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One of the exercises in CLP is about identifying and clarifying our personal values. We each identify our top five values, writing one each on five index cards. Then we have to drop one, and another… until we are left holding the card with our number one, top value. What is your current One right now and why?
One hundred percent, without a doubt the exact same one from however many years ago Cohort 12 was. It’s a value I really hold dear to me. I hope that I – and feel that I do – live my life by it.
It’s authenticity.
I often go back to that exercise; I’ve reflected about it and wondered if there is something different. But authenticity is still my core value, because without it you can’t have personal integrity.
Honesty is a huge part of authenticity. But for me, as a young gay kid in Duchess County, New York, showing up in the world exactly as who I was was not a luxury I had. I grew up feeling like I had to hide who I was, for my own safety and value and place in the world. It took me a long time – forty-something years – to really get to a point where I finally, 90% of the time, feel like I don’t care what other people think. There’s still that part of self-preservation and pride and all that stuff that I hold onto where I do care.
You’re human.
Yes. And I think that background is why authenticity is so important to me. There are so many other values in my life that are important too, but I feel like without authenticity, none of them are real, none of them work for me. If I’m not who I am, and embrace that, then I’m nothing.
It’s what drove my addiction, it’s what drove my self-loathing. Embracing who I am, and the process of that starting in my early twenties through to today, has been where I find my power, where I find my peace, where I find my serenity, and where I find my value in the world.
Would you like to say more about your journey from childhood to your early twenties to today?
I came out to my mom – and the world in general – in my early twenties. I expected my mom to be accepting and loving and fine. She was not – and that devastated me at that point. She loved me, but had a lot of judgement. Not as much as my dad, or other people in my life – often times the men in my life.
From fifth or sixth grade, I knew that I was attracted to boys. But I worked hard to be attracted to girls, or have a girlfriend, or try to live a different life. I even thought, “I’ll just be a priest.” I called the local parish priest and hung up the phone three times before I had the courage to say, “I think I want to be a Catholic.” He invited me to meet with him, and I did; every Wednesday night, just the two of us, spent two hours studying Catholicism. I really thought I wanted to be a priest, because it would protect me from the thoughts I was having about who I really was.
When I went off to college, I tried dating women. It was never a good experience, because it’s not who I was meant to be – it never really worked. Right before I graduated from college, I came out to my mom.
She had a gay brother, who she was very close with and supportive of. So, I thought, “mom’s not going to be an issue at all.” It was my father and the other men in the family who would make jokes about him. The message I got from the men in my life was that I was always the whiny, pain-in-the-ass kid who cried and was “too emotional.” My mom was my safe person.
I had her come up and visit me one weekend. I’m glad I did it in my space and not hers, because her reaction was surprising to me. And it gave me the opportunity to distance myself for a while.
What was her reaction?
She said, “this isn’t what I want for my child; it’s a hard life.” My reaction to her was, “it doesn’t have to be, I don’t know why you think that.”
It was 1993; I went off to the March on Washington in Washington, D.C. later that weekend. It had national news coverage, it was huge. I think it was the largest gay and lesbian civil rights march in history. I marched with my college group.
She called me the next day and said, “I watched it on the news, and you’re just not one of those people.” She locked herself in her room for months, and wouldn’t see her friends. She wouldn’t take my phone calls; she just had a horrible reaction to it.
We’ve talked about it since, and she says, “I have no idea why.” But she does know why – she didn’t want the people around her to judge her. She worked for a very religious Greek family that had very strong opinions. She thought she’d lose her job.
It was a coming out process for her; I understand that today. She needed to come to a place of being ok with who she was, and hence who I was, and not feel judged because her son was gay. It took her a while.
Maybe my journey toward authenticity started about a year after that. Because for a year, I didn’t go home. I just distanced myself.
I was living in Philadelphia with a friend. I thought, “I have great friends, I love my friends – and I need to show her that she will too. I don’t know who she thinks I am, and what she thinks this lifestyle is.” Instead of hiding, I needed to show her.
It took years, but it worked. She’s one of the closest people in my life today, and continues to teach me so much about life, leadership, judgement, acceptance, not rushing to reaction.
I’d never thought about it this way, but maybe like in CLP, we had to go through the ‘trouble’ to get to the new normal. And the new normal is so much stronger than what was there before. But we had to go through a lot to get there. And we’ve had an amazing relationship since then.
But then you go through life, and society. I never thought I’d get married. I never thought that would be a possibility. I always felt judged. Policies, and laws, and the debate and all of that – led to a sense of not feeling good enough, of feeling less-than. Which led from childhood experience all the way to addiction in my life.
I was a chubby kid. In the gay community, and society in general, I wanted to look good, and fit in. But I didn’t. And I felt very judged. As soon as I turned to drugs, I felt like I fit in, because I didn’t care anymore. That led to addiction. And again, when that concept of ‘normal’ and ‘trouble’ and a new normal was introduced in CLP, I thought, “yeah, that’s what I’ve lived in my life – that’s recovery.”
There have been some struggles since. Four years ago, I relapsed, and went into rehab for the first time. It was right after the election. It was around how I felt – it just brought back all these old wounds.
The process of going to rehab was one of the most powerful things that I’ve ever done, and the best thing I ever did for myself. It was a total surrender. I went out and used, and didn’t come home. My husband, Ed, didn’t know where I was. I finally reached out to him and said, “I’m safe, but I’m not coming home, because you don’t want to see me like this.” I came home the next morning after he had left for work, called someone and said, “I need help.” And I went to rehab.
I didn’t see Ed again for a week, and didn’t know if my marriage would survive it. I called my board and said, “I’m checking into rehab, I’m going to be gone for a month,” and didn’t know if I’d have a job when I got back. It was a true surrender – give it up. And a true lesson in really being taken care of if you’re authentic. If you stop fighting and you’re just honest, and let people know what’s going on and see where you’re at, they will help. And you can help people that way.
That’s why authenticity is so important. If I’m authentic about who I am, there are other people I can help and inspire – in a humble way. Versus trying to be something else that you’re not – it’s a façade. Without being authentic, I’m in big trouble. So that’s my number one value.
Thank you for sharing. Wondering, what is one big, burning leadership question you are wrestling with these days?
It’s something really clear right now, and it’s weighing heavily on me. It’s all about the pandemic and what science is saying is right, related to community behavior.
I’m struggling to reconcile what I feel is the right thing – getting vaccinated – with my anger toward people who won’t, who I feel are being selfish. I know that’s judgement on my part, even though it’s backed up by science; it’s still judgement.
I feel the division it’s creating in the world, in society right now. When it’s just the bigger society, I can be calm. But when it shows up in my workplace where I’m the leader, or at church, or in my own family, I can no longer hide.
I struggle with people who don’t want to get vaccinated. But who am I, who are we as a leadership team, to be making decisions that directly impact other people’s bodies, in the same way I believe men should not make decisions about abortion. I would never want someone telling me I have to get vaccinated if I didn’t believe in it. At the same time, I can’t reconcile that with vaccinations being backed by science, and my beliefs about our responsibilities to each other as members of society.
At different times, I lose sleep over it, get angry about it, and let it go. I have some influence in different spaces, but I don’t have control over it. Institutionally, we put a lot of thought into our policy, we took a lot of time and had a lot of conversations with leaders in local and national organizations. Some organizations are mandating vaccines, others aren’t. Some are not because they are already short-staffed and don’t want to lose anyone else.
How do you make all of those things align? It’s not just a conversation within my spaces, it’s our whole community. We know, in leadership, often times things don’t align neatly. There’s going to be conflict and tension, things that don’t fit together, and somehow you have to move forward. It’s a challenge, and it’s the thing that weighs most heavily on me today.
What inspires you, gives you hope these days?
A few months ago, my answer would have been different, because I was feeling more inspired and hopeful.
Certainly what inspires me on a daily basis, is working with other addicts and seeing the change and improvement in their lives when they make a decision to make a change and they work for it. The miracles you see happen in people’s lives. I have sponsees that I work with, and I see it in them on a daily basis.
This work of transformational change is hard. Stepping in, stepping up, over time, can be draining – physically, intellectually, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. How do you recharge, restore, take care of yourself, rekindle your fire?
I’m very clear on this today, in a way that is very different than I would have been two years ago. In the past I would have said travel. I love to travel, step away from things for a little while. It was helpful in terms of recharging last week when I went to the beach, got up every morning and watched the sun rise. My niece and nephews were with me, they bring great joy into my life. And they also make me realize what a peaceful and serene life I have!
People always asked Ed and I, how could we travel so much? We both have really good jobs, and we don’t have kids. I work really hard every day to make a difference in the world – to help people overcome stigma, live their best life with HIV or other stigmatized challenges, people in recovery like me. We’re double the size we were five years ago.
Travel was pulled out from under me a couple years ago, with the pandemic. But even with it being possible lately, we’ve cut a lot of travel out of our lives. Because the thing today that recharges and restores me – I feel strongly about it – we’ve invested time, energy, money and imagination into our home, our back yard and the environment we live in.
Last year I put a backyard railroad garden in. I now have a to-scale model railroad that goes around my back yard, with all these little buildings that are lit up at night. It’s all hard-wired. I researched and purchased all of these to-scale plants so that the trees are scaled to the buildings which are to-scale with the train.
I always thought I was a horrible gardener. But I’ve landscaped it – my back yard is now a magical place, with the railroad and garden, and other gardens. They’re thriving because I’m paying attention to them in a way that I never had time to before. We’ve put a patio in with an extension, a hot tub, a pizza oven, fire pit, movie screen and speaker systems. We’ve just created our own little piece of paradise in our back yard. We can retreat to it and enjoy. We sit out there with a fire, and the dog in my lap, and our zero gravity chairs, watching tv on a summer night; I’ve got a telescope and I look at the stars.
I’ve created a space where I live that is exactly what I want, and I never did that before. I always felt like I had to run to somewhere else to get away. It used to be that I’d travel and rent a car that was better than the one I owned – last week, I bought an all-electric car that is incredible. We’d go to a hotel because it was ‘luxury.’ But now I feel like none of it is as good as our home, and I just want to be in our home. We hung artwork in the garden of the same words Walt Disney used to open and dedicate Disneyland in 1955: “To all who come to this happy place, Welcome.”
And that is such an amazing feeling, to create your safe, serene space where you live, that you can embrace and love – especially in the world today. People may think it’s the silliest thing to have a backyard railroad garden. Who would do that and spend money on that? Me. And you know what? There’s great joy in it, I love it. It brings the kid out in me, it brings the creativity out in me.
We bought electric bikes, and we go on 25-mile rides on roads we’ve never been on before in our little town. After work, we get on our bikes and go for a ride almost every night. We come home and get in the hot tub, sit and have long conversations. The nice thing about the hot tub is, we don’t bring our cell phones in there, so we actually pay attention to each other!
So that’s what recharges and restores me today. Having created a space that I feel safe and secure and proud of and that is magical to me, right where I’m at. And I don’t take it for granted – I see it and have immense gratitude for it. I’m still in the daily habit of that gratitude practice we talked about in the heart of the pandemic last year.
Introduce us to someone you are/were close with personally (e.g., family, teacher, friend, mentor), who shaped (or shapes) you and how you view leadership and possibility for a better community/world?
My mom. There’s tension in it, given my experience with her in my early twenties. But she is the most balanced, accepting, non-judgmental person; she wants the best for everyone, sees the best in everyone, and inspires everyone to be their best.
The one figure in my childhood that I resonated to like a strong magnet was Mister Rogers. He was intentional, reflective, quiet, calm, and so opposite the chaos that was my house and family when I was growing up. He made me feel safe and good. And in my life, that’s my mom – she’s the Mister Rogers in my life today.
She lives her life with grace and acceptance; if I’m struggling with how to handle something, she’ll always help me put it in the perspective of calm. She’s not reactive, and I tend to want to react and fix things. And I can’t. Part of developing my authenticity is realizing that I can’t. Sometimes I think it’s my responsibility at work, in my family, to fix things that aren’t going right for others. And a big part of my journey is to realize that’s outside of my capacity and interest level – I’m not God. I can be present and walk with someone as they go through something – that’s what my mother has taught me.
What was the turning point for her, or for the two of you?
Just like it’s taken me forty-something years to get to feeling much more calm and serene and accepting of who I am, I think it took her that same amount of time for her to feel good about herself. She was 18 when I was born. She had grown up in a horrible household with a domineering father and an abusive mother. I think she felt like her only answer was to get married and have kids right away.
She was a young mother, and – she said it to me again yesterday – “I didn’t do a lot of things right, I would change a lot of things.” She was a people pleaser, she wanted everyone to like her. And that can be just as harmful as being an addict, or anything else.
The turning point for her was when my dad left her, about 19 years ago when she was 51 or 52. He had been having an affair, and left – it shocked her. I think at that point, she found her authentic self and her power. She found that she didn’t need a father or a husband to be who she could be.
What do you recommend to us, in each of these categories:
- Reading – The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, by David Brooks. His book talks about the second mountain in our lives. The first mountain is based on a false sense of importance, self-centered ego, and gathering things just to gather things and not for the right reason. The second mountain is much more community-centered, other-centered, having great respect and gratitude for the things we have. How do you live a joyous, committed life where you embrace the necessity and beauty of community and interconnectedness. In the beginning of our lives, we spend all this time collecting stuff, building career. In the later part we’re more about our passions and what makes us happy.
- Listening – The Hidden Brain podcast – love it.
- Eating – Arethusa Farm Dairy ice cream – the best, most pure, wonderful ice cream. It’s my downfall, and I love it. Out of Litchfield, but they have a store in downtown New Haven – a couple blocks from my office, dangerously!
- Watching – Ted Lasso, on Apple TV.
- Laughing – I wish I were one of those people who – like my husband – will watch something and really laugh. I’m just not that person, I don’t laugh as often as I would like to. I’d like to cultivate that. Or maybe it’s just who I am authentically and I should accept it. But I’ll pick the silliness of Schmigadoon on Apple TV. And, my 10-year-old nephew – he is so quick-witted and spontaneous; I laughed harder than I have in a very long time, spending time with him last week. His older brother is a vegetarian, and ordered an “impossible burger” at dinner. After taking his first bite, he was sure it was meat, and asked the chef about it – who assured him it was vegetarian. My mom asked him how long he had been a vegetarian. As he looked down at his plate, his younger brother quickly answered, “about 37 seconds.” We all laughed so hard.
- Wildcard – your choice – The top thing I do not recommend: watching the news. I stopped watching the news four years ago, and it’s the biggest thing that changed my life. Any time I catch myself in any way getting caught up in it, I get anxious and depressed. My life just works so much better when I don’t watch the news.
Learn more about Chris’ organization, APNH, A Place to Nourish your Health
Get in touch with Chris directly: cacole1@mac.com