I was probably 12 or 13 years old when it started. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my childhood home, feeling left out, depressed, and envious. Nanny was in the living room with my younger sister and brother, and they were joking and giggling about something. I don’t recall what they were laughing about, and I don’t think it was at my expense, but at that moment I told myself no one loved me and I didn’t belong. 

“Life begins on the other side of despair.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre 

When what appeared to be my forever life crumbled before my eyes a few years ago, I couldn’t see a way out of my despair and pain. All the memories, conversations, trips, and Netflix binges vanished along with my husband’s love, my house, and my happiness. I couldn't imagine a life without my husband. I had formed habits and routines around the life that he and I had created. I had been in a comfort bubble with no desire to leave. 

The pain and grief we feel when we lose a loved one to death or divorce is one of the most intense feelings we will ever have. The emotion literally feels like physical pain. Like a hammer came down on your foot or a brick just fell on your chest. If you’re human, you have experienced these things and have developed ways to cope that work the best for you personally. 

Rejection happens to everyone. It can come in the form of being overlooked for a promotion or being turned down by a potential date. Rejection happens to me quite frequently. This type of rejection is not work related, relationship related, or health related. It’s the rejection that comes from literary magazines where I send a piece of myself, of my writing, to potentially be shared with a bigger audience. No one else, except for me, or a few close people I choose to share it with, know about it.

     I wanted to share an excerpt from the memoir I've been working on for two years. The excerpt is entitled "Voices," and it captures a part of my life when I struggled with an eating disorder and distored eating, and what I do to overcome the worst parts. 

“You must give up the life you planed in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” Joseph Campbell

When I got married, I thought my life was going to be predictable. My husband and I had our own hobbies, habits, routines, and traditions that we introduced to each other and we were starting our own together. I enjoyed cooking and baking new healthy food from the YouTube channels I watched, I did Yoga, and I worked out probably way too much. My husband played Magic the Gathering online and in person, went fishing, played other video games, and was part of the Men’s rugby league in our city. We were both teachers and had the same days and summers off. Every few years we would go to the Florida Keys to fish, snorkel, and kayak. We visited our family in the summer and at Christmas. His parents would come to spend Thanksgiving with us. I couldn’t imagine, nor did I want to imagine, anything other than that. It was familiar, comfortable, and safe.

Have you ever felt that you lacked any and all motivation to do anything? When it comes to motivation, I feel like it’s a game that keeps wanting to be played. Some days motivation comes easily and you’re winning at life. Then other days, you lose all desire to do anything and can’t remember your toast left in your toaster. Are there any solutions to this back-and-forth tug-of-war? 

I’ve read countless books and listened to more podcasts than a pharmacy as drugs and I still haven’t discovered the secret to being motivated all the time. But maybe that’s not the point. We are humans after all, not machines that can function 24-7. With the societal pressure to “be on” all the time, it can be hard to remember that we are humans and not our phones. 

I’d like to share five tips on ways to win at the game against motivation. These tips may or may not work for you, but I've found that they are certainly worth trying because otherwise, I would be scrolling on my phone for an hour looking at funny cat videos. 

“I think everyone should attend a grief retreat at least once in their lives,” I told my friend asking me how the experience of attending a loss and transformation retreat was. “It should be required for navigating tough times.”

As humans, grief is an inevitable part of life. When we open ourselves up to love, we risk losing it. In October of 2022, I went on a life-changing trip to Bolinas, CA to a house of hope and healing called Commonweal. There, I delved deeper into the grief over my mother’s death and my marriage’s failure. During the course of six days, I met wonderful women from all over the country, from all walks of life, and who were experiencing their own personal loss and seeking the same things as me: to feel loved, to be heard, to squelch the loneliness, and to heal.

When I was five years old, my mother enrolled me in a local majorette’s group for kids my age. I whined to her that I didn’t like it and wanted to quit, but she “forced” me to go so I could learn how to twirl and toss and spin a long metal bar with two knobs on either end like her. She was the “best in the school,” said my grandparents. But I was not like my mother. I was uncoordinated, dropped the baton, and had a hard time paying attention. During the parade my group marched in, I carried the banner with our group name on it because I wasn’t good enough to walk and twirl with the others. I quit after the parade.

There is a story in the Buddhist tradition about a clay statue of the Buddha in a monastery in Thailand. Over the years, it was protected in the monastery from outside invaders. One day while it was being relocated, one of the monks spotted a crack in the clay. When the monk looked closer, he noticed that underneath the clay there was solid gold. The clay statue had been made of gold the whole time!