After years of writing about what’s on MY mind, I’ve decided—by popular demand—to write about what’s on YOUR mind. So I’m launching a new interactive feature on my website that lets you tell me what’s on YOUR mind.
Just click the ‘Ask Questions’ button below to visit my WANT MY OPINION? page. Then ask me whatever’s on your mind and I’ll weigh in with my opinion.
By Lisa Sugarman
When I sit down to write, I usually don’t set a goal of pissing people off. Usually. Sometimes it just happens, kind of organically.
This week, though, I know most of you aren’t going to appreciate my enthusiasm. And that will mean an almost guaranteed piss-off. But I just can’t help myself. When I get excited, there’s very little I can do to contain myself.
Look, I don’t know if it’s winter where you are right now, but where I am, just north of Boston on the coast, winter hasn’t really shown itself. Until now. A little late in the game, if you ask me, but better late than never. And it looks like it’s making a big fourth quarter comeback.
Sure, we’ve had plenty of frigid days and reasons to keep the fireplace cranked, but without any real bonafide snow covering the ground and shrouding the trees, the true vibe of winter is just missing. That’s because, at least to me, snow is the x-factor that makes winter winter. I’m well aware, though, that I may be one of a small minority of people living in this region who feels this way. But I’m okay with that. Haters gonna hate, right?
I’m hip to how the saying goes. Be careful what you wish for. But as far as I’m concerned, bring it on. And I say that because snow draws out my inner child unlike almost anything else. Always has, always will. It represents something sacred and beautiful to me. It takes me straight back to my childhood, when life was simpler—when a day in the fresh snow felt like winning the Golden Ticket.
When we were kids and the blizzards came, everything stopped and the only thing we were expected to do was play. It was heaven. Moms and dads and neighbors were home, school was padlocked, and our snowsuits were on, morning to night.
Unfortunately, when most people transition from child to adult their feelings about snow and storms become somewhat contaminated. Sentimentality fades and people stop seeing storms as a natural phenomenon that transforms the world into a giant playground. Instead, they start seeing it as a tedious inconvenience.
Once we become the ones responsible for clearing it, plowing it, and navigating through it, the beauty factor of snow and the storms that bring it disappears. We become jaded. With the exception of the snow sport enthusiasts like skiers and boarders and ice climbers and mushers who live for fresh powder and white outs, the majority of adults I talk to aren’t real fans.
But I think it’s important to remember that even as bad as it gets in some places, we have it way better than our ancestors did. Look back in history, even only a few hundred years, and you’ll see how good we really have it compared to our forefathers. We’ve got insulation and home heating, Thinsulate and Doppler radar, snow blowers and ice melt. When Washington and his posse crossed the frozen Delaware, only a couple hundred years ago, they did it in skimpy tights and wool coats. We’re in hella better shape nowadays, I’d say.
Now don’t think that just because I’m a fan of nor‘easters and blizzards that I’m naïve to the aggravation they cause. I get it. There’s the frigid cold and black ice, power outages and shoveling, shorter days and frostbite, chapped lips and wind chill. But like I always say, life is about balance. And wherever there’s a negative, there’s always a positive somewhere nearby to keep things level. That’s how I can still love winter so much; because I always try to remember the things that make it beautiful.
So now that we’re all firmly in the thick of it again, here are 10 things to love about the storms that paralyze us—the things we tend to forget once we grow up. Maybe, somehow, they’ll remind you that you loved it once too.
Your inner snow angel is in there. You just need a good old-fashioned blizzard to bring it out.
Lisa Sugarman lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Read and discuss all her columns at facebook.com/ItIsWhatItIsColumn. She is also the author of LIFE: It Is What It Is available on Amazon.com.
By Lisa Sugarman
I just got rejected. Twice in the same day, actually. And I’ll be perfectly honest, it sucked.
I’m sorry, I try hard not to be negative. But the reality of rejection is that it’s sucky. And no matter how hard I try, that’s a reality I just can’t sugarcoat.
And we’ve all been there, too, either as kids or as adults. In that awkward, hollow moment, hearing those deflating words, feeling that deep disappointment and wishing we were anyplace else so we could avoid the inevitable. It’s the old you-can’t-please-all-the-people-all-the-time scenario. And every single one of us has been touched by it in some way.
Whether you were rejected by the girl you asked to prom or by the hiring manager who just didn’t think you were the right fit or by the group of popular girls playing on the field at recess, rejection stings. Bad. In fact, it pierces so acutely, right straight through the chest cavity and directly into the heart, that I honestly believe it may hurt worse than most physical injuries. After all, you can’t cauterize a broken heart. That’s because emotional pain heals according to a very unique and unpredictable timetable.
Oh, wait, I never told you who I was rejected by or why. Sorry. I was negged by a couple of literary agents. You know, the middlemen between authors and publishers. They’re the ones who represent writers and shop them around to publishers and get them big, fat, juicy book deals. Not that I was looking for a big, fat, juicy book deal; but a tiny, skinny, dry one would do me just fine.
For one brief second after I read their standard form emails, I was so simultaneously deflated and bitter that I honestly wanted to reach through my laptop and bitch slap them. Then I heard my mother’s voice in my head. When you cast your bread on the water, honey, something always comes back. Always. You just have to cast a lot of bread.
And, as usual, that’s all it took to reset my emotional compass and remind me that rejection is just part of The Process. Any process. Rejection is simply a reality check that reminds us to be humble to the fact that we can’t always get what we want.
See, every single one of us has the fundamental need to be accepted, whether it’s by our family or our friends or our co-workers. It’s primal. On some level, we all have that internal craving for positive reinforcement from other people and when someone rejects us, or some part of us, like our work or our ideas, it’s a blow to our self-esteem. And there’s really no way around that.
But, that’s just life. And a critical part of life is learning to cope with disappointment and learning how not to be derailed when our caboose wobbles a little on the track. Think of it this way, rejection is to our emotional well-being what cold and flu germs are to our immune system. They suck, but ultimately they help strengthen us and make us better equipped to fend off the hurt when it comes.
What I’ve always found so interesting is the difference between emotional and physical pain. It’s pretty astounding, actually. I mean, try to remember how painful it was when you broke your leg in three places skiing and your brain can’t recreate the actual physical pain. You remember all the details but they’re all one dimensional. But remember back to when the mean girls in middle school teased you for wearing overalls every day (don’t judge, they were comfortable). Your heart quickens and your face flushes and the same anger and sadness you felt thirty-five years ago manifests itself in the exact same way that it did back in 1977.
That’s the thing, though, about rejection. It comes at us all disappointing and harsh and nasty, but oftentimes is the best thing that ever happened to us because it leads us in the exact direction we were meant to go in in the first place.
When properly harnessed, rejection or disappointment of almost any kind can be recycled as raw fuel to motivate us to try harder or reach further. That’s the secret most people don’t see right away; because rejection blurs your vision and distorts reality. At least initially. But rejection also has great motivational properties buried inside the innermost layers of its negative shell. We just have to be nimble and open enough to recognize it.
The trick is not to fear or hate rejection, but to harness it. Because lamenting over what you didn’t get does absolutely nothing to help you move forward. All it does is snuff out your passion and renders you pathetic. A good attitude, though, well that’s like rocket fuel. And a full tank of rocket fuel can take you, well, to the moon.
Lisa Sugarman lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Read and discuss all her columns at facebook.com/ItIsWhatItIsColumn. She is also the author of LIFE: It Is What It Is available on Amazon.com.
The first step to getting anywhere is deciding you’re not willing to stay where you are.
By Lisa Sugarman
I’ve lived in my hometown almost all my life. And since it’s barely four square miles around and surrounded by water on three of its sides, it makes for a pretty cozy place.
I’m also very fortunate. With so many years under my belt in the same community, I’ve stockpiled a pretty broad cross section of friends. And I’ll be the first to say, it’s a beautiful feeling knowing your roots run deep where you live and that you’re never really alone.
Wherever I go, I’ve almost always got people I feel comfortable with around me. Either it’s a good friend or it’s someone I went to school with or worked with or sang One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall with on the camp bus (times were looser, it was the 70s). And for me, that feeling of connectedness has become like a security blanket. Because even though I may not have close relationships with everyone I know, there’s always this sense of familiarity wherever I am. And I happen to love that.
But plenty of people here—everywhere for that matter—are from somewhere else altogether. More people have relocated than most of us realize—for work or school or a relationship—and are trying desperately to grow new root systems in places where the soil has a very different consistency than what they’re used to. And because of that, new relationships often take a while to fully germinate.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because I met a woman recently who is exactly that person and she confided in me that even though her family has been here for a while now, it’s taking a long time for them to feel comfortable living here.
We talked about cliques—both among adults and kids—and how hard it is to break into them and feel like you belong. I assured her that like-minded people are out there, and that there’s this invisible gravitational pull that eventually draws those people together.
I told her I know this because there was a time in the Sugarman family history, when our kids were very little, when we moved away. Far away. To a place where we were virtually all alone and completely intimidated by the fact that we knew practically no one.
I reminded her that transplantation takes work. And risk. And a pretty decent amount of blind faith. I also told her that every one of us will be building new relationships for the rest of our lives. And that even though it seems like certain social groups are impenetrable, relationships are constantly in flux, as much when you’re a kid as when you’re an adult.
I mean, how many times as a kid were you friends with someone at one point, then things changed and you weren’t, then things changed again and you were? Or, once you got to high school, you unexpectedly became friends with a girl in the cool crowd because you ended up sitting next to her in your physics class. That’s the stuff I marvel at—the unpredictability of relationships.
Well the same thing happens when you’re an adult. We assume we can’t develop meaningful, deep connections with people who already have what looks like their quota of deep meaningful relationships. Then, without warning, we meet our next best friend in a Mom-and-Me playgroup or at a spin class or at the park with our dog.
And that’s the funny thing, people don’t realize that we’re wired with an almost unlimited capacity for making connections. Think of it like this, the human spirit is like a power strip that you buy at the office supply store. Only the one we’re all hardwired with has an unlimited number of ports to plug things into. And that’s what I think people sometimes forget.
See, a lot of these ports stay vacant for a long time and are only filled at certain points in our life. Because, as I say often, there’s a time and a place for everything—especially relationships. And people have the uncanny tendency to come into our lives at exactly the points when we need them the most. When we head off to college, alone in life for the first time. When we get a new job and relocate to a new city. When we retire and move to Florida. We’re constantly being transplanted and having to start again.
So, to those of you who haven’t made all the connections yet that you want to make, you will. Because even though breaking into new circles sometimes seems impossible, it does happen. All the time. And new relationships can be just as meaningful as old ones.
The bottom line is that transplants aren’t easy. They’re often painful and debilitating and take a lot of recovery time. You just have to remember that, after a while, a successful transplant usually leads to a whole new life.
Lisa Sugarman lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Read and discuss all her columns at facebook.com/ItIsWhatItIsColumn. She is also the author of LIFE: It Is What It Is available on Amazon.com.
Lisa Sugarman 