For many of us, the holiday season offers a second, or possibly third or fourth opportunity (depending how often a family gathers and how many family configurations exist) to try again and focus on what's really important at this time of year: cultivating a sense of gratitude whenever possible, practicing the art of self-preservation/care, and doing what we can to not make anything worse. For me, that sums up a good enough family gathering.

It's time to return to the holiday classics...including my personal guide to having a GOOD ENOUGH holiday season! 

If I go by the arrival Christmas merchandise on shelves and the first time I hear “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" over a store’s sound system, the “most wonderful time of the year” begins in mid-September, and kicks off in earnest the day after Halloween. 

Even so, I obstinately persist in defining “the holidays” as beginning around Thanksgiving and ending soon after New Year’s Day. As an adult, I’ve generally found that these six weeks stir up challenging emotions, as well  moments of joy and togetherness. Sometimes simultaneously. 

​But when I’ve struggled with depression during the “hap-happiest season of all,” I become trapped in what a friend of mine describes as a “web of bad.” Really bad. Each crushing thought becomes twisted with another, and another. The silken threads of self-judgement intertwine and grow stronger. The web becomes bigger, stickier, and harder to escape. And everyone around me seems like they are on a different planet. A very merry planet. 

Over the years, I’ve become aware that I’m not alone in my trepidation, or outright dread, of the holiday season. So I’ll be rolling out a series of blog posts as part of “Dawn’s Personal Guide to Having a Good Enough Holiday Season!” 

​I'm also an grown-up who has had the privilege and joy of being involved in some wonderful families lives over the last 35 years or so, as a babysitter, daycare provider, older cousin, pre-school teacher, family friend, and nanny. I’m not an expert, or a therapist. But when I spend time with kids who have big feelings, I feel a LOT of empathy. And I believe that creating a space where kids feel safe riding that wave of emotion is really important. 

I really want the children in my life to be able to start building emotional resilience when they are little, and skip the part where they lose touch with their feelings in the first place.

The thing is, feelings are not convenient, for kids OR adults. They show up at awkward times, like when we are in a hurry, or around people we want to impress. I really do get that, and how hard it is to create space for kids to experience their emotions. I feel a lot of empathy for primary caregivers too.

My Mom, aka Joanne Dreyer, remembers when she held the power to fix whatever made me sad.

As I got older, my painful feelings were no longer something my Mom could fix. 

When my mom realized that she'd lost her superpower, she felt really sad. It took a long time for her to let go of the idea that she was supposed to be able to fix things for her kids. The urge to fix things hasn't gone away, she says. But there's not that same kind of grief.

Intuitively, kids learn which feelings are acceptable and valued by their families and communities, and the ones that are going cause a disturbance to the cultural ecosystem. Since as a kid, our survival is dependent on the stability of our environment, (not unlike the ecosystem of our physical environment), we all figure out how to sustain life on our particular patch of earth. This all happens before we're four years old.

Looking back, I think that feeling of sadness itself wasn't really the issue. It was our bone-deep conviction that if we gave sadness any space, opened that particular door even a crack, we'd all drown in a tsunami of grief. 

​​Which I've learned isn't true.

Feelings come in waves.​ Each wave has a beginning, middle, and an end. We might experience a wave of feeling as unbearable, but it's not. It's the feelings that are buried deep that cast a specter across generations.

It wasn't until I was an adult that my Oma, Mom, and me had the language to talk about these tacit agreements we'd made with one another. We also came to understand that our family's history with depression. Likely, genetics play their part. But my Mom and I both believe that unexpressed grief or sadness seeped in at the cellular level my great-grandmother, to my Oma, to my Mom, and to me.

​​I like to think that Oma, and her mother, free of both physical and emotional pain, is somewhere rooting for my mom and I to explore the world of our feelings beyond the paths we know so well.

Here is something I never considered before I studied SCT:

What a relief. Once I understood this useful fact, I was able to let go of a lot of fear and step forward into the realm of deeply uncomfortable feelings. Like anger.

I remember the first time I experienced anger in my SCT group. Heather, one of the leaders, said: how big would you need to be to hold all that anger?

I thought about it. Then I started to feel the anger fill my body.

​Woah.

When I realized that experiencing my anger would actually help me be more effective in managing my emotions, and lead to making effective choices in how I managed my interactions with the people or groups of people that had made me angry, I was all like, wow.

Then, I'd take a step back and center myself. Did I skip over something? A lot of the time, I'd find anger. I could feel it in my body. It felt amazing.

It's gotten to where I can shift back and forth between self-judgement and shaming feelings to anger, and feel my whole being react. It's really incredible to experience. My years of practice are making a real difference in my life! Woot.

As a discipline method, Time Out has fans and detractors. For some kids and caregivers, it's not that useful. For others,  it works really well.

I was a nanny for sisters, ages two and six. The two-year old (I'll call her Beth) had a frequent habit of expressing her displeasure in a way that dominated any situation. She'd scream and cry, and sometimes, hit. Her older sister would get quiet. I think we all felt kind of captive to her moods.

I started to pick up Beth at the first sign of this behavior. I'd take her to Time Out, in chair I could see from whatever I'd be doing with her sister. One that had no distractions, like toys or books. I'd set the timer for two minutes (pretty standard: age=number of minutes in Time Out).

Beth would often scream louder. I didn't engage her. Logic does not work with toddlers when they are upset. (It doesn't work super-great with adults, either.) Thankfully, she believed in the magic of Time Out and didn't leave her chair.

Thankfully, Beth always calmed down before the two minutes were up. When Time Out ended, I'd go pick her up, swing her around, and say, "Oh, Beth, I'm so happy you're back!"

What started to happen is that Beth took less time to calm herself down. I'd let go of the two-minute rule, and went ahead and welcomed her back right away.

Beth's mom wasn't sure about how often I used Time Out. We'd sometimes overlap in the morning when she was getting ready to go to work. She asked me if it was necessary to put Beth in Time Out so often. I can't remember exactly what I said, but I didn't say I'd stop using it.

Pretty soon after, Beth said to her Mom, "Dawn loves me so much! She puts me in Time Out every day."

I felt so good! Not in a snarky way of her Mom was wrong and I was right. (And, technically, I didn't use it every day.) I felt good because my theory about Time Out -- that it's not a punishment, but a way for kids to just get out whatever feeling they are experiencing -- seemed to gather some credence from Beth's declaration to her Mom. 

I often think that it would be great if adults could just call Time Out for themselves, or each other. And not be ashamed. It would be practical, I think. Step away from the meeting, or an argument that doesn't really seem like it's about what's being discussed. Go find a chair without any distractions. I don't think grown-ups would have to apply the age=number of minutes in Time Out for it to work, although it would be nice to have that option. 

I also think that we'd all do a much better job getting along if grown-ups were encouraged to take more naps. A lot of what I've learned about myself seems to work when I use it with kids. But I've learned at least as much from the children I'm grateful -- that I've been grateful -- to have in my life. Many of whom are now adults, with kids of their own.

Parent Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT)
If you feel overwhelmed by the intensity of your child's emotions and the challenge of communicating with your child effectively when her or his behavior feels out-of-control, Maureen Gomeringer, MSW, LCSW, offers Parent Child Interaction Therapy, an evidence-based treatment intended to increase a child’s sense of self-control and cooperation by strengthening the child’s trust for and connection to his parent. Click here to learn more.

Maureen provides her services through Carolina Partners in Mental Healthcare, the organization that generously supports Cracked [the blog] and Bipolar Girl Rules the World. 

Systems Centered Theory (SCT)
To learn more about SCT, you can go to their website. There is also a SCT YouTube channel. I think the short video The Edge of the Unknown is a great place to start.

Several years ago, I wrote my personal declaration against the Dictatorship of Perfectionism, "The 80% Manifesto." (Check it out, here.) I've got to say it's one thing to know something to be true, and quite another to live by that truth. I battle perfectionism every single day. And a lot of the time, we're talking epic, Godzilla-Mothra battles. Sometimes I win, but it's never easy.

So when I decided to start a garden, I broke down my expectations to what seemed to me to be the most basic premise I could find:

I know that idea seems really obvious, but it's where I wanted (and needed) to start. It's more like a Garden in the Land of 2%, I know. But it felt FUN to me. And I really, really wanted it to be fun. 

That one is for a few different reasons. One, if I spent money, that would make me feel like I needed to raise my expectations from where I started. Also, I don't have a lot of money. And spending money I don't have feels stressful. Which means NOT as fun. And this garden = fun. I had nothing to lose, and I wanted to keep it that way.

A lot of people don't quite believe that New Jersey is called the "Garden State" with good reason. But it's not a joke. It's for real. Every single one of the hundreds of tomatoes I ate growing up testified to this very simple fact: ​there is dirt, and then there is soil.

The rock solid red clay my mother encountered our first fall in North Carolina when she tried to plant tulips -- that’s dirt. She picked and scraped away a few scant inches before she dropped the bulbs into the shallow holes in disgust. That spring, tiny tulips -- about a third of the size promised by the garden catalogue -- poked their pitiful little heads out of the dirt. Those tulips were a family joke for a long time, even after my mother and father had dug up a little patch in the backyard to grow tomatoes, zucchini, and some lettuce. They brought in layers and layers of organic material to coax some kind of soil out of the dirt.

In northern New Jersey, we have soil -- dark brown, almost black, crumbly, with a deep murky smell that conjures life and decay all at once. It is soft and it sticks to your knees if you have been weeding or picking fresh lettuce, or on your pants' bottoms if you’ve been hiding among the plants listening to the grown-ups talk nearby. My mother grew up on the same land as her father, and I lived in the house she grew up in until I was eight years old. His family had farmed the land that now made up a good block of houses, bordered by Stiles Street on one side and Harding Avenue on the other. My PopPop, my grandfather, Saraphino “Ed” Truncale, received an exemption from serving in WWII in order to grow food for his country, but he joined the Army anyway. He was sent to Germany, and that is where he met Johanna Bimbose, my Oma, my grandmother.

My Oma grew up hungry. So the garden meant so many different things at once. We were fed. We were loved. We were never -- could never -- be hungry at her table. Not if she had anything to do with it.

I wrote this poem -- "Off the Vine" -- many years ago, and read it at my PopPop's funeral. I think it gets at why planting this garden felt so important to me. And why I wanted to keep it simple. I didn't want anything to do with my garden to make me feel bad or embattled. I wanted a garden that felt like how my grandparents saw me, which had nothing to do with being perfect. Now that both PopPop and Oma have passed over, I wanted to create a space that reminded me of what it felt like to be nurtured by their love, and to see if maybe I could shine some of that light on myself.

My PopPop grew all different kinds of tomatoes -- a whole slew of vegetables, actually. But the Ramapo stuck in my mind. A couple of years ago I tried to find out if the seeds were still available, and I saw that Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, had recently reissued the seeds. That year, my Uncle Ed, who lives in New Jersey, ordered the seeds and planted them. Uncle Ed sent us photos via group text messages and we all watched as the tomato plants grew. When we came to visit, and eating those tomatoes became it's own kind of holy ritual.

So this year, I went online, and ordered seeds! And not just tomatoes!

A really amazing friend of mine, Eri Yokoyama wanted to be an animator, but she didn't know how to draw. So she decided to teach herself how to draw by engaging in daily practice sessions, about 30 minutes each. She also completely lowered her expectations, and took a super-playful and funny approach to her learning process. (Learn more about her awesome project,and see the final animation, here.)

​With my low/no expectation garden, I also wanted to cultivate a daily practice. To do something, the smallest possible thing, every day. It could be more, but just one thing would rank as a success.

And, finally, the huge amount of shame I would feel for not being able to fulfill a very basic, reasonable commitment would make it really, really difficult for me to show up at all, even if I still was able to maintain my membership in the space.

​Nobody wants me to feel ashamed, or to leave. But still. I can't just keep being inconsistent. The Mothership needs to be able to rely on me to do what I say I'll do.

And asking someone to have coffee with me doesn't necessarily qualify as asking for help, even if I'm feeling a little wobbly at the time. By the time I get there, the wobbly feelings might just be gone. Or not. But that's being human. Or so I hear.

I had SO MUCH FUN and LAUGHED SO HARD. I've been thinking about it every day and looking forward to the next class all week long. (UPDATE: Class #2 just as awesome.) I could write A LOT about all the ways that improv clearly connects to the emotional and spiritual work I'm doing, and how the "Yes, and" philosophy could, in fact, bring about world peace, if only everyone would sign up for an improv class. For real.

But I'm not going to write that blog post. Because I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT ALL THAT STUFF. I JUST WANT TO RELAX AND HAVE FUN. (God, please. I exhaust myself sometimes.)

All I'm going to do here is write about this one thing we did in class. 

We started off by introducing ourselves. Besides the usual stuff -- what's your name, where you're from, and "what you do when you're not pushing at the edges of your comfort zone with a group of strangers," the instructor asked us to share our spirit animal*. Except in this case, we had to pick a made up one. Like, we could combine the traits of two different animals, or give an animal magical properties. 

I knew that my spirit animal would be some kind of underwater creature, because I'm my most comfortably calm self when I'm near, on, or especially in, water.

By the time it was my turn, I'd made my decision.

In my magical and mystical world, my octopus spirit animal would grant me the ability to breath underwater and withstand oceanic pressure, so we could explore the depths of the ocean together. Bliss upon bliss upon bliss.

​But that's not all.

​Now that I've done a tiny bit of research, I've learned that octopuses or octopods (not octopi: it's a Greek/Latin root thing) are even more incredible than I thought when I chose one as my magical spirit animal. But what I did know is that octopods are really, really smart and deeply intuitive. And that octo means eight. 

I imagined my octopus would attach to me like a miraculous, floating backpack and accompany me everywhere, intuiting the next task to be accomplished and seamlessly moving from one to the next. I'd simply focus on whichever of the day's creative endeavors I found most appealing. I'd be free to move into sustained hyperfocus (the attention deficit flipside of ADD, which a lot of people don't realize exists) while my octopus returned emails and managed other essential details. You know, things like paying bills, and other stuff you gotta do in order to be considered a competent adult.

Also, I'd ask the octopus for lots and lots of shoulder and neck massages. Like, all the time. 

I know I said I wouldn't go into what I learned in my research. But check this fabulosity out: three-fifths of an octopus’ neurons are not in their brain, but in their limbs. And get this: an octopod's limb can be severed from the rest of its its body and still think (for a while, anyway). Because its brain cells travel with it! MINDBLOWN, right? The octopod's magical multitasking abilities are so far beyond...beyond. I can't even.

I realize as I write that I'm selling this magnificent creature way short. An octopus deserves much, much more than a life as an unpaid intern/massage therapist.

I'm not sure if my longing for octopod task management is just an ADD thing. I know plenty of people who could use an extra set of hands, or four extra sets of hands. (For those of you with children too young to drive: the carpool possibilities of the detached limbs occurred to me immediately.) 

Over the years, I've gotten a lot better about attempting to execute a more reasonable number of ideas. I've acquired a decent set of organizational skills, and found tools that suit my particular way of engaging with the world. And I've learned how great it is to collaborate, particularly with people who bring complementary skill sets to our work. I'm confident about my abilities and don't undervalue or apologize for my work. 

But lately, I've been feeling frustrated and sad. I've developed relationships with people I like and value that have opened up opportunities for me to work on projects that matter to me. And sometimes, I'm able to move forward effectively. But often, it takes so much more effort than I'd like, or that I can always sustain.

I wake up with a good sense of what needs to be accomplished to stay on track. I get out of bed. Get going. But most days, it feels like a fearsome, buzzing cloud of doom -- made up of wrong choices and potential failures -- joins me somewhere around the end of breakfast. 

This cloud doesn't announce itself dramatically. It just shows up and settles in. It's just there: tinnitus of the to-do list. 

I've tried fighting it: reconfiguring schedules and lists and where I work and how often I take breaks. Some things help, sure. But it the cloud also makes me angry. It doesn't make sense that this cloud exists. It feels like it belongs to a much earlier time in my life, when my struggles with depression warranted this kind of gloomy, anxious company. But depressions not the issue. Maybe it's some kind of depression hangover.

The other day, my therapist observed that I speed up -- a lot -- when I'm trying to solve some deadline quandary. That she starts to speed up, trying to help. We both surmised that the speeding up doesn't make things better.

Which makes me think that my multi-tasking octopus may not be the solution. That doing more things, faster, is not the solution. Which is annoying. Because more, faster, is one of those ideas where trying harder is the fix, and I know how to try hard. It's very important to me that people know I'm trying very hard. 

But I'm at the point where I'm convinced that if trying harder would have made it better, then it would be better by now.

It's difficult to be curious when I'm afraid. But I'm trying something that is deeply counterintuitive. I'm slowing down. All the way down, to stop.

These lines are from a poem I wrote about a decade ago:

I've practiced different forms of mindfulness for a long time. I've learned that there is something inherently reliable about how my body responds to this kind of focused attention: here. stay. longer. 

Yesterday, I sent my therapist a text:

Today, I sent her an update:

Now I'm imagining my octopus as a weight on my shoulders. A good kind of weight. Steadying. Helping me find the ground. Keeping me from floating away.

Everytime I think about it, I'm finding my feet. Settling in. Listening.

​I'm setting timers and taking five minute breaks.

I get out my new blocks.

I play whiffle ball with my dog Lady Godiva in the back yard. I hit, she fetches. Her short game is improving. She's getting better at fielding the bunt. 

I make art just to make something.

I escape for an hour to stare up at the trees as the sky grows dark.

I go to my improv class. 

I do all of these things even though I have work that's overdue. Embarrassingly, painfully overdue.

​It feels risky to stop. To play. To breathe. But I'm gonna try. If I fail, at least I will fail trying something new.

I can’t remember I if dreaded getting on the scale. But after the heavy thunk of the big weight, and the tinny back and forth of the smaller one, I heard a number. Eighty-nine. I weighed eighty-nine pounds. And somehow, I knew that eighty-nine pounds was a terrible weight to be.

In retrospect, that “somehow” isn’t so hard to trace. It’s a messy confection of family, hunger, love, food, power, unrealistic cultural standards of beauty, and how annoyed I felt when I started to grow breasts, because they got in the way when I played soccer.  (That was a bit later. And I’ve reconciled with my breasts and now I like them.)

​Knowing that I weighed eighty-nine pounds didn’t stop me from playing hard, from running up and down the soccer field in 100 degree heat. Usually, my body wasn't something I thought about; it was something that did things. It moved. I rode my bike as far as my parents would let me (sometimes, a little farther). I went rollerskating up and down the biggest hills in my neighborhood. 

My sophomore year in high school, I auditioned for the school musical, and as an enthusiastic chorus member, I started to hang out with the “theatre group." I knew that other girls made themselves throw up, because sometimes there were two or three of them together in the bathroom closest to the auditorium. I’m sure it wasn’t just a theater thing, or just a girls’ thing.