metamorphosis
Last night was amazing.
There was this fundraiser going on, and I'd agreed to help with it, to say a few words (i.e. fill about 10-15 minutes of the event, between the silent auction and the party/dance part) about living with HIV, specifically in Rhode Island. For a number of reasons, I wasn't really thrilled about going; I think my biggest issue was that the actual event bore little resemblance to the event that had been described to me a few months ago, when I'd agreed to do it. Still, I'd made this commitment...
The other speaker didn't show, and the other people that had been lined up were performers (one singer, a couple of dancers and a drag queen) so I was the only one who was basically handed a microphone and told okay, talk to us. So here's the thing: I was barely prepared. I had this loose concept in my head that I'd cooked up, on the drive into Providence, more a skeleton than anything, even though I've known about this event for months and been given specifics on the topic almost a week ago. I hadn't done any kind of rehearsal, either in my head or out loud in my car while I was driving; I hadn't fleshed it out at all. Normally I can be kind of obsessive about that kind of thing: what am I going to say? who's my audience? what's the "message"? and I hadn't done any of that.
Yet I wasn't at all nervous when I took the mike and started talking; I had a kinda vague outline in my head, which appears to be all I need nowadays. I just started talking. I went into this zone with it. It's like, I sorta knew what needed to be said, and trusted that, as long as I went slowly enough with it, I was going to communicate it clearly enough.
That was probably the best speech I've made in my life. And I don't know where the hell it came from; I feel like "I" was barely there.
Okay, sure, I talk about this stuff all the time. And there were several people there, from a case manager who really loves me (and the feeling is mutual) to the executive director who inspires me to all these other people who believe in me, and that makes it so easy to be relaxed and just let it flow. And at this point, I've made a ton of presentations over the past (almost) three years- easily in the hundreds of presentations, speaking to thousands of people, and most of those have gone well. And I could feel pretty confident that what I said was going to be well received, which also helps with the relaxed part.
But still.
I hadn't intended it to be anything really big or important; I mean, I felt okay going into it, but I figured that whatever I was going to say would be pretty standard fare for this sort of event. Actually, now that I think about it, I had this detachment to the outcome, not really caring all that much how it was received (maybe that initial "not wanting to be there" thing was part of that), along with this trust that it was going to work okay. So something kind of magical happened: there was this little commentary in my head going uh, am I done now? yeah, I've said enough (and one point about 2/3 of the way through where I thought oh fuck, I just talked myself into a corner and lost track of the direction I was going, but I figured it out by the end of the sentence, and the whole thing was barely conscious). But none of that really mattered, because it's like something else took over the speaking, and I was just observing it. It didn't feel like I was the one speaking; it was more like I was plugging into this consciousness within me and just letting it do its thing. I really felt like more of a passenger on a ride than anything else. I had a similar experience about twenty three years ago (my, how time flies) but I don't think I've done that quite so intensely since way back then. Even though I wasn't totally sure that I was done until I was saying the words thank you and handing the mike back to the host, I just had this really good feeling that I'd nailed it.
And the thing is, I had. I got lots of great feedback from complete strangers. There was one person who confided in me being HIV+ and completely closeted about it, and we talked for a while about it, in hushed voices. Another person came up to me and wants to interview me for an internet radio show. (If/when that happens, I'll post a link to it.) Yet another told me that she felt like she already knew everything she needed to know, but I opened her eyes to a few new things. Plus the aforementioned case manager told me that it looked like I'd rehearsed it and said exactly what I'd planned to say and ended exactly where I'd planned to end it all along. It blew me away.
Now, here's the part that I find interesting: five years ago, when I left US Airways, one of the things that I believed about myself is that I was comfortable speaking to large groups of people, but only if it was rehearsed. I don't do spontaneous was something I often uttered.
And yet, there's this part of me that's always wanted to. I think the issue wasn't so much that I'm not spontaneous. I just hadn't had enough practice being spontaneous, in that form. (Heh, I know plenty of people will probably cringe at that sentence.) I think back to when I learned to drive: the first time I got behind the wheel I was terrified, but I got over it; then the first time I had to drive on the highway (with a car full of friends and no driving instructor) I was again terrified, but I got past that; then the first time I drove a stick shift I was again terrified of screwing it up, but again I got over it. All I needed? was practice. After a while it just becomes second nature. I didn't have to focus so hard on what I was doing; I'd done it enough times to where I just knew that I could do it.
I think something similar has happened with speaking: the day I made my first boarding announcements, I was completely terrified, but I still managed to board the flight (and noticed that nobody really pays attention to those things anyway except for the he's boarding my row now part), then I got comfortable with that and moved up to stuff that was less scripted, and over a fourteen year period I got to the point where I could fairly quickly translate pilot/airline babble into something a non-industry person could absorb. The next step didn't come until I got involved with the Speakers Bureau, where I started talking about subjects that are both more personal and more technical (when I'm discussing the medical end of it), and again, it just takes practice. So now, I guess I'm pretty good at it.
The thing is, in order to tap into all that experience, I have to get this chunk of my personality that I'm calling my ego out of the way. (Interestingly, as I try to write about it I feel like my ego is too much in the way, as much as I'm trying to filter it out.) I've read a lot about that kind of thing, although it's usually written in different contexts: that state of detachment to outcomes, and trust. It's the state that people go into when they do card readings, or channeling, or energy work. I recognize that state from when I do my best card readings, although there's something about a thousand times more intense about going there without props (like the Russian gypsy cards, or a powerpoint presentation) and with not just one person in front of me, but more like a hundred. I don't know that I would have noticed myself going into that state if it weren't for the fact that this wasn't my normal presentation at all, so I can't just say oh yeah, I've told this story so many times I could do it in my sleep, and yet it worked just as well. Last night, in the grand scheme of things, part of the reason I did it was to show myself that I have this skill.
So the question presents itself: where am I going with this? Where is this leading?
I was at a school about a month ago, doing this really cool (but exhausting) speaking gig, at a high school. The school had arranged several people to come from different agencies, and the teachers rotated the students through each of our presentations. When it was over, I was talking to one of the teacher who hadn't heard me speak. Somehow we got to talking about life and death (not really much of a tangent, I guess) and she told me that her sister-in-law had dropped dead a couple of years ago from a heart infection; something about the cavity around her heart getting enlarged, and she didn't get any treatment for it and it killed her.
Holy fucking shit, I thought, I've had that myself.
The last time I was hospitalized was New Years Eve, 2001, for that very issue. I had been working the ticket counter, and every time I lifted a bag I got a tightness in my chest. I knew it wasn't a heart attack because there were none of the other symptoms, and it didn't really hurt, per se, so much as feel not right. I remember feeling really sorry for myself, spending NYE in a hospital bed, starving because I'd been there all afternoon and by the time they'd admitted me dinner service was over, and I couldn't even order pizza because the only form of payment I had was a personal check. (Long story.) I had to spend four days in the hospital, taking anti-inflammatory drugs every four hours, with food (which was a great big pain in the ass) and doing stress tests and being on a really restricted diet because everyone around me was a heart attack patient and the whole time I felt like it was much ado about nothing, that they were only doing all this crap because I'm HIV+ and they had to be reeeeeeaally careful. Even though I've since looked upon that hospital visit as the crisis I needed to get away from my airline job and get on with the next phase of my life, which involved owning my HIV status and accepting a new direction, I'd never really considered the actual presenting complaint to have been much more than a nuisance.
But here was this woman, telling me her sister-in-law had died from the same thing.
She went on, to tell me something else that hit me pretty hard, but it was a delayed effect: she said that she felt like her sister's life purpose might have been as simple as bringing her children into the world. She'd apparently had this heart defect that made her prone to this sort of thing for years, but it wasn't until they were both born and safely weaned from her that she dropped dead. I think this sent me off on two tangents, if belatedly: one, I do believe that we incarnate for a specific purpose, for a specific set of experiences and lessons and accomplishments, and that once we're done with them all we find a way to leave; the other? well, I'm still alive, despite several close calls. So why do I keep scraping by? Why haven't I died any of those times?
Okay, I guess that sounds melodramatic, but from a certain perspective it's true. There's the big one, where I got my AIDS diagnosis (among many others), and I was told that, had I waited even twenty four hours longer to come to the hospital about something unrelated, I probably would have gone into a coma and died alone in my apartment. There's also apparently this time where I had pericarditis and that, apparently, very easily could have killed me. There's another hospital visit where I was complaining about a swelling in my ankle that wouldn't go away that turned out to be cellulitis, and again, judging from the way that the nurse totally freaked out when I told her that I'd had this swelling on and off for about three weeks, that could have killed me too. And that's not to mention all the times I've really come close to killing myself, and all the close calls I've had in my car, and the two times I've had food poisoning and all those little accidents that could have been a lot worse... I've been incredibly lucky. Or maybe just not finished with my life purpose.
So, if my unfulfilled life purpose is the reason I'm still here, what might that be?
Last night, when I got home from the fundraiser, quillon told me that he'd watched a movie over the internet called The Secret. In a nutshell, it's about how your thoughts create your reality. Up to this point in time, that's been in the realm of New Age mumbo-jumbo or Far East mysticism, but recent scientific advances suggest that it's something that can be explained in linear, objective, rational terms, that's it's not just a matter of perspective or faith but a real component of something we can measure. Our thoughts really do create a template into which we, and the world around us, grows.
On that note: I've held the idea that I want to be a successful speaker in my head for quite a long time. And I've had this really strong feeling that my life is going somewhere, important, and I don't need to know exactly where so long as I trust that it's going in the right direction, that my faith in that is enough to make it so. As I plan a return to school to get my Masters in Social Work, I have this excitement (tempered with a little fear, but it's mostly excitement; almost like that giddy anticipation of a roller coaster just as you're climbing that first hill) that I'm going to accomplish great things with it, and that it's all going to fit together, with the life experience I've accumulated, with the speaking experience, with the life and death experience, the whole shebang. And I'm also certain (some might say I have faith) that how it all fits together will become clearer as I get farther along in the process. And finally, the foundation under all of this is my strong belief that if I'm not dead yet, I am not finished and there's still something for me to do, so the fact that I survived all those close calls, from that perpective, means I have a life purpose and I'm going to find it. So: how much of that is my own doing, just by believing it? How much of it is some grand design that we're all acting out? Is there really any difference between the two?
The most exciting part of it for me is something that I just kind of discovered flying out of my mouth last night. I said, paraphrased, that all change starts on the individual level; how do I take care of myself? And then it branches out from there. Each of us knows, or comes in contact with, hundreds of people, and while each one of us might feel small and unimportant, nothing is further from the truth. When we talk about changing the world, we usually think of people like Gandhi (or Hitler), but anyone can change the world. It all starts with that first little ripple, that one hug, the voice that makes another person stop and think. And then that person makes another person stop and think. And on and on and on. We are each more powerful than we give ourselves credit for. Mountains can be moved one pebble at a time.
I feel something coming alive in me when I speak. I don't know what it is yet, or where it's going, but I trust that it's good, or at least interesting, and probably both.
There was this fundraiser going on, and I'd agreed to help with it, to say a few words (i.e. fill about 10-15 minutes of the event, between the silent auction and the party/dance part) about living with HIV, specifically in Rhode Island. For a number of reasons, I wasn't really thrilled about going; I think my biggest issue was that the actual event bore little resemblance to the event that had been described to me a few months ago, when I'd agreed to do it. Still, I'd made this commitment...
The other speaker didn't show, and the other people that had been lined up were performers (one singer, a couple of dancers and a drag queen) so I was the only one who was basically handed a microphone and told okay, talk to us. So here's the thing: I was barely prepared. I had this loose concept in my head that I'd cooked up, on the drive into Providence, more a skeleton than anything, even though I've known about this event for months and been given specifics on the topic almost a week ago. I hadn't done any kind of rehearsal, either in my head or out loud in my car while I was driving; I hadn't fleshed it out at all. Normally I can be kind of obsessive about that kind of thing: what am I going to say? who's my audience? what's the "message"? and I hadn't done any of that.
Yet I wasn't at all nervous when I took the mike and started talking; I had a kinda vague outline in my head, which appears to be all I need nowadays. I just started talking. I went into this zone with it. It's like, I sorta knew what needed to be said, and trusted that, as long as I went slowly enough with it, I was going to communicate it clearly enough.
That was probably the best speech I've made in my life. And I don't know where the hell it came from; I feel like "I" was barely there.
Okay, sure, I talk about this stuff all the time. And there were several people there, from a case manager who really loves me (and the feeling is mutual) to the executive director who inspires me to all these other people who believe in me, and that makes it so easy to be relaxed and just let it flow. And at this point, I've made a ton of presentations over the past (almost) three years- easily in the hundreds of presentations, speaking to thousands of people, and most of those have gone well. And I could feel pretty confident that what I said was going to be well received, which also helps with the relaxed part.
But still.
I hadn't intended it to be anything really big or important; I mean, I felt okay going into it, but I figured that whatever I was going to say would be pretty standard fare for this sort of event. Actually, now that I think about it, I had this detachment to the outcome, not really caring all that much how it was received (maybe that initial "not wanting to be there" thing was part of that), along with this trust that it was going to work okay. So something kind of magical happened: there was this little commentary in my head going uh, am I done now? yeah, I've said enough (and one point about 2/3 of the way through where I thought oh fuck, I just talked myself into a corner and lost track of the direction I was going, but I figured it out by the end of the sentence, and the whole thing was barely conscious). But none of that really mattered, because it's like something else took over the speaking, and I was just observing it. It didn't feel like I was the one speaking; it was more like I was plugging into this consciousness within me and just letting it do its thing. I really felt like more of a passenger on a ride than anything else. I had a similar experience about twenty three years ago (my, how time flies) but I don't think I've done that quite so intensely since way back then. Even though I wasn't totally sure that I was done until I was saying the words thank you and handing the mike back to the host, I just had this really good feeling that I'd nailed it.
And the thing is, I had. I got lots of great feedback from complete strangers. There was one person who confided in me being HIV+ and completely closeted about it, and we talked for a while about it, in hushed voices. Another person came up to me and wants to interview me for an internet radio show. (If/when that happens, I'll post a link to it.) Yet another told me that she felt like she already knew everything she needed to know, but I opened her eyes to a few new things. Plus the aforementioned case manager told me that it looked like I'd rehearsed it and said exactly what I'd planned to say and ended exactly where I'd planned to end it all along. It blew me away.
Now, here's the part that I find interesting: five years ago, when I left US Airways, one of the things that I believed about myself is that I was comfortable speaking to large groups of people, but only if it was rehearsed. I don't do spontaneous was something I often uttered.
And yet, there's this part of me that's always wanted to. I think the issue wasn't so much that I'm not spontaneous. I just hadn't had enough practice being spontaneous, in that form. (Heh, I know plenty of people will probably cringe at that sentence.) I think back to when I learned to drive: the first time I got behind the wheel I was terrified, but I got over it; then the first time I had to drive on the highway (with a car full of friends and no driving instructor) I was again terrified, but I got past that; then the first time I drove a stick shift I was again terrified of screwing it up, but again I got over it. All I needed? was practice. After a while it just becomes second nature. I didn't have to focus so hard on what I was doing; I'd done it enough times to where I just knew that I could do it.
I think something similar has happened with speaking: the day I made my first boarding announcements, I was completely terrified, but I still managed to board the flight (and noticed that nobody really pays attention to those things anyway except for the he's boarding my row now part), then I got comfortable with that and moved up to stuff that was less scripted, and over a fourteen year period I got to the point where I could fairly quickly translate pilot/airline babble into something a non-industry person could absorb. The next step didn't come until I got involved with the Speakers Bureau, where I started talking about subjects that are both more personal and more technical (when I'm discussing the medical end of it), and again, it just takes practice. So now, I guess I'm pretty good at it.
The thing is, in order to tap into all that experience, I have to get this chunk of my personality that I'm calling my ego out of the way. (Interestingly, as I try to write about it I feel like my ego is too much in the way, as much as I'm trying to filter it out.) I've read a lot about that kind of thing, although it's usually written in different contexts: that state of detachment to outcomes, and trust. It's the state that people go into when they do card readings, or channeling, or energy work. I recognize that state from when I do my best card readings, although there's something about a thousand times more intense about going there without props (like the Russian gypsy cards, or a powerpoint presentation) and with not just one person in front of me, but more like a hundred. I don't know that I would have noticed myself going into that state if it weren't for the fact that this wasn't my normal presentation at all, so I can't just say oh yeah, I've told this story so many times I could do it in my sleep, and yet it worked just as well. Last night, in the grand scheme of things, part of the reason I did it was to show myself that I have this skill.
So the question presents itself: where am I going with this? Where is this leading?
I was at a school about a month ago, doing this really cool (but exhausting) speaking gig, at a high school. The school had arranged several people to come from different agencies, and the teachers rotated the students through each of our presentations. When it was over, I was talking to one of the teacher who hadn't heard me speak. Somehow we got to talking about life and death (not really much of a tangent, I guess) and she told me that her sister-in-law had dropped dead a couple of years ago from a heart infection; something about the cavity around her heart getting enlarged, and she didn't get any treatment for it and it killed her.
Holy fucking shit, I thought, I've had that myself.
The last time I was hospitalized was New Years Eve, 2001, for that very issue. I had been working the ticket counter, and every time I lifted a bag I got a tightness in my chest. I knew it wasn't a heart attack because there were none of the other symptoms, and it didn't really hurt, per se, so much as feel not right. I remember feeling really sorry for myself, spending NYE in a hospital bed, starving because I'd been there all afternoon and by the time they'd admitted me dinner service was over, and I couldn't even order pizza because the only form of payment I had was a personal check. (Long story.) I had to spend four days in the hospital, taking anti-inflammatory drugs every four hours, with food (which was a great big pain in the ass) and doing stress tests and being on a really restricted diet because everyone around me was a heart attack patient and the whole time I felt like it was much ado about nothing, that they were only doing all this crap because I'm HIV+ and they had to be reeeeeeaally careful. Even though I've since looked upon that hospital visit as the crisis I needed to get away from my airline job and get on with the next phase of my life, which involved owning my HIV status and accepting a new direction, I'd never really considered the actual presenting complaint to have been much more than a nuisance.
But here was this woman, telling me her sister-in-law had died from the same thing.
She went on, to tell me something else that hit me pretty hard, but it was a delayed effect: she said that she felt like her sister's life purpose might have been as simple as bringing her children into the world. She'd apparently had this heart defect that made her prone to this sort of thing for years, but it wasn't until they were both born and safely weaned from her that she dropped dead. I think this sent me off on two tangents, if belatedly: one, I do believe that we incarnate for a specific purpose, for a specific set of experiences and lessons and accomplishments, and that once we're done with them all we find a way to leave; the other? well, I'm still alive, despite several close calls. So why do I keep scraping by? Why haven't I died any of those times?
Okay, I guess that sounds melodramatic, but from a certain perspective it's true. There's the big one, where I got my AIDS diagnosis (among many others), and I was told that, had I waited even twenty four hours longer to come to the hospital about something unrelated, I probably would have gone into a coma and died alone in my apartment. There's also apparently this time where I had pericarditis and that, apparently, very easily could have killed me. There's another hospital visit where I was complaining about a swelling in my ankle that wouldn't go away that turned out to be cellulitis, and again, judging from the way that the nurse totally freaked out when I told her that I'd had this swelling on and off for about three weeks, that could have killed me too. And that's not to mention all the times I've really come close to killing myself, and all the close calls I've had in my car, and the two times I've had food poisoning and all those little accidents that could have been a lot worse... I've been incredibly lucky. Or maybe just not finished with my life purpose.
So, if my unfulfilled life purpose is the reason I'm still here, what might that be?
Last night, when I got home from the fundraiser, quillon told me that he'd watched a movie over the internet called The Secret. In a nutshell, it's about how your thoughts create your reality. Up to this point in time, that's been in the realm of New Age mumbo-jumbo or Far East mysticism, but recent scientific advances suggest that it's something that can be explained in linear, objective, rational terms, that's it's not just a matter of perspective or faith but a real component of something we can measure. Our thoughts really do create a template into which we, and the world around us, grows.
On that note: I've held the idea that I want to be a successful speaker in my head for quite a long time. And I've had this really strong feeling that my life is going somewhere, important, and I don't need to know exactly where so long as I trust that it's going in the right direction, that my faith in that is enough to make it so. As I plan a return to school to get my Masters in Social Work, I have this excitement (tempered with a little fear, but it's mostly excitement; almost like that giddy anticipation of a roller coaster just as you're climbing that first hill) that I'm going to accomplish great things with it, and that it's all going to fit together, with the life experience I've accumulated, with the speaking experience, with the life and death experience, the whole shebang. And I'm also certain (some might say I have faith) that how it all fits together will become clearer as I get farther along in the process. And finally, the foundation under all of this is my strong belief that if I'm not dead yet, I am not finished and there's still something for me to do, so the fact that I survived all those close calls, from that perpective, means I have a life purpose and I'm going to find it. So: how much of that is my own doing, just by believing it? How much of it is some grand design that we're all acting out? Is there really any difference between the two?
The most exciting part of it for me is something that I just kind of discovered flying out of my mouth last night. I said, paraphrased, that all change starts on the individual level; how do I take care of myself? And then it branches out from there. Each of us knows, or comes in contact with, hundreds of people, and while each one of us might feel small and unimportant, nothing is further from the truth. When we talk about changing the world, we usually think of people like Gandhi (or Hitler), but anyone can change the world. It all starts with that first little ripple, that one hug, the voice that makes another person stop and think. And then that person makes another person stop and think. And on and on and on. We are each more powerful than we give ourselves credit for. Mountains can be moved one pebble at a time.
I feel something coming alive in me when I speak. I don't know what it is yet, or where it's going, but I trust that it's good, or at least interesting, and probably both.