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Why Would Anyone Live This Way

Desperado

Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?
You been out ridin’ fences for so long now
Oh, you’re a hard one
But I know that you got your reasons
These things that are pleasin’ you
Can hurt you somehow
Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy
She’ll beat you if she’s able
You know the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet
Now, it seems to me some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can’t get
Desperado, oh, you ain’t gettin’ no younger
Your pain and your hunger, they’re drivin’ you home
And freedom, oh freedom, well that’s just some people talkin’
Your prison is walking through this world all alone
Don’t your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won’t snow and the sun won’t shine
It’s hard to tell the night time from the day
You’re losin’ all your highs and lows
Ain’t it funny how the feeling goes away?
Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences, open the gate
It may be rainin’, but there’s a rainbow above you
You better let somebody love you (let somebody love you)
You better let somebody love you
Before it’s too late.
Songwriters: Glenn Lewis Frey / Don Hugh Henley
Desperado lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
Featured

Getting Better All The Time

My journey from birth until age 41, as written in my memoir, SURVIVOR, is based on parental influences and childhood experiences.

Having been given a fairly limited set of coping skills and an excess of emotional baggage, my life choices had been based on dysfunction, fear, anger, ignorance, defensiveness, anger, addiction, control, trial, and error.

Later, when push came to shove, I was given the “gift of desperation.” Only then, with the advice from medical experts, holistic practitioners, nutritionists, spiritual counselors and the wise, was I able to begin healing.

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From Brene Brown

Brene Brown

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation – Brené Brown Endowed Chair at The Graduate College of Social Work.

She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy and is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and her latest book, Dare to Lead, which is the culmination of a seven-year study on courage and leadership.

These are Brene’s tips for speaking. Important to remember.

My five rules for speaking:

1. Generosity. Bring all you have. It’s ok to be brave and afraid at the same time.

2. Gratitude. Remember they’re giving you their most precious resource: TIME!

3. Connect. It’s all about collective connection. Look into their eyes.

4. Service. It’s not about you. Stop doing it if/when it becomes about you.

5. Never take yourself too seriously. Laugh, learn, keep it real.

Five minutes before I went on stage for SXSW, I found Charlie’s stick-on mustache in my jacket pocket. It was such a good reminder.

BTS Green Room 📷 by Aaron ❤️

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Soothing the pain for awhile

Jane Faraco’s memoir, SURVIVOR, tells the story of her life as a child of an Irish American, serious binge drinker and a very chilly, highly aristocratic mother who had very little time or interest in her child.

Having had little nurturing and less in the way of guidance, Jane was confused about who she was or about how to be. An attraction for the other girls overwhelmed her. The shame and denial of it, brought it to her knees.

Overeating soothed the pain for awhile. Dramamine at eight, amphetamines at twelve, then, later, pot and alcohol.

The addiction was always to more, more of everything and to serious partying.

Roles were played, mistakes were made, disasters happened, times were high – too high.

When the pain was so great, she thought she might never climb out of it she found a recovery group. And it was there, in those humble rooms that she found the love and nurturing she had always longed for, who she was underneath it all and in the end, the love and the willingness to help others.

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THE POWER OF A VOICE

DAVID HAZARD

I have worked with authors who nearly gave up on their writing… all because of the damage done by one voice. Someone who spoke destructively about their work.

Every one of us has the voice of The Critic and The Judge already speaking inside us. These are deadly voices, really, that chip away at… or bludgeon… us from the inside over years and years. A negative word from someone outside our heads can be more destructive than the person speaking even knows.

I have found veins of pure gold in the drafted work of writers who all but gave up on their stories and memoirs, and helped them finish and deliver their gift to the reading public.

If you’re a person who has been disheartened or wrecked by the voices of critics and judges – inner and outer:

Turn down the volume. Unless they’re trained and constructive, turn those voices off. (Commenting on everything that’s in need of fixing without offering solutions is not constructive.)

Remember that few are trained in the art of constructive criticism and can comment objectively. Most will tell you more about themselves than about your work. (“I didn’t like it” is not a critique.)

Believe the impulse that drove you to write in the first place is the correct one to listen to. Keep going.

Your work does have an appreciative reading audience waiting for it, and you can find it. The very thing one person doesn’t like about your work, the next person will * love * about it.

Choose as your inner voice that of Winston Churchill, who claimed a WWII victory for England despite horrific attacks,

“NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER QUIT.”

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WE SURVIVE WE THRIVE

CRACKED

Cracked.

Oh yes I was. I came from a family, some of whom, at least on my father’s immediate side were for lack of a better word, cracked.

It was the drink that got them.

They say my uncle Bill, Dads brother, who had TB, locked himself in his room and sadly, drank himself to death.

While, much later my father did himself in with a gradual, slow sort of consumptive denial until he too died but not before he he made himself and his family desperately unhappy.

Now what about me, you may ask. I had my ways and I had my days both good and bad. And then, fortunately, I cracked and as Leonard Cohen says

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
 That’s how the light gets in

Thats’s how the light gets in

That’s how the light gets in

Cracked. Open. Yes. But not entirely,

I was the secret, schrouded, kind of cracked.

This stretches back to my grandfather, an Irish/ Scotch road builder who created the roads for the Worlds Fair. I never knew the man but they say he was a big drinker and known for taking his road crew for some big nights out on the town after a hard days work. My father who lost his mother when he was only ten, trailed after his dad till he was almost eighteen.

He learned from his dad,

everything.

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