On Being Human
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
On Being Human
“Forget everything you know about memoir. Of course this is about the comet that is Jen Pastiloff and how she grew up struggling with deafness, depression, and a wrecked body image to go on and crack open the world’s heart with yoga/writing retreats, a website named The Manifest-Station, and pure love—but honestly, it’s really the memoir of all of us, every single one of us who ever felt ‘I’m not enough, I’m not loved, I’m falling apart, I don’t belong here.’ I was reading this moving memoir while crying, scribbling down sentences and holding on to them like lifelines. I’ve got you, Jen says, but the true message of this radiant memoir is nothing short of that revolutionary love: we’ve got each other.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow
“Listen to me: you’re going to think Jen Pastiloff is your BFF after you read this book, because when you’re done reading it you will feel known. No one is better qualified to write a book called On Being Human than this particular human. Having long struggled to accept her own imperfections and struggles, Jen manages to bring these to the page with a humor, heart, and generosity that makes room for all of us to be a little kinder to ourselves.”
—Elizabeth Crane, author of Turf and The History of Great Things
“Especially in these dark times for women, there is actually nothing ‘simple’ about Pastiloff’s radical alchemy. Read this book and feel yourself expand.”
—Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting
“Jen Pastiloff is a rejuvenating supernova! A life-force of primal, extravagant delight! Frank and funny, she’ll boss herself around and change the rest of us in the meantime. I’d want to listen to anything she has to say.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Pushcart Prize–winning poet and author of Fuel and 19 Varieties of Gazelle
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Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Pastiloff
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Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Names: Pastiloff, Jennifer, author.
Title: On being human : a memoir of waking up, living real, and listening hard / Jennifer Pastiloff ; foreword by Lidia Yuknavitch.
Description: New York City : Dutton, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018048010 | ISBN 9781524743567 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524743574 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Quality of life. | Well-being. | Yoga. | Self-realization. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | SELF-HELP / Personal Growth / Happiness. | HEALTH & FITNESS / Yoga.
Classification: LCC HN25 .P375 2019 | DDC 306—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048010
Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_2
For my father, who left too soon—and for my son, who came at exactly the right time
Contents
Advance Praise for On Being Human
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Lidia Yuknavitch
INTRODUCTION Beauty Hunting
CHAPTER 1 Rewrite Your Story
CHAPTER 2 The Art of Unknowing
CHAPTER 3 I’m Right Here
CHAPTER 4 The Disappearing Act
CHAPTER 5 Where Are You in Your Body Right Now?
CHAPTER 6 Sisters, Stepfathers, “Friends”
CHAPTER 7 Fear and Loathing in New York
CHAPTER 8 Doing and Undoing Pain
CHAPTER 9 The Just-A Box
CHAPTER 10 Boys of Summer
CHAPTER 11 Lessons from The Newsroom
CHAPTER 12 Yoga Finds Me
CHAPTER 13 Blast from the Past
CHAPTER 14 How May I Serve?
CHAPTER 15 Seen and Heard
CHAPTER 16 Embracing Change
CHAPTER 17 It Was in You All Along
CHAPTER 18 Bringing People Together
CHAPTER 19 From Connector to Leader
CHAPTER 20 Fearless-ish
CHAPTER 21 Gifts, Unexpected and Otherwise
CHAPTER 22 Bullshit Stories and Other Lies I Believed
CHAPTER 23 We Must Have Tools
CHAPTER 24 All Very Normal
CHAPTER 25 Make Room for the Possible and the Impossible
CHAPTER 26 What You Need
CHAPTER 27 The Human Impulse
CHAPTER 28 I Am a Body
CHAPTER 29 How to Open
CHAPTER 30 Little Beauties Everywhere
CHAPTER 31 I Got You
CHAPTER 32 The Inner Asshole: Acceptance and Resistance
CHAPTER 33 Keeping of the Going
CHAPTER 34 Fathers Everywhere
CHAPTER 35 Give Yourself a Fucking Medal
EPILOGUE The Art of Knowing and Unknowing
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Foreword
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME someone listened to you?
I mean really listened to you. Heard you with their whole body. Can you remember?
Jennifer Pastiloff practices radical listening. She is also mostly deaf, so when I tell you that she listens with her entire body, I promise you, there is nothing else like it. How we first met was she attended a writing workshop of mine in Portland, Oregon. She arrived with a broken foot. She was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Her eyelashes alone were dazzling. I was mesmerized. Smitten. Immediately and ridiculously. After she left I Googled her late at night like a stalker. The next week she messaged me on Facebook to tell me that my workshop had changed her life. I was so scared to answer her message I disappeared into my own butt (a common introvert tactic akin to sea anemones).
And yet there was something so profoundly attractive about her; something radiating from inside of her that literally took my breath away enough that I transcended my idiotic shyness and introversion and eventually answered her. The profoundly attractive thing about Jen Pastiloff is this: her ability to be so fundamentally and authentically present alongside other human beings that you remember who you are, or who you might be, if you could be amazing. And when she sits down to listen to you, your soul comes back to life.
What does it mean, radical listening? Jen Pastiloff embodies a kind of listening that originates in the heart and the gut. Perhaps the fact that she has struggled with hearing loss has given her special sensitivity to what we mean when we claim we are listening to each other. To be honest, I don’t know very many good listeners. I seem to meet more and more people who have forgotten that listening is the other side of voice. I am most in love with people who deeply understand voice as being able to tell their story in a way that makes room for other bodies and other stories to coexist. When Jen teaches an On Being Human workshop, a kind of magical hybrid of yoga, s
tory-listening, and storytelling, a whole world opens up where our differences and our similarities are allowed to emerge, reminding us that even as we are individuals we can also make bridges to each other. Honestly, though, you have to take one of her workshops yourself so that you can experience what I mean when I say she listens with her whole body.
The first time I was in one of her workshops and she sat down in front of me to listen to what I’d written, my entire body began to shake. No one had ever looked at me or listened to me or sat with me like that in my entire life (okay, except the times Joan of Arc and Mary Shelley each visited me in a dream, but most people think I’m nuts when I tell them about that). It both scared the crap out of me and simultaneously unearthed a long, partly sad, partly joyous note in my own throat. A truth note. A glimpse of my own heart worth.
I suck at yoga. No really, I do. For one thing, I have scoliosis bad enough to have given me chronic pain since I was thirteen. I have a hip dysplasia that makes sitting, standing, driving, and walking super fun. As a fifty-five-year-old woman, I’m also menopausal, arthritic, and generally stiff and cranky most of the time, even though I was a competitive swimmer for more than twenty years. What I’m saying is, I’m not up for yogi of the year or anything by a long shot. If I get down on the ground I’m not even sure I can get back up by myself. My hips and knees and ankles make noises that sometimes frighten me.
And yet.
What came out of me the first time I participated in one of Jen’s On Being Human workshops was something like a wail. A life sorrow buried so deeply within my body I didn’t even know I was carrying it. Let me tell you, I know a few things about sorrow. I wrote more than one book about sorrow. But I’d never heard myself make the sounds that came from my own physical and emotional depths that first workshop. Crying is not even close. I made a snot sea on my yoga mat. My eyes puffed shut. The word I’d use is human. I touched the strength of my own vulnerability. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be in a state of fully human, and to have someone see me and hear me all the way to the bone.
Now Jen and I teach workshops together on Writing and the Body. The scared me still exists. I’m just learning how to love her rather than bury her. I learned that from Jen.
When I think about the years that Jen spent waitressing while simultaneously dreaming of being an actress—a story she tells frequently in her workshops—I think about how paradigmatic that story is for all of us. Our life choices surge out of us when the pressure to move gets bigger than the pressure to hold it all in. It’s no Cinderella story. Fuck that story. Most of us just bust ass and fail and fall and get up and try again; we buy our own shoes and we get the fancy dresses at discount and we no longer wait for the world to hand us a crown, a glass slipper (who could run away in those?), a gown, or even a decent bra. Almost none of us jump into our dreams without rough beginnings or a damn difficult struggle along the way or giant falls that cause us to have to start the hell over again.
The Jen I know now is an internationally known workshop leader and speaker. How did she shoot the gap between waitress with a dream balloon hovering over her head to international heart-healing rock star?
It may be a very good question. But it’s not the only question.
A better question is: How do we recognize beauty and love in the shapes of a life?
When I think about the years Jen has spent mourning the death of her father, or the years she spent struggling with an eating disorder, or the years she spent trying to live with family legacies or dark experiences that torque a life path, or the years she spent helping people build bridges back to their own hearts, I think maybe she is reinventing the word beautiful. I think maybe she is asking us what it would be like if we gave beauty back to the world and to each other, instead of striving toward some false fiction that places beauty out of our reach and away from our oh-so-varied bodies.
This book is the story of how Jen invented her life from the inside out, rather than waiting for the world to tell her who she might be. The story travels through doubt and depression, love and loss, grief and death, desire and dream, but more than anything else this story travels through her actual body as she experienced the events of her life. When she began to read lips without realizing her hearing was diminishing as a child, something else was born into her. When she reads your lips, she’s not just looking at the words your mouth is making. She’s reading your whole body story.
She’s giving your beauty and love back to you.
When people come out of her workshops, their faces look different. Suddenly it seems as if beauty and courage and love might emerge from the inside out. What the world may think of us and the stories others project onto us falls away for a while, and we walk back out into the world with something like souls that won’t stop singing. Like heart songs that won’t shut up. And I gotta be honest . . . between you and me? We could use a little more heart song these days. We could use some fierce joy that won’t shut up.
—Lidia Yuknavitch
INTRODUCTION
Beauty Hunting
You Can Have This
WHEN I FINALLY got out the tools to build what I thought I needed to get the life I wanted, I realized that what I needed was within me. But first, I had to rebuild everything. Once I did that, I would be on my way to a different kind of living.
I started with the heart. I took an old phone book, the Yellow Pages, that old relic we used to rely on to find people, and I cracked it against my chest until my old heart came out with a thump. I picked it up off the faux hardwood floor of my living room among toy fire engines and little-boy shoes and placed it on the bookshelf that was just given to me by a woman who lost her baby the day before she was to be induced. I wondered how long before my son tried to climb on the bookshelf, since it resembled a ladder and he loves to climb on anything, including his high chair and things that can (and do) topple over. I thought of the woman’s lost baby and my living son and how we never know when we might face things that topple our hearts over and bring us to our knees.
I placed my heart on the highest shelf, between a picture of my father-in-law, Agha June, Persian for “Granddad,” and a photo of my own father holding me as a baby. My heart, beating and alive, sat isolated on the shelf with the dead fathers. I placed it high enough so that my son couldn’t grab it and roll it on the floor yelling Ball, ball but not too high that someone couldn’t reach out and touch it and feel the weight of it in their palms, or ask it questions like it was a Magic 8 Ball heart.
The questions you could ask my heart: How did you make it out? Is it scary out here? How are you living unprotected like this? And like a good Magic 8 Ball, it answered people’s questions. Yes, definitely. As I see it, yes. Without a doubt. Signs point to yes. And they would place my 8 Ball heart back on the shelf, satisfied with the answers, because it was as if they were being told, Everything is going to be okay, and isn’t that all anyone ever wants to hear? It’s all I ever wanted to hear. My exposed heart gave the askers of these questions comfort to see how they might survive like this, too, and how it would change the way they lived, the way they loved. They would go home and think, As I see it, yes, I can be vulnerable, too. It is decidedly so. Outlook good.
I would put my 8 Ball heart back in my chest at the end of the day, give my son a bath, kiss my husband, and marvel that I could be two things at once. Wholly unafraid and utterly terrified. Exposed and safe. Deaf and listening. How remarkable that my heart could be out in the world, helping me to listen when my ears failed me, and also be safely nestled inside my body.
And that, in fact, is how this story begins.
Just Say Yes
I want to show you what I mean when I use the phrase beauty hunting. But I have to get you to believe me that when you listen to people and when you show up, like really show up, there is beauty everywhere. And when you start noticing it, you can’t unsee it.
You may ask, Who
are you to show me what beauty is, where it is, and what it can do? What the hell do I know? I haven’t gotten out of my pajamas today, and I drank too much coffee, and I’m just trying to keep my head above the drowning water of all the negative thoughts, so what can I tell you about how people are and about beauty and about the way the world is? I can’t. But I can share my journey.
That’s all we can do. Right? Isn’t that what it means to revel in our humanness? To let ourselves be seen? And when we do that: It’s beautiful. Trust me.
Some years ago I connected with Rosie Alma, a reader of my website, The Manifest-Station. She had cystic fibrosis. She’d written a guest-post for the site and followed me on Facebook. In April 2013, she heard I was coming to Atlanta to do a workshop and sent me an e-mail asking me to come visit.
I didn’t know how to make this happen during the short time I had in Georgia. I didn’t have a car. I was busy. But I told her I would be there. My sister, my nephew Blaise, and I, all went to Emory University Hospital at Wesley Woods. Blaise jumped on the bed and hugged her. She couldn’t talk, since she’d just had the double lung transplant. I’m deaf, so I’m used to struggling to hear people speak, so I told her that as long as she moved her lips, all would be right in the world.
I had never been in the presence of such light before. I’m telling you, it was like a corny movie where you hear angels humming in the background. She was so full of life.
And she was dying.
I think of all the bullshit stories that get in our (my) way. If I had not gone to visit her because I couldn’t make the time, I would have never met this human before she died. My sister and Blaise went to visit her again one more time after I left Atlanta, and then Rosie suddenly passed away just a week before her twenty-fifth birthday.
I saw the parallel universe. The one where I said, I wish I could but I can’t, I’m busy, I don’t have enough time, I don’t have a car, I have a workshop to do, I am afraid, and I saw how many times that parallel universe was the one I lived in and how it was the opposite of beauty hunting. I lived there for a long time. I might have stayed there forever. But I didn’t.