State of the Self Address

2013 Seventh Annual State of the Self Address

Published on by Lisa

Every year I write a reflection about the past year of my life and deliver it on my birthday.  This year, the address will be given twice.  Once to my husband Nick, who is in Rhode Island, using FaceTime at midnight.  The second time address goes to a dear group of friends, my dinner guests, to help celebrate 34 big ones.

I could eat 34 avocados over the next year.

I could throw a quarter, a nickel, and four pennies into a fountain with a hefty wish.

I could donate $340 to my favorite charity. I could run for 34 minutes.

I could write a 34 word haiku, or even write a 34 word haiku everyday for the next 34 days.

It seems that that’s what birthdays have come to mean to a lot of people, doing something to commemorate the number of years they’ve survived lived.

I’m not doing any of those things.  Instead, I sit down and give myself the curse gift of an honest reflection.  Once a year, I become a coroner over the body of a life I lived for the past year, investigating the scars, the stretches, the entry and exit wounds of the bullets of life.  All the evidence is gathered to be delivered in a report I call The State of the Self.  And it’s not just the wounds that are noted, but the signs of growth, ghost trails of joy, mapping personal achievement and meaning over the past year.  This is the seventh year I’ve done this and still, like every year before, I struggle to convey what a year of life, my life, can mean in words.

It was the year of breaks and break-throughs.  Friends and neighbors died.  Break.  Nick finished his MBA program.  Breakthrough.  My book was picked up by a publisher.  Breakthrough.  The publication journey began. Break.  Praise finds me, blithe criticism follows.

The year went on like that.  Life goes on like that.

In my Catholic peer circles, when they found out I was 33, would often remark, “Oh hey!  It’s your Jesus year!”  To which I thought, “Oh, awesome!  That’s the year he was betrayed by his closest friends, tortured, arrested, wrongly convicted and crucified.  Excellent.”

No, 33 took a different route than crucifixion.  It was the year that I radically accepted the mysterious paradox of making life choices.  I relinquished Robert Frost’s most beloved image – the diverge in the wood and the less traveled by road making all the difference –  in favor of Sylvia Plath’s terrifying image of a fig tree as my touchstone:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

My figs are beautiful and plump, and represent different parts of me.  Upon intense scrutiny, they all seemed to have my initials imprinted on them.  One fig was a tireless journalist.  Another was an artistic photographer.  One fig is a respected novelist.  Another fig was a psychotherapist working with survivors of violence and trauma.  Yet another fig was a gender and women studies professor.  Another fig was a zumba instructor.  Another fig was a mother of four.  Another fig was a nomadic missionary.  A priestess fig.  A globe-trotting human rights lawyer fig.  A smashing activist fig.

The fear of failure, of things and life ending, the fear of publicly stumbling, the fear of turning around and finding oneself alone in a crusade, the fear of being wrong impedes the fig-selection process.  Fear is a contagious mental illness, the mouth that never stops whispering. Despite those devilish whispers, we must choose.

I’m tempted to write an ending that describes the fig I chose, but the significance isn’t which fig I chose, it’s the fact that I actually and tentatively chose one.  For now.  Unlike Sylvia’s figs, which wrinkled, darkened, and fell to the ground, mine did not follow suit. Sylvia watched her figs die and I refuse to sit as she did and starve into the bend of a tree.  Off the page and in real life, Sylvia Plath took her own life, the violent refusal to choose any fig at all.

My figs are still glowing, but the real milestone of 33 was not the choosing.  It is the knowledge that even if I did watch some figs die, I know that I am not. I look back at 33 and see a woman of choice, deliberation, and active honesty, sometimes painfully so. Yes I am afraid, but I am not paralyzed.  I know my figs won’t last forever, but they’re here now and so am I.

The coroner’s report read three simple words: She chose well.

6th Annual State of the Self Address

Published on by Lisa

Six years ago, I began a tradition to write an essay on my birthday about the past year.  I deliver the “State of the Self” the evening of my birthday.  Sometimes in front of a party crowd of thirty, sometimes just to Nick.  This year, just to my lovely hubby, and two good friends over a bottle of wine and some good cheese.

2012 State of the Self

Happy Ecdysis.

Ecdysis is about letting go.  The scientists explain that it’s a biological term to describe the molting process of certain species.  Biologists use ecdysis to describe the snake shedding its skin, its outer lay, before it reveals brighter a new outer layer.

Happy Ecdysis to me.

Birthdays are personal invitations to examine our personal ecdysis, our ability to let go of the previous year of life.  All of who I was, all that I struggled with, did, accomplished is released today.  And I begin another year.  Those things aren’t gone, per se, but they are offered to the winds of change.  What purpose does the dead skin of the snake serve to the snake?  None, except giving evidence of growth and that one is still alive.

Research has found that the arthropod (the invertebrate animal that goes through the shedding process) goes through a period of inactivity before ecdysis. Before the molting process begins, there is preparation, a resting period.  This time of inactivity preps the anthropod so the soon-to-be-shed layer loosens from the body as glands release fluid to assist the separation from under the cuticle.

During its ecdysis, the snake will seek out uneven terrain to help its process of shedding.  Just as I am.  I am moving forward, relentless in my search for more.  I am still yearning, still slathering forward, purposefully seeking out trees of struggle to help me scratch off old habits.  I stutter my body along cement surfaces of challenge.  32 was one long skin shed and I began to feel like I couldn’t find any more new surfaces to help me shed my exoskeleton and in the desperate search for new crawling paths, I feared that the old skin that needed replacement – uncertainty, anxiety, complacency, doubt, sadness – would regrow and re-strengthen itself.  Resurrect with emotional fervor. I feared nothing more than that.  I wanted new, brighter skin.  So much so, at times, I felt I took my own paring knife to personally skin myself so to let the new layer of strength, resolve, maternal understanding, spiritual fluidity, and confidence breathe.

I went through that long skin shed with the painful unconscious knowledge that, as Richard Rohr would say, everything belongs.  Even the suffering.  The nights of laying in bed wondering if the anthology will ever come to a binding sense of reason.  The faith crisis of having one foot out the catholic door before realizing the other is inexplicably nailed to the cross.  The crying spells over isolation, mental loneliness, being misread, labeled, racialized, downsized, minimized, sexualized, falsely idolized.   It all belongs.

It all belongs.

There’s a beautiful liberation waiting for those who want to choose not to die.  I think people assume that as long as our lungs, brains, and mouths are physically working, then we must be alive.  But I haven’t found that to be the case.   Our bodies can work perfectly while we are still sleeping and dreaming.  But I don’t think that’s the same thing as living.

Waking up to our own ecdysis is a bone-chilling alternative to unconscious dreaming.  We must choose to wake ourselves and similar to our dreams where we recognize our desire to wake up, we must do something active to break ourselves out of sleep.  In my dreams, after I realize I’m dreaming and need to wake up, I slap myself.  Hard.  And it’s always in muted slow motion so I can’t feel the pain.  I try again.  It’s even more arduous than the first time and then I try to scream.  It’s muffled and I tell myself Wake Up, Wake Up, Wake Up. It doesn’t help.

In my dream, I always panic, afraid that I’ll never be able to wake up and I look for higher ground and I always find myself at a cliff.  Without an inch of grace, without anything but the sweat of panic and desperation to feel alive, I’ll throw myself off a cliff and tumble while screaming to myself, Now it’s time to wake up. Now is the time to wake up.

Sometimes hitting the bottom wakes me up.  Sometimes not.  I don’t always remember what finally broke the dream spell, but I always wake up the same: my heart pounding and body pulsing with hot blood.  The relief feels like lava, slowly engulfing my muscles.  It is only when I know for certain that I am awake, I begin to relaxed.

32 was like a series of deep sleep and re-awakenings.  And each time I woke myself up, I searched for even higher ground to climb.  More authentic struggles, deeper, complex lines of life seemingly which have no easy answers seem to beckon.  I love that about my life.  I love that higher ground calls me and that I finally know that I exist for the climb.  What I love even more is that I am loved by those who know that I must climb alone.  The journey of writing, the lens of cameras, the stroke of paintbrushes, the lyric of a poem, the channel of spirit, the voice of G*d – all of these things I love best, I best feel alone.  While I am a firm believer in accountability and necessary of and to community,  I no longer feel ashamed to ask for that time to Be alone.  I no longer feel pressure to pretend I am someone I am not, no matter how small the situation.  I am emboldened by the love of Nick, Isaiah, and my family, community, and ancestors who love who I am, who I truly am.  A woman.  Driven.  Determined.  My life is my story of lost and found, and each “found” is a vindication of my right to exist, my right to call out my own name in the desert.

Just this morning of my birthday, when I decided to write my State of the Self about the theme of ecdysis, I received a message on my blog from a new reader who loved the concept.  He wrote:

Your web site is wonderful. I would like to create my own ecdysis. I do not want to step on your toes. My themes are darker and may be more inflammatory.
I am a spirtualist, but am dying slowly from leukemia. I would like to create an open forum for people to write their own obituary. Not the phony ones published by family after they are gone. Since you are the only ecdysis, please permit me to use the word. Thank you.

I thought a long time about that last sentence, “Since you are the only ecdysis…”

Of course I knew what he meant literally, but on a spiritual level, it was one of the most disturbing ideas: what if no one embraced their own ecdysis.  What if people did everything in the power to keep their lives as even and smooth as possible?  What if no one sought out scaly tree bark, or grass divots to assist their shedding process?

The new epidermis is soft, still tender after the old exoskeleton has fallen off, but it eventually hardens in time so it withstands the reality of the anthropod’s world.  So it is with our deepest, most authentic evolving selves.  Without fear or hesitation, I am beyond living for change.  I crave it.  I crave the intellectual incineration that preceeds rebirth.   It is the only way forward for me.  My survival is directly related to my ability to find safehouses of regeneration.  A place for me to safely sleep and then come back to the world in whatever state I am: wild, calm, thoughtful, or lost.  I must Be in a place, I must Be in a community that not only allows but expects transfiguration.  Because each morning I find a new Self.  And the evidence is next to my pillow.  There is a flaky residue that resembles something like fear, uncertainty, and self-consciousness.  The new skin is more sustainable, mesmerizing, and mystical than the last.

I wish nothing but the same awakening for each person I encounter.

5th Annual State of the Self Address

Published on by Lisa

This is my 5th annual state of the self, a speech I deliver once a year on the revelations and reflections of the past year.  Every year I have invited close friends and family to listen, but this year I decided on a much more private delivery: alone in a rocking chair with my son.

It was fondue.  That’s how I began my birthday last year.  With friends, family, and my two month old son, we went out for fondue.  And suddenly, here I am, hugging my mother, holding my toddling son, with Nick smiling at me, turning 32 and another round of the carousel of life is complete.

I suppose I could talk about how 31 was my first year as a parent; how I found seven gray hairs in my mop of raven strands; how I fought post partum blues, ran my first road race, began editing my long-ago dreamed anthology, traveled to New York and New Jersey, California and El Salvador, and even flew with Isaiah to Atlanta so he could meet his great-Lola and Fernandez blood.

31 is the year that shook my beliefs in everything, including God and even myself.  Isaiah is a chisel, who with one small stab, could crack me into a hundred pieces a hundred times everyday.  More times than I would like to admit, I was a mess.  Few things in life can mess with me like that.  1) Being a new mom  2) Having no road map on how to be a new mom and still be myself

31 is marked as the year the illusionist died.  The illusionist who preferred to think of life as an endless supply of chances.  Time, for all of its illusions of abundant opportunities, is actually a dwindling bank with unknown capacity.  I don’t know exactly when, but I realized that somewhere early in my adult life, I had subconsciously, nonchalantly, and arbitrarily agreed that my life was as oceanic and boundless as the sky, with no restrictions on how much time I had to live, photograph, love, forgive, and write.

Here’s the not-so-sophisticated newsflash of the year: I don’t have forever.

Somewhere in the space between last year’s fondue and this month’s Egyptian revolution those four hammering words “I don’t have forever” splattered itself on my brain like a gob of sticky gum.  It came from my body.  I knew tiredness like I never knew it before.  I knew anger like I had never experienced it before. I got cranky.  I reached palpable limitations of my own biology.

My life got really unsexy this year.  More times than I can count, I left the house with a new stain on my lapel or a button loosened. Memory cells vanished.  I often smelled like a mix of Aveeno baby soap and maple oatmeal.  The pencil scratches of “Things I Want for Me” folded itself into the garbage pail.  The ever popular journal prompt “Who am I” disappeared from the pages and meshed into the blurred advice lines of  motherhood and survival. I suffered from a strong case of self-forgetfulness.  Repeatedly this year, a tiny voice kept asking, “What is it you really want?  You better move on it cause you don’t have forever.”

You don’t have forever.

Such ordinary rhetoric.  Such extraordinary meaning.

This call to urgency will be answered loudly.  I vow to be the kind of person, the kind of mother who greets her son with the shining eyes that know self-fulfillment and community relationship.   “Children need to see their mothers happy, accomplished, satisfied.  They need models to show them how to fulfill their dreams,” a fellow artist told me. I vow to be the person that remains undeterred from my own dreams, no matter how odd or unconventional it may seem to others.  I vow to remember that a safe, comfortable life is not the meaning of life.

I promised myself an intrepid life.

And if that vow calls me to stand with nothing but the feet of shaking courage –

so be it.

Lisa Factora-Borchers

February, 27, 2011

2010 State of the Self Address

Published on by Lisa

Four years ago I began delivering the “State of the Self;” a reflection on the past year of life which is always given the evening of my birthday. This is my 2010 State of the Self.

February 27, 1979 is the day I stopped breathing someone else’s air and began breathing on my own. It was not by choice. The woman’s body is built only to support another life for so long before the placenta begins to thin, before the protective and nourishing sac of life begins to deteriorate. It’s like our birthday is our first eviction and the landlord is out mother’s body.

A birth. A day.

I spare no indulgence on the 27th of February and, previous to this year, birthdays always meant my customary helium balloon, sheet cake with vanilla satin icing, and a long list of “must to do” things that include morning mimosas, naps, writing, dreaming, and sniffing around closets and car trunks for my hidden gifts. For the record, I never pretend to be more than a child on my birthday, save the mimosas.

But this birthday is different. This is my first birthday as a mother. This is the first birthday in which the word “birth” and “day” have extracted themselves from streamers and sweets and grew into profound meaning. “Birth,” as in, a son, my firstborn. Day has grown to be more than the frame of 24 hours. “Day” is now gift.

Last year, my State of the Self focused on my identity as a writer. My pen itself nearly throbbed with pain as I described the challenges of creative writing. Now, I worry less about identity as a writer and more about truthfulness. Being truthful with Isaiah may very well be the most challenging task of my life.

And one truth I am going to share with my son is to take moments for himself. Or as I like to put it: Breathe in the awesome. I never understood those who hated their birthday. I suppose it can be viewed as a self-important concept, but the celebration of life, of my own life has always superceded any other reason to deny the day. Those who dread their birthday often do so because of a number – age. Or it reminds them of death.

Birth, for me, evokes the boundless beginning of life.

But if birthdays aren’t your cup of tea, I hope and pray that you do find a day, a time to rejoice in your own life in the very miracle of your existence. Because if we can’t find a reason or an hour to relish in our blessings, to be authentically and radically grateful for our friends, family, lovers, gifts, talents, experiences, insights, and lessons – I don’t know if we’re truly seeing ourselves – or life – clearly enough.

Thirty-one years is more than enough reason for cake and drinks. And after birthing my son, I know that thirty-one seconds alone is more than enough reason for celebration. The paradox of birth – its fragility and its power – must, begs, needs to be recognized. And celebrated. Isaiah has taught me that.

So, my state at 31 is one of utter grace. Grace of understanding. Grace of frustration. Grace of holy parenting and emotion. It is a period of firsts and failures and finding that my life can hold so much more than I ever thought possible. That realization also came with the responsibility that I myself am capable of so much more than I ever thought possible.

It is my birthday wish that everyone – at some point in their life – births new life and it need not be a child. A revolution, a concept, relationship, invention, methodology, habit or path that inducts an enhanced thought-process, a better more gentle way of loving and being in the world.

Because if we all took a moment to birth and rejoice in our own birthing, the state of grace would no longer be a temporary lingering, but an everlasting positioning of soul.

Yes, It’s my 30th Birthday

Published on by Lisa

Today is my 30th birthday.

And in my annual tradition of writing a State of the Self, I wrote a long piece about my current state of life.

I will post that shortly, but as I wake up this beautiful morning, a tumultuously grey morning, I think to myself, “Birthdays are days of celebration. I want mine to be of thanksgiving.”

While my cohort of 29 year olds wish me well and I depart the alliance and move toward the grace of 30, I am reminded of all the goals and achievements I set out for myself. All the things I *said* I would have “by the time, I’m thirty.”

Thank God some of the them happened.

Thank God some of the them didn’t.

Without super thoughts of predestination, I do carry a certain acceptance that life, the Universe, a spirit co-authors this crazy life I have led. And at this very moment, at this view on the mountain, I am left with nothing but gratitude for the monstrous amounts of love and relationship in my life.

Nothing is sweeter than the connections I have been and all of the understanding, comfort, conflict, and lessons that come with that.

Several months ago, I made a bucket list for 30 and as I shared the idea of what I wanted to accomplish, some folks pushed the customary milestone activities like skydiving, traveling, doing risk things, walking the line between safe and dangerous…as if to prove something about turning thirty.

There’s nothing I have built in my thirty years that I am willing to jeopardize by doing something that is not supported by life-affirming, joy brimming, and champagne flavored love.

I don’t want to kiss someone random in a bar. I want to make sure that the one partner I have chosen feels the magnanimous truth of how much I adore him, how he has become, as Nathaniel Hawthorn wrote, the only thing that was ever necessary to me.

I don’t want to skydive because I already feel as if I’ve flown across the difficult terrain of my heart and survived.

There’s no greater pilgrimage to take than the one I just took to my parent’s homeland.

I’ve found, at 30, what I believe most people strive their entire existence for.

And I’m not done yet.

At the present moment, I am drafting a book proposal for an editor. Prepping for an interview with a documentary director whose work I admire. Packing for a wild woman’s retreat. Checking the calendar for a roadtrip to see a close circle of friends. Throwing away the tissue paper from packages I received from family. Nursing a sore foot that I injured during working out. Smell like lemon from the body massage oil used yesterday. Headed to mass in twenty five minutes. Listened to the birthday greetings left for me at midnight last night. Writing this list of richness.

Paradox is the state of thirty. There is nothing aging about my skin or hair. There is nothing I did not accomplish that I set out to do in my teens and there is everything left that I intend to build for the rest of my life.

Let me begin.

2008 State of the Self Address

Published on by Lisa

It is my birthday today and my second annual State of the Self address. I began this last year, on my birthday, to declare who I am, what I am, where, and why I am to the world. Last year, I delivered it to a living room full of loved ones who cheered and applauded me. This year, I write it only my Self and for the 29 years of ballooning experiences I stash under my raincoat.

I am 29 years old.

This world I have grown up in, the country of the United States has brainwashed me to grow and cultivate an addictive dependency on numbers. Compasses, equations, menus, percentages, age, numbers, numbers, numbers everywhere exist to provide direction, comfort, reason, and a measuring stick. Nearly everyone comments on this being my last year of the 20s, a year away from 30. As if there is some pattern of life that I am destined to follow because of 29 being a step before 30. Ech. What if I’m not 1 before 30 and I’m just 29, a life complete as is without wondering what 30 will bring or what 28 left unsigned.

There is nothing “-un” about my life. Everything is finished, everything has closure. A sliver of an opening in a ring is not incomplete, it’s in the state of its destined permanency. The moon is full every night, regardless of what the sun reflects.

John making out with my friend sophomore year in high school while he was my homecoming date.

That reimbursement check in 2002 that my employer was delayed in processing which dented my personal savings.

The package that the mail deliverer said he lost contained irreplaceable photos and videos of childhood moments and priceless pieces of my family and life are gone.

1996 scarred me with a thoughtlessness that would overflow a river.

What we think “should” happen often leaves us in a psychological limbo. What we mark as the hinge that allows the door to swing close is nothing more than an illusion, a helpless, relentless, frantic irrationality that wants control over the ending; the dark side of us that need for it to end the way we need it to end.

There is no control over the ending, only the role we are given in the unfolding. That’s the warped beauty of numbers, of my 10, 592 days. It lets us measure what we think should happen, what shouldn’t happen, and what should have happened. Age is the common pebble to throw in this pond game.

How wasteful are we when we become fixated on what we thought our lives were supposed to be? It was supposed to end with his explanation and my telling him off. I was supposed to receive my check in the mail. The sweaty but smiling mailman was supposed to at my door, offering a shoebox wrapped in brown grocery bags.

The full moon, whether I saw it or not, was that J* made out with T* because he was a horny bastard and I was a shy 15 year old. “Macy” was a motivated but disorganized supervisor who forgot to process my check. That package is never arriving. Ever. Not every wrong finds a humble apologetic.

At 29, I’m supposed to live out one last hoorah, try to find closure with my 20s, sink into my skin before I lean back into the 30s and prepare for a February 2009 trip to Vegas where I’ll wear glittery tank tops and nuzzle my way into a VIP table at a red-lit, red-painted wall bar on the main strip. At 29, I’m supposed to have one more go around the world, steal a kiss from a 21 year old body builder, and learn how to cook a flourless chocolate cake from scratch. The classic novels need my bent elbow, my sex life is to be at full throttle, and my shoe collection is due for a shot of ipecac so I can justify a refreshed podiatric wardrobe.

At 29, I am to be lamenting the gravity and reality of my boobs and hips and spend more time perusing rugs and perfume counters. 29 is the time to cash in my frequent flier miles, find cheap hostels, drain tablets of Dramamine to go whale watching, and connect with old ruins of Europe, kneel on mats in Bali, or kiss the sands of Fiji. Better do it now before kids come.

Ah yes, children.

29 – the dangerously close age to passing primo childbearing years. Enthusiasts for Children talk to me like my organs have their own personalities and minds. Like my ovaries are going to take in a collective sigh and grumble why they haven’t seen the womb fruits of their monthly labor and then just decide to die. The ever competing for attention Uterus will begin talking smack with the ovaries, wondering approximately when Uterus will ever be of use, if at all! As usual, the Fallopian tubes are the peacemakers, the liaison, calming the Ovaries and Uterus, “The time is coming soon, friends. We’re almost past childbearing years! She must know that. No worries!”

(Side note: Don’t think for a moment that I don’t realize timing and planning, in many ways, is a privilege. It stains the asses of those like me who can choose from a variety of lives to lead. I have been afforded choice. Momentarily putting aside the political meaning of the term, my life is one billboard for Pro-Choice, there’s nothing in my life where I did not have at least 3 other options to consider.)

Back to my point:

Yes, at 29, I’m supposed to be “trying” for a baby.

29 has been presented to me as a giant farewell; an act, a year motivated by good-byes. 29 is one giant frill, a forced pep rally for 30. A convincing performance that leaves little doubt that I am ready for maternal responsibility now that I have left no stone unturned in my journey. I am to convince the world (and my Self) that doing these things, pursuing such feats, potteries and achievements, I am bidding adieu to something that has inevitably run its course. The finale, the greatest inaugural sign of the dirty thirties – a baby – is the red exit sign at the door of the decade, symbolizing woman. A belly bump is the most graceful exiting of my 20s. “Expecting” takes the lead from “exploring.”

Once again, the Ought To Theory surfaces with scores of alleys, boulevards and avenues. I do not deny that I want a few of those things; I’m not a wallflower in an abandoned warehouse of society. I seek adventure, travel, love, orgasms, freedom, rarity, and children in my life, too. The difference is how I want them to arrive. I resent the artificial notions of what it means to mathematically mature, to gain one more year, to live life in reaction to an arbitrary number.

The question of time and numbers haunts my 29th birthday. There is a particular verse in the bible that spiritually chases me. I often run in fear of its searing truths. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…A time to be born, a time to die…”

“To everything there is a season.” Everything has a season – jobs, lovers, CD players. Everything has a destined timelines of function and meaning and I am the receiver, observer of these fates. Every relationship, conversation, and moment is temporary; a resounding laugh that eventually fades. Its lasting effect is only as profound as my ability to recognize the significance of its brevity.

I am left to ponder the lesson of time, purpose, agenda, should, and expectation. Who am I after I acknowledge that I do not want Europe or ruins or tea? What is left of me after I proclaim that my perfect partner is all the love I could ever need or dream and no other kiss could steal my heart? Today, I recognize that I am the 29 year old resplendent freak who hates everything 30 minus 1 stands for. I refuse to believe in ridiculous notions of valor and experientially based milestones. I remember the moon is always full whether I see it or not. It’s complete. As is.

There is no shame in me anymore or any regret that would fuel a series of contrived expeditions. Whatever the 20s did, it has stripped it from me. In its place, a phoenix Venus, a trembling certainty, a stirring smoky volcano keeps repeating, “I am enough.”

There will be no Vegas (I don’t think) or alcoholic mosh pits of emotional destruction. There is no “one last” anything or systematic charting my progression.

There is only canvas and color. Aperture and camera. Skin and blankets. Soothe and wind. Resignation and redemption. Acceptance and altruism. Light and forgiveness.

I refute everything I was taught and embrace everything I have learned.

This is my life at 29.

State of the Self Address: Delivered 2/27/07 at 9:20pm

Published on by Lisa

On January 8, 1790 in New York City, the first United States President gave the first State of the Union Address. The deliver, name, and level of eloquence shifts from year to year and it is my pleasure to announce that you are a part of a historic event: the first State of the Self address and the first to be delivered by a woman.

The State of the Self is many things. It is a brief glimpse, a poetic celebration. I pay tribute to all the blessings and tragedies that have smoothed me into the person who stands before you, 28 years young.

Contrary to what I say tonight, this being a very special night, my State, how I am, will change. It will change as surely tomorrow as it did today. And so, my friends, I begin by telling you to not hold on to what I say. Believe it, acknowledge it, and know these words are my truth, but only for a little while. Life, as charismatic as it is unpredictable, will surely continue to smooth me and chisel me even further on February 28th, just as it did today.

I am pleased to report, in a word, in this first State of the Self address: I am strong. I am strong for many reasons. I am strong because I am resilient, because I am a woman. I am strong because I am loved, and because I am me. I am simply myself with a growing knowledge that this is all I am and all I have and thank God for it.

My intention is not to run down a long list of milestones that give personal measurement to my encounters with resilience, fortune, misfortune, or grace. My intention is to stand before the world, on my birthday and say, I am here. I am here still. I am here with more. I expect more from life, more from myself and am ecstatic to let go of past calamities to make room for further lessons and growth. I am here to say I am head over feet in love, so in love that my state of self cannot be honestly given without my heart taking a deep bow to my love, Adonis, with whom building a life has been more profoundly sweet than any dream I could have dreamed.

On February 27, 1979, I was born cesarean to a mother and father who belonged to a country I have still yet to see, a generation I may never fully understand, and unbendable values. On February 27, 2007, I have battled transitions from Republican to something else; pro-life to something else; a little girl to Someone Else. This Someone Else has plans to visit the Philippines in one year and to connect with a history I have only experienced in stories and letters from cousins and family I have yet to meet. In my immediate family, I have learned the painful and loving separation that must occur in order for members to survive. In Filipino culture, family is central. What holds family in place in God. Those values, to this day, to this minute, I still believe and practice, but that definition – the Face of – G*d has changed. My vision of who this G*d is, is wordless, unexplainable, and powerful. I have withstood enough familial earthquakes to understand and accept that I will forever be in struggle with them and also in debt for their love, support, guidance, and forgiveness.

In my lifetime, I have battled tumors found benign, been delivered news of friends in fatal accidents, wept over bitter heartbreak, held dying children in my arms, and have wondered lost in spiritual and mental deserts of confusion and depression. In my lifetime, I’ve also photographed pictures that cannot be adequately captured and laughed so hard my mouth stretched into a new elasticity. In other words, I have lived.

I have a future that I am building for myself, for my life partner, for my future children, and for the world. I dream that I can give something in this lifetime that benefits another soul. As I age, I notice that I am becoming more certain of what I do NOT want than what I do. I know that I do not, cannot have a regular driving commute, work a 40+ hour work week, run errands on a time table with the rest of North America, or sit for hours in front of a plastic flatscreen. I am more postmodern than I want to admit, more irreverent than I’d like to be, and a lot less capable of handling loud children than I thought.

I thought I was called to be a nun, then an actress, then a priest, then a writer, then a political activist, then a psychologist, then an educator, then a professional programmer, then a photographer…. Who would have thought: I am none of those things and all of those things at the same time.

When I lived in Aberdeen, WA, I attended a conference where a woman, whose name I cannot recollect, delivered a speech about her work with sexual assault survivors. She was brilliant. She was funny, real, poignant, and irreverent. The one thing I remember from her speech six years ago was that young adults make the mistake of thinking they got to where they are by their own work alone. She remarked, “I used to think that I got to where I am standing because of my sacrifices, my time, my work. I know better now and that’s what I am telling you, too. If you are here in this room, you didn’t get here alone. If you are sitting before me, healthy, eating, laughing, and enjoying – you didn’t get here alone. So many people have helped you get to this room and your ego needs to acknowledge that.”

I offer the same to you. I didn’t get here (“here” loosely and humbly defined) alone. I am here because of you and because of people like her whose names I cannot remember, but whose words changed me for the good. I am here because I have a thousand handprints on my skin and some of them were passing acquaintances, strangers, and forgotten individuals who shared a portion of their life with me and mine with them. Time has erased their names, but I remember what they said and how they changed me. If you are here, it is because you have changed me, significantly. You have changed me to be 28 and full of life, hope, and expectation. You have smoothed me to be less rough, less angry, and more human. It is because of you I have learned to love and live and I am forever indebted to you in friendship.

Thank you and good evening.