking it would return me to the clarity I had as a child. Instead it has left me as a child in babbling overlapping realms of emotions, memories, data, relationships, coincidence, and systems that make, theoretically, for progress. Without the protection of persona to filter, judge, weigh, censor, select, and measure, I have been broadsided, sucker punched, unmoored.

I have become a pilgrim whose life and manner seem calm, even serene, as I stand inside infinite options, interpretations, perspectives, realities – and wonderment. It is as beguiling as it is disorienting, and was more or less my secret until now.

Over the months I have found three walking sticks through the sometimes howling storm: curiosity, humor, and attempting to be honest. When I feel yet another certainty slip away, I hold to these three, and try to do it with a tad of grace. Curiosity and humor are easy. Honesty is more problematic when your sense of self – necessarily including your emotions, beliefs, and perceptions – shifts daily.

Life is so complex that to experience a microscopic fraction of it is to see how ignorant we are. As we take off the barriers of our beliefs of who we are, what we do, what we believe in, what we have done, what we like, we are naked in the enormity of life.

To simplify one’s life by striping away one’s accumulated sense of self is careful work. When I was eight, my mother stripped decades of darkened shellac off the hardwood floors of my childhood. I remember her on her knees with chemicals and scrapers and rags. It took time and the chemicals burnt, even through rubber gloves.

Few of us have been given the gift of time and safety to strip ourselves rather than add more layers of shellac. I kneel in gratitude, gently scraping.

Blog Bouquet: ode to spring

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It has been a week of not completing blogs and worrying about not completing them, and then worrying that I wasn’t adequately worried about not completing them – then wondering if this is a sign of inability to focus or an unwillingness to focus.

One blog was about synchronicity in NYC. Three paragraphs from that below:

This pulchritude and chaos of talent lets the Goddess of Synchronicity amuse Herself by arranging “chance” encounters. The ultimate good hostess, she places this person next to that for good conversation and inspiration. Ours and hers, I suspect.

storefrontTwo nights ago I was eating dinner solo at a favorite restaurant when a younger man was seated at the next table. I had pegged him the moment he walked in as a musician from out of town, probably Nashville. It was the worn jeans, jacket, and long hair, but also his bodily ease.

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I was right, and I was wrong. He does usually live in Nashville and is a musician, but is classically trained in opera and is composing two musicals and one opera. His singing voice is sublime, he has been one of People magazine’s “Sexiest Men of the Year,” and a couple years ago he tried to rescue a large dog from a hot-wired fountain. The dog died, he only barely survived. He also trains dogs, and goes barefoot half the year.

Okay, so that was that unfinished blog, and don’t you wonder what happened next? We had lunch the next day. He may train my dog.

Another blog was about being cool. Two paragraphs below:

My love-hate relationship to cool is not because I can’t do cool. I can do cool. I have the cheekbones and lack of innocence. What I don’t have is the necessary willingness to congeal. I don’t want to observe life while leaning against a wall, hands in my pockets and disdain in my eyes. I don’t want to be so involved with a stance and persona that I miss all the fun – the messiness of being human, the splat and awkwardness of it, the insecurity of it, the raw unhoned gifts of it, the confusion and heartache and love of it. I want to live within the mistakes.

Giving up being cool means you can be silly, inconsistent, madly in love, disrespectful of your own age and others, honest, and wear plaid. 

That blog ended because I didn’t know where it was going.

Which brings us to today:

photo 3We’ve waited long for spring this year, haven’t we? And now the many trees around my home that bloom in the spring have just started doing so. It will be a relay from one to the other for the next month or more, white, light pink, dark pink.

I planted a rosebud tree in front last fall, and it survived the winter. I can see small buds that will come out soon. I showed them to my granddaughter, and told her that when I lived in Tennessee the hills were filled with wild rosebuds and that is why I planted mine in my tame cultivated DC neighborhood, for that bit of wildness and memory.

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Today it is raining, which delays the spring a little more. The warmth is still inside. (See photo.)

But spring will come. We know that is true, and when it does my dog, trained or not, and I can bask in the irises and tulips that will come up. I planted the bulbs last fall with great care.

We will bask in the warmth after winter. How cool is that?

War = Evolutionary Flaw?

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War proves that evolution is hodge-podge. We create master works of art, architecture, technology, and exploration, and then we destroy them along with each other.

The glitch in survival of the fittest is that mean greedy strong people – think Huns, think small pox in trading post blankets, think any dictator – lack empathy and seem to have little appreciation for the arts, education, or other people. Well, some monsters appreciate the fine arts so long as they get to own them.

Since before the sacking of Constantinople, the multiple fires of the Library of Alexandria, and the Crusades, the dynamic has been the same. People strive together to learn, create knowledge and beauty, reveal the mysteries of existence, and build new cultures. Then some ruffians come over the hill with weapons. Destroy, rebuild, destroy, rebuild. Certainly humans have resilience and persistence. We keep striving to the light.

These days, the “destroy” part of “destroy and rebuild” is on the move, literally. Displays of strength everywhere. Russian troops along the Ukraine border, Israeli fighter pilots flying low over Gaza as a reminder, Egypt judges condemning hundreds of Islamists to mass executions, as hundreds of thousands of Syrians seek refuge from violent madness.

It’s been awhile since it’s looked this bad. The world is fracturing more than usual along the usual lines of fear, greed, suspicion, denial, self-righteousness, and beliefs of having a monopoly on the One True God – and which One True God is on our side, and we, being created in One True God’s image, should rightly rule over others. “Dominion over the earth” and all that.

Well, I don’t know if Putin has One True God beyond himself. He might take up his entire world.

Ever feel like a small fuzzy mammal trying to avoid being trounced by very large reptiles? Very large reptiles that never look down? Who think only they and the other large reptiles exist?

If my evolutionary metaphor is getting out of hand, it’s the panic speaking. Remember the dodos? They never got upset, and they were wiped out. On the other hand, lemmings jump off cliffs and wild horses stampede and it’s no benefit to any of them. What to do? What to do? “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date (with peace).”

Last night I had dinner with a fellow peace worker . . .  Yes, dear readers, that is my background that until now I have avoided bringing into my emerging blogger career. So, last night I had dinner with a fellow peace worker, a veteran with decades of training. I told him I was worried.

I told him that, since stepping back from the peace business, I’ve started to lose control of my professionally-imposed balance regarding cruel people and idiots. Yes, I said that. I said “cruel people” and “idiots.” I also said “blind people,” and “people who think they are liberal but aren’t.”

I told him that I had started wanting the last word, that my nonviolence was becoming tinged with the impulse to squash everyone I felt interfered with love and song and flowers and truth, and that I was on the last dregs of patience.

I also said that I felt there just might be something wrong with these impulses. He leaned back and said, “It’s part of getting older.” He told me we have earned the right to be cranky.

I said, “I can’t see a single reason why people fight each other. Not one. I just want to shake people and say ‘stop it, just stop’.”

He said, “Yes, they should just stop. Maybe in a year, maybe ten, maybe a hundred.”

And that is the flaw in evolution: not all humans can tell what is good for them. I hope the rest of us can live with that.

Creationism has it worse. Any God that nudged the pieces this way and that is a pretty sorry god.

So we’ve got evolution – and free will within the limits of what’s possible in the constraints conflict places on us.

My free will chooses to support those who create master works of beauty and exploration and answers and solutions. My free will supports the peace makers. My free will sides with those who see that it’s a miracle that we exist and who tend that miracle with grace, forgiveness, and generosity.

My free will still believes in the One True God of “love your neighbor.”

Feeling the Love

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My father’s youngest sister, Phyllis, tatted lace. As a child, I was fascinated by the contrast between her, a stolid woman of few words wearing loose cotton dresses, and the white delicacies that seemed to escape from her fingertips.

My mother knit and my daughter crochets. She used to make bobbin lace. This inclination towards small arts that require nimble fingers skipped over me.

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Wikipedia: Tatting is a technique for handcrafting a particularly durable lace constructed by a series of knots and loops, used for lace edgings as well as doilies, collars, and other decorative pieces. (Like the laces in Rembrandt paintings in my blog “Laces of Rembrandt.”)

What Wikipedia doesn’t say is that tatting looks very delicate. In French, the root word is frivolite, also the root word for “frivolous.” In Italian, it’s chaicchierino, meaning “chatty.” I’m heading into a metaphor here:

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Click to see video.

Tatting is intertwined strings that look delicate, but are durable – and are usually beautiful. As of a couple days ago, this is my image of love through generations.
You see, I had a private tea party with my 4-year-old granddaughter with teacups from my mother’s estate. The cups have been with me under two weeks and were featured in my blog “Falling with Teacups.”

My mother started collecting the cups more than 50 years ago, according to notes she pasted on the bottoms of them. I never saw them used, though decades ago she was in a women’s club that met every month. I think they drank coffee. The teacups are probably virginal.

I’m avoiding the subject, which is: knowing you are loved is different than feeling you are loved.

Secondary clause: not feeling that you are loved doesn’t mean you aren’t.

photo 5When I asked my granddaughter how much she likes tea, she said, “I love tea as much as you love me.” She knows she is loved, and has all the rights and privileges of that to be willful, difficult, loving, impossible, and adorable.

As an adult, I live in a zone of knowing intellectually that I am loved but not feeling it viscerally every moment. The sense of being loved is not in my cells as a natural state, and – oh, folderol and ta ta ta – I could tell you the circumstances that created this gap, but my childhood isn’t the point.

. . . and then the one person I viscerally felt loved by was leading a double life with another woman and apartments on two continents. Clearly I’m not good at this.

I am, however, good at loving others – strangers, friends, family. I love people hugely, immensely, consistently, bursting out of my chest-ly. This loving of others is a bath I live in most of the time.

But when it comes to feeling loved myself by others, it’s more of an intermittent shower. Truth is, I need a daily fix to feel loved.

Even as I write this, there are people who extend their love for me, express it in such measure that it is as though the universe is in my face saying “Get it.” So far I have gotten that I will never be like my granddaughter. There is no magic wand that will make me feel 24/7 that I am loved.

But if I cannot retain the visceral feeling of being loved, I understand, nonetheless, that I am surrounded by people who love me, and that is a blessing, and it is enough.

I write because I know I am not alone with a disconnect between being loved and feeling the love – and to give the reminder that we might be wrong when we don’t viscerally feel loved.

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As I watched my granddaughter sip camomile tea with mountains of honey in it from my mother’s beautiful teacup, I literally saw between us a web of white tatted lace connecting my mother to my granddaughter through four generations.

I saw its fragility, was awed by its durability, and knew that when my mother put little tags on the bottom of the cups with my name on them she was giving me her love as she knew best. I felt it viscerally.

Those of us who didn’t feel love when we were young can make sure that those we love are held, precious as porcelain, unquestioning of their gifts and limitations. This is the gift we can give with a little tag on it marked for them.

We who know the gap often know best how to love others for love is our way out. Camomile with honey, anyone?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best Definition of Imagination

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One night a year or slightly more ago I asked Ben, then five, if he did multiplication in school.

Ben: What’s multiplication?

Me: Like adding 2 twos, or 3 threes.

Ben: No, we don’t do multiplication.

Me: Want to?

Ben: Sure.

Within the hour he was doing, in his head, problems like “What’s 3 times 7 plus 12 times 3?” Within two hours he was doing, in his head, problems like “What’s 7 times 12 times 3 subtract 4?” After going silent, putting his head face down in the pillow and wiggling his body this way and that, he would look up and give me the answer. Correctly. Each time.

He asked me not to call them “problems” because they weren’t problems. I told him it was past his bedtime.

A year later he says things like,”If 1 wasn’t a number, there’d be no prime numbers, right?” Think about it.

Or “Look! When I add 1 and 3, I get 4, which is 2 times 2. And then when I add 5 to that, I get 9, which is 3 times 3. And then I add 7 and I get 16, which is 4 times 4. And it keeps going all the way up to 100!” That is, when you add up the odd numbers sequentially you get answers that are square numbers. Who knew?

Recently he counted by 17s up to 3000, then by 18s, then by 19s, and on up while walking, dancing, eating, and taking breaks to do normal kid things. He made up songs and dances for the two of us of his growing totals.

Attachment-1Last night he was multiplying 99 by 99, then 98 by 98, then 97 by 97, as entertainment, silently, while eating pizza, four cheese.

Several months ago he was doubling numbers and when he got somewhere over thirty million, the going got rough. I thought it was a time to learn how to write this stuff down.

Now, if you have a child who is fluent in French and takes exquisite joy in sounds, puns, rhythms, and rhymes in a perfectly calibrated language, and you abruptly tell them it might be better if they did it in Chinese, of which they knew not a word, what would you expect them to do? What Ben did was scream – shriek actually – and run out of the room. Not immediately but after five minutes of valiantly trying to speak in Chinese. Nothing about it made sense to him. It was horrendous. An identity crisis, a disaster, a massive failure by grandma.

Nonetheless, he recovered and a couple weeks later he figured out the number of seconds in a year. It took awhile and a little guidance from his dad, but he did it, and he did it in his head.

So he does it all in his head, and he can explain his process to you later, though you might not understand. I seldom do. (However, if you happen to want to multiply 97 x 97, I recommend his method, which I do understand. Multiply 97 x 100 and subtract 97 x 3 from that.)

Recently, he referred to a computer in his head. Last night we talked about that. I asked if the computer was his whole brain or only a part of it?

Ben: Well, if the whole solar system were in my head, and the sun was in the middle, the computer would be about where Mars is. (He indicated a place behind the “sun,” which was in the middle of his head, and, yes, he is also absorbed with the universe as big and quarks as little. It’s all quantitative scale.)

Me: Does it move?

Ben, with a puzzled look like how could I be so dumb: Noooo, of course not.

Me: So that is where the things you know are?

Ben: Sorta.

Me: Is that where your imagination is?

Ben, with a look that I was even more uninformed about brains than he realized: No!

Me: So where is your imagination?

Ben, short thoughtful pause: It’s like a big bubble . . . (tracing a large circle in front of himself that includes his head and body.) . . . and it’s filled with words floating everywhere and there’s a sentence in it, and then that sentence disappears and suddenly there’s a new sentence in it. (His face lit up when he said “new sentence” like it was a gift written in light.)

Me: The sentence is like a new idea?

Ben: Yes.

photo 2And with that he got on his little sister’s mini-scooter and rode from the dining room to the kitchen while his aunt and I looked at each other in amazement until we heard the crash and wail of the scooter against the cabinet and the boy against the floor. Ice packs on his back, kisses from his aunt, and some tears in gramma’s arms. He really is only six, which is a small number after all.

More “Ben-isms” on Facebook at whatbenwonders, posted by his mom.

 

 

 

 

With God as my Plumber

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Last night God appeared in my dreams as a plumber to fix the drip under my kitchen sink.

Decades earlier I found God in a dream as a paraplegic on a raised cot in an old damp stone basement, dependent upon humans to do everything. Great mind and all that, but humans had to do all the work. It was revelatory, but God as plumber?

The question of the dream was not would there ever be world peace but would He use a mat to protect his elbows and shoulders as He scrunched under there to check the curved P-pipe. If you’re wondering what He looked like, He looked like a stockier version of His son as portrayed in popular movies, i.e. Jewish by way of Norway.

He wore white, but not a robe. It seemed to be a long smock over loose matching pants. Probably cotton, maybe linen.

We didn’t talk. It was about fixing the leak.

Later I dreamt of a large late-18 c. painting of commerce in Piazza San Marco in Venice as these words were said: New money buying out old money? Old money buying out old money? Old money buying out new money?

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The painting could have been by Canaletto or Francesco Guardi, though I guess it was by me. No plot, only the painting and words. On the surface it has to do with the power struggle between entrenched long-term privilege and brash new energy, a topic that interests me both about money and society. (The painting looked most like this one by Canaletto, though mine had more people and was a diagonal view.)

Why Venice? I suppose the dynamic of old families with palatial houses on the sands of intrigue, upstarts, and betrayal. It is both established and collapsing, stratified and shifting. And, since money never means just money, this probably has something to do with my internal psyche.

Several times I woke giggling from dreams I don’t remember. They must have been doozies.

Point is: in the past two months, I lost my wonderful mother and I presided over her arrangements and estate, I swam with a sea lion and watched giant land turtles mate in the Galapagos, I was ill for nearly two weeks and am still physically depleted, I saw an exhibition of exquisite violent porcelains that nearly did me in, and I had a Valentine’s dinner for my adored women friends where we discussed the seeming conflict of privacy and transparency over good wine and truffles.

Alongside this, the world is erupting into new geographies of violence next to ongoing conflicts and brutalities. Our collective hearts are breaking.

Yet, we live and our souls claim their right to joy – and my mind seems to answer to that right by entertaining itself grandly.

I owe it to my mother. As she lay dying on the last day of 2013, I sat alone with her in her room at the nursing home. The room suddenly filled with the energy of a young woman whirling and laughing. She was free, celebrating, happy and wanting me to be happy. I was stunned, having never met that young woman before in all my life. And, yes, her energy was golden.

Her laughter cascaded into me as she whirled through the open spaces above me – a true trickle down effect.

And so I wake, laughing as God tends the leak, the tears, under the sink – ah, so that is the metaphor. Now I know.

I Want to be Johnny Depp

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I want to be Johnny Depp. Period. No qualifiers, no “on the days I’m feeling wild.” No, I want to be Johnny Depp every moment. I want to walk as Johnny Depp, I want to scare people as Johnny Depp, I want to sleep as Johnny Depp. Not with, but as. I want to wear a dead crow on my head and beads to my naval over my bare chest. image

I don’t want to be a man, that’s not at all the point. I want to be me, female, but as Johnny Depp, not Juanita Depp, or Janice Depp. Johnny Depp. Totally.

I want talent that makes my teeth sharp and other people quail. I am the bow and arrow, they are the quiver. I want to step out of the ordinary and walk down city blocks in leather pants with ferret fur wrapped around my arms. I want to look out at the world through a mask of colors, eyes of a hawk, mouth as a line. Missing nothing.

I may not want to live off cactus juice but I would know that I have and that I could again if needed. I would have the paw or claw of my vision quest animal in a purple velvet bag held closed by a porcupine quill.

I want biceps that don’t show that I’ve ever been held by a man, I want freedom from having to please, needing to be pretty. Johnny Depp is all the pretty I need. I want to eat cuteness for lunch.

I want politeness to fall off behind me like old tin cans tied to a Model T. One clang per tin, and each gone forever. I want the Model T to fall off behind me, too. The wedding of niceness is over, my divorce from propriety finished. I won’t look back.

Not that I’ll ravish others, not that I’ll not abide by my code of what’s proper and just, a frontier justice nuanced by years of observation of the animal life of humans compared with wild gardens, sweet with compassion that is held in check by fatalism. But only I would know I had compassion, and I would do secret things to up the quotient of good in the world. And then walk silently on in my moccasins. I won’t look back.

Or maybe I’d just be the Mad Hatter, looney as a rainbow captured in a bell jar.

Or Sweeney Todd as a vegetarian, killing innocent broccoli.image

I want to be the Mad Hatter going into restaurants, a pirate going into business meetings, a maniac with scissors as hands going into the wilderness, and Tonto going into love affairs. Love me, love my dead crow. Humans fake a lot. My crow knows.

But I wouldn’t freak out at being larger than a house or smaller than a dope-smoking caterpillar. It would just be another day.

Yes, I want to be Johnny, crazy, but I’d have damn good beads, and my make-up would be stunning.

A GUIDE TO LIARS: living well is the best . . .

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This is the final post of the series. Part 1 focused on that you are surrounded by liars and they are well-disguised. Part 2 examined the mental-emotional processes of deceivers, scammers, and narcissists and how their minds work differently than ours. It looked at delusion, empathy, guilt, entitlement, and conflicting impulses of superiority and inferiority. It touched on how liars project their qualities onto you, allowing them to blame you and fight dirty.

This post focuses on you and how to recover from injuries by deceivers. While it is not necessary to read Parts 1 and 2 to appreciate this post, you are encouraged to read the entire series – and file it nearby, just in case.

Part 3 of A Guide to Liars

Reality #9: your right to joy is inviolable

You have a right to joy. No one has a right to take that away from you, and you should not let them. I am not talking about fighting for goods or reputation. I am talking about your happiness.

Your first duty is to yourself as a miraculous creature on this earth. This is different than an aggrandized sense of your importance compared to other people’s importance. Your joy is intricately tied in with the joy and care of those around you. They are inseparable.

Your job is to sort out how best to care for yourself in relationship with others. That includes sorting out who supports you and your happiness and who doesn’t, and if any one person’s support matters or doesn’t, and, consequently, who should then be in your life and who shouldn’t.

Your job also includes protecting yourself in ways that will not set up or continue cycles of damage, i.e. the boomerang hit me in the head again effect. Winning battles with liars is seldom a productive goal, or realistic. Winning the battle to return to joy is both productive and reclaims – or perhaps claims for the first time – the golden chalice. It is realistic, and it can expand you into new levels of compassion, greater understandings, and more nuanced relationships. It also gives you the muscle, experience, and desire to help others.

Besides, you’re too good to keep down.

Reality #10: betrayal demands grieving

Betrayal is a kind of death, whether of your plans for your future or as the end of a relationship. Especially painful is to be betrayed by someone you loved and were, or are, committed to, someone you identified, or identify, your being with.

Betrayal by your mate can be as painful as a physical death. I have had recent widows say to me, “This I can survive, it is easier than betrayal would have been.”

Your trusted mate slipped away, abandoning you to face a stranger who is willing to harm you a lot and who, unfortunately, looks exactly like your missing mate – has the same gestures, same mannerism, same hands. Love does not turn around quickly. You stand, grieving the loss of your dearest friend as you have to become a warrior against a sudden enemy. It is immensely confusing.

And it will have the same grieving cycle as for a physical death even though you try to fast forward it because of the circumstances, even though people may not understand why you don’t instantly hate your betrayer. One day, months or years later, the grieving will be over. There is a release. It may be quiet, but you know when it happens.

I’m just acknowledging that for those of you to whom it has happened or are in this process; and I am telling those of you it hasn’t to remember that when this happens to a friend, male or female, that love isn’t turned off by fraud or savagery by their mate. It takes time and the grieving process is mucked up.

We have to learn to save ourselves with as much elegance as we can muster.

Reality #11: even stunned, you need to do some things immediately 

So, you’re reeling, your world has been turned upside-down, your money was scammed, your spouse blind-sided you, the child isn’t yours, the list goes on.

Gather your team immediately. Contact your friends and ask for support, secure your funds, get therapeutic help if you need it, find a great lawyer, make a budget, change your will and estate planning if pertinent – and start preparing yourself to walk away if it comes to that.

My double-life husband who never expected me to leave nonetheless had a lawyer by the next morning. A really nasty lawyer. It foretold what was to come. Do NOT expect deceivers, once exposed, to play nice. They might, I’ve heard some do, but for most you have become an obstacle to what they want now.

That said, do not engage in tit for tat. It is bruising and he or she is the pro, not you. I once watched a self-made Park Avenue lawyer swear under oath the truth of a story he totally fabricated, complete with detailed conversations, time and place. Now, he was a pro. You, however, whether in court or other conversations, need to rely on truth. It has to do with your relationship to yourself. It has to do with honoring your future.

Regarding your lawyer (if that’s where you are): check and re-check that they are doing what they agreed to do when they said they would do it, change them if necessary, see them only with a note-taking friend if you get confused, micro-examine and negotiate their charges, and strategize with them when to be tough and when to be yielding because most lawyers are stuck in either being “tough” or “compromising,” which can be another word for “giving in,” sometimes too soon.

Your lawyer is not in love with you, and he or she has other cases. You know better than they what might be best in dealing with your “adversary.” Trust, with scathing self-examination, your intuition. You get to mix it up, gentle one day, unyielding the next.

With your “adversary” – mate, business partner, other – save records of all communications, past and on-going. I advise witnesses. Taping conversations is allowed, just not as evidence in court if you didn’t tell the person you were taping that you are taping them. Reasons to tape? Liars change their stories, deny or forget what they said, renege on promises, and set you up.

I personally have never taped anyone without their knowledge, but I have refused to have conversations unless they were taped. It brings some element of carefulness and rationality to a conversation.

While it may feel weird, even alien, to strategize against someone you may have loved and/or trusted and/or worked with, get it though your head that he or she is strategizing against you. Get clear that someone who deceived you does not have your interest at heart and does not have a viable concept of justice. Instead of seeing their culpability, most liars blame you (specifically or as a representative of humanity) and they want revenge. You’ve messed with their projected happiness, you caused their troubles. She or he will not wake up tomorrow and stop lying because it seems like a nice thing to do.

Other concerns: eat well, dress beautifully, exercise, dance, change your hair, take a shower or bath very single day at least once, cry often, hug, don’t drink too much, never ever listen to sad music, and watch only happy movies – or movies where good conquers evil. I watched the entire seven year series of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in two months. My daughter brought the set over as immediate first aid. It was a brilliant move. Little girl kicks the crap out of evil non-dead people. (I love Angel, but ultimately preferred Sting.)

Reality #12: revenge is a two-way sword

There is fighting to reclaim – material goods, reputation, and other losses – that might have been taken away from you or at least to get some recompense. Then there’s “getting even,” which is about your anger and hate. “Getting even,” as usually used, means deliberately injuring the other person, business, corporation, or organization for personal vengeance, as a vendetta.

I believe that people are accountable for deception and calculated harm – rape, scamming, fraud, all of it. I also believe in going public, which you may have noticed. That is, I am not willing to cover up for liars, deceivers, bad actors. The shame is not in being deceived, it is in being a deliberate deceiver. I believe in holding up mirrors because I believe people should act decently towards others. If public knowledge, transparency, helps stop that, then good. Note: people who deceive, like other abusers, usually continue unless revealed.

That said, I’m not an expert on hate or anger. Fewer women than men are. It is men I hear say “I’m going to get that s.o.b.” and “(S)He’s gonna wish (s)he never messed with me.” Problem is, you can’t cut others without inflicting self damage. Hate corrodes. Revenge gives away your moral core.

I’m not saying women are nicer than men. Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. What is sure is that we have learned that the court system is weighed against us, we are physically weaker than men, and society is quicker to condemn our bad  behavior, i.e. we have training in anger management and creative solutions in order to survive.

But let’s say you, male or female, are in a rage and feeling hate. (Hate is the hard top coat over the “softer” and more “vulnerable” emotions of grief, fear, and humiliation.) Therapists, friends, time, exercise, and art are aids to get past that, but first you must be willing to get past it.

Important: to get past rage and hate, to reclaim your right to joy, you must recognize that actions by you with the goal of doing harm, even in exchange for harm done to you, makes you (also) an aggressor. They change you in negative ways, and will cling to you through your life. Anyone can do harm. It takes more courage to find and walk the path where you receive justice as best possible without perpetrating gratuitous cycles of damage.

What you want is an end to it, what you want is to live well again, which is, after all, the best revenge. But you want to live well on your own, reclaiming your joy without constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure your injurer knows you are living well. Move on.

Now, this does not mean you can’t have some fun in the “make it public” area. A woman I knew in Brazil took out a huge billboard on the busiest street of Rio near her husband’s office that showed a photograph of his fancy sports car with its license plate. It said the person driving that car was having an affair. It was the first he knew she knew.

A woman I don’t know did something similar with a huge photo and announcement at Times Square in NYC. There are ways to vent and regain a sense of personal power that expose but are essentially fair. As one of my husbands said, you shouldn’t do anything you don’t want on the front page of The New York Times.

Reality #13: trusting again is a choice. Choose it.

Trusting again is a decision. You can, if you wish, stay outside of humanity and intimate relationships and never invest again, financially or emotionally. But do you want to live fully or not? Do you want to be creative or not? Do you want to be juicy or not? Do you want to dance or not? Do you want to expand your life and work and contributions or not? Do you have the courage to trust yourself to trust?

Will you answer to your fears or to your right to joy?

Now you’re older, wiser, have more compassion, and have learned what matters most to you, what is to be cherished and celebrated for its rarity and beauty. Cherishing and celebrating require sharing yourself and that requires trust.

Trust and gullibility are not the same thing. Enlightened trust is not gullible, it is grounded and watchful and does due diligence. It looks carefully, and checks for discrepancies. Not everything, every proposal, every person is to be trusted. Now you know. You know to look for the gems, usually people, and savor them more than you did before.

And now, when you do trust, you understand in advance that there may be a gap between what you prefer to happen and what may actually happen. But understanding that the gap may occur, you are prepared to leap over it or go another direction. Your trust can be both adventurous and flexible.

Without trust you cannot experience the warmth of people who want to be with you, who want to be nearby, who want to know about your life and be, in one way or another, loved by you and to love you.

Reality #14: you can forgive if you want to

Yes, I know forgiveness is essential to happiness and good health. I also know that so long as you don’t forgive, whoever abused you by any kind of deception has a hook in you. They may or may not care, but you sure feel it.

I’m not airy-fairy about forgiveness. For me it is somehow irrelevant. I just don’t want bad behavior to continue, and I think people should be accountable, but I’m used to that many liars appear to get away with deception, and I’ve made my peace with that. I don’t find these people very interesting. I find people of truth and courage to be interesting.

I also probably don’t like the exchange of deceivers owing me an implied apology. It leaves a kind of connection while I prefer neutralization.

If, for you, neutralization includes an internal act of forgiveness, then do it the quicker the better and again and again if you need to. Work it out. Come to it. Bring your full self back to joy. Don’t leave part of yourself behind, snarling in the dark.

Reality #15:  . . .  just to know, deceivers don’t get away with it

Even when liars appear to have gotten what they wanted, they are, unavoidably, alone. Surrounded, they are still alone. It’s unavoidable because they are not really there. There’s only a stand in, a fake, a deceiver, a pretender. People lose their own good company when they deny their authenticity. They sacrifice their right to joy, which always comes from inside, from the honest place, the hard working place, the place of love with others and recognition of kinship, the place of “two or more gathered . . .”

Reality #16: honesty

No one hasn’t been hurt. No one hasn’t lied. Most of these hurts and lies have been, or could be, laid to rest. They don’t need resurrection. They are compost.

Having free will, we make choices. Honesty works best over time because it keeps our own good company and, by processes I could not possibly explain, celebrates our right to joy.

 

A GUIDE TO LIARS: how a liar’s mind works

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Part 1 (previously posted): you’re surrounded
Part 2 (below): how a liar’s mind works
Part 3 (coming soon): living well is the best . . .

Part 2 of “A Guide to Liars” 

The mind of a pathological liar has a sub-terrain with shifting plates of distorted perceptions and assumed privilege that split the worlds of the rest of us, our sense of what is real and what is the order of things. Their fault lines turn our lives upside-down. Whether that is through a Ponzi scheme, infidelity, false claims of expertise, embezzlement, or other frauds the patterns are the same, both of us and for them. In part 2 of this guide, we will look at them.

Reality #3: liars lie because they want to

In most societies we no longer need to lie to save our lives or remain healthy. Chronic liars choose to lie because they feel it serves them better and faster than honesty.

Yes, there may be differences in the brain structure of some pathological liars from that of the rest of us, specifically a lack of development in the area that differentiates truth from fiction that usually matures around age six; and pathological liars have been shown to have more white “wiring” matter and less grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of their brain than other people.

Nonetheless, the primary differences between chronic deceivers and the rest of us  is not our ability to tell reality from fiction but between our levels of greed, capacity for empathy, sense of privilege, and concern for “right” and “wrong.”

The interior fault lines of frauds have them experiencing inferiority and superiority at the same time. Their sense of superiority tells them they are above the normal rules while their sense of inferiority urges them to disguise their inferiority by acting above the rules.

Reality #4: liars and narcissists experience themselves as the center of the world

A subset of the colluding delusions of superiority and inferiority is “power corrupts,” where wealthy or other powerful people feel exempt from the rules (honesty, fidelity, paying taxes, for example) and they feel that what they want should be theirs because they are a “cut above.” Ethics and morals are revised to support an isolated life of privilege. Erasing the poor and deprived from your mind and actions is, by the way, moral deception.

Wealth is a test of character. I’ve lived around rich people. Most are deeply caring, welcoming, and generous. But I’ve heard others actually say they deserve whatever they want because they’ve worked so hard. Never heard a single mom working two jobs say that.

But not all frauds are wealthy and not all work hard. Most want fast and easy rewards and deception is the tool of choice – identity thief, scamming the elderly, faking resumes, embezzling, having affairs.

It’s easiest to do this when you experience yourself as the center of your world so completely that you feel yourself to be the center of THE world. Self-delusion, deception of others, and narcissism are the holy trinity of liars.

Narcissists have diminished empathy. They do not have a mature compassionate interior self. They lack the “ping” of relationship. They do not viscerally feel others as completely real. This makes deception of others easy.

As a character disorder, narcissism is notoriously difficult to treat because 1) narcissistic liars are not motivated by caring overly much about anyone else, 2) they get their way often enough that they have little incentive to change, 3) they are not troubled by their consciences as much as the rest of us, and 4) they feel superior to therapists. One study I read boiled down to “If you’re involved with a narcissist, turn around and run. Now.”

Reality #5: liars have skewed guilt meters

Most liar’s ability to cipher out what they should or should not feel guilty about is non-functional and nonsensical. One can have sympathy when this condition came from horrendous early experiences, but be careful. That was then, this is now.

Liars may or may not express remorse, some even beg forgiveness, some make promises, but there is an agenda behind it that is not about taking care of you or changing. (Did I mention the other ex-husband, the one who was physically violent? That’s how I learned that begging for forgiveness, even on your knees, and making promises can also be calculated lying.)

Reality #6: some liars lie as a way of life, or just to do harm

While most liars want to gain something – status, money, sex, admiration – others lie out of habit and/or the desire simply to harm others. One woman in the San Francisco Bay area is infamous as a broadband liar with a specialty in gratuitous character assassination. She convinced many of us that one ex-husband was so crazy and violent that for years I and others assumed he was in and out of institutions. In fact, he is a mild-mannered expert in the Far East, retired professor, world traveler, and author of many successful books.

She tried to destroy another man’s reputation by starting rumors he was a pedophile, and fabricated a case against another ex-husband as a compulsive spender buying wine at $1000 a bottle and suits at tens of thousands. Swearing to this under oath, in order to get special financial consideration in their divorce, didn’t faze her.

Often people who lie specifically to do harm also use “suck up” techniques on people they perceive as powerful or “above them.” It is two sides of the same coin used to climb an imagined ladder. Bring some people down, get other people to lift you up.

Reality #7: liars are usually very angry and almost always fight dirty

When most of us “try on” the feeling of lying – whether overt, covert, or by omission – we become uncomfortable because to deceive others is to alienate ourselves from our integrity. It separates us from our core being. We betray ourselves the instant we betray someone else. We lose our mooring when we lose our morals.

That is, bastardizing your integrity to deceive or do harm exacts a heavy price. When you are not honest with yourself, self-delusion, dissonance, and confusion move in. Your internal mirror is broken, so instead of seeing your shadow side, you project it onto others. What you unconsciously or only semi-consciously don’t like inside yourself you see as the qualities of other people, i.e. Pogo: we have met the enemy and he is us.

This projection makes deceivers formidable enemies because in their minds it gives them license to fight dirty. They see you as trying to cheat them, feeling entitled, and not giving a f**k about them. Their projection is seamless and may feel like the most real thing in their world. They can smolder in righteous indignation and rage to take you down. (Did I tell you about the former employee who cyber-stalked me and whenever someone wrote an article about me, she contacted them to tell them the “truth”? She had fabricated vital points of her resume, read and sometimes kept my private mail, and . . . so it goes.)

As projectionists, liars blame. As narcissists, they do not make mistakes. Failures in business, life, marriage, and family are caused by someone else, by the people who were supposed to do their work for them.

Mix together projected demons and narcissistic privilege. Stir in that even honest people who substitute short-term rewards for long-terms gains are usually disappointed.

And that is how chronic liars become so nasty.  I hope you never need to review this material.

Reality #8: liars’ abilities to perceive and grow are compromised

The dynamic is: once you’ve compromised your integrity, your capacity for self-examination is compromised. Your interior mirror is foggy if not outright splintered. You have no true way of seeing yourself, even the good parts, which everyone has somewhere.

In any case, most deceivers are so heavily invested in fooling themselves there’s no incentive to look deeply. The mirror, splintered or not, is not looked into or missed.

Now, everyone wants a sense of self. This desire is so strong that in order to grow – that is, to change ourselves – we feel we must have something to hold onto during the transition. For most of us that “something” is a baseline belief that we can trust our integrity. We feel our core essence will stay true even as we change. We believe we will find our way to larger truths and nuances and complexities and relationships, even if a tad wobbly. This allows us to mature and develop, have sophisticated beliefs, and nurture multi-level evolving relationships.

Liars, not sure their centers will hold through uncertainty, tend to freeze in place, clutching the same perspectives, worldviews, sense of privilege, and belief, usually that they are more clever than the next guy.

IMPORTANT: I can think of few things more courageous than a chronic betrayer or deceiver owning up to himself or herself to do the work to rebuild authenticity, to peal back the layers, to distrust his or her personal story. It would take such courage of self-examination, deconstruction, and reconstruction! The initial work is so important that the secondary work of personality reconstruction and of any recompense or apology to others is … well, secondary. Necessary, but secondary.

Part 3: living well is the best . . . will be posted soon. Learn the principles of recovery and why honesty is the best policy.