Hey wonderful humans.
I’m back on my Sunday morning writing date. (Actually, I started this two weeks ago and then on the Sunday afternoon, I coughed my way back into covid. Just about back on the horse-hoarse now so some of the timings were true at time of typing but some aren’t actually true now, two Sundays later.)
(New here? Click here for the context of the full six-month cycle, and here for this month’s theme and here to get updates in your inbox.
Threads this time: Walking alongside grief. Getting perspective on overwhelm. Staying true to your values when team stuff gets messy. Self-care (but others care?). Gallows humour. The all-pervasive battle metaphor.
1.
(CN: grief. Skip to the next section if you’re tender.)
It’s the first anniversary of my Mum’s death today. It’s 9.01 am as I type this. Last year, at this time, she had gone to hospital in the middle of the night with horrible gastric stuff. She whatsapped me at 10.10 (I just scrolled back) to say she was being admitted with pancreatitis. I texted her some comforting stuff from the NHS website that said most people recover after a week or so.
That message only has blue ticks because I read it when I got her phone a week or so later. It was in her tiny grey rucksack, alongside notes on bits of card (my Mum was ALWAYS with the notes), and tissues. Her lipstick. Her bank cards.
I still remember going into her bedroom and finding a tissue box covered with Italian vocab she’d written on there with biro. So many questions I can’t ask her.
December was rough from about the middle onwards. I think it was Christmas approaching and it being the first one in 48 years without Jenny Joy. I didn’t really have anyone over for the couple of weeks before Christmas and was crying about ten times a day.
This week hasn’t been like that. It’s like the well of tears are there, but I can choose to put my feet in, or not.
I suppose I’ve gotten used to carrying on?
I wasn’t really devastated by Mum dying. But it still doesn’t make any SENSE. I’m still, a year later, waiting for her to stop being dead so I can see her again. Like, surely it can’t be that I can NEVER ask her a question or laugh with her or SING with her again? Exchange a few sentences in Italian or wash the dishes and sing showtunes at the top of our lungs. (Mum was in the am-dram for years. So I grew up with songs from music halls and shows going back to 1900. I still have her voice when I’m at the sink saying in the Eliza Dolittle voice, “I washed me face and ‘ands before I come I did”.)
I went to text her yesterday. Apparently, these urges don’t really go away.
I listened to Krista Tippett interview Nick Cave, whose teenage sons died pretty soon after one another.
He talks about how loss is a fundamental part of being human, the constant sense of loss that we try and avoid, but in grief we are pulled right UP against, our breath frosting the glass. His grief took him to his own kind of faith, which he speaks of in interesting ways.
In my meditation tradition, we’d say the loss is speaking to the fundamental wound of being separated from the divine, and that the longing for connection is what can drive us to seek sacredness.
So part of the longing for Mum is a longing for God, which for me translates into doing what I think I’m here for, which is writing to you about leadership.
So here we are.
(The photo at the top is Mum’s rosebush having survived the winter.)
2.
Woyyy this week has been a lot, including a whole BUNCH of changes and turbulence at work and it was leadership meetings and Board meeting and commissioner meeting this week, and travelling to speak at a conference.
Oh, and we’re looking for a new place to live, doing the paperwork to sell my Mum’s house whilst going through the emotions and logistics of another major bereavement.
Plus there’s colonised mindful stretching practice to get back into (I have NOT done this this week) and, of course, my Duolingo streak to nurture (@megalightheart - find me lol).
Two things have helped.
But before we get to those, I’ve been trying to pay attention to what overwhelm actually is?
Seems to me like some of the ingredients are:
Too many moving parts to keep track of easily in your head
Many things that imply many branching cascades of steps that all feel like they need to be taken at the same time
A sense of it never ending?
One key that is helping currently is gaining perspective. I kind of feel it almost literally. Like, standing back and having some distance.
In Euston station in London there’s a mezzanine floor with restaurants and the first class lounge that forms a kind of balcony around all the people milling around on the ground floor where all the train platforms are. Being down there is a LOT, particularly sensorily - loud, lots of people, tracking your bags, waiting on tippy-toes for when your train’s platform is announced, so you can be at the front of the surge.
That’s kind of how it feels sometimes to be in amongst the zoomed-in detail of my task list! Loud, urgent, too much to track, things obscuring your vision, in a crowd of things to do.
What’s been helpful is being able to group a whole bunch of things together and go, That Whole Thing is this.
Like, okay there’s:
Recruitment (several roles, several many tasks).
Conference.
Team dynamics.
Board.
Commissioners.
Leadership team stuff.
Mum’s house and grief.
Other major bereavement logistics.
Upcoming surgery logistics.
Moving house.
Wellbeing rhythms.
Queer family.
Helps to be able to zoom out. And see, okay, that’s That Whole Thing. That’s THAT Whole thing.
But even that list feels like too many things to track. Like, I had to actually think to get them all.
So I have to zoom out again and go:
Day job.
Bereavement logistics.
Moving house.
Me stuff.
It helps to know that I have all the actions captured in one place for all of these projects, so I know I’m not losing anything by zooming out.
But especially in the morning, at breaks, and at night, to stop my Ordinary Mental Consciousness from whirring and whirring and spinning me into actively obstructive swirls, it can help to go, okay, all of THAT belongs to That Whole Thing. Anything in there that I haven’t already captured as a task in my notebook? Yes - capture it. No? Well it’s in there.
The other aspect that helps is handling the downstream whilst somewhat getting upstream.
What do I mean by that?
We have a vacancy at work for the person who deals with the public voicemail and email. We get 5-10 voicemails and 20-30 emails every day - and not always straightforward ones.
I’ve been trying to help my deputy out by dealing with these inboxes and it’s a LOT of work. In fact, I had SUCH grand plans for the four days they were off. I counted all the messages and got a pot of 70 white beans and another pot to put them in, and was going to clear my schedule and do 70 message-beans a day until I’d totally cleared the backlog. Miss Rona had other ideas, so we only caught up with the backlog in the past couple of days.
That’s working downstream - in the thick of it
Upstream is going: what’s somewhat causing this?
Okay - we need to recruit a person.
But also are there any patterns? We were getting repeat messages from people because they hadn’t heard back. So I changed the auto message to set better expectations.
The team have also discussed doing a better FAQ doc that goes to service users so that some regular questions are answered.
That’s upstream.
Of course, we could go even more upstream and think about information flows and system change and putting more control in the hands of patients and renegotiating contracts and abolishing the whole system.
But that’s plenty for now.
Another example.
I have a surgery date and they want me at a certain ‘BMI’. (Ugh, the ridiculous racist bell-curve.)
I need to lose a few kilos.
Downstream, I can buy a bit more fruit so I snack on that rather than biscuits.
A bit more upstream, I can get out some recipe books that inspire me to do more plant-based food.
But I was talking with one of my sibling-friends, and we were saying that if we could deal with the emotional side of eating, that cascades down.
For me, that’s making sure I do All The Things - getting out in the air and the light, properly meditating, seeing my meditation instructor for kind-of-therapy, doing stretching, seeing loved ones, all of THAT.
That’s upstream.
I could, also, contact the clinic and question why they’re using BMI. I could find people who are already doing the work of combatting the use of BMI. I could link in with other trans people who are working on eating differently without the spectre of clawing dysphoria.
Upstream often takes more commitment, and downstream often can’t be ignored in the meantime.
But I find it helpful to find how many steps I can go upstream with the energy I currently have.
3.
In the past, I’ve talked a good game about unilateral control vs mutual learning. How we should come from a perspective of not having all the pieces, and have genuine curiosity about how others deal with things and a transparency about our thought processes.
I’ll bring you some of the detail in a couple of months when we’re talking about relationships with others.
What I noticed about this, however, in this month when we’re focusing on self and feelings and work, is that I am wildly influenced in my ability to come from a collaborative mindset by how stressed I’m feeling.
There is definitely a mini-dictator in me, and not necessarily a benign one, not even from my own perspective.
I can feel her saying, ‘They should just do their job or get out! Sometimes you just have to lay down the law and people have to deal with it.’
This is NOT the mindset that will take us to a new world! But it’s in there. Not very far from the surface, either.
And I feel guilty because we started differently way back in the first few months. But somehow we’ve settled into a groove that is very close to the traditional, closed, hierarchical mindset.
I think I’m going to experiment with using this as a symptom for me to gain some perspective, slow down, and check in with the people around me? Remember queerness. Link in with my values and my sacred practices.
Theory vs practice? All business problems are personal problems?
We have to keep bringing ourselves back. Again and again.
As Natalie Goldberg, the Jewish Buddhist writing teacher says, ‘You don’t just drink one glass of water. You drink glass of water after glass of water.’
4.
I spoke to a loved one I haven’t spoken to in wayyy too long this week. She works in freedom from oppression work, particularly around race, class and gender.
She asked me about what was going on, and I told her (bereavements, end of relationship, surgery date, moving house, work things).
‘And the world,’ I said.
And we looked at each other and just laughed. For maybe a full minute, we had no words.
It’s SO bad out there.
Sometimes you need to laugh with someone you love who gets it.
5.
I took four days off with Covid. But WOW it took a lot of persuading by my sib-friend.
Self-care and boundaries are all well and good, but when you can clearly see the impact they’ll have on others around you, it’s really tough to follow through. Even if you’re the one who hassles other people to take time off. ‘Should you really be working?’
She persuaded me by saying, ‘What will matter in a year?’
Me having done my best to not create long-term health problems will matter. So I slept for three days.
Whenever I’m walking I’m having to remind my fast legs that my lungs are slow.
6.
The battle metaphor is EVERYWHERE, right?
Yes, sometimes we have to literally physically fight.
But most of the time we don’t. I’m trying to be sensitive to how it inhabits my language.
7.
If you’d like to know what action you can actually take to move us beyond capitalism, this programme by someone I really respect and love is starting on 24th April.
https://www.sowingpostcapitalistseeds.com/foundation-course.html
I literally couldn’t recommend it higher. It changed things deep within me.
***
Another world is possible.
With love.