Interview: Robert Kagen and Lisa Lahey

I reached out to the authors of Immunity to Change, Robert Kagen and Lisa Lahey of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, with a few questions about their theory on how we can overcome the obstacles to making the changes we want. (Discussed in yesterday's post.) Their responses are even more detailed and insightful than what I read in the O Magazine article. I can't wait to read their book (to be released in mid-February and can be pre-ordered online).

Here is what they had to say:

Q. Please specify the steps you recommend to someone who finds him/herself bogged down in his/her efforts to change.

A. Before suggesting any ‘step’ we want to say that we aren’t actually that big on ‘advice.’ We don’t think we are any smarter than the people we help, so what we’d come up with for ‘what you might try’ is probably no different than what people have already thought of on their own. What we have to offer starts off in quite a different direction: Don’t take any step out of the ‘bog’ at all—until you have a new ‘footing’ for taking steps in the first place! Helping you see your ‘immunity to change’ provides that ‘new footing.’

Now having said that, we suppose we can suggest some first ‘inner steps’ to get you into the right state to develop this new footing. You need to get your head and heart in a good frame — change is hard and if you are trying to change some long held way of operating, it will take time (and concerted effort) to alter that. Too often, people believe they ought to be able to see gains immediately, and then they get discouraged. (And for many people, that discouragement turns into self-disparagement, which then gets them into a negative spiral!).

Another early internal prep is to ask yourself how important your goal is to you. Because change is so hard, you need to really want to change. We use a 1-5 “important to me” scale (1=not very important, and 5=extremely important). Minimally, you need to think and feel that your goal is very important (4). This is what you believe, and not only what others may want for or from you.

Be explicit about why your current change goal is so important to you. What do you hope to gain by making this change? Identify your personal reasons first and only then consider how others may benefit by your accomplishing your goal. This whole step is about clarifying your motivational state (a huge resource for change work).

If all of this is in place (you have a positive frame of mind, a very important goal, and high incentive for pursuing it) and you are stymied, it’s worth asking whether there is some technical reason why you are not making progress: are you trying to accomplish too much all at once? Are you in the midst of some big change in your life that leaves no time, energy or spirit left for this additional change? If you can’t identify any powerful technical explanation, then it’s quite likely that you have an immunity to change around that particular goal. Welcome to the big canoe!

All the next steps we recommend add up to having you understand what your exact immunity is. That’s where the 4-column exercise comes in.

Once you’ve done that, the next steps involve targeted self-observations and learning how to test new actions that can inform your worldview. We describe and give lots of examples of all these steps in our new book, Immunity to Change.


Q. The core of your theory on overcoming the obstacles to change seems to hinge on our ability to identify our buried anxieties. How do you recommend we go about identifying these anxieties if we hide them from ourselves?

A. Our Immunity to Change exercise is designed to do exactly that. Starting in Column 1, we write the important goal we want to accomplish. Then, we honestly answer the question of what we, personally, are doing and not doing that works against that goal. We then use that column 2 information as a resource to identify our anxiety. How? By asking ourselves the question, “Imagine doing the opposite of those behaviors in column 2. What worries or fears come up?” We enter our answer into the top of column 3.

Let’s anchor this in an example: let’s say I have a goal to be more straight-forward in telling people what I really think. What do I do that works against that? I sugar coat my words; I withhold what I really think; I say something once and if the person doesn’t respond, I let it go. That takes me to the critical step: now I need to ask myself to imagine doing the opposite of all that—so imagine saying things directly, and follow-up on that—and then paying attention to what worries or fears emerge. Ok, I worry that I’ll say the wrong thing, and that people will think I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I’m uninformed, maybe even dumb. Or I might worry that I will make people uncomfortable, and they won’t like that or me! Or perhaps my biggest worry is that people will, in turn, be more frank with me, and I’m not sure I want to hear that. Different people, obviously, will answer this question differently.

That’s the worry. Now I need to take another step in column 3 which involves seeing our active relationship to these anxieties.

The core idea behind the immunity to change is that we do not merely have these fears; we sensibly, even artfully, protect ourselves from them. We create ways of dealing with the anxiety these fears provoke. We are not only afraid; we take action to combat our fears. We are actively (but not necessarily consciously) committed to making sure the things we are afraid of do not happen. This is the heart of a third-column commitment. It is a commitment to keep the thing we are afraid of from happening. To follow this example then, I could say I have a commitment to be seen by others as being smart, or easy-going, or likeable. Or that I have a commitment to people withholding the negative feedback they have for me.

Identifying our anxiety, seeing how it has a hold on us and how it gets in the way of accomplishing important goals (our immunity to change) is a crucial step. But that insight isn’t sufficient for us to change. We need to identify the assumptions we are making that keep that anxiety running so deeply. (And that’s column 4). It’s the assumptions we make that hold us back.

The most reliable route to ultimately dismantling the immune system begins by identifying the core assumptions that sustain it. We use the concept of “big assumptions” to signal that there are some ways we understand ourselves and the world (and the relationship between the world and ourselves) that we do not see as mental constructions. Rather, we see them as truths, incontrovertible facts, accurate representations of how we and the world are. These constructions of reality are actually assumptions; they may well be true, but they also may not be. When we treat an assumption as if it is a truth, we have made it what we call a big assumption.

The heart of successful change is learning how to safely test those so that we can generate actual, rather than imagined, data about the consequences of new actions. This is how we can develop a new understanding that the world works differently than we had imagined, that we can still be safe—and even experience more expansive benefits—doing things we never thought possible before.


Q. Do you have suggestions on how we should sort through our anxieties? In other words, how do we individually assess which anxieties are healthy and necessary and which ones hold us back from our potential?

A. We might have to push back a bit on this forced choice. It may be important to start with a recognition that all our anxieties are, in a way, ‘healthy,’ insofar as the impulse to take care of ourselves, to keep ourselves alive, is certainly healthy. We start Immunity to Change with our belief that the usual explanations for why change is so difficult are not very good: ‘Human weakness,’ ‘lack of discipline,’ ‘insufficient incentives,’ ‘the inability for old dogs to learn new tricks,’ and so on. We say that the failure to accomplish important goals is often due to the success we are having accomplishing other goals which are usually out of sight!

The person in the example above is failing at being more courageous in his communications, but he is succeeding brilliantly at staying likeable or protecting himself from other people’s frankness, or whatever is ‘in this 3rd column.’ These hidden, parallel goals are always about protecting ourselves. They are about the way we are handling the fear of our own demise. We need to start with the sense that this anxiety, like a big friendly dog that barks at everyone who comes to the door, is on our side, and intends our good. When we look out the window, and see that all this barking is about the postman, we don’t shoot our dog. We just tell him, ‘Calm down, silly, It’s just Ed, the mailman; relax.” The experiments we describe in Immunity to Change are a way to help us learn to run our big friendly dog, rather than letting our dog run us.

Q. Do you think it's possible to overcome our psychological fears/anxieties without addressing real life sources that engendered those fears/anxieties in the first place?

A. In most cases, yes. The problem for most of us is that our assumptions about the dangers we face are Big Assumptions, that is, they may be correct in some cases but we over-generalize them. We all have a particular ‘door’ where we see all approachers as dangerous intruders. So we then need to protect ourselves all of the time. At some earlier point in our lives, we may have learned that speaking directly and honestly is dangerous. Whether we learned that indirectly, e.g., we witnessed scenes between our parents, or directly, e.g., we got slapped, literally or figuratively, for saying what we thought, these are powerful learning events. Where we get into trouble is when that learning extends beyond that situation and shapes our understanding of how the whole world works and how I therefore need to operate all of the time. As we discuss in the book, some people we work with make very explicit connections between their now-visible, anxious ‘parallel goals’ and things that happened to them years ago, sometimes many, many years ago. It’s often a powerful and helpful experience. Making that connection is one kind of fuel for overturning the immunity to change. But many people make no such connection, ever, throughout our work together, and they also make big progress. Happily, there are many sources of ‘fuel,’ and our process tries to make them all available to people.


Q. For those in your workshops who failed to change as they set out to do, did you notice any common thread(s) in what went wrong?

A. The most common threads are these:

• the original goal gets seen in a brighter light (through the immunity to change) and the person concludes that it’s just not as important as he or she thought it was. They drop their change goal, at least for now. That may be because they now understand what would need to change and that feels too scary or risky, or because they see the various trade-offs and conclude that the status quo is good enough, or they realize what’s involved in tackling the change and this is just not a good time in their lives to take it on. (None of this means that the person won’t eventually feel otherwise; “readiness” to change is a real phenomena)

• the person gets pulled into trying to change by going only at behaviors, and ignoring the underlying mindset changes that also need to change. (Sometimes the opposite happens, where the person gets too drawn into the psychology dimension and isn’t willing or able to risk testing assumptions).

Q. Have you noticed any common personality types or backgrounds (i.e., difficult life experiences, etc.) among people who are more resistant to changing despite their own goals?

A. The kind of change we are talking about here doesn’t occur for personality types who want quick and big results.


Q. Have you worked with many attorneys in your workshops? If so, have you noticed any common trait(s) among attorneys and their resistance to change?

A. Yes, we’ve worked with many attorneys. In general, they seem to appreciate the logic behind the 4-column exercise and are surprised at how quickly it gets to real issues.


Q. Do you still offer workshops on change at the Harvard Graduate School of Education? How do we sign up?

A. Yes, our next workshop is scheduled for Saturday, March 28th. For further information feel free to leave any message on our website, www.mindsatwork.com, or call us at 781-254.4541.

***

Wow, lot to chew on... I hope you find this as helpful as I do.

Disentangling

As you know, I've been frustrated by my slow progress in figuring out my new direction. I've made so little progress and have been irritated with myself for having squandered so much time. It has been eight months since I got booted out of Paul Hastings, and I have very little to show for it. This period has been the most unproductive since I left law school. I keep asking myself, why can't I get it together?

During my plane ride to Israel, I read an eye opening article about a new book called Immunity to Change by clinical psychologist Robert Kagen and Lisa Lahey (to be released in mid-February). Essentially, Kagen and Lahey believe that when we fail to bring about the change we want, it could be because we are at odds with ourselves. When we find difficulty implementing changes, despite ourselves, our defense mechanism may be kicking in to protect ourselves from a deeply buried layer of anxiety. It is, as the article quoted, having "one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake."

It may not be because we are lazy or lack willpower. (Well, not always.)

"What you see as demonic is actually in some ways a very tender expression," says Lahey, "a protection of something you feel vulnerable about."

I find this theory fascinating. I have been treating this transition mainly as a job change, but it is also a transformation of identity and realignment of values. The article made me realize that I need to be more attentive to the psychological transition I am undergoing. Considering how I spent the past ten years talking myself into accepting my lot as an attorney, I should recognize that I am buried under layers of psychological shields I put in place. And it will take time and patience to dismantle them.

When I was a third year law student, I went to a friend's wedding. My friend put me at the same table with an accomplished documentary filmmaker knowing how much I appreciated her work. I sat two seats away from the filmmaker, and between us was another young woman about my age. When the filmmaker asked us what we did, I stammered, "Well, I'm in law school..." and the woman in the middle said, "I'm a writer," even though she soon clarified that she had not yet been published. The filmmaker asked me one or two polite questions about law school and then turned to the writer with a host of questions I wished she had asked me, like what kind of writing do you do, who are your favorite authors, what do you think about this or that book, etc. That evening, I realized for the first time what my career decision meant for me. Others would cast me in the role of a lawyer, with all the stereotypes and assumptions that go with it, just as I had stereotypes about politicians or actresses. That was probably one of my most depressing days in law school.

So for the past ten years, I built up some defenses to help me come to terms with my unhappy choice. Some of it came in the form of being overly sensitive to lawyer jokes, talking a little too insistently about the practicalities of making a decent living and setting up for retirement, rolling my eyeballs at the artsy, fartsy types. Some of it resulted in arguments with my sister, who obtained an MFA in writing. Some of it manifested in the smugness of buying $15 martinis and taking a cab because my time was too precious to be wasted on public transportation.

So I am going to sit down and sort through these issues, one by one, and try to disentangle myself as much as I can.

And then maybe I will be ready to start writing seriously in about ten more years...

In Search of Redemption

I'm not the only Korean kid whose parents acted as if becoming a lawyer or a doctor were the only career options. For my parents, the doctor path was the first line of offense. Throughout high school, we were barraged by comments like, Don't you want to become a doctor? Dr. Rosenberg is such a gentleman. He always pays his bills on time. Look how well his wife dresses. Along with some downright dirty, guilt-tripping pleas like, Wouldn't it be nice to have a doctor in the family? Think of how you can help us when we grow old. Imagine if we developed heart problems... They found ways to weave these hints into any random occasion, bearing testimony to their faith in the Chinese water torture method. If you repeat it often enough, my mother once confessed, it will seep in.

Every time I tried to point out that I fainted at the sight of my own blood and that I hated chemistry, my parents dismissed me with a wave of the hand. You can become a doctor if you try hard enough. As if it were only a matter of effort. Their bombardment continued until I declared myself an English major in college. Soon, my parents began telling their customers that English was a perfect major for pre-law.

Their imposed career path hung like an albatross around my neck. Perhaps a common legacy for immigrant children, my life felt ransomed. As if it had already been paid for by my parents who worked fourteen to sixteen hour days, first at a hamburger joint, then at a dry cleaners. When they lifelessly dragged themselves to the store at the crack of dawn with the same packed lunch of rice and chicken they had eaten daily for years, bickered over the smallest cleaning mishaps, or snored heavily in front of the tv on their one day off, I felt responsible.

We moved to the States in 1979 when our dad was transferred to the NY office of Hyundai Heavy Industries. When Hyundai asked him to return to Korea after six years, my dad quit after weeks of hand-wringing. It was the first time we saw him cry. Our parents said that returning to Korea would jeopardize our futures, especially of my brother who was already a high school sophomore and would not have enough time to prepare for Korea's rigorous college entrance exams. Almost overnight, our father went from being a managing director of a Korean conglomerate who gloated in retelling the tales of his business trips to Scotland, India and Amsterdam to a guy who served strawberry shakes and french fries, from a father who steadfastly doled out extra homework to the man who sat alone in the corner and could muster no more than a few perfunctory words for his children.

It was our fall from middle class grace, where we left behind full service gas stations, Jordache jeans, and company picnics. The transition may have been less traumatic had the success come easily. But our father had paid for his success with defiance, loneliness, and hard work. For a boy who, through sheer persistence, had propelled himself from a life of rice paddies, manual labor, and flimsy plank outhouses above the pig's trough to scholarships to Masan High School and then to Seoul National University, it must have felt like waking from a dream.

When our family returned to Korea for a short visit in the late 80's, my dad's relatives looked at his haggard face and my mother's emaciated frame and interrogated, Why did you go to America? Was it worth it? Those questions must have seeped into my veins, because I found myself struggling to find a way out of this confounding riddle. The move that had beckoned with a promising future brought instead a crushing end to a cherished career and threatened to drown us in regret. The need to find a way to redeem the difficult lives we were living, to find a way out, felt pressurized, as if we were living in an underwater bubble about to burst. To my teenage mind, all the answers pointed to our career choices, and I wondered how to surface without suffocating myself in the process.

My career path started at a fork, leading to either redemption or rejection. On the one hand, I could choose a career that answered for my parents' difficult lives in the US. To the question Why did you move to America?, my life could supply the answer Why, for the children, of course. Look where they are now. It was all worth it. And my parents could smile at their relatives with some level of self-satisfaction. Alternatively, I could do what I wanted, answer to my inner desire, and fulfill my potential in a field that fed my urgings. But this choice would afford my parents no bragging rights, no sense of redemption. The first choice seemed misguidedly too old world, too self-sacrificing, and the latter childish and selfish, too American.

If only I had been inclined to become a doctor or a lawyer. Instead, I found it a painful dilemma. I timidly wanted to write. My parents had invested in a future lawyer. My brother buckled under the pressure of being a first-born son and rebelled. The burden fell to me, the second born. I took my LSAT during my fourth year of college. When I scored in the 98th percentile, I bragged to a few close friends but hid the results from my parents. When I received my acceptance into Georgetown Law a couple of years later, I cried. I remember asking my mother, with all the angst of a 24 year-old, why I, and not my siblings, had to be the one to be sacrificed, why couldn't I be free to live my own life. And I self-pityingly mulled over the injustice that someone else's mere wish should shape my life.

For the past decade, I worked as an attorney without too much regret, but still wondered if this is all there is. When I lost my job in 2008, my parents surprisingly encouraged me not to look for work immediately. You need to rest your body to have your baby, they said. You can always look for some part time job later. Initially, I felt as if I had been betrayed for the past fifteen years, as if my career, which they were now dismissing so casually, never really meant that much to them. But then I started to realize that sometime during the past fifteen years, the pressures we used to have must have been released. Somewhere along the line, the wounds we had as a family healed, and we were no longer in such desperate need of a salve. We could now make room for other priorities. I felt as if I had been released, as if I had repaid my dues.

In our lives, I see the Gift of the Magi, where a sacrifice is returned with another sacrifice. Where for the future of his children, a man gives up his dreams, and his children sacrifice some of their own to restore what he lost. Instead of a thwarted career smothering another, I've wondered if there could have been another way. I struggle to find some insight and wisdom admist the clutter of cultural rifts, unfulfilled dreams, and the painful lament that love should demand so much. But I remember what my mother told me a few years after I received my JD. You don't know what you have done for your father. You gave him his spirit back. And I fill with a quiet pride and whisper a silent thanks that all is not lost.

Beginning of Days

I love new beginnings. I love brushing off the lumps of yesterday's what if's and if only's and flinging them behind me. No need to let those awkward mistakes, regrets, and irritants pass through the fine sieve of the new year. Why stay at their mercy?

So I kick my miscarriages and Paul Hastings job fiasco to the gutter. I first stomp on them, with my fists clenched, face scrunched, all my effort concentrated on landing perfectly in place, and crush them like empty beer cans. I draw in a breath and swing my leg swiftly, aiming as far and high as I could. They land with a thud. May the dust settle where they will.

I squeeze my way into the new year, keeping my eyes wide open. I already feel lighter. And more hopeful. It is only the beginning of the year, and I have yet to grow my onion layers of spent days. From here, I will try to remember that things grow outward from within, and that it is my core I need to cultivate. I will try to remember to be kind to myself, nurturing what needs to grow, protecting what tends to cower. And I will try to see things with a clear perspective.

Like the ability to see that all I have to discard from 2008 are the miscarriages and the job fiasco. Just those three from a year's worth of living ain't too bad. And these are not purely unfortunate events. The Paul Hastings termination is a blessing in disguise since I would have surely been miserable had I worked in a law firm my whole life but may have lacked the guts to leave on my own. The experience was so shocking only because I had been so sheltered for the past decade. As for my miscarriages, I remind myself that just two years ago, I was whining about the possibility of being alone forever, and here I am today, with the sweetest man and the possibility of someday having children. The miscarriages are setbacks only because I did not view them as a normal byproduct of trying to have children, which I now am beginning to appreciate.

And if the tears come -- when the tears come -- I will tell myself that they are natural outgrowths of all that I have. Which is not necessarily a bad place to be.

Notice

Hello, Everyone,

We'll be traveling for the next two weeks, so I will probably be off-line until the week of January 5, 2009. I hope you'll come back and visit then.

In the meantime, warm and happy holiday wishes to all of you!

Evening of Panic

Everything felt perfectly fine yesterday morning when I dropped Jeff off at the airport at 10:30 am. He found out last week that he had to go on a last minute business trip to Israel, and we hastily booked his flight for Saturday and made plans for me to join him on Thursday when he would be done with his work and I, with my doctor's appointments for additional tests. From the airport, I rushed back to the city to pick up my dear (and as it turned out, hungover) friend Paul who was waiting for me at a Bart station. We attended an information session on USF's MFA program and then spent the rest of the afternoon having lunch and loitering at a Border's.

Around 4pm, I headed back home, looking forward to reading Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, a book recommended by a friend and one I was sure would launch me into writer stardom. I pictured myself, curled up on our chaise lounge, under the lamp, complacently absorbing words of wisdom and the key to my future.

Thirty minutes later, I found myself feeling strangely panicked. The house was too quiet and everything too still. The house felt too narrow, the walls too close. I looked at the clock, and it was only 5pm. The thought of facing the whole evening alone felt suffocating and daunting. I dreaded another minute alone in the house.

I wrapped myself in layers, put the leash on Sherlock, and headed toward the doggie park less than two blocks away. When we neared the park, after many No!s, Sit!s, and Sherlock, No Pulling!s, I scanned the park to survey the visitors of the hour. When I saw the lone owner and the lone doggie packing up to leave, my chest fell, and I pitied the two of us about to enter a soon to be empty park. We walked in, and much to our relief, other moms and dads with their little pooches entered the park within minutes. We did the usual greetings. What's the name of your little one? How old is she? Oh, mine's a little nutty. He doesn't really care to play with other dogs. Oh, really? Well, at least yours isn't OCD like mine. All he cares about is that ball even around a cute poodle like yours. We stayed for at least forty minutes in the unusually cold evening, mainly because I was reluctant to return to the quiet of our house.

When we returned, the quiet was still there, as palpable as the wall. I felt gripped by some strange pressure, making it difficult for me to breathe, making me feel too alone and slightly panicked. I turned on the lights in the kitchen, the dining area, the living room, the hallway, and even the bathroom and the bedrooms that were completely separated from where I was sitting. I popped in a CD, first Puccini's La Boheme, then irritated by what now sounded too distant, Eurythmics' Greatest Hits, the music of my college years. I sat on the couch, checked my gmail, read the latest stories on the NYTimes, the Huffington Post, SFGate. Then I went onto iTunes, looking for some movie I could click on and impatiently scrolled through a couple of categories. I made Sherlock sit on the couch with me. Within a few more minutes of clicking, I found myself darting off of the couch, pacing the room, feeling suffocated, wondering if I should just step outside and walk around the streets in the dark aimlessly.

What was wrong with me? I am a woman used to solitude. I spent big chunks of my 20s and early 30s living alone, coming home to an empty house. There had also been many nights when I had worked late in the office, at ease with the fact that I was alone on the entire floor. Even during the past two years, Jeff had been away for days at a time for his business trips, and I had felt perfectly fine. But today, I felt panicked. I had felt this kind of panic only twice before, once after a bad break-up and another when I was visiting relatives in Korea and realized that no one there, possibly no one in the entire country, really understood me, not the way I needed to be understood.

I found myself typing out a panicked email to a few girlfriends and clicked the send button, knowing how busy they usually kept themselves, wondering what they had already planned for the evening, and regretting that I hadn't planned my weekend in advance.

I put on my jogging gear, got in the car, and drove to the gym. It was 6:30 on a Saturday night. I never went to the gym at this hour on a weekend, even when I had no plans. I found the gym surprisingly filled with people and felt relieved. I jumped on the elliptical with an enthusiasm I rarely saved for this machine and focused on following the plight of the gorillas in Rwanda and Congo on Planet in Peril.

About an hour later, I returned home and found that six of my girlfriends had already responded to my panic email. On a Saturday night. They left email and voicemail messages inviting me out, suggesting get togethers for the following day. And I felt a wave of relief come over me. My friends were out there, making time for me even on a busy night. I felt the panic subside, the loneliness dissipate. I made plans for the following day and had a glass of wine. I spent the rest of the evening talking to my sweet friend Sarah who was taking a break from consecutive late nights of flirting (and depriving many bar hopping men of her wit and charm). And by the time I went to sleep, I felt once again at ease in my world.

Jeff's Glass

Jeff blows glass as a hobby. I thought I'd post a photo of one of his pieces. Here's how he described it when it was auctioned earlier this year at the Bay Area Glass Institute Great Glass Auction:

"Inspired by Davide Salvadore, Lee Militier, and The Smurfs. A tubby thing, with a white core, coated in two-tone blue transparent veil cane, with a chubby split neck."

Gestating

I think I'm buckling under the pressure I'm putting on myself to figure out my career while trying to have a baby. I keep thinking that it has already been over seven months since I was let go by Paul Hastings and that should be more than enough time to have figured out my career direction, studied the ins and outs of this new career, and written the great American novel. Since I failed my two attempts at having a kid, I should at least have succeeded in that, right?

Instead, I've barely gotten started. I am only now starting to become comfortable with the idea of giving up my career as a lawyer. Maybe it sounds shocking that I'm not long past this. It's not the job but the security that comes with it that I find hard to let go. But it dawns on me (belatedly) that this security is no longer a given, not just because of the state of the economy, but because I've been booted out. To survive as a lawyer at my level, I have to be willing to fight like a shark, and I can muster neither the motivation nor the energy. Frankly, the idea of working again as a full time litigator fills me with dread. When I see listings on craigslist.com or law.com for litigator positions, I find myself articulating reasons why the position would not work for me.

There are times when I regret having spent the past ten years working as a lawyer. The Obama's and the Michelle Rhee's of this world make me feel like I've spent my time so poorly. I keep thinking of where I would be had I invested the past 10 years working on my writing instead. Yeah, maybe no Pulitzer Prize to my name, but at least I could be writing professionally and have some by-lines to point to. And who's to say that I would not have succeeded? I'm not sure how some people nurture the confidence to forge ahead in the face of unlikely odds, but I would surely like to have some of that rub off on me.

I spent an inordinate amount of time in college fretting about my career. Too earnestly, I believed in the importance of one's life work, the product that sums up your human effort, ideals, values. At the same time, I struggled with the need to create a sense of security in our family. Our immigrant way of living in the US - with no relatives and few friends - felt so vulnerable, and I obsessed over the fear that my parents - who worked in a dry cleaner and had no health insurance - would be stricken with cancer. And for some reason, I thought the solution to finding our family's security and redeeming my parents' decision to live such difficult lives in the US rested entirely on my shoulders. Talk about being self-absorbed.

So I talked myself into law school. I told myself a lot of things. Knowing the law empowers you. It will give me a sense of authority. I'll make good money.

And all those things happened. And lots of other good things, like meeting some incredible people along the way, learning how to write and think precisely, learning some discipline, working on some fun, high-profile cases.

But it still does not feel like enough. I keep thinking about how I am using up the limited days of my life. I have some skepticism toward people who blindly tout following one's passions because it does not take into account any practical considerations. And I don't take lightly the need to feed oneself, pay rent, have health coverage. But I am at a different place in my life now than when I graduated from college. My parents are happily retired with a good enough nest egg. Jeff and I are financially secure, and he has been incredibly encouraging about my writing, urging me repeatedly to take the risk of going for it. And I have all the time in the world - at least for now.

So a part of me feels like I should be grateful for having had my miscarriages. It buys me time - at least for the next several months - to work on my writing, take more courses, try to get some pieces published. And I have to remind myself that seven months really isn't enough to draft up a Pulitzer Prize worthy tome, especially since I had to set aside some of that time to simmer down after the Paul Hastings dismissal, to deal with the fallouts of two miscarriages, to flail aimlessly, to do some mindless contract work, and to build up an obviously prize-worthy blog.

So here's my new mantra. Even babies get a nine month gestation period. Shouldn't I give myself at least that same amount of time to find my way into this new world?

Limits of Blogging

I guess the past few posts have been kind of depressing, huh?

I hope I'm not coming across as one of these self-pitying bores. The fact is that generally, I'm a pretty cheerful person, and I laugh very easily. When I'm with Jeff or my friends, we're often laughing, even if we are talking about the most unhappy events of our lives, not because we don't know how to talk about unhappy events but because we make each other happy. I am surrounded by amazing friends, the kind you know to cling onto your whole life, even though I don't blog about them very often, since I'm assuming they haven't abandoned their sense of privacy as casually as I have.

There are a lot of facets of my life that I haven't yet blogged about. Probably because as Tolstoy said (to paraphrase), happiness really isn't much to write about. The past month of my life has been difficult with my second miscarriage, for sure, but it hasn't been spent in the depth of despair, as it might seem from my blog alone. The rear of our house, wall to wall glass, looks out onto the garden, and my life is usually lived surrounded by California poppies, fuchsias, snapdragons, abutilons, and roses of all colors. But that is a view I haven't shared with most of you.

Here's how my life usually unfolds outside of the blog. A few weeks ago, through facebook, I found my fourth grade best friend from PS 20 in Queens, NY, and it turns out that she lives in the East Bay. The last time I saw her was when she was in college. Now, more than fifteen years later, we have reconnected, and we've spent several jolly hours catching up. Yesterday, she came over with her family along with a few other friends, and we passed the whole afternoon laughing, playing with our dog and their kids, eating, and then eating some more. I find nothing more satisfying than stuffing my friends with my cooking and then sending them home with leftovers.

And today, I am off to my book club, which we've had going for about 5 years now. The members of the club are the warmest bunch, and we love seeing each other. I'm sure we'll hang out for hours, as we usually do, gossiping, talking about the book (Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship), giggling, empathizing. Together, we have read over fifty books. And tonight, Jeff and I will be off to have dungeness crab (yum) with a high school friend of mine who's visiting from Michigan.

But would I have thought to blog about any of these events? Probably not. Because... well, because I don't assume that they are interesting to any one other than me. Also, I don't want my blog to be just a record of my daily activities, but a place where I can store some emotional truths (as pretentious as that sounds). In that process, this blog may seem a little weepy at times, perhaps a little intense, possibly somewhat imbalanced, hopefully not too neurotic. But I hope you will have the patience to bear with me.

If I ever have the occasion to meet any of you anonymous readers in person, I hope you will do me the favor of saying, "Wow, you're so different than what I expected!"

Biding Time

I tell myself that I don't want to become one of these women who do nothing but obssess about having a child, but I feel like I'm turning into one of them. It doesn't help that I'm not working right now. My contract job ended several weeks ago, which seemed perfectly fine when I was pregnant and felt both a sense of purpose and the value of my limited free time. Now, my free time stretches out indefinitely. Having too much time to think feels a little suffocating at the moment. So, I've been desperately scouring the web for a part time job to keep me somewhat busy while I continue working on my writing. And the economy flicks me a finger and says, bad timing, lady. Frankly, I wouldn't mind working at a Starbucks right now (if they're even hiring), but working as a barrista probably isn't the most constructive use of my time in the long run. Not to say that I look down on it because I would do it in a heartbeat if we needed the money.

So I'm trying to recall those days when I worked 6am to midnight and whined about wanting more free time. And dreamed of taking classes, throwing pottery, gardening, volunteering, reading, writing. I'm trying to get to a point emotionally where I can focus on my writing projects, get interested in reading about subjects other than miscarriage, where I can stave off the sense of depression that weighs me down, keeps me in bed in the morning, and questions what is the point of all this. And when a friend calls for lunch, I drag myself off to meet up with her, somewhat reluctant to go but grateful for the fishline.

I'm trying to keep it all in perspective. I know how lucky I am in so many respects compared to so many others. And I know that having this time is a tremendous privilege - and can be extremely fruitful if I can force myself to focus. And that two miscarriages is not the end of the road. Compared to what some of my friends are going through, these are just small bleeps. So I plug in my ipod, get into my jogging gear, and drag myself to the gym. I prepare my to do list for the day. I research my writing subject. I send out emails to people to propose ideas and solicit advice. I try to put my thoughts to paper. I take the dog for a walk. And before I know it, it is already evening.

And then, only then, do I look at my google calendar, count how many days it has been since my miscarriage, project how much longer until we can try again, and start to hope for another beginning.

Praise for Chutzpah

Reading about DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee makes me rethink the career choices I've made. Like me, she is a Korean American woman. Like me, she graduated from college in the early 90s. Unlike me, she didn't opt for the safe choice of going to a law school to work at a law firm making a high salary. Instead, she joined Teach for America, taught at a Baltimore elementary school for three years, and then founded The New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization that recruits new teachers to work in under-performing urban schools. In 2007, DC's Mayor Adrian Fenty plucked her from relative obscurity and threw her into the fray to fix the failing DC school system.

Now she's out to overhaul the public education system. We've all stood by on the sidelines and impatiently wondered why the public education system is in the state it is in, why no one can fix it. We've pointed our fingers at the usual villains: the union, the parents who don't spend enough time with their children, tv, the politicians, society. We've sighed a quiet sigh of relief that we have the option of sending our children to private schools, even as we bemoan the ridiculously high tuition and the waste of our tax dollars, believing there's no stopping the sinking ship. Instead of standing safely ashore, Michelle Rhee has jumped onto this Titanic, enrolling her own daughters into a DC public school, and started throwing over the deadweight, greasing the engines, and adding coal to the furnace. She's taken on the politicians, the unions, the parents - with an urgency and chutzpah we don't often see in public administrators.

Whether she will actually accomplish all that she has set out to do and how many bruises she'll suffer in the process are yet to be determined. And I don't know enough about the DC public schools system to assess whether her strategy is the most effective. What I do know is that she has come out swinging, taking on the most established of establishments and refusing to take no for an answer. She is out to change the power structure, to upset what many often assume will always be. And that is pretty damn inspiring.

We need more like her. And the surprising thing is that it is not out of our reach to be another Michelle Rhee. Especially those of us with privileged education, some amount of smarts, chutzpah, any of the above. Just think of the mess we can clean up if more of us followed in her footsteps?

Maybe it sounds silly to say that a woman my own age is my role model. But she is. And I can certainly use one.

Reading about her makes me think that safe choices in life aren't always the prudent ones. Maybe rarely.

Good thing I'm only 37 with more than enough time for additional careers.

Healing

There are some things that have the power to heal.

Like watching Sherlock romp through the doggie playground, chasing the green soft plastic ball with the dedication of a professional athlete, before he crashes into the wire mesh fence like a right fielder flying for the ball;

Fighting with the shells of a dungeness crab with all of my fingers dripping with garlic butter and then slurping up a forkful of garlic noodles as we banter about the election, Thanksgiving, the health risks of eating chicken skin;

Standing above the butternut squash and sweet potato soup, stirring, tasting, and stirring some more, as I strive for perfect spoonfuls that will feed our family;

Feeling the fleshy softness of Jeff's fingers each time he reaches across to hold my hand;

Reading my book under the warmth of Sherlock's body draped across my lap;

Seeing a new bloom on my fuchsia.

I gather these moments and place them side by side. As surely as there are broken days, there are moments like these, filled with life, shaped by happiness. With these moments, I build a giant band-aid to wrap around me, to give me space to heal.

Crevices

I spent most of last week trying not to fall into a crevice. You know, those little cracks that can suck you up and swallow you whole. Funny how you can go for months never noticing them but then all of a sudden, they seem to be everywhere when you find yourself feeling rather small. Like the tiny green baby shoe that someone had dropped in the middle of the sidewalk. Or at the doctor's waiting room where I found myself surrounded by pregnant ladies in chirpy excitement over their due dates. Or in my backyard where I found my blood colored camellia dead surrounded by thriving giant weeds sucking up whatever energy the sun had to emit. I don't want to ponder the meaning of life or death or its cruel irony. Not this week. I don't want to get stuck in these little moments that can swirl into a giant vortex of meaning.

I want to tread lightly over the tricky letters in the word miscarriage, especially the concave c with its wide open mouth and the slippery g that winds around itself like a little maze. I want to fly over the loopy s's in loss even as I find myself curled up like one giant s on my bed with my legs bent at the knees and my head curled into my chest. And avoid slipping down the diagonal of the y in baby and getting stuck at the bottom with no way to climb back up. I want to bounce off of these letters so that I can find my way to the next word and then the next, past the punctuations and the spaces, and eventually onto the next sentence and then the next paragraph.

This is my life unfolding, page by page. And I tell myself not to get stuck here. I need to refocus my lens, gain some distance, so that I can see past these few words, these few sentences. I have to find my way onto the next page, the next chapter. I want to end up ensconced in the warm embrace of o in love, buoyed by the peppy p's in happiness, and resigned to the decisive t in fate.

NY Observer Article

Here's a fun little article by Glenna Goldis in the New York Observer about "email-retentives."

Miscarriage of Silence

I reject silence because silence is not for me.

Silence is for the criminal in hand cuffs who has something to hide.

Silence is for Charlie Chaplain who danced with the world that laughed with him.

Silence is for the adulterer who hangs her head in shame for stealing the life of another.

Silence is for the Buddhist monk in meditation who empties his heart and mind by choice.

Silence is for the lambs as they wait to be slaughtered.

Silence is for the dead.

Silence was not for my friend Jemma's mother who screamed and clung to the coffin as her daughter was lowered into the grave.

Silence was not for my mother who wailed with the cry of an animal I had never before heard when she learned of her mother's death.

Silence is not for the angry who take to the streets in protest for the deaths of innocents.

Silence is not for those who feel cheated and seek to reclaim what was lost.

Silence is not for the heartbroken.

I want the world to know how I cry for my lost baby.

Silence is not for me.

My Bruise

There is a bruise on my right arm. It is a black, brown, purple oval, yellowing along the edge, about an inch and a half long, half an inch wide, in the inner part of the arm just below where the elbow bends.

I saw it the other morning in the shower as I was washing myself of what does not belong, what is not a part of my body. There it was, a smudge of something that did not belong but would not wash off.

It is there where the doctor had inserted the needle. After the greeting, after the droopy eyes to express her sympathy, after the warm touch of her hand, after the tears. After we made some jokes because that is all we had, likening it to two glasses of martini. After the injection, she had me lie on the table, feet in the stirrups, bottom all the way down to the edge. As my head dropped, I felt the drug ride through me, soothing and numbing, and I gave in without resistance.

And I lay there, staring at the ceiling where little cut out women dangled in the air, pretending I was drunk on fancy martinis without olives, as the noise of the suction whirled around in my ears. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the nurse dangle some tissue, bloody and wet and glistening under the florescent light, before dropping it in a test tube, and I tightened my grip on Jeff's hand.

Later, I staggered out of that room, not only drunk on the injection but weighted down by the pain of the cramps, even though I was leaving lighter than when I had entered. We went home where I lay in bed, clutching my stomach, smelling my own smell from the night before.

Today, I find myself looking at my bruise, touching it. It provides a strange comfort. It is the only thing that remains after the process of removal.

Quagmire

I am pruning the over grown tree in front of our house. It has been two years since I took the time to tend to it. During that time, I have seen its gaunt branches threaten to take over the sidewalk, slap the faces of unsuspecting pedestrians, and lurk over fragile windows of innocently parked cars. Today, I go at it with my lopping shears in hand, forcefully severing its limbs with broad swaths, watching the flutter of leaves as they dive to the ground, hearing the heavy fall of its parts. And I find myself wondering, why this sudden enthusiasm? Why today? Why am I so eager to cut through this life?

I sit with my laptop on my lap. I click impatiently, scanning the page for some magic words I have not yet identified, before moving onto the next link to begin scanning again. There are so many stories, so many women, so many lost children. I leave little notes here and there, desperate to connect, secretly begging for sympathy. When I look up, it's already noon. How could that be?

I run into an acquaintance I hadn't seen for months. I scrutinize her smiling face, wondering if I should say something or stay with the small talk. In the middle of Market Street with the buzz of cable cars and buses and pedestrians. When people are already starting to prepare for the holidays, and tourists bounce past the stores with maps and shopping bags in hand. And in my baggy green camouflage pants, raggedy fleece with a hole on the left sleeve, nondescript black shirt, I'm dressed as if I have disappeared, as if I no longer exist. I wonder if she wonders where I have gone, if I am lost.

I don't want this to be my life. Not the whole of it. I want to move on, not get stuck here. Please, not for too long...

Nourishment

I don't want to wallow. So I turn to anger, that all too easily accessible, less than authentic, wonder bread of emotions.

On Friday, I found myself on the couch, clutching Darci Klein's To Full Term until I had turned the last page. It is the story of a mother who, after having a daughter prematurely at 28 weeks, suffers two subsequent miscarriages and then goes onto another pregnancy with twins. At 20 weeks, the twin boy's sac ruptures and she is faced with the impossible choice of having to agree to abort both twins. By the time she becomes pregnant a fifth time, she had spent an inordinate amount of time researching miscarriages and learning more about the subject than some of her doctors. By insisting that she receive the tests and care she would not otherwise have received, she saves her pregnancy and carries her baby to full term.

I read her story, and my attitude about miscarriages has changed. I have been so passive about my pregnancies, accepting what my doctor told me and just waiting to see what happens. Now I wish I had insisted on the whole set of tests after my first miscarriage and demanded additional monitoring during my second pregnancy. I accepted my doctor's cursory statement that 70% of miscarriages are caused by chromosomal abnormalities and that the causes of the remaining 30% cannot be determined. Apparently, this statistic is not correct for women in my age group. And for miscarriages that are not caused by chromosomal defects, there are a slew of tests that can be used to assess other possible causes. I know I read about the other tests after my first miscarriage, but for some reason, I focused on the language regarding chromosomal defects, possibly because I wanted to believe there was nothing that could have been done to save the baby. Now I wonder if I could have saved this baby had I insisted on testing after my first miscarriage?

So I am angry, about the poor quality of research available about miscarriages, the wait and see attitude that I had accepted for the past several months, my failure to inform myself, the unanswered questions. According to Klein, NIH spends not even 1% of its funds to research miscarriages, indicating that they treat miscarriages as inevitable conditions instead of treatable disorders. So I focus on this anger and map out a plan. Compliance and complacence will be checked at the door. I will put on my litigator hat, put skepticism and scrutiny on high alert, and filter for glib responses. I will scour the web and bookstores and squeeze whomever I can for answers.

Even with this anger, I know that I could take the entire slew of currently available tests and come up with no answers. That the tests could say nothing is wrong, even though something is obviously not right. That months and months later, we could find ourselves helpless, with not much more knowledge than we have now. And that we could find ourselves traipsing from day to day, wondering again what the hell went wrong.

But that thought is more than I can bear right now. For now, I will embrace this anger and let it nurture me and nourish the emptiness echoing throughout my body.

Not Again...

I am sad to report that I had another miscarriage yesterday. We went in for our genetic counseling and CVS and found out that the fetus did not have a heart beat when we did the ultrasound. Apparently, it stopped growing shortly after my last ultrasound when we saw the heartbeat at 9 weeks and 3 days. For the past two weeks, my placenta and ovaries continued to nurture the little thing as if it were still alive, which is why I continued to have pregnancy symptoms. At least this time, I was spared the pain of watching the life leak out of me and having to drain myself every few minutes.

So, we're back to the drawing board. I'm not sure how I'm feeling yet. A little numb still. We are planning to undergo some tests to see if they can figure out what went wrong. I'm trying not to get too discouraged because I've heard so many success stories from many of you who've had a much tougher time. So for now, I'm just going to hang in here and try not feel too sad for myself.

On Stolen Time

I am 11 weeks and two days into my pregnancy. It is now one day after the length of the last pregnancy, and I feel as if I'm living on stolen time. At times, I find myself stealing glances over my shoulder, looking to see who's out to reclaim this time and declare that this time was never mine to enjoy. When I tell my friends that I'm pregnant, I speak sheepishly, feeling like an interloper staking a claim to what isn't really mine. At other times, I find myself flinging back on the couch, relieved as a mound of silly putty that we've survived this far, we, this baby and I.

I still have not told my mother about my pregnancy. She calls every few days and always makes a point to ask, "How is your body?" A seemingly strange question, but one that asks without asking, are you still fertile? are you still trying? are you pregnant yet? My answer is always a curt "I'm fine" because I am a terrible liar and I can feel her staring through the phone into my blushing face and wondering what it is I am hiding.

I think of Jeff's 74 year old father's response back in March when we told him I was pregnant. He counted out six fingers on his hands and said, "I can last that long. I'm going to last long enough to take him to the Wild Animal Park." We also haven't yet told him about this pregnancy. We'll wait until the shadow of disappointment recedes into the closet, or at least under the shadow of our happiness.

I am counting the minutes until the second trimester as if it is my day of reckoning. I feel as if in five days, I can start breathing again. I haven't read any baby books since April and I haven't opened any of the documents I started back then, the list of baby gears, the list of to dos and don'ts when the baby arrives, the list of things we should know as parents. I don't have time for the future yet. I need to focus on keeping this little being alive, healthy, inside me.