soul | the greasy pancake theory

Question: How do you get over someone or something that feels like it breaks you? (lover? job?)

An answer:

I find myself repeating this theory/advice over and over to other people, so I figured it deserves a place on the blog (plus I finally told Cha I was going to do it and she approved).

It's her theory and it's called The Greasy Pancake Theory.
Stay with me, because I promise it's good - like extra butter, extra syrup good.

The theory goes that when you end something BIG, like a relationship or a job, that has really defined a lot of your growth and experiences, you can't just rush into the next BIG thing - like another serious relationship or career. It's like when you wake up on a Sunday morning and decide to make a whole batch of pancakes. You get your big bowl of batter all ready, you turn on the stove, and you throw on a little bit of oil to grease the pan. Then you put batter in for one pancake which ends up soaking up more than half of the oil you put in making it pretty unappealing (or pretty appealing, depending on your pancake style), but as you push it around, it starts to spread the oil evenly around the pan, and when you finally take it out and flip the whole greasy, soggy thing onto a plate - or feed it to your dog - the pan is ready for all the other pancakes. The rest of the pancakes now have the potential to be perfectly unsticky and golden brown because the greasy pancake prepped the pan.

So now you may be wondering - what in my life is a greasy pancake?

It's that first, kinda dirty hook-up you have after ending a serious relationship, with someone who you're not interested in dating, but helps to (figuratively...) soak up the excess butter so when you do meet someone you're really into, you don't have all that extra grease and craziness left over from the last relationship.

Same thing with a job - it's that summer you spend waitress-ing instead of rushing into the next job that's just like your last job. This way you have some time to think about what you want, to reflect on what you had, so that when you start your new job you don't bring with you all the grease and routines from your last job and have a fresh new start.

But the most important part of the greasy pancake is that it's not permanent and does not have to be incorporated into your pattern - so embrace it in all its greasy, buttery goodness, but then keep making more...

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"there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground"
-Rumi

Successful Psychopaths V. Criminals

After a crazy summer I've decided to restart the blog!

I went to a fascinating lecture this morning on treating personality disorders with cognitive therapy (CT). This spurred three questions:

Questions: What is a personality disorder? What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? How will knowledge of both these topics give us insight into ourselves and our own coping mechanisms?

Some version of an answer:

Personality Disorders:
A personality disorder is basically when a normal coping mechanism - such as being wary of dangerous situations, paying attention to details, or feeling able to accept help - extended to situations in which it becomes problematic or even dangerous. Some examples include paranoia, dependency, passive-aggressiveness, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (not OCD). The American Psychiatric Association (APA) defines a personality disorder as "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it".

What's striking about these disorders is that they're so relateable because these behaviors are effective in certain contexts. For example, paranoia can make you safer if you're walking alone at night, obsessive-compulsiveness can be productive when you're packing for a long trip, dependency is positive when you're sick and need to accept care. However, they become a disorder when they're projected into other parts of one's life inappropriately - like getting paranoid at the grocery store or becoming so dependent on a partner that you can't let them out of your sight.

One study surveying executives and criminals in Great Britain (reference: Board, B.J. & Fritzon, Katarina, F. (2005). Disordered personalities at work. Psychology, Crime and Law, 11, 17-32) found that some personality disorders were actually more common among the executives than the criminals. They refer to this as the difference between successful and unsucessful psychopaths. Taken with the cultural component of the APA definition, it speaks to "the importance of social norms in our definition of functioning - and adds to the discussion of interpretation of illness in different cultures (The Sprit Catches You and You Fall Down -style: how epilepsy is a divine gift or a disease depending on which cultural lens).

Cognitive Therapy:
The more I learn about cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT (of which cognitive therapy is a specific type), the more I think everyone should be engaging in at least some of the strategies. One of the clinicians with whom I work says that the real goal of CBT is to train someone to be their own therapist - or more specifically, to ask themselves the "Why am I thinking this?" and "What are the factors affecting this decision/action/response" as it's occurring, instead of only at therapy appointments.

CBT is based on a theory of dividing thoughts into three categories:
Core Beliefs: general beliefs about yourself, the world, and other people (e.g. I am compentant)
Assumptions: the ways in which you apply this to the world around you (e.g. I will do a good job)
Automatic Thoughts: in response to specific situations (e.g. I will do a good job on this paper).

Judith Beck, PhD, the speaker, said that when people have negative core beliefs it's usually because they feel at least one of three things: incompentent/ineffective, worthless/unvaluable, or unloved. Addressing why someone feels these things is not the point of CBT, rather the aim is to revamp ones responses/actions so that they prove these core beliefs wrong.

The speaker's father, Aaron Beck, MD created the most commonly accepted psychological theory of depression which is that people who are depressed feel depressed because their thinking is biased towards negative interpretations. Therefore, all of his theory of CT is focused on adjusting these interpretations to make them 1) more accurate and 2) more positive by evaluating what core beliefs and assumptions are going into them.

I keep trying to challenge myself and my friends to think about the assumptions and core beliefs we're working with as we make all these challenging decisions about navigating through "real life" - are we worried about feeling unloved? are we making sure we're not avoiding because we're worried about feeling ineffective? do we know how valuable we are?

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"yet the terrible truth was that the girl who broke your heart would always have more power than you liked" -charles baxter (I'm pretty sure), feast of love

stay hungry, stay foolish

Question: What's the best graduation speech you have heard or read?

The best answer was from a friend:

In a commencement speech at Stanford a few years ago, Steve Jobs gave a brilliant speech where he calls upon the graduating class to forge their own lives and not to live within the boundaries of other people's thinking (or what you think is other people's thinking). He reminds us to listen to our inner voice and intuition - or, as my mother would say, to your heart's longings, wherever they take you.

This seems to come up with each set of new graduates - as if we're shocked every year that we're creating a society were inner voices are drowned out, as shown in a recent NYT article on new graduates. It questions whether colleges have become simply a selection mechanism for Wall Street and other elite professions that do nothing to change the system. How do we inspire people to change the world? When Obama spoke at my alma mater (ooh, that feels weird to say) he called it a "poverty of ambition" - this lack of momentum towards service after college. I'm not sure it's that we aren't inspired - I think we're very inspired. We're just broke, and scared of forever being broke. Scared that we'll never really be adults because even things like gas and rice are out of our price range.

So I think the question then becomes: how do we, as a society, as a world community support world-changing? how can we encourage it?

stay tuned for ideas as I ask all the brilliant people around me...

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"Stay hungry, stay foolish"
-Steve Jobs (advice to graduates, and everyone)

Rumors of the Death of Feminism

Question: Is feminism over?

the short answer is no. The long answer is more like a conversation (as perhaps all answers should be):

The headlines all over the place as Hilary dropped out questioned what this means for women, feminism - will the glass ceiling come crashing down again? While I admit I'm saddened that now the articles can say "when the next president...he..." I don't think it's by any means the end. Reading a NYT article by Kate Zernike a few weeks before Clinton ceded the nomination clarifying what the next woman who runs for president has to think about and the qualifications she must have. The one that caught my attention - besides the fact that Zernike doesn't think the next candidate exists - is that "She will be young enough to qualify as post-feminist (in the way Senator Barack Obama has come off as post-racial)"...

What does this post-feminist woman look like? Someone who would not vote for a woman?

So much about this primary has pitted young, "post-feminist" women against older women who perhaps think we're resting on their hard-fought battles for equality. I'm still not sure how to reconcile these different vantage points into a coherent philosophy, but I do think that feminism is ultimately about choice - about working to create a world in which choices are not limited by gender or sex. But to say that the choices that present themselves or that we have to make aren't influenced by gender or sex is naive. I've discussed the career/family balance with every one of my female friends, plus some random female acquaintances over the past year, and it's come up maybe once with any of my male friends. My ex-boyfriend's mother recommended to me that I look into freezing my eggs, since by the time I finish my residency I'll be almost 30, and then I'll probably want to actually be a doctor. And she has had a career her whole life, with two children, so I know it was out of concern for me trying to have both.

I hope the next female candidate for president is post-feminist, but not complacent or content with the factors that influence women's choices - or, like some of my good friends, actually - feel like "all this anger is for someone else's fight, because we don't feel limited" - but post-feminist in the way that Dhalia Lithwick describes in her recent article in Slate's Feminist Blog, XX: "It's true that far fewer of us have bumped our foreheads on a rigid glass ceiling. But we're not blind to sexism and we don't tolerate it any more than our moms did. We've worked very hard to broaden our definition of feminism to include women of different classes and races and we are proud that the men we date and marry have met us halfway on the little things. We don't think our choices are frivolous. We think they are complicated."

complicated, indeed.

i dare MYSELF to jump in

Question: What is the best advice you've received by accident?

I confess in this case, this answer came to me before the question, though I like hte idea of accidental advice. While relaxing by the pool yesterday (yes, somehow, in the middle of downtown this happened - and was glorious) I kept dozing in and out of sleep, which makes for some very interesting dream/thoughts. We were next to the children's end of the pool and there was this group of kids who were taunting each other to see who could be more brave in the water. So one kid said, "I dare Rose to jump in and spin around. twice." in a sort of smirky voice. Another said "I dare Michael to jump in the FIVE FEET." And then a slightly younger voice, in what sounded like both an attempt to push himself into inclusion in the game and give him the guts to actually play, said, "I dare myself to jump in!" and jumped.

It made me think about the ways in which we, especially in our 20s, dare ourselves to jump in all the time - a friend of mine just jumped into starting a non-profit in NYC after she had planned on moving to DC to work on capitol hill; other friends are jumping into relationships - or taking next steps of relationships that they never would have thought they would do in the near future. Even last night, just diving into a conversation with someone it may have taken much longer to talk to - because why not?

At some critical point, whatever research, planning, maneuvering goes into making decisions or connections - at some point you have to dare yourself to jump in.

and then I guess you have to just hope you hit water.
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"It wasn't scheming or wickedness that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstandings; above all it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you" - Ian McEwan, Atonement

in praise of the man who asks questions

Question: What book have you read recently that has given you insight into the ways people interact with one another?

My answer: I recently read Free Food for Millionaires after seeing Min Jin Lee (the author) speak - and while it wasn't life changing, I found the novel to be absolutely compelling because it's a wonderfully written account of several very different people's voyage through "the odyssey years". When I heard her speak, she explained that it is a book about grace - or rather, the attempt to navigate these crazy years gracefully.

The part I find myself recounting to others is actually about a relatively minor character, an investment banker who is a super smooth, handsome, wealthy guy and quickly identified as the guy who sleeps with everyone (in a totally attractive way, obviously). What's fascinating is that it's not his looks or even his charm that makes him so good at seducing the world, but that he understands how important attention is to a woman. How little things, like watching a woman completely as she walks away, on the off-chance that she turns around and notices - make all the difference.

If I were to give one general seduction tip (and this has been confirmed by many) it would be this: ask lots of questions... and then actually pay attention to the answers.

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"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired"
-Robert Frost