It’s a little ironic that I wrote last Friday about surviving the whirlwind…

And then Sunday, we ended up with no power after the remains of Hurricane Ike spun through the area.  

LG&E reported about 300,000 without power due to the event in Louisville, and when I called Duke Energy (the Indiana provider) they said that about 100,000-200,000 of their customers were down.  

So about a half a million people were bereft of electricity this week in my local area.  

We got ours back late Tuesday evening (I had fortunately already queued up Monday’s post on Friday.  Thank you, Wordpress!)  

I had a lot of plans for this last week.  I can assure you, none of them involved grilling all the rapidly-thawing meat from my freezer on our tiny charcoal grill.  Or cooking soup in a crock pot next to my desk all day Tuesday for dinner. (The office still had electrical power, and I think the smell was starting to drive my coworkers slowly insane by about 3:00 PM.)  I briefly considered picking up a copy of Manifold Destiny to figure out how to accomplish dinner during my evening commute for Wednesday.  

I had to improvise.  I had to slow down.  I had to let go of my own plans and work with the situation at hand.  I spent a lot of time reading children’s books to my kids.  

It was a little bit glorious.  

Enjoy your weekend.  May your plans work out exactly as you’ve foreseen.

Or else, may you be enriched by whatever happens that wasn’t in the plan.

Depending on how you found me and the nature of our relationship, you may know me as coffeecupkat, Kat French, Katina French, Katina Beckham French, or (and this is pretty much strictly if we’re related by blood) Tina.  So what gives?

About a year or so ago, I started the ball rolling toward legally reinstituting my maiden name as a second middle name.  This would have left me with the rather lengthy moniker “Katina Lynn Beckham French.”  I had my reasons.  

Partly, it was an experiment in personal branding.  ”Katina Beckham French” sounds a little more impressive than “Kat French,” which, as a client pointed out to my chagrin lately, sounds vaguely like an “adult entertainer.”  I can’t really get angry with the client, since it’s hardly the first time I’ve heard that–evidently I’m among the few who don’t need a goofy website to provide me with a “porn star name.”  

When I was a kid, I got pretty tired of having to spell both my first and maiden names.  Thanks to a certain British soccer star, underwear model and metrosexual, “Beckham” is not the oddity it once was.  My family shortened my first name to “Tina” most of the time, but the truth is, I never liked it.  It didn’t seem to fit my personality, and by the time I was in the 4th grade, we had about 5 “Tinas” so I started going by “Katina”– or “KT” to my friends. 

I got married the weekend before I was due to start college, and since all my financial aid was under my maiden name, I went by “Katina Beckham French” for a while.  After two years, my husband joined the military and we moved away from our hometown for six years.  I started going by “Kat” and dropped my maiden name.  It was easier to spell and remember for most people.  

I’ve been on something of a healing journey for the past seven or eight years.  A big part of that healing has involved, for lack of a better term, reintegrating all my various parts.  Over the years, I’ve tried to derive my sense of identity from a lot of different sources–pretty much all of them the wrong ones.  My family, my marriage, my career, my own creativity, have all had a turn at defining who I am.  

So a year ago, I decided to spend some time owning and being at peace with the various names I’ve carried over the years.  More than a few people assumed that resuming use of my maiden name had to do with the state of my marriage–it truly didn’t.  It had more to do with loving and accepting both the family I grew up in, and the awkward kid/teenager who was sick of spelling her awkwardly long and unfamiliar name.  

After a while, I realized that I was putting an unnecessary burden on others by insisting they use my full, unabbreviated name.  I may like it better now, but “the big name” is still kind of a mouthful.  I realized there were other, more important things I really needed to be doing to restore my relationships with family and other people from my past.  

So now, most of the time, in most cases, I go by “Kat French”–it’s still shorter, and easier to remember and spell.  I’m in a part of my life where I’d like to lower the hurdles for getting to know me wherever I can.  

Except, of course, the people who want to get to know me based on the assumption that I’m an adult entertainer.

img courtesy wirkiantoh

I’m now about three months into bouncing merrily through this new phase of my life that started roughly about the same time I started my current job.  Have you changed jobs recently?  If not, let me remind you what it’s like.  

It’s basically as if someone walked into your office, pulled out all the drawers, flipped them upside down, rifled through the contents and randomly removed about half of it or more.  Then they trashed your computer, meaning you have to start new on a totally different machine, which may or may not have all the programs you’re used to using.  Then they changed all the numbers and email addresses in your address book.  Then they kidnapped your entire office and replaced them with totally different people with completely different roles and personalities.  Then they called up all your existing clients and told them to “bugger off” (I’m not really that familiar with British slang–if that’s dirtier than I think it is, somebody let me know.  To me, it sounds less dirty than it’s American equivalent.)  Meanwhile, they went out and sold your services to a half-dozen entirely new and different clients.  

So in short, yeah, it’s been a little disorienting, to say the least.  

All that said, I’ve been having a tremendously good and exciting time.  But, there have been some unanticipated effects in my personal, outside-of-work life as well.  

For one thing, the posts here both diminished in volume and became very “marketing-y” as the rigors of adjusting to a new, challenging job ate whatever remains of my brain.  

I found myself editing certain aspects of my personal life out of what I write here, because I suddenly became quite a bit more visible online because of the new job.  I’ll be frank.  My faith is a big part of who I am, and I almost completely eliminated talking about it here in the last three months.  That’s not only just plain silly, it’s dishonest and inauthentic.  

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that my faith is not like a slice of apple pie that can be pulled aside and laid on another plate separate from the rest of my life.  It’s like the cinnamon that flavors and permeates the whole thing.  I’m not going to turn this into a theology blog (for a WIDE variety of reasons).  But the self-editing is over.  My spiritual thoughts and experiences are as valid as my other thoughts and experiences, so when they’re part of the stories I’m sharing, they’ll be in there.

On a related note, my daily prayer time evaporated, and for a really stupid reason: because my daily routine changed.  I had been spending about half of my one-hour commute praying (with eyes open, obviously.)  Once I moved to a closer job with a half hour commute, I stopped praying.  How dumb is that?  At any rate, I’ve reinstituted the “prayer drive” in the last week, and it’s predictably helped me get more clarity and groundedness at the beginning of my day.

I live fairly near Gethsemane Abbey, which was home to contemplative scholar Thomas Merton.  I’ve always found the monastic tradition to be strangely fascinating.  There’s something uniquely appealing about living outside the bounds of ordinary society–living apart from the rush and chaos of postmodern life.  I find the local Amish interesting for much the same reason.  It seems especially appealing at times to someone who is, by necessity, “plugged in” so much of the time.  

In an earlier post, I remarked that the term “cellular,” which we typically associate with mobile phones and connection, at its root means a small, self-contained part–or a room in a prison.  The cloistered life, whether it’s living formally in a community outside of mainstream society, or informally by just withdrawing from life and community into one’s suburban dwelling, is not without it’s benefits.  But they come at a high cost.  You lose much that is good about living in the messy world of imperfect, aggravating humanity.  

Trying to cloister the different elements of your life–work, family, friendship, faith–may seem to keep things neater and easier.   But things have a wild tendency to slip their bounds.  The peanut butter invariably ends up in the chocolate, and vice versa.  It gets messy.  

But in the mess, I often find the energy, enthusiasm and above all things, humor, to deal with life that escapes me when I’m focused on keeping things neat, tidy, and separate.

I tried not to write about this day.  Tried ducking my head.  Tried bobbing and weaving.  Tried tossing a million other ideas into the blender that is my head while hitting “Frappe.”

But it comes back like a boomerang.  Better than a boomerang–I’ve never been able to get those blasted things to actually return.

It’s seven years gone from September 11, 2001.  From a beautiful clear blue day that got shot all to hell. 

A month before it, I was sitting on a beach in Cancun celebrating my 10 year anniversary with my high school sweetheart and celebrating a new job that seemed too good to be true.  A month later, the pressure cooker of stress, anxiety and general soul-searching created by 9/11 had resulted in my seeking therapy over the morass of personal insecurities revealed by the job, having a huge falling out with my mom, and a situation that spelled the certain implosion of my marriage.  

It was a big bloody mess.  Kind of like surgery.

Surgery is painful and bloody and messy and it always takes a lot longer to recover from than you think it will.  But you do it because you need to.  Because there are things inside you that are killing you, either slowly or quickly, and you need to get them taken out.  

I can’t speak to the global or even national effect of September 11.  I can only say that for me, it was the scalpel making the first incision.  It was painful and messy and it took a lot longer to recover from than I thought it would.

But without that falling out with my mom, we wouldn’t have had our issues worked out before she was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer.  I would not have been able to have some of the talks we had before she finally passed on, which were some of the best conversations of my life.

Without the implosion of my creaking, dysfunctional marriage, my husband and I would never have been able to build a new, healthy, genuinely happy one.  I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to walk alongside some friends as they experienced their own marital problems with a deeper understanding of what they were going through and the ability to encourage them with my own experiences.   

Without dealing with my insecurities, I would never have gotten the opportunity to run my own business, work as an agency copywriter, win a couple of awards for copywriting, and eventually find a career path that played to all my strengths, rather than my parent-induced fears.

Nobody wants to enter the whirlwind.  And there are no guarantees that you won’t be utterly broken by them.  But when you come out, you can sometimes emerge broken–and restored.

You’ve probably noticed that things look a little different around the old iBard digs.  As much as I liked my old theme, and as much positive feedback as I got about it (from the vaunted James Chartrand of Men with Pens, no less!) there were a few problems.  So in honor of James’ visit, I’m going to do a little “Drive By Shooting” of my own previous theme.  ;) (more…)