Channeling Beck and Lamott toward a new perspective
When Martha Beck and Anne Lamott are in your head, you know your life is messy.
I don’t do New Year resolutions. Some lose weight every January only to regain it by Memorial Day. Others exercise more intensely, more frequently for a week or two and then slide back into their warm beds rather than onto their mats/cycles/treadmills.
Like Lent, the New Year compels us to focus on how we can improve ourselves.
Now that is definitely a good thing. But I do not understand those who post their resolutions on Facebook or Twitter (or wherever) early in this first month of the year. Doesn’t that just invite later public confessions that you couldn’t persevere? Or even the awkward silence when it becomes obvious that you are the same weight?
I prefer curiosity to public humiliation.
As the New Year approached I felt an unease that had been building through a stressful 2015. My “North Star” had shifted and I couldn’t seem to right my course with the familiar methods of prayer, self-forgiveness, and heavy doses of Bailey’s.
So my Christmas gifts to me included two more of Martha Beck’s books. I am not certain I’ve entered a “wild new world,” Martha. Still I remember the state of contentment that followed the pursuit of my “North Star.” I remembered thinking of Martha Beck as my BFF before I knew what BFF meant. She talked straight. She made me do the soul-searching I couldn’t/wouldn’t do on my own. She helped me regain my footing during a perilous stretch of life.
Not certain I could join her “tribe” I began to read her books anyway hoping for similar results. And the very first pages were exciting because I could see myself in her descriptions. Obviously she had been hiding in my personal space, spying on my consciousness. I’ve not yet completed all of the work she demands of her reader though I’m intent (resolved?) to do it soon.
Somewhere in her earliest pages, Beck references another female voice important to me, Anne Lamott. Lamott visits my classroom — as she does hundreds of others — virtually and early each term when students read her description of “shitty first drafts.” Like William Zinsser, Lamott gives student writers permission to fail. But unlike the august Zinsser, Lamott offers an example of personal struggle that might not be failure but certain adheres to the definition of a messy life. Her books have been mirrors to my own situation.
I like that both Beck and Lamott have struggled and persevered and now are in my head because they shared. Perhaps that’s what makes me feel a kinship with them. I can read their straight talk, their personal stories of their messy lives and relate. They tell me what to do just like a best friend: with compassion because they have been there.
My messy life finally consists of mess that I created for myself rather than the mess I inherited from a messy — nay, disastrous — marriage. Like our president, I can no longer blame my predecessor self, my previous (married) self, for the life I lead now (though I suspect therapists, if given the chance, would do just that).
No. My messy life is entirely my fault. The unease I seek to escape is the result of inaction and faulty actions both. True. I’m a product of a depressive economy and mental state that stem from a decade ago. But I have had enough time to take the actions that could have righted my course.
And it’s time I did just that. So, I welcome Beck and Lamott and others into my New Year’s resolution of creating a life that feels better than the one I lead now. Though I recognize the irony of turning to a public forum for this announcement, I know that Beck and Lamott would approve.
