An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff's years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how hearing loss taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness.
Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning.
Jen did not intend to become a yoga teacher, but when she was given the opportunity to host her own retreats, she left her thirteen-year waitressing job and said “yes,” despite crippling fears of her inexperience and her own potential. After years of feeling depressed, anxious, and hopeless, in a life that seemed to have no escape, she healed her own heart by caring for others. She has learned to fiercely listen despite being nearly deaf, to banish shame attached to a body mass index, and to rebuild a family after the debilitating loss of her father when she was eight. Through her journey, Jen conveys the experience most of us are missing in our lives: being heard and being told, “I got you.”
Exuberant, triumphantly messy, and brave, On Being Human is a celebration of happiness and self-realization over darkness and doubt. Her complicated yet imperfectly perfect life path is an inspiration to live outside the box and to reject the all-too-common belief of “I am not enough.” Jen will help readers find, accept, and embrace their own vulnerability, bravery, and humanness.
Review
"With harrowing vulnerability and badass candor, Jen Pastiloff has written a gritty and passionate memoir." — Elizabeth Gilbert
“[A] powerful account of hearing loss and learning to communicate in a new way—through yoga, gratitude and radical honesty.” —People , “The Best New Books”
" On Being Human is heartbreaking and triumphant. And it has plenty to teach us about listening, forgiving, and ultimately, finding peace." —GOOP
“In On Being Human, Jennifer Pastiloff shares the story of how she left her 13-year waitressing job to become a yoga teacher, despite her fears about her inexperience. These days, she's a widely-regarded and beloved speaker, and in her memoir, she tracks her inspirational journey from a life of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness to one of contentment, gratitude, and bravery.” —Bustle, “21 New Memoirs That Will Inspire, Motivate, And Captivate You This Summer.”
“Centered around touchstone stories that she shares in her workshops, Pastiloff tells the story about how one can battle their own demons to grow into the person they were always meant to be.” **—Today.com, “20 beach reads you won't want to put down”
** "A memoir beautifully wrapped in inspiration and self-discovery that can speak to almost anyone. . . . It's raw, real, and truly a story on 'being human.' There are universal messages revealed in this book about waking up and genuinely living your truth." —Inc
“This memoir details the author's life journey with refreshing honesty, outlining the path she took to (finally) start a fulfilling career and build a family after struggling with hearing loss and the death of her father. This is definitely worth reading if you’re in need of a bit of inspiration this summer.” — Better Homes & Gardens, “13 New Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer.” “In this candid memoir, Manifest-Station blogger Pastiloff transforms from a troubled restaurant server at a celebrity haunt in Santa Monica, Calif., into a yoga teacher and maven for self-discovery...Readers feeling stuck in their lives will devour this inspiring story of a woman finding her way.” — Publishers Weekly
“This book actually changed my life.” —Lindsay Tucker, Yoga Journal
“This is an openhearted, therapeutic journey that's perhaps a little like one of Pastiloff's workshops in book form.” —Booklist
“Kick off a summer of self-love with Jennifer Pastiloff's On Being Human , a treatise on the importance of embracing vulnerabilities and imperfections, and of loving deeply, bravely, and with compassion.” —Bustle , “50 New Books Of Summer 2019 To Read By The Pool, In The Park, And On The Beach.”
“The year’s uplifting memoir has arrived. Jennifer Pastiloff shares her unusual life story, from growing up deaf in a broken home to working as a waitress in L.A. for decades to creating On Being Human, a now-famous yoga workshop and retreat. Pastiloff is a self-professed ‘beauty hunter.’ In this honest and vulnerable book, she’ll show you her way.” — Refinery29
“The book is constructed as a memoir of Pastiloff's earlier life waitressing, but it's much more than that: a love letter to yoga, a self-help book, a spiritual how-to guide, and more. Fans of Cheryl Strayed will flock to the raw, earned healing and personal growth.” — MindBodyGreen.com
“I devoured On Being Human in one sitting—nodding, laughing and connecting from the first word to the last. Jen Pastiloff is a brave and vulnerable leader whose book will help people take a deep breath, recognize themselves, and understand each other. What more can we ask of a book?” —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller Love Warrior **and founder of Together Rising
** “On Being Human is beautiful and tender, profound and absorbing. I never wanted to put it down. In writing with such clarity and honesty about her jagged path to becoming, Jennifer Pastiloff has told the story of not only herself, but so many of us. I was consoled by this book and also inspired. On every page I felt the presence and the power of Pastiloff’s brave and gigantic heart. This is a book friends will tell friends they have to read for years to come. It’s an important, enthralling debut.” —Cheryl Strayed,author of #1 New York Times Bestseller Wild
“This is a memoir at once strong and vulnerable, an absorbing account of Jennifer Pastiloff’s inner life, filled with humor and inspiration and sincerity.” —Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far from the Tree
“Jen Pastiloff is the only human ray of sunshine who could ever make me earnestly consider incorporating unpalatable things like ‘manifesting joy’ and ‘listening’ (UGH) into my life. This book is a treasure.” —Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Meaty
“This book is a beacon of hope from someone who’s been VERY far away from that beacon but managed to find her way back.” —Patton Oswalt
“Read this fcking book. Jen is very much part of the light and the balance that is needed in this world right now. I don't even know her but I love her. Read this book.” —P!nk*
“Forget everything you know about memoir. Of course this is about the comet that is Jen Pastiloff and how she grew up struggling with deafness, depression, and a wrecked body image to go on and crack open the world’s heart with yoga/writing retreats, a website named The Manifest-Station, and pure love—but honestly, it’s really the memoir of all of us, every single one of us who ever felt I’m not enough, I’m not loved, I’m falling apart, I don’t’ belong here. I was reading this moving memoir while crying, scribbling down sentences and holding onto them like life lines. I’ve got you, Jen says, but the true message of this radiant memoir is nothing short that revolutionary love: we’ve got each other.” —Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow
“This darkly funny, deeply personal and powerful memoir will speak to anyone who has ever felt outcast: from their bodies, their minds, the world. A must read for human beings.” —Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World and Poster Child: A Memoir
“For self-help fans and seekers of self-empowerment, this is an inspiring memoir with tips for overcoming and maybe prospering from the chaotic or disappointing elements that comprise an imperfect life.” —Kirkus
“Jen Pastiloff is the anti-guru. Rarely will you meet anyone more humble, compassionate and ready to learn. She's the kind of leader we need.” —Rene Denfeld, author of The Child Finder
“Listen to me: you’re going to think Jen Pastiloff is your BFF after you read this book because when you’re done reading it you will feel known. No one is better qualified to write a book called On Being Human than this particular human. Having long struggled to accept her own imperfections and struggles, Jen manages to bring these to the page with a humor, heart and generosity that makes room for all of us to be a little kinder to ourselves.” —Elizabeth Crane, author of Turf and The History of Great Things ****
“Jen Pastiloff is the authentic voice women need right now. By challenging us to embrace our imperfections she teaches that 'wellness' is the process of letting go of ideas that don't serve us-- as well as a radical act of joy. The On Being Human workshop is a radical reset for anyone struggling to become herself.” —Lori Leibovich, Editor-in-Chief of Health *
“Especially in these dark times for women, there is actually nothing 'simple' about Pastiloff’s radical alchemy. Read this book and feel yourself expand.” — Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men and* Every Kind of Wanting *
“A memoir of pure love. When Jen says, ‘I got you,’ she’s also saying we’ve all got each other. In this pandemic that message is a gift.” — Maria Bello,* People *
“Jen Pastiloff is a rejuvenating supernova! A life force of primal extravagant delight! Frank and funny, she'll boss herself around and change the rest of us in the meantime. I'd want to listen to anything she has to say.” — Naomi Shihab Nye, Pushcart Prize-winning poet and author of Fuel and 19 Varieties of Gazelle *
About the Author
Jennifer Pastiloff travels the world with her unique workshop On Being Human, a hybrid of yoga-related movement, writing, sharing aloud, letting the snot fly, and the occasional dance party. Jennifer is a frequent contributor to SHAPE Magazine, including SHAPE Escape at Miraval Resort and the Women Run the World initiative, and she has been featured on Good Morning America, New York Magazine, Health Magazine, CBS News, and others for her unique style of teaching, which she has taught to thousands of women in sold-out workshops all over the world. Jen is also the guest speaker at Canyon Ranch, and she leads Writing and The Body workshops with author Lidia Yuknavitch, as well as retreats with Emily Rapp Black. ** Founder of the online magazine The Manifest-Station , ** when Jen is not traveling she is based in Los Angeles with her husband and son and a cup of coffee.
Before I was born, I was a memory. A feeling my mother once had, her grandmother Rose holding her in her lap, before Rose had the breast cancer, before it ravaged her body, before her broad shoulders began to slump with the weight of defeat and dying and the wrenching chemotherapy.
Before I was a memory, I was my mother's little head being cradled into her grandmother's chest, after she'd been released from the hospital, after she had run, in her five-year-old body, out into a rural New Jersey road and a car ran over her tiny head.
Rose lived with my motherÕs family at the time. Bubbe Rose was the only one who ever showed my mother any kind of affection or attention, besides my motherÕs own sister, Ellen. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, Marion, saved money by never turning on the lights. She kept plastic on the sofa for protection. Cockroaches scurried over the dirty floor. She sat in the dark for hours on end.
My mother, at five years old, wanting to die, ran out right in front of a car and that car drove over her.
My mother floated over the houses and imagined landing in one that welcomed her with, Hello! I am so happy you are here. I am so happy you are alive. I love you. There you are. We got you. We've been waiting for you.
Isn't it incomprehensible what the imagination is capable of? How deeply we want affection and love? How we are, even at five years old, willing to risk our lives to find it?
There is a scar above my mother's right eye, barely visible. I remember how my mother would always say, When your time is up, it is up, don't be afraid. Her time was not up, it would seem, by her reasoning. Bubbe Rose pulling her into her bosom, Shh, Bubbelah, I love you, it's going to be okay, and my mother closed her eyes and saw only her own mother saying, I wish you were never born.
My mother took her grandmother's love and placed it somewhere inside of her next to the darkness of being unwanted and unloved and I grew from that. An idea as inconceivable as being run over by a two-ton vehicle and surviving with only a tiny scar that has to be pointed out to be noticed at all.
When my mother's grandmother Rose got to the end, my mother held her hand and whispered, Shh, shhh, it's going to be all right, reaching inside of herself and away from the darkness to that memory of safety and love, and there she found the idea. The idea was this: I can give this away, this love, I do not have to keep it here in the dark, I can give it away and create more, even if I don't remember what it feels like to be loved. I can create it.
All the stories that live inside of me, that I am holding, both sustain and haunt me. The time when my mother was eighteen and had started working in Center City in Philly, at Rohm and Haas, a chemical manufacturer, where she worked in foreign operations marketing and airfreight. She'd bought all new clothes for the job, and came home once to find that her mother had taken a scissors and sliced through all of them in her closet. She sat and wept into half of a skirt, a sleeve, a pant leg, and yet, still, on every Mother's Day, she sent flowers; she tried so hard to reach inside of herself and find a memory besides that of her grandmother Rose that said I love you, and when she could not find any, she begged her mother to love her, until she died all those years later when my mother was sixty-three years old. Please love me, please love me, please love me and my grandmother sealed her ears to those pleas and sat on her plastic-covered sofa in the dark and did crossword puzzles and complained about the weather.
Before I was born, I was just a memory of love, and thank the gods of coffee and books for that memory, because if my mother did not have her grandmother Rose, if she was left to the machinations of her own mother, she would be forever stuck in that South Philly row house. My grandmother was endlessly picking up men at the nightclub where she was the hatcheck girl. They were dangerous and mean. Sometimes my mother sat in a damp basement with the neighbor my grandmother left her with when she went on dates. I can imagine men pulling my mother to them, her small body a separate planet entirely. How could she have stayed in her body and endured?
Luckily my mother had the memory somewhere inside that body she so often left, a memory of the love she had felt from her grandmother. Before we are molecules, we are memory. Every time my grandmother winced as she looked at my mother, every time she tried to unspeak her into not existing, that's in me.
My mother grew up in a brick row house in South Philadelphia on Reese Street. Her mother's parents, whom she called Bubbe (Rose) and Zayda (Al), also lived with them. They both died before I was born. It was a dark, narrow space that always smelled like cat pee when I would visit as a child. I rummaged in my grandparents' basement for Barbie doll clothes my great-grandmother Helen, my grandfather's mother, had sewn. My mother's stories have been in me as long as I can remember. Both my mom and my dad treated me like an adult since the time I could talk, so the tales of my grandmother Marion have no origin story for me. I have always known: she was a monster. I remember asking my mom, Why didn't Grandmom ever say she loved us? Did she hate my sister and me? Why does she sit in the dark all the time? Why is she so mean?
My grandmother got pregnant with my mom when she was eighteen years old. My grandfather had been a sailor stationed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and was only home once a year until the time my mom and her sister, Ellen, were teenagers. When I started asking serious questions about why my grandmother was so unkind, it was as if my mother became uncorked and all the years of abuse and neglect and sheer terribleness flowed out of her and into the air. She told me everything.
It was 1983 and I was reading Judy Blume's Forever. I was eight years old and my father was still alive and I thought how lucky he was that he had my Bubbe, who was so loving and gentle and grandmotherly, and how unfair it was that my mom had grown up with her monster of a mother. That was my first true moment of realizing that there is no such thing as fair. I decided then that fair was a made-up word that might as well be in the fairy tale I was reading except I was not reading fairy tales, I was reading about sex and penises named Ralph and any other adult book I could get my grubby paws on.
Marion, my grandmother, worked as a hatcheck girl at Big Bill's, a nightclub in Center City, Philadelphia. She slept every day until three p.m. and they all dreaded the hours from three p.m. until seven thirty, when she finally left for work. Once she left for work it was calm again, my mother told me. My grandmother had dates with all those men while my grandfather was away in the navy. My mom said that neither she nor her sister Ellen ever got birthday presents except for when one of the very temporary boyfriends would take them to Lord & Taylor on the Main Line in Philadelphia to pick one out. She said, "She would brag about giving me the present, but it never came from her. It was always from the boyfriends." Clothes from shops along the Main Line, before there were shopping malls. A smoky topaz heart on a gold chain my mother wore all her life. And once, a cocker spaniel named Sandy, whom my grandmother later abandoned in the street.
My mother told me these stories while I sat at our kitchen dinette set in Pennsauken with the yellow vinyl cushions, the backs of my thighs stuck to them, making that noise they make when they peel off, like suction cups, and I watched my mom put flounder in the oven as I wrote stories. I let one leg at a time stick to the vinyl and then pulled it off like a vacuum, thinking it was hilarious because it was something my dad liked to do.
My father had a high-pitched laugh, like a sheep. He'd bray after he asked, "Who did that? Was it you, Jennifer? Rachel?" and then there was laughter and silence and we ate spaghetti and crab, stuffed pork chops, meatballs and gravy, or whatever my mom had made that day. My father never cooked. Never even poured his own cereal, or so the story goes. I recall only my mom doing anything remotely domesticated, like cleaning or cooking, grocery shopping, and making her own salad dressings. My dad's job was to go to work in a men's clothing store, make us laugh, buy us presents, and sing "You Are My Sunshine" to us before bed. Other than that, my mom did it all. Even simple tasks like driving my sister and me to school: my dad often got lost on the three-mile drive.
There were dishes in the sink, patterned plates, long foggy glasses with my father's lip marks. The island in the center of the kitchen had not been built yet. That came after my father died, when my mother used most of his life-insurance money to remodel the kitchen right before we left the house forever.
My mom talked as she made dinner or cleaned the kitchen counter with Clorox. She told me so many stories as if no one had ever listened to her in her entire life, which I came to realize they hadn't. I was the first, and I had to work hard to hear her above my constant tinnitus that I didn't understand or tell anyone about. I assumed this was what everyone heard, how sound existed in everyone's head.
I was fascinated with understanding why we had to go visit my grandmother Marion, why my mother still sent her presents, why my mom didn't hate her. I wanted to know why why why and how how how as I peeled my sweaty summer leg off the kitchen chair and stuck it back on, again and again, until my mom asked me to stop because the sound was driving her crazy. It felt like an impossible math equation to me and I was awful at math. If my mom had such an odious childhood and such an awful mom, why did we have a relationship with her? It did not make sense.
"That's just the way I am. I forgive," my mother said as she unloaded groceries and put them away; Pepsi for my dad and his Breyers chocolate ice cream. Those are always the groceries of my memories. Coffee, Kools, Breyers.
I never wanted to forgive my grandmother. My mom had told me too many things, things I perhaps already knew, things that lived so far in the marrow of me that I did not even need to hear them spoken aloud in kitchens, yet when I did, I wanted to throw things at walls, and at my mother. I thought about how my mom had been run over by a car when she was five years old. A story I had heard so many times that I wondered if I made it up in my unicorn diary because it felt like it was mine and had always been mine. I touched my eye to see if I had a scar there and sometimes it felt like I did. A tiny ridge under my eyebrow hairs.
My mom said that she had no memory of the faces from the day she was hit, so I made the faces up. She had been on a car ride to New Jersey from Philadelphia with my grandmother and one of the faceless, sometimes kind, sometimes not so kind boyfriends. In my mind, he had big hairy hands and brown eyes with eyelashes that pointed straight down. He smelled like cigarettes. My mom had been hit in the head and thrown thirty feet.
"I can't believe I survived and that they saved my eyes," she said every time she talked about it, lifting her thick brown bangs to show me the scar. I touched my own eye and said, "You can barely see it."
"I know," she always said, "but it's there."
We all had thick brown bangs since forever. I was probably born with bangs. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized I even had eyebrows. Bangs equal the eighties in my mind.
She had been trying to run away from her mother and the boyfriend while my grandfather was away overseas in the navy. She ran from them and right into the front of a car speeding on a small rural Jersey road. The car handle went through her right eye.
I was curious about my great-grandmother Rose. In my mom's stories, she was always kind and loving, and yet her daughter, my grandmother, was vicious and mean. I thought we were simply extensions of our parents. Whoever they were, we were. Or more precisely, would inevitably, and inextricably, become. I wanted to know my mother's Bubbe Rose so I could understand that love was not necessarily inherited, but that it could be created, fashioned from all sorts of things, including pain and car handles going through eyes.
"Tell me about your Bubbe Rose," I said as my mom sat down with her tea. Daddy drank coffee and Mommy had tea. I would come to hate tea.
"My Bubbe got breast cancer when I was fourteen years old. She was fifty-four. I was in ninth grade and they called me into the office to tell me my grandmother had cancer. I didn't even know what cancer was."
Rose begged my mother to give her a whole bottle of pain pills every day. Every day for seven months she asked to be put out of her misery.
"When I look back now, I wish I had given them to her. She suffered so much. The day she died, they called an ambulance, but she wouldn't get into it unless I was with her. I was at the park with my friends but a neighbor came to find me and we went to the hospital in the ambulance. She died in the emergency room. She was completely yellow and she was lying with her mouth open. I was fourteen."
An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff's years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how hearing loss taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness.
Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning.
Jen did not intend to become a yoga teacher, but when she was given the opportunity to host her own retreats, she left her thirteen-year waitressing job and said “yes,” despite crippling fears of her inexperience and her own potential. After years of feeling depressed, anxious, and hopeless, in a life that seemed to have no escape, she healed her own heart by caring for others. She has learned to fiercely listen despite being nearly deaf, to banish shame attached to a body mass index, and to rebuild a family after the debilitating loss of her father when she was eight. Through her journey, Jen conveys the experience most of us are missing in our lives: being heard and being told, “I got you.”
Exuberant, triumphantly messy, and brave, On Being Human is a celebration of happiness and self-realization over darkness and doubt. Her complicated yet imperfectly perfect life path is an inspiration to live outside the box and to reject the all-too-common belief of “I am not enough.” Jen will help readers find, accept, and embrace their own vulnerability, bravery, and humanness.
Review
"With harrowing vulnerability and badass candor, Jen Pastiloff has written a gritty and passionate memoir."
— Elizabeth Gilbert
“[A] powerful account of hearing loss and learning to communicate in a new way—through yoga, gratitude and radical honesty.”
—People , “The Best New Books”
" On Being Human is heartbreaking and triumphant. And it has plenty to teach us about listening, forgiving, and ultimately, finding peace."
—GOOP
“In On Being Human, Jennifer Pastiloff shares the story of how she left her 13-year waitressing job to become a yoga teacher, despite her fears about her inexperience. These days, she's a widely-regarded and beloved speaker, and in her memoir, she tracks her inspirational journey from a life of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness to one of contentment, gratitude, and bravery.”
—Bustle, “21 New Memoirs That Will Inspire, Motivate, And Captivate You This Summer.”
“Centered around touchstone stories that she shares in her workshops, Pastiloff tells the story about how one can battle their own demons to grow into the person they were always meant to be.”
**—Today.com, “20 beach reads you won't want to put down”
** “A searing, riveting narrative.” **—Tablet Magazine
** "A memoir beautifully wrapped in inspiration and self-discovery that can speak to almost anyone. . . . It's raw, real, and truly a story on 'being human.' There are universal messages revealed in this book about waking up and genuinely living your truth."
—Inc
“This memoir details the author's life journey with refreshing honesty, outlining the path she took to (finally) start a fulfilling career and build a family after struggling with hearing loss and the death of her father. This is definitely worth reading if you’re in need of a bit of inspiration this summer.”
— Better Homes & Gardens, “13 New Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer.”
“In this candid memoir, Manifest-Station blogger Pastiloff transforms from a troubled restaurant server at a celebrity haunt in Santa Monica, Calif., into a yoga teacher and maven for self-discovery...Readers feeling stuck in their lives will devour this inspiring story of a woman finding her way.”
— Publishers Weekly
“This book actually changed my life.”
—Lindsay Tucker, Yoga Journal
“This is an openhearted, therapeutic journey that's perhaps a little like one of Pastiloff's workshops in book form.”
—Booklist
“Kick off a summer of self-love with Jennifer Pastiloff's On Being Human , a treatise on the importance of embracing vulnerabilities and imperfections, and of loving deeply, bravely, and with compassion.”
—Bustle , “50 New Books Of Summer 2019 To Read By The Pool, In The Park, And On The Beach.”
“The year’s uplifting memoir has arrived. Jennifer Pastiloff shares her unusual life story, from growing up deaf in a broken home to working as a waitress in L.A. for decades to creating On Being Human, a now-famous yoga workshop and retreat. Pastiloff is a self-professed ‘beauty hunter.’ In this honest and vulnerable book, she’ll show you her way.”
— Refinery29
“The book is constructed as a memoir of Pastiloff's earlier life waitressing, but it's much more than that: a love letter to yoga, a self-help book, a spiritual how-to guide, and more. Fans of Cheryl Strayed will flock to the raw, earned healing and personal growth.”
— MindBodyGreen.com
“I devoured On Being Human in one sitting—nodding, laughing and connecting from the first word to the last. Jen Pastiloff is a brave and vulnerable leader whose book will help people take a deep breath, recognize themselves, and understand each other. What more can we ask of a book?”
—Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller Love Warrior **and founder of Together Rising
** “On Being Human is beautiful and tender, profound and absorbing. I never wanted to put it down. In writing with such clarity and honesty about her jagged path to becoming, Jennifer Pastiloff has told the story of not only herself, but so many of us. I was consoled by this book and also inspired. On every page I felt the presence and the power of Pastiloff’s brave and gigantic heart. This is a book friends will tell friends they have to read for years to come. It’s an important, enthralling debut.”
—Cheryl Strayed, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller Wild
“This is a memoir at once strong and vulnerable, an absorbing account of Jennifer Pastiloff’s inner life, filled with humor and inspiration and sincerity.”
—Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far from the Tree
“Jen Pastiloff is the only human ray of sunshine who could ever make me earnestly consider incorporating unpalatable things like ‘manifesting joy’ and ‘listening’ (UGH) into my life. This book is a treasure.”
—Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Meaty
“This book is a beacon of hope from someone who’s been VERY far away from that beacon but managed to find her way back.”
—Patton Oswalt
“Read this fcking book. Jen is very much part of the light and the balance that is needed in this world right now. I don't even know her but I love her. Read this book.”
—P!nk*
“Forget everything you know about memoir. Of course this is about the comet that is Jen Pastiloff and how she grew up struggling with deafness, depression, and a wrecked body image to go on and crack open the world’s heart with yoga/writing retreats, a website named The Manifest-Station, and pure love—but honestly, it’s really the memoir of all of us, every single one of us who ever felt I’m not enough, I’m not loved, I’m falling apart, I don’t’ belong here. I was reading this moving memoir while crying, scribbling down sentences and holding onto them like life lines. I’ve got you, Jen says, but the true message of this radiant memoir is nothing short that revolutionary love: we’ve got each other.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow
“This darkly funny, deeply personal and powerful memoir will speak to anyone who has ever felt outcast: from their bodies, their minds, the world. A must read for human beings.”
—Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World and Poster Child: A Memoir
“For self-help fans and seekers of self-empowerment, this is an inspiring memoir with tips for overcoming and maybe prospering from the chaotic or disappointing elements that comprise an imperfect life.”
—Kirkus
“Jen Pastiloff is the anti-guru. Rarely will you meet anyone more humble, compassionate and ready to learn. She's the kind of leader we need.”
—Rene Denfeld, author of The Child Finder
“Listen to me: you’re going to think Jen Pastiloff is your BFF after you read this book because when you’re done reading it you will feel known. No one is better qualified to write a book called On Being Human than this particular human. Having long struggled to accept her own imperfections and struggles, Jen manages to bring these to the page with a humor, heart and generosity that makes room for all of us to be a little kinder to ourselves.”
— Elizabeth Crane, author of Turf and The History of Great Things ****
“Jen Pastiloff is the authentic voice women need right now. By challenging us to embrace our imperfections she teaches that 'wellness' is the process of letting go of ideas that don't serve us-- as well as a radical act of joy. The On Being Human workshop is a radical reset for anyone struggling to become herself.”
— Lori Leibovich, Editor-in-Chief of Health *
“Especially in these dark times for women, there is actually nothing 'simple' about Pastiloff’s radical alchemy. Read this book and feel yourself expand.”
— Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men and* Every Kind of Wanting *
“A memoir of pure love. When Jen says, ‘I got you,’ she’s also saying we’ve all got each other. In this pandemic that message is a gift.”
— Maria Bello,* People *
“Jen Pastiloff is a rejuvenating supernova! A life force of primal extravagant delight! Frank and funny, she'll boss herself around and change the rest of us in the meantime. I'd want to listen to anything she has to say.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye, Pushcart Prize-winning poet and author of Fuel and 19 Varieties of Gazelle
*
About the Author
Jennifer Pastiloff travels the world with her unique workshop On Being Human, a hybrid of yoga-related movement, writing, sharing aloud, letting the snot fly, and the occasional dance party. Jennifer is a frequent contributor to SHAPE Magazine, including SHAPE Escape at Miraval Resort and the Women Run the World initiative, and she has been featured on Good Morning America, New York Magazine, Health Magazine, CBS News, and others for her unique style of teaching, which she has taught to thousands of women in sold-out workshops all over the world. Jen is also the guest speaker at Canyon Ranch, and she leads Writing and The Body workshops with author Lidia Yuknavitch, as well as retreats with Emily Rapp Black. ** Founder of the online magazine The Manifest-Station , ** when Jen is not traveling she is based in Los Angeles with her husband and son and a cup of coffee.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Rewrite Your Story
Memory: Lost and Found
Before I was born, I was a memory. A feeling my mother once had, her grandmother Rose holding her in her lap, before Rose had the breast cancer, before it ravaged her body, before her broad shoulders began to slump with the weight of defeat and dying and the wrenching chemotherapy.
Before I was a memory, I was my mother's little head being cradled into her grandmother's chest, after she'd been released from the hospital, after she had run, in her five-year-old body, out into a rural New Jersey road and a car ran over her tiny head.
Rose lived with my motherÕs family at the time. Bubbe Rose was the only one who ever showed my mother any kind of affection or attention, besides my motherÕs own sister, Ellen. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, Marion, saved money by never turning on the lights. She kept plastic on the sofa for protection. Cockroaches scurried over the dirty floor. She sat in the dark for hours on end.
My mother, at five years old, wanting to die, ran out right in front of a car and that car drove over her.
My mother floated over the houses and imagined landing in one that welcomed her with, Hello! I am so happy you are here. I am so happy you are alive. I love you. There you are. We got you. We've been waiting for you.
Isn't it incomprehensible what the imagination is capable of? How deeply we want affection and love? How we are, even at five years old, willing to risk our lives to find it?
There is a scar above my mother's right eye, barely visible. I remember how my mother would always say, When your time is up, it is up, don't be afraid. Her time was not up, it would seem, by her reasoning. Bubbe Rose pulling her into her bosom, Shh, Bubbelah, I love you, it's going to be okay, and my mother closed her eyes and saw only her own mother saying, I wish you were never born.
My mother took her grandmother's love and placed it somewhere inside of her next to the darkness of being unwanted and unloved and I grew from that. An idea as inconceivable as being run over by a two-ton vehicle and surviving with only a tiny scar that has to be pointed out to be noticed at all.
When my mother's grandmother Rose got to the end, my mother held her hand and whispered, Shh, shhh, it's going to be all right, reaching inside of herself and away from the darkness to that memory of safety and love, and there she found the idea. The idea was this: I can give this away, this love, I do not have to keep it here in the dark, I can give it away and create more, even if I don't remember what it feels like to be loved. I can create it.
All the stories that live inside of me, that I am holding, both sustain and haunt me. The time when my mother was eighteen and had started working in Center City in Philly, at Rohm and Haas, a chemical manufacturer, where she worked in foreign operations marketing and airfreight. She'd bought all new clothes for the job, and came home once to find that her mother had taken a scissors and sliced through all of them in her closet. She sat and wept into half of a skirt, a sleeve, a pant leg, and yet, still, on every Mother's Day, she sent flowers; she tried so hard to reach inside of herself and find a memory besides that of her grandmother Rose that said I love you, and when she could not find any, she begged her mother to love her, until she died all those years later when my mother was sixty-three years old. Please love me, please love me, please love me and my grandmother sealed her ears to those pleas and sat on her plastic-covered sofa in the dark and did crossword puzzles and complained about the weather.
Before I was born, I was just a memory of love, and thank the gods of coffee and books for that memory, because if my mother did not have her grandmother Rose, if she was left to the machinations of her own mother, she would be forever stuck in that South Philly row house. My grandmother was endlessly picking up men at the nightclub where she was the hatcheck girl. They were dangerous and mean. Sometimes my mother sat in a damp basement with the neighbor my grandmother left her with when she went on dates. I can imagine men pulling my mother to them, her small body a separate planet entirely. How could she have stayed in her body and endured?
Luckily my mother had the memory somewhere inside that body she so often left, a memory of the love she had felt from her grandmother. Before we are molecules, we are memory. Every time my grandmother winced as she looked at my mother, every time she tried to unspeak her into not existing, that's in me.
My mother grew up in a brick row house in South Philadelphia on Reese Street. Her mother's parents, whom she called Bubbe (Rose) and Zayda (Al), also lived with them. They both died before I was born. It was a dark, narrow space that always smelled like cat pee when I would visit as a child. I rummaged in my grandparents' basement for Barbie doll clothes my great-grandmother Helen, my grandfather's mother, had sewn. My mother's stories have been in me as long as I can remember. Both my mom and my dad treated me like an adult since the time I could talk, so the tales of my grandmother Marion have no origin story for me. I have always known: she was a monster. I remember asking my mom, Why didn't Grandmom ever say she loved us? Did she hate my sister and me? Why does she sit in the dark all the time? Why is she so mean?
My grandmother got pregnant with my mom when she was eighteen years old. My grandfather had been a sailor stationed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and was only home once a year until the time my mom and her sister, Ellen, were teenagers. When I started asking serious questions about why my grandmother was so unkind, it was as if my mother became uncorked and all the years of abuse and neglect and sheer terribleness flowed out of her and into the air. She told me everything.
It was 1983 and I was reading Judy Blume's Forever. I was eight years old and my father was still alive and I thought how lucky he was that he had my Bubbe, who was so loving and gentle and grandmotherly, and how unfair it was that my mom had grown up with her monster of a mother. That was my first true moment of realizing that there is no such thing as fair. I decided then that fair was a made-up word that might as well be in the fairy tale I was reading except I was not reading fairy tales, I was reading about sex and penises named Ralph and any other adult book I could get my grubby paws on.
Marion, my grandmother, worked as a hatcheck girl at Big Bill's, a nightclub in Center City, Philadelphia. She slept every day until three p.m. and they all dreaded the hours from three p.m. until seven thirty, when she finally left for work. Once she left for work it was calm again, my mother told me. My grandmother had dates with all those men while my grandfather was away in the navy. My mom said that neither she nor her sister Ellen ever got birthday presents except for when one of the very temporary boyfriends would take them to Lord & Taylor on the Main Line in Philadelphia to pick one out. She said, "She would brag about giving me the present, but it never came from her. It was always from the boyfriends." Clothes from shops along the Main Line, before there were shopping malls. A smoky topaz heart on a gold chain my mother wore all her life. And once, a cocker spaniel named Sandy, whom my grandmother later abandoned in the street.
My mother told me these stories while I sat at our kitchen dinette set in Pennsauken with the yellow vinyl cushions, the backs of my thighs stuck to them, making that noise they make when they peel off, like suction cups, and I watched my mom put flounder in the oven as I wrote stories. I let one leg at a time stick to the vinyl and then pulled it off like a vacuum, thinking it was hilarious because it was something my dad liked to do.
My father had a high-pitched laugh, like a sheep. He'd bray after he asked, "Who did that? Was it you, Jennifer? Rachel?" and then there was laughter and silence and we ate spaghetti and crab, stuffed pork chops, meatballs and gravy, or whatever my mom had made that day. My father never cooked. Never even poured his own cereal, or so the story goes. I recall only my mom doing anything remotely domesticated, like cleaning or cooking, grocery shopping, and making her own salad dressings. My dad's job was to go to work in a men's clothing store, make us laugh, buy us presents, and sing "You Are My Sunshine" to us before bed. Other than that, my mom did it all. Even simple tasks like driving my sister and me to school: my dad often got lost on the three-mile drive.
There were dishes in the sink, patterned plates, long foggy glasses with my father's lip marks. The island in the center of the kitchen had not been built yet. That came after my father died, when my mother used most of his life-insurance money to remodel the kitchen right before we left the house forever.
My mom talked as she made dinner or cleaned the kitchen counter with Clorox. She told me so many stories as if no one had ever listened to her in her entire life, which I came to realize they hadn't. I was the first, and I had to work hard to hear her above my constant tinnitus that I didn't understand or tell anyone about. I assumed this was what everyone heard, how sound existed in everyone's head.
I was fascinated with understanding why we had to go visit my grandmother Marion, why my mother still sent her presents, why my mom didn't hate her. I wanted to know why why why and how how how as I peeled my sweaty summer leg off the kitchen chair and stuck it back on, again and again, until my mom asked me to stop because the sound was driving her crazy. It felt like an impossible math equation to me and I was awful at math. If my mom had such an odious childhood and such an awful mom, why did we have a relationship with her? It did not make sense.
"That's just the way I am. I forgive," my mother said as she unloaded groceries and put them away; Pepsi for my dad and his Breyers chocolate ice cream. Those are always the groceries of my memories. Coffee, Kools, Breyers.
I never wanted to forgive my grandmother. My mom had told me too many things, things I perhaps already knew, things that lived so far in the marrow of me that I did not even need to hear them spoken aloud in kitchens, yet when I did, I wanted to throw things at walls, and at my mother. I thought about how my mom had been run over by a car when she was five years old. A story I had heard so many times that I wondered if I made it up in my unicorn diary because it felt like it was mine and had always been mine. I touched my eye to see if I had a scar there and sometimes it felt like I did. A tiny ridge under my eyebrow hairs.
My mom said that she had no memory of the faces from the day she was hit, so I made the faces up. She had been on a car ride to New Jersey from Philadelphia with my grandmother and one of the faceless, sometimes kind, sometimes not so kind boyfriends. In my mind, he had big hairy hands and brown eyes with eyelashes that pointed straight down. He smelled like cigarettes. My mom had been hit in the head and thrown thirty feet.
"I can't believe I survived and that they saved my eyes," she said every time she talked about it, lifting her thick brown bangs to show me the scar. I touched my own eye and said, "You can barely see it."
"I know," she always said, "but it's there."
We all had thick brown bangs since forever. I was probably born with bangs. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized I even had eyebrows. Bangs equal the eighties in my mind.
She had been trying to run away from her mother and the boyfriend while my grandfather was away overseas in the navy. She ran from them and right into the front of a car speeding on a small rural Jersey road. The car handle went through her right eye.
I was curious about my great-grandmother Rose. In my mom's stories, she was always kind and loving, and yet her daughter, my grandmother, was vicious and mean. I thought we were simply extensions of our parents. Whoever they were, we were. Or more precisely, would inevitably, and inextricably, become. I wanted to know my mother's Bubbe Rose so I could understand that love was not necessarily inherited, but that it could be created, fashioned from all sorts of things, including pain and car handles going through eyes.
"Tell me about your Bubbe Rose," I said as my mom sat down with her tea. Daddy drank coffee and Mommy had tea. I would come to hate tea.
"My Bubbe got breast cancer when I was fourteen years old. She was fifty-four. I was in ninth grade and they called me into the office to tell me my grandmother had cancer. I didn't even know what cancer was."
Rose begged my mother to give her a whole bottle of pain pills every day. Every day for seven months she asked to be put out of her misery.
"When I look back now, I wish I had given them to her. She suffered so much. The day she died, they called an ambulance, but she wouldn't get into it unless I was with her. I was at the park with my friends but a neighbor came to find me and we went to the hospital in the ambulance. She died in the emergency room. She was completely yellow and she was lying with her mouth open. I was fourteen."