"Learning to love yourself..."

"I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way."

"I decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadows."

Such words of wisdom.

Now have them coming from one of the greatest vocalists of all time and being a kid of about 12 when you hear it.

Whitney was the first "diva" I'd ever heard - the first one that was relevant to my life. I knew my dad listened to Linda Ronstadt and Crystal Gale, my mom to Barbara Streisand (they made me gay, right?!) - but that all happened before I started seeking my own tunes.

Whitney was also the first person I remember following or hearing about in the media - I remember them saying she was young and new and had a great voice. When I saw her record (actual vinyl!) I thought she looked like someone that would be one of my friend's mother. I used to spend the night at my best friends house a lot and she would make us the most amazing pancakes in the morning and I actually had a recurring daydream of seeing Whitney cooking us pancakes instead! So yeah, a mother figure.

And those words... they really stuck with me... ""I decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadows."

We hear  thousands of inspiration phrases and there are millions of such inspirational songs, but I  didn't know that at twelve.  Hearing this was like magic to me, and I remember feeling strong and inspired by such a noble, talented woman. I hid in my room and listened secretly, tears welling up from the simple message: no matter what anyone says, you can LOVE-YOUR -SELF.

I decided instantly that she was classy and angelic, accepting and nice. I liked nice... having just gotten into middle school, it seemed everyone was mean and picking on each other. Cool looking and always the peace-maker, I don't think I actually got picked on that much but I lived in extreme fear (in rural Louisiana) that someone would see through me and decide I was ugly, an outcast or challenge me in a way that would lead to a fight in which I would lose, making me the joke of the entire k-12 school.

I stopped following her as I became a little goth boy, but I never stopped liking her. When I heard about her tragic relationship and drug use, I felt genuinely sad, again as if it was happening to a friend's mother. By then I'd learned that bad things can happen to good people, and good people make bad choices, and that addiction was a long tough road (yeah, I'd read all about Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious!).

Today I'm saddened again, because I think we all wanted the best for her, a road of recovery and health. So many people loved her so much. She gave us so much.

I hope that she loved herself.

Processing.

"Treat everyone as if they were your mother." 

That's the title of my last digital story that I created for work. I think it's an old Buddhist proverb.

The digital story is the end result of a workshop I attended for work over the past few weeks. Having done some video work and taken photos just as a hobby (which if you know me, abound on my Facebook and flickr accounts) I thought this would be way easy and I could just coast through the workshop, learn the curriculum and be able to adapt it for my own professional needs and maybe even become a certified trainer. That's how it works with most trainings I go to.

But the first morning, during the introduction to the process and overview, they said something about it needing to be a personal story, from the heart.I kind of knew going into it that I'd most likely end up addressing tobacco in the video and that I could easily tie my mothers death into it as the personal story. 

The fact is, that my mother's cancer was very directly caused by exposure to secondhand smoke. Bladder cancer is widely known and accepted as the cancer that "only smokers get" - so when doctors met with my mother for the first time, many of them asked her - and I remember, I was right there next to her - "Have you quit smoking?" They asked because EVERY person that gets bladder cancer is or was a smoker or secondhand smoker. I remember that this always baffled my mom, because she was so darn healthy! But it's not what you do to your body that affects your health, it's also the environment we live in. I think we are reluctant to talk about it because in our family at least, that means point to family members, and at this point... well, that's just not productive. 

But it still weighs heavily on my mind. Not a day goes by that I don't think how easily treated this would have been if it have been caught in stage 1 with a 97% cure rate or even stage 2, with a 60-80% cure rate, as opposed to late stage 3 with virtually a zero percent cure rate. If she had actually been a smoker herself, her exposure to smoke and cause of bladder cancer would have been detected early on - but because she wasn't the one smoking, her exposure to the smoke was often - if not always - overlooked. Instead, physicians saw a healthy non-smoker, some would even say a fitness and nutrition zealot.

This has been weighing heavily on my mind for a year now. Then a few weeks ago, just prior to this workshop, I experienced another emotional assault, this one of a professional nature. I went to a meeting with some managers and staff from very low-income housing and transitional housing programs and properties. I thought I was invited to offer training for staff, support and to share my experience and expertise to promote tobacco-free living and specifically to reduce or eliminate secondhand smoke in multi-unit housing (apartments, shelters etc). What I got was a room full of very caring folks that didn't think smoke-free rules were an option for them. Which, given that we all know that less fortunate folks tend to smoke more and homeless folks smoke more etc might seem understandable initially, but once you read the research and the data you know - you know - that secondhand smoke is extremely dangerous. Besides, don't they have rules about other types of behavior - perhaps even some that don't expose other residents to something that causes cancer? Wouldn't the residents be better served learning to abide by smoke-free policies, given that you can't smoke anywhere else and that some employers wont even hire smokers? Aren't these residential staff actually allowing more barriers to be in the paths of their residents that are seeking to move out of the temporary housing, secure better jobs and gaining a financial life and achieving overall success? YES! Holy crap the list of benefits for having smoke-free policies for residents in low-income settings goes on and on, but I digress....

As you can tell, just typing this gets my blood flowing and my personal perspective was ripe to launch into the project requirement: take a stand on an issue, make a statement that promotes health while tying it to a personal issue. So, not only did I have a very personal and emotional issue at hand, but I'd been reminded about the number of people still forced to live in toxic filth. 

So the video below is a result of that - it needs some tweaking, but I'm willing to share it now. I think the anger I felt at the meeting gave me the strength to sort of slap viewers in the face at the end - you will see what I mean. 

Luckily, my mom being very supportive of anything that I want to do and not really caring about what people think of her physical appearance etc, I know she would support and approve of this. It would be awful and I probably wouldn't even do if I felt my mom would be embarrassed or ashamed.

So this - this was really something for me. The entire process might have been the "process" that I needed, you know to process through my mother's death, to give it some meaning. I mentioned the Big D's and little d's before (big depression, versus feeling just a little down) and how I have been feeling better, but some folks still say - "Mike you need t-h-e-r-a-p-y!" and maybe I do (heck don't we all?) but I think this really helped to close a chapter - to remember, close a chapter and bring my story forward with me.

Something else too...

During the course of the workshop (several weeks) I developed a pretty severe case of the shingles, my own photos looking significantly worse than that Wikipedia link. It was timely for sure, because during the final months of my mom's life she also developed a bad case of shingles. It somehow made it even more real for me, and in some way the fact that I suffered part of what she suffered made me feel better. At least I knew some of the pain that she was going through, which is silly because it doesn't take away any of the pain that she felt, but I'm sure there's some psychological explanation.

At any rate, I feel like the whole process - despite the fact that each component was awful and took an emotional toll - left me a better person - with a video!