Sonia Connolly

In 2015, when my word of the year was Music, I took piano lessons for a year. I stopped at the end of the year because I wasn't enjoying playing the piano, and I had gotten some of what I wanted with being able to plunk out a line from sheet music to be able to sing it.

I've been singing with a friend regularly, and between the two of us, I'm the one who can play piano and read music at all, so I've been doing the honors. Sometimes I get it wrong and it takes us a while to figure out why we can't get our parts to fit together.

A couple of years ago I picked up some beginning piano lesson books for adults at a library book sale. Finally now, after all the changes of the last couple of years, including being done with eye surgery, I took the first book in to my singing teacher who also teaches piano, and asked her for some exercises to get better at playing the right notes. She suggested playing all of the C's on the keyboard, all the D's, etc, so I've been doing that, and also starting to work through the book.

I'm enjoying it! Partly, it's easier when I'm not seeing double when trying to find the right keys. Partly, five years of singing lessons have helped my ear and my understanding of music. I can hear right away when I hit a wrong note and something clashes unexpectedly. Partly, it's good to have a beginning music book for adults rather than children.

Also, I looked back at my posts from 2015, and wow that was a painfully hard year. It's a wonder I stayed with music at all after that. It's a powerful inner drive for me.

Judith Love Cohen, Jack Black’s Jewish Mom, Was a History-Making Aerospace Engineer by Lior Zaltzman.

“It was really difficult psychologically and emotionally to be better than all the boys in math and science,” she shared with the LA Times. “[The books] really would have helped encourage my feeling good about myself, that this was the direction I wanted to go. I didn’t see role models. I didn’t get encouragement other than at home.” She wrote over 20 books with amazing women collaborators.

Apple punishes women for same behaviors that get men promoted, lawsuit says by Ashley Belanger.

Jong, currently a customer/technical training instructor on Apple's global developer relations/app review team, said that she only became aware of a stark pay disparity by chance.

"One day, I saw a W-2 left on the office printer," Jong said. "It belonged to my male colleague, who has the same job position. I noticed that he was being paid almost $10,000 more than me, even though we performed substantially similar work. This revelation made me feel terrible."

27. I'm proud of being a flexible friend.

This past weekend, a friend and I planned to go to a solstice event, but it was sold out, so we planned to go for a walk, but then she asked for a raincheck because of logistics when a close friend of the family died recently. Of course, I'll catch her later!

Saturday I had plans with a friend to go for a bike ride, and he called to say he had slept badly and could go several hours later, or would need to cancel. I didn't have other plans, so we had a nice ride starting later in the afternoon.

Sunday I had plans for a walk with another friend, but she texted to cancel not long before because it was her husband's birthday and he decided he wanted to go for a hike instead of out to dinner. I texted back 'ok' and left it at that. That one was painful, being reminded that I don't rate in comparison to family, but there's no point in fighting about it.

In general, I try to make room for people to live their lives and have crises and change their minds or be too tired, and enjoy when I do get to see them. I also try not to flake on people, but I appreciate being given flexibility in return when I need it. I'm sure I've benefitted from people's spaciousness when I didn't even realize I needed it.

25. I'm proud of being a homeowner. I bought a condo in Oakland at age 25, and only now looking back does that sound really young. There was a fortunate confluence of having a programming job, real estate prices not being as extreme as they are now (although they looked plenty extreme then), and a brief dip in the market.

I'm proud of having owned and managed a whole house and yard in Portland for 17 years. In the end it was deemed a "fixer-upper" because I hadn't done any major indoor renovations, but I replaced appliances and the roof and the exterior paint along the way. I took pride in being a good steward as best I could.

I'm proud of owning a condo again in Oakland a few blocks from the first one. It's a relief to have stepped down from a house to a smaller space, and while I eye houses when I go for walks, I'm not sure I want to own one again. We'll see what the future brings.

I'm grateful to the real estate agents that have guided me in buying and selling real estate along the way. I'm grateful that I was born long enough ago and have enough privilege and saved enough money to get into the real estate market on my own, without a partner or parental help. I'm grateful for the friend who suggested I consider buying, when I hadn't really imagined it.

The whole idea of real estate as an investment contributes to inequality, especially since it is applied in racist ways. I have bought in gentrifying areas and benefited from that. I live with the cognitive dissonance of understanding the inequalities of American capitalism, and still having to live within it.

23. I'm proud of running a successful business offering bodywork for trauma. If I had known what I was getting myself into and how difficult it was, I would never have started. But I had no idea. I took it one step at a time, exploring and learning and struggling as I went, and eventually after a lot of years it was a full-time practice. I ran the business 23 years in all, in two different cities.

My grandmother had a business in Chile, a handbag factory. I can only imagine how hard it was to get that going as an immigrant in a new country with a new language. I don't know very much about it, and she died when I was 10 years old, long before I would have thought to ask her. My parents both worked for the federal government, and I didn't learn anything about owning and running a business growing up or in college. I had to learn about marketing from scratch.

I found bits of support along the way, business coaching and book coaching and people who were ahead of me on the path so I could learn from their example. There were kinds of support I looked for and never really found, especially supervision around working with trauma. I was off to the side from the formal support that therapists get (and pay for), and I didn't realize until later that I needed that.

I'm glad I did it. I made a difference in people's lives, at the very least as a kind witness to their struggles to heal. I learned an immense amount about being with other people and being with myself and about the human body and how it works, and how it changes under stress.

I'm glad I stopped when I did. My nervous system felt worn down from supporting other nervous systems. I will eventually use my skills as a volunteer somewhere, but two years after stopping I still don't feel ready when I check inside about it.

21. I'm proud of my books. I'm proud of having written an article every month for 14 years, and I'm proud of sticking with the process of turning them into books. That process is much longer and harder than one would think, starting from existing articles. I'm proud of doing the design and layout myself, and of paying people to help with copy editing and cover design.

I'm proud of sticking with the process of turning them into ebooks when each print book was complete, which is also much longer and harder than one would think, especially with illustrations.

I still want to figure out how to market them, because there's more and more trauma out there, and the books are a way to help. This summer I might have more time to update my website and explore what it would take to create audio books.

Wellspring of Compassion: Self-Care for Sensitive People Healing from Trauma Welcome to support and comfort whether you are new to healing or an old hand, whether the trauma is long past or ongoing.

Presence After Trauma: Reconcile with Your Self and the World This book is a non-judgmental companion for your healing process after the initial crisis is over.

Embodying Hope: Living in Difficult Times with a Difficult Past We embody hope when we keep moving forward, one stubborn step after another, and when we take shelter for protection and rest.

19. I'm proud of what I've learned about anti-racism and managed to unlearn of ingrained racism. And of course there's always more to learn and unlearn. I'm proud that a friend feels safe talking to me about the racism she experiences.

I was one of those lurkers during RaceFail '09, silently reading and learning and hoping that when the time came to speak I wouldn't put my foot in it quite as badly. I'm proud to have learned about calling in rather than calling out.

Above link is by Sian Ferguson. The original article on calling in is by Ngọc Loan Trần on Black Girl Dangerous. I had to dig for that article because the idea has spread and most people don't credit original authors, especially BIPOC. Props to Sian Ferguson on Everyday Feminism for linking to the source.

In 2012 I took a 13-week Social Justice/Social Change class. (locked posts tagged social change class) It was disappointingly basic, and at the same time I absorbed background knowledge about how issues of oppression are framed, and that the instructors are only one step ahead of the students. We're all figuring this out together, and we're all going to mess up along the way.

Hopefully we learn and find new and different ways to mess up the next time, and hopefully we give each other space to learn. It's an ongoing balancing act, compassion for learning vs. boundaries and consequences for not learning or not trying. The people who try the least want the most "tolerance" and keep the focus on themselves.

Relevant footnote from Ngọc Loan Trần:

This post is specifically about us calling in people who we want to be in community with, people who we have reason to trust or with whom we have common ground. It’s not a fuckery free-for-all for those with privilege to demand we put their hurt feelings first regardless of the harm they cause.

For Juneteenth I donated to two Black-run organizations, North By Northeast Community Health Clinic in Portland, just up the hill from where I used to live, and Power 4 STL Bullet-Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis, where a friend volunteers as a spiritual counselor.

17. I'm proud of my hair. It's long and thick and has only recently started looking gray overall. I remember one evening as a young teen having my hair loose and feeling the curtain of it around me and thinking with surprise, "I like my hair." It was a new thought, liking anything about myself.

I mostly wear it braided, because it gets into everything when it's down. And I shed a lot. I don't know how there's any hair left, but there's always plenty more.

During pandemic lockdown, it kept growing until the braid was well past my hips and was brushing the ground when I bent over to weed the garden. I finally had to figure out how to cut it myself.

Looking around at a bunch of older ladies with abundant hair at a Portland synagogue event one day, I realized that it's Jewish hair. It stood out because of the relatively small number of Jews in Portland. Random strangers would comment on my hair when I was waiting at a traffic light on my bike. When I started saying, "Thanks, it's Jewish hair," they would suddenly look very uncomfortable. Strangers haven't commented since I've been back in the Bay Area, where there are all sorts of people with all sorts of hair, so mine doesn't stand out in the same way.

(Randomly, because icon, I've seen a male peacock just hanging out on the neighborhood street a block from the Rockridge Trader Joe's, twice now. Someone's pet??)

16. I'm proud of having a good memory. I was born with it, so I can't take credit exactly, but I'm still proud of it and enjoy it. My short-term memory for numbers is great if it's not scrambled by fragrances, and works even better if I say them out loud. I will often remember the numbers later if there's a context for them, like a cost for something or the number of people at an event.

I can echo back tunes that are sung to me. It takes a bunch of repetitions for a tune to settle into long-term memory. It will come and go until I can call it up at will, and even then I might have to hear a few notes before I remember how it goes. I will recognize a recording as being the same version I'm familiar with, or a different group recording the same tune.

I remember names of dances and the steps and where they're from and who likes them and who usually leads them, and where I first learned them and who taught them. My memory is strongly associative with music.

I can reconstruct whole conversations shortly after they happen, and will know if I'm remembering exact words or a paraphrase. Emotionally intense ones stay with me for longer, although mercifully they fade eventually.

If I want to find something I read online, I'll often be able to reconstruct the path I took to find it. For physical books, I'll remember about how far in the book it was, and where it was on the page. Since I don't spend that much time looking at the cover, I often won't remember title or author, which is why I keep a book blog.

Having a good memory gets weird when other people don't remember conversations or events. I've learned to just accept that the other person doesn't remember. Sometimes it will come back to them later. I've had that experience too, where I'm reminded of something and it slowly reassembles itself.

14. I am proud of speaking calmly and politely to customer service people who work for companies that are not serving me as a customer. On the one hand that sounds like a low bar, and on the other hand it can be really frustrating to be faced with obnoxious scripts and blank walls when something has gone wrong with a transaction. It's even harder when they flatly ignore what I said.

I am working on responding better when I am not being heard. Trying to have more tools available than walking away, which is not always the best option. Repeating myself (calmly and politely). Asking questions. Acting confused and incapable (hate that one, but it works sometimes). And finally, saying, "We seem to be having trouble communicating. Please refer me to a supervisor."