George Clooney on Mental Backpacks

George Clooney!

A few days ago I wrote this piece on how having a mental backpack can slow you down. How could I have forgotten this scene from the great movie Up in the Air? Thanks to Angela Beeching, author of Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music for the reminder.

Now I’m going to go off and pretend GC paid a personal visit to my blog.

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Coming Out of Your Closet: Teyonah Parris, Adam Chandler, David Leavitt, and You

Yesterday’s piece on Betty Ming Liu’s quest for self-liberation got me thinking about authenticity. Today, I ran across stories about two people, each on their own quest for it:

For Teyonah Parris (who plays Don Draper’s secretary Dawn on Mad Men) the quest was to accept her beautiful natural hair:

“I was walking down the street with one of my girlfriends and I saw this young lady who had the most amazing, bomb twist-out. I said to my friend, “Oh my gosh, her hair is so beautiful. I wish my hair could do that.” My friend looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Uh, it would if you stop relaxing it.” I stopped and thought to myself, wow, duh. I kind of felt dumb because of course I knew my hair was naturally curly, but it had been so long since I had been relaxing. I realized that I had no real relationship with my natural hair.

“At that very moment, I decided to change that. I wanted to see what my own hair felt like because I really didn’t know. I had no clue. In the back of my mind, I always figured I could go back to a relaxer if I didn’t like it. I started transitioning for a year and a half using sew-in weaves so my transition was fairly easy. My stylist would trim off the relaxer as time went on and eventually, she cut off the last little bit of straight ends and I was relaxer-free. I finally saw my own hair in its natural state.

“And then… I cried.

“I did not know how to deal with this little afro on my head. I called my best friend crying because I did not want to leave the house. She came over and literally sat me down and said, “Teyonah you are beautiful. Your hair is amazing.” She is really the main reason why I am natural to this day. Later on, we went out in Harlem and I was trying not to feel so self-conscious. The whole day, people would come up to me and say, “Wow, I love your hair. It’s gorgeous.” I was totally shocked. The reaction I got from other people was really comforting. I know we shouldn’t look for approval from other people, but in all honestly, it really helped me see that it was really my own perception of my hair that was holding me back.

If you want to understand why hair is such a complex and emotional topic for many black women and men, Wikipedia will get you started.

Meanwhile, Adam Chandler writes about being a closeted gay man who overcompensated for his feelings of shame and powerlessness by overachievement:

I tore through middle and high school, craving perfect scores like a junkie in need of a fix. In college, I wrecked the curve for my straight classmates. Each semester, I petitioned the dean to overload my course schedule and sought the presidencies of student groups I had joined just days earlier. By the time I reached Yale Law School, where once-closeted academic superstars are like the hay in a haystack, coming out wouldn’t even have provoked a yawn. No matter. I built a wall of casebooks, hunkered down and ignored the growing hole in my social development.

Dr. Pachankis and Dr. Hatzenbuehler would not be surprised to learn that more than half the men in my randomly assigned “small group” seminar at Yale were gay. Deriving self-worth from achievement-related domains, like Ivy League admissions, is a common strategy among closeted men seeking to maintain self-esteem while hiding their stigma. The strategy is an effort to compensate for romantic isolation and countless suppressed enthusiasms. And it requires time-consuming study and practice, which conveniently provide an excuse for not dating….

But the study does show that the longer a young man conceals his sexual orientation, the more heavily he invests in external measures of success, potentially leading to undue stress and social isolation. Perhaps that explains why I recently moved to Washington, D.C., America’s most populous closet, where esteemed work abounds, promotions are frequent and ambition is in the water supply.

Another of the study’s findings is that boys who grow up in more stigmatizing environments are more likely to seek self-worth through competition. I spent my first 18 years in a rural, religious town in North Carolina, a state that recently passed a constitutional amendment barring same-sex unions by a wide margin. Now here I am, a metal detector scanning for golden prizes. That’s no coincidence, the research suggests.

(Click arrow at right to continue!)
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Dave Grohl on The Truth About How to Succeed in the Music Industry

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Yoga Can Help With Creative Block

This article recommending yoga as a solution for creative block makes a lot of sense.

First, as the article points out, a lot of creative endeavors, including even writing, can tax the body:

As a yoga teacher, Bobowicz was concerned about the repetitive stress that plagues artists as they work.

“Jewelers can hammer over and over again, painters use their hands and wrists to do brush strokes, and writers crouch at their desks and type — stress that builds up on important parts of the body can become a block so the creative force can’t flow through,” Bobowicz said. “We want to keep these body parts open and healthy. I see this as occupational therapy for artists.”

For writers and others who are sedentary, that’s also a big problem.

Beyond that, getting passionately involved in yoga or any other endeavor can take the pressure off your writing.

Finally, physical exercise is a great catalyst for creativity, and many people (including me!) get useful ideas or fresh perspectives while walking or exercising.

So…good idea to incorporate yoga or another physical activity throughout your day.
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“My life…was often lived as performance art for invisible Simon Cowells”

A moving and wise essay on how one woman’s becoming less perfectionist helped her when she had to face cancer:

Around 13 years ago, a confluence of events revealed to me how soul-sucking perfectionism was, and how much the futile striving for it was costing me in stress and anxiety. I began to understand that my zealous pursuit of knowledge was feeding arrogance, complacency and flawed answers that left me empty in crucial ways. Control was a deceptive illusion and my life, though not fake in any way, was often lived as performance art for invisible Simon Cowells.

So I forsook perfectionism, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and the insecure need to control and be right, and the world began opening up to me in surprising ways. Coloring outside the lines led to more happiness and optimism, my character flaws became just a part of all I am, and “just OK” became permissible. In mystery, no longer a source of anxiety, I found wonder and satisfaction, even amusement. I began to value the questions, finding an odd satisfaction in them. I came to enjoy saying “I don’t know,” and “haven’t a clue!”

This put me in a very good place to learn that I had breast cancer. My cells had gone rogue – a mystery – and I didn’t have to make sense of it, explain it, or research it to death. I could just accept it as an imperfect part of life. Others had had cancer and now it was my turn. I simply wanted to go through it maintaining my core personality and sense of humor.

There’s nothing funny about cancer, but there’s a lot of funny in it and I mined it for all it was worth. Choosing to view it as an adventure, I journeyed through it without anything, including myself, being perfect. Instead I experienced an unexplainable peace foreign to my younger self.

Girl can turn a phase.

Link

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Healing Strategies

I live right near Boston’s Logan Airport so my main Marathon experience happens just before and after the race, when my normally sedate T (subway) line fills up with hundreds of incredibly skinny, fit, and exuberant people from all over the world who have flown in to take part. I was out of town when the bombing happened, and can only imagine what the post-race T crowds headed back to the airport must have looked like. Marathoning is such a pure and wholesome endeavor; I wish all the marathoners well, and hope (believe) that the incredible skills, dedication, and perseverance that brought them to the point where they could run a 26.2 mile race will get them past this week’s horrible trauma.

So what can people do to heal? The currently popular WWII English mantra “Keep calm and carry on” is useful, to a point. But a bit too passive. Better advice is to take active steps to regain your perspective:

1) Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts offered free admission on

Currently at the MFA

Tuesday. Don’t know if they’re still doing it, but a little beauty and history can be healing.

2) Fred “Mr.” Rogers’ advice to, “Look for the helpers.” is justly popular. The quote continues: “You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.”

3) Blogger John Cole suggests refraining from what he calls “disaster porn” in the media. His whole post is typically brilliant as he reminds us that both the depraved elements of our media and the authoritarian / militaristic elements of our government thrive on scaring us, and concludes, “The bomber(s) isn’t the only one who wants you to be afraid. Remember that.” Read more

“A Good Death”

I had never looked closely for a long period at a dying person. I had never listened to the strained breathing of a body barely functioning and had never put my head beside a man too weak to speak, smelled his pungent breath and silently shared his day in, day out view of the white popcorn ceiling. It was when I put the camera down and became present that I could feel my fears melting away.

With this deeper but calm proximity to death’s physical attributes, I contemplated my parents’ current and serious health concerns, as well as my own mortality. My consciousness became richer for it….We could use news of a good death. Not a tragic death or a famous death, just a good one, the kind that might happen to any of us if we are lucky.

Link
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