Tag: Nicole Gordon

I had an experience today that brought home to me once again that the Critic is something I fight in my daily life as well as in writing, and that I often do things that make it even easier for the Critic to get some punches in.

Probably everyone says this, but it’s true for me.  My grandmother was a great cook.  She passed when I was in seventh grade, but I still have very vivid memories of Saturday afternoons in her kitchen, homemade beef noodle soup on the stove, fresh cinnamon rolls warming on top of the wood stove, and pies cooling on the counter.  My grandma was the first person to put milk instead of water in my tomato soup and to make me a gingersnap cookie.  I won’t pretend that my picky younger self loved every single thing my grandma ever cooked, but I always loved eating as a family, and I especially loved seeing the smile on my grandma’s face when we raved about what to her was a very minimal gift.

Now I’m grown up, and one of my favorite things  is to have family and friends over for a meal. It’s not an every Saturday sort of thing, but I do it whenever I can.  I don’t know that I actually enjoy cooking so much as I enjoy bringing everyone together, giving the gift of food prepared with love and taking the gift of love and conversation and time spent in return.

Which brings us to today.

Due to my new work schedule, I now eat “lunch” at 9am.  I have been bringing traditional lunch food, and that’s worked out fine, but towards the end of last week I was really starting to think about preparing some breakfast food on the weekend to take for leftovers during the week.  I invited my family over for brunch today as a way of nudging myself into actually taking that step instead of just thinking about it. 

It might have worked a little too well!  Before I knew it I had talked myself into making three recipes (sausage egg casserole because that’s what I’d been imagining, vegetarian egg casserole because my brother’s a vegetarian, and peach french toast because it’s so darn good.)  Both egg recipes were new to me.  I did five loads of laundry yesterday and cleaned the house in addition to grocery shopping.  The vegetarian egg casserole and the peach french toast needed to be refrigerated overnight, so I prepared those last night as well.  Suddenly it’s 9pm and I’m exhausted (I’ve been getting up at 3am, so 9am after a busy day is quite a bit past my bedtime.).

I woke up this morning and finished the housecleaning and started preparing the food, only to realized I’d put the vegetarian egg dish in the oven an hour too early. 

And then 9am came around and my growling stomach pointed out to me that scheduling brunch at 11am, two hours after I am used to eating my first major meal of the day, was probably not a great idea.

So, fighting low blood sugar because I had a cup of yogurt instead of the full breakfast I needed, I proceeded to brown the sausage by itself instead of with the onion the recipe called for.  I also put it in the oven for 30 of the 60 minutes it needed to bake without covering it.  And then I did the same thing with the peach french toast.

By this time, I have to say I was not expecting great things from brunch at this point.  I was sure the vegetarian casserole would be cold, and the french toast and the sausage casserole would be dry.  And that doesn’t even cover the bacon that got a little too reheated in the microwave as well.

But you know what?  Someone was really watching out for me today, because everything came out great.  The sausage casserole was awesome (We ate it all – so much for leftovers!), and the peach french toast was delicious.  Mom brought cinnamon rolls and Barbara brought fresh raspberries and pink grapefruit and oranges.  It was really a lovely meal.  Even better was having all of us around the table enjoying each other’s company.  There was so much positive energy in the room, I can still feel it.

So what does this have to do with the Critic, you ask?

First of all, dinners for my family can’t be so-so, they have to be amazing.  Hence my decision to bake three different entrees instead of one, or even two.  And heaven forbid I serve them a recipe I’ve actually made before (Except chicken pot pie.  We all love that!).  So I end up with  two new recipes that weren’t especially complicated but that did require me to carefully read and follow directions, paving the way for lots of little things to go wrong.

Scheduling it at 11am instead of 9, or even 10 wasn’t so much an attempt to sabotage myself as it was fact that we almost always have brunch at that time (my brother and I are not early birds as a rule) and I simply forgot to take my new work and eating schedule into account.  But it was still something to kick myself with while I was trying to apply tinfoil without burning myself.

First and foremost I am taking away a whole bunch of new memories of a great day with my family.  I have a couple delicious new recipes, too.  But there is no denying that I’m also coming away from today with a strong reminder of how important it is to be reasonable and realistic with ourselves not just with the goals and expectations we have for our artistic selves, but for the balance of our lives as well.  Our inner artist shares space with our work self and our family self, and what happens to one can happen to all.  We must be kind to every part of ourselves. 

Today reminded me that sometimes it really is enough to take a step or two rather than running the whole race at once.  I hope all of you get to really enjoy those baby steps, too.

Today was gorgeous.  I mean really beautiful. It was not only sunny, but warm.  The kind of day that makes it impossible to stay inside.The kind of day that makes the doctor’s request that you take vitamin D a little harder to brush off.

I live in the Northwest, so believe me when I say that I would never take a day like this, especially in March, for granted.  But I lit up on the inside, too, and I can’t help feeling that my reaction to this day isn’t just a reaction to a sunny day.  It’s actually been building over the last couple of weeks, and today is just the moment the switch finally flipped.

Making notes for this post, it occurred to me that I’ve been holding things in.  Not avoiding, exactly – at least not consciously.  Just not reaching out.  Not doing morning pages.  Barely posting on my Writer’s Retreat journal, even though in the past I’ve been on there every couple of days.  I see friends and family regularly, but when I’ve talked about my life it was books I read or movies I saw, not what jobs I applied for and how my interviews went.  In fact, when the job search did come up the other day, my family was genuinely surprised to find out I was stressed out about it.  I’m not one who really hesitates to say what’s going on with me, so the idea that they really hadn’t been aware was eye-opening for me.

So I wrote in my Writer’s Retreat journal this week.  A friend who usually calls so we can talk about her actually called to see what was happening with me, and I told her.  I wrote in my journal again.  I took advantage of a business meeting to have an artist’s date, as well.  I actually had a story idea.  I sang out loud in the shower.  I marked my blog deadlines on the March calendar.  I put my storage stuff back up on the shelf in the laundry room instead of leaving it on the couch a few more days.  I beat down the Critic and applied for a job I really wanted instead of putting it off another day.  Things that seemed little enough at the time, but that built momentum as the week went along.

Last night I hit the point where I had to turn the TV off because no matter how much I turned the volume down it was just too much noise.  There is no denying that part of me is concerned about being in that place when I don’t have active stress in my life, but for the most part I’m actually relieved.  It feels like I am really hearing myself, like I’m totally present in the moment in way I didn’t realize I’d lost. 

So I left the TV off today, too.  I walked to the store for shampoo instead of driving.  I bought sparkly pink polish so I can have pretty hands at the new job on Tuesday.   I walked to Starbucks and sat in a comfy chair and drank coffee and read Z. A. Maxfield’s The Long Way Home.  I still wasn’t quite ready to be inside when I got home, so I grabbed a lounge chair by the pool and read some more.  I played cards with my brother in the garden of one of our favorite restaurants until the sun went down.  I wanted as much sunshine as I could get, and I wallowed in it.

Obviously the nice weather helped make today pretty fantastic, but what really made this a beautiful day was feeling the door open inside me, being able to take things in rather than being caught entirely in my own head.

I have a whole new appreciation today for how important it is to keep ourselves open.  When the door is shut, two things happen.  First our brains have no outlet for all the noise our daily lives build up and we start focusing on just managing the volume instead of listening to what we’re actually hearing.  Second, we have no way to let new things in.  It’s like driving on the freeway at seventy miles an hour.  Everything that happens becomes a flash across the windshield, there one second and gone the next, rather than sticking with us, making an impact.

I don’t mean to say that I plan on spilling my guts to everyone I meet.  But I do think that communicating and opening myself up is something I have to be consciously aware of.  Simply trusting myself to do it naturally is apparently not enough.  I’ve learned this week that my Critic is very good at making isolating myself seem like a perfectly rational thing to do, and I know it isn’t.

Sharing and keeping the lines of communication open doesn’t just give us a chance to blow off steam.  It lets us share our joy, too, and allows us to take things in from the world around us.  I opened myself up and had a really beautiful day today.  I hope you have a beautiful day, too.