Category Archives: love

NaBloPoMo 2024: What I Hold for Us

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“What can I hold for you?”

Friend asked me at the end of lunch, after I had shared some hard things about life at the time. I have rarely felt quite so loved and cared for, so seen and utterly held, just in the asking.

This is my tenth consecutive annual 30 day blogging challenge. By now I have confidence that I can complete the task. The theme emerges easily and intuitively each year, always a pleasant and knowing surprise. The real challenge is to create thirty pieces that I’m proud to save and share, to not overthink, and not sacrifice sleep. Let’s go.

I had initially named this year’s theme “What I Wish for You.” That’s too passive. I do a lot more than wish things, especially the relationally meaningful and important things I intend to write about. I work for these things. So I turned onto “What I Hold for You; What I Do for Us.” But that was a bridge too far, somehow separating (elevating?) myself from people, which is not my MO.
I’m about connection in all circumstances.

Thus “What I Hold for Us.” That feels right. Holding is a gentle action, yet powerful and strong; active yet unobtrusive. It attunes and attends; it persists. It has depth and carries intention. Holding, like standing and planting, implies perseverance and resilience. This is what I want for us all, now and for the foreseeable future–we need it.

Doing this challenge in 2024 feels different from and higher stakes than in 2016 and 2020, the last two presidential election Novembers. Anxiety and tension have intensified; even the most equanimatous people I know are agitated. Conflict escalation feels inevitable; desperation and hopelessness lurk everywhere. I have ceased political activities for some years, and consume political news in the smallest possible bites. I have held that we are all humans, here doing our best every day, getting along close up even as we denigrate one another in groups from afar. We are tragically and heroically paradoxical, we humans, and I embrace it, love us for and despite it. Yet now, the week before voting closes, even I cannot escape the dread.

“‘What can I do, I am only one person?’ said seven billion people.” I can write.

This month, this year, in this season of society, we must resist the pull of toxic politics. I intend to hold this line: The line between connection and separation, between shared humanity and dehumanization. My political and policy leanings may show, and I will let them. They will always take a back seat, however, to my commitment to relationship and connection.

Six days now until who knows what. Deep breaths. We are all in this together, folks. Whoever you perceive as your enemy will not be vanquished. And it’s not about that anyway. We suffer from serious and significant differences, yes. It feels life- and liberty-threatening to people on both/all sides–existentially terrifying. Still, if we breathe deeply for a moment and look all around, the unassailable truth of collective human resilience and the potential for cooperation still shines through the cracks of rhetorical rubble. I will write from this emphatic perspective the whole month, rooted here with my entire being.

I Hold Us–All of Us.

Chengerisms and NaBloPoMo 2024

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“Hey friend, favor?
“When you think of me, what things do you hear me say all the time that signify to you who I am and what I’m about? πŸ€”
β€œ…Collecting ‘Chengerisms’”

The compulsion overtook me Thursday evening, when I should have been finishing clinic notes and packing for LA. I texted a slew of people in a flurry with the question above, intending to assemble their answers into backbone for National Blog Posting Month in November. For those who don’t know, NaBloPoMo challenges bloggers to publish 30 posts in 30 days, all written in real time. It coincides with NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, a sprint to write a 50K word manuscript in the same time.

This will be my tenth consecutive NaBloPoMo challenge–BRING IT, I say!

My “Chengerisms” query, I see now, was actually me gathering validation and support for showing up all me, all in, BOOBS OUT at the Writers Rising retreat this weekend. My subconscious intuition knows what I need; I sense, trust, and follow better with age. Replies rolled in with speed, earnestness, and so much love it positively bowled me over. Highly recommend!

The strongest messages I perceived throughout the conference reinforced all of my highest writing and living values:
Let loose your curiosity
Take risks
Tell the truth
Honor your Central Self
Own Your Shit
You are enough
Assemble your pit crew
Connect, connect, connect!

How tightly these correlated with the Chengerisms my friends mirrored to me:
What is that about?
How fascinating!
Tell me more…
Hey friend
How did that feel?
Love you love you
Yaaaay!
One breath
Walk the talk
BOOBS OUT (apparently catching on in my small circles–yaaaayy!)
Tribe
Sooo human.

This spontaneous, subconscious-driven exercise shows me the profound importance of good, loving feedback and the absolute value of meaningful relationship. My response to almost every reply was a sincere and heartfelt, “I feel seen!”

While I continually noodle on content and structure of Book (I’m getting closer, really!), I feel a limbic and visceral certainty about how I want readers to feel throughout and especially at the end–seen, validated, inspired, empowered, and convicted. This NaBloPoMo, I aim to color in and sharpen that vision, saturate my thinking and writing brain with it.

At the end of an executive physical, I want my patient to feel thoroughly understood. I show that I know them, even if I only see them once a year, by reflecting their stories back to them, interpolating and extrapolating what’s not said, checking in, and providing what I know patients need from their doctors: personal connection in service of self-efficacy for health. So this year for NaBloPoMo, I commit to the theme:

What I Wish For You

Thirty things I want patients, readers, or anyone, really, to experience after encountering me in person or in print. Chengerisms in action. I will resist wallowing in guilt and shame when I notice how often I fall short of these aspirations. When I see perfectionist self-loathing approach I will divert it to the nearest off-ramp. All part of the process.

This could be both fun and enlightening! Let’s see what happens, eh? Ready, set, let’s go.


Love Out Loud

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Hey Love!
Good Morning Darling.
Hello Dear One.

More and more, this is how messages from me begin.
OH how wonderful if feels to effuse love every day! I have observed and written for a couple years how I feel liberated and even irreverent about it now, well into middle age–BOOBS OUT. “Tell (people) you love them. Tell them a lot. Make it weird.” Because the more we do it the less weird it is, and the more joyous and connected we all get to be.

I love easily, I think most who know me would agree. Some may wonder if it’s superficial, blind, or even fake. But it feels like none of these to me, and I’m confident not to those I love. I attribute this unreserved tendency to adore to my matrilineal inheritance of optimism and penchant for connection. Ma, her sisters, and my maternal grandmother, 婆婆, all set the example of seeing the best in people first, of loving first, with great openness and, some would say, vulnerability. This does not mean we throw ourselves headlong into random or toxic relationships. We simply, by default, assume the best of everyone we meet and go from there. Most of the time people respond fantastically, and if not, we know how to (lovingly) distance and protect ourselves, if necessary. So the older I get, the more I let loose my inner Agape lover on anyone I meet, and the rewards multiply. I shake my head in wonder almost daily, and it just keeps getting better.

Wonder is exactly the right word for it. I actually wonder how it could be this easy, this rewarding, this uplifting and reciprocal? I’m not sure I really need to answer this question, to look for some subconscious, potentially abnormal driver of this somewhat outlying behavior. I can just revel in the wonder, in the awe, that it simply is.

Interestingly, the louder I love in many ways and with more people, the more I notice the contrast when I don’t. How fascinating! It’s pretty uncomfortable, if I’m honest, because the difference can be quite stark. It feels inhibited, constrained, not like myself. It’s cautious, hesitant based on prior experience, protective. So all my talk about openness and vulnerability still stands; I just think I’m intuitive about risks and costs of engagement, and clear about what I’m willing to expend. If there is any potential for deep and meaningful connection, I’m pretty damn willing. And when I’m not, I can honor that, too. Because I know it’s not from an inherently negative place; I can trust my gut when it tells me to be wary. I also get to regulate consciously, to stay open to noticing when things shift and the possibility and potential of (re)new(ed) connection emerges.

Relationships evolve. Life paths converge and diverge, we flow together and apart over the long, complicated journey. We never know what’s coming, and our perspectives on what’s passed can morph and transform with the broadening perspective of time elapsed.

In the end, how satisfied will we be with how we loved ourselves and one another?

Loving out loud, often, and with abandon can be risky. In my experience, however, reward far outweighs risk and cost. The more I love, the more love grows within, between, and among myself and others. There is simply more love moving about in the world, and that is always a net good thing.