Befriending Silly, Deep, Barney, Bernie, and Nuance

First, a thank you. Happy Pride month friends. Thank you, LGBTQ+ family and community and ancestors, from the bottom of our hearts, for everything you so generously give the world with your presence and perspectives, just by being yourselves. I personally need to thank you as individuals, and as community, for:

• Teaching my younger selves the value of found family and new and expanding community. Thank you for helping me stop feeling bad about, and apologizing for, just being me: highly sensitive, empathic, intuitive, full of wonder, always wandering away to listen to the voice of a whole place or planet, bored by sameness and small talk, and prone to weeping other people's tears especially those most afraid to share them. Who else could have shown me so fully that these were strengths or gifts or blessings or simply ways of being alive on Earth?
• Helping me learn how to make peace with moving people out of our inner circles so we can rest and recover and make room for others to help our truer, and sometimes shaky, emerging selves to step forth. My own family couldn't fully help me with this one. I've leaned on your lessons to find my way back to peace. Repeatedly.
• Making it possible for me to accept and survive (and then thrive) being removed from other people's lives simply for being my honest, real self. I have friends who had to do this as young as 12 years old. Families not capable of accepting them. That I had some family members feel similarly about me in my early 40s also sucked. I spent a month mostly weeping in bed and binge-watching Gilmore Girls to heal being let go by beloved others for sharing my truths. And, I also had powerful survivors and thrivers and friends in all directions around me as I mourned the loss of people who I thought would always love me, but, under the weight of their grief and mine, just couldn't. Some for a while. Some, it seems, maybe forever.
• Demonstrating the remarkable, sassy, powerful, more-fun-and-loving selves that can emerge from within true community, and found family, and from more and more self-acceptance across time. Thanks to your community, we have more remarkable self-loving role models than we could possibly follow and learn with or dance with in one lifetime. Believe me, I've tried. ;-)

And to the gay and trans men in my life, thank you for teaching me what being fully and powerfully supported by real men feels like– as a cis, heterosexual-ish woman I genuinely had no idea– and for modeling what that looks and feels like for all men. You're not hated by bigots for who you love or who you are– you're amazing– you're hated by cowards because you collectively and individually shine such a bright, unwavering light on all the dominating, violent, and ultimately cowardly, disconnected, stale ways of being that some straight men cling to that still harm women and nonbinary and trans and gay folks, and themselves, too. It's impossible for me to settle for less than being treated as a full and equally powerful being– even by myself and my own cultural BS when it surfaces– thanks, in large part, to you.

I've named, loved, and set down so much cultural and personal baggage thanks to the LGBTQ+ community that the words thank you couldn't even begin to cover what I owe the community for that. What everyone I touch in this lifetime owes the community for that. And shit, now I'm crying. That didn't take long. Thus concludes the Gratitude Births Tears of Joy portion of this essay. Possibly. We cry often around here.

Ok, Befriending Silly, Deep, Barney, Bernie, and Nuance, take 2

We had a deep philosophical discussion in our family today that began solidly in the Silly. Silliness births Deepness here, that's just how it works with us. D found a new podcast called How We Made Your Mother– a 2025 rewatch podcast of the TV show How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) by some of the show's original creators and stars. We like to listen to silly and relaxing podcasts as we drive the 45 minutes each way to and from my parent's home each week. Caring for elders and people with Alzheimer's can be joy-filled, rewarding, life-changing, and also sometimes remarkably, spirit-shatteringly, body-breakingly hard, so we regularly need a bit of uplifting. D started telling me about the new podcast he found, so we listened to it for a few minutes together, and then we stopped it, so we could discuss a few things even more deeply, and in sillier and more nuanced ways, than the podcasters themselves were doing.

Silly, relaxing podcasts have taught us that we're often still far more interested in each other than we are in shows that our younger selves once enjoyed and we're even more interested in each other than in what the still-our-age (but now 45- to 60-something) actors and creators have to say about the shows as they look back at their younger selves, creations, and collaborations.

Regularly noticing that you're still remarkably interested in growing with, and laughing with, your partner of 27 years is what I call an offering– a gift beyond measure. Grace of the highest, and most common, order. Thank you, Silliness. Thank you, rewatch podcasts, and long drives, and especially partners who clearly prefer Silly but dive into the Deep with you every week anyway, because they love growing with you.

Possibly about Barney, and other people we both love and hate

D and I started out discussing what the podcasters happened to be discussing: the character of Barney. If you haven't watched the show, Barney is an I-can't-believe-this-slimy-sexist-jerk-is-somehow-also-likeable-and-even-often-loveable character that our younger selves were once convinced only actor Neil Patrick Harris could have made work. That it took a hardworking, talented, beloved, and beautiful gay man, with unique insights into the real motivations of many insecure-and-isolated-and-floundering straight men, to make a slimy and straight character hold so much nuance, and be likeable (usually), and even loveable (sometimes) felt true back when the show itself was airing, circa 2005.

Today, 20-years later, we notice that it took a whole lot more than that to make the character likeable. It took friendship, community, and courage in all directions. For example, it took writers and directors and funders and actors and audiences allowing– and many people insisting upon– other characters, and especially the women characters around him, getting to be more and more of their true selves with him over time, as real friends do.

Over time, we ourselves evolved, and so did the characters around Barney. We got to evolve our relationships with, and influence with, the creepy/slimy/stale/chronically hurtful parts of our culture and also showing up within ourselves, through the characters as a friendship group, which included Barney. We faced the misogyny within us together. Or, if not full-on hatred of women (difficult today for me to find within Barney at all, because I no longer hold hatred of women within me nor do I accept hating myself– inside Barney often felt like worthless trash so he often treated other people like worthless trash), then at least the cowardly acceptance of treating other human beings like objects, property, and conquests and thinking that was somehow funny. So creepy. Or, believing that it didn't matter if at least half the audience was being hurt by the "humor." Today felt, and named, as the violence it is, by sensitive, connected beings bravely unwilling to settle for violence.

The characters (and cast and writers and the real people behind them) clearly evolved with time, and so did we. Barney evolved too, just more slowly than everyone else. Maybe because his particular brand of cultural BS to carry (we all carry some) rigidly insisted that he not change much at all– that he be strong and dominant and independent, but in only very narrowly defined terms, and he could connect, but only in shallow and childish, often off-putting ways for adults who are outgrowing settling for shallow, which eventually meant that he was saying and doing outdated things, feeling alone because healthy, always-growing adults expected better, and utterly mystified about why everyone wouldn't want to be him, or be with him, given that he still perceived his actions as awesome or legendary once he had a lot of money, suits, and the ability to con others.

Over time, the rest of us– and the women first– shifted from nodding and smiling along with creepy and insulting behavior, to then calling him out on cruel behavior and witnessing real and sad consequences for him and others of his behavior, to seeing others beat him at his own game and allowing him to fully feel how he'd been making others feel, to my personal favorite: a friend getting 100% fed up with his stale, hurtful, outdated nonsense, standing up from the table, letting him know she was just done with his chronically hurtful presence, and simply walking away (go, Lily, go!). Leaving his presence entirely, for a while. Allowing all the men who remained sitting around Barney to fully see her pain and fully feel and notice her absence, and then her power. Notice courage demonstrated– both in speaking from your heart to friends and also simply by being completely done with tolerating abuse, standing up, and walking away from people who chronically hurt you. Even if it was never, or rarely, intentionally done. That's what I witnessed in rewatching the show. I witnessed the moment younger me thought "Yep, Lily. I'm fucking done too."

Some younger people will disagree with me on this. Will experience the Barney character as problematic from start to finish, irredeemable, and not worthy of their time. And that's great. You do you. Keep those standards high. Keep those boundaries strong around your sensitive self as long as you need them. I myself skipped entire episodes when we rewatched this show. And. If you yourself didn't evolve as a young human being along with the How I Met Your Mother characters when it first aired, then you're unlikely to fully understand how some of us can feel forgiving of and loving toward Barney. To feel forgiving and loving toward Barney isn't about Barney. It's about forgiving and loving our younger selves, and our own past behaviors and language, having grown up in a violence-ignoring, violence-creating, and head-in-the-sand-just-to-survive culture. At 55, today we know that we'll continue to need to repeatedly feel forgiving and loving and connected to others to survive and thrive, and our found family helps us do that, even those whose own wounds hurt us, eventually, too. Sometimes our found family includes writers, actors, cast, crew, and fictional characters on a show at critical points in our lives when we're unlearning exactly what they're unlearning too. I can love Barney. I feel zero need for you to love him too.

About our friends Silly, Deep, Nuance, and Bernie

Deep and Silly. Silly and Deep.

What a remarkable thing it is to be alive and fully present today.

Across his lifetime, my mentor Bernie "Blue" DeKoven experienced Deep and Silly as fully present beings, here to play together, and to play with us, and for us to play with together, as friends. I experience them the same way. That's actually how Bernie and I found each other online from opposite sides of the country. "Be yourself, your true self, your strangest and most unique self, and know that your people will find you or you'll find them when you most need them," the forest here whispers. And now, so do I. Bernie is as much as part of me today as he was when he was alive. That we never met in person has nothing at all to do with how much we meant to each other back then. That his ridiculously generous, kind, and playful spirit no longer lives in his body has nothing at all to do with how much we still talk and mean to each other now. Whoops, I meant to talk about our friends Silly, Deep, and Nuance. There you go again, Bernie. Always stealing the show. As full of main character energy as ever. What a remarkable thing it is, too, to be dead and still so fully present.

So, as beings, names, and proper nouns, Silly and Deep, receive reverent respect from Bernie and me. And capital letters:

• Our friend Silly helps us not take ourselves and life too seriously, with bodies tightening up to the point of illness, chronic pain, and immobility. They show us that the safety we sensitive beings need to go deeper is already present in our imperfect societies, relationships, shows, and selves. We– exactly as we really are right now– can trust ourselves and others to be fluid, go deeper, unlearn what no longer serves us, thanks, at least in part, to Silly. Bernie was a big proponent of the idea that Fun doesn't need a reason beyond fun. Silly, for the sake of Silly, is plenty. Yes! And. Anyone who has been worried, anxious, depressed, sad, grieving, or even full of despair– and then laughed so hard with a trusted other that one of you actually peed your pants, making you laugh even harder, until you both cried– understands fully the power of Silly. Without even trying, Silly saves lives. Silly has saved my life more than once. Though I sometimes struggle with being Silly myself (TeamDeep4Evr!), I've noticed that all my favorite earthlings excel at playing and being Silly.
• Our friend Deep, like deep ocean water or a cavern, can be dark or scary from the surface or outside. Deep can even hold levels of pressure or trauma or despair that we'd be foolish to tackle alone. And. Deep invites unknowning, discussion, unlearning, collaboration, experimenting, experiencing yourself as so much more than an individual being, saying the unsayable and then bringing forth the unimaginable, out loud, together– all of which demonstrate that we're stronger, more flexible, more connected, more creative, and well, just far vaster and more complex than we could imagine alone. And by we, here, I mean earthlings. This can lead to greater respect for each other, greater trust in ourselves and others, and growing closer across time. Deep entices and invites us to explore connections in places we and our people once couldn't imagine or feared to even look at let alone go into and explore. Deep invites stepping off well-worn paths and wandering somewhere new, or ancient, together. Deep creates life-long friendships for lovers of the Deep. Life-long friendships and relationships can create Deep, too, almost while you're not even looking.

Together, Silly and Deep teach us how to live with, befriend, and eventually love Nuance. How to just be with, breathe with, and become, Nuance.

Wow, do I love Nuance. Twenty years ago, had you told 35-Year-Old Me that I would say that today, at 55, after having felt, and witnessed, years of genocide of children, elders, and civilians funded by my own tax dollars, with both Democrats and Republicans in charge, I would have told you that you were dead wrong. That other things are far, far more important than Nuance. Younger Me wasn't wrong. But she was so full of ideas, trying to change everything everywhere and all at once, and so often overtaken by rage and fear that she left precious little room for Nuance even when she desperately wanted Nuance to be present. Nuance is an always collective, always multi-perspectived, always we or us or them or they being. I've learned that I can be really annoying to people, and to paid bad actors on social media, who don't love Nuance like I do. Or, who maybe do love Nuance, sometimes, just not when it's my face they're seeing or my words and voice they're hearing upon first meeting. Nuance is here for everyone. Let's let Nuance speak for herself. But I– gratefully now– am definitely not for everyone.

If you want to experience Bernie's influence on me playing with Silly and Deep, here's a good place to go: Bitterness, Sweetness, and Bittersweetness as shared by Bernie on his Deepfun site. If you want to experience Bernie's and his friends' initial responses to the original offering from me, scroll to the comments section here: Bitterness, Sweetness, and Bittersweetness on my old Collective Self blog which is where I wrote in my 30s and 40s outside of my books. If there's something better than bringing tears of joy to people in this lifetime, or letting people know how much they mean to the whole world, and to you, I haven't found it.

Being alive means perpetually waking up

Back to How I Met Your Mother, and Barney, for just a moment. Now that D and I are in our mid 50s– having been together and discussing life for 27 of those years– today we can both see how jarring and hurtful (my words), problematic (younger generations' word), sexist (older generations' word), and deeply longing for and in clear need of connection and love (our words together, as cross-generational and cross-cultural family and community) the Barney character seems to us today. And often how other Barney-type characters– those still flailing and floating around alone out there, refusing to set down cultural BS and fear and judgement and self-loathing for even a moment in favor of connecting, unlearning, learning, being silly, and deepening together– seem to us today. They seem sad. Scared. Alone. Barney characters just seem sad and lonely today. They feel like two-dimensional paper beings not built for a living, moving, always changing, everyone's-always-learning-together-here world. Like the fake paper snowflakes we made and hung in windows as children as we waited and hoped in impatient anticipation for real snow– and snowball fights, and sledding, and snowmen, and holidays, and snow days(WAH!)– to arrive.

Barney characters are great mirrors for us today. For seeing our own Barney selves. Encounters with Barneys are like looking at our younger selves in the mirror– looking at what we did, or put up with, in the past, out of fear, isolation, cultural BS about what and who we believed we had to be, and even simply not having experience with more loving, life-giving ways of being across a wide variety of situations. Some days, they're like looking at a mirror of our present self– shining a light on yet another nugget of cultural BS it's time to let go of.

We transform our Barney selves not by hating and punishing ourselves or others and hiding the things we've done, but by practicing love and learning to love ourselves and others far more than we could before, and sharing our past experiences and language and selves, even those that make us cringe. We love whenever loving is needed– which is pretty much always and especially when it's not it's earned or deserved. We're strong enough to offer love when we want to, even when it makes no sense to others! And, we step away or shift to be with others, to rest and recover (go, Lily, go!), when we can't be loving. Most days. When we do this most of the time, we end up being loving most of the time. So, when we do blow up at someone, now, we have far more trust that blowing up is exactly what the moment called for and that we were the one present who is the one who should blow up, not someone else present. Love and trust go hand in hand. The more loving we are, the more we can trust ourselves and others.

Loving selves grow and connect, get braver together, and change together again and again across time. So, here, for example, we no longer do the things we did 20 or 10 or 5 years ago that seem hurtful and wildly out of touch today. And we don't tolerate within ourselves many things that we tolerated 20 or 10 or even 5 years ago– things Younger Us did that were harmful to both ourselves and others. It's always both. All harm we perpetrate or witness but do not try to stop is harming everyone present somehow. So, we speak up as we can. We try to minimize suffering and harm. We grow closer so we can change patterns and make braver choices together. We make amends when we cause or allow harm. We learn. And we keep loving.

Waking up and outgrowing old behaviors, ways of being, stale or harmful or abusive patterns, and our younger selves is being fully alive. Waking up, speaking up, making amends, unlearning, growing, and loving more, not less, as we grow older– that is being fully alive! It feels like the very nature of the living to love more as you age. The only alternatives to waking up and outgrowing our former selves seem to be dying, medicating ourselves into total numbness or lying to ourselves all the time, and finding ourselves chronically alone and clinging to the nightmarish dreams and illusions of fear-centered lonely selves, stuck, trapped, and chronically feeling unloved, persecuted by others, and blaming others. If you feel judgement from me there, you don't have to. All I ever do is describe myself.

Every time I hear a voice speak a difficult lived experience out loud to me that they were once too afraid to speak in my presence, it hurts a bit. It hurts, but it's not an attack. It's amazing. It's relationship. It's growth. It means that we've grown to the point that they can share their experience and feelings with me and trust me with their experience, words, and story. Both or all of us have grown for these moments of growth in the relationship to happen.

When I'm feeling isolated, alone, or scared, I still need words like slimy and creepy and belittled to describe how the Barney character feels to me or can make me feel. When I'm feeling loving, powerful, supported, and just slightly stretched by life and respected others, then the words he's deeply longing for and in clear need of love work far better for describing Barney and how I feel about him. It's both. I feel all these things. So, my work isn't changing others. And it isn't calling out strangers publicly for their failings. Most days. My work is loving myself and others enough that we get to rest and stay loving, end up coalescing again and again around love and learning and laughter, and we end up moving through the world together looking for places to land or co-creating spaces where we feel loving, powerful, supported, and stretched by respected others. So we can all keep loving. Spaces where, eventually, we even share and make peace with our Barney selves and all the total crap we've believed, thought, done, helped perpetuate, or not stopped out of fear or because we couldn't even fully see it at the time: cultural and family BS becoming like the air we breathe and don't even notice or think about.

Welcome, Nuance

Nuance is subtle and so powerful but elusive, at least for my people. She tends to show up mostly in the moments we insist on, or more fully accept, loving ourselves and each other. Nuance shows up in the moments we slow down to learn more, hear backstory, create enough spaciousness within us to wonder and follow curiosity down rabbit holes again, and grow truly curious about the experience of others. I'd like to amend these words: Nuance isn't elusive, though she can seem so to my people. Whenever we settle for less than the powerful, connected, love- and curiosity-centered beings that we naturally are– whenever we assume the worst of others from a distance or mentally toss millions of people we don't actually know into a tiny box, label them, and write them off– we blind ourselves to a whole lot of reality. Nuance doesn't hide from us. She's always present. We shut our eyes to her when we chronically shut our eyes to pain and suffering and when we chronically plug our ears to other's experiences, stories, and lessons. Or, when we aren't getting enough rest and support for ourselves to hold all the pain and suffering of a planet that we're determined to witness and help carry and hold. Holding global pain and suffering has to be a group effort.

Loving these selves takes time, presence, rest, considerable wandering, and regularly finding and being with collections of loving, unique beings with different perspectives. It's so cool that time exists! Allowing us to grow into more awareness and more open, loving selves capable of holding Nuance, becoming and returning to our bravest selves repeatedly until bravery itself is collective and fully sticks. Dancing with Silly and Deep. Figuring out how to love the Barneys within us, including those we'd rather hide in a basement or punch in the face instead of share out loud. Share your Barneys. And, being found by mentors like Bernie– strangers who feel like home from the moment they arrive until long after they're gone– people who help us realize that we are from Earth after all. And we love our home world.

Like it or not, the living are always learning and unlearning. We're always waking up to something. And cruelty has never come naturally to living beings, nor does our cruelty serve us, or anyone who deeply loves life and their home world, in any way at all. This is all good news in a human world drowning with greedy-billionaire-backed bad news now. We're also learning how to stay with Nuance now– together. How to stay with pain and suffering and horrifyingly cruel and intentional harm, loss, and thievery on a global scale while staying open, soft, gentle, and not becoming hard and cruel ourselves. We will not become them. This is a monumental moment in time. Keep resting more than feels necessary, keep waking up, keep giving more of your time to your people and accepting joy, and keep noticing if Nuance is welcome wherever you go. If she's not, change something. Open your eyes, take a deep breath, pull your fingers out of your ears, and/or speak up. Cruelty cannot settle within us– we will not settle for cruelty– when Nuance is present.

Welcome, Nuance. Welcome!