Photography by Lori K. Tate
I’ve never been good at gymnastics. In elementary school, I was the one who cheered her friends on as they flipped on the monkey bars and performed round-offs on the asphalt. All I could muster was a cartwheel. Those fears still linger, as I still can’t do wall handstands in my functional training class.
At the last staff meeting of my almost former job, a co-worker gave me the card pictured above. I stared at it because it was a beautiful Wink of Goodness that completely nailed where I am in my life right now — even though I can’t do handstands.
Leaving a job after 10 years is scary. There’s a lot of security in doing the same thing over and over. Some people stay in the same job all of their lives, and I admire them for it. But after thinking and thinking and thinking about it, I knew it was time for me to take a different path, so I jumped off of a somewhat secure track onto the dirt. There’s some brush in my way, but it’s nothing I can’t handle — I think.
While taking the first steps in my new life, I’ve been reading a lot about personal narratives. These are the storylines we create in our heads based on tidbits of information we receive in daily life. This information can and often is easily misunderstood and therefore, misconstrued. For a long time, my personal narrative has been negative based on my whacked out interpretation of everyone’s motives and actions.
Only recently have I begun to understand that I can change the narrative because I’m the writer of the story. Believe me I see the irony in this. As someone who has made her living telling stories, it’s incredible that I never realized that I have the power to tell my own tale truthfully until now, but I didn’t. I looked at the worst of situations and went from there.
Now that I’m in a season of change, things don’t seem so negative anymore, and my narrative is taking a positive turn. There are so many emotions to sift through as I create this new storyline. I’ve worked the whole time I’ve had children, so taking a couple of months off seems decadent. Insert guilt here.
My friends run the gamut from stay-at-home moms, part-time working moms, full-time working moms and super corporate moms. I love them all, but I’ve never felt like I fit into any of their categories, and I’m sad to say that I have judged all of them. But the person I’ve judged the most in my head is myself.
I went through the season of being everything to everyone — working to top capacity, serving on boards, volunteering whenever asked and so on. Though things were mostly getting done, I wasn’t living truthfully, and my family suffered. I was going through the motions of being a seemingly perfect person who had it together, but I didn’t have it together at all.
Now that I have stripped all of that away, I’m starting over. It’s like rebuilding a desktop on a computer. I know which programs don’t work, and I’d like to try some new ones that I’ve heard do work. There is so much goodness in this realization, and I’m grateful that I’m in a place in my life where I can rebuild and improve it.
People will say what they will, and my old narrative would cling to the negativity of their statements. But my new narrative is stronger, as it’s sprinkled with a healthy dose of “who cares what you think, this is my life.” I trust myself enough now to know that I’m going to construct a positive narrative with solid information. That’s helpful as I wrap up my tenure at my job and begin enjoying a little free time.
I’ve noticed that I’ve been noticing things that I haven’t noticed for years. For instance, last night at the pool, my daughter asked me to swim with her, and after reading for a while, I did. Splashing in the pool, she asked me to do handstands. (Though I can’t do them on land, my gymnastic skills in the water are considerably better. In my mind, I’m the Mary Lou Retton of the three-foot-deep section of the pool.)
I looked at her, smiled and quickly dove into the water to land the perfect handstand. As the cool water enveloped my head and my legs darted into the air for at least an 8.5 score, I felt like new life was being injected into me by the second. When I finished the first handstand, I went back for another and then another. It felt good to turn things upside down, and it still does even though I’m no longer in the pool.
We chart our own stories every single day in our heads, and they are hardly ever accurate. I took the scenic route to arrive at my true story. While I wouldn’t change any of the twists and turns that landed me here, I sure am grateful that I’ve finally arrived.