Speak now or forever stay silent
I remember in high school, in my speech and debate class, I had to give a short talk on a subject of our choice. I picked cockroaches because I wanted the crowd to be as uncomfortable as I was throughout the entire thing. I told myself that I would never, ever do that again.
In 2017, my big scary goal was to overcome that fear and be able to speak in front of crowds. I joined Toastmasters and signed up for every conference I felt qualified for. For every single one of them, I spent days ahead of time trying to talk myself out of doing the presentation, and I would give in, do it, and find myself still alive at the end.
I kept speaking, mostly about imposter syndrome, systems and processes, and WordPress. I was a backup speaker for WordCamp Asia this year and will talk at WordCamp Buffalo and WordCamp Canada. I am very proud to be given these opportunities and to know that I put in the work to reach a point where I could stand up and speak about what I know about sharing, teaching, and learning.
Here’s to overcoming your fears and conquering the world!
Photography
I took this photo many moons ago, during a period of time when I was heavily into photography. I have an infinity towards abstract and macro photography. Life got busy, my focused shifted, and I stopped taking photos. I bought a camera right before things changed last year, with the hope that I would once again find the passion and love that I had before. That was put on hold for a while, and I’m hoping to jump feet first back into the mix of the beauty of the world. We will be going on a tour of Wyuka Cemetery in May. It is one of the more beautiful cemetery in Lincoln, and has so many aspects of inspiration.
Turning Sadness into Celebration
I sat at my desk, gazing at the knickknacks arranged before my monitor, attempting to dispel the relentless roar of crashing waves echoing in my ears. Those waves rolled and thundered, obscuring my doctor’s words on the other end of the phone call. Her initial words seemed to hover just beyond reach, tantalizingly close, yet continually slipping through my grasp as the waves surged, pulling me deeper into their tumultuous grip.
A desperate need to ask questions clawed at me, the urge to form coherent sentences growing more urgent. Closing my eyes, I embarked on a journey of mindful breathing, the gentle rise and fall of my breath providing a fleeting respite, just long enough for me to inquire:
“Do you have any information about the cancer’s stage?”
She responded with uncertainty, “I’m afraid not.”
“And do you know the type of breast cancer it is?”
Once more, her reply conveyed her lack of knowledge.
Her voice broke through the chaos to inform me that she had already made referrals to an oncologist and breast cancer surgeon, assuring me that they would contact me later today. She apologized for the results.
As I disconnected, a rush of air left my lungs, and the sensation of buoyancy vanished. The waves crashed over me again, forcing me deeper into a swirling abyss, like an underground tornado, words and emotions swirling chaotically around me. The thunderous waves, the surging water, and the screams in my mind grew louder and more frantic until, finally, a fragile calm descended.
My first call was to my husband. I can’t recall whether he picked up on the first attempt or if I had to dial again. He was at work, immersed in the tasks of his day, fixing someone’s computer.
He answered.
“You need to come home.” With those words, the entire world seemed to crumble beneath me, the floor disappearing from beneath my chair as the sobs echoing in my mind finally found their way to my lips. “You need to come home. It’s cancer.”
That call happened almost a year ago. April 28 at 8:35 am. I was on a call with my lead and one of the engineers to discuss some changes on the product that I was leading. An entire year between then and now, and so much has changed.
Every single day was filled with a level of love and kindness that I had never experienced. Friends surrounded me, taking over wherever I needed help. Sitting with my husband during my surgery. Bringing food for dinners. Driving kids around. Love so deep and true that it filled every single crack that quickly formed, holding everything together like a put together broken piece of fine china.
This weekend, instead of remembering the call, we are celebrating the life. The last year. The friendships that grew stronger. The ties that bound. The highs and the lows and the love that will forever remain unbroken. We will sit around a table and eat brunch, and drink mimosas, and laugh and smile, and remind ourselves that this circle is infinity and beyond.
Find your people. They’re out there, and some of them will surprise you. Some will remind you how to feel alive. Find your people and cherish every single moment.
Comfort Care
My brother called me this afternoon to let me know that the outlook for grandma wasn’t getting better. She has been heavily sleeping, barely eating and was under comfort care.
Comfort care is defined as a patient care plan that is focused on symptom control, pain relief, and quality of life. It is typically administered to patients who have already been hospitalized several times, with further medical treatment unlikely to change matters. Comfort care takes the form of hospice care and palliative care.
They don’t think she will ever be able to walk again after her surgery, and that hospice is the next step. She won’t be able to go home, the home that she so loved.
I can’t imagine the farm without her. I can’t imagine my life without her. I’ve been incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity for her great-grandchildren know and love her. It doesn’t make it easier thought. Grief is grief and sadness is sadness.
The Tortured Poet Department
Earlier this year my sister-in-law invited me to see the Era’s movie with her and my niece, and I happily joined in the fun. Not because I liked Taylor Swift; at that point, I really hadn’t listened to any of her music. Going was more of something to do and spend time with people I liked. I left the movie with a greater appreciation for the Taylor Swift world, how charismatic she is to her fans, and why she has haters who are gonna hate hate hate.
I have always appreciated her business sense. She’s smart, tenacious, savvy, and kind. I also believe that she lives in a world that no one else can even begin to comprehend and the complexities of everything she needs to navigate just to be a human being.
So, when we heard that she was releasing a new album on April 19, I was a little excited—okay, I was very excited. I have never waited anxiously for an album to drop. Ever. Never. But there I was at 11:00 central time, clicking the play button on Spotify and texting my sister-in-law about the songs that I liked and didn’t like.
Taylor isn’t mind-blowing incredible. Her music seems to sound alike, and there isn’t much bravery in trying something new. It’s easy to listen to in the background and easy to tap your toes to. What Taylor gets right is that she writes what she knows, her life. She tells a story using words that play off of each other and as you learn the story behind the song, you become invested more and more into the music, because you almost feel like Taylor is telling you a secret, that she is starting the film real on her life and allowing you to sit in her living room and watch the story unfold. She makes you feel included. And she does it for every single generation, grandmas, moms, daughters, aunts, uncles, dads and brothers and sisters. She doesn’t exclude anyone. We can all close our eyes and pretend that Taylor’s story is ours, or we compare our world with hers and see similarities.
So for now, I guess I’m a Swifty. 🙂
Trip down memory lane
I grew up in the 80’s (yes the 1900’s), a Gen X’er who drank from the firehose and was a latch key pirate. I have lived in a world without internet, a world where the internet was dial up 1800 baud modems, a world that saw the creation of the first browser, the first cell phone, the first.. the first.. the first..
I bought my first computer in 1994. It had a 8MB of ram and an 80MB hard drive. For a today conversion, that is 16 HEIC photos on your iphone. I had an 1800 baud modem that made the most beautiful screeching sound that connected me to AOL Online and my local BBS. Less than 20% of the world had a personal computer, compared to the 96% in 2024.
That computer was the opening of a world that I didn’t even know existed. I struggled in school. I continually flunked my math classes and now know it was due to Dyscalculia, which is much like dyslexia, whereas dyscalculia affects brain areas that handle math- and number-related skills and understanding. We didn’t have computers in school, so this giant box was my first introduction to the glorious things it could do; which at that time was Mine Sweeper, Solutaire and a Microsoft Word.
One small act; purchasing a computer, changed the entire trajectory of my life. I taught myself HTML, learned mySQL, started designing web pages, started my own online business that ran for 12 years, started teaching people how to use WordPress, started speaking at WordCamps and now.. I work for WordPress 🙂 One computer, a million years ago. One choice. Once change. Big results!
What lit the fire?
Creative writing has always been in the back of my brain, itching to bubble to the top and be freed. I remember my senior year of high school, taking the creative writing class and feeling this sense of exhilaration at the words that would flow onto the paper, etched into the DNA of the universe. One word after another word.
I journaled during the C with an E, though those journal posts are private, for now. The other Stacy without an E has been poking me to journal more, followed by watching my co-worker V posting for the last 100+ days, which lit the fire under the creative writing preverbal pot.
Writing doesn’t always come easy. There needs to be a mood swirling about, giving the lit match an accelerant. I also don’t write in a way that would please even the lax of grammar police. Thoughts are. They don’t form proper sentences or abide traditional guidelines. Thoughts just are.
I have a folder in the basement stuffed full of teenage angst. Poetry filled with anger, sadness and longing. I have one has engraved on the inside of my skull, I don’t even need to close my eyes to remember that starting lines.
Acid brains, burning in hell.
People screaming, bodies for sale.
I believe that the way I think, the way that I feel, the way that I write, is why I love music. My words feel like music to me, making you pause. Think. Feel. That may be rather boastful of me, and I choose not to give way to the imposter syndrome that lurks around the darkness waiting for the perfect moment to step into the light and declare “She is a fraud!”
I turn off grammarly, I turn on my “Writing Music” playlist and I follow the lessons my Creative Writing teacher taught me my senior year. Write. Don’t worry about misspellings. Don’t worry about structure. Don’t worry about making sense. Write as if you had to write to save your life from drowning in the words that have been ever growing in your head. Let them free. Let them fill the open spaces around you and become real, released and free. Write. Dream. Love.
Stacy Without an E
I was, again, the new girl in school. 8th grade, middle school, the hardest years of a teenagers life. I don’t know how we met, but we did. It was probably because we had the same name, spelled the same way. Stacy without an E. You brought me into your friend group and we were it. Birthday parties in the basement, lunches with chocolate shakes and cherry filling, after school listening to music and talking about boys.
We watched the Challenger on tv’s on media carts, explode, the memory seared into my memory due to the tragedy of it all. You made my life tolerable. You made me feel seen.
I moved again, and again, and you stayed as a number in my rolodex saved for when I was back in a “calm” period of my life. It could be months between calls, or years, and it didn’t matter. We picked up where we left off, as if time had stopped during the lapse and everything was right in the world, because we were Stacy without an E.
I cried when the announcement happened that you had cancer. The C, with an E. The story of your life was already so tragic and this felt like overkill. Hospitals, chemo, blood marrow transplant. You were so weak right afterward, asking for your Squirt knowing that it wasn’t going to end well. The stay in the hotel room, with friends, signed up to be there to make sure you recovered and could come home. Trips to Omaha, long waits between appointments, chanting the mantra Fuck the C with an E.
And the days rolled on, and then it was my turn for the announcement of the C with an E. It wasn’t a bonding experience that either of us wanted to cement the 30+ year friendship, and here we are. We play Hand and Foot, and talk about grief and recovery, and feeling stuck and rejoicing in our children and laugh at the silly things that women our age shouldn’t find funny.
1985. The joining of the Stacy’s without an E. The crystal ball would have shown the future , our life lines intertwined and connected in happiness and tragedy. In silence and screaming. In laughter and in tears. And had we looked in the ball and asked “Do you want to continue?”, the answer would have still been yes. Because without you, there wouldn’t be the me that we all know.
2023, Oh how I hate you
My memories on Facebook roll the slide show of a year that left me wounded and forever changed. A year ago last week, I had my mammogram. Instead of the normal all clear call, I was pulled into a room, and blurred words explain that it wasn’t all clear. This week last year, I was in San Francisco, replaying the conversation in my mind over and over. Next week last year I would go in for two biopsies. And the grand finale comes April 28, the call that dropped me into a black ocean, turbulent, with waves crashing over my head, shoving me deeper and deeper into the darkness, with no lifeline to save me. Doctor appointments. Big scary words. Decisions that I don’t want to make. Just another chapter in the book called me.
I spent my days desperately trying to find the lemonade amongst the lemons that life kept pelting me with. I kept moving forward, battered and bruised. No longer me, but just like me with an apple rotting my spirit. 2023 sucked. There is no sugar coating. 2023 sucked.
Ever so Quiver
She was a trailblazer. Taking on the patriarchy way before we understood what patriarchy was. She was brave, courageous, stone cold in a nice way. She understood what it took to walk toe to toe with the men who didn’t believe she should be in her position.
She grew up on a farm, where in the winter she would wake up in the morning with snow drifts in the corners of her bedroom. She raised 3 boys and lost a girl at childbirth. When I came along, in my dysfunctional world, she stepped up and rubbed her hands together and said “Give me that girl! I’ll take care of her!”
She created a world of mystery and imagination in my broken little world. In her closet she kept a box of dress up clothes. Pretty dresses, dangly necklaces and high heeled shoes. She would get her hands on refrigerator boxes and we would decorate them, cutting out windows, and at night, we would drag our mattresses outside into the boxes and sleep under the stars.
She’s 94 now. She had several mini strokes a few years back that wiped out her short term memory. Everything resets every 15 minutes. She fell a few months back and hit her head, which was the domino to her downfall. Hospital, rehab, home, hospital, rehab, hospital… broken hip, surgery, loss of blood, low blood pressure. And through it all, her memory reset every 15 minutes.
I saw her in the hospital this week and it broke every single piece of my heart. My hero. My protector. The person who I wanted to be like. The person who I wanted to make proud. The person who marveled at my accomplishments and bragged about me to her friends. Now laying in a bed. I said “Grandma, it’s me Stacy.” and her face filled with confusion. She whispered, “I used to know a Stacy. But she’s gone. She abandoned me. Everyone has abandoned me.”
I reassured her that I hadn’t. She would forget in 15 minutes though. She told me about how she used to have Stacy all the time and she loved Stacy. That Stacy was so sweet, such a sweet girl…. And her chin quivered, and she cried. She turned her head and looked at me and said, “Are you really my Stacy?”
I just stroked her head and reassured her that yes, I was really her Stacy, and that I loved her.
She always told me that the day you stop learning is the day you die. I’ve held onto those worlds like an anthem, and become my own trailblazer, she raised me well.