Birthday Wishes for a Beloved Soul
· · · · · · · · ·

Birthday Wishes for a Beloved Soul

Dear One
I wish for you discernment
that you may see who truly is your friend
and who isn’t
who truly wishes you well
and who doesn’t.
I wish you freedom
from your entitlement, your addictions, and your demandingness
so that you may enter into the clear
sweet peace of humility
that has everything to do with your soft open
heart’s kindness and love
for your core Self
and nothing to do with the curdled ego’s insistence
on gratification.
I wish for you that you seek wisdom
alongside knowledge,
words of gratitude
rather than proof,
and opportunities to give
in the very moments that you are tempted
to take.
I send you my love and my light
in the fullness of this day, your birthday,
as I do every moment of every day
and I wish for you that you feel my love
in every angstrom of your being
and that you learn to hold love in the reverence
it deserves
instead of seeing it as an agent to serve your bidding.
May you push you away the voices of false friends
who whisper in your ear of aggrandizement,
realizing that respectfulness
and honesty
and personal responsibility
is the better path.
May all your decisions be for the highest, best good
of yourself and all living beings,
And may your Higher Self bring you to conscious awareness in this lifetime.

by Traci L. Slatton
Birthday Wishes Birthday Wishes Birthday Wishes

· · · · · · · · ·

On Dealing with Mental Illness

My husband Sabin met Robin Williams in the lobby of our building. Sabin came away with respect for the comic. “He’s down-to-earth, a nice guy,” Sabin approved. These are rare words of praise from my laconic husband, who seldom dispenses compliments and who is impressed only by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Robin William’s recent suicide has erupted into a public ferment of discussion about suicide and depression. I worry about copycat suicides, but the new open forum can benefit people who suffer from depression.

I’m a deeply creative person and creativity is linked with depression. I’ve stood at the edge with my toes curled over, staring into the abyss, wishing with every angstrom of my being that I was dissolved into that nothingness. I have been in that place of despair. It feels like there is nothing else. It feels bottomless. I understand, beneath what can be articulated, what Williams felt in the last hours of his life.

I don’t know how I survived some of those experiences. When I emerge from them, I have always felt so ashamed of my “weakness.” It didn’t help that my borderline personality disorder mother and entitled narcissist ex-husband were quick to use my despair as a means of “proving” that I was less than, that I was deficient, even worthless. For them, my depression validated their unkind treatment of me.

One beloved friend wrote recently about her own near misses with suicide. For her, the gun in her mouth failed to go off. I am so grateful that it failed. She is beautiful person, full of grace; the world is richer for her presence in it.

For me, survival might have something to do with my most primordial DNA. Family legend says we have Cherokee blood; DNA testing revealed a preponderance of hitherto-unexpected Ashkenazim genetic markers–such a large percentage of them, in fact, that the genetic testing technician looked at my results and stated, “Oh, you’re Jewish.”

So I have thought to myself that my ancestors were marched down the Trail of Tears, and they were burned up in pogroms. I am the dregs of not one but two genocides. I think it has left a residue of something inside me that keeps going and going and going.

In the bleakest moments of depression, I felt like an infinite can of gray paint had spilled out everywhere, onto everything. It coated everything so thickly and airlessly that there was no light or color anywhere. It is an unbearable, unyielding oppression of spirit.

When I am out of that state, I can imagine how my grappling with the gray paint must have been hard on the people around me. I can empathize with the difficulties they experienced through me.

Unfortunately for me, until the last decade, many people closest to me were so filled with malice that they took satisfaction in my depression. I hope Robin Williams didn’t have those kind of people around him. My life is different now, I have been working on my boundaries. I don’t keep malicious people around me anymore.

Life is better when I have kind-hearted people around me.

Malice is itself a mental illness. Unlike depression, people who live in that state of malice see the impact they make on the people around them–and they enjoy hurting other people. From my own reading and research, they tend to be borderlines and narcissists.

I am dealing now in a legal forum with a borderline who is way off the reservation. She’s also a sociopathic liar. I’ve written in other posts how she went crazy when I made a business decision she didn’t like. She sent dozens of caustic, threatening, obscenity-filled emails; after impersonating me online, she impersonated an attorney to me, signing his name and legal credentials to a threatening email; she tried to extort thousands of dollars from me and my husband by threatening malicious litigation; she pretended she had contacted a dear friend of mine and he had given up some dirt on me; she fraudulently stopped payment on checks, one to me and one to a third party; she left vitriolic voicemails that I may upload into youtube so that other people unfortunate enough to deal with her know how truly deranged she is.

My dear friend wrote me, matter-of-factly, that contrary to what she’d written, he’d never spoken to her nor heard her name before I forwarded her email to him. “Good luck,” my friend wrote, “she sounds like a looney tune.”

But this psychotic woman is far more than a goofy looney tune. She’s mentally ill in a way that hurts other people and enjoys doing so. I watched her be vitriolic and abusive toward other women, before she unloaded onto me. She turns on women regularly. I also watched her craven seduction of every man in her purview. Her conversation was filled with statements about how other women were jealous of her and how every man wanted to sleep with her.

Why didn’t I wise up sooner to the extent of this psycho’s cruelty and insanity?

Partly because this psycho can appear normal and she knows how to flatter people.

Partly because I have a blind spot when it comes to borderlines, thanks to my mother.

Partly because it’s hard for me to impute malice to people. I just don’t get it. I want to live with integrity and to act with kindness and generosity toward people. Note: I don’t succeed every minute of every day, but this is my stated intention. I do not take pleasure in the suffering of other people.

So sometimes I don’t see what’s staring me in the face, whether it’s a borderline’s obvious psychotic imbalance as she bullies people, especially women, or the malicious, invasive obsession of an ex stalking my blog, visiting my blog site every day from wherever he is, sometimes several times a day.

I need to grow out of my naivete.

There’s the mental illness turned inward, that hurts the self. There’s the mental illness turned outward, hurting other people. Many books claim that the latter is a defense against the former, that people lash out with malice because of the pain of the rot at their own core.

Perhaps. Recently a healer with whom I am working defined “evil” for me: “It’s the conscious decision to harm another human being.”

It’s necessary to be wary, to be mindful, of this evil, whether it’s evil turned inward or turned outward.

For the evil turned inward, I’ve developed a series of strategies that help me. Regular exercise, for one. I have made a commitment to practicing yoga every day, and it’s not just because I’m vain and want a nice-looking body–though that’s part of it. Another reason is because yoga is the single best negative-pattern interrupt I’ve encountered in my 51 years. I go to the gym several times a week for cardiovascular exercise. I’ve worked on myself in psychotherapy and I receive spiritual healings. I’m filling my life with friends who have loving hearts, friends who laugh with me. I meditate. I chant mantras. I pray. Oh, yes, I pray every day.

I’ve trained myself to look in the mirror and say, “I love you and you are beautiful and worthy. You are a wonderful person.” This exercise in self-appreciation and self-love was the hardest thing I’ve ever accomplished in my life. It was much harder than going to Yale and Columbia from a modest, turmoil-filled family where no one had ever attended college.

Ultimately, I believe that this is the antidote to evil: Love. Love from within to the within. Love that starts with the self, and radiates into strong boundaries that keep out the malicious folks. Mature love that accepts that sometimes other people are malicious and must be kept out of the inner sanctum. Love that understands that sometimes evil will have its way.

I know that karma exists. Actions always return. Sometimes karma has a long, long arc, but in the end, evil is balanced.

Wherever Robin Williams is, I pray that he feels the outpouring of other people’s love for him. I pray that it leads him to greater and greater self love. I pray that the evil he did himself is balanced by some extraordinary kindness toward his soul. I pray that when people come to that moment of choosing to harm themselves, that some tiny particle of love comes in to pull them back from the abyss.

Florence, the Medici Chapels, the Uffizi, and Social Media
· · · · · · · ·

Florence, the Medici Chapels, the Uffizi, and Social Media

There are too many tourists in Florence. Plenty of them are dreadful.

Today I overheard an American as he stood in front of Leonardo’s sublime Annunciation and wondered aloud in a nasal voice if he would be “done” with the museum by 2:00.

I wanted to spit at him.

Some of us go to the Uffizi and we show up. We bring ourselves to the art, not so we can cross if off some list, but so we can participate in something larger than ourselves: great art, the finest art humankind can create. Beauty, truth, and love.

The Botticelli room does it for me. It grabs my internal organs and squeezes and uplifts me and forces me into transfiguration. I want to kneel and pray in front of the Primavera. Every time I go to the Uffizi, every time I pass through that room with its dazzling paintings, I am a different person than when I entered. I am a better person. I am someone who has been weeping with joy and grace.

Sabin the classical figurative sculptor loves Michelangelo, and Sabin in his own right is a master artist, so he’s earned the right to his opinions. He’s also read every book in English or Italian written since 1750 on the Renaissance, so he’s educated.

But for me, it is Botticelli. Botticelli understood women, he understood beauty, he loved femininity, he conveyed grace like no one else, he got it.

This is a debate Sabin and I have every time we discuss Michelangelo and Sandro Filipepi. It is hard for me to relate to Michelangelo who just didn’t like women. Michelangelo’s female figures wear coconut boobs and the most butch arms this side of construction work. OK, I understand, his architecture of the body is unparalleled. But still.

Then there is Leonardo il Maestro. The golden-ringleted angel in the Verocchio painting. That stunning Annunciation, and was that the only painting naughty, restless, genius Leonardo ever finished? Holy god.

And now we are allowed to take photos in the Italian museums. Why? Free advertising. Joe Schmoe American in front of the David on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram will bring in 20 other Schmoes, and Italy needs their $. Gotta love social media.

Florence

Belonging: the either/or/both/and conundrum of Universal and Specific
· · · · ·

Belonging: the either/or/both/and conundrum of Universal and Specific

There’s a chilling moment in The Talented Mr. Ripley movie when wealthy Meredith Logue says, “The truth is, if you’ve had money your entire life, even if you despise it, which we do–agreed?–you’re only truly comfortable around other people who have it and despise it.”

I thought of this quote today at lunch, but not because of wealth. It came to me in the broader sense of similarity and common elements in life, and how we feel most comfortable around people who have undergone similar life-defining experiences.

I met one of my loveliest, most precious friends at our usual spot. We shared and laughed and joked and commiserated and exclaimed on each other’s behalf, as always. Then there were things we said to each other because we could. We both had shitty childhoods and we both have heart-wrenchingly difficult grown kids and we both are exceedingly well educated and we both love BOOKS and writing. Oh, and she has Native American blood, too, same as me.

I looked across the table at her sweet, intelligent face and thought how lucky I am to have her in my life.

There are things I can only say to her, things confided in her alone of all people ever in my life, things I’ve never told husbands or shrinks or other friends. This is so because she has endured things that I have, happenings and feelings that cut deep into the innermost sanctum of the soul. So my friend gets it. She knows what it means to survive and then to heal, and then to go on and lead a rich and imperfect life brimming with love and progress and hurt and joy and tears and laughter and gratitude.

There are other friends with whom I share common bonds. I have two friends who lived military lives, and that’s a specific, defining thing, too. There’s us, and there are civilians. So it’s always a relief to be in the company of my military friends. We understand the tacit assumptions that govern life in the military and we don’t have to explain that particular ground of being to each other. We just know.

I have friends whose lives have been vastly different from mine, and I prize those friends, too. It’s fun to meet and grow close to all sorts–especially for a novelist, who is always looking for characters for her stories. One of the great privileges of being an author married to a famous artist is that we’ve sat down to dinner with billionaires and with broke XXX-movie star underwear models and with everyone in between. Artists travel freely among social castes and classes, which is delicious.

The first time I married, it was into a family whose expectations and understandings of life couldn’t have been further removed from what I grew up with. I raised my older daughters in that culture, and I did so with some success. To this day, it remains one of the sweetest victories of my life that my former Grandfather-in-law, my former mother-in-law’s father, said to me, “Thank you for raising your children Jewish, Traci. I know that wasn’t natural for you, but you’re doing it well.”

I’m paraphrasing because this conversation happened so long ago, many years ago, before this extraordinary and brilliant man died. He was someone with a fascinating life story of his own, and it thrilled me that he understood, he got it, that I had pierced the boundaries of otherness in service to his family and his grandson. I relished my conversations with him even before he thanked me, but after, I felt a special sense of gratitude toward him. He had seen me and he had acknowledged me.

The temptation is to judge Meredith Logue for her exclusivity, for only embracing other filthy rich people with her genuine, authentic self. But I think that’s too easy. We all go to that place of feeling safest and truest with folks who belong to the same ethnic group or socio-economic category or minority or whatever. We can easily get entrenched in our specifics–that’s a universal experience. It’s when we can hold both our specifics and our universals simultaneously that we transcend our limitations.

So the picture for this blogpost? My husband and daughter laughing at The Three Stooges. Larry, Moe and Curly’s humor has to be one of the most universal experiences going.

 

Brené Brown on Love, Respect, Kindness, and Vulnerability
· · · · · · · ·

Brené Brown on Love, Respect, Kindness, and Vulnerability

A post contemplating Brené Brown on Love.

Of late I have been thinking deeply about these issues of the human heart. It’s partly because of a dark and difficult book I’m writing, and partly because someone to whom I’d turned for help, someone I trusted and respected and liked, has let me down.

This person is powerfully and deeply defended, and isn’t the kind of person who can own their own stuff. Rather, it would be a situation of lack of truthfulness and unacknowledged projection—as it has been for a long while.


So there will be no resolution for me with this person. There will never be a moment when that person can look me in the eyes and own having taken advantage of my trust and vulnerability. It’s not going to happen. And that’s life, so often unresolved.

It happens, right? I sometimes think that we’ve all been subtly trained by sappy television shows and trite movies to believe that there’s always a neat ending that fits our preconceived notions of right and wrong. I also see in our culture a growing entitlement and refusal to take personal responsibility. It dismays me.

Then this morning I encountered this quote:

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare.

Brené Brown The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

I took from this passage that I can continue to nurture and grow love, trust, and respect within myself. I can soften and I can open my heart, even when the other person doesn’t. I can own that in myself: my willingness to be vulnerable, respectful, and kind.

It doesn’t mean I have to be vulnerable to everyone I meet.

There’s a myth that’s prevalent in our society that blames both parties for the behavior of one party, as if two parties equally participate in one person’s treatment of another. All you have to do to understand the falsity of that notion is read history. Categorically, the Jews had nothing to do with the way Nazis treated them. It works in the microcosm, too, in dyad. One person can behave well and the other not so much.

There’s another liberal culture myth that I call the Great Narcissism, which goes like this: If we are tolerant of them, they will be tolerant of us. People want to believe that. They want to think that the world is a mirror that will reflect back their own kindness and tolerance. It’s just not so. It’s a very dangerous myth, in fact.

Plenty of extremist groups will use tolerance to hurt the more tolerant groups.

But Brown has a point: we can each nurture love within ourselves, not demanding and expecting that it will be universally reflected back. But sometimes it is, sometimes the other person can and will nurture their own inner love, kindness, respect, and trust, with mutuality and reciprocity.

Then there is transformation and healing.

 

Writing Well is the Best Revenge
· · · · · ·

Writing Well is the Best Revenge

Almost two decades ago, when I worked as a healer, I had my hands on a male client when my husband called.

New York city apartments being constrained for space, my healing table stood in the living room, not far from the answering machine.

My husband’s voice rang out as he left a message. He had a deep, resonant voice; it was one of his best features, a pleasure to hear.

But the client didn’t think so. “Just listen to him,” my client growled, “so sure of his own prerogative!”

Those words, and my client’s scathing tone, branded themselves irrevocably on my mind. It was early in my career as an energy healer, and this was my first palpable experience of psychosexual transference.

I remember freezing and thinking, “Uh oh. This can’t be good.”

Sure enough, a few months later my client erupted into blind rage. He spewed verbal venom at me, at length, haughtily assuring me that I was in delusion about myself as a writer, he had the proof, and therefore he couldn’t trust me anymore as a healer.

In fact, I had made a grievous mistake some days earlier: I had broken a boundary. My client was a well-known journalist; he offered to read a manuscript I had just finished, and I accepted his offer. The manuscript was a first draft hot off my printer, and it wasn’t even spellchecked. Remember those ancient days, when Word Perfect didn’t automatically spellcheck a document?

I told him it was a first draft. I said it hadn’t been spellchecked. Then I made the mistake. I handed the manuscript over to him.

Right around the same time, I had informed him that I had to start charging him for sessions. Mutual friends had introduced us when he told them he was writing a book about healing. At their urging, he came for one session. Then he came for many more, all free.

I had gotten sucked into this arrangement because he was writing a book, but healing was my business. I couldn’t afford to keep giving away sessions. It was time to set a boundary with him.

When he started working with me, he was a charming, brilliant, and carefully guarded playboy. He was locked into an unconscious certainty that no woman was good enough–beautiful enough, rich enough, wonderful enough–for him.

Most of the work I did with him focused on his heart. Not to be too technical about it, but I restructured his heart chakra and wove the energy of love into his being during every single session I gave him. There was other work too, but for him, it always came back to opening his heart.

By our last session, when he attacked me so vociferously, he was monogamously dating a woman to whom he would soon be engaged. He later married her. This particular woman was that beautiful, rich, and wonderful–she was exquisite, in fact, and talented and accomplished. But I also believe that the work I did on his heart and soul helped him reach a place where he could love someone deeply enough, and with enough maturity, to commit.

Over the decades, in order to deal with certain people in my life and to continue working on myself, I’ve read a lot about borderlines and narcissists. Borderlines are empty and have only rudimentary self-soothing skills. It gives them that astonishingly quick, unpredictable trigger: one minute you’re a saint, and the next you’re evil incarnate. They’re vicious.

And narcissists, well, they’re on the spectrum of sociopathy. Since the world must reflect their perfection back to them at every moment–and let’s face it, the world ain’t that pretty–narcissists are steeped in their own victimization. So steeped, in fact, that they can justify all manner of criminally unkind behavior. Narcissists are cruel.

I never figured out which category my client fit, if he fit into one at all. I only know that two years after he ceased working with me, his book about healing and healers was published.

He had written an entire chapter about me and our work together, employing a pseudonym that did not disguise my identity to others in the healing world. Using terribly clever and expressive language to skewer my writing ability, he went on for a few pages about what a terrible writer I was. I read it with astonishment. There was no mention of the warning I had given him: that it had been an unspellchecked first draft.

I have always loved Anne Lamott’s beautiful book on the craft of writing, Bird by Bird, with its outright approbation for ‘shitty first drafts,’ a term which she has immortalized, and claims is practically obligatory:

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995.

In fact, I had entrusted my manuscript to that long-ago client hoping he would give me feedback that would help me take my shitty first draft to the next level, to being a good second draft.

My bad. I shouldn’t have given him the manuscript. He was my client, and I knew he was in the grips of deep and unconscious projections onto me. I learned a hard lesson about not breaking boundaries with a client.

After reading my client’s printed criticism, the gist of which was even picked up in a Publisher’s Weekly review, I cried for a few days. Then I moved on. He wasn’t the first, or the last, person to blast me with his negative projections.

Transference is a bitch.

In 2005 my novel Immortal sold to BantamDell, and it was published in 2008. It was published on four continents; it was a bestseller in a few countries. Since then I’ve published eight more books, of which five are novels.

My novels get good reviews and they’ve been socked with bad ones. Then there are the splendid reviews. After all these decades of working on my craft as a writer, I get some spine-tinglingly excellent reviews. I’ve worked hard for them, and I’ve earned them.

When drafting this post, I considered which great reviews to quote, to “prove” that I’m a good writer–occasionally, at my best moments, an excellent one. I’d bet 50 bucks cash money that my client still has that shitty, unspellchecked first draft of mine tucked into a drawer somewhere so that he can “prove” what he said about me being a terrible writer. He was that kind of person.

So I thought of quoting twenty or fifty reviews that say my books are wonderful; there are at least that many. Or perhaps I would quote from the fan email I regularly receive. My readers are vocal and appreciative and they reach out. I’m lucky that way. I could mention the awards my books have won or the “Best of” lists to which they’ve been appointed by enthusiastic book review bloggers.

But in the end, overkill is unnecessary. That old client is inconsequential, a distant and unpleasant memory from my past. What matters is that readers buy and enjoy my books.

I offer one quote, from a review of Far Shore (Book 3 of the After Series) by a book review blogger who had conflicting feelings about the novel. I could have chosen a rave review, there are plenty of those. I am grateful for every one of them, too. People have busy, complex lives and I appreciate it when they take the time to read one of my novels and write about it.

This particular review, on The Lost Entwife blog, reflects the reader’s ambivalence about the book. There were two sentences that have stayed with me and give me deep personal satisfaction. They prove something to me about my merit as a writer:

 If nothing else, Slatton writes in such an addictive way that I could swear there was some sort of addictive substance between the pages.  I know when I pick up one of her books I am not going to want to put it down until I finish it, and Far Shore was no different.  

Writing well is the best revenge.

Listen to this blogpost as a podcast on iTunes here.