When I was a kid one of the best and most exciting times of the year was my family’s annual, summer vacation trip to Grandma’s house.  These days by car the trip can be made in just over five hours, but back then the trip took more than seven.  Mom would pack our last-school-year’s lunch boxes full of snackie food surprises, we’d take books and paper and pens to stay busy, and I lost countless travel checker-chess-trouble-connect-four games to my younger brother.

The trip was made in my mom’s Toyota Camry.  It is a smaller car, particularly small for three nearly-adult size kids in the back seat.  Dad, true to his Viking roots, stands at 6’3″ tall and had to jam the driver’s seat as far back as it would go in order to wedge himself inside the vehicle.  My brother, sister, and I would argue about who had to sit behind him and which one of us got to sit behind Mom, who is purebred Japanese and not even five feet tall in shoes.  Usually the shortest person sat behind Dad and the tallest behind Mom, which for many years put me smack in the middle of the back seat.

Summers in Eastern Washington are HOT (it’s practically the effing desert).  My brother puts off heat like a space heater and tolerates ALL forms of discomfort insanely well.  My mom and my sister I’m convinced are both part desert lizard, and flourish in the heat.  My Dad was raised in a pretty drastic culture of poverty, so using the a/c in the car was tantamount to DEATH for wasting fuel efficiency, plus his internal thermostat has a comfort range of about 60* up or down (anything between 23* and THE SUN is tolerable to him).  

On this particular trip, my sister was tipped against the door and sleeping like a gecko on a hot rock, face turned up toward the sun as it blazed through the un-tinted window.  My brother was sweating and emanating heat; I’m pretty sure if I looked closely I could see wavy air currents over his head like a desert mirage. I recall very distinctly being squished in the back seat, cloyingly stagnant hot air sticking to my face and coating my lungs, daydreaming about ice water baths and wishing I could experience death from hypothermia.  I was stuck between reading-a-book-like-it’s-a-day-at-the-beach-mr-heating-pad on the left and face-against-the-window-open-mouthed-snoring-miss-lizard-sun-bather on the right.  I was sweating like a faucet, my hands leaving moisture wrinkles in the loose-leaf notebook paper I was writing on, my damp legs warping the book I was using as a lap desk.  It was the second circle of hell in the back seat of that car, hot enough to see a mirage.

“DAD.  It’s really hot in here, can you please roll the windows down?”

“It’s not that hot.  Tough it out.  Stop complaining.”  (Seriously, he’s hard core.)

My brother piped up.  “Yeah, it’s hot in here.”  (Please note his lack of request to be COOLER… I think it’s because at least half the heat was coming FROM HIM.  Heating pads don’t know or mind that they’re hot, they just keep doing what they do.)

Dad would then get irritated.  Back then his fuse was pretty short.  “FINE.”

With a huff and a jerking movement, ALL FOUR WINDOWS of the car suddenly rolled down at once, all the way down to the frame.  YAY POWER WINDOWS.  The family was instantly in the middle of a raging tornado.  (We were on the freeway, remember?  And probably speeding, if my dad was driving.)  My hair whipped around my face and throat, in my mouth and in my eyes, rendering me speechless and blind.  My sister, whose cheek was stuck to her window a second before, came awake with a spasm and a yell as the descending window threatened to take her skin with it.  Even in the best of circumstances she does not wake up peacefully and will throw punches in her sleep if you try and move her.  She was not happy with the sudden waking, or the wind, or the cancellation of her sunbath.  Her flying hand upended my book-for-a-lap-desk which launched the sweat-wrinkled papers into the swirling air, and the inside of the car became total chaos.

Imagine dropping a pissed off, hungry feral cat straight down into the middle of a resting flock of molting pigeons and you’ll start to get a glimpse of the situation.

Throughout my childhood it was always that way with Dad.  He is the most all or nothing, black or white, give no quarter, zero middle ground person I’ve ever met in my whole life, and he raised us to be the same.  We are a family of extremists.  We are TERMINAL in that it’s either done right, we die trying, or we never try at all because doing it without doing it RIGHT is failure… and if you fail you might as well be dead anyways.

There’s a good reason why I’ve never questioned, “Gee, I wonder why I’m a perfectionist and overachiever, I wonder why I tend to do things the hard way.”  I have never wondered why.  I KNOW WHY.

It’s in my blood.

We learned that “anything worth doing is worth doing right,” and in our house RIGHT equals PERFECT equals AS HARD AS YOU CAN.  There were no expressions of gratitude for doing a good job or doing your best, there was just “doing it.”  Doing it well and doing it right and doing it HARD was standard and expected.  EXTREME living, extreme choices.  “Go big or go home.”  My dad taught us that if some is good, more is better.  That “tight is tight, too tight is busted.”  I learned that if you ask for some jam he brings you the jar, that if you need a small drink of water while doing yard work he’d bring you a hose turned on high enough to pressure wash concrete, that if you want a few apples he’d plant you a tree.  I learned that work isn’t work unless it makes you sweat and gets you dirty, and you’re not trying your best unless you have to dig deep and use mental toughness to finish the last ten percent.

And OH I AM MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER.  I am his first born son.  I am a duplicate of him in all the biggest ways.  If I had a dollar for every time I heard “you’re acting just like your dad, why do you make things so black and white, you’re just so hard, you’re just SO MUCH,” I would have enough money to retire ten years ago.

Everything I’ve ever done in my life has been about “all or nothing.”  When I was in school I took the hardest classes, because why do “kind of hard” if you can do “the hardEST.”  In college in order to get over my fear of vulnerability with people I joined a sorority, because “if living with one person is good, living with one hundred people is better.”  After college I didn’t just work, I worked eighty hours a week.  When I learned to snowboard I forced myself to learn goofy-footed because left foot was harder.  When I played basketball I shot with only my left hand for every other practice.  When I got pregnant I didn’t just have a natural childbirth without meds, I had them at home so I couldn’t take the meds even if I wanted to.

My philosophy has been “find the thing you want to do, figure out the biggest, hardest, most aggressive way to do it, then do it that way FULL SPEED.”  Do everything you do like you’ve got a monster set of balls.  Wrap one hand tightly around life’s throat, cup the other hand snugly around life’s nuts, and then SQUEEEEEEZE SLOWLY, and AS HARD AS YOU CAN.

Don’t just DO, DO IT HARD.  Don’t just LIVE, LIVE HARD.  Work hard.  Play hard.  GO hard.  PUSH HARD.  Hit the ground running and don’t stop until your body collapses in protest.  Do and say and behave as you would, but in the biggest and hardest and toughest way possible.  My days were so full and packed so tightly that most of them couldn’t fit in even one extra thing.  My day planners were expensive because they broke down the day into five minute increments, and my planner was always FULL.

I loved it, but it’s made it difficult for me to get along with other people.  It’s made me “a lot to take” for a lot of people I’d consider to be important.

When I first started this journey with WLR I got myself a notebook.  I use the notebook to corral thoughts, and ideas, and tidbits of mental activity.  I carry the notebook with me and write in it as I go about my day, mentioning things to myself to use for later when I write, jotting down thoughts I have that I need to work through later.  “Extreme behavior” was one of the first ideas to go into that notebook, and it was one issue that kept coming up over and over again.  I knew I had some issues to work through with regard to the subject and that I’d end up writing about it at some point.  Over the course of a few weeks I wrote about thirty small notes that revolved around being extreme, and about finding moderation.

When I compiled all my notes to start this post my intention was to write about moderation, and how I need to find it.  How I AM finding it.  How I’m naturally an extreme person but “hey look how good I’m doing, I’m learning how to live in the grey area.”  I thought I’d write about how I can see the error in living as an extremist, how my extreme actions have gotten me into trouble, and how finding moderation, calming down, and going easy is the best way to do things.

I imagined I’d write all of those things like a confession, like a penance, and the people that know me would read it.  In my mind I saw them reading.  I saw them nodding their heads, smiling a bit as they said “good girl, I knew you’d see it our way, I’m so proud you’re tolerable now.”  I imagined those people that always told me “you’re too much” would finally see that I really do have it in me to be gentle.  And calm.

And TAME.

And so I wrote.  For four days I wrote, and it got harder every day.  Usually when I write the words just POUR OUT over the course of an hour or three and the bad things in my head and heart go with them.  Usually it’s cathartic, a relief, like a giant amount of pressure is released and some of the ugliness and confusion about myself disappears like smoke.

This time it did not work like that.

I did write about my extreme nature, and about finding moderation.  I did write about the way I am, and how people tried so hard to teach me to be more gentle.  All the words and pieces were here to get my point across, but the more I worked on this piece the more angry and frustrated I got.  The more I read over what I’d written about learning moderation, and how moderation is a good thing, and “look how much more calm I am now that I’m learning to be moderate,” the more angry I became.

I got angry because I realized how much all of that is bullshit.

I got angry because through my attempt to write about how “I need to be moderate,” I realized that I don’t WANT to be moderate.

I don’t want to be calm, or mild.  I do not want to be tame.  I do not want to go quietly in the night, I want to live like every day is the last one.

I am angry because I realized for the first time in my whole life that maybe, JUST MAYBE, there might not be anything wrong with me.

As I read through my self-proclaimed need for moderation, it occurred to me for the first time that those people who told me over and over for so many years “you’re just too much, you’re a lot to take, you need to be gentle,” 

…what if they were wrong?

I started thinking about my kids, and what kind of people they are.  About their nature.  Growing up I consistently got in trouble for doing things too much, and too hard.  For BEING too much.  Now that I have kids I understand just how unfair it is to be told things like that when you’re a child.  

When you’re a child, you just ARE.  There is never another time in a human’s life that they will be so unincumbered by social expectations.  There is no other time when they will have such pure intentions, or intentions so purely their own.  As a child grows and is hardened off by the world they change and learn to reign in their natural tendencies, but only wisdom and time and experience teach the discernment required to be anything but what they naturally ARE.  With kids “what you see is what you get” because they don’t know any other way.  They CAN’T do it any other way.  As a child you don’t really get to pick and choose the ways your God given personality is applied to the world.  You just ARE.  And you just DO.

And I just DID, and I did it in extreme ways.

Teaching a child to be who they are and how to channel that in productive ways is good parenting.  Telling a child “don’t be what you are” is just NOT FAIR.

I get that now, as an adult.  I get that as a mother.  As a child it was confusing, at best.  Devastating and emotionally crippling at worst.

I spent almost all of my life torn between being the extreme person that I AM, and being the moderate person I am just not but was expected to be.

And yet, after working through this post and making a few realizations, I don’t think I’d change a thing.  No matter how tough it was to navigate a gentle world with extreme tendencies, I think it’s GOOD that I’m extreme.  And I’m not just saying that so I don’t have to change (even though YES, for the record I don’t want to change), I’m saying that because it’s EXTREME PEOPLE that do EXTREME THINGS.  Doing things gently and moderately is okay some of the time, but it’s the people that live “outside of safe and moderate” that make the most impact.  It takes some inner extreme to walk to the edge of the map, find the fence between “here” and “there,” and then systematically and forcefully check to see just how solid the fence really is.  Extreme people are always pushing past comfortable.  Extreme people push the boundaries of what we know and expect.  Extreme people change history.  Albert Einstein was extreme.  Galileo was extreme.  So was Picasso, and Columbus, and Caesar, and Harriet Tubman.

So was Hitler.

So was Jesus.

Being extreme changes the world.

I don’t WANT to give up my extreme.  I LIKE IT.  My extreme nature is part of what makes me unique, and fearless, and aggressive (and kind of crazy, if I’m totally honest).  My extreme tendencies have helped me to overcome obstacles when other people said “you can’t,” or “you shouldn’t,” or “I don’t think it can be done.”  Extreme living means you don’t take “no” for an answer.

I’ve decided I’m going to keep the extreme.

DID YOU HEAR THAT?  All you people that told me throughout my life that I was TOO MUCH, DO YOU HEAR ME?!  I AM KEEPING THE EXTREME.

Does that mean I’ll be offensive to a lot of people just by living my life?  Probably.

Does that mean I’ll be a lot to take?  And harder to love?  And have less friends?  Yep.

Does that mean I’ll continue to unintentionally intimidate people?  Yes.

But only the weak.

It is possible that people have spoken into my life because they were sincerely concerned for my well being, but I would speculate that only one out of every ten times that was the case.  Maybe less.  I believe that people (ESPECIALLY WOMEN) will push in to other people and force onto them the behaviors and personalities that they themselves find palatable.  People try to change those around them instead of changing themselves so they feel more comfortable.  So they don’t have to deal with THEIR OWN SHIT.

Extreme people generally don’t FIT IN.  We stick out.  We are goldfish in a pond of guppies.  Others find us threatening, or intimidating, or infuriating.  For those that don’t do with their lives what they wish they did, people that get shit done are TOO MUCH.  Extreme and active and progressive people are used as a litmus test for others to measure their own dead weight, and unfortunately when people see that they don’t stack up they get pissed off.  They deny that the conditions of the test are valid, claim that the test results are wrong or that the test itself is stupid.  They generally lash out and shoot the messenger instead of being real with themselves and making an effort to grow and change.  It was not and IS NOT MY FAULT that my activity makes others feel the weight of their inertia, yet that is what they believe.

And that is what they tried to get ME to believe.  For a long time they succeeded.

Not anymore.

I will confess that EXTREME (doing it hard) and EXCESS (doing too much) are two different things, and finding moderation is the best way to remove the excess.  I am willing to remove the excess.  (The Mister will be glad to hear that, he’s my excess-meter and gets tired of his job sometimes.  It’s a 24-7 job with no pay, and when he does his job I fight back with yelling and punching.)

I will work on removing the excess.

I will not remove the extreme.

I will do my best to be kind, and loving, and generous, encouraging, and uplifting.  I will offer help where and when I can, I will live my life as an example to those that want to break out of what they’ve always done to be more than they’ve ever been.  I will be gentle and patient to the fullest extent of my being, but DAMNIT I WILL DO IT MY WAY.  I will do it while being true to myself.

No more apologies for the way I am.  NO MORE feeling bad for those that choose to not keep up.  From here on out I will live as extremely as I’m made.

I wonder how many people that struggle with body image issues and food disorders (or any other self-destructive behavior, for that matter) ALSO struggle with accepting themselves for who they are on a deeper level.  How much and how often do you feel that you need to apologize for yourself?  For being who you are?  How often have you felt bad for being exactly the thing you were made to be?

How many people in your life have told you “just be different and things will be easier,” and how many times have you believed them?

What if they’re wrong?

What if the thing that makes you tough to deal with for other people is in fact the part of you that makes you great?  What if the problem is THEIRS, and not YOU?

No more accepting limitations that others put on you.  Any change to your personality should be made for YOU, not for those that can’t keep up.  Be as extreme as you can with exactly what you are to be the best and biggest version of yourself you can be. BE YOU, HARD, and eff anyone that doesn’t love you for exactly what you are.

I’M going to. And I have cookies, so you should do it to. We can share. :)