As promised, here are the highlights of how the Freak Revolution Manifesto has changed the world in October!

Moon’sLark shared a very touching story of how the manifesto is affecting her.

Diary of a Bad Housewife has a post about the manifesto in the form of a long letter to a friend.

Pace had a conversation with Karl of paradox1x, and it turned out that Karl’s opinion of the manifesto was totally different after reading it thoroughly than when he first skimmed it.

The manifesto also made guest appearances on Lily of the Valley, Thanks For Playing, and Odd Angel, and you guys have left some amazing comments about how the manifesto has affected your lives.

Last but not least, after enjoying Marty’s beautiful “Heal the World” art as my desktop background for a couple of weeks, I decided that I wanted a print copy to frame and hang on the wall to inspire us and remind us of how we’re helping to heal the world. We twisted Marty’s arm and talked him into offering 11×17″ prints for $14.99. (75% of the money goes directly to Marty.) We’ve ordered ours, and if you’d like a copy too, you can get yours here! (:

“Heal the World”
(click for larger version)

I need a break from all the death-talk, so let’s talk about some of the other things on my mind for a while. Surprisingly, it’s not weddingweddingwedding or even IrelandIrelandIreland in here – yet. I’m sure I’ll get there. Probably soon.

So, I’ve been reading “The Body Sacred” by Dianne Sylvan. By page 4, I was nodding enthusiastically. Page 8 had me crying, and by page 12, I was wondering how I can meet this extraordinary woman and be her friend.

It’s a good book. I highly recommend it. I’m still only on page 50, because it’s the kind of book I have to read in chunks because I get too full of epiphanies and need to take breaks.

The biggest epiphany I’ve had so far (all 50 pages of so far) is: I’m not limited by my body size.

I have (had?) this attitude of limitation brought on by being fat. I feel like there are things I shouldn’t wear, things I shouldn’t do, things I shouldn’t think or want, because they’re for thin people. I’m not a thin person, therefore I can’t have or do or want those things.

My stripy socks are a great example. There was a time, not very many weeks ago, when I felt ashamed or embarrassed to wear my socks in public. I was afraid that people would look at me and think (or even say) look at that stupid fat girl in those striped (mean people wouldn’t say “stripy”, they’d say “striped”) socks. Doesn’t she know stripes are for thin people?!

Stripes are for thin people. Stripy socks are for thin people – they’re supposed to go over my knees, but none of them do because my legs are too big. The one pair that does actually go above my knees won’t stay up because of my large thighs; they just roll down. My stripy arm-warmers are the same – they only go up to my elbows instead of mid-upper-arm because my arms are bigger around. I really shouldn’t even wear them, right?

Crazy-colored hair is for thin people. When fat people color their hair blue (just to pull a color out of nowhere), it’s just for attention. Look at the fat girl with blue hair, how sad.

High boots are for thin people. I had such an incredibly hard time finding boots that would fit my calves, and I spent many evenings in my bed, crying and feeling horribly fat when they wouldn’t zip up. I nearly gave up, but my bright yellow ones are vinyl enough to stretch over my huge calves. But when I wear them, I feel like people are judging me – knee-high boots are for thin people, and I’m not one.

Flirting is for thin people.

Being attractive is for thin people. Look at media. Everyone is either attractive and thin or fat and evil or stupid. If you’re not thin, well, there you go. Evil or stupid.

Traveling is for thin people. Plane seats are really uncomfortable if you’re heavy – and some airlines charge fat flyers more, up to and including making some of us buy second seats. And the trouble I had finding boots? Tripled for finding a coat, so I guess I’d best not go anywhere too cold. I guess they assume fat people don’t get cold; we’re so well-insulated, we’ll be fine.

Theatres are for thin people. When we saw “Wicked!”, we had to smoosh ourselves into our seats, and my hips ached through the second half of the play. Pace encountered the same thing at a ride at Sea World, so I guess roller coasters are for thin people, too.

Tattoos are for thin people. Piercings are for thin people.

Basically, life is for thin people.

And really, how could I learn any different? Media bombards us with images of supermodels and stars, all of whom are thin – and if they deign to gain a few pounds, they’re the brunt of dozens of tabloid scandals. Most stores don’t carry clothing or even jewelry (like rings) for above average sizes. Target and Walmart used to have nice plus-sized sections, but they’ve both whittled it down to a rack or two at the back of the clothing department – and you have to walk through all the clothes you can’t fit into just to get to the meager pickings of the ones you can. And Old Navy only sells bigger sizes online – giving me the impression that fat people aren’t welcome in their brick-and-mortar stores.

The very terminology used in stores is telling: woman can shop in either “Juniors” (thin and trendy, nothing over a size 10), “Womans” (thin and less trendy, usually for the older crowd, nothing over a size 16 – if they’re generous), and, if the store is particularly generous, there might be a few, hard-to-find, larger sizes somewhere. Occasionally – and this is rare – there’s an actual section of the store for larger sizes. This often falls under “Plus”, and is usually secreted away at the back of stores, and always has about a quarter of the selection of the other departments, if that. And often, “plus-sized” clothes cost more than regular clothes. The fat tax, I guess.

Being a fat teenager is heartbreaking. Finding clothes that are cute, trendy, and fit well is either going to cost a fortune or be fairly impossible – and if you have non-mainstream taste (like me), you’re screwed.

Ugh.

I digress. Ah, my mind is a weird and wandering place these days.

“The Body Sacred” introduces a novel and paradigm-shattering concept: I’m okay the way I am, regardless of how that is.

Wait. Hold the phone. Stop the presses. What? It’s okay to be fat? It’s okay to take a break from the countless hours of calorie-counting? It’s okay to eat that cupcake and not exercise myself senseless to make up for it? It’s okay to be fat – and being fat doesn’t make me a loser? It doesn’t make me automatically ugly? I don’t have to feel shame when my thin friends talk about being on diets and losing weight?

It’s okay to be what I am, regardless of how that is.

I’ve exercised til I wept. I’ve counted calories til I made myself neurotic. I’ve starved myself. I’ve snapped and binged and felt ill and been full of self-hate. I’ve judged myself harsher than anyone around me – and I’ve been around some pretty damn harsh judges. I’ve had people tell me, “You’d be so pretty if you lost weight.” I grew up hearing apologetic tsk-tsks because I took after my father’s overweight family instead of my mother’s tiny skinny family. I’ve avoided my reflection in the mirror for over a month. I’ve worn the same pair of pants til they could walk on their own because they were all I had that didn’t make me want to stab myself. I’ve sat in the kitchen, wondering if I could cut off my fat stomach without killing myself.

Seriously.

I’ve spent my life wishing I could be thin. And I’ve spent a damn lot of time and energy trying to be thin.

But you know what? It’s true. It is okay – in fact, it’s wonderful and great and glorious – to be what I am, whatever I am.

I am fat. I weigh in at 235lbs. I don’t hate myself when I look in the mirror anymore, nor do I struggle to get thin. I exercise for fun and because I like being healthy, and I unapologetically eat ice cream whenever I want. I travel. I go to the theatre. I wear stripy socks, I have tattoos, I have piercings, I occasionally have blue hair. I have a pair of obnoxiously yellow knee-high boots that are just a little too snug, but still utterly awesome.

I’m not over it. I’m not at a place where I can dance without feeling self-conscious. I still get teary when I struggle to zip my boots up over my calves.

But the seed has been planted and has started to grow. It’s okay to be what I am, regardless of how that is.

Yeah.

If you want to change the world, here are three big reasons why starting your own small business is a great way to do it.

1. Following your heart keeps your heart healthy and happy.

If you spend your weekdays at a job that’s somewhere between “meh” and horrible, that’s not nourishing your soul. How much passion will you have left for changing the world on nights and weekends? How much more passion would you have if you were doing entirely soul-nourishing work instead of soul-sucking work?

If you free your heart from pointless toil, it will blossom in ways you never imagined.

2. Side projects lose momentum.

If you want to change the world on evenings and weekends, that’s super. But how much more good you could you do if you could spend your weekdays on it, too?

What if you put your money where your mouth is?

What if you put your time where your mouth is?

What if you put your commitment where your mouth is?

What if your life’s work and your living were the same thing?

It’s a powerful commitment. If your business doesn’t make money, you don’t pay your bills. If you don’t help people, your business doesn’t make money. That’s a powerful incentive to help people!

And just like not buying junk food or not going to the cheese factory, you’re much more likely to accomplish a big goal if you make one big decision than if you try to make a bunch of little decisions.

3. If you postpone until later, you might as well give up.

If your plan is “I’ll do what I love later” or “I’ll change the world as soon as ______” for whatever you fill in the blank, here’s something to chew on. Po Bronson, in his book What Should I Do With My Life, interviewed 50 people about their passions, career choices, and struggles. Many of them tried the “I’ll do what I love as soon as _______” plan. Guess what the success rate was?

0%. Goose-egg. Zilch. Nada.

Don’t wait. You don’t have to do everything now, but if you want to reach your goal, you do have to do something now.

But capitalism is bad!

Bullshit. Yes, there are a lot of greedy people out there. Yes, there are a lot of unethical companies out there. No, there aren’t a lot of role models for conscious capitalism and ethical entrepreneurship.

So why don’t you become one?

Help others, and accept a fair exchange of value for your help. If you’re worried about manipulating or taking advantage of others, offer a guarantee to ensure you don’t profit unless you actually help your customers.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you think that lots of businesses are evil, and that makes you not want to start a business… how about you just don’t be evil?

What path resonates with both your heart and your good sense?

Feel what moves you. Discover what you’re good at. Experiment with what you could be paid to do.

What’s in the intersection of all three?

Do that.

We are thrilled to announce that, after much work, many laughs, and long anticipation, the Usual Error audiobooks are here at last! If you liked the Usual Error book, e-book, or our series of Usual Error blog posts, you’ll love the audio book.

We only ordered 100 copies for our first run and after that we’ll be back-ordered, so grab yours now if you don’t want to wait. (:

We (Pace and Kyeli) take turns reading the book to you, with some of the example dialogues acted out by our talented friends. They come in a beautiful 6-CD set – one disc per section of the book, plus a bonus CD of outtakes, including a full two minutes of Kyeli losing her shit and laughing her fool head off. The outtakes are hilarious, people. They also include some awesomely funny interactions between a couple of our guest stars.

Why do you care?

I don’t know. We can’t read your mind. (: But we can tell you why we care.

We care about The Usual Error, in all its forms, because communication is a form of connection. Practicing communication leads to deeper connection with others and also with yourself. It’s a great way to start changing the world! (See page 28 of the Freak Revolution Manifesto for more on the how and why.)

We care about the audiobook in particular because it’s a fun way for you to learn and practice communication. You get to listen to the two of us read to you, and you can lean back and soak it all up. You get to listen to our friends (who also happen to be talented voice actors) act out some of the dialogues from the book. And on the outtakes disc, you get to laugh along with us as you listen to all the times we messed up or broke into giggle fits while recording it. (:

Here it is!

Click here for more information, including streaming audio samples from the actual audiobook and the outtakes reel! We hope that it will make you really happy. (:

I forced myself to stay home on Monday to give myself a chance to process all the stuff going on.

I’m not doing a very good job of it, actually.

I keep thinking about how precious life is, but I can’t seem to get unstuck enough to feel like I’m doing anything useful about it. I want to shop. I want to drink dangerous amounts of coffee. I want to read brain-candy books. I want to cry, but the tears don’t come. I want to hide, but at the same time I want to surround myself with friends and activities. I want magick and I want mundanity. I want to lay on my porch swing and watch the clouds, curl up on the couch with my best friend’s infant on my chest, bury my face in my cat’s soft tummy. I want to run til I collapse, push myself too far on my elliptical, and scream til my lungs give out. I feel like I have an insane paradox-hurricane whirling around in my chest.

All the while, I’m watching the clock tick and the days fly by. I’ve got a wedding extravaganza in three weeks, where a large number of my favorite people in the world will be converging at my house for 4-6 days. I’ve got a honeymoon in seven weeks – a trip to Ireland where it’s starting to look like we’ll be sleeping in the bonny heather for two weeks.

And I care, but I’m just watching the time go by. I’m craving stillness, but also a kind of slowness and fastness. A weird combination of social and isolation.

A week before my cousin died, a friend of mine died. She was the kind of person who made everyone she encountered feel warm and safe and loved. I only spent a few hours total with her, but I wanted to know her better. I wanted to spend gobs of time with her, but we never seemed to be able to be free at the same time – and I admit, I didn’t try very hard. Not hard enough, at any rate, and for reasons that pale now. And now she’s gone, and I’ll never get the chance. And my heart hurts, and I miss her so much. I doubt she even knew how much I cared about her, and I’ll never get the chance to tell her the way I wish I had.

I keep wondering what else I might be letting slip that I’ll so deeply regret – and then feeling so overwhelmed, I can’t be useful.

I feel like I’m on the edge of something big, but I’m too… something… to see past all this fog. Scared, maybe. Overwhelmed? Something.

I have no idea how to deal with any of this. I feel like I’m making progress, but then I feel like I’m kidding myself.

Late Saturday night (and into early Sunday morning), we were at Chili’s in a tiny little East Texas town, having a rollicking time with a wild bunch of new friends.

Our waiter sucked.

I understand that it was a tiny town. I get that Pace and I were likely the first vegetarians he’d ever met. I know we’re freaky and we were loud and it was likely overwhelming to have such a large group – and it was nearly closing time, so I’m sure he’d had a long day.

I took all of that into account, and still. Our waiter sucked.

He was pleasant enough. He was even cute… and vaguely reminiscent of someone I’d seen before. But he was incompetent and a poor listener – and in a service-based job, you’ve got to be competent and a good listener, so the odds were stacked against him.

Pace ordered a black bean burger, straight off the menu. I ordered a sandwich, and substituted the meat for a portobello mushroom cap – an option that was clearly listed on the menu in the sandwich section.

We were both served big honkin’ beef patties.

We sent them back.

He brought Pace’s out correctly the second time. Mine had the portobello mushroom cap, but it was on top of the beef patty. At that point, I ditched the sandwich and opted for just fries. Frankly, being served a huge slab of beef twice in a row had limited my appetite substantially, and I wasn’t in the mood to try and explain my desire again. So I ate my spinach and artichoke dip and my fries and was content enough.

Hungry yet?

After he brought out our checks, I stood to go to the bathroom and he stopped me. He apologized. He said, “I’m not very good at my job.”

I asked, “Well, do you like it?”

He looked down and said, “No. I hate it.”

I said, “Oh! Well! Do something else! Follow your heart!”

He said, “Yeah, well, I have to pay my bills first.”

I said, “Yeah, but your heart can help with that, too.” He looked unconvinced, my bladder reasserted its demands, and we went our separate ways.

When I sat back down, I reviewed my check. He’d dropped both burgers off the bill. I sat there for a minute, then tipped him $10 and wrote follow your heart! (: on the ticket.

If you hate your job, get out. Find a way. Take a leap of faith. Pray, dream big, imagine, believe. Follow your heart. If there’s anything I’m learning these days, it’s that life is far too short and far too precious to do anything less.

I can’t stop thinking about my cousin’s death.

Yesterday morning, I spent a couple of hours with my best friend and her newborn. I was so relieved, the entire time, just to be with them – Nicole’s story could have been hers. She was sick right before she gave birth, she had a c-section, she had complications – she could have died. She didn’t, but I keep seeing the possibilities in my head.

When I had my miscarriage, I thought the world was going to stop. My heart felt like lead and every beat surprised me. A part of me wanted to die, to make the hurt stop. But then I would look at my little boy, my sweet little five-year-old, and I’d keep going. Somehow I kept going.

And I know that’s what we’re all feeling now, my family and I. We keep going. We look at those we love, and we keep going, and we love them all the more because we’re taking them less for granted these days.

I feel like my immortality boat has been rocked. I was sailing along, feeling immortal because that’s how we get through our lives – that’s how we do things that don’t make our hearts sing, by pretending that there’s always tomorrow. But then I looked down, and suddenly I realized that my boat is sailing through a lake of acid! With sharks! And lasers!

Death is everywhere! We’re oh so very mortal and fragile, and we take it for granted, and we fill our time up with stuff that doesn’t make our hearts sing, and then we look down one day and fall into the lake of acid and sharks and lasers and wonder where the time went, oh my.

I don’t want to lose this feeling, this sense of urgency about life, this utter refusal to spend my days doing anything that doesn’t make my heart sing. But at the same time, I can’t spend all my time fearing the shark-and-laser-infested acid lake, either.

Balance. That seems to be what I’m flailing around reaching out to find; balance.

Hey, everyone. Kyeli is feeling a bit shaky and introspective lately, so I’m handling the business and technical side of things to give her space to process. Writing is a big part of her process, so I’m sure she’ll be sharing some of her thoughts and feelings with the rest of us, too.

But today, I want to correct a misunderstanding about our newsletter — it’s not just email versions of the blog posts. (If you want to get the blog posts emailed to you, here’s the link for that.)

In the newsletter, you’ll read inspiring thoughts, ideas that motivate, and awesome treats on how to make personal, life, and world-changing improvements! You know, kind of like our blog, except shorter (usually 1-3 paragraphs), more focused, and less frequent.

The newsletter also contains, well… news! We talk about all the neat things we’re planning and what’s going on within our community. Like, for instance, upcoming product releases. Newsletter subscribers get the news first and we also offer newsletter-only discounts.

We’re releasing 52 Weeks to Awesome later this year and a surprise for you next week, so I wanted to make sure that everyone who wanted the newsletter-only discount gets the newsletter-only discount. (:

So if you want to, you can join by clicking here, and if you don’t like it, it’s easy to unsubscribe.

That’s it from me; now back to your regularly scheduled Kyeli. (:

My cousin Nicole passed away last Friday morning.

She went into the hospital three weeks ago to have a baby. She was sick. That plus complications in birth lead to her death. This means she left behind a newborn baby boy. She also left behind a nine-year-old daughter.

I saw Nicole last Christmas at our family party. She looked wonderful; she was in love and happy, and seemed better off than she ever had before. It’d been ten years since we’d last seen each other, and we spent a little time reconnecting. It was nice. Not epic, not like long-lost-friends or anything, but good.

And now she’s gone.

And I just can’t believe it.

And now, the memorial service is over, and we’re all going back to our regular lives, whatever that means.

I’m so sensitive. I barely knew her as an adult, and I’m crushed. I keep seeing the faces of her children when I close my eyes. I keep thinking about all my other cousins and family and people I love but rarely see. People who might not know how much I love them. People who I don’t even know how much I love them.

We’re funny fragile creatures.

And now I’m supposed to return to my life, but I’m scarred, scared, trembling.

Being an entrepreneur is one of the most important things in my life. This blog and my readers (that’s you) are on my top priority list. But I still haven’t learned how to work through a tragedy, how to keep going when my heart hurts so much, how to push through when I’m moving in a fog of sleep deprivation and sorrow.

This post is posting late. I haven’t queued anything up because I’ve been in shock for over a week now, since she went into ICU.

Lessons all over the place. I hope I can find them.

How can we, as consummate rule-breakers, deny this bold “Change The World In One Minute” contest entry an honorable mention, despite the fact that it’s over six minutes long and submitted days after the deadline? We can’t, that’s how. (:

Congratulations for an honorable mention to Charlotte (@acbowen) of inspirIT.com.

Watch Charlotte’s contest entry. It’s worth suffering through the wind noise for. Charlotte, you are really changing the world. Rock the heck on.