Elizabeth Potts Weinstein » Elizabeth Potts Weinstein

The Finding in the Beginning.

Elizabeth Potts Weinstein — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:06:59 +0000

Today my daughter left me at Kindergarten.

She stepped forward, intuitively working the room, making introductions between new friends, negotiating what toys could be explored before morning meeting, finding a place for her posse on the carpet.

Without me.

Surpassing me.

And I am left alone in my apartment, stretched out on my bed with a MacBook on my lap and a pan of Betty Crocker fudge brownies tucked in besides me, and as proud as I am about her being excited about school, I wonder.

So. Now.

Who am I without her sitting beside me?

As an INFJ, I want to have it all figured out.

I feel safe and comfortable and in control with a really complex system providing clear and predictable answers. With well defined rules that govern how I should be and what I should do. With the future analyzed and decided and scripted re what program I’m launching next and where we’ll be for Christmas break and how my website will be formatted in 2014.

But when I give up all the tests and rules and systems and bullshit and just accept what’s going on in this moment, all I’m left with is the only thing that’s true.

I am me.

And really, no one can know who the fuck that should be.

Yes, I do have some ideas. I do have some plans.

I’m in the middle of a master’s degree and a few unfinished LYT programs and a website relaunch. I have ideas for new businesses and websites and blog posts and videos. I dream of travel and more learnings and to get certified in bookmaking or hand analysis or how to fly a plane.

Yes, I’m still a mom for the rest of my life.

Even when she’s not with me during the day. Even when she’s out on her own and has better things to do than text with her mom or whatever replaces texting in 2024.

But in the meanwhile, right now, I’m just going to focus on being myself.

(Whoever that is.)

And I’ll try be patient about what this being will end up doing.

—

Have you gone through a transition, sent a kid off to school or to live on their own, quit a job or business, leave a long-term relationship, and wonder … who are you without that role?

Who are you without that relationship or position as your identity?

I’d love to hear from you below!

A Day in My Life.

Elizabeth Potts Weinstein — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:33:12 +0000

People ask me how I do it all.

The answer is … I don’t.

But to really answer the question, here is how one day happened for me.

It’s not a typical day – I don’t have typical days. Some days I work a lot more, some days I don’t have my daughter with me, some days I’m more or less insane.

This is just a snapshot of my life, as it was, one summer day when I was 36 and a half, running a business and getting a master’s degree while living in the Silicon Valley with a six year old girl and a cat.

Thursday, August 4, 2011.

5:22 AM. I wake up alone in my bed.

No alarm set. It’s quiet. Suburbia.

I grab my iPhone vibrating next to my pillow and answer the early morning texts from two of my favorite people, who are awake, elsewhere. I laze in bed, checking Instagram and Twitter and my personal gmail account, reading my message from the universe for the day.

5:50 AM. I need coffee.

While the Tassimo is making its magic in my Gracie-designed coffee cup, I cook my breakfast, the same thing I eat every morning – one scrambled egg with sauteed onions and one piece of whole wheat toast with real butter. The cat watches me from her perch as I sit down at the dining room table, my blue journal before me, and I write three morning pages with my blue felt-tip pen, brain dumps about what’s upsetting me, and the outlines for two new videos.

6:45 AM. Sit down at the iMac.

Check Twitter and business email, ask people on Facebook for advice about an interior plant that’s less resistent to death. Set up an SQL database and finish a WordPress install for a test site of the new ElizabethPottsWeinstein.com web design.

I realize that I’m still writing July on everything.

6:57 AM. Stand up and go into mom mode.

Pack Gracie’s snack for nature camp, with a mini-love-note from her to me, as requested. Realize that Adia the cat peed all over the floor underneath the litter box and she tried to cover it up by pushing half of the litter onto the floor. Oy!!! Litter fail!!!

I make more coffee.

7:09 AM. Gracie announces her awake status from her room.

Get her started on her day (apple juice, Wheat Thins, PBS) and I start tidying up toys and clutter and cleaning the apartment – today we are getting a visit from the Head of the new school she’s attending in the fall. I don’t want the lady to think that I’m an incompetent housekeeper.

Make a list of everything I forgot to get at Target and the grocery store.

I have been to both stores twice in the last two days.

7:25 AM. Get me ready for the day.

While in the shower, rehearse a video I’m planning to film later in the day. I would totally make videos in the shower – if it was not for the wetness and the naked.

7:59 AM. Get G ready for the day.

She “texts” me on her new Barbie phone that she’s decided to wear a long sleeve sweater dress to outdoor nature camp. As such, I pack a short sleeve shirt and shorts in her backpack.

Drink a glass of water to combat post-two-cups-of-coffee insanity.

8:13 AM. Drive G to nature camp.

9:27 AM. Home.

Paranoid. Decide to clean the house more, so the Head of G’s school does not think I’m a bad mother. Move boxes, vacuum, sweep, try to damp mop the floor with the new mop but realize it’s ineffective. I can’t figure out the best way to clean these slightly-squishy matte-finished wood-looking floors.

I think the floors are pourous. #flooringfail

10:00 AM. Back at the iMac.

As I set up the video, realize I am shiny in the wrong places. Powder. Lipsick. Do the record, edit, export, upload, post the video blog, send to social media, reply to comments/replies/retweets thing.

Switch laundry to dryer.

11:00 AM. Oy! It’s time to leave to get G from camp!

11:57 AM. G meltdown on the way home.

She thinks I don’t do a good job packing snack because it’s not what she wants to eat that day. I respond that I am not magical and cannot predict the future about what she will want on any particular day. So if that’s important to her, she needs to pack her own snack. After a large quanity of tears and pissyness, she agrees to do so. #EPWwin

12:25 PM. G is eating spicy hummus on crackers for lunch.

She does not yet know that unlike mac & cheese and chicken nuggets and cheese sandwiches, hummus is not a typical kid food. Please dear god don’t anyone tell her.

Gracie suddenly asks, “how did the dinosaurs die?”

12:51 PM. Inadequate housekeeping paranoia increases.

More cleaning.

G watches PBS while I do the email/social media/comment thing until the Head of school arrives.

2:00 PM. “Home Visit” with the Head of G’s new school.

She’s very nice, asking G about her summer, what camps she has gone to, if she went on vacation. G uses Harry Potter as an example for a point that she was making and the Head is surprised that she’s seen such a “scary movie.” G matter of factly answers that it is not scary because she watched at home with her mommy.

2:20 PM. Order a twirling baton.

2:33 PM. Research for two papers due on Saturday.

Have to use peer-reviewed journals to support my arguments, which the syllabus says are more reliable and important than other sources. I find this entertaining because in law school I was a editor of two law reviews and am not impressed by said peer review process. But is required, so I research in journal databases about the trolley problem, the hippocratic oath, and oaths taken by army officers.

3:23 PM. Sort through a box of old clothes from the basement of G’s dad’s house (was our old house).

Find 6 sweaters that fit me! It’s like shopping without the spending of money! Win!

Text Alli re said sweater success.

3:50 PM. Don’t know what to do with myself.

Make coffee.

Play with the Canvas theme from WooThemes. Omg. This theme framework is freaking powerful and easy and I think I can actually use it to create the site I imagine! Love.

4:25 PM. G wants to go swimming & I agree as long as I don’t have to get in, so I can use the time to outline chapters for Ethics class.

5:21 PM. As G takes a bath, I eat my dinner, reading Eddings’ Crystal Gorge book.

I used to multitask while eating – eat at the computer, in front of the TV, or while studying for class. But a few years ago when I changed how I ate (and thereby lost 40 lbs), I created a new practice of no work/studying while eating. I either do nothing, write in my journal, or read a book.

5:59 PM. We watch Harry Potter together and eat Tootsie Roll Pops.

Neither of us make it to the center via just licking.

8:39 PM. G is in bed. I’m at the iMac.

Look for hex code color families & google fonts, play with the layout and design, using the Canvas framework. Am so excited! I think this will work!

9:46 PM. I need to get off the computer & go to bed.

9:49 PM. No. Seriously. Get off the fraking computer, EPW.

I go into my bedroom with a snack of Cheezy Cheese Its and some water so I don’t wake up hungry at 3 am.

Read Pride & Prejudice yet again. Text. Get a yummy late night phone call.

Sleep.

#thatwasall

–

How do you spend your days? How do you balance all of your roles and responsibilities – and still get work done? I’d love to hear from you below!

a story of two pens

Elizabeth Potts Weinstein — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:43:32 +0000

Can the right pen improve the quality of your life?

I say yes.

Here’s my story of two different pens.

Now I ask you … what are you tolerating in your life?

What’s just “good enough” but isn’t great?

What little irritations are you putting up with … instead of getting what you actually want, what would actually make you happy?

Tactics of Transformation and Fire Station No. 1

Elizabeth Potts Weinstein — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:06:46 +0000

Today, I am different.

There is a calm. A grounding.

An ability to see things how they are, not that which my worry imagines they could horribly metamorphosize. Not how they should have been if I had know better, if I was a good mother, if they had treated me right, if I could write all futures.

I’m here.

Yes, there were tactics I used to bring this calm into my life.

Accepting that I am Highly Sensitive and, as such, living in a high-rise in San Francisco a block from Fire Station No. 1 and riding in packed & smelly public transit system all day was not healthy for my body or my soul.

Allowing myself to be healed not only of the injury that was on the surface, but the damage done to me by the tumor my daughter carried in her brain. Healing of the meanness the Ideal Woman in my head pounded me with over the last few years. Healing of wounds I had suffered for so long, I forgot what it was like to be undamaged.

Deciding. Moving. Buying. Signing. Starting new projects, registering new domain names, beginning a certification program in the MBTI and a Master of Arts in Human Behavior.

Writing three pages in my journal each morning, to dump out the crap and the drama and to spread out what’s underneath onto the page, so the truth can reveal.

Playing with a new business plan, a new daily schedule, a new way to arrange my desk. Playing with room for the current iteration of Live Your Truth, room to expand into what Live Your Truth will become, room for entirely new projects that are inviting me forward.

Practicing. Touching. Being. Living the feeling of grounded as I rest here on my sofa entering characters into OMM Writer with my eyes closed, letting the words flow from my insides out onto the screen.

But this transformation didn’t magically happen because of any one of these pills.

Transformation happens in the nexus.

The nexus of these tools and this moment. The nexus of what you do now with all the good and bad and powerful and traumatic that has happened in your life, up until today. The nexus of the pill you practice and the truth that you are.

It is true, that I invite you to find out if your environment supports your temperament.

I invite you to heal injuries that continue to wound you.

I invite you to decide, to move forward, to expand.

I invite you to write.

I invite you to create a schedule with space for where you are going.

I invite you to practice being grounded in this moment.

But I remind you.

What you do this weekend, what you experience in that program, what you write from that journal prompt, what you fix with that healer – the results from those tactics may happen all at once.

Or they may not show up for years.

Just like social media campaigns, constructing a new two car garage, or conceiving a new member of your family, transformational results do not flow immediate from a tactic.

Transformation flows from the strategy.

Do the Work.

Pay Attention.

Love.

Live.

Accept.

Take the Risk.

Have Faith.

Trust.

Trust that the dividends of our investments of work and attention and love and living will reveal themselves in their own time.

When we are ready.

We just have to keep showing up.

—

Are you still waiting for peace to arrive? Are you frustrated because you’re doing all the right things and it hasn’t happened yet?

Have you done work where the results showed up for you years later? Are things finally coming together for you?

I’d love to hear from you below!

Fear or Fool

Elizabeth Potts Weinstein — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 06:01:41 +0000

How many tears have I shed in the last week, the last month, the last three years?

Tears of suffering from the harsh lies of the bitch in the corner. Tears of hopelessness, tears of trapped, tears of working, pushing, forcing, trying to make it happen so hard, for so long, so many times that it seems pitiful, idiocy, failure to continue.

And with deadlines looming ahead of me, of when I will no longer receive support, of when debts will be called, of when it must happen or else …. I wonder.

Is the fear right?

Maybe this is impossible.

Maybe continuing this thing is throwing good time, good money, good energy after bad.

Maybe, even though I change people’s lives, even though I’ve experienced more joy and connection and freedom in the last few years than I thought was possible, even though I know there are people that I have yet to help …

Maybe this venture is doomed.

So I wonder … is there another option?

Another option that seems more reasonable.

More likely. More endorsed by society and logic and the bitch in my head.

Well yes. There is another option.

The other option is to go back.

Back to safety, to stability, to a guaranteed paycheck with a great 401(k) and health package and a few weeks of vacation every year.

Back to becoming that girl.

Well … that’s only sort of an option.

You see, that 401(k) menagerie has been ruined for me forever.

Now I know that there is no safe, that the stability is an artifice, that there are no guarantees.

Now that I know, going back would be the foolish choice.

I wish there was some third choice.

Something real but not scary.

Something changing the world, but not risky.

Something following my purpose, without having to face my lessons.

But that’s not how it works, eh?

It’s feel the fear, or it’s be the fool.

We can choose to live in uncomfortable, to take the risks, to grow past our boundaries … or we can choose to push our heads back inside the sand, to chicken out, to shrink our souls.

There is no in between.

#fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

That is all, my loves. Goodnight.