The Resilient Posture: To Stand Up Straight

When I was a vulnerable child, I was with my siblings and the three children of the couple with whom our parents hung out when they hung out with other people. Later in life, these couples would break apart, a year apart, before the two women married.

The man would today be called my uncle, but back then, he was simply related to someone upstairs. I was on his lap, and his hand was in my underpants. I was terrified, afraid, in pain, and did I say terrified? Yet somehow, I was able to gather myself, to stand up straight and leave. I hid upstairs until he left.

That’s when I literally came out of the closet in which I was hiding. I went and told my dad, and he said, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I could have done something about it, but it’s too late now; he’s left.”

The second time I heard that excuse – It’s too late – I was able to say, “I came straight here.” Learnt my lesson. Fool me once, but the second time, that really feels like something I don’t enjoy experiencing.

Then, as a vulnerable child, you learn about the risks of wearing dresses. Damn, overalls with bibs look like a dandy garment. As an engineering student, I doodled beautiful gowns.

After graduation, I made those dresses, filling a closet, but I rarely wore them. It was like I had a left brain thinking, “I’ll make gowns and make occasions to wear them,” and a right brain thinking, “Danger, danger, danger, no way I am going to let that happen.”

Imagine the turmoil when you can’t even agree with yourself.

When Equal and Opposite Collide

This constant war, of mommy and daddy fighting, because, of course, I knew exactly what that looked like, and the damage, and the costs involved.

Divorce is something to be avoided, no matter what, because there is no such thing as an ironclad prenup. Nor a thing as a perfectly reliable birth control. If you can’t first agree on what will happen in the event of a pregnancy, perhaps you shouldn’t be jumping into bed together.

My mother did what it took to stand up straight to reveal, “Kids ruin your lives.” As an adult, she told me about the long-term physical costs. Immediately after the announcement of the impending divorce, I learned about the financial costs and missed opportunities.

As a child, I’d seen a magnet on the fridge of a harried woman, a cartoon of a mess of hair, tattered robe, and on her hands and knees with a bucket and scrub brush. It’s captioned, “For this, I went to college?”

I learned many times about my mother’s two degrees when the only job she could get was cleaning houses with a company called “Broom Hilda.”

Today, I am highly mindful and intensely concerned about what I allow into my visual field, and what I will not allow my attention to feed. Focus and concentration are my slaves, and I will be their master, lest they decide for themselves.

I often hear managers complain about what their employees do, while they themselves proceed to do nothing about it. Absolutely nothing. I made a career out of pointing out what they could do about it. Create training. Write a manual. Provide support and assistance. Identify a role model.

The Playbook for Ultimate Control

The lists can sometimes be pages, and pages long. From the reactions I received from everyone, I might have been uniquely gifted at it. Providing many ideas on how to achieve the ultimate control over your employees.

All by focusing on the principle that ultimately, everyone wants to do well, and if they don’t, don’t give them a second chance to do it again. Fix the system the first time, fire the employee the second time, and go fix the hiring system.

Easy-peasy.

Yep, so easy, everyone assumes they can do it for themselves instead of hiring me. I get the job when your manager decides he’s had enough. No one needs me, but everyone says that their employees are lazy, misguided, or uninformed. The easiest thing in life is to realize, am I so different? No, we are not.

Humility is the door to wisdom. To not protect the ego, to simply sit and ask yourself if you are so certain. If your right brain, which doesn’t use words, but pictures and feelings, has something to say about it, when do you let it through?

Many people have no way for the right brain to ever get through. They might have a moment in a shower, a flash of insight, and an exhausted right-brain feeling, “Finally, I got through. I wonder how hard I have to work before I can get through again?”

To stand up straight, as in yoga, is actually the result of perfect posture, or the other way around. The other day, I was walking to get my mail when I saw that to stand up straight might be to cause a collision. When I turned to the screeching tires, I saw an ogle. Today, if I walk with a hunch, you can bet that it’s on purpose.

Instinct Over Instruction

As a child, I walked with a hunch, at first, is my belief, because I was depressed, yet I don’t remember getting asked anything about how I felt about anything. My job was obedience, and I was a rebel who only got punished harder.

I was supposed to “Eat my food”, yet one night when I looked at the shriveled tomato skins and greasy sauce, there was no way I was putting that grossness in my mouth. Instead, I was told to sit at the table until it was gone.

I stretched out on the vacant chairs to spend the night. Three days later, I was finally allowed to eat canned spaghetti instead of homemade.

Stubborn, they said. Protected by animal instinct. Animals will not eat anything that might kill them, including putrid food. Everyone can feel the retch of imagining eating something vile – for me, I might have simply felt it when everyone else thought it was more important not to get kicked out of the family. In my case, the relief was a delight.

The first and only time in my life when I cried with delight was when I was actually packing, a ride was waiting to take me to a different house for a week, and my mom was actually not coming. Oh, the joy!

If I had known that life was better without my mom in it at that age, it took me many therapists, time-outs from life, and sabbaticals from doing anything else but investigating why I felt the way I did, before I accepted the truth that my life was better without my dad in it.

To stand up straight authentically was an exhausting, time-consuming, expensive journey, and the best one I ever took.

It’s so important to me for everyone to stand up straight that I write all this down. If there’s one thing I am about, my dad said, it was efficiency, alright. The most efficient way to live your life, to project the confidence of a stacked backbone, is to live it with one mind – aligned to your soul.

To give equal attention to the left as you do to the right, for society values and rewards the left. Creative avenues we know as youngsters disappear as we age. We leave the crayons behind. Some of us leave the art pad altogether.

Bye-bye nap time, when you go ahead and pretend to sleep, but you will lie down and close your eyes. If I meditated as a kid, and it got me through difficult times, why did I not continue the practice? Why did I not know or recognize its value, and why did my life only settle down and improve when I started again?

I spent hours painting, letting my hand be guided by my right brain rather than my left. It wasn’t as easy to do as you imagine, having learned a mathematical approach to art at a young age. Simply imagine a grid over the subject, and look at only what’s in that little grid. You might get little things wrong, but overall, the impression will be fairly accurate.

When I received the art award, I had progressed to using a ruler and a calculator. When I met others in my class who did no such thing, and indeed, didn’t even need a photograph, I realized something was dreadfully wrong with my success. It shouldn’t be this difficult.

I pursued difficulty at length. I couldn’t seem to grasp statistics, so I pursued a career in statistics.

Side Hobbies

I started a side hobby in art, a sideline in photography, and in anything I thought was a way to offset the overuse of my left brain, and open a path to my right.

My exhausted right brain did everything it could to get my attention. Finally, I used yoga not as a way to constantly measure and compare my reflection to everyone else’s, but to close my eyes, see where it felt tight, and do what was supposed to come naturally to that joint.

In focusing inward, not outward, I felt things I didn’t want to feel. I simply started by listening to the thoughts in my head and wondering why I’d say such mean things to myself. This is not something you do to something you love. I’ve never even once said a harsh word to my cat, and she has scratched things to destruction, broken my skin, and, indeed, once, tried to blind me. Yet I love her, and love means asking why rather than scolding.

I’ve met people who assume that animals are there to obey. These people tend to get dogs as pets. Still, I believe we are souls, and souls have missions, including how they live their days.

With my cat, I know that when she scratches, it’s because she wants me to come with her, so I’ve limited her destruction to one thing. My mother would turn around and yell a command to stop. Likely three times, then she’d get up and try to swat the cat. I’ve seen it progress to picking it up by the scruff of its neck and getting tossed outside. Oh, just like me.

To stand up straight is to realize that how we treat one thing is how we treat everything, including ourselves.

Upgraded Stories

Time for an upgrade, and start with how you choose words when you are telling your story, whether that’s to someone else, or within your own thoughts. Be kind; this is the work of love.

When I personally arrived at the first insight that I needed to watch my words and my thoughts in everything, I decided to think, “Love is everywhere.” Yes, I wasn’t feeling that way at all; in fact, I’d struggled my whole life to understand the concept when it seemed such a contradiction of actions and declarations. That day, I flipped my universe on its head, and the difference was immediate.

That day, I was at my boyfriend’s house, although I resided in my own house in the city. My job changed, and I had to quit or move. My logic dictated that you don’t pick money over love, yet to stand up straight means to know your freedom and career are worth something.

Marriage is the promise that we will weather the impacts of life’s crossroads together, taking each turn as a unit rather than going in separate directions. We weren’t married; in fact, there was no way to even have a conversation about it. So, I’d moved, with every doubt of love in my heart.

In fact, I’d meditated, asking the universe to tell me what I needed to know when I opened my eyes. When I did, there, in the clouds, were the letters capital M and capital T with a heart emoji. Empty heart, I read. A powerful, multilayered message that I will proceed to decode and apply over the years. So here it was, that I was attempting to fill it, or something to that end.

Love Everywhere

We headed to the wilderness that day, as it was a normal Saturday. In a vehicle where the volume didn’t allow for conversation, for an ATV ride that makes it less so, and back again, to sit in front of a television, when, shush, don’t interrupt the program, and you eat your meals in front of the television. There simply is no time for conversation when you don’t want to have it.

In my silent treatment tour of the bush, I saw hearts everywhere. The shapes of the leaves were hearts, from the new buds on the trees to new growth through the mud. The mud puddles were heart-shaped, every one of them just as much from the tread on the tires as the organic ones farther in the bush. Every cloud in a slightly cloudy sky. It was stunning, and it did seem to me that “Love is everywhere.”

Well then, whatever could be, I might do myself and my universe better to think such a thing than whatever else it might do without concentration and focus. Do what you want, but I’ll choose the perspective that makes things easier, happier, lighter, and freer.

Realizing that this could be powerful and expansive, I had the time and inclination to examine the music I sang along to. Some songs were permanently ejected from my life. To stand up straight meant leaning on my library card to create new playlists with the most appropriate lyrics for the current missions I had for myself. Identify the internal fight that was preventing my forward motion, and solve it. In short, to identify an ingrained fear, unravel its source, and decide if I am grown enough to confront it. Such is what “growing up” means to me.

In my later forties, there was no denying how crappy I felt when I’d see my dad’s name on my call display, and shame when I thought of myself as a daughter.

With open eyes and a well-thought-out agenda, I was prepared to endure the two days of flying required to visit him. Not because I’d moved, but because his wife wanted to wake up in the mountains every day. They’d kept their intentions a secret until moving day was on the calendar.

To say the news was a shock would be an understatement. To me, it felt like the termination of the relationship, with the same bewilderment I’d felt when I’d first heard that he was leaving the family.

But what will I do now? Imagine the journey from that reaction to the one that flips that emotional response into neutral, because it sure can wobble around before it settles there permanently.

On the flight out, I was supposed to make a connection after 11 hours of travel. I found the gate I was supposed to leave from and set my alarm, but didn’t adjust for the time change. I slept through a gate change and didn’t make the connection. With apologies, I called my dad to tell him to go to bed, and I’d see him at the airport in the morning.

The next morning, my dad said, “Phew, I wasn’t sure I’d recognize you.” There was the time that I walked right past him, with newly straightened hair. Another time, I walked right up to my older sister in a crowded market before she remarked, “Oh, it’s you! I just saw a beautiful girl approaching, and I wondered who it was.”

Oh, what anonymity there is to stand up straight with contacts and a new hairdo?

Warning Signals

To be invisible and go about living my life, and not be the subject of unwanted male attention? To not be under the thumb of someone you can’t escape? Oh, you don’t say!

On the way home from the airport, I sat in the front seat. Later, touring the mountains where I’d lost my dad, his wife was in the front seat. Both were telling me about the features of this new car and how smart they were to buy it.

Both of them were looking at me, and I was the only one looking out the window to see a deer run across the road. “Look out,” I pointed and yelled, in time for my dad to hit the brakes. It seemed to immediately punch a hole in the story they were just telling me about its collision-avoidance system. Frankly, I’ll stand up straight for my right to take the wheel, and not the other way around.

While watching television, my dad told me there was no binge-watching at his house. Only one episode per program was allowed per day. I didn’t have a television at my house, so I was captivated by Netflix. The show Stranger Things became my addiction, and reluctantly, my dad allowed me to break the binge rule and go to two shows in one day because it was my last day, and I might otherwise not find out how the season ended.

If I picked Stranger Things, I thought the other show we watched was my dad’s pick. Instead, I found out that the choice I thought was his was actually my brother’s choice, as he’d asked him, “What show should we watch?” meaning he and I.

Obvious Failures

One of the questions on my agenda to ask was, “Why did the therapist recommend that Mom get primary custody in the divorce?” Finally, I was able to weave it into the conversation.

He laughed and said, “She thought I was too overbearing and controlling and you’d be better off with your mother.” Who is violent and overtly abusive.

Wise me realizes that yes, it’s easier to heal physical trauma than mental, and at least everyone has empathy for cuts and bruises.

I had a follow up question for my dad. What did he decide to do about her appraisal of his character?

Again, he laughed. “What?” and that was that.

I didn’t get a verbal salad like a politician may offer, nor an lie made up on the spot. I got nothing.

People who are already perfect don’t bother changing, no matter the information to the contrary. This permeance of character is called narcissism.

After one last time feeling small, ignored, and worthless on vacation, I prepared to fly home. Instead, the plane would be delayed. I was offered the choice of coming back the next day or spending 24 hours in airports and planes. I chose the former and called my dad to come back and pick me up for one last, and I mean last, day.

Surrendering Agendas

That day, his wife was returning from her own vacation. She’d not been there the entire time, yet still, I didn’t win any of his attention. On my one last day, she set me loose with a list of tasks, ones that my dad was becoming to frail to perform. I did his chores, and then flew out.

One the flight home, I was seated in the emergency aisle – the one thing I’d learned from too many flights in one career. The flight attendant was going through her spiel when she stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching to touch my arm, “Are you okay?” I nodded, although the tears pouring down my face said another story, however my face was calm, unclenched in any emotion. It must have looked stony, but I was at peace. “I’ve just seen my father for the last time.” But I didn’t waste a minute.

Later, I sat down to explain why the calls would continue to go unanswered. How I felt, even though proof was to the contrary that he was interested or cared. If he wouldn’t listen when I was in the same room, he wouldn’t take the effort to read either, and certainly not the curiosity to feel empathy or compassion for my point of view. It was too threatening to his point of view, and hence the incompatibility of a continued relationship.

A couple of years later, I got a check in the mail from him, with a brief formal letter. It was addressed to my old address, but luckily caught in my mail-forwarding window of opportunity. I called to stand up straight and thank him, and tell him of my new circumstances, previously held secret.

I mistakenly thought the check was an apology.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said indignantly, like I was a moron to confuse money with regret. Indeed, it was the most hurtful thing to hear, but I knew the call of the narcissist is that cry, “No one could have done it better.”

Life is about knowing how to survive. Then it’s about choosing to stand up straight and thrive. When you know what you have to do, do it. It might be clumsy and awkward, but it will be done. You can prepare and plan, you can learn from books, people, and courses to do your best the first time, but you must practice, and that means doing it when you know it won’t be perfect.

That’s what practice is for. Plan for the best, prepare for the worst, and do it with one mind and a full heart. Worrying is an emotional indulgence; planning is an activity. Being better planners is being better learners.

The next time I got a check, there was no letter, only a Post-it note reading, “Inheritance.” I think that means I am out of the will, and that’s okay. I surrendered to that outcome before I agreed to that last visit, choosing love over money, but I could only do so when I had enough of my own.

Yes, we buy our own freedom. We purchase our own voices. We do so from our masters, and those masters are not always our parents. Desperate people do desperate things, and when you can afford better, you do better.

Think about that the next time you feel like maxing out your credit card to feel better about life. Will that really work? The tug of war is in your head, heart, or body, but not your wallet.