Faith + Gratitude = Peace + Hope
When I was young, my dad would always say, "Crystal, you can choose your attitude." One day I chose to believe him.
I was scared
for a moment
to remove the bandage
and the gauze
and face the scar.
In the hesitation,
a bold voice said,
“Why, Warrior Woman?
You are a survivor.
Scars show strength,
how you fight and heal,
overcome and thrive.
Fear is human.
So is pain.
This too shall pass.
May you be happy
and well and free
of suffering.”
Life is the consummate teacher, and God keeps showing up with strength, peace, and hope for the lessons. May you be happy and well and free of suffering.
I don’t care to tell people I’m reading Self Help. The term carries a stigma as if I’m sitting here, crying, “Help me!” I’m not. Not that I never have. 54-year-old Crystal has learned to be so much kinder to herself than many of her earlier selves—maybe because of these recent books. If I had read any of them, let’s say ten years ago while experiencing a schizophrenia-low with my son, or back in 2017 when a hurricane flooded me, my family, and lots of things out of our home and we lived in a hotel ten months while rebuilding, or in 2020 when my mother died followed by my dog, or even last year when I experienced a cancer low, the timing might not have connected to an open mind. In my personal experience, if I believe something will work, it will. If I say, “There’s no way,” then I’m also right. This is why words have power—especially the words we reserve for ourselves. So—I would say these books fall into the genre of Self Kindness.
In November, I read The Emotion Code.
In December and January, I read Atlas of the Heart.
In January and February, I read The Untethered Soul.
There were times when reading a couple of these books that I became a little annoyed at the repetitive nature. I could’ve thought, “This is stupid,” and reshelved the book or left it on the porch for Goodwill. Instead, I kept an open mind, persevered to the end, found pieces worth appreciating, and started the next book on the list.
Now I’m reading The Four Agreements. It’s subtitled A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom and A Toltec Wisdom Book. Another must-read in my humble opinion.
The 1st Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word
“We must understand what power comes out of our mouths…Your opinion comes from your beliefs, your own ego…When you are impeccable (literal translation “without sin”), you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself [or others]…If I love myself I will express that love in my interactions with you, and then I am being impeccable with the word, because that action will produce a like reaction.”
Don Miguel Ruiz
The agreements that follow are all based on the first one, and I’m seeing more LET IT GO:
I’ve noticed that the more I surround myself with good thoughts and energy, uplifting words and people, the more vibrant and healthy and at peace I feel. Of course, there’s always that tiny voice in my head that says, “Let’s see how you’ll handle the next (fill-in-the-blank).” Cue the evil laughter. I’m learning to let that go.
Well, recently I had a biopsy to confirm my clean bill of health. One week later, I received a call that included the words “cancer” and “surgery.” I wrote everything down. On Friday, March 15, I will have a little lumpectomy to scoop out those cells. I’ve known for over a year this would be a possibility, and I feel as if I’ve been training for this moment. I still feel vibrant and healthy and at peace. And to maintain the good, I’m talking with God, letting go of certain emotions, and turning off today’s comments. These are the last things I’ve learned.
I gave birth at age 19. I thought I had grown up. My son, my baby, was the love of my life. I would have done anything for him.
When he turned 19, suddenly I realized something was wrong. Maybe I knew before then, but for so many years, he was smart and kind, good to animals and good looking, loving to his sister and a cellist. Then, suddenly, he believed things that weren’t true. I was a witch, so was my mother. Cocaine was streaming through the air ducts of his bedroom. God bless him.
It was a journey…that discovery of schizophrenia. He had just turned 20. I cried many tears before learning the truth. And since then, since 2010, I’ve learned more. His reality is different than mine, and he doesn’t see a reason for help. You can’t help a person who can’t or won’t help themselves. All you can do is help your own self.
What experiences in life helped you grow the most?
daily prompt
There’s an iconic sign on a railroad overpass just north of downtown Houston. It says…
I often think about what that means.
There’s an iconic Xeroxed copy of my 10-year-old face tucked away in a long-forgotten cardboard box. Lucky for 54-year-old me, I have the digital image. I often think about that little girl. Clearly, she has always wished for me to be unapologetically me…
That little girl inside me long ago learned the power of visualization. Inside our head, we saw the roundoff back handsprings and the back flips before we made it happen. That little girl is alive and well. She reminds me of the magic of vision and dreams. She wishes me a life lived to the fullest and says, “Let go of the past and step into who we’re becoming—wiser and kinder and stronger.” She nudges me to forgive those who hurt me and wish them well. She roots for me to be an example of what is possible and cherish every moment.
Perhaps being someone is about embracing, trusting, and standing up for our authentic self, speaking our truth, aging gracefully, walking our unique path, sharing our gifts, taking care of our needs—body, mind, and spirit—believing and dreaming, learning and growing, carrying an abundance of love, seeking the good in others, understanding that humans have faults. These are the things I’m learning at age 54 and somehow the things I’ve always known.
While traveling for the holidays, I downloaded the audio of Brené Brown’s latest book Atlas of the Heart, Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. I drove and listened and clicked the button that flags the important stuff. Upon finishing, I counted my bookmarks, 113, and laughed out loud. Throughout January, I relistened to those parts, bought more hard copies for friends, and flipped pages before parting with these gifts. I took notes as if I were in school and ended up with close to 6000 words in a Word document. I reread my notes, highlighted my best takeaways, and can’t stop having conversations about this book. Brown and her team of researchers explore eighty-seven emotions and experiences (87!) that define what it means to be human. Writers need this, right? Doesn’t everyone?
I grew up in a family that didn’t talk about feelings. Maybe this is normal. I remember crying (quite often) to my mother. She would hug me and say, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said time and again. Call it a childish lack of self-awareness. Maybe it’s normal not to understand how we’re feeling. I’m curious how often we deny the truth. At some point, shouldn’t we be able to name our emotions in connection to our experience? How else can we let go of the baggage we carry?
“Our hurt feelings are typically experienced simultaneously with other emotions, such as sadness, anger, anxiety, jealousy, or loneliness. As a result, they don’t always feel the same way, as most other emotions do…Our reactions to hurt feelings can be self-blaming, or we might cry, lash out, or retaliate by trying to hurt the other person, and/or seek out other relationships to find comfort. When reparation doesn’t seem possible, hurt feelings can turn into anger or sadness.”
Brené Brown p. 200
Brené explains my tears as normal along with other common reactions. I find this helpful in understanding not only myself but also others. We’re all prone to hurt feelings (that carry a range of emotions), but a brave, honest, simple, vulnerable way to deal with them is to say, “My feelings are hurt.” I could have used this information earlier in my life, but it’s never too late to practice.
Brown’s work defines the nuance between awe and wonder, joy and happiness, guilt and shame, jealousy and envy. All topics are easily located through the table of contents. Before writing this book, Brown believed resentment was part of the anger family. Research revealed that resentment is part of envy.
“Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, “better than,” and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.”
Brené Brown p. 33
Brown taught me when I start to feel resentful, instead of thinking about what the other person is doing “wrong” or what they “should” be doing, I should think, What do I need but am afraid to ask for?
There’s so much good psychology here. It proved an impossible feat to choose my top ten takeaways. So here are just fifteen more:
For anyone out there currently struggling:
Me, too. Brain fog is a bitch. Mornings are better than afternoons.
Healthline defines brain fog in a kinder way, “a symptom that can be caused by stress, sleep changes, medications, and other factors.” This totally applies. “It can cause confusion, memory issues, and lack of focus.” Check. Check. And check.
Then due to symptoms and medicinal side effects, I swing between anger and sadness. I’m tired of tearing up at school. I’m terrified of unleashing on a student or co-worker or even worse a friend. Lucky for me, the screaming and computer screen punching only happen at home. Something has got to give.
***
After lunch on school days, I find myself staring at my attendance screen not knowing what button to push. Students swarm me to say things of dire importance that I may or may not remember—one hands me a late essay (now to delete the zero from my gradebook until I can grade the work), one asks what she missed when she was absent (which is all online), one needs help with his paper, schedules an appointment, and later no-shows. Twenty-five chat like the teenagers they are in the background. The bell is ringing. Five more walk in late. I try to write things down. I try to decipher my notes. I try to remember to take attendance. I try to teach the Tragedy of Macbeth. Meanwhile, since lunch, here are three e-mails from parents and five e-mails from students and seven e-mails from counselors requesting updated paperwork for students with accommodations. Where are my accommodations? Can’t I get some *%#@-ing accommodations? Then I stare at the stack of 190 research papers. I exaggerate. I’ve graded 33, and 30 essays are late, so it’s a stack of 127, plus the one just turned in 128. How will I find the energy to contact those parents, not to mention the energy to grade the rest? For now, I’m a warm body in the classroom who can still teach Macbeth and throw the rest of my balls in the air.
I’ve been told a person with cancer should stick to a routine. Routine these days means taking a shower and going to school with wet hair unless I feel like lifting the hair dryer above my head. Most mornings I’m sweating my make-up off before I leave the house or I’m nauseous or both. I can tell when my blood pressure is elevated. I’ve spoken to my doctor about all of this and said I need help making it to the ends of my days and to the end of the school year. My medical team has suggested a psychiatrist. They threw around the terms—depression and anxiety—and compiled a list of doctors. I haven’t made an appointment. I’m not opposed. Just tired. If someone would make the appointment, I would show up.
Meanwhile, I’m seeking healthy ways to cope and finding.
Back in February after finishing my radiation, I watched a documentary on Netflix called STUTZ. If you’re struggling with your head space, I say, “You must-see.” Oscar-nominated actor Jonah Hill spotlights his own psychiatrist Dr. Phil Stutz and his approach to self-care. Together they share tools that take a normally unpleasant experience and make an opportunity. Dr. Stutz gives his patients notecards with visuals that “turn big ideas into simple images.” During my second viewing, I took notes:
Dr. Stutz and Jonah Hill discuss the concept of Life Force and how a person can always work on that. It’s the part of yourself “capable of guiding you when you’re lost.”
“If you think of it as a pyramid, there’s three levels of the life force. The bottom level is your relationship with your physical body…The most classic thing is [people are] not exercising. Diet is another one and sleeping.”
Dr. Phil Stutz
“Your relationships are like handholds to let yourself get pulled back into life. The key of it is you have to take the initiative…You could invite somebody out to lunch that you don’t find interesting, it doesn’t matter, it will affect you anyway, in a positive way. That person represents the whole human race, symbolically.”
Dr. Phil Stutz
“The highest tier is your relationship with yourself…get yourself in a relationship with your unconscious because nobody knows what’s in their unconscious unless they activate it. And one trick about this is writing. It’s really a magical thing. You enhance the relationship with yourself by writing. The writing is like a mirror. It reflects what’s going on in your unconscious, and things will come out that you didn’t know you knew.”
Dr. Phil Stutz
Dr. Stutz says if you work on these three things, “Everything else will fall in place.” Quite frankly, my relationships—self, others, body—have suffered in the last six months or so. I don’t feel like going out after work or talking on the phone. I don’t have much brain power for texting or writing. I don’t care to eat or exercise. I know these things have strengthened my Life Force in the past. I know…
Regardless, I talk or text with my daughter almost every day, and she means everything to me. In my passing death fantasies, I focus on my reason for living. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a plan for ending my life (I’ve discussed this in detail with my medical team), but I’m struggling. So—last Friday after school on Minute One of Spring Break, I hopped in my packed car and drove to Oklahoma City. I broke out of my cocoon to spread my wings for a mother-daughter weekend with Lauren and a perfect storm of culinary experiences and shopping, binging TV and deep talks.
On Sunday, we dined on Thai with my two cousins. One had COVID in November, which caused her to wake up dizzy in December. She drove for the third time since her illness just to meet us and hasn’t worked in almost four months. My other cousin said, “Savage women…” our moms are sisters born of Catherine Savage, “have always had a way of sacrificing themselves for others. Be kind to yourself, Crystal. Don’t work if you don’t have to.”
Dr. Stutz says that when adversity comes, we face a judgmental part of ourselves called Part X. I’m happy to have a clinical explanation of this. Part X is an antisocial part of ourselves that wants to hold us back from changing or growing. Part X almost told me to stay home and not attempt a seven-hour, one-way road trip. I’m happy I didn’t listen to that inner voice.
“Part X is the voice of impossibility. Whatever it is you think you need to do, it’s gonna tell you that’s impossible. ‘Give up.’ It creates this primal fear in human beings.”
Dr. Phil Stutz
When my cousin said, “Don’t work,” I remembered Dr. Stutz’s 3 Aspects of Reality:
Clearly, there are more aspects of reality including good things, but these are probably the ones that cause his clients to make appointments. I thought he was talking about coming to an acceptance of pain, uncertainty, and constant work, but he says we have to learn how to LOVE the process of dealing with them.
“What will make you happy is the process. You have to learn how to love the process of dealing with those three things. That’s where the tools come in. Because the highest creative expression for a human being is to be able to create something new right in the face of adversity, and the worse the adversity, the greater the opportunity.”
Dr. Phil Stutz
So while I’m learning to love cancer, symptoms, side effects, uncertainty, and constant work along the way, allow me to share one more memorable visual tool. The String of Pearls. Dr. Stutz says this is “probably the most important thing, motivationally, you could teach yourself.”
Picture this: Line. Circle. Line. Circle. Line. Circle.
Each circle is an action. Each action has the same value. The String of Pearls is about taking action. No one can put a pearl on your strand except you. Last Friday, my pearl included a seven-hour drive to see Lauren and my Grand-Pup. On Saturday, my pearl was a shower, lunch with Lauren’s friend, and arts-district shopping. On Sunday, my pearl included cousin-time, Panang Curry, and the strength of my roots. On Monday, my pearl was making the trip home and brunching with a friend along the way. On Tuesday, I wrote for the first time in a while. On Wednesday, I posted. Creation in the face of adversity. Opportunities around the corner.
Today comments are closed. I must grade.
On Sunday night, I went to bed with the night sweats. On Monday morning, I woke up with them. Since the beginning of the new semester, I had missed nine days of school. To clarify, this teacher doesn’t like missing school, especially nine days in one month, but cancer. I had finished my radiation Friday and planned to return to school Monday. I don’t like breaking plans. I missed the kids. I didn’t have sub notes. I couldn’t stay home another day. I was going to school. Sweaty or not, I pulled my hair into a ponytail. Only later would I notice my horrifically crooked eyeliner. I looked like shit. I would wear a mask.
Back in 2021, I had cap and gown portraits made at Houston Baptist. The photo package included a mask with the lower half of my face. I bought it, and it’s so creepy. My smile is oversized. See? An understated message. I would fake it till I make it.
My students are working on research papers, a good plan considering my absences. Monday would be a workday. I would be available for consultation at my desk where I would sit and play catch up.
Before classes started, I searched YouTube for Snoop Dogg and clicked Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode.” How appropriate. With the tunes on my overhead speaker, I wrote the kids a note and displayed it on my overhead projector. “I probably should have stayed home,” I said, “but I needed a sense of normalcy.” What is normal? I thought yet again. I signed the note, “with love.”
Between the gangsta hip-hop on my speaker and the ridiculous mask on my face, my students may have been more concerned than ever before. So much for faking it. My note said I needed a silent study hall. Never mind my music. Of course, they wanted to know how I was doing.
I’m not good with “How are you?” Especially with people who really care. The kids really cared. When I’m not okay, a super-sensitive version of myself sometimes appears. When my mouth opens, sometimes so do my tear ducts. I think I cried in every class that day, just trying to say I’m okay.
I CLEARLY was not okay. I possibly hit an all-time low. F-bombs exploded overhead, like a battle cry as I worked from my desk and tried to concentrate on grades and missing assignments, failures and emails, lesson plans and life. The kids seemed to get me, and through the sweats I made progress toward some goals. In the end everything was okay.
Back at home, renewed energy conquered my sweats. I decluttered a corner of my world, put away misplaced things, and patted myself on the back. Action lead to action. And Tuesday was better, and with each day came strength. Cancer has definitely been teaching me a thing or two. Here’s a favorite:
Faith + Gratitude = Peace + Hope 