Ask Again Later

I was in the back of a cab the other day running some errands, on the way to the brassiere store, as my grandmother might say, to buy some (can you guess?) new brassieres, when I saw a friend of mine crossing in front of my cab. As you do, I got all excited seeing her, and started to roll down my window to yell out hello across 5th Avenue when all of a sudden I remembered something pretty important:

We're not friends anymore.

Or at least I guess we're not. No one ever told me this. There was no big blowout, no declaration of non-friendship, but she stopped returning my calls and emails a couple of years ago, including a last ditch effort I made a few months ago essentially saying, "If I did something wrong, which is highly possible, let me know and whatever it is, I'm sorry for it."

She's a wonderful person and it's sad to not have her in my life anymore. But I was happy to see her looking well and happy. Smiling and laughing, she seemed to be the same kind, fun-loving person I always remembered -- and not the person I pictured in my mind deleting my texts, emails and voicemails automatically, and yes, a little devilishly.

So, instead of saying anything, my cabbie and I drove on to the land of overpriced brassieres (also known as the Upper East Side) and I pushed it out of my mind.

The next day, exchanging emails with a mutual friend on other topics, I admitted that I had seen her. She let me know she is having the same experience -- for reasons unbeknownst to her, just as they are unbeknownst to me, this friend isn't responding to her either and has seemingly dropped her as a friend too.

Now, I'll admit, this made me feel much, much better. I know that I make mistakes essentially every five minutes and I am sure that it's possible that I did something wrong in this situation, but I really couldn't think of what it could be, and sadly, she wasn't giving me the opportunity to find out and try to right this wrong. Which is wrong.

All of a sudden, I wasn't sad anymore. I was worked up, not so much on my own behalf, but on behalf of my friend. How could she treat her like that? Unacceptable. And it got me thinking again about why things like this happen. What is happening in her life that she has decided to cut people out of it? What's going on in her head?

I know plenty of people who, in times of stress or upset, shut down and stop responding to emails, calls, and texts. On the other side of that it's hard to know what's up -- radio silence is telling but can be misinterpreted.

My, I guess, now "ex-friend" maybe really doesn't know why she cut at least a couple of us out of her life. Heck, if asked, she may not even think she's doing it. Or she may well know exactly what she's doing and have plenty of reasons. I might just never know.

So how do we bridge the gap? How do you know when it's really over? And if you care for someone, how do you know when to stop trying?

I sometimes think it would be very handy to have the ability to read people's minds. You'd know what everyone is thinking, and you wouldn't have to go through as much BS to get to the truth. It would be right there for everyone to see. Is this person happy/sad, etc.? Does that person hate me, or find me fascinating? Does my hair color really look natural? We'd all be each other's Magic 8-Balls, but the answers would be the truth instead of a generic response.

Then again, it could be like that episode of Gilligan's Island where Gilligan discovers those seeds that, if you eat them, you can know what the other person is thinking, and it turns into a big disaster with everyone mad at each other.

I'm not so sure I want to know what people are thinking about me all of the time. Would it be more or less depressing to realize that it's not always about me?

And I'm equally unsure that I want others to know what I'm thinking either. Maybe I'd be a nicer person thinking nicer thoughts if I knew people could read that I think they have no business wearing gold lame jeggings, but probably not. I just don't have that kind of self-control and as a general way of being, I am a control freak, so I don't need anyone all up in my business.

Now each week at acupuncture we sit and go through how I'm feeling -- a laundry list of ailments thankfully improving each time, and a discussion of how I'm sleeping and feeling emotionally.  I had been so focused on what I was trying to fix through our sessions -- i.e. my physical symptoms -- that I had blinders on as to how my emotional health could even come into play so I just gave the appropriate knee-jerk emotional responses -- I'm fine, doing great. When actually, I know intellectually that our mental state plays a huge part in how we deal with any positive or negative situation in life.

More often than not, I think it's just as much about what we're not admitting to ourselves as what we're not telling each other. How did I feel? Pretty good, I think.  Emotionally, great, well, except for the three times I burst into tears uncontrollably. Had I been sleeping well? Yes. Oh wait, you mean all the nights of the week, not just last night, and you mean, sleeping through the whole entire night, oh well, then, no, no, I haven't been sleeping well. At all.

Fortunately or unfortunately, in polite society, we don't often ask those kinds of point blank questions, of others -- or of ourselves. We keep our respectable distance. We wouldn't want to pry. I was talking to two friends this week who hadn't seen me since my concussion and they were both kinda stunned. They really had no idea what had been going on and asked me point blank why I hadn't told them, well, point blank about how I was feeling and what support I needed. I didn't really have a good answer and it made me kinda sad. Why would I create a situation for myself that didn't have to be that way?

Unfortunately, at least in my case, I often think that others have raided Gilligan's stash of mind reading seeds and know what I think and what I need, and not only is that unfair, but it's impossible, since half the time, I don't even know what I want or need nevermind expecting others to.

It's the gap between what we say and what we don't say. And when you add that up with the gap between what we say and what people actually hear, and the gap between what we think we know and what the truth is, it's a wonder that we can communicate at all.

So, what about the my relationship with my friend?

Outlook not so good.

But am I sorry that I've spent time reaching out and trying to make it work?

My reply is no.

I know we were friends for a reason - even if that reason is to teach me something as simple as the hard lesson that you can only know me to the extent that I allow you to know me, and vice versa.

It is decidedly so.

But we can help each other along by staying open and challenging each other.

So concentrate and ask again.

All signs point to yes.

My Valentine, My Self

It likely comes as no surprise that, as a child, my favorite activity was reading, and I would read everything I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, since I was the youngest of three girls with two older sisters, 7 and 11 years older than I am, what I got my hands on most often was Cosmopolitan magazine and Harlequin romances.

My mother's philosophy, which I don't disagree with, was, if she told me that reading those things was bad, that I would equate reading with being a bad thing that my overachieving, goody-goody self shouldn't do, so she just shook her head and let me read away. I remember bringing a copy of Cosmo on a school field trip when I was, oh, about 9 years old. The chaperone, someone's mom, I can't remember whose, saw me cracking open my copy of the latest issue, looked at me like she was debating whether to say something about the appropriateness of my reading material, then, deciding against it, asked to borrow it when I was done.

I must have read hundreds of magazines and romances during my most formative years. Our local library had (still has) a book sale every Saturday morning, and I would go and get 10 used Harlequins for $1.00. Since they take about a couple hours to read (not exactly War and Peace), I easily burned through at least a book a day, sometimes more.

Most of the stories took on one of the following formulas:

a. Damaged boy meets damaged girl, girl hates boy (and/or vice versa), boy and girl are thrown into some madcap/terrifying/ridiculous situation together where they realize just how right they are for each other, everyone lives happily ever after.

b. Boy meets girl, they are forced into an arranged or pretend marriage of some sort, they realize just how right they are for each other, everyone lives happily ever after.

c. Girl is in relationship with a very rich boy, poor boy comes along and makes girl realize she does not, in fact, love rich boy, but loves poor boy -- everyone lives happily ever after especially when, SURPRISE, turns out poor boy is in fact a VERY rich boy after all. Hooray! Everyone wins!

d. Girl is kidnapped into slavery by some sort of foreign royalty, girl and boy fall in love despite the horror of said slavery (which no one seems to acknowledge is a bad thing), everyone lives happily ever after.

Now, I'm not recommending this reading regimen to anyone, but it sure helped to shape who I am today, for better and for worse.

For one, I can't believe that I have lived this long without being kidnapped into slavery by a member of the royal family of some exotic distant land like Scotland. It's almost insulting.

(A Note from my Conscience: I am kidding! There is nothing funny about sex trafficking, which is a huge problem, especially here in NYC.)

But perhaps most importantly, it's made me, despite my supreme feminism and raging independence, a total romantic, absolutely certain that a happy ending in love is out there for me. Not a happily ever after ending filled with wine and roses and a release from slavery, but a realistic kind filled with bills and home repair, the stuff that real life partnership is made of.

Essentially, my happy ending involves it also being someone else's problem when the toilet is overflowing, not just mine. And that my cat has someone else to stalk and attack, to give my poor legs a break; I'm running out of unmarred real estate.

And despite the fact that I don't have a technical Valentine this Valentine's Day, I don't think it's a bad thing to be an eternal optimist about love. Valentine's Day doesn't make me depressed but optimistic and grateful -- grateful that I have a heart with a capacity to love a lot of people, places, and things and not just one day of the year, but all of them.

Sure sometimes I get disillusioned, wondering when I'll settle down, but no good can come out of thinking that way. I mean, I'm not Adele, turning heartache into gold, so I may as well keep on keeping on.

I've also learned a thing or two these past few months about being your own Valentine -- and by that I mean putting yourself first -- making healthy choices and setting boundaries. Realizing that only I know what's best for me and how to make me happy and fulfilled.

And I'm not just saying that to justify the fact that I bought myself several Valentine's Day gifts.

So bring on the red outfits, the love songs, the heart shaped candy boxes, flower delivery people, and grown men dressed as Cupid.

Especially the grown men dressed as Cupid. That's some hilarity right there.

Come February 15th, when many have a love hangover, I'll still feel the same. I'll still be playing love songs on my iPod, watching The Bachelor and, yes, tearing through the latest Bertrice Small book.

And I am happy to share the love and lend it to you when I'm done.

(As a footnote, I was going to close out this entry with a list of my top ten songs about love. But for anyone who knows me, you know that's impossible -- ten became twenty, which became fifty, then one hundred, so insert your favorite love songs here and enjoy! xoxo)

All That Remains

My uncle, my father's brother Lawrence, passed away this week after a long illness. Unfortunately, this is not the saddest part of this story. In many ways, his passing was a blessing after so much suffering. The saddest part to me is the relationship between his branch of the family and mine had become virtually non-existent over the years, and so, we found out he passed not from my aunt or cousins, but from a family friend who happened to tell my mother's sister, assuming she knew.

As I checked my cousin's Facebook page for confirmation of his passing, I was struck by some comments people had written about my uncle -- things I had never known, like that he, a Captain in the NYPD, was one of the first officers on the scene the night John Lennon was shot. It made me wonder how much more I never knew about him, and even still, how much he never knew and will never know now about my own family. And ever a romantic dreamer, it made me wish that things had turned out differently -- that instead of finding this out from a stranger's comment, that I had my own memories, "Uncle Larry, tell us again what happened the night John Lennon was killed."

Sadder still, stories like these aren't rare: they're all too common. But it still mystifies me how they happen. How do bonds disintegrate so much? How do things come to this state? How did we get here?

I think about my own nieces and nephews and how close we are, and how I can't imagine not having a relationship with them. I think about my mother's four siblings, their spouses and my many, many cousins, and how they have been so much a part of my life that I can't think of any major event that they haven't shared with me -- good or bad.

The relationship with my father's side of the family, at least in my lifetime, has always been awkward and strained, although I understand from my mother and from looking at old family photos, that that wasn't always the case. But time and circumstance change, people change.

My father was an alcoholic and became difficult to live with. As a result, my parents separated, but even when we weren't seeing my father regularly, my mother made sure that we kept in touch with his mother, my grandmother. And we would see my uncle Larry and his family whenever we visited my mother's mother, as he lived just down the block from her in the Bronx. We didn't see them very often -- perhaps a handful of times a year, but they were still a part of our lives, unlike my father's other siblings - a sister and a brother, technically a cousin that had been adopted by my grandmother when his own mother fell on hard times. They, for reasons I'm sure unique to each of them, which I will never know, stayed away.

When I was 14, my father was killed in an accident. I remember my mother getting the call that Saturday morning from my uncle. He had been struck by a car by a nurse coming home late at night from work. And as much as our lives were changed in that instant, I remember feeling sorry for that nurse, and how her life was changed too, how she was just coming home from a hard day at work and now she had accidentally taken a life. She, like my family, would never be the same, but at least, in some ways, we had been prepared that it could end like this. With an alcoholic/addict, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the phone to ring with another bit of bad news, but the fact that his death had happened in this way was shocking. In some ways, his death was freeing -- for him and for us. He didn't have to struggle anymore and we could know he was at peace.

We saw much of my father's family at his wake and funeral, where we felt like outsiders. My parents had never technically divorced and it was certainly awkward seeing relatives I had never met or hadn't seen in years. Not exactly the time for a happy family reunion.

After that day, the distance grew wider. We didn't hear from my uncle as much. We would sometimes see him on television, on the nightly news. High-ranking in the NYPD, he would often be the spokesperson for various cases and we would see him sharing news of some big arrest or the details of some horrific crime. Whenever I would see him, I'd feel proud and wistful -- what if my own dad's life had gone differently, he was in the NYPD too, maybe that would be him instead of my uncle? But that wasn't his path in life.

As the time moved on, phone calls placed weren't always returned. Still, when my grandmother passed, he did let us know and my sisters were able to go and pay their respects. After she was gone, it seemed like the bonds were even more strained, as if it was out of respect for her that he stayed in touch. And since then, we rarely heard from them.

In the last few years, I noticed my uncle and cousin were on Facebook; I friended them but we didn't really communicate beyond that. Then two years ago, my father's cousin, a man I'd never met, reached out -- like many men of his age, he had retired and become interested in genealogy and had found me through my uncle's Facebook page. We struck up a strangely comforting e-mail exchange -- he shared stories of my dad as a child, in happier times, said how much he had admired and loved him, and how much my father, even as a child, had taken care of them. He talked about his own struggle with alcoholism and how it had destroyed so much of their -- our -- extended family.

He let me know he had reconnected after many years with my uncle, and, as a result, had discovered that he, and my father's other relatives, thought that there was ill will harbored on my side of the family; I assured him there wasn't and asked him to please extend that message to all who would listen. My family never had any ill will toward any of our relatives, largely because, as the saying goes, "Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." There's just no point to it.

About a year later, late on a Saturday night, my phone rang with an unfamiliar number. At a noisy event, I didn't pick up. When I retrieved the message, it was my uncle Larry, but his words were incoherent. Surprised and thrown off, I didn't know how to handle the call. I hadn't spoken to him in 20 plus years. Soon after, I heard from my cousin, who let me know he wasn't well and that he really wanted to talk to me. "Absolutely," I said, "Just let me know when."

I'm not sure what happened after that, but I never heard back. We never had our call. I try not to spend too much time wishing that I had picked up the phone that night, but, being obsessive, I can't help myself.

My mother later heard from his wife, my aunt, that my uncle wasn't well at all, and that he was no longer lucid. What he was sick with, they wouldn't say, so we don't know. Irish people have a long history of never admitting health issues and other weaknesses and instead use euphemisms. I can't count how many relatives died of the "winter disease" or the "summer disease." This makes giving my medical history at the doctor's very interesting as we'll never know exactly what those conditions were; the "winter disease" isn't exactly in the medical books.

And it was through Facebook I learned last week he had been admitted to hospice, and yesterday, we learned he passed, again, through a friend of my mother's sister, who mentioned it casually, as if my aunt knew. My aunt called my mother, assuming she did indeed know. Because it wouldn't be off base to assume that, but alas, we did not.

I'm not sad that my uncle passed; from what I understand, his body and mind had deteriorated to a point where his life was no longer a life. I'm sad for my cousins and my aunt, and everyone who knew and loved my uncle -- and that includes my mother, sisters, and me. I'm sad for any time he may have spent wishing that things were different without knowing how to fix them. He and my dad, and their siblings, didn't have an easy life and as a result, none of them communicated their feelings well. Perhaps he just wasn't sure what to do to rebuild our relationship. Most of all, I'm sad for how things turned out, and what they could have been.

They say that when you know better, you do better. When my dad died, I learned a lesson in how not to leave things unsaid. We weren't in good touch then; when he would call, often after a few too many, I would refuse to speak with him. I was a child and I couldn't handle it. He died shortly after his birthday. I had sent a birthday card to his last known address, but he moved around a lot. Several days after he died, his birthday card was returned to me, "No longer at this address." I never forgot that. It was a lesson to me to not let anything -- good or bad -- go unsaid with the people you care about. I'm not saying that I'm 100% successful at it, but since that day, I've tried my best to do better.

And my uncle's passing is another reminder - a reminder to do better, but to also realize that everyone has their own holes to fill, and crosses to bear, and sometimes, no matter how much we want relationships and situations to be different, sometimes they just can't be, and we have to accept that.

I hope that my uncle is in a better place now, ideally reunited with my father and others who have passed before, and I hope they both know that, when we see each other again, there needn't be any awkwardness. We've already wasted too much time on that.

But I can tell you this: I am SO going to want to hear the one about John Lennon.

Poker Face

One of the most irritating and embarrassing side effects of this injury to me, especially early on, has been my inability to conceal my emotions. At first, I was incapable of doing it -- the part of the brain that controls this had seemingly shut off, so no poker face here. It made me realize just how much energy I -- and likely others -- spend hiding how we truly feel in a lot of situations.

So, to the colleague I would normally try to gently coax into volunteering to help with a project, I found myself saying, "You're going to have to do this. I can't do everything."

At the doctor, when asked how I was feeling, instead of saying what I normally would, something in the "I'm okay" family, I burst into tears and told the truth, "It really hurts and this totally sucks."

And when I found myself feeling totally overwhelmed, and feeling like I couldn't handle it anymore on my own, I called home and said exactly that. And instead of trying to continue to tough it out, I went home to be taken care of.

And strangely, I've found that all of this honesty, all of this truth-telling has been actually productive. Sure it could have been presented a bit better with a little more finesse and flair, but I found that, actually saying what I was feeling, well, actually told people how I was actually feeling and what I needed.

Pretty shocking, eh?

And it made me think about how much effort all of us put into packaging up the truth each day -- from little things like answering "I'm fine" when asked how we are, when we're really not fine at all, to bigger things like not letting people know when they've hurt your feelings or asking for help when you need it.

At least for me, I think that I'm being kind and gracious when I tell these sometimes not-so-little white lies. Letting people off the hook. Oh, she's just being nice to ask, she doesn't really care how my day has been ... when we're really cutting people off from knowing us.

Learning how to express our feelings, wants and needs to get the right response is something we learn as babies, but somewhere along the way it becomes really complicated. When babies are small and crying, seemingly for no reason, we desperately think, "I wish I knew what you wanted!" And when children start talking, telling us what they want, it's both adorable and acceptable when they blurt out things like, "I have to pee." We even clap and say "Great job!"

And then, we start censoring them, and as we get older, we take over the task of censoring ourselves. We start to worry about hurting other people's feelings, or, worse, our own feelings -- worried about coming across "wrong," you know, aggressive, stupid, self-centered, weak, or heaven forbid, vulnerable.

Being vulnerable is perhaps the worst of all because it reveals our worst kept secret -- that we're human and we have feelings. And as humans with feelings, we care about our interactions with other humans, and, sometimes, if hard-pressed, we'll admit that we actually care about other humans.

Caring about other humans is the most problematic of all. Sometimes, they don't care as much about us as we do about them, or vice versa. And to protect ourselves, we start to become stingy and keep score and we hold our own feelings hostage lest we reveal too much or reward others for what we deem bad behavior. We might think of someone and want to reach out and then think, "I called that person last so I'm not calling her until she calls me back." And all kinds of similar spiteful sport that really only ends up hurting ourselves because they stop us from being true to who we are.

So why is communicating really so hard? Why is something so simple so complicated? And how do we seemingly UNlearn all that we've learned about how to help get our needs met?

I did an activity last year as part of a leadership training where they blindfolded all of us and had us try, as a group, to match up pairs of colored puzzle pieces simply by using our sense of touch and explaining to one another what it was we were feeling. At first, it was terrifying and a bit of a disaster. I think the technical term might be "clusterf*ck." Until someone smart -- sadly not me -- realized we had to actually all shut up, talk one at a time, and actually listen to one another. It wasn't as much about what each person was saying, the actual words, but moreso that we all listened to one another. I might say, "I have a three sided pointy piece" and someone else might declare, "I have a triangle." We were both saying the same thing in different ways but we all had to keep the message as simple as possible. We also had to trust one another -- that if he says it's a triangle, it's a triangle and not a circle.

So we did the exercise, and we did it "correctly." We matched up all the pieces, and we did it in a reasonable amount of time without any bloodshed. We felt pretty proud of ourselves.

Again, sounds pretty straightforward, but what if we took the blindfolds off?

Without the blindfold, in exercises like this and in life, that's when the real biases come out. Tommy always drops the ball -- he can't be counted on to complete this task. And Margie, she never learned her shapes, God bless her, she must have been sick that day in Kindergarten. Bob is just trying to complete this as fast as possible so he can look good in front of the boss, as always, and Len, of course, is a big old bossypants who always has to be right and isn't letting any of the rest of us get a word in edgewise.

When I think about how I communicate in daily life, when the blindfold is off, so to speak, I realize how much gets skewed, buried, sugarcoated and sanitized through the lens of what we call past experience. Instead of taking people at who they are and what they say, I find I am often guilty of letting my own biases dictate my actions and response.

I find it odd that, in world that encourages us to communicate in 140 characters, it seems to be hard to get to the heart of the matter. Is it any wonder that we're left feeling misunderstood and disconnected?

As I've been feeling better and better, I find myself slipping back into wearing more of the poker face again. In truth, some questions require more complicated answers that we're just not prepared to give sometimes, and some situations require us to look more to ourselves than others. And I think that's okay as long as it's not all of the time.

Because I find that, the more I wear that poker face, the more isolated I do feel, and it's a situation of my own making that doesn't have to be that way. As a wise man once said, as every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser, you just have to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run.

Because sometimes we're all out of aces, and betting on ourselves is always a gamble, but the payoff can be so great.

White Noise

This may be a bold statement, but I think one of the best things I ever did, one of the best moves I ever made, was to buy an air purifier for my bedroom. Not because I think it's doing anything to the actual air, mind you. If anything, I feel like I'm sneezing more and waking up sounding like Harvey Fierstein, but I love it because it totally and completely blocks out the sounds of the other humans in my building. You know the humans, with their annoying walking and talking and breathing. Now instead I have the sweet, sweet rumble of a noisy motor as it works overtime trying to turn the mud thick NYC polluted air into something fit for human lungs.

You see, if I hadn't actually purchased this purifier, I may have had to do the unthinkable: I may have actually had to interact with my neighbor and tell him that I don't appreciate his nightly ritual which, to my ears, sounds like Irish step dancing in Doc Martens to hip hop music while running all of the water in the apartment and watching Lord of the Rings dubbed into Chinese. And no one wants that. I'd rather resent him and plot ways to drive him out of his apartment with my own retaliatory strike. Perhaps a little Barry Manilow blasting at 4 a.m. would do the trick? But drowning him out is even better because, this way, he doesn't exist.

Technology saves the day. Again.

I was reading an article this week about how, globally, more and more people are living on their own than ever before. One of the reasons cited is that we live in such a technologically connected world that people need a break. They need a room of their own to which to retreat to block out the external stimuli and recharge. They need to really be alone.

Sure, we're bombarded with stimuli, but for what purpose. Are we really connecting to anyone or anything? Or are things just being thrown at us? If so, I think we've got a lot of incomplete passes.

I feel more disconnected than ever from those who are really close to me. It may be months or even years that I see friends of mine who actually live in the same city. And I'm not talking about acquaintances, but people I consider good friends. Sometimes I wonder if my definitions are screwed up -- how can people be good friends and not see each other for such long periods of time? Maybe I didn't get the memo that we weren't friends anymore. Or maybe I was the one who was supposed to send the memo and I forgot to do it. But I don't think so. I think that all of these ways we have to communicate trick us into thinking that they're all perfectly fine substitutes for human interaction.

And when we do see each other, I feel like there's this weird assessment that needs to be done -- have we been following each other on Facebook or Twitter, how much do we need to catch each other up? It's a weird feeling when I haven't seen someone in years and yet they know that I drink a green tea every day from Starbucks. So, okay, what do you say? If everything's been said and read, what's left to say? Awkward.

I did it to my mother this morning who was like, "Oh I have great news!!" and she started to tell me that my niece had won a competition. I didn't even let her finish, I said, "I know, I saw it on Facebook!" Would it have killed me to let her finish her sentence? I wasn't any less excited about it, but it sure stole her thunder in telling me.

I find it even more awkward when good friends don't seem to track each other on social media. I had a conversation with a friend last week who is very active on Facebook but didn't know I had an accident. I was pretty dumbfounded because I feel like I bore everyone to tears with the story and everyone knows, even people who probably shouldn't know. I asked, "But wait, aren't you on Facebook?" "Yes, every day." "So, don't you read my posts? Do you not read mine in particular or do you not read any at all?" It was fascinating to me.

It's like social media intimacy is a whole new level of intimacy -- or lack thereof. Is it wrong to be offended if your friends don't track you on Facebook? Or is it right to assume that they'd want to?

Since I'm an active user, I tend to assume that everyone I know is on Facebook regularly and following their friends, when I'm learning that's not the case. Some people essentially never log in at all, they only joined because EVERYONE else was doing it. Some people only play games, doing whatever it is that happens over in Farmville or Frontierville or whatever the kids are calling it. I even know people who are really active on Facebook, posting like crazy, but don't read anyone else's info. Now that's really curious to me. Don't they want to see what's happening with other people's lives? I can understand not being active at all, but if you think people should care about you, shouldn't you care about them? Or is that not what it's about?

I guess I can only speak for myself: Facebook gives me a way to connect with those I care about. I do want to hear what's going on in your lives and what's important to you, even if, honestly, I may not really remember you because we met once twenty years ago. But I also think I have a healthy balance -- if one of my closest friends posts that they won the lottery, I am going to react in a different way than if someone I haven't seen in twenty years does, mainly to remind him or her about our pact about splitting said lottery winnings should one of us ever win the lottery.

A good friend has a theory that Facebook and Twitter desensitize us. Because in your feed you might see posts of all kinds, from "My dad died" to "This cheeseburger is delicious" from all kinds of people, from your best friend to someone you felt forced to accept as a friend that you never liked anyway. Or, as a real life example, from my feed the other day I learned from my cousin that my uncle is in hospice care preparing to pass away the same time I learned a distant acquaintance had put $500 on the Giants to win the Super Bowl. They're all in there with the same level of importance, and it's up to us to sort through it all. But maybe because there's so much of it, we've lost the ability to do that. Our brains see them equally and you just move on to the next one without processing it, without connecting.

But is that acceptable? Is this the new normal? Has it, have WE, all just become white noise?

I've had people say to me when I see them in person, "I saw about your accident on Facebook." Which reminds me of that old question -- if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a sound? If we see these posts, and don't reach out to connect as friends and humans, either on or off Facebook, what's the point?

I've had big arguments with people over Blackberry Messenger. And I've heard devastating news via text message. Not ideal ways to handle either situation, but we're in a new day.

I share on social media because I have something to say, but yeah, because I hope someone out there cares to read it. For me, the sheer act of posting is enough a lot of times, but I do admit, sometimes if I post something and it doesn't even get one crappy little "like," I wonder, "What did I do? What's wrong with this post?" then it turns into "Seriously, not one of you people likes this post???"

Because I do want to connect with others and be a part of their lives, and hope that at least some people want to be a part of mine.

But I still don't want to be a part of my neighbor's. Although, since I have never actually seen him, for all I know, he could be one of YOU.

We just might never know.

Put Me in Coach...

Last summer, I started working with a former boss, friend and mentor as she was finishing up her certification in life coaching. Even before she decided to make this her life's work, I had always considered her a mentor, and though we've kept in spotty touch over the years, she's just one of those people who has played a pivotal role in my life, and I knew she could do the same for others.

I'm not sure if anyone else has ever had the feeling -- you meet someone and you just know that they were going to be an important part of your life in some way. From the day I met Gayle 16 years ago, I knew we had been predestined to meet. I had just moved to Boston right out of college and needed to work. The temp agency that I was working with placed me at Boston University, working for Gayle in the Development office there. And the rest is history.

Gayle took a chance on me and gave me a permanent job that no one else would have, one that I was not qualified for on paper; she believed in my abilities and saw potential. She is warm, generous, and encouraging; she believes in me and helps me believe in myself. She is just one of those amazing people that everyone should be so fortunate to have in their life. So when she asked if I wanted to be a part of the process as she was getting her certification to be a life coach, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to be a part of something I knew was important to her and try to return the many favors she's bestowed on me. And maybe, just maybe, I would learn a thing or two.

You see, as much as I consider myself an ambitious person, I've never been someone who really knew what path I was going to take. I think that has both helped and hurt me. It's helped because I've stayed open to opportunities that have come my way, some good, some bad, some wonderful that I would have never dreamed of for myself. And yet, it's hurt me too because one thing I've come to realize is that, without clear goals, what are you working toward? Without some sense of direction, days seem to pass in a blur, and you turn around and think, "Right, there goes 2011, and what have I done?"

Even if the answer is plenty, without goals, it's hard to measure where you're going vs. what you want to do.

But alas, therein lies the problem that has always plagued me: What do I want to do? Seems like an easy question. Only not so much. Not for me anyway.

And even still, even if you set goals, it's nice and all, but unless you align your actions with your intentions, you're going nowhere. We know what they say about the road to Hell, and believe me, I've paved a few in my day.

So working with Gayle was a chance for me to think about who I am, where I wanted my life to go and where it would take me. Especially because the area of focus that she was offering was a course designed to help you bring more love into your life and ultimately, wait for it, your soulmate, The One, with a capital T, capital O.

Now, some of you more cynical types may be thinking, "Soulmate? Please." But all I know is, I'm a pretty game person and I'm open to a lot of things, so I knew that, if nothing else, I could benefit from a little self-reflection.

Self-reflection isn't really a strong suit of mine. In both work and my personal life, I tend to just keep moving forward, without looking behind too much. It's messy back there. A person could get hurt. At work, I always tell my team that my philosophy is that it's better to act, make a mistake, and apologize for it than be paralyzed into inactivity. You know, go out onto the ledge, that's where the fruit is and all of that. Just do it, don't overthink.

Yet in my personal life, I tend to overthink everything before doing anything, analysis-paralysis at its best and worst. Exactly the opposite of what I preach at work. But even with all of that thinking, I don't take the time to self-reflect. It may take me forever to decide to do something, but once it's done, it's done.

Working with Gayle was going to force me to spend an hour each week (and plus some) thinking about me and reflecting -- peeling back some of the layers, who I am, what I want in life, what I want to do with it, and yes, what my soulmate would look like.

I confess, in the beginning the process was a lot for my over analytical, practical brain to wrap around.

What does that mean: What does my soulmate look like? The answer was not to think literally, in terms of hair color or build, but what characteristics I might want in the best mate for me. What's most important to me. But to get to that, I had to begin the process of uncovering who I am -- without knowing who I am, I couldn't begin to think about who would be a good partner for me.

The key thing seems to be to focus on what you do want versus what you don't want. If you believe in the laws of attraction, and I do, it's far better to spend time thinking about what great qualities I want in a guy versus what I don't. You know, so all the time I spend thinking "No scrubs..." doesn't somehow call them all to my door.

Which brings me to one of the most important revelations: What you want in life, whether it's a soulmate (scrub or not), the winning lottery ticket, that next great job ... is not just going to show up at your door without effort. Well, unless the delivery guy from the local Mexican place is somehow The One for me. He might be, but somehow the fact that he essentially throws the food at me and runs away doesn't really seem like a positive indicator. I may not be the best at reading men, but I think I'm spot on here. But even then, I have to actually order the Mexican food, he doesn't just show up with it, so I've made my point...

What I've also learned is, well, it helps to have a specific goal, and a timeline for achieving it. Without a timeline, there's no incentive to align your actions with your goal. We all want to be successful, in whatever we do, and the specter of a deadline helps keep us honest. It keeps the goal right up in front of mind where it should live as something important to us. It's a daily reminder when life takes over in its insanity -- when work gets busy, when you get hit on the head ... "Hey, at one point, while in sound mind and body, you decided this thing was important to you."

Oh, yeah, right.

But why is it so hard remembering the things that are important to us? If it's my life and I can do with it what I want, why don't I know what I want to do with it? The more choices I have, the less I seem to know. Again, a high class problem, but a problem nonetheless.

So in this case, in thinking about The One, aside from the obvious "no scrubs," what qualities do I find necessary and important? Don't I want what everyone else does? Isn't it obvious? You know, someone smart and kind with a good sense of a humor and a job who doesn't have a criminal record?

Well, yes and no. I mean, definitely yes to all of those things, but other things too, like being family-oriented, nice to old people, and a generous tipper. If there is a lid for every pot, then my lid had better be helmet shaped -- meaning, as unique a person as I am -- as we all are -- so are the qualities that I am looking for in a mate/future husband.

And along with those good qualities, I also think that finding the person you're to spend your life with is really finding the person whose annoying qualities annoy you the least and vice versa.

I'm sure we all know what it's like to feel down and feel like you want to be in a relationship and you're not -- but then, here comes the salt in the wound, you realize that the most annoying/obnoxious/intolerable person you know is in a relationship. How can this be? EVEN THIS PERSON has someone. I might as well become a nun.

And then you meet their boyfriend (or girlfriend) and you realize, "Ahh yes, this person is perfect for her," and even better, "There's no way in Hell I would ever want him to be MY boyfriend."

Whew, that was close.

Or when we were little and used to go to sleepovers at a friend's house. Everything would be fine and dandy until your friend would commit some unforgivable offense like having a Menudo poster hanging in her bedroom and all bets were off. Not realizing what she had done, your friend would ask if you could sleepover again, you'd have to call home for permission in front of your friend and then pretend that your parents were absolutely forbidding you to stay over again, "Mom, can I PLEASE stay over Joanie's house again? Oh, what's that mom? I can't sleep over at Joanie's again? What? Uncle George Glass is coming to visit all the way from Africa. Oh too bad..."

Maturity means that you know that your My Little Pony collection is just as bad as that Menudo poster, and that's okay, it makes you who you are.

And what's why most of us don't settle down at 12. Well at least now that we live past 30.

My grandmother used to say, "I don't care what you've got, show me what you do with it." You can be the smartest person on the planet, but unless you decide you're going to do something with it, well, you're not so smart after all, now are you?

So I'm treating this opportunity as the gift that I know it is. Having started the life coaching process before my accident, I can say that I know now what a great gift this time for self-reflection has been. As much as the overall process has been about finding "The One," it's really about taking a look at the person you are, the person you want to be, and what kinds of people you want to share your life with, yes, romantically but also otherwise. Having started taking a hard look at my life by working with Gayle before this happened made it less of a shock when all of a sudden, the brakes were slammed and I had a lot of time on my hands to confront the big questions.

It's like those times when I was (much) younger and used to go out and have one too many drinks. Working with Gayle has been like that one sober moment you have right before the last drink that puts you over the edge where you see into the future and think, "Oh man, I am so going to regret this tomorrow" and then down the hatch it goes. But when you wake up the next day you know, "I deserve to feel like this." If I hadn't started reflecting before the accident, it would have been like the thankfully fewer and farther between times when I woke up the next morning thinking, "What the heck happened last night? Why is Mrs. Derek Jeter written on my hand? Who the heck is Emily and is she really dead? And why are there peanut shells stuck to my face?"

Don't judge now, we've all been there. And those were some good times.

I'm not saying I have all the answers, or any of the answers, really. I am still just as confused as to what I want to do with my life. But, having looked back a bit, I know how I got here, and I have a better idea of what I need to do to move forward. Even if it's just one day at a time, it's something.

So put me in coach, I'm ready to play.

Panic Room

Aside from the feeling better and all, I can honestly say the thing I like best about acupuncture is the panic button. Since I'm new to this, I'm not sure if it’s standard practice or not, but, once I'm fully loaded with needles, blindfolded with a relaxation mask and ears wrapped in gigantic headphones piping in allegedly relaxing music, before he leaves the room, my acupuncturist hands me this remote and says, "This is the panic button, if you need me at all, push this and I will be back in two seconds."

Excuse me, where has this been all my life? Can I take this home? A button that I can push at any moment for any reason at all and someone will come rushing to my aid? It's like a dream come true.

As an anxious, somewhat neurotic person, I'm constantly looking for the escape hatch, the release valve. I sit on the end of the row at the movies and the theater. On planes, trains, and automobiles, I'm an aisle girl. Whenever I go anywhere, I like to think out in advance how I'm getting home. I like my escape route all planned out in advance and then, and only then, can I enjoy myself.

You see I'm not much for relaxing. My brain is always in motion and I pretty much never get tired. Although I love sleeping and have been overheard muttering as such in my sleep (Seriously, "I love sleeping..."), I don't really do a lot of it. There's too much to do, and I'd rather do it than sleep through it. I mean, I can sleep when I'm dead and I don't want to miss anything. That's no fun. And I have a hard time comprehending people who are tired all the time. They are like alien beings to me, seriously. In truth, I actually have two medical conditions that make me tired - anemia and hypothyroid - but I just push through them most of the time, and I'm lucky to be able to do that.

Strangely enough, I didn't always have this much energy. I used to be really shy. I wasn't always a big talker. As my sisters fondly recall, as a little girl, I was very quiet. I barely said anything at all. I played with our family pets and actually did things like smell flowers in the yard, which I wouldn't have believed but I have photographic evidence. I was this way until I was about, oh, 10, and then I realized, "Hey, those people over there laughing and talking, they are having a much better time. This shyness thing is for chumps. It's boring." And thus the cycle began.

The not sleeping thing is NOT helping this process. The brain needs sleep to recover and I'm just not used to doing that. Like drinking water, I find it boring and I don't want to do it. So I've been literally forcing myself to relax, which feels like torture. And the vicious cycle is, because I'm used to doing so much, my body is like, "Um, sitting on your a$$ all day didn't really wear me out," so many nights, I have insomnia (also helpfully a common symptom both due to lack of activity and brain disturbances). So I've started to try to do more -- some to positive effect, some to negative. Apparently I am supposed to only be in quiet, soothing spaces, which pretty much rules out everything I like to do. Oh I know, maybe I should join a troupe of mimes. Is Mummenschanz still around?

I'm told many people sleep through acupuncture - or at least relax. Not me. All kinds of questions run through my head -- What should I have for dinner? Was I too mean today at work? Could Khloe really not be a Kardashian? What if I swallowed one of these needles by accident? How much of a train wreck is Emily going to be as the Bachelorette? Oh no, do I have to pee?

And on and on.

But yesterday, the unthinkable happened: I actually relaxed. Well, a little. And of course, as soon as the last needle was out, I announced it, "I actually relaxed a little this time." I was so proud of myself, whereas he was probably like, "Dammit, more needles next time..."

I do think I'm making progress -- the first day he gave me that panic button, I gripped it to death, and now, I don't feel the need to hold onto it, but I know it's there, and that's comforting. But when I really think about it, I know that it's not the button that I need, it's that I need to trust him – and really trust other people. Letting someone stick needles in you is a good first step, and trusting that he'll do what he says is the next one.

I've had to do a lot of that along this journey -- trust in others. If I feel sick, will that person help me or leave me to rot on the sidewalk? For a control freak like me, it has not been easy, but it's been kinda nice to have to look at people and try to see the good in them, which honestly, is usually there all along.

So maybe the trick is to make myself a panic button. Even though it will technically lead to nowhere, it many ways, it leads everywhere. And connects me to people in ways that I've never been before. And maybe someday, I won't need it at all.

But for now, you're going to have to pry it out of my cold dead hands.