On Un-Writing
Or, How to Tell Your Story Differently
In the spring of 2019, at the age of 41, I was facing multiple crises. My business, an indie children’s bookshop, while not failing, was not financially succeeding, and the pressure on my husband and me was immense; my father’s life had morphed from inspiring, Quixotic journey, to cautionary tale of losing everything bit by bit— he’d divorced for the third time, had run out of money, been diagnosed with dementia, and moved into assisted living; I was trying to be a full-time mom to my two young children while wrangling all of the above; I sincerely believed it was a lack of ability on my part that I could not summon the infinite energy, grit, and time required; and my own health, no surprise, was experiencing a dramatic and escalating catastrophe. It was one of the scariest periods of my life.
I joked to friends recently that I hadn’t realized mid-life would contain so many actual crises. I’d thought they’d be more, you know, metaphorical, emotional, spiritual; less practical, logistical; less life or death. When my personal health crisis was resolved in May of 2019, through the intervention of my husband and a great doctor, with a blood transfusion and emergency surgery, I knew I had been given a second chance. I knew my compulsion that I was the one appointed to be responsible for everyone else’s well-being, but somehow not my own, was demanding swift attention and revision. The stakes were high—and the change had to be, at first anyway, an internal one.
How had I come to believe something so fundamentally at odds with my own good? What old stories was I telling myself? How did I learn those narratives? And how could I begin to change them? Could I tell myself a new story that not only saved, but also honored and cherished, my own life?
