I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks. That’s the word I use because I don’t want to use the word “stressful.” Or “anxiety-filled.”

I believe if I don’t say it, the feelings won’t actually be there. Crazy.

But, they were stress filled and hard. Yes, I’m retired, but I do volunteer. And I’ve discovered that my underlying anxiety, which for the most part stays beneath the surface, rises up when I am in charge of something. For the past two weeks, I’ve tried to manage emails, zoom calls, regular calls, and texts about a topic that means a great deal to me. Each day, I could feel myself getting more tired, stressed, anxious, and finally sinking into myself. Which is what I do when life seems overwhelming.

That seems silly to say when one is retired. Selfish is a better word, given the abundance I have in my life. But how much time in the day does not dictate whether or not you’ll feel stress. And I did. So I practiced my breathing. I took a Tai Chi workshop. I wrote. A lot.

Gradually, clearer thoughts emerged, and I realized I need to take this off my plate. Or at least, I need to play a different role in this organization. Once I made that decision, I could feel the weight lifting.

We are headed to the Caribbean for two weeks, and I plan to walk, read, write, and sleep. We’ve been to the same little hotel before, a place where I see the same lovely faces, walk the white, pristine beach, and find joy in tiny moments.

I am grateful.

I debated about whether to write this. I tend to want to keep some things private. And I don’t want our choices to come across as arrogant or self-serving. But I want to share something my husband did for me. For us.

We lean left, as they say, politically. Until recently, we didn’t advertise that. But last year we decided to put up a yard sign for Black Lives Matter, and more recently a flag pole with rotating flags– one for BLM and one for gay pride. We had been thinking about ways we could take a stand, quietly.

Well, two weeks ago, someone decided to tear down our BLM flag while we were away. I was distressed and angry. Long story, but the sweet lady who watches our cat decided to buy us another and have her husband fix the pole before we got home. Their act gave me faith in people again.

Then this weekend, a woman with a dog knocked on our door. “Did you have a BLM yard sign in your front yard?” she asked.

She pointed down the street to a tall man in jeans, sauntering down the sidewalk WITH OUR SIGN! I shook my head, my mouth open in shock. She empathized, saying “I wanted you to know he just grabbed it and walked away.” These days I shy away from confrontation. Oh, who’s kidding? I have always shied away from confrontation. But I felt myself burning in anger.

David said, “we’ll buy another.” But the anger was still there.

Last night I walked into our living room and heard David on a phone call I didn’t recognize.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“The head of the NAACP of Fxbg,” he said.

Long story short, he had sent them a check, and the man was calling to thank him.

He explained that he had been thinking of sending a check earlier but when the hateful man stole our sign, he added much more to the check and sent it off.

“So there,” David said.

Somehow it really did make me feel much better.

I can’t demonstrate in large crowds, I hesitate to put myself out by writing letters, but I feel self-centered for not taking a stand. This felt right.

We can support people in many ways. So we did.

I hadn’t been keeping track. But my friend, Donna, told me I’d written 52 poems for our project.

Writing, talking with Donna, planning, editing…all of this has been a joy. But I hadn’t really thought about the heft of this project until she mentioned the number. And that means, she, of course, has taken 52 photographs. The idea seemed simple: she’d send me a photo and I’d use it for inspiration to write a poem.

We didn’t plan for this to be so huge. We didn’t even envision it. We hadn’t realized how much this would end up being about those very things that drew us together in the first place– a shared experience with grief, complicated relationships with mothers, and aging. Our conversations drove this naturally, and it came to an obvious conclusion. A year. A season in our lives.

Poetry can be revealing, and for me so healing. Over the course of the year, as my poetry collection grew, so did my recognition of buried emotions. Writing about them helped me process feelings and come to terms with them.

Another challenge– imposter syndrome–came in like a storm. Even now I read some of my work with an overly critical eye, wondering who the heck I think I am to be writing poetry. This syndrome, first identified by Ruchika TulshyanJodi-Ann Burey, is one many women face.

Enter what’s known as imposter syndrome, which was originally coined by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in their study of professional women in a clinical setting. For people with imposter syndrome, self-doubt, insecurity, and perpetual trepidation that their inadequacies will be discovered is a way of being in the workplace. Any successes and accomplishments can trigger anxiety. Women and ethnic minorities are often the hardest hit because hierarchical and masculine cultures can contribute to imposter distress.

I have learned to speak gently to myself, calm myself down. In a few hours, I am usually able to realize where this is coming from. People pleasing tendencies manifest in many ways. Also, I know I am writing for me, and this writing has been healing.

When we write about psychologically upsetting experiences, we actively confront the event and the emotions it has engendered. We are able to give perspective to the experience and its relation to the rest of our lives by opening up (… and) constructing an understandable narrative of what occurred. In this way, expressive writing is much like excising a wound – rather than obsessively ruminating about the event in a manner that yields no answers, thus allowing the painful experience to fester and possibly lead to mental health problems, expressive writing allows us to cognitively confront, process, and heal from the pain.

https://www.artandhealing.org/evidence-of-the-healing-power-of-expressive-writing/

We will be putting the finishing touches on this project over the next month and then sending it to MILK, where they will create a beautiful book for us! I am so grateful to have shared this time with her. We’ve already talked about doing something together in the future. Both Donna and another friend Linda have rekindled my interest in photography. And I’ve signed up for a watercolor class. I don’t know where this will lead, but I am open to possibilities.

“Art is a wound turned into light.” ~ Georges Braque