11_20_2019

Growth Spurts

This commitment to continue to evolve as one ages is not without its challenges!  It is quite easy to slip into a routine that temporarily fools you into thinking that you have currently mastered what you need to in order to pursue your dreams and goals.  Surprise – and then you learn otherwise.

I recently had two such experiences within the same day.  The first experience flowed from a course I designed over the summer and am currently facilitating.   Titled, Composing Your Life’s Story, the course has had an unanticipated impact on both myself and those taking the course.  The course goals included gaining greater clarity on the people and events that helped shaped our development as well as more clearly identifying the paths and themes that have grown out of our life experiences.  I anticipated that these first two goals would lead to our gaining a deeper and more joy-filled appreciation of the lives we are living as well as a sense of peace in claiming and celebrating our lives.

The good news is that the process – deeply enriched by the participants’ dedication to discovery and generosity in sharing our stories – led to real progress towards our stated goals.  As a result of my reading and research in preparing the course, I had an innate sense that it would lead to positive outcomes, but beyond that hunch I didn’t dwell on the level of intensity of the outcomes.

My assessment as the facilitator is that all of us that participated throughout the course were able to unlock some buried, privately held emotions that enabled us to examine how those feelings and the experiences leading to them might still be shaping or controlling our lives.  Some common elements emerged from our work.  Our ages ranged between 40 – 84, which means that most of us were raised in environments prior to the availability of more enlightened research on positive, less harmful practices in raising children.  As one member of the group noted, “When I was growing up, the concept of ‘parenting’ didn’t exist; you were simply a parent.”

I grew up in such an environment, when parents seemed more concerned with providing for the physical and character needs of children and less about their emotional and unique identity needs. I’m a full-fledged introvert who grew up in a highly dysfunctional childhood, and because I had enough awareness as a kid to recognize that my family home life was much different from my friends’ lives, I never found a way to share any of that information with others as I was growing up.

I’ve remained silent and somewhat envious throughout my adulthood as I’ve listed to friends talk so openly and frequently about their childhood memories and extensive family connections.  An unanticipated outcome, the experience of this course finally moved me and provided me with a pathway to begin to put words to my early life that allowed me to share more about myself.

We used Brenda Peterson’s and Sarah Jane Freymann’s book, Your Life is a Book: How to Craft and Publish Your Memoir as a resource in the course.  While the course outcomes didn’t include writing one’s memoir, that option was left open to people who were interested in pursuing that goal.  The authors reminded us via a quote from Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes in Chapter 6 that “You can’t write – [or speak] – about that kind of childhood until you have some self-esteem.”

The authors were also quite clear that if writing a memoir that is going to contain some harsh or rough scenes from one’s earlier life, the writer has to provide the reader with assurance in advance that he or she has survived those earlier challenges.  We don’t want to be in the business of passing on pain; we want to help our listeners and our readers learn how we were able to work through and rise above our pain and move forward.

Listening to how others shared challenging events from their earlier lives – coupled with the spontaneous, thoughtful and caring support of the group – has enabled me for the first time in my life to actually put words to parts of my past.

In the final session of Part I of the course, we each shared drafts of our narrative arc, a central theme that permeates our life and that serves as an all-encompassing concept as we describe our hero’s journey.  Most members of the course included in their narrative arc an example of the obstacles they have had to work through as they redirected their lives in a way that is enabling them to become the person that they are capable of becoming.

I was moved by their examples to share more of my story, a growth spurt that allowed me to pierce my fear of harm that would come my way if I was less than perfect.  Breaking through the carapace that I’ve carried for years, I felt a sense of relief and experienced the beginnings of a new paths to explore.

This real growth spurt for me was fresh on my mind as I went to my Transformative Writing class later that day.  I’m taking this class as I want to pick up the manuscript I completed several years ago and rework it with what I now feel is a stronger voice that includes more of me.  I realized earlier on in the course that I am facilitating that something was occurring within me that was also strengthening my voice, and when I saw the Writing course advertised, I thought the Goddess of Synchronicity was calling me to action.

The class that night focused on preparing a Book Proposal.  The steps involved in preparing a book proposal require a lot of work – and given that I later realized that I was pretty emotionally spent from my earlier growth spurt – I was beginning to hear those inner critic voices telling me, You don’t have enough energy to do this work.”   Temporarily, I was holding my own and trying to quiet the inner critics.  But when the instructor started to list the extensive social medial presence that we would need to convince an editor that we could generate a following, I found myself feeling defeated.

I probably should mention here that I have a long-standing aversion to our culture’s current fixation with social media.  I am a private person through and through, and I don’t have a public Facebook account, a Twitter, or an Instagram account – all requirements that the instructor said we would need.

By the end of class, I could feel myself starting to believe that the goal of publishing my book on leadership was never going to happen.  Pursing this goal seemed out of my reach; I questioned whether or not I had the energy to do all of this work.

But here’s what turned me around.  After a good night’s rest and some quiet time to start to process the emotional growth spurt from gaining more insights from my life’s story, I reminded myself about my Blog and my commitment to Still Evolving.  My thoughts progressed along the lines of: “Damn, you didn’t expect that you would have to tackle this social media frenzy, but so be it; you’re going to have to keep growing!”

While I’m still recovering from my recent insights about sharing my own life’s story, the insights I’ve gained have given me ideas and enthusiasm on how I want to approach editing my existing manuscript in order to bring the full experience of my voice to the message.  I know I have a lot of work ahead of me, but for now I’m concentrating on taking it one step at a time.