write me well

Tag: goals

  • The Bucket Theory

    I’m a chronic mom-caller. Like, I may live over three thousand miles away from my mother, and I may be a grown-ass thirty-year-old woman, but if I go more than 2-3 days without speaking to my mom, it’s weird. I used to call her on my way home from work, and now that I have my own place, I call her as soon as I’m home, eating my pre-made dinner on the couch while I tell her about my day and listen in turn about hers. I’ll call her on my days off when I have literally nothing new to tell her. I’ll call her when I discover pre-filled strawberry jam and cream scones for sale at Tesco. Chron-ic.

    Whether it’s because I do such a faultless job of this on a regular basis, or because my mom has a tendency to feel like she’s a ‘bother’ if she’s the one that calls me (“I never know what you’re doing! You’re so busy. You could be at work.” “Mom, I keep telling you. If you call me and I’m busy, I just won’t pick up the phone.” I digress.) – my mom hardly ever calls me. But this afternoon I was off work, sitting at a coffee shop, when my phone rang and it was my mom. Calling me!

    We talked about a lot of things, as we always do. Work stress, life stress, good things, challenging things. And at one point, somewhere between good things and challenging things, I mentioned my Bucket Theory. I feel like I tell everyone and their mother about my Bucket Theory, so I was 110% sure I’d already not only mentioned it to my own, but explained it in depth. But it turns out I hadn’t, and because I will never not enjoy the sound of my own voice – especially when expounding my own life views – when she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard about your Bucket Theory” – I LEPT at the opportunity. And as a result, the topic is fresh on my mind, and I figured no time like the present to infect the internet with it.

    So here, un-asked for, is my Bucket Theory.

    We spend an inordinately large amount of time while we’re growing up and getting older being told exactly What Will Make Us Happy. People, society, strangers, LIFE. They all act like there’s a one-size-fits-all formula for how to make a life for yourself that genuinely brings you joy.

    What I spent my twenties doing was unlearning all of that.

    Attaining happiness is only universal in that it can always be broken down into buckets. One bucket, six buckets, twenty buckets, every person is different. The buckets come in all different sizes. Maybe yours are all tiny and easily filled; maybe some are bigger, and need a regularly scheduled top up. But the constant between everyone’s buckets is this: the sum of their parts is a Satisfying, Happy Life. (Accidentally just typed Lie, and I’m gonna go ahead and ignore what that typo is trying to tell me.) The only way your buckets can be Wrong is if they hurt people in the process of being filled. As long as you have peaceful, kind buckets, I truly think your only priority in life should be to define them and fill them however you see fit.

    I believe I’ve gotten to the place I am in life because I figured out what my buckets are and made a big deal out of prioritizing filling them the fuck up. Having my family in my life is a big bucket – but for me, geographic closeness isn’t a requirement of keeping that full. I rely heavily and happily on technology to do so. Having a job that’s satisfying, but also allows me creative freedom in my style and on my days off, is another big old bucket. It needs a regular top up in that I always want to feel driven and like I’m developing the people around me, but I’m quite certain my career bucket will never get any bigger. It will always play second fiddle (second…bucket?) to others.

    And then there are the surprise buckets – Being Near Medieval English Things turned out to be a pretty major one. Nobody told me when I was thirteen that where I live would bring me more happiness than my college degree itself. Tattoos. Financial Independence. Writing – well, no surprise there. Seven year old Kathy could have accurately drawn the size of that bucket right after she wrote her first short story about a girl sneaking off from a family picnic to find a dragon in a hillside cave. It will probably always be my biggest bucket.

    But if your career bucket is your biggest, wahey to you! You will find no judgement here. The same if being physically close to those you love is a big bucket. I get that too. Making a family. Having a dog. Achieving fame. Immersing yourself in other cultures. Helping the environment. Listening to great music. Chocolate chip cookies. They are your buckets. It is your life. Too many people get down on themselves because their buckets are different or strange or maybe even because they’re not different enough. I assure you, it doesn’t matter. Nobody has to deal with whether or not something brings you happiness and fulfillment except You.

    So on this doing-its-damnedest-to-pretend-its-not-Spring April afternoon, if you’re looking for an extra bit of happy in your life, take a look at your buckets. And once you figure them out, there are only two things you need to do: chase their fulfillment like nobody’s business, and never apologize for it.

  • 2019. For Now, Anyway.

    Eighteen days into 2019 and I’m just now sitting down to write for the first time in what feels like an absolute age – that, my friends, is what a retail Christmas will do to you.  

    This is the first time I’ve parked at Foyles with a pot of tea, post-perusal of the English Middle Ages history section of the store, satisfactorily plonking out several overdue email responses since the ensuing chaos of December’s end. Retail Christmas is always a busy time, but this particular one was full of firsts that only added to the controlled burn: First time managing a flagship store through peak? Check. First time spending Christmas on my own? Check. First time launching end of season sale on Christmas day and then running inventory less than two weeks after NYD? Check and fuck-that-noise check (I mean, not really – I’ve got a dream team that got me through it, and you can only ever learn and improve). 

    Sitting here, though, five days following that last check mark, listening to Hozier and deciding his vibes are my 2019 vibes (has anybody else seen and fallen in love with that oatmeal-based Twitter exchange he had?), I wouldn’t change it. Every box you check off brings you that much closer to what you want your endgame to look like.  

    It does not hurt that I have a pretty clear idea of what the next few months will look like, and the forecast is most excellent. February includes my first trip home since moving here back in March! I’ll get to see several of the lights of my life that give me the brightest and best faith in the world and I won’t have to plug my brain in for fourteen straight days. May will see my first trip to Croatia with a fabulous friend, a week of beaches and books and delightfully one-pieced swimsuits. Dotted in-between, ideally with a bit more planning than last year but cherished regardless, more day trips around the whole of England, maybe even with a few weekend trips thrown in because nothing says living on the edge like a solo mini-break to a village most people would struggle to point out on a map, but damn yo, those castles!  

    It’ll also be the first few months of the UEA Women’s Alumni Network, something I’ve been helping put together for the past eight or so months and launched with a chic and lovely bang this past Tuesday at my store. You don’t realize how deeply energizing and empowering it is spending time with and relating to other women until you have an evening filled to the brim with chats and questions and anecdotes. Plus, as a rather pleasant side effect, it reminded me of just how much I enjoy public speaking. It’s not something I have the occasion to do very often but I genuinely enjoy the thrill of it – even if it was only about a minute and a half. I mean, I realize it’s easy to feel good at anything that only needs to be sustained for a minute and a half, but I’m also not too big to admit I like easy and good.  

    Resolutions on the whole are a bit bullshit – we as a society know that – but can you even call it January if you don’t resolutely overreach and then hate yourself a bit for it less than halfway through the month? Suzy has encouraged me towards the philosophy that the only true resolution is to listen to your body and believe in moderation, and nearly-thirty-year-old-me is quite inclined to agree with her (she writes, feeling smooth, sophisticated, and balanced, two cups of tea and six songs into her Hozier playlist). Yes, I have chosen to test myself in my annual fashion by cutting out my favorite beige foods, but it’s more an exercise in will power than anything else. One of my great glories in life is that I am very happy with who I am, where I am, and that I’m lucky enough to get to present myself to the world, both physically and mentally, in a way that is incredibly satisfying. If there’s anything I’ve truly resolved to do, it’s to be more present and supportive to those that don’t have that luxury. So there that is, 2019. Less new year, new me; more new year, old me with significantly improved friendship, mentorship, and partnership performance. Next year I will focus on trying to make myself sound less like an emotional Volvo.  

    Other things I’m looking forward to: making my new place feel like a home, bookshelf by bookshelf and wall art by wall art; diving head-first into longsword fighting or boxing (…emphasis on the metaphor, ain’t nobody got time for decapitation); making myself a better manager and leader; wearing more mock-necked everything; embracing facial moisturizers and a committed skincare routine; continuing my mission to simplify my wardrobe and only commit to classic, clean, investment pieces; helping motivate and develop those around me; eating more green things; devouring more medieval history than has been healthy since the seventeenth century; and, finally, let’s be honest…probably another tattoo. 

    I’m not so special as to see my writing as any kind of forum, but if you’ve been looking for the place to jot down 2019’s positivities and potential proclivities, and unlike me don’t have roughly thirty-seven blank notebooks to choose from and then immediately regret doing so because handwriting is the WORST whenever you need it not to be, here’s a safe space for them.

    2019’s gonna be a good one.

    (Or, at least, please oh please better than the last trip around the sun, right?)

     

     

     

     

  • Driving Forces

    (Aside: Up until about twenty minutes ago I had developed a new love for the simplicity of using Notepad to write with. I was 90% done with this blog post when my computer decided to die before I’d hit save.

    So, suffice it to say, one serious rage session later, I’ve ditched simplicity and am now back on Word. WHERE THEY HAVE DOCUMENT RECOVERY.)

    Summer has a tendency to inspire promise: impending adventures, previously unfulfilled personal sojourns imminently poised to become life’s Next Big Thing. Every year it’s like hearing Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten for the first time all over again and I always feel like I can take over the world. This year, I settled for kicking June off with my first trip to Spain.

    Three days in Madrid saw me reunited with Jaime and Edu, who along with helping me begin a life-long obsession with jamón, showed me first-hand all of the corners of the city that made them fall in love with Spain in the first place. I even snagged a true local Madrid experience when Edu’s family was gracious enough to host me for the duration of my stay. (In fact, if I can avoid hotels for the majority of my European adventures, all the better. Nothing beats a local neighborhood experience.) The Luchena Ruizs put on a stunning spread of Spanish food all three nights I stayed there, we ventured into the city and drank cheap delicious wine and ate free fabulous tapas late into the warm Spanish evenings, and I spoke a lot of terrible, terrible Spanish (I exaggerate. Mostly I just said “gracias” very poorly). What more can you ask of an early summer Spanish vacation?

    If you said “see the Mediterranean Sea for the first time” then you are SPOT on, my friends. So after saying farewell to the Luchena Ruiz clan, I hopped onto a train to the beautiful seaside city of Valencia, and it did not disappoint.

    My friend Suzy met me in there, and after spending our first evening exploring downtown and enjoying the tapas and wine (and gelato and bats) there included, the following three days were filled with sunshine-y, sunscreen-y bliss, parked on the beach watching utterly comfortable Spaniards lazing around La Malvarosa and diving into the Mediterranean.

    I had a moment back when I visited Arundel and stood in the same rooms as Empress Matilda, a moment of that sort of knowing and feeling that Natasha Bedingfield so shamelessly inspires. I had another one when I visited the Tower of London and stood in the same rooms where Stephen, Henry, Eleanor, and Richard had, in turn, stood.

    Standing waist-deep in the Mediterranean was another one of those moments.

    This was the same sea that the Ancient Greeks sailed. That the Normans sailed. That Empress Matilda looked out over before she ever returned to England. That Eleanor of Aquitaine covered when she joined her husband on crusade.

    I like to think that all ancient places and landscapes have their own energy, invariably thrumming at their own frequency. The Pacific Ocean is somehow fiery; it’s confident, endless, and always crashing. This sea was calm. It lacked the kinetic, impressive, white-capped waves that crashed along the entire breadth of the California coastline, the kind of waves I’d grown up with my entire life. And this water’s energy was different, less obvious, and buried deep. It was huge and capable of much but burned itself out over thousands of years, happy now, for the most part, to sit and be admired until it saw otherwise necessary.

    While swimming in that calm, feeling that thrum, I had the moment. I knew that my next adventure had to be in Italy.

    About a week ago, I was doing some casual online research on the Normans. (Any time spent substantiating my strange Norman obsession is time well spent. Obviously.) Now, most people have heard of the Norman Conquest of England. William the Conqueror was fairly effective and kind of changed the entire course of English history so, I mean, it makes sense. But something that’s less talked about (she writes, as if you generally run into people discussing the Norman Conquest whenever you’re grabbing coffee at Starbucks) is the Norman conquest of southern Italy, and the eventual Kingdom of Sicily that they then ruled for a decent chunk of medieval history.

    If you grab a map and take a look at the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, you’d see that it included all of Calabria. Also known as the region of Italy from which my great grandfather immigrated in 1912, from whom I, one hundred years later, claimed my dual citizenship so I could move back here. When I saw that, I thought to myself, “I’m not going to jump to any conclusions here, but MAYBE, SOMEWHERE, way back in my Italian ancestry, I MIGHT BE NORMAN!”

    And I am fully aware that that is useless, irrelevant, ridiculous information that changes absolutely nothing about who I am as a person and in no way effects the present. But the romantic half of me – which wields a hefty amount of power these days – can’t get past it. It’s that part of me that walked into the Mediterranean, looked out across the ancient water and thought, “Y’know what? Italy, you’re next.”

    History is just so astounding.

    There’s one more uniquely Kathy moment that happened in Valencia, and I’m quite sure I’ll have this one in my list of all-time favorites for years to come.

    Suzy and I stayed at an Airbnb in historic old town Valencia, in a 1930’s era apartment decorated by an exceptionally hipster pair of local Valencian guys that respectively moonlighted as a DJ and a photographer. One of the reasons I picked the place was that it had a tiny balcony that opened onto Carrer de Sant Vincent Martir (on which, I pictured, Suzy and I would drink black coffee and eat breakfast each morning before heading out to the beach. On which, unsurprisingly, we never did.)

    The last night we were in the city, Suzy fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow. I couldn’t sleep so I went out to the main room, threw the balcony shutters open, and listened to this late-night, outdoor concert that happened to be going on in the street below. It was a local high school band and after a few songs and a bit of nostalgia, I decided to pop in my headphones and watch an episode of Vikings until I got sleepy.

    My headphones were such that even with the open shutters, I couldn’t hear the concert over Ivar the Boneless being obnoxious and horrifying.. That was, until, during a quiet moment of the show, when I thought I heard something familiar coming from the street below.

    I threw down my head phones, ran outside, and sure enough, the band was playing a song I hadn’t heard in years. But the years hadn’t changed how blood-stirring it was, nor how impossibly strong the memories attached to it were. It was the opening overture from the (notoriously hammy and complete classic) 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And it immediately took me back to being a kid, watching it with my sisters, seeing the camera pan across the Bayeux Tapestry, having never heard of the Bayeux Tapestry or having any concept of what the Norman Conquest was.

    It was a moment of pure magic. Nearly midnight, in the balmy streets of Valencia, in the house of total strangers, twenty-nine years old and still a shamelessly believer in life-changing epiphanies, feeling my heart thrum when the French horns kicked in. There’s not a feeling like it.

    Usually coming home from vacation is a struggle, but I left Spain feeling almost impossibly fulfilled. Toss in some very exciting work things on the horizon – which I’ll share more about if and when they come to pass – and this June has been everything I’ve come to expect from summer.

    (Considering the season doesn’t really even start for two more days, I’m feeling pretty good about it.)

  • The Art of Settling

    The pattern I follow on my days off has varied little in the past seven years. It altered temporarily for a year and a half, when I was in a relationship, and then semi-permanently when I got Gilmore. But in between dog park visits or long walks in sunny outdoor shopping centers, I never stopped finding places to plop down for hours at a time to write.

    My first consistent writing project was my book, Crashing, Burning, & Other Pursuits, which I have accepted will never see the light of day (it’s not a great book) but will always be a pure blast of warm nostalgia for me. After that, my writing took a handful of different spins. A bit of high fantasy, a bit of chic-litty contemporary, some inconsistent journaling. But while aimless it may have been, writing remained a ceaselessly satisfying way to spend any day that I had to myself.

    January 2017 I was inspired for the first time since UEA to embark on a screenplay and that has been the driving-force creative project in my life ever since. I spent the greater part of 2017 pushing out about ninety pages, slow but steady, researching my way along with a large Moleskine notebook the well-worn index of the entire project. My life became very simple, and I always knew where three things were: my work keys, my phone, and that notebook.

    Then I did a thing – last September I casually (not casually) decided it was time to move back to England for real. From that moment until almost this one right now, that took up all of my focus. It was good timing because I had hit a bit of a block with the screenplay’s plot, and its character development, and the project in general.

    It wasn’t until around mid-February, having replaced my Peet’s writing sessions with Peet’s moving-job-hunting-expat-everything research sessions, that I suddenly realized I had not seen my precious Leyendecker notebook in an unknown amount of time. I didn’t panic for two reasons: one, I knew I wouldn’t be diving back in for a few more months, so there was no rush in finding it; and two, I was about to pack up everything I owned in order to move countries. It was going to have to turn up some time.

    Spoiler: it never did. I never found that notebook, and all of the research within its pages (and several drivel-y bits of journal that will hopefully amuse whoever finds it) has been lost. And as a result, every attempt I’ve made at trying to work on that screenplay since I moved has felt fruitless, lacking the anchor that was having that notebook splayed open companionably next to me. Sure, all those notes had led me to a decidedly uncompanionable phase of writer’s block, but it had gotten me that far, at least, hadn’t it?

    Turns out, losing that notebook was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Only knee-deep in a new direction of research, I can’t even recall how it was I got to those dead ends six months ago. Imagining where hours more will take this project and these characters is so exciting, I don’t have the words. It doesn’t hurt that the venue for this epiphany is an amazing café in Soho, recommended by an excellent writing friend and adjacent to an independent theater.

    (Hey, I’ve never said I wasn’t a cliché.)

    So it’s here, writing on my day off for the thousandth time, feeling a new anchor developing neatly beside me somewhere between a slice of chocolate cake and a pot of tea, that I’ve truly begun to feel like I’m settling in.