Be Brave Friday
Bracelets, IQ points, and fighting that anxiety
So, last night I was just anxious, randomly anxious, for absolutely no reason. This time, I think, was because I missed my brain before my brain broke back in college when the Epstein-Barr virus attacked it a bit and gave me seizures and took away some IQ points.
It isn’t always easy knowing that you used to be smarter, right? What if I lost more IQ points? What if I just kept going down and down and down? What would I do?
While I sat there, thinking, this quote came to me that I heard this week from a neuroscientist, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who was on a podcast.
“Sometimes in life YOU are responsible for changing something, not because you are to BLAME but because you are the only person who CAN,” she told the people listening to The Diary of a CEO.
I was feeling pretty anxious, sitting on the couch, worrying about things like IQ points and violence, about people in pain, and instead of living in the moment, my brain was busy predicting trauma.
So, I had to knock it out of that place if I didn’t want to be anxious.
I remembered a couple of stories that I heard within the last 24 hours from local people and those stories helped me keep things in check.
One man told me about how he gets to collect people’s stories and hold them inside of him every time he meets people. Because he works in hospitality, he gets to have people share joyous experiences and also spends some time with curmudgeons. Either way, he listens, ponders, hears their stories.
A local woman wrote about how her husband hung out and helped a guy trying to get copper out of some abandoned air conditioners and was having troubles, doing hours of work for approximately $5 worth of copper. Her husband ending up helping him, talking to him, and by the end of their hours together, food was shared, and the man gave her husband bracelets to give to her.
“"I want you to give these to your wife. Please thank her for the blankets she makes. My daughter makes these so I can give them to people who help me out,” he told her husband. She posted a photo of the bracelets surrounding her wrist, bead after bead, connecting to make something beautiful.
Another man told me he never won things.
“But you win at life,” I said because I thought he did.
“Nah, not according to my family,” he said.
And then I heard a bit of his story.
A few minutes later, a woman squealed when she won something.
A half hour earlier, a banker told me that he hugged a woman after he disagreed with her.
“What I don’t get,” he said, “is why people act like you have to be enemies if you don’t completely agree on every issue.”
He was talking about local politics, not national politics, just so you all know.
I thought about those bracelets, about how the beads are all attached, how they are singular pieces strung together to make something beautiful.
The day before, a town manager told me about his memoir and asked me what I thought of his final chapter, which I got to read thanks to the miracle that is a Google drive.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him. “You’ve weaved it all together and your heart is on every page.”
That’s the thing, right? It’s brave to live with your heart on every page. It’s brave to talk to the curmudgeon, to hug the person you disagree with, to be hugged, to sit on a couch with that same curmudgeon and become friends, to admit that you never win things, to squeal with joy when you do, to help a guy get copper out of thrown-away air conditioners and to take the bracelets he gives to you to give to your wife.
Bead by bead, we create our lives and we create our community.
It is brave to be human and authentic, to have hope for future, to care about others, to mess up. We all react sometimes instead of responding (and there’s such a difference), but that is because we are all human and to be human is to be perfectly imperfect, to take chances, to create things, to help each other.
And when I thought about all these things, about those two bracelets on that woman’s wrist, my anxiety went away a tiny bit.
Here’s the thing. We all want to be seen. We all want to be valued. We all want connections. We want to see other people, too.
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them,” Maya Angelou said or wrote once.
We can choose not to be reduced by them.
We can choose to lift ourselves high, to hear stories, to see people for all their nuance and potential and bits and pieces.
I have two quick quotes for you because they helped me today when I was feeling anxious on the couch. I hope they help you, too. But before I share them, I want to thank you for being here with me. You give up your time to read these words of mine. That’s a big deal. So, thanks. Thanks for being here with me.
Here are those quotes:
"Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it," - Kahlil Gibran
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein
Carrie...I am so grateful that your writing brought you into my life. You make my life better. You often bring light into a dark place that I couldn't see out of. This post was one of those pinpricks of light I needed to see. Thank you. So damn much.