Desperately seeking discipline

I recently worried aloud/admitted to a friend that for the first time I feel ambition-less. The last ten years I’ve pushed myself steadily up a mountain of ever-rising responsibility, always taking the job that’s slightly out of reach, moving closer and closer to my assumed destiny of even greater leadership and success. 

Then last month, I jumped off this familiar pathway to enter the ranks of the self-employed, leaving behind a fairly glamorous and definitely well-paying job to launch myself as a major gifts fundraising consultant for social justice and grassroots nonprofits. A few months ago I was on fire: relentlessly brainstorming what to call my new venture (I eventually abandoned my cutesy/horrid early ideas — Danamite and Majorette among others — for the perhaps bland but unquestionably solid Dana Textoris Consulting), mapping out a scope of offerings, and gobbling up domain addresses to keep up with my revolving door of possible company names.

Now, as suddenly as the regular, reliable paychecks stopped hitting my bank account, all I want is to look up recipes on Pinterest. 

I guess it’s not true that I’m just doing nothing. I completed a nine-week small business course through the fabulous and feisty woman-operated-small-business incubator Bad Girl Ventures. I’m logging hours as a contract grantwriter for another local consulting firm while I pursue clients of my own. I’m meeting with a string of colleagues and mentors here in Cleveland and (next week!) in San Francisco to gain their guidance and pointers.

I suppose these are all justifiable steps for responsibly growing a new business. It’s just that I’m not spending as much time on these things as I probably should; I keep waiting for fears about paycheck uncertainty to put a fire under me, but so far I can’t believe how many hours I can whittle away each day simply taking care of myself and a one bedroom apartment. (I mean, I don’t even have a pet fish.) Do you have any idea how many errands you can run when you are no longer expected to show up for work at 9am? Who knew I could be such a slacker! 

I sought self-employment because I craved more flexibility and autonomy. I decided that the ability to choose my own clients and design my own schedule would afford me a freedom that was more valuable than the security and perks of full-time employment. Work from home or a coffee shop? How dreamy! Stay up late to finish a project? I’ll just adjust tomorrow’s schedule and sleep in. The life of the small business owner — why didn’t I do this sooner?

But it turns out I’m already unsure how sturdy a tolerance I have for uncertainty. It was sobering and destabilizing to purchase private health insurance and realize that I am giving up the reliable employer-funded health coverage I’ve gotten used to over the last decade. Forget going to the doctor unless I’m ready to pay for it, given that the only plan I can reasonably afford carries a $5,000 deductible that I’ll never reach. Not to mention how expensive I’ve learned my sheer fertility turns out to be. “Is it possible you could become pregnant in the next six to twelve months?” Ummm. Biologically speaking, yes. Pay many hundreds of dollars extra a month for the optional maternity waver? No thanks. Guess I’ll have to hope things go according to plan, because it turns out you can’t just obtain maternity coverage when you need it. 

Of course, the fact that I have an insurance plan makes me much better off than the 20% of U.S. women without any health coverage at all. Especially at this moment, as the media fawns over Angelina Jolie for revealing that she underwent a preventative double mastectomy, it’s vital to acknowledge and address the challenges and realities of women without health coverage or the means to afford even life-saving care.

Through this new period of uncertainty, there’s been one constant, and that’s my awareness and realization of how absolutely privileged I am. Privileged that I can decide to quit my job just because I want to. Privileged to have had the financial surplus to build up a savings account, not to mention add to my retirement and mutual funds. Privileged that I have had consistent access to quality reproductive health care and birth control, enabling me to choose to remain childless and in control of my career and life choices. Privileged to live in a country — and, given the density of small business resources I’ve discovered here in Cleveland, a city — where I can test my entrepreneurial ideas, and privileged to have the education, experience, and professional network to reenter the traditional marketplace if I choose. Privileged and grateful.

The friend I worried to about my lack of ambition suggested I’m being too hard on myself, and that I am only directing my ambition in a different direction: inward, rather than upward and out. Time and experience will reveal the fate of Dana Textoris Consulting. For now, I really need to wrap up this blog post. For goodness’ sake, I’m supposed to be working.

My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow) My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor. (Click photos for slideshow)

My grandmother first learned how to make potica in 1950 when she moved to Cleveland to marry my grandfather. She learned by watching and helping, working alongside my grandfather’s old world Slovenian mother. There was no written recipe until my Great Aunt Nancy forced my great-grandmother to pause with each scoop of flour so she could write the proportions down. My grandmother has protected this time-intensive recipe as a holiday tradition because, she tells us, our grandfather loved it so much — and, of course, so do we. Today my sister and I learned to roll out the dough, spread the walnut filling, and carefully fold the delicate loaves by working alongside our grandmother, watching and helping. Tomorrow is the six year anniversary of my beloved grandfather’s passing. Next Sunday on Easter my family will slather our slices of potica with extra butter in his honor.

(Click photos for slideshow)

1

Heart’s desire

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So there’s this guy. I’ve been keeping up a flirtation for weeks. He’s a different type for me — quiet, maybe shy. But he’s good-looking, with eyes that seem to know just what I’m thinking. I smile, he smiles back. I slip in quick little things (“Good morning!” “Hi again…” “Have a great day!”), biting my lip as I go by. He never responds, but I swear he always looks like he’s just about to say something. I just rush past, and as soon as it begins the moment’s gone. Sigh. You might know him. He’s the guy on the PNC billboard off the Shoreway at W. 6th. The “For the perfectionist” guy? I swear he looks better everyday, if not a little…flat. I realize I’m probably not the only one who’s been seeing him. Have you? Are you?? Bastard.

Funny and true. I flirt with a man on a billboard every day. I guess it puts a little sparkle in my morning commute. You could say it’s a romance going nowhere fast.

But I have to admit, he’s just about the best thing I’ve got going on this Valentine’s Day. Most years I think I’ve been in one relationship or another on Valentine’s Day, but now here I am, “hot in Cleveland,” just starting to dip my toes into the Cleveland dating pool. Dating here can’t be harder than it is in San Francisco, right? At least here guys seem more inclined to settle down; in San Francisco, what’s the rush? There are a million crazy adventures and distractions to keep guys otherwise occupied well into their mid-thirties and beyond. Trouble here is that it seems most guys got around to settling down before I got here. Hmm.

I’ve had a few dates. Just not any I really wanted to have again. There was the firefighter who came over for our second date to check my smoke alarms and demonstrate how to use my emergency ladder (if you know how many times I’ve screeched back home to make sure my hair straightener hadn’t already burned my building down, you’d know that this was pretty hot). But sweetly protective as he may have been, he didn’t bring the intellectual heat I need. On the flipside was the intellectual type who dazzled me with conversation, but didn’t seem to understand that we were (I thought??) on a date (I knew the ship was sunk when I walked him to his car and then continued in the dark to my own). There was also the one I met at an election night party (promising!) but just wasn’t very interesting. What has been interesting is noticing that guys like the firefighter and this last one (decent, good guys who perhaps never left Cleveland and whose world view and intellectual ambition stays safely close to familiar shore) just think I’m this exotic creature they’ve never seen before. I broke it off with the election night guy after two very-nice-but-that’s-about-it dates, and got an email a couple weeks later telling me that I’d like…exploded his mind and my energy had somehow changed how he’s thinking and feeling about life. It’s not like I did anything special; I just showed up as I am, but I guess our conversation ventured into territory he’s not used to with other dates. I was touched that I brought so much to him, but I need someone who brings just as much to me.

I know what I want. Intensity. Someone to match me, who will eke out every last bit of life. Authenticity; you enlist the power of where you come from to forge exactly who you were meant to be. A balance of power and sensitivity. You want to go deep, fight hard, and talk about it tomorrow. Yes, you of course have to make me laugh. Be physically confident and commanding. Have stunning intelligence and, the cherry on top, consider yourself a writer at heart.

Disappointing dates aside, the truth is I wouldn’t want to be anyone else but me at what feels like a perfect moment in my life. I’m grateful for the relationships I’ve had and more grateful that they ended. I am thankful to be single, childless, and totally free to make any choice without balancing someone else’s needs against my own. Anything can happen. I know something will. Lately I’m constantly feeling heart flutters of gratitude for the gifts of experience — in my life, work, and heart — and where that puts me now, poised on the edge of something.

I remember the morning after the night I canceled my wedding, six years ago. I had endless humiliations ahead — a hall to cancel, shower gifts to return, a gown to shove out of sight, calls to make, invitations to retract — but first I had this morning, this run around Lake Merritt, just for me, and I had a searing sense of my own possibility and power, and the realization that I’d just saved my own life, that I’d pulled myself back from the edge of a cliff, just at the last moment, before I would have fallen down and lost myself. I feel sort of like that now, except rather than almost falling, I’m flying.

One day during our jointly awkward years of college (let’s say that finding feminism was great for my soul but not for my hair choices), my best friend Holly and I consoled ourselves with dreams of how we’d be in our 30s. We’d determined that our early 20s were a bust, and that our 30s would be our time. Our vision for these better selves and better lives didn’t have anything to do with particular milestones or achievements in career, marriage, or money, but about how we’d feel: powerful, bold, confident, deeply self-aware and fiercely beautiful for it. I’d like to go back and drop in on those girls to assure them, “It’s true. Just wait. She’s there in her 30s waiting for you. You’re exactly who you want to be.”

So there’s no dream date for me this Valentine’s Day. But that’s ok. I think he’s out there, let’s hope somewhere in Cleveland. For now I’m in love with the life I’ve had and what it’s still becoming. I feel lucky I have myself…and for now, my billboard boyfriend.

2

Finding the frontier

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Recently I’ve been to Chicago, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Palm Beach, and Naples, and each trip I’ve craved Cleveland and felt grateful to be back to its cozy familiarity. I guess that means I’m over the hump; I think I like Cleveland. The panic that slammed me at three months (What had I done?) has been soothed away; already I can feel the tug of San Francisco lessening, like heartbreak just starting to heal, and the once-distinct experiences of eight years spread across Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco blurring and merging: my California era.

That’s not to say that Cleveland has or can replace San Francisco. Cleveland has its own worthy story, it’s own unique charm and texture, but there’s an extraordinary something like myth or magic about San Francisco and the people there that I don’t expect to get in Cleveland. My friend Matt gets at it in naming “the magnetism of San Francisco’s starry-eyed dream makers….the ambitious creatives who are drawn to the city in droves.” The Bay Area is a starry-eyed place of ambition as much as abandon, with a Peter Pan delight in never growing up. This is what makes it so fantastical and invigorating, but ultimately, I decided I didn’t want life inside a bubble, and so back to the real world of Cleveland I came.

So what can Cleveland give me that San Francisco did not? Space. The real space of Cleveland — more living space, parking space, accessible wandering space — has seemed to open up more inner space in me. Here I feel like I have the emotional and spiritual room to think, to process, to contemplate ideas, to imagine possibilities, to ask questions, and to hear answers from my heart. In San Francisco I frequently felt stuck on a social carousel and struggled to keep up the pace — not because it wasn’t fun, but because I felt that so much fun came at the expense of my individual creativity, spirituality, and balance. Here I don’t need to compete against the world to get a piece of myself. This isn’t for lack of things to do in Cleveland; I could keep busy every night of the week at interesting places and events (like the Brews + Prose reading series at Market Garden, where I’ll be tonight). It’s partly a change in my situation — I don’t have the social circle I had in San Francisco — but I also think Cleveland grants more allowance for simply being and stopping. Maybe it’s the snow effect: we are used to hibernating, we get forced to slow down.

The other night, a guy in a bar in Delray Beach was fascinated by my San Francisco to Cleveland story (married — all the ones who think I’m fascinating are married) and told me the premise of his friend’s graduate school thesis: that we can account for the difference in the innovative West Coast and the less enterprising Midwest by looking back at the risk-taking pioneers who braved the Wild West verses their contemporaries who stayed safely behind. I’m sure the actual thesis was not so simplistic (or smug), but the basic idea is tidily intriguing. And of course San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and LA are destinations for modern-day adventurers who go west to chase dreams, launch ideas, and experiment with life. I’d like to think I was one of them.

But many of us come back and others just come, seeing possibility in places that aren’t so obvious. And maybe places where possibilities are even more…possible. With this newly found creative and mental space, I’m feeling revved up about what I might do here in Cleveland — things that are new, potentially risky, that I didn’t have the time, money, or audacity to try in San Francisco. I could start a business. Travel more. Indulge in classes and workshops. Audition for the roller derby team. (Well, I opted out of that one…for now. But I didn’t take skating lessons when I was little for nothing.) I don’t know yet what new adventure is ahead, but I know it’s coming, and Cleveland is preparing me for it.

I’m not the only one feeling it. There’s a whole growing movement — a Micropolitan Manifesto — to realize the potential of Main Street, and see “small cities, tiny towns, and rural outposts” as engines of transformation in our own lives and of sustainability in the larger environment and economy. Read the manifesto — it’s refreshing and electrifying stuff — as well as its parent blog, Urban Escapee. It’s all about living a big life on a smaller scale.

Life in Cleveland is a lot like garage sale shopping: half the fun is the thrill of the find (and scoring a bargain). San Francisco offers up an endless supply of fascinations — you hardly have to try to live a full and fabulous life. You have to work a little harder (and drive a little farther) to unearth the gold nuggets in Cleveland, but they’re all here. And isn’t there something that’s maybe a little more pioneering about that?