Yesterday (Tuesday) when I spoke of having thrown up Sunday night, I said, “Hey, if it takes a week to get better, what’s the big deal?” Well, apparently my body took this as permission to not only stay sick, but also to get worse. That’s right, this morning at five-thirty The Big D showed up (and I don’t mean Dallas). Y’all, it wasn’t pretty. My stomach wouldn’t stop gurgling. Every thirty to sixty minutes I was on the pot. I’ll spare you the details, but it was like, evacuate the dance floor. Talk about miserable. The only good thing is that I think I went down a dress size.

“You’re getting the poison out of your system,” my dad said.

“How much poison IS IN THERE?” I said.

“Apparently a lot,” he said.

Everyone’s a comedian.

Thankfully, after seven hours of running back and forth to the bathroom, something in my tummy shifted. Not that I’ve felt like a million bucks all afternoon, but I have been able to keep down (and in) applesauce, yogurt, bananas, and even chicken noodle soup (woo). Going forward, we’ll see what happens. My body is a wonderland.

This afternoon and evening I lay in bed and watched three movies–My Own Private Idaho, Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley: The Original Queen of Comedy (a documentary), and 42 (the story of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major league baseball). And as much as My Own Private Idaho (starring Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix as two hustlers) was, um, okay, the documentary about Moms Mabley was absolutely fabulous. If you don’t know Moms Mabley, one of the first female (and African American and lesbian) stand-up comedians, check her out. She was both smart and hilarious (my therapist says funny people are smart people). Plus, like my grandma, she rarely wore teeth. As one comedian pointed out, this helped her promote the idea that appearances don’t matter.

As for 42, I can’t say enough good things about it. Simply put, it’s a beautiful story (I cried, a lot), a reminder about what’s really important–the inside, not the outside. Harrison Ford plays Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the man who hired Jackie Robinson and, thus, pushed the issue of integration and forever changed history. Talk about a man with balls (no pun intended). At least as he’s portrayed in the movie, the guy wasn’t afraid of anybody. Gruff, he was both level-headed and firm. His no meant no and his yes meant yes. In short, he was a man of character.

While watching Ford’s portrayal of Branch, I thought about how much we admire men like him and Robinson, how much we admire anyone who stands up for what they believe is right. And yet, as one character in the movie said, Robinson just wanted to play ball. What I mean is that often our heroes aren’t doing anything huge. They’re just doing something ordinary in a huge way. That is, it wasn’t a big deal for Robinson to play baseball. He’d been doing that most of his life, just like Rickey had been hiring baseball players most of his. It was a big deal, however, to buck the unwritten law of segregation in baseball, since this took being able to withstand being spit upon, threatened, and called names.

Among other things.

In the movie there’s a scene in which a teammate of Robinson’s comes to Rickey because he’s been threatened and called names (like a carpetbagger) by his “friends” back home. Consequently, he’s embarrassed, afraid to play with Robinson. “What will they think of me?” he says. “What will they do?” Of course, it’s easy to look back decades later and say, “Screw those guys,” but this is the cry of the ego–What will they think?–and it’s just as present today as it was back then.

I’ll explain.

Once as part of a personal/spiritual growth class, I was asked to make a list of all the people in my life that I had to run my decisions by. You could do this. Make a list of all the people whose approval you’d need if you of all a sudden decided you wanted to get married, get divorced, pierce your ears, get a tattoo, quit your job, move, or–hell–eat a candy bar. Who are you afraid would judge you? On a scale of one to ten, how much do THEY control you? For me, at the time, I had a few people who were a six. (I’m happy to say that years later when I revisited the list, they’d dropped to a zero or a one.)

Recently I blogged about personal power and empowerment, and this is the same idea. That is, if anyone else (a friend, relative, or even an organization) gets a vote in how you behave, this means that you’ve handed over part of your personal power to them to manage for you. Honestly, that’s what marriage is–a sharing of power. This is okay, of course, if it really is a sharing. But if one person gives up their power and allows the other person to constantly make decisions for them, this creates an imbalance, and that’s not okay. It’s never okay to not be personally responsible. Of course, being personally responsible means you can’t blame anyone else for your life. You never get to say, “But my husband told me to,” or “But everyone else was doing it.” You don’t even get to say, “It was their fault.” This is why being personally responsible is no fun and why nobody wants to do it. It’s why we’d rather HAVE heroes than BE heroes.

Because in order to BE a hero, you not only have to be personally responsible, you also have take your power back and stand it in. Often you have to stand AGAINST the crowd. This requires being INTEGRATED within yourself, which means that your head and your heart–your mind, body, soul, and spirit–are all on the same page, all working together. It means your energy system isn’t segregated, isn’t SEPARATED, isn’t spread out and controlled by a dozen different outside influences. It means you’ve “gotten yourself together,” that you’re whole, at least more whole than you were before. This work, of course, is difficult and lonely. But it’s not THAT difficult and it’s not THAT lonely. It’s certainly nothing YOUR soul can’t handle.