Last week I did something that scared the shit out of me. I stood up in front of a group of incredible women and I bared my soul. Here are some of the words I spoke. If you have been with me for a while, you will recognize some of these stories and I sure hope you will recognize the message in them. But even if you’ve been here forever, you haven’t heard them like this. This is everything, all of it, the things I believe with the core of my being and the lessons I’ve learned along the messy way. Here, friends, is my heart. XO
Here’s something you may not know about me: I am a trained yoga teacher, believe it or not. And if you don’t believe it, trust me, I get it. I’ve never really felt like I “looked” the part. The yoga world is full of these perfectly gorgeous and perfectly bendy and perfectly perfect yoga celebrities, all thin and young and with hair down to their butts, so it was real easy when I tried to move into that world to convince myself I was a total impostor. I knew I was never going to be any of those perfects: not perfectly gorgeous, not perfectly bendy, not even perfect enough to practice yoga everyday like they all said I had to.
And for a long time I would get up in front of my classes to teach and I would think “God I hope they don’t figure out what a big fat phony I am and drag me outta here by my short non-yogic hair.”
Which is exactly what I think every time I sit down to write to you.
Honestly, it’s what I think a lot of the time about a lot of the things in my life. I have four amazing children and I’m telling you my parenting “style” is basically me making it up as I go along and praying a lot. I’ve been married 15 years and occasionally someone will ask me for marriage advice and I’ll just stare at them like a deer in the headlights because I’m not kidding you when I say every day I see my husband next to me and think “wow I literally cannot believe he is still here.” Same with my job, same with my writing, same same same blah because this is what we do to ourselves, right? There’s even a name for it. Impostor syndrome. Which I love because it sounds like a terrible disease and it kinda is.
And I might be patient zero.
I tell you this because I want you to know there is no way I would sit down here and write something that tells you how to live your lives or how to raise your babies or how to find the meaning of life. I’m not even going to tell you how to do a perfect downward dog pose, because there is no such thing.
And THAT is what I do want to tell you.
I want to tell you how perfection is a lie. I want to tell you how there is no perfect yoga pose just like there’s no perfect yoga teacher just like there’s no perfect mother, or wife, or body or outfit or moment or life. And how not only is perfect a lie but it’s a dirty little secret of a lie, one no one is really talking about very much because we’re all so busy walking around with impostor syndrome feeling like we are the problem, like something is wrong with us with our messy lives and our imperfections and our chaos, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
There is nothing wrong with us.
We are regular messy humans leading regular messy lives.
The problem is now we live our regular messy human lives juxtaposed onto this world of curated perfection. Starting when we’re young and super impressionable, we’re presented all day long with images and stories of unattainable not-real standards and told to hide our flaws and our mess.
And what happens is we learn pretty early on that in order to survive–in order to remain upright and breathing and presentable–we need to protect ourselves. We need to hide some things, paint over some things, suck some things in and swallow some things down. The messy and the ugly and the painful don’t fit into this world view and so they need to be avoided. And if they can’t be avoided (spoiler alert: they can’t) then we need to hide those parts of our lives away. And I don’t just mean from each other but also from ourselves.
How do we do that, you ask? How do we hide from our own junk? Well I’m glad you asked me that because while I am not one to brag, I will tell you that I am a bit of an overachiever in the “hiding from your junk” world. Here are just a handful of the many, many creative ways I have avoided my own actual life:
- Overeating
- Undereating
- Binge eating
- Binge drinking
- Binge watching
- Binge scrolling
- Prescription drugs
- Street drugs
- Sex
- And my current favorite, flat out denial (which is basically like being on fire and saying “no, you guys, it’s fine. I’m FINE. EVERYTHING IS FINE.”)
I could go on but I’ll stop because there may still be a few of you who have a shred of respect left for me. But trust me when I say there are many, many ways to stuff that pesky junk down and out of the way, paint it over in a hard shellac of perfection, all in the name of continuing to be able to play the same “we’re fine, nothing to see here except this pretty Instagram picture of the chicken I just roasted for dinner,” game.
And I’m not calling anyone out here, including myself. There’s no shame in this. This is survival. This is the way of the world and we’ve all got to live here, after all. So we share these little pieces of ourselves and our lives and our babies and it’s just the good with none of the bad, sure, but also none of the everyday regular, the normal blips and mistakes and wrong turns that make up a life. And I think what happens is a lot of us walk around all day seeing this and we worry about where we stack up and how we fit in with our lives that happen to be less than perfect.
But what if we are not, in fact, gorgeous bendy yoga instructors with hair down to our butts?
What if we are, well, ordinary?
Or worse, what if we are struggling: with our weight, our hair, our marriage, or our life? What if we feel a little broken and a little scared and a little like no one else in the whole wide world could possibly understand what we are going through?
Let me tell you a story.
So I’m 16 years old, sitting in the kitchen with my mother while she is making dinner.
Just for purposes of context here, let me tell you a little about me at 16. I am a HOT MESS. I’m drinking, I’m drugging, I just got my heart truly broken for the first time by my first love, I cannot bear to be in the same room most of the time as my mother (and honestly I think the feeling is mutual).
And I’m starting to feel things. They’re big, heavy, adult things, like pressure and inadequacy and pain and depression and anxiety, and I’m scared. Also I’m convinced I’m the only one on the planet who has ever felt these things because–like we’ve already established–people don’t talk about these things. Especially not 16 year old girls.
And on top of everything else I’ve stopped eating. At this point it’s not even a conscious decision. I certainly don’t realize that I’m doing it to slow down time, to keep me a kid a little while longer, to exercise control over what small parts of my life I might still be able to control, because growing up is super scary. No, at this point all I know is that obsessing over food and my body feels a heck of a lot easier than actually facing anything else.
Anyway so I sat in the warm kitchen, watching my mother make dinner. I was probably supposed to be doing my homework or something but I don’t remember any of that, I just remember watching her. And my mother? God was she a sight. If I was a hot mess she was my polar opposite, fresh from her big job in a power suit with full make-up, big shoulder pads, bigger diamonds. By then things were tense between us most of the time, and in the kitchen it was so quiet that the click of her heels on the hardwoods rung out like a heartbeat.
“Are you okay?” she asked me, finally, probably weirded out by my staring. And isn’t that the question, right there?
Was I okay?
I WAS NOT OKAY.
And I was sure she could see that if she just stopped and looked, like really looked at me, my dilated pupils and the hollows under my eyes from not sleeping, the way all of the weight I’d lost made my clothes hang off of me.
But I lied, told her I was fine. Of course I did. That’s what we do, right? We lie. I let my chance go by and I lied and then I remember how the air in the kitchen filled with the smell of olive oil and garlic and I was so hungry. This isn’t surprising- in every memory of high school I have I am hungry. It’s an emptiness that goes beyond food, an emptiness that I will carry with me in some fashion for most of my life.
Now on the table in front of me was a bowl of apples. This bowl of apples was a fixture in our house. They were not for eating. They were the best apples, the biggest, the shiniest, the roundest, granny smith green apples specifically picked to sit in this blue bowl on the kitchen table and catch the evening light through the window and look perfect.
(If you wanted to eat an apple the ordinary ones–the ones just for eating–were in the fridge).
Gosh it sounds ridiculous now to say that but it was just the way it was, and yet I was 16 and a hot mess and kind of a jerk and I was gonna eat one of these show apples right there in front of my mother just because I could. Because I was hungry. So I found the best one, the shiniest and roundest and greenest of them all, picked it up in my hand to find the best first bite, and it cracked clean in half.
The two pieces fell open onto the table and the inside of that perfect apple was totally rotten, all brown and soft and mealy and gross. I spent a long time looking at it lying on the table in front of me, smelling that sickly sweet fermentation smell, convinced there was a message there for me.
It had looked so perfect.
And there was a message in there, alright, something big. I wasn’t old enough or ready enough then to get it, but I felt the edges of it tugging at me. I looked from that rotten apple to my mother, still clicking around the kitchen, still so perfect looking.
It had looked so perfect.
We lost my mother five years ago now to suicide. It was, as these things often are, totally unexpected, and in the first few days after it happened people just kept coming up to me: her friends, her neighbors, her coworkers, even her family, and saying the same things over and over again: “But she was so perfect. She was so beautiful. She was so together. Blah. Blah. Blah.”
And what did I remember? The apple. I thought of the show apple and how it had looked so perfect, and I realized that maybe the thing that had tugged at me as I sat there in the kitchen smelling garlic and holding a rotten apple was this idea of how our outsides don’t always match our insides.
Right? Our outsides can lie. They can lie the same exact way that we do, the way we lie when people ask us if we are okay and we say “no really, I’m great, it’s great, everything is great, just look at my chicken,” when maybe the truth is we are dying a little inside.
The way I was already lying all those years ago at 16, starving and drinking and hiding the pain away.
The way my mother had her whole life hid everything inside of her.
The way we’ve created a whole culture out of making ourselves into show apples, perfect and shiny and filtered, and no one really knows what’s going on inside, sometimes until it is too late.
When my mother died we all met with the church to plan the funeral and the priest asked us if he could speak openly about suicide during his homily at her funeral mass.
Yes of course, I said, remembering the apple.
No of course not, everyone else said, aghast.. What will people think?
So what the priest spoke about instead was this idea of suffering. Quiet suffering. Private suffering. Carefully hidden suffering, wrapped up and hidden away in the dark corners of our lives, painted over careful with the hard shellac of perfection and never talked about.
The kind of suffering that kills people.
He didn’t know us personally, not well anyways, so he couldn’t have known about that time we had come home to find my mother drunk and unresponsive and lying in her underwear on the bathroom floor. How we’d called 911 and an ambulance came and we’d waited next to her in the ER for what felt like forever willing her to please, please open her eyes, wondering the whole time if this was it, if this was how she was going to die. How when she did—finally–open her eyes the first thing she said, before even asking what had happened, was “did the neighbors see?”
But I guess he didn’t need to know that because he has heard that story or others like it a thousand times before, I’m sure. Because in some variation that’s a universal story, one that has been ingrained into so many of us, one that we can see reflected back to us plainly every day in our politics and our celebrities and our communities and now in our Instagram and Facebook feeds.
And it’s human nature, no doubt, to want to share the best moments and hide the rest. I’m not knocking it. I do it too. I call myself a truth teller and yet there are things that don’t make it into my Facebook statuses, moments not captured in filtered Instagram images, events I don’t want to preserve and display, like my hangovers or stomach bugs or the alarming way I look when I wake up in the morning.
There are the meals that I burn because I got distracted by the internet or trying to pluck a stubborn chin hair or the times when my pants don’t fit and I have to lie down on the bed and flop around like a dying fish to button them properly.
And there are messes and spills and fights and things said that should not be said and tears shed in locked bathrooms and enough ugliness on a daily basis to almost balance out the beauty.
Almost.
And here’s the thing. Here’s the truth I gathered from those few minutes of sitting shell shocked on a hard wooden pew while that priest did the best he could to speak light into the dark places: all of this stuff we’re all hiding, it’s just normal life. These less than perfect moments, the mundane ones that generally make up an ordinary life and also the bigger ones, the tragedies and the wounds and the scars: they are as much a part of the universal story–or maybe even more of it—than the things we see on social media or on the made up faces of socialite beauty queens.
We are not meant to be show apples.
And I looked around that church full of people grieving, all these people still reeling from the shock of this sudden and seemingly senseless tragedy, these same people who had pulled me aside earlier to say “but Liz, she just seemed so perfect,” and I thought: what if everybody here is carrying something with them that they’re not talking about? What if this could be any one of us?
And here is where the yoga comes in. Remember the yoga? Here I am doing my yoga teacher training, hoping to get a little bendier or a little more perfect, or maybe become an Instagram yoga sensation—you know, just normal, everyday expectations–and instead what happened is the very first time I stood up in front of my class to teach my very first pose I opened my mouth and this fell out:
“You guys? I am not okay.”
It turns out when you get a bunch of people with regular messy lives together in a room and make them sit still and take deep breaths for a while something funny happens. They get REALLY vulnerable. And really real.
And it was the first time I’d ever spoken the words out loud like that. It was the first time I’d simply told the truth. And it was amazing. It was like exhaling a breath I’d been holding my whole life. It was like finally understanding what all these other teachers had meant when they had said a million times over again and again: exhale, release, let it go.
In fact it was so amazing that I got a little over-excited—remember, I’m an over achiever–and decided from that moment on I would tell my truth to anyone who would listen: clerks in coffee shops or the person pumping my gas, the waitress taking my drink order, the guy who goes through our recycling bins each week looking for returnable cans. And if that wasn’t weird enough, I also started asking people to tell me theirs. I’d corner my friends or the parents of my kids friends or people I saw in the grocery store that I thought I recognized from the neighborhood and ask them how they were doing and then basically not accept “I’m fine” as an answer.
And yeah, it was super weird. People looked at me like I was crazy and let me tell you: if its human nature to want to keep our stories to ourselves, it’s even more human nature to not want to tell them to a crazy person.
But I knew the stories needed to be told. I remembered that transformative moment in yoga class. I remembered the priest’s homily. I remembered the show apple. And I knew this was how we saved lives.
Even if it was too late to save my mother.
Maybe I could save someone else.
Heck, maybe I could still save myself.
So I sat down and I started writing. Five years ago. It took me five years to write the complicated story, which at first I thought was my mother’s but eventually realized was all of ours. And two months ago I signed a book deal and you want to talk about impostor syndrome? Every day I open my email inbox and scan through for an email from my publisher that says “oops, Liz, sorry about that we thought you were someone else, kindly return that book deal at your first convenience.” The truth is the list of things I am fully unqualified to write about is alarmingly long but there is one thing, now, that I know for sure, and that is this:
The only real way to heal—heal ourselves, heal each other, heal the world– is to speak up.
Because here’s what’s important: Struggling can hide. You just can’t know. Maybe it’s the woman next to you in Target, her hair perfect and her heels clicking behind her cart like a heartbeat. Maybe it’s the mom at school drop off who looks so perfect that you feel ugly just being in the same space as her. Maybe it’s your neighbor who always has the best looking lawn, or your kid’s teacher, or your hair stylist. Because EACH ONE of these people has come to me with their own stories, once I started sharing mine. Them and a whole lot of others, people I know well and people I don’t know at all and everywhere in between. I get messages from people every single day, people like you and me, people just trying their best to live their regular messy lives and wondering why sometimes it seems like they are the only ones struggling to keep it all together.
And so you can trust me when I say we cannot know what is going on with people just by looking at them. Trying to be a show apple is a dangerous and futile goal for many reasons but here’s another one: hiding the ordinary on a regular basis not only sets us up for failure, but it makes us miss out on a lot of what is truly important. Think about it. Instead of asking ourselves questions like:
What if I don’t have the right clothes, or job, or family, or car, or hair, or
What if my kid, or my marriage, or my career, or my body, isn’t anywhere close to perfect, or
What will people think, or
Did the neighbors see?
Maybe we should be asking things like:
Are we doing okay, like really, truly, honestly okay?
Do we–and that’s you and I and our children too–have the things we need to survive in this world, like faith, hope, curiosity, love?
Do we have the courage to speak up, to ask for help, to tell our truth?
Sometimes I wonder still what would have happened if my mother and I had opened up to each other like that right there in the kitchen. Could we have saved each other? It’s a slippery path, that regret, and I can feel it pull me. I could have told her the truth when she asked me if I was okay. I could have asked her to tell me mine. I could have said: “We can do this. We can carry each other.”
I didn’t.
But I can say it to you.
One last story.
When I was young, not 16 this time but little still, I used to sometimes roll off my bed in my sleep. I think this is actually pretty common, and it’s probably why they make those guard rails now that my own kids had when they were around that same age.
And anyway it wasn’t usually that big of a deal. I would wake up when I hit the floor—which thankfully was carpeted—shake the sleep from my hair and climb back into my bed. No one else even needed to know, thank you very much, because I was embarrassed and proud and desperately wanted to be more grown up than I actually was. EVERYTHING WAS FINE.
That is, of course, until it wasn’t.
Until one night I rolled off the bed and didn’t wake up. Instead I kept right on rolling, somehow ending up fully underneath my own bed, where I slept for a while like a total freak. And when I did wake up later it was to complete terror and confusion because I HAD NO IDEA WHERE I WAS.
I tried to sit up, only to hit my head against the underside of mattress. I can still feel the claustrophobia of it all, the sensation of being trapped and alone in the dark, the realization that I was in a situation I did not know how to get myself out of.
So I did what anyone would do.
I called for my mother.
And she came running into my room, hearing my voice but confused when she didn’t see me anywhere. She didn’t know about the falling out of my bed because I hadn’t told her, of course. So it took the two of us calling out to each other, a late night mother-daughter freaked out version of Marco Polo, for me to be found and eventually pulled to my rescue.
Afterwards both of us were reduced to those strange giggling fits that seem to only happen when you think you’re doomed and then realize you’re still alive and everything is okay and all of it, all that primal terror and confusion, just seems funny in retrospect.
Anyway I tell you this story because I think it captures exactly what it is like for so many of us to be living this strange life right now.
Like how sometimes we all roll a little too far and end up on the floor. And usually it is all fine, deep breath, no big deal, no one needs to know.
Except sometimes—and this is where it gets tricky and this is what I’m here for—we might roll a little bit too far and end up cold and alone and in the dark, where the only way out is going to be calling out Marco and trusting, even while our hearts try to gallop right out of our chests, that the Polo is coming.
And this too, if nothing else: I thought I was in my own terrible world, doomed and all alone in the dark, and really I was just under the bed.
All I had to do was speak up.
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