If you don't stop making that face...

Did your Mom ever tell you, "If you don't stop making that face, it will freeze that way"? When life is moving really fast, people often just get one glimpse of us, like a snapshot. In their minds, that's the way we are -- face, talent, personality, preferences. That's their image of us, our face is "frozen that way".

How closely does my public persona resemble the person I think of as me? Has anyone ever gotten fixated on an inaccurate view of me or formed an image that represents just one side of who I am?

Sometimes, the matter is out of your hands. Parents often think of their offspring as children, even after they grow up, and no amount of rational persuasion or objective evidence will change their minds. Maybe your classmates from high school remember you as that nerdy/freaky/jock/flaky kid even though you've moved past that long ago.

The cast of Star Trek got stuck in the image of the characters from that show, no matter what other roles they played. They got a lot of money and fame for their efforts, but their careers pretty much got stuck there. The movie Galaxy Quest parodied their plight, with a story about a group of actors from a long-defunct television show who could only find work reprising their roles at sci-fi conventions and shopping mall openings.

In the 1960s, four budding musicians and actors signed on for a TV show about a boy band, The Monkees. Their careers were defined by the characters they played on that show for the next 40 years. They got very frustrated at the constraints imposed by their contract, but they raked in a pile of money. That was a good thing, financially speaking, because their most visible source of income in the years to come was band reunion tours and appearances as former members of The Monkees. Was it worth it?

On the other hand, if you don't provide something that your audience, clients, or friends want, you can find yourself all alone.

A folk singer I know insisted so strongly on doing everything on his own terms that he choked off his own career. He didn't care enough about what his audience wanted, and his fellow musicians found him difficult to deal with.

Andrew De Leon, an aspiring singer, gave his first public performance almost as a way to put his dreams to rest, certain that he was going to be hated. The audience responded in an overwhelmingly positive way, and his new-found fans pressed him to release a CD. Now, he's changed genres, blending the operatic style that made him famous with the heavy metal and goth styles that he has admired for several years. Did he perform his least important kind of music so that if he was rejected, at least it wouldn't be for the music that was closest to his heart? Should he please his fans or please himself? You can't blame the fans for wanting more of what drew them in the first place. On the other hand, being typecast in a role that's not really you can choke off your enthusiasm before you can realize your potential.

In my previous job, I became known in my company as a very capable technical editor and trade show exhibit manager. That wasn't inaccurate, but those talents ranked very low on my list of personal priorities. Perhaps I could have pursued my creative writing and visual arts interests in my spare time, but my job left me very little time or energy to pursue the things that I cared about most. My employers didn't require those skills from me, and "creative writer" was not what came to mind when they thought of me. So I provided what my employer wanted, at great cost to my personal priorities.

If you don't care enough about other people's feelings, you're a narcissist, and people walk away from you. If you care too much about what people think of you, you're a people-pleaser, and they take you for granted and exploit you.

There has to be a third way, where you engage with other people while keeping a sense of yourself. You act in a way that shows respect and caring for others, but you respect and care about yourself as well. Reveal your true self, but only as much as appropriate. Actively seek common ground between what you have to offer and what others desire from you. Have boundaries, but give your closest friends a means of access to the self that you think of as "really me".

"Being yourself is not remaining where you are, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure." -- Sydney J. Harris

"As I think more positively, I attract positive-thinking people into my life, with whom I have satisfying relationships." -- Barbara J. Winter

"As I know myself better and act with more integrity and authenticity, I become more capable of entering into close, authentic relationships." -- Nancy McGuire

Enough is Enough

I just sent this letter to Congressman Chris Van Hollen and Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin:


These past few weeks have shocked us over and over again with senseless killings due to gun violence. It's not just the Newtown shooting, as horrific as that was. It's the Clackamas Mall shooting in Portland. It's the killing of Selina Brown and the wounding of her daughter Kodie by her father as they boarded a bus in DC. It's the shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, the shooting of Gabrielle Gifford and others in Arizona, and before that, the Beltway Sniper, the shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, the individual shootings that claim so many young lives in the District… well you get the picture. Over and over and over again, someone with easy access to guns decides to claim some fame or revenge, and there is so very little to stop them from acting on their impulse.

I am not advocating a complete ban on private gun ownership. I grew up in a town with a strong hunting culture. I have friends in rural areas who need to protect their livestock, and who cannot wait a half hour or more for the police to arrive if an armed intruder is prowling around their homes. I know that business owners must have some means of protecting against armed criminals. Legitimate gun ownership is not the problem here.

However, I can see no legitimate reason for civilian citizens to own assault weapons, semiautomatic weapons, high-volume ammunition clips, and other weapons best left to the military and law enforcement professionals. Even if there were legitimate uses, surely these instances are rare enough that we can give up access to these weapons to serve the greater good.

Certainly, someone in an insane rage can kill using a knife, a baseball bat, or even bare hands. But such a person, acting alone, cannot kill scores of people in a few short minutes. Only someone armed with a rapid-fire gun can do that.

We require people to register their cars, pass routine inspections, and carry liability insurance. We require drivers to demonstrate proficiency and familiarity with the laws of the road, and we take away their licenses if they violate these laws too often. We require additional qualifications and special licenses for people wishing to drive big-rig trucks and Metro buses. Surely we can institute similar safeguards for gun ownership and use? All that is lacking is the political will to stand up to well-funded special interest groups -- the NRA in particular. Congress is in a lame-duck session right now, and many of your colleagues have nothing to lose by pushing for gun control legislation before they leave office. The nation has been shocked and horrified by one mass killing after another, and people are pleading for some kind of concrete action to curb the violence. Now is the time to say, "enough is enough" and push through the legislation that we need. Australia did it in 1996. We can do it now. Please.

Your constituent,
Nancy McGuire

Keep, Donate, Toss

Three years ago, I decided that my bedroom was a wretched mess. I had already gotten my living room into decent shape with furniture that harmonized and functioned well. I sent a couple of carloads of clutter (plus several large pieces of mismatched furniture) to new homes -- including the landfill, when I couldn't come up with a better solution. The space where I entertained guests was looking pretty respectable, but the space that was just for me was a dumping ground for whatever had landed there over the years.

My first step was to ask for help. The Washington Post runs a weekly article where people send in photos of rooms that they want to remake, and a professional decorator provides a sketch and recommends various furniture pieces and paint colors. The photos I sent in of my hodge-podge bedroom were deemed worthy of the challenge; a professional photographer came and shot several "before" photos to run with the article. A decorator took my comments, asked for measurements and a proposed budget, and set to work on creating the "after" sketch.

The "after" sketch was nothing like what I had asked for. Instead of a soothing, sunny Zen retreat, the decorator had gone for heavy earth tones and a strong Southwestern theme. More than half the budget was devoted to a dresser that had several layers of "artistically" peeled paint. I realized that I was going to have to come up with my own answer on this one. I did, however, like the way that she had arranged the furniture, so I kept that bit of information. Maybe the sketch in the newspaper article would appeal to someone else, so that would be my donation to someone else's inspiration.

I already had some idea of where to start. I knew that the five-drawer lateral file cabinet that dominated the room would have to go. Why was I saving all that paper? I weeded it out the best I could, boxed up the rest, and made myself a promise to scan as much as I could into computer files and send the paper to the recycling bin. I advertised the file cabinet online, and a husband-and-wife counseling team claimed it for their office.

I went through two wicker hampers of things that I hadn't looked at in years. After saving a few precious keepsakes, the hampers went to new homes at the next condo association yard sale.

After a couple of months of searching locally and online, I found a set of furniture that I liked. I placed an order, to be delivered in three weeks. I called a local charity to come and pick up my old bed, mattress, night stand, and chest of drawers. While I waited for my new furniture, I would be sleeping on an air mattress and using cardboard boxes to store my sox and undies.

I took the opportunity to clear everything out of my bedroom except the pictures on the walls and the clothing hanging in the closets. The parquet floor was in need of a new finishing coat, and this was a rare chance to get that done. I had also planned to paint the walls, but I ran out of time, energy, and motivation. The current paint job was just fine -- a total change was not necessary.

When the new furniture came, and it was time to move back into my bedroom, I brought back only the things that I knew I wanted to keep. The rest stayed in the living room, cluttered and under foot -- purposely annoying me to force me to donate or toss them rather than letting them sneak back into my new personal space.

The newly decorated room was not a complete change -- I still had my familiar artwork on the walls, which were the same color as before. I still had that odd little round table that no one seems to like except me. I used the furniture arrangement from the Washington Post article, but the furniture itself was my own choice. It doesn't all match, but it harmonizes quite well. I still have keepsakes on the new, airy bookshelves, but just a few -- not the visual bedlam I had before. The room doesn't look like the photos in the decorating magazines. It looks like where I live, only it's more peaceful now.

This year has been a metaphorical parallel to 2010's bedroom project. I took the radical step of leaving my job so that I could open a space to reconstruct my life. So that I could give the same honor to my own space that I had spent so many years trying to give to others' spaces. For the time being, my own space is a lot emptier than it usually is. I have used that time to get a few things in order -- physical health, stress levels, personal relationships, creative projects.

I'm keeping a few familiar things in place during the renovation -- my home, my friends and family, the kinds of things I read. A lot of the old things have been moved out. Some will come back into this new room, some will not. As I did for my bedroom, I am making three piles of "life stuff": Keep, Donate/Sell, and Toss.

The only things that will be allowed to stay in or return to my metaphorical room are the things that are valuable to me, including friends and family, home, adequate income, music, photography, travel, learning and discovery, creativity. Other things don't fit me so well, but might be useful to someone else: routine technical work, exhibit planning, proposal-writing teams, classroom teaching, "leadership". Some things are going into the dumpster -- if you want to dive for them, be my guest: the long commute, cubicles, being a human dumping ground for someone else's low-priority projects, the chaos and constant sense of crisis that comes from working with people who don't plan in advance or respect other people's plans.

Anyone who has ever done a major decluttering project can tell you that you have to go through a stage where everything is a mess. You have to navigate your way around stuff on its way out. You have to dig through boxes to find stuff you need to use. Things don't fit quite the way you expected, and you have to adapt. Sometimes, you have to go looking for a couple of extra pieces to make the whole thing work. Eventually, though, everything finds its place and you begin to believe that it's all worthwhile.

Chill

Autumn is winding down. The sun can't seem to drag itself more than halfway up in the sky, and some days, it doesn't crawl out at all from under its downy blanket of gray clouds. The trees outside my window have closed up their photosynthesis factories for the season, and the squirrels are topping off their stores of acorns before they bed down for the winter. Slow down, Nature says.

Didn't we used to do that? After the harvest was all in the barns, didn't we put up jam and visit the neighbors and plan next year's gardens? Didn't we grab a few extra hours of sleep or stare dreamily into the fire? Didn't students have a few weeks away from their classes -- time to spend with family and friends?

That's all slipping away now, or at least it seems that way. The relentless grind of the industrial machine demands end-of-year reports. Metrics to be gathered, deadlines to be met. Conferences scheduled adjacent to holiday weekends mean more tourist dollars from attendees tacking a few vacation days onto their business trips. Smart phones and laptop computers let your far-flung team hammer out contract proposals from their seats in various hotel lobbies as they await their airport shuttles. Those few days away from the office just mean a lull in the meeting schedule so that you can finish up that extra paperwork.

Time to reconnect with friends and family, exchange gifts, and sing and dance has morphed into a two-month marathon of jam-packed schedules where every spare moment is crammed with events or commuting between events. Gift-giving requires camping out in front of stores to ensure your place at the head of the predawn stampede on Black Friday -- or foregoing your leisurely pie and coffee after Thanksgiving dinner in order to snag the prime deals available on Thursday evening. Instead of a few precious items, carefully chosen to symbolize a friendship, we fill shopping carts with piles of mass produced commodities. Why drive around delivering plates of homemade candy to your closest friends when you can send them boxes of red and green M&Ms that you ordered online?

The quiet sense of reverence inspired by a candlelight midnight Mass or a Solstice bonfire is drowned out by back-to-back concerts by every performing group in existence -- great throngs of under-rehearsed choristers who are stressed out from generating annual reports and studying for final exams. Every conductor uses the holiday season to stage his grandest effort, but the aggregate is just a cacophonous blur.

Setting aside one time of year for paying special attention to the people we love used to make sense when our communities were small. When we worked, lived, and played together all year long. When the driving force was the connection with each other, and the music and dancing was just a symbol of that connection. Now, the music and dancing have become the main focus, and people are secondary. Commerce has gotten into the act, and so now the holidays are pressed into service as a revenue-generating activity. People are tertiary. Getting together requires airline tickets and tight scheduling and dealing with flight delays and tiny airplane seats. People are quaternary.

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe the medieval peasants didn't enjoy holidays so much as just survived day to day through the long cold winters. But didn't they dance and go wassailing now and then? I distinctly remember getting small gifts from friends and family that said, "I know what makes you smile." I remember making batches of candy in our family's small kitchen and helping my parents deliver plates of goodies to our closest friends. I remember the intimacy of candlelight church services, and singing "O Magnum Mysterium" with the choir.

This year off has allowed me to stay away from a lot of the craziness that accompanies this time of year. No annual reports to write, no metrics to gather, no conference exhibits to organize. The television screen is dark for much of the week -- I don't have to put up with the advertising mania if the set's turned off. I can take long, contemplative walks in the middle of the afternoon. I'm living off my savings, so my friends and family understand that my gift giving will be simple, and my travel budget does not include airline tickets this year.

The end-of-year mania sounds like a distant roar from my little refuge. It's like watching a street mob from the safety of an upstairs apartment. Like hearing the throb of a stadium concert from an office on the other side of the college campus. Like seeing a news report of thousands of people stranded at an airport, while sitting in a nice warm living room and enjoying a cup of tea with one friend. I'm not oblivious, I'm just not in the thick of it this year. Thank goodness.