Hunt for Yourself

Yesterday, a friend of mine who is in the throes of that horrible necessity called the job hunt – potentially one of the most demoralizing experiences there is – wrote to ask my advice. (Never a wise move unless you are jonesing for a novella, coz that’s what you’ll get. This person does not know me well so he had no idea what he was in for. We are Facebook friends only. We’ve never met in the flesh.)


His dilemma: having to go through yet another job interview, after which he figures he’ll spend weeks wondering not only if he got the job but whether or not he is utterly deficient as a human being. His experience so far has included not getting so much as a “no thank you” post-interview e-mail or call back. Just silence.


Dead air does have this uncanny power to bring even the most self-confident of us to our knees. But, more interesting to me, is the way it illustrates how adept we are at filling the quiet with our own noise – i.e., the cacophony of criticism we imagine others are leveling against us and about which we are most likely mostly wrong. How do I know? Because I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what others really think and feel, not even my closest friends, nevermind strangers, nevermind job interviewers. And unless you’re psychic, you don’t know either. So why spend time and energy inventing stories you'll never be able to corroborate? More importantly, why invest these stories/people with power over you? If you really want pain, why not do something more direct, like giving yourself a paper cut between your fingers just before plunging your hand into a nice salt bath?


In focusing our attention on this other person (as if thinking about what they might think about us could actually crack the door to their inner souls), we avoid focusing on our own thoughts, feelings, actions and the power we actually have over ourselves.


When a girlfriend of mine got upset because her mother did not like a piece of furniture my friend bought, I asked my friend if she liked her mother’s taste in furniture. As she mentally surveyed the living room of her youth, one which was chock-a-block with Victorian fru-fruness enough to choke out the sun, my friend was able to state an unequivocal no. “So why would you expect your mother to like your sleek, mid-century-modern hutch? More importantly, why do you need her to?”


It’s easy to understand how family and friends hook us, but the problem is that we are not satisfied to hand our power over to them alone. Oh no. We send out invitations to the great unwashed, asking everyone and their grandmother to weigh in on our deepest dreams. Why do we do that?

One of my favourite Gary Larsen cartoons names the Finkelsteins as the “they” in “they say,” which seems to suggest that if we knew who “they” were, we might be able to throw off the shackles of their judgment. After all, who would consider the Finkelsteins – in all their wacky Larsenesque suburban, white-bread weirdness and outdated cat-eye glasses glory – the arbiters of taste, or anything thing else for that matter? Yet we still give our personal Finkelsteins enormous airtime on the radio stations of our minds.


Whether we are projecting on a person we know intimately, or on nameless hoards, we either believe they are better than us, or worse than us, or that they are something we can never hope to be, or someone we would never want to become. Either way, we project an other against which we measure ourselves. And we always come up on the losing end. It does not matter what we project onto them in the end, however, because what’s really at stake here is not how great or pathetic they are, but how they have become the reasons we stop ourselves from being/becoming us.


Lest you think I am above my own “they” envy, let me be the first to admit I am hounded by a pack of "theys" who complicate my every decision. My favourite empty signifier is the ex-boyfriend onto whom I can project all manner of superlatives the moment the relationship ends. Here are some of my favourite "they" stories I like to tell when I find myself suddenly single: it seems my ex boyfriend's career skyrockets, and/or his new running regimen not only hardens his body but makes him nicer to be around, and/or his taller, thinner, more-degreed girlfriend/wife delivers sexual delights I can only hope to read about in Penthouse Forum (nevermind that admitting this shows just how depraved I am compared to the GF/W, who likely spends her leisure time reading Kirkegaard while bringing my ex to exquisite . . . oh, nevermind!)

What it took me a long time to learn, and what has been so liberating since learning it, is none of my ex’s lives need have an impact on mine. I don’t mean to suggest we are islands who have no effect on each other. What I’m saying is, someone else’s success is just that. Their success. And we can choose to rejoice in it, or use it to beat ourselves up. The former is more fun for everyone. But which ever you choose, the thing is, what their success is most definitely not is my failure. Or yours. Your success and/or failure are yours to own, and no one else can bring about either state. You get to do that for yourself!


On the first day of my MFA program, I met my beautiful friend, Brendan, who, within five minutes of yakking with me, delivered a piece of information that I instantly invested with sinister meaning. Turns out we both had had painting shows at the same time that year in the same city, both shows exhibiting paintings with literal seams stitched into the canvases, which I thought was a brilliant, original move on my part until I heard he'd done the same thing. My reaction? "Fuck! Now I have to change my whole practice so that I’m not competing with Brendan!" (Competing for what is a question I never bothered to ask myself).

His reaction? "Liz, there’s room for us all."



Having just spent three years in life-painting classes with a room full of people all making their version of the same model, how could I not have internalized the powerful fact that we all have our own idiosyncratic take on the same thing?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: DUH!

It’s entirely possible your worst fears will come true. You may make something that someone else has made better and/or marketed better. And that person may become rich and famous. And he or she may be, or become, horribly arrogant and, therefore, in your mind, undeserving of the slice of pie he/she has just removed from your hand. But the thing is, there really is no finite pie, and that piece in your hand comes from your perfectly whole pie, not theirs. Plus, there is always more pie. All you have to do is make it. And that way, you can make it to your taste!


Or, how about this metaphor: you cannot break or heal someone else’s leg by breaking your own. You see that, right? So, transfer that onto your life: you cannot have the life you want by focusing on how someone else is living theirs, or by wondering how they are judging yours. The sad truth is, everyone is way too focused on themselves to spend time judging you. And even if they are judging you, don’t you think they could be spending their time more wisely? And, even better, wouldn’t you want unleash yourself from that last thought because you can’t do a thing about what others think or do anyway? Seriously, who cares because look over here . . . this is far, far more interesting . . . LOOK! it's YOU!


What do you want?

My friend's brother just died at 43, having spent much of his adult life blaming others for his stuckness. He was wrong. He was bright, had access to a great deal of money, had an enviable education and was good looking. I know people who have had far less but who have given themselves so much more. It's about being kind to yourself. (BTW, I know depression is a chemical soup that often disables our ability to see ourselves clearly, but then be good to yourself and get help. You are worthy. You have been worthy since birth. Believe it. It's the truth.)

Since my job-hunting friend asked for my advice, I gave it to him. Take everything as information, not judgment. What information tells you is more about them -- the way a person treats you, or what they say to you, is not a reflection on you, it's about the other person's perceptions and where they are in their own journey. Pay close attention. That kind of information is power. Not power to abuse. Power to choose not to take it personally.

It's easy to attach a story to an event, especially a scary story in which you have been stalled in some way by external forces, but this (false) story does not actually do anything useful for you except cause you pain and obscure the real possibilities before you. When you treat events, conversations, other people's actions and most anything else that comes your way as information (and drop the story), it lights your way. You have a path. Stories are great, don't get me wrong, but they are fictions, to be enjoyed as such.

As for judgment, I suggest you leave that for other people.

Elsewhere in the Future

Sometimes excitement is all we have, even when we don't yet know what purpose a person, place, or thing will serve in our lives.


Lately, however, my excitement has been severely tested.

I was not born an optimist. And I did not grow up surrounded by optimists. My father, for instance, can project every manner of calamity on the most innocuous of circumstances.


"We'll never make it!" is certainly an appropriate expression for when you are racing to Emerg because you are hemorrhaging from the place where your foot used to be attached to your ankle before it was severed by an errant lawn mower. But the same statement is over the top when you're looking for a parking spot nearest the supermarket doors early on a Tuesday morning when what's spread before you is a vast tract of concrete that resembles the Dust Bowl from the Depression era. But that's never stopped my father.


Being my father's daughter, I admit I share his hyperbolic tendencies, but I never really noticed them until my friend Jacline politely-but-wearily asked me, as we were flying home from a vacation together a few years back, if maybe I could try, once in a while, saying that I was "hungry" instead of "starving" or "sleepy" instead of "dead"?

It's not that I did not believe her when she suggested my language tends towards the dramatic, but I thought it appropriate to put the blame squarely on the shoulders on which it belongs -- my father's. In the car ride on the way home from the airport, my father confirmed his role as the cultivator of my fatalistic vocabulary. It was a hellishly hot August day when we pulled out of the sauna-like airport parking lot into the blistering sun when my father remarked, "winter is upon us." Jacline looked at me and I swear to god I actually heard a whole jackpot of pennies drop. It was a look that said there was no hope for me.


Had my own life not utterly disintegrated a few months earlier, she probably would have been right. But actual calamity changed my cynicism. Forever!

I won't go into the various trauma stories I've told a million times because, really, who cares. Calamities come and go. But what we make of them, the stories we tell, and how we choose to perceive our lives both then and now is what really colours our experience of it, both then and now.


I have spent the last eight years reading every self-help book ever published, and more Oprah magazines than I care to count (because admitting to even one is social suicide in my circles), not to mention talking to my therapist/guru/healer on the phone a few times a week when I could not sit with her in person, and running enough times that I am sure I have cumulatively completed more marathons than most Kenyans. What did all those years of reading and keening teach me? That calamity may happen, but that we are never out of hope, and there is always a way to make our lives worth living.


Depression runs in my family. My brothers and I could have easily surrendered our lives to it, but somehow each of us, by god only knows what grace, found a way to battle our inner "no way it can't be done because you are worthless and joy and fulfillment is for other people not you" with a stronger inner "what's the worst that can happen you may as well give it a try." Where my parents see the world as one big closed door, my brothers and I retained the childish belief that something just might be on the other side of that door. In our own idiosyncratic ways, we threw ourselves against our respective doors until they opened.


Since before my younger brother, Justin, could spell (which was around the time his son, Nicholas, learned to spell), he has longed to own a Porche. How to make the money to manifest that dream was the question. Like me, he was a poor student, so an MBA did not exactly present itself as remotely possible. But somehow he made it to and through university. He truly blossomed later at work. He knew he wanted to own his own company one day, although there was no precedent in our family for such lofty ambitions, so he focused all his energy on emulating his CEO, and volunteering for every company event to make himself seen, known, and indispensable. Today, he does own his own company (which has good and bad years), but, more importantly, last year he bought himself a Porche. An old one. And not the sexiest or most fine-tuned one. But it's his.


Andy, on the other hand, did not go to university but started working as a builder instead. Today, he has five guys working for him, has built himself two homes and, by all accounts, from the outside looking in, he has a great life. Yet building up his own business did not bring him joy. After a few years of depression, thinking he had screwed himself out of fulfillment by avoiding higher education, Andy finally found his nirvana elsewhere. He took flying lessons. His mood altered immediately. And in that state, he pushed the envelope of possibilities and decided to build himself a plane. This enterprise would cost far more money than he had, but he decided to do it anyway. And in the middle of the project, the money did come. And now he has a plane. Yesterday, Andy flew to Toronto from Ottawa to take Justin for a ride.


I grew up thinking I was not only dumb, but stupid. I strove for Cs and got them. But somehow I realized in my last year of high school that I had no fall-back skills, such as being able to make something I could sell. I didn't even know how to cook in those days. I somehow knew that in my case, if I did not go to university, my life would become a black hole of nothingness. In my last year of high school, I had to ask Jacline to teach me how to study (that's how long I've known her. Her role in shaping my life and teaching me optimism, which has carried me places I never thought I could go, is a whole other blog post).


When I was at art school, I lamented to my landlord/friend that I would never make it as an artist because the art world did not accept my particular style of painting, or my age, or my sex, or my whatever I thought "the art world" did not accept. In the space of a sneeze, he dismantled my ill-conceived belief system with two simple words, "who cares?" He didn't mean who cares about your dreams, he meant who cares what "they" think because there really is no they and the world is what we make of it. And even if there was a they, why on earth would I let them tell me how to live my best life? Especially when all around me, if I just looked, were examples of lives that found their level in all kinds of orthodox and unorthodox ways, and successfully, too.

Recently, I have taken an anthropological interest in the way the current economic-crisis rhetoric has taken hold of people I love. People with a job fear its loss, even if that loss may or may not be immanent. People who have lost their jobs fear for their futures, even though possible new jobs may be just around the corner. The common denominator here is that no one really knows anything about what the future holds. And that's always the case, in good times and in bad. I spent the whole of last year -- pre-economic downturn -- jobless. Then, when the news was reporting the worst-case scenarios for job losses, I got a job. With a non-profit no less, and at a time when all budgets are being slashed. I'm not saying it's not scary out there. I'm saying that I honestly believe there is opportunity all around us. We just need to shift our perspectives and paradigms.

Here's what not to do: my father spent the three weeks leading up to his fancy vacation in Italy last year worrying that his luggage would go missing in transit. And you know what? It did. It was missing for four days while he toured the Italian countryside, stuffing his face with one sumptuous meal after another. All his worrying did not prevent his luggage from getting lost. But if he'd had a different perspective on what is in our control and what isn't, he could have suffered only four days of so-called hell instead of including the three preceding weeks of hell, which were totally unnecessary.

I forget more times than I take a breath that living in the now and going forward with hope takes awareness and courage, which is why I often find myself frustrated and exhausted in the face of any kind of naysaying, overt or hinted. It's easy to sit around and blame the world for why you are not living the life you want, but no one is really holding us back, except us. Not even systems. And even if they were, we are still capable of living more fulfilling lives if just a notch above where we are now and within the worst of systems. I recently read an article about a political prisoner who was in solitary confinement for seven years (what about Mr. Mandela!) and used that time to develop all kinds of internal skills, such as optimism.



So instead of harshing on my optimism as you ask me why you should bother going on, much less try for something you don't believe you can achieve (read: deserve), can you please try to ask yourself instead, "why not?" I never thought I'd be a writer for a living and here I am. I never thought I'd go to grad school, never mind write an 80-page thesis filled with theory I not only understood but actually thoroughly enjoyed, but I did. I even got one grade higher than the smart girl (who also happened to be my nemesis), and the highest mark in the class. In grad school! How's that for a C student? And you know what, that A never brought me money or fame or a career in art or love. So all that worrying about it was as useless as spending two days moving a truckload of furniture and other personal stuff that would burn to a crisp two years later in my apartment fire.


We really can't know what the future holds, but we can at least smile on our way to it and assume it'll be pretty fucking good, because that way we are more than likely to contribute positively to its unfolding.

And remember, when something fails, it not only means you at least tried, but it also means another thing is coming round the corner. Because what other choice do you really have than to believe it will be great?

Click

In Januaray, I gave my digital camera to my friend, Sara (of the Star Wars Action Series fame). Her camera broke almost two years ago. She has been making do with her computer camera, which led to some truly innovative strategies and arresting images, but still, her talent is big and needs more tools, and besides (and more to the point) I’m greedy: I wanted a new camera. So.

But I could not seem to find the time nor the energy to buy this new camera. During these cameraless days, I borrowed one from a friend for a day. I also took a page from Sara’s book and used my own computer camera a few times. And I downloaded images from the Internet, gaining a new skill I needed anyway. Then, about a month ago at a dinner party, while affecting the look of a listening dinner guest, I said out loud, “I need a new camera.” My friend David responded, “I have an extra camera. It’s yours.” And voila, a free camera! (This from the man who earlier, and randomly, had expressed what I believe to be the most perfect tee-shirt caption. First he sighed, then he said, longingly, “I love toast.”)


A few days ago, I was again affecting the look of a listening friend while internally struggling to keep my new-job anxieties down to a quiet roar, when I suddenly blurted out, “I need a world map!” I had just come back from a work retreat in Antigonish where I had met my new colleagues, most of whom hail from India and Africa, and whose hometowns or work towns may as well be waves in an ocean, so unspecific are their locations on my washed-out mental globe (though I do congratulate myself for nodding my head and furrowing my brow thoughtfully during my conversations with them in a way that surely conveyed, “yes, yes, Tajikistan, yes, I share your geographic, political and cultural understanding of that place deeply.”)


“I have a National Geographic world map right here. Take it. It’s yours.” The map was sitting right there on my friend’s desk, acting like any old reference tool one uses on a daily basis, except his job does not require him to refer to a map. Naturally, I wanted to make fun of him because that’s just what I do, but my need for the map was greater than my desire to tease. I took the map, bit my tongue, and even remembered to say thank you.

This asking-and-receiving thing has been happening so much in the last four years that I have to remind myself to be surprised when it happens now. It all started in Montreal around my 37th birthday when my friend, Rosemary, gave me a book. This book is out there. I mean, it’s “out there.” Which makes me shy about sharing its title. I’d feel more comfortable discussing the quality of my orgasms on this blog than talking about this book with the faceless hoards I think of as my readers. I’m not afraid of being skewered, I’d just rather have a face-to-face with my skewerer. So, I tell you what, if you to write me offblog, I will tell you the title. And here’s another gift: you can save your expensive scientifically-backed arguments for someone who really may not know they are a flake. I know I'm a flake. You may as well tell me I have freckles. There’s no discussion to be had there because there’s only one reasonable response to that. “Duh!”


We all walk our own paths, and what arrives on them is often just plain odd, and, as my lovely guru/therapist keeps trying to hammer into me, no two paths are alike (Liz, why don’t you just make your kind of paintings instead of trying to be that painter over there?). So, I’m loath to suggest that following my idiosyncratic path will improve anyone’s life (who would jump up and down at the idea of living in someone else’s furnished apartment, making sort-of-good-enough wages, and not knowing where you will live after June because ever since your apartment in Montreal burned down, you have not been able to commit to a home?) I'm definitely not suggesting that this thing I'm about to tell you about is the solution to all your problems, or even that it works, or even that it's true. It's just my wacky experience, and I thought I'd share. That's what blogs are for ...

Before it burned down,



my Montreal apartment was the most beautiful, spacious, gracious place I’ve ever lived (on my own).



Just before Montreal, In the last week of my grad program in one of the most soul-destroying cities I’ve ever lived in, I was gathered with my tiny group of meditators in one of the tiniest apartments I’ve ever lived in.


In the middle of our quiet conversation about life, I practically shouted, “I don’t want to move back to Toronto! But all my work contacts are there!” One of my beautiful meditators asked me this: “can you stop striving so hard and trust that you will get to where you want to go?”


No. I didn’t say that out loud, but I did think it. I thought it hard. And then I thought, why not? I had nothing to lose by trusting. And trusting did not stop me from also thinking about how to find work. I could do both. Plan A and Plan B.


A few days before my grad show, I was venting all my work/life anxieties to a friend who promptly gave me an exercise to help me sort out my life choices (I was graduating from a painting program after all … hahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahaha!) The exercise consisted of drawing three columns on a sheet of paper and three headings: “good”, “bad” and “solutions.” I had 15 minutes to write down everything I enjoyed in the good column, and then another 15 minutes to write down the obstacles to my joy in the bad column. For the solutions column, I was given unlimited time. I was to do the exercise somewhere with good energy, like a park, or a café.

I took myself to the only café that did not serve brown crayon melted in hot water, claiming it was coffee, and set about my task. Within three minutes, I was in tears. Sure, I love painting. But who can make a living out of that? I was about to give up the exercise when I told myself that the least I could do was finish the task and get some satisfaction from proving to my friend that he was cracked. It’s not that I lack commitment. I am deeply committed to my givey-uppy approach to life. It has always proved me right. If you give up, it won’t happen. That’s a 100% guarantee. Those are odds I can live with.


But by the end of half an hour, and against all odds, I had a plan. I had remembered I had some savings (who forgets something like that? A miser, that’s who). So, with my savings, it stood to reason, I could start a dog portrait painting business. Don’t ask how I got from savings to dog portraits. The important part is that I had a plan! I am not good at much, but I can nail a likeness as surely as a toaster can make toast. Why not exploit that talent? But where? Toronto is too expensive for such a fragile enterprise. I would have run out of my savings in a month. Not to mention it's lousy with ex-boyfriends. So, what about Montreal? … MONTREAL? … YES!

At the time, I had no contacts in Montreal. I’d had boyfriend from Montreal while at university (who is still a close friend, but who now lives in New York). When we visited his family, I fell in love with his city. So, I put it down in the good column. In the bad column I put that I had no contacts and nowhere to live. In the solutions column I put that I’d move to Toronto first after graduating and from there I’d make reconnaissance forays to Montreal for an apartment. As I’m fond of saying, a gal can dream, can’t she?


As I walked out of the café, I decided I would keep my new plan to myself to protect it from naysayers. But as most of my friends know, questions are like truth serum to me. If someone asks me a direct question, I involuntarily answer it. A few days later, at my grad exhibition, one of my profs politely inquired, “so what happens now?” As if I had never in my 41 years encountered the esoteric concepts of “secret” and “self-protection,” I responded immediately with, “I am going to start a dog portrait painting business in Montreal.”

And then I cringed. But the snear I feared never came. Instead, the prof said, “Montreal is a great city! That sounds like the right place for what you want to do.” So I repeated the plan in case he’d misheard me, because who graduates from a school steeped in Derrida and Foucault and then says, OUT LOUD, to a professor who worships at the alter of every French philosopher that ever was, “I want to make dog portraits”?

“Sounds great!” he said again.

The next morning – THE NEXT MORNING – I got an e-mail forwarded to me from one of his colleagues in Montreal who was looking to unload her apartment in Montreal ASAP because she’d gotten a new job in Toronto. Within the space of two e-mails, and before I’d even had my morning coffee, I was the new renter of an apartment in Montreal. The first thing I did (after making coffee) was to send out a mass e-mail with my new coordinates. Almost immediately, I heard back from my friend, Nicolas, who I’d met while I was at grad school and he was at Stratford (up to this point, I had no idea where he was originally from), to where I drove 40 minutes a few times a month to treat myself to real coffee at Balzac’s. Nicolas wrote, “Guess what? I’m from Montreal! Moving back exactly when you are!” Turned out Nicolas’s Montreal apartment was five blocks away from mine.


To make a long post longer, the book Rosemary gave me did not reveal anything new, rather it confirmed a phenomenon I had been experiencing for a while, but for which I'd had no name. The book talks about the power of asking. So, I decided to make my asking more conscious. As I lay in bed one day avoiding my studio and all the dog-portrait commissions I did not have, I asked for more books. Specific books. Inspiring books. In the foyer of my building sat an old wooden chest, probably a steamer trunk someone left at the turn of the last last century.


On top of that trunk a few days later sat a pile of books someone, who was moving out, had left. Great books. Books I had wanted to read. I took them. When I needed clothes, there they were. Beautiful pieces, too. Once, as I was passing the trunk on my way out to replace a burnt-out light bulb in my studio, I saw a light bulb on the trunk. Seriously. Turns out it was also burned out, but still …

Last fall, I expressed a wish to do work that called upon all the skills that I love using (vs. all the skills I have that lead me to soul-crushing work), and work that would be meaningful. I had applied for a job that seemed the perfect fit at first, but between my initial interview and waiting to hear the “it’s yours!”, everything in my body said “noooooooo!!!!!” Against everyone’s best wishes for me, I withdrew my candidacy without a cogent explanation. You can’t really say, “um, my gut says this ain’t for me.” I took flack from my community, faced the void of no other prospects, and decided to just trust.

And a few months later, I got my dream job. Now, I don’t believe anything lasts forever, not even dreams, but that’s not a problem. When dreams change, all you have to do is change the asking accordingly. But you also need to be open to seeing your dream happen in ways you did not expect. To wit: one of my dreams this year was to travel through Asia. Also, a number of my friends have recently voyaged through South Africa, and their passion for it put it on my map as well. Australia is also there. I had no idea how I would undertake any of these travel plans, but I did feel it would happen. As I sat in one of the workshops during my retreat in Antigonish last week, it struck me that I was surrounded by amazing people from Asia and Africa! In other words, Asia and Africa had come to me! And yet, that’s not the whole of it. On the ride to the airport, our Executive Director informed me that in August or September of this year, I’d likely be travelling to India or South Africa for my job.

And then she asked (get this) “would you mind?”

Up to Now and Now

I love running. It’s something I came to relatively late in life, not taking it seriously until I was 34, and after a childhood of believing I could do no such thing, as well as a teenagehood of always being the last one around the track during fitness week (and long after gym class was over). If someone had told me then that I’d become a runner, I would have handed them my large bag of Cool Ranch Doritos so that I could use both my hands to grab my sides as I doubled over.


I love running for many reasons, not the least of which is that during runs I solve a problem: most often a painting problem, sometimes a writing problem, and, when lucky, a nagging suspicion about myself that, if investigated, might shed light on the whys and wherefores of my current crisis (because I’m always in crisis, it seems. I think I might love crises more than I love running because, unlike running, it’s never too cold, or rainy, or I’m never too tired, or achy to indulge a crisis . . . but I digress).


A few days ago, during a long run, and at a time when I was relatively crisis free, and, therefore, casting about for some new problem to chew on, this thought bubbled to the surface: what’s the deal with the way I sprinkle my Jewishness all over my blog like so many salty chunks of feta crumbled over everything from toast to post, even when it’s totally unnecessary and maybe even overkill?


Why this need to trumpet my cultural heritage to which I have only the most tenuous thread of connection since my parents are effectively ignorant on the subject and so were never able to transmit anything useful to me, except to let me know I was, indeed, a Jew? In typical running-epiphany style, I realized it comes down to this: the old high school saw of needing an identity, and of needing to belong.


There were exactly two Jews in my high school (I mean real Jews, not may-as-well-be-Protestant Jews, like me). Both were girls and both were beautiful and thin and clad in polo-identified gear, which I believe facilitated their ascension into the great Pantheon of Perfect that ruled the school.


During Passover, however, they suddenly became out-in-the-open Jews, munching faux miserably on their faux sandwiches comprised of two matzoh crackers containing, simply, butter and raspberry jam, loudly complaining about how much they missed leavened bread. They really did say “leavened,” scratching a verbal chalk circle around their already shining heads. My own mistakenly-made-that-morning ham and cheese sandwich on leavened bread clearly designated on which side of the circle I belonged. (Since then, I have had a bad relationship with yeast.)


(BTW, if you have never tasted the surprisingly delectable combination of dry, unsalted motzoh crackers slathered in salty butter and topped with sweet and tart raspberry jam, you need to befriend a Jew this Passover and treat yourself. That, and chopped liver.)

The thing is, despite their coveted position within the Firmament of Fab – impossibly, enviably – the Passover production propelled these angels into an ever more rareified layer of social strata, garnering them– impossibly, enviably – an even higher position among the stars. They were like two princess sisters who had captured the love of their people but refused to live among them, insisting on their pointy castle where they remained adored but touchless.


Although I could legitimately claim Jewish blood on both sides of my family, I knew less about Jewish holidays, traditions, and Yiddish catch phrases than most of my gentile friends. But don’t misunderstand me. I was not surrounded by the Goyem either. I was a girl of maybe one or two friends, usually belonging to other groups, but who had stepped outside their pack to confide in me on the sly. I didn’t so much have a social circle as occupy each corner of a social square where individuals from the four main bloodlines –preppy, stoner, nerd, artsy – intersected with me for but a moment in social time in order to scratch some momentary itch.

Looking back, however, I can see that I did perform an essential service -- enabling each group to stay its course without, god forbid, intersecting -- but no one ever seemed to notice or thank me for my function (which may explain my attraction to the editing vocation, being used to the unfame behind the curtains). I did, however, get all the empty space inside the square, which became the repository for all my longing to belong, and which also efficiently imprisoned my soundless yawp.

But here's the thing: it’s not like I naively think that my Jewishness will put me in touch with like-minded people I will unconditionally adore (and vice versa) based on our shared culture.

Amongst my Jewish friends, some of us are staunch Zionists, which I am not. Some are atheists, which I am not. Some are Buddhists, which I aspire to. And we don’t all agree on all kinds of things. And yet. I wonder if I tend to elide differences because belonging matters more. When I was in Berlin last year, I felt so invited back by the Germans in my position as a displaced Jew. I suddenly had caché, kind of like the caché certain of my colleagues have in the art world thanks to the colour of their skin and their sexual orientation. Even they would agree. And I'm not trying to dismiss their talents. The only difference between them and me is that they actually do work that deserves the credit they have earned despite their caché. Me? I have done nothing to educate myself on being Jewish, or to support/express my culture. I’ve just claimed the title and hoped no one would check the deed.


Lest I paint a skewed picture, let me admit I did belong before high school. And how! I grew up in an exclusive community of expats in Manila, where my father worked for the Asian Development Bank. My friends were from all over the world, but what bound us together was our privilege. We got superiorily educated at an International School, we all belonged to clubs with pools, and despite the cliques that formed around stoners and soccer players, we all attended the same parties and we all got very drunk at a very, very, VERY young age. We just didn’t do it in basements as I saw it done here, to my great contempt, upon my return to Canada at the sophisticated age of 13. No, we drank Singapore slings poolside with people in uniforms serving us.


In those days, I knew who I was. I was a Canadian living overseas. I had freedom of movement (mostly because my parents were too busy at their jobs, or at the club playing tennis, to notice what I did after school). I travelled with my family to exotic locations every summer, and went “home” once a year to see the grandparents. I thought I owned the world and everyone in it.

At university, I belonged again. A late bloomer, I botched most of high school until I realized that if I did not get certain grades, I would be doomed to secretarial school, my mother's greatest aspiration for me, believing that every girl should be able to support herself. Her heart was in the right place. So, at the 11th hour in grade 13, I decided to study for once in my life, and that’s how I gained entrance into Queen’s, another bastion of privilege at which I felt at home. Yet it was not the privilege with which I identified. It was with those who were questioning everything. That was something I had been quietly doing since childhood, but had learned to keep quiet about it, or be ostracized. At uni, I focused on questioning the history and politics of womens' experiences ...


... and found articulation for all the things I had always felt were wrong but for which, up to then, I had not developed a vocabulary.

At university, I found my voice. And I let her rip.


In Manila, throughout our seven-year tenure, I had never stopped being affected by the purposefully maimed children who tapped at our car window, asking for money as we sat in a black cloud of traffic.


Someone had scratched out their eyes or broken their limbs to make them look more pathetic. As a child, I understood that their lives were catastrophic, even if their limbs had been whole, that their need was beyond desperate, and that in the face of their unforgivable condition, I was helpless. The adults taught me to keep my window rolled up and soothed my tears with words that never made sense, “we can't give them money every time they ask." I never understood why not. I still don’t.

Since my high school days, I’ve definitely found belonging in a variety of groups. For instance, my running group in Montreal made up of folks of all ages, from all walks of life, with all manner of experiences and history, all coming together around our one insane addiction.

And, recently, I landed what seems, so far, like a dream job and one that has instantly expanded my sense of identity and belonging.


I am the Outreach and Communications Coordinator of an organization called Gender at Work, a not-for-profit that rights the embedded wrongs of gender discrimination that leads to social, cultural, political, economic and you-name-it gender inequalities. G@W helps other organizations develop their own best practices for improving womens' lives in their own communities (most of the work is being done in India and Africa right now), with the goals of ending poverty and domestic violence, and placing women in key leadership roles in order to bring about deep-structure transformation of internalized discriminatory attitudes and values. My job, in a nutshell, is to collect and disseminate the stories that come out of the work being done, to bring attention to the actual condition of women around the world, and to inspire more positive action and change.


You heard right: my job is to help get stories told! Hello? Pinch me!

For me, the word “story” does not designate fiction, per se. Or, actually, it does, but the word “fiction” does not designate a lesser form than so-called fact. The two things are one, equally important, and not much different from each other (just ask a handful of French theorists). And both are vital for healing individuals, communities, cities, states, cultures, and the world. I deeply believe that stories are no less than lifeblood transmissions. And they require the only naturopathic ingredient that can truly remedy any ill: people and their good will.

Once hired, I received e-mails from everyone at G@W welcoming me into their fold with such warmth that I felt we were sitting in a comfy living room, real time. I will meet them all this week at a retreat in Antigonish. This mostly virtual org (since most of us live and work around the globe) will become a flesh-and-blood org for a week. But the thing is, I already feel as if I know these folks. I know that some people find virtual communities a lesser form of community, but, truthfully, that has not been my experience. In all my online living rooms and office spaces, I have felt connected to people I don’t know as much as to those I know. My friends and colleagues online (as well as my online friends and colleagues) are legion. And they have given me a sense of belonging in ways I could not have imagined.