The Weilers Have Left The Building

That's right. We've moved. Again.

But before you roll your eyes and suck your teeth at me, let me explain…

When Richard got into Internet marketing, it wasn't long before we realized that we could live anywhere we wanted. ANYWHERE. We could close our eyes, spin a globe, and choose with our finger. We both worked from home, with our clients being spread all over the country. So, we made a list of what we wanted out of where we lived. It was very specific. We were very thorough. In the end, we handpicked Dallas, TX (Flower Mound, TX to be exact). There were business perks for Richard, and I was in heaven living halfway between a sister in Oklahoma and a brother in Louisiana.

 I thought I was going to live and die there.

But then we unexpectedly started a whole new adventure just over a year ago (which was what inspired the creation of this blog - so if you want to fill in the holes, you can go to post #1). And what an adventure it's been! It was a flurry of activity and change.

When the smoke cleared, we were in Los Angeles, CA of all places. At the time, it was a necessity for several reasons. But even though we had a permanent address there, we did little else than collect our mail from time to time. We were travelling so much - for both business and personal reasons. That put a lot of strain on our ability to really become a part of our new community. It never felt like home to me. I always felt like a stranger in my own house. I struggled to make friends, which was made even worse by losing some very close ones. And to top it off - I plain hated living in the city. (Here is a colorful post on how much I actually despised it.)

Then one day, we didn't need to live there anymore. So we started talking again about where we would want to live - making lists and trying to determine what we wanted; just as we had over two years ago when leaving South Carolina.

Now, I have to tell you that it is not easy trying to decide where you want to live when you don't have to live anywhere for any particular reason. It's hard! So, we took our time and really thought things over. Sadly, the list of things we wanted for our family did not match up with all the things that we wanted for business reasons. For instance, business reasons suggested staying in California might be a good idea. Family reasons (i.e. ME!!!) suggested that California might be better off falling into the ocean, and we could live somewhere (ANYWHERE!) else.

Finally, we settled on the Las Vegas area, which miraculously proved to meet all of the things we wanted on both lists - in ways that I never would have ever conceived possible. It's a perfect place for business, since Richard spends a lot of time both there and in the surrounding areas speaking and networking, and it's a great place for me because I'm super close to my brother and other loved ones living in Utah.

So, as of yesterday, we are now living in a small town called Logandale, NV. It's halfway between Las Vegas and St. George, UT, near Lake Meade. We're in Moapa Valley, which is a small area, but honestly could not be more perfect for us and the lucky loved ones that get to come visit :) 

We're not usually small-town-living-folk, but this place was just too ideal for us to pass up. There is SO MUCH SPACE here. And I'm not just talking house-wise; I mean when I step into my backyard, I have to squint to see the next neighbor (not to be confused with the front yard, where we're fairly close to our neighbors). No traffic. No sirens in the middle of the night. No walking up to give homeless people food only to realize that I just offended them because they aren't homeless.

It could not be further from the last year of my life. And as grateful as I am for all the experiences I've had, and all the opportunities to grow over this last year, I have to confess that I am really, really glad it's over.

Goodbye, California - hello, Mayberry. 

City Schmity

This was previously an unpublished blogpost because it's so negative. But now that I don't live in the city anymore, I can share it!

I've been in California for one year. And I hate it. I never considered myself a city person, but that was before I lived in a city. So that was just conjecture. But now I know for sure. So much so, that if Los Angeles fell into the ocean tomorrow, I would throw a party.

Living in the city has given me a case of agoraphobia. I don't like taking my dog to pee and having to wade through an array of strangers several times a day. I don't like having to budget an extra 30-60 minutes for traffic when making a "quick" run to the grocery store a few miles down the road. I don't like having to circle the block five times looking for a parking spot, only to come back to my car an hour later to find a ticket waving at me from my windshield because the sign that said "no parking EVER OR ELSE" was a lot harder to read than the "parking allowed forever and always" signs lining the rest of the street.

And then there's the cost of living. OUCH! People need to sell a kidney just to survive around here. The part that really kills me is that I know we're just paying for location - a location that I despise. Talk about adding insult to injury.

When I look out of my window, I see houses, palm trees, AND THE MALL. That is not pretty to me. And when I go to bed at night with the window open so I can enjoy the cool air sweeping off of the ocean, I often have to get up and close it in the middle of the night to block out the sirens and the choppers.

I don’t just hate the city. I feel personally offended by it. I feel like it's taken something away from me, and I'm going to have to fight to get it back.

Education vs. Exposure

As I was taking a college writing class several years ago, the class was reading and discussing a book that I found very offensive. It was saturated with vulgar language, and disgusting illustrations and themes. I refused to read or discuss the book, and opted not to come to class those days. I told my professor I was willing to do an extra assignment in order to be fair, and he asked me to write him an essay on the pros and cons of engaging students in materials that they find offensive. This was my response. 

Education vs. Exposure

            When students walk through their professor’s doors, the professor is automatically given the responsibility of giving them a broadened perspective of the world around them.  Students have existing ideals and opinions that have been formed by a parent, ecclesiastical leader, and life-experience in general.  Their views have been formulated through a mix of education and exposure, and are accepted as truth, whether they are or not.  It isn’t until these beliefs are tested and tried before one can really be sure if they are a practical, real-life view of the world.  Education is like a refiner’s fire.  Old views and opinions should be tested and challenged before they are accepted as a life-long creed of living.  People are, after all, only human, and they shape their belief systems around their own experiences.  A parent can still be ignorant, an ecclesiastical leader can still be narrow-minded, and life-experience can be misleading.

            When an individual makes the decision to be educated, they are saying they want more than what they have.  They want more experience, more knowledge, and more insight.  Because the very nature of education is a process of growing, this can often be uncomfortable.  In the course of learning, there are frequent challenges to one’s accepted truths, as they are required to stretch and grow into new principles and ideals.  As these situations arise, it is important to be able to decipher which of these experiences are necessary, and which are not. There are both pros and cons to engaging students in materials they find offensive.  This is determined by whether or not certain materials serve the purpose of educating, or just exposing.

            When a student comes up against offensive material, it serves as a crossroads.  Once they investigate their feelings, and decide why they are offended, they can better determine if their pre-existing views hold any weight, or if they need to be modified, or tossed out all together.  In order to do so successfully, students should ask themselves why they are offended.  Is it because of their adopted views of what is right and wrong?  Or what is normal or different?  As they answers these questions, they will either fight for what they believe, having a better understanding of the truths at their core, or discard or evolve them as they see that their pre-existing views were narrow or incomplete. 

            On the other hand, there are offensive materials that do not pose questions of right or wrong, normal or different - they simply carry the shock factor of immorality.  The difference between the two is best understood when one considers the difference between being educated and being exposed.  Being educated on certain subjects, ranging from drugs to religion, is far different than being exposed. Let's take rape as an example. The definition of this heinous act is enough to teach me that it is wrong. I believe we should all be educated about its dangers, what you should do if it happens, how to avoid it, etc. On the other hand, I don't need a graphic description of the act to understand or detest it any more than I would otherwise.  I read a book years ago that gave a graphic description of a father raping his daughter. It still haunts me. I vicariously lived through that. I do not feel it benefited me in any way. I wish I could erase those details from my mind.

That is exposure. And it hurts.

The same goes with certain materials adopted into academic curriculum.  For instance, I took a general Psychology class my freshman year of college.  During the course, we held a discussion on the myths about sex and sexuality.  In order to stimulate class discussion, our professor conducted a slide show that posed a series of true or false questions to the class.  Each slide was illustrated.  Sometimes, it was as innocent as two men holding hands.  Others were pornographic.  The question-and-answer session was educational.  The graphic images were exposure, and did nothing to further the educational aspect of the class.  This can have a negative effect on students’ learning.

            Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann developed a theory called the cumulative effects theory.  This theory basically says that media-messages are not all that powerful in the short-run, but in the long-run, after being repeated over and over again, they take a firm holding.  Once that occurs, people who disagree with those messages are discouraged from speaking up because they believe that if it's in the media, it must be the majority-view, and they are the minority.  The resulting silence of their views and their voices is referred to as the spiral of silence (Vivian 404).  What is most appalling about this is that the silence is self-induced because they think they are alone.

            Although this theory deals with media effects, this also holds true for the field of academia.  The fact that certain views or materials may be esteemed in academics gives credence to these views, whether they are worth entertaining or not.  This can create a ripple effect through students who are still striving to determine what is and is not true.  Because students so often come with open minds and open hands, they are not always thorough about sifting through what they are told and determining if it has any value.  Embracing certain offensive materials can create a mirage of truth about certain topics and issues that should not be held in high esteem.  This was demonstrated in the graphic slide show referenced earlier.  Showing such offensive materials in an academic environment gave credence to such behavior.  As offensive as the material was, the professor did not bat an eye.  From his demeanor and presentation, it could be assumed that this was normal, this was right, and this was ok.  As children, we learn through imitation.  This is still true at the crossroads of our adult lives.

            When we start a new job, we learn by watching to see how others perform and respond.  Not only do we want to know how to do our job right, but I think it’s safe to say that we also want to know what we can get away with.  When an individual is transitioning from high school to college, it is also a transition into adulthood. They are no longer sitting at the feet of mom and dad, but looking to the universe for answers to life’s most basic questions. 

Even outside of the budding adult, the academic arena is still a cross roads for all players.  This is the moment in a person’s life when they are willing, and wanting, to unwrap their brain and fill it with truth.  How that truth is handled, or mishandled, has lasting effects on the individual.  It is important to weigh each course’s material for its educational value, and be willing to “kill our darlings” if it crosses the line of exposure.  After all, the ultimate goal of education should be to arm us with the tools that will prepare us to extract Truth from the moments that make up the rest of our lives.  Although our lives may not be laced with rainbows and butterflies, there is no reason to pull ourselves through the mud to prove it.

My Greatest Fear, and the Cliché That Gave Me CPR

I've been dumped.

One of my closest friends called me on Friday to tell me that she didn't have the emotional bandwidth to be my friend anymore. It was a short conversation. I didn't know what to say, so I just thanked her for the call and hung up.

I wrote and rewrote several letters to her, then filed them all away into my "Letters I Will Never Send" folder. Then, I sent her a short email explaining that I respected her decision and would quietly bow out of her life.

But there were paragraphs of unspoken words between each line. I felt like someone had punched a hole in my chest, and I was so sad to see the end of a vibrant friendship. 

Here Comes the Cliché

But it also taught me one of life's most important lessons. You can't please everyone, no matter how hard you try. But this is a cliché, right? We all know this.

Even still, you could power a small country with the amount of energy I have invested in trying to prove otherwise. I honestly don't think I really internalized this truth until now. Sure, there is a whole list of people and kinds of people that probably would not want to spend a sober evening chatting it up with me on a Friday night. But that just means they aren't my intended audience anyway, so who cares?

But THIS - this was the first time that someone I loved stopped me on my way to loving them to say, "Enough. I don't want you anymore."

I absolutely crumbled. So it was there, in a pile of tissues and self-pity, that I really came to fully understand that I really cannot please everyone - even the people that I most love, or those that I believe most love me back.

My Greatest Fear

Two weeks earlier, I had sat on the couch of this very friend and confessed to her that I was haunted by a desire to be as invisible as people need me to be - and that THAT is the gaping hole in my wholeness. It's as though I inherently believe that if I can just be small enough and quiet enough, then I will not upset the fragile balance I believe my relationships to be - as if they hinge on my ability not to be too much of anything.

Of course, I know this is just an old, irrational fear, probably stemming from some childhood misinterpretation of love. And in spite of it, it's something I successfully push through in order to maintain healthy, vibrant and authentic relationships in my life. I love people. Some of them even love me back.

But still… there are times that it sneaks up on me and suddenly I'm pressing myself into the shadows before I remember that I didn't mean to.

So when my friend called me this past Friday to tell me that, actually, I wasn't quite invisible enough for her after all, it kinda shook me up.

The Silver Lining

But in that moment, when it seemed that all of my worst fears had come true - that after years of fighting irrational insecurities and beliefs about myself, the very thing I'd been trying to avoid happened - there was a moment of clarity that took my breath away.

It hadn't felt the way I thought it would.

It hurt, yes - the pain was searing - but I didn't feel responsible for it. Even in my pain and disappointment, I absolutely knew that this wasn't my fault or my problem. It was her issue. It was her own fragile balance that had been upset by my beingness. There wasn't anything I could have done to avoid this. It wasn't my fault.

This insight saved me from the guilt and the smallness that could have caved my chest in otherwise. I did not collapse into myself. This experience did not validate and reinforce my life-long fears of rejection.

It erased them.

Now, I do not feel afraid. Having experienced the thing that I most feared, I no longer fear it. It is not an unknown. I know the texture, the flavor, and the smell of it. It will not sneak up on me again, or pull me quietly into the shadows unawares. I will see it coming a mile away, and instead of succumbing to it, I hope to be able to give it a slight nod of recognition, then keep on being fully me - the purest gift I have to offer anyone.

Including myself.

The Greatest Gift You Can Give an Entrepreneur

As I looked at photos of Richard speaking in front of a crowd tonight, I thought about the road that has lead us here. It's been a bumpy one, full of sacrifice and bruises. But it has brought us to our destination, however vaguely we imagined it. And when we arrived, it felt so much like home we couldn't deny that we had reached something for which we'd been longing.

But we would never have gotten here if I had not given Richard the greatest gift you can give any entrepreneur:

The freedom to change his mind.

I think that's part of the entrepreneurial spirit. It's about breaking away from the well-travelled road and forging a new one. You can't expect someone to stay exactly on a path that doesn't exist yet. There are no quarterly promotions and annual dividends to help you measure your success. There's only "there" and "getting there." This often involves detours and hacking away at branches again, even after you were just getting used to being surrounded by familiar things again.

Sadly, I have spent many years being embarrassed by how untraditional our life has been. I would look for rational explanations when someone would ask, "What's he doing now?" Or, "You're moving again?" This put distance and resentment in my relationship and even distance between me and my ability to live. I was too busy waiting for things to settle into the rhythm I thought my life should take.

Over the last few years, I've come to better understand Richard, and the things that make him tick. I've come to trust his intuition and admire his unconquerable spirit. I've seen him build cities, watch them crumble to ash, then fearlessly start building again. It's hard not to love someone like that. So many times I would have given up; so many times.

Now that I have a better perspective, I wish I could reach across time, give myself a big hug of compassion, and say, "I understand. It's okay; things are going to turn out fine."

There sure have been a shortage of people in my life that did understand. But I can't blame them, really. After all, I didn't understand. And besides, being an entrepreneur really is about swimming upstream, and breaking away from the masses. It's about doing things different - not reinventing the wheel, but using the wheel to take you to brand new places. It's being a pioneer.

All of these things imply that you will be alone.

I used to wait for my life to calm down, and for it to take on a more "normal" cadence. Only now that I've seen the pattern worn deeply into my life do I understand that this is my life. No. It's our life. And when I look at it that way - as an adventure that we are embarking on together, and not something that is happening to me - I can better see it for what it is, and I am excited to be travelling with someone who aims so high.

My sister recently posted the following quote on Facebook:

That sure sums up my life. And so I will always give Richard the space to change his mind, because he is not really changing his mind at all. He is merely calibrating his course.

And I get to go along for the ride of a life time.

Dreams Need Time to Grow, and Space to Stick Around

A koru - symbolic of new life, growth, strength and
peace.  - picture by Gwen Weiler

My life has been a constant buzz of verbs for months. I have taken very little time to sit down, breathe, and be still. Instead, I have been reacting to a mounting list of responsibilities. It has felt like someone slipped a corset over my torso and has been steadily tightening the strings until I cannot breathe.

Last weekend I was complaining to my husband about the stresses in my life – during which I even used the word “miserable” – and he’d finally had enough. He said, “Gwen! Be grateful!”

That really brought me up short. Because I AM grateful. But it wasn’t really until he said it, and I defended myself, that I got the clarity and relief I’d been praying for.

The Back Story

I have been working as the project manager for Richard’s SEO company since last July. The plan at the time was for me to come in and tighten the position, map out all the procedures, create systems and processes for everything, then pass the job on to someone who doesn’t have to go home with the boss every day.

However, our decision to hit the road last September kind of put a wrench in my exit strategy, and I’ve been handling the project management ever since.  

Well, Richard’s company was acquired by a larger one back in November, which opened up a unique opportunity for me. You see, this bigger company also owns a publishing house, and ever since my stint as the Editor in Chief of my high school literary magazine, it’s been my dream to get into that industry. I’ve wanted to be an editor for years, and have even enlisted my writer friends to send me their books to “play” with. (Thanks friends! You know who you are….)

The good news is that I’ve been living my dream since December. I’ve been working as an editor and writer! Cross that big fat goal written in all capital letters off my life’s to-do list!

The bad news is that I’ve still been working as Richard’s project manager.

The worse news is that there’s been a cruise, some other travels, a two-week stint of whooping cough, trying to finish my own book, and a move shoved in between the cracks, too.

I’ve been busy.

I’ve been complaining.

So Here We Are

Until my conversation with Richard, I’d been blaming everything on my decision to add the writing gig to my list of current responsibilities. I’d assumed the only way to find relief was to stop (last one hired, first one fired, right?).

So when Richard told me (or reminded me, I should say) to be grateful, I took a long look at my situation.

I realized that as stressed as I've been about this latest opportunity, the real problem is that I'm trying to do it in my spare time, since I'm already working as Richard's project manager.  But the truth is that if I had to pick one, I would do the writing/editing – forever and ever. It’s very high on a short list of things I’m very passionate about in my life.

I was amazed and relieved to see very clearly that I haven't hated doing this - I've just hated how it’s manifested itself in my life. I hadn’t allowed time or space for my dream, so I had to contort my life to fit around it.

And I almost lost it.

It reminds me of my last semester of college. I was putting in about 60 hours of schoolwork, between a 40-hour a week “practicum,” my evening class, my self-paced class, and all the homework in between. I would come home at night and just cry. When I wasn't doing schoolwork, I was just hyper aware of the fact that I wasn’t doing schoolwork, instead of enjoying the break.

But it didn't change the fact that I LOVED the work I was doing and that it was something I was very passionate about. As miserable as I was every night, there wasn’t a single morning I didn’t wake up bright-eyed and ready to do it all again.

It was just the pace that was breaking me.

And so it is now.

What Now?

When I responded to Richard, it took me 10 minutes to state my case, 24 hours for me to truly recognize its significance, and every day since for me to revel in my new perspective of my life.

I am not an over-worked, over-stressed, over-extended woman. I am a woman that is living my dream, while also holding on to a lot of things that aren’t my dream. I am sad that I almost let go of one of the most important opportunities in my life because my arms were so full of mediocre things I was used to. And I am so very, very grateful that I didn’t.

But in order for me to truly understand that I have arrived, there is still more that needs to be done. It’s kind of like this:

When my mom, in awe, asked my dad how he carves such beautiful sculptures from wood, his response was simple, yet profound. “Easy,” he said. “I just take a block of wood, then carve away everything that isn’t a duck.”

And so it is. It’s time to do some carving.