My Very Own Bee Hag

We all have one. And, no, it's not some naggy crone who goes clubbing with a hive of (gay) bees.

A bee hag, or, properly spelled, B-HAG, is your greatest dream, your Big Hairy Audacious Goal.


I first heard this term in a business meeting at which I was acting as imposter-cum-marketing expert. It was the year after I'd moved to Montreal to escape heartbreak and a painful graduate degree (which I'd done to escape heartbreak). Justin, my younger brother, called me up from Toronto to see if I wanted a marketing-writing gig, something for which I was not remotely trained. He needed to know RIGHT NOW, or else lose the client.

Montreal was where I was kinda sorta trying to start a portrait painting business, but in the end it "failed" because I spent too much energy on the business of being terrified, which made failure a guarantee. When you lie in bed most of the day dreaming up all the ways you will fail, it's kind of hard to convince others you are a painter, especially when you are not painting.



To pay my bills, I got myself hired at a flower store, one of the most backbreaking and unromantic jobs I've ever held. I lasted a month. And not because I quit, which I desperately wanted to do, but because Justin, the brother I'd tortured his entire childhood, saved me from death-by-roses. He asked me if I knew how to write marketing material. I said no. He said, "you're hired." His only requirement was that I promise never to show fear or lack of experience in front of clients. In exchange, he promised to mentor me. We both kept our promises. I got training that has led to better and better jobs, and he got to tell his clients something closer to the truth -- that his roster of employees included a marketing writer.


At the first meeting with Justin's clients, he kicked things off by asking the group of expensively suited men (with me in a miracle of a "business" ensemble I managed to pull together from nothing but wishful thinking) to define their organizational B-HAG. I was gobsmacked. Justin was not asking about their processes, programs or organizational structures. He was asking the senior leaders to express their most audacious dreams. In other words, he was speaking my language, the language of making meaningful choices in life (which I'd been reading about in life-coaching books to help me get out of bed), which meant I could not believe he was speaking theirs (I had so little faith in the corporate world back then.). When the CEO said he hoped they would grow the organization by five million a year, Justin patiently explained to him that, "that's not a B-HAG. You should expect that kind of growth. A B-HAG is fifty million growth in five years." You could almost hear Dr. Evil crowing, "one BILLION dollars!"


This statement would be an eye roller if Justin didn't have examples to back it up, which he did. Board-rooms full: companies that had set their goals high and then met them. How? Well, by taking steps towards those goals. It seems that if you set your sights on a small dream, then you'll only take steps small enough to achieve something small. If you set your goals on a great dream, then you'll take different steps to make the bigger dream happen. In other words, all dreams require steps, but you'll never arrive if you have no idea where you're headed. So, big or small, clarity of the destination is vital. But while you're dreaming, why not dream big? And, bonus, your journey towards a bigger goal will more than likely get you to your smallest goal along the way!



When I turned 40, I told myself (and my blog peeps) that I'd be living by a new motto: "there's no giving up." I had long since passed the age at which I could be considered a child prodigy, which meant I was free to do what I wanted, how I wanted, when I wanted. Not that anyone had held me back before, except me, but it helped to have the motto anyway. It meant I would at least try the things I had previously feared trying. Failure was not an option because failure was not an excuse (besides, define failure, please.) If failure was not an option, then giving up was also not an option.

My first order of business was to paint again. Which I did. During a month of freelance dead time, my head exploded with ideas that I tried to get down in paint. If there had been a soundtrack to my frenzy of activity, it would have been a maniacal laugh.

But before the month was out, I gave up.

I loathed my paintings. And that's putting it diplomatically. Yet something had changed. Yes, I wanted them burned in every ring of hell; but . . . I had not taken to my bed. And that's because I knew it didn't matter what I thought, or how bad the paintings were (or weren't).


A life-time pattern of giving up may be hard to give up, but I realized I didn't have to do it all at once. I could give up giving up in baby steps. So, I turned the paintings to the wall and told myself it was good that I painted at all. A year later, I painted again. A really good portrait of my friend's kid.


And then I painted again this year. Another really good portrait of another friend's kid, if I do say so myself.

So, perhaps it's more accurate to say I was givey uppy, which is different from actually giving up, which puts a period at the end of something. My giving up was more of an ellipses . . .

At 41-going-on-42, I've decided that forming a strategic alliance with a motto is effective, but it's no longer enough for me. I need to grow the Liz company. So, I've decided to adopt a B-HAG. Never one to do the easy or simple thing, as my therapist/guru never fails to point out, my B-HAG is similarly not simple or easy. It's more like an idea only a mother could support, like wanting become a chef at the Chef Boyardee factory. My B-HAG is a Medusa's head of writhing and slippery dreams that I intend to see as beautiful, and to let live.

One of those dreams is to have some kind of correspondence or meeting with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. (see item #3 on my last post). Maybe even interview her for my blog.

The truth is, I don't have a clear plan. But, I am not waiting until I do. Which will make it hard to convince her publishers to pass along my request for face time, or even e-mail time. If I'd thought of this last year, I would have worked it into a series of thematic blog posts a la Julia Powel's (whose blog eventually led to her meeting Julia Child, her idol). I'm just not that organized or focused. The idea of talking to Liz is one of many things I want to do this year, but it hit me just after I bought my ticket to hear her talk with Heather Reisman at the end of February that I might make item #3 a reality since she'll be in Toronto. There's no harm in trying. I have to at least try!

But I can tell you why I want to meet her, even if I have no clue what I'm going to say to her, or ask her. I want to meet her because I think she's brave. She wanted to write and she did. She wanted to travel and she did. And she wanted to leave her marriage and she did. And none of it was easy; all of it took time and effort, and much of it caused her enormous pain, but she did it anyway. Simply put, she inspires me. She also makes me laugh.


But even those are not my reasons.

A few weeks ago, I sat in the living room of two of my favourite people, Mark and Tonya, and my new favourite inspiration, our mutual friend, Hilary, and I asked them to brainstorm with me about what I should do next. Thanks to a small inheritance, I was recently able to afford a down payment on a modest townhouse (which put a stop to my moving-to-Berlin-or-Sydney fantasies; at least for the time being). My contract job ends the month after I take possession, which means I need to find more work to pay my new bills. As a freelancer, I used to fear these kinds of transitions, but now I see them as opportunities.

A few things came from that conversation with my advisory board of three. One was to paint portraits (as a sideline), i.e. to try that as a business again (while still writing to earn my keep). The reason it could have failed in Montreal is that I didn't know anyone there. In Toronto, I am Malcolm Galdwell's "connector" made manifest. But what really hit home in the conversation was Tonya's take on my rightful vocation:

"I've always though you should have your own interview show."


She's not the only person who has said that to me. And it's kind of true. I am the person who can talk to anyone anywhere, be it a police line up, ordering take out in city where no one speaks English, or at a funeral of the great aunt of a friend of a friend. I am good at putting people at their ease, asking questions about them and their life and sharing stories. And I don't do it for prurient curiosity, or other reasons of exploitation. None of it gets reported in a public way (well, except sometimes they do appear in my blog but dressed up to ensure anonymity). I ask because I want to know, because here is a human being just like me and I am interested in their life story and how they feel about it. That's it. I like a story for its own sake.

At 41-going-on-42, however, and with no training in television/radio interviewing skills, never mind no job history or connections, and no real background in pop culture or celebrity schmoozing (I don't give a toss about celebrities, is the truth) . . .



. . . I can't really see how to make Tonya's B-HAG for me a reality.

Except . . . what if Liz G lets me interview her . . .

The reason Eat, Pray, Love was such an inspiration to me is because Liz wrote from the hip, and because she wrote in a way that said it's enough to be alive and loving, that you don't need a PhD to be lovable, listened to, or valuable. You can be a travel writer even if all you write about is the pasta you ate that day in Rome, and not about the history of the buttresses in this or that Cathedral. Buttresses bore me, let's be honest, and Liz made that OK. But descriptions of pizza made from dough as soft as kitten leather will get my attention every time.

I'd like to talk to Liz. I don't want to plug her new book, Committed, (although if she wants to, I have no issue with that), I don't want to probe her personal life anymore than she wants to divulge. I just want to have a conversation with her. Just because. Maybe we can talk about . . . me!


Here are my two final reasons for wanting to take on this B-HAG.

First, this snippet from her website:

I have a friend who’s an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his hero, the brilliant (and perhaps half-insane) German filmmaker Werner Herzog. My friend complained about how difficult it is these days to be an independent filmmaker, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how the audiences have all been ruined by Hollywood and how the world has lost its taste…etc, etc. Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friend that essentially ran along these lines: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.” I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful, entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.” Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

And, the second, this thought about late bloomers:

Here’s another thing to consider. If you always wanted to write, and now you are A Certain Age, and you never got around to it, and you think it’s too late…do please think again. I watched Julia Glass win the National Book Award for her first novel, “The Three Junes”, which she began writing in her late 30’s. I listened to her give her moving acceptance speech, in which she told how she used to lie awake at night, tormented as she worked on her book, asking herself, “Who do you think you are, trying to write a first novel at your age?” But she wrote it. And as she held up her National Book Award, she said, “This is for all the late-bloomers in the world.” Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something where – if you missed it by age 19 – you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world – at any age. At least try.

If "late thirties" is late blooming, then I have practically wilted and died on the vine at almost 42. Yet, there is always a story to trump my own for not starting something new (and scary). A friend of mine is making a documentary film about a man who was illiterate most of his life. When his wife died (she'd done all the reading for the both of them), he decided it was time for him to learn how to read. He was 94. Now he's about 103 and has become a spokesperson for literacy. Talk about an on-death's-doorstep bloomer. Good for him! But I don't want to wait that long.

Here's another story, one that Liz tells in Eat, Pray, Love, about a man who prays every day to a god statue in a fountain in Rome (can't remember which god or which fountain). He prays to win the lottery. After months (or it could have been years, I don't remember) of hearing this man's prayer, the god finally loses patience and yells at the man, "OK, OK, I will help you win the lottery, but for god's sake, you need to buy a ticket!"

Today, I write Lizzy G's publisher. And to ensure I don't leave this all to chance, I want to ask all of you to sign a petition in your heads that will help me plead my case to the Universe. It's a little bit of magic Liz used in her own life to get something she really, really needed. It worked for her. As I take my first step, I am just going to assume it will work for me, too . . .