Tag: magic

Susannah Says

Anyone who has lost touch with old friends and then circled back with them years later is often taken aback. Not necessarily at how they have aged but at how grown up and mature their kids have become.

This is a nod to Susannah (nee Margison) Everett. A fraternal twin to Gordon and born within a few weeks of my own son, Cameron in 1986. Her parents Jennifer and Douglas are longtime friends.

Lest I bury the lead (and pretty much already have), Susannah switched tracks after law school and decided not to pursue law as a lifetime career.

She opened her own business as a coach to other professional women advising them on how to manifest their dreams. I can think of no-one better suited to that calling.

I’m sharing this post that she recently published. I often do that when I come across someone else’s words that I wish I had written.

The words and sentiments Susannah shares are strong both in vulnerability and wisdom. Similar to Susannah, I left a law career “to do my own thing.” The parameters for women to ascend in the profession of law are tight and restrictive (especially for older women as I was when I was called to the bar).

To me, it meant the road ahead in law was fated to be nothing else if not dull and predictable and not terribly satisfying. The cachet and status of a law career often reads better on paper than it plays out in reality, except for a favored few.

Susannah left law awhile back and married a doctor. She is a beautiful and happy young woman doing her own thing.

And she is clearly wise beyond her years. As you will glean from her words below. Not a bad outcome for Doug and Jenny’s kid. 🙂 The same kid I last saw when she was wearing diapers and a onesie.

She done growed.

A few years ago, I felt rejected and that rejection felt MONUMENTAL.

I was wallowing in what I’d lost. The fun I would have had. The experience I would have gained. The lost financial upside.

Then someone said something to me that felt like the pick-me-up my heart (and ego) really needed. Want to know what it was?

“Susannah, this is the BEST thing that could have happened to you”.

You know what? That comment became like an omen. It lit up something in me that was determined to get over the pain of the rejection and capitalize on the opportunity it presented.

The reality was that (now lost) opportunity wasn’t all it was cracked up to be when I sat down and thought about it.

I was settling.

I had been “playing small”

Better things were not only out there, but attainable.

And the longer I was focused on the lost opportunity and tried to get it back, the less space I had for something better.

As soon as I started playing with the ideas that “rejection is just redirection” and “if it’s not this it’s something better” and that “life doesn’t happen TO you, it happens FOR you”, magic (it felt like magic) started happening.

The bigger, better, more perfectly suited opportunities started showing up.

While it’s important to honour the feelings that come with rejection, it’s also important to keep them and the situation into perspective.

What if being rejected was the best thing that could have happened? What would be possible?

You owe it to yourself to find out.

What Color Should My Mother Be?

Final night at the Murphy Writing School in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The twelve memoir students read in the dance studio what they worked on this week. Throughout the readings of these diverse pieces of writing by diverse writers, I was transported to eras, countries, and life situations to which I had no previous exposure or knowledge. If I did know about them at all, my knowledge was glib and superficial.

These memoirists shared raw, wretched, deep, delicious, hilarious, poignant, wry memories and observations. We spent time in a psychiatric hospital with one writer tonight. When the writer’s husband left her for a 17-year-old girl shortly after the birth of their first baby, she mused that there was only one difference between her and her patients: she had the keys.

A young first-generation Vietnamese told the wrenching story of the long COVID his mother was suffering. She shunned conventional treatment because she followed the orange-headed leader’s claim that bleach would kill the bug and cure the problem.

An older American fellow revealed what he went through to extract a psychiatric evaluation to keep him out of Vietnam when he was drafted. Agemates of his were not as fortunate. One Vietnam veteran casualty was buried close to his family’s plot in their hometown.

A woman of Filipino descent shared her father’s World War II stories. One, in particular, underscored his futile attempt to stop a Japanese pilot friend from committing kamikaze, or, “divine wind.” It appears young Muslim suicide bombers have stepped up to weather the mantle of martyrdom.

Another woman mused tenderly about the inevitability of death for us all and how she wishes to embrace it when the time comes. A woman living with a stroke wrote about constant vacillation between hope and despair with her and others in physical therapy. A woman raging against the physical vagaries of age spoke hilariously on behalf of hundreds of thousands of aging women. In her diatribe, she spoke convincingly about the necessity of undergoing the same sort of renovation for her body as her house had recently been through.

The poetry readings last night and the memoir excerpts tonight had similar impacts: both were powerful and highly humanizing. School director Peter Murphy says, “Yes. This happens every time.” People’s personalities and characters emerge and their issues take shape when they focus on their writing And even more powerfully when their work is witnessed. Murphy continued: “Whether it is a smaller group like ours with under 50 students, he said, or workshops with 200 or more. There is magic in the doing of the writing. It changes you and it changes those who hear or read it.”

That, at the very least, is my dearest hope and ambition. Has the title of the post confused you at all? Well, me too. if I’m honest. I meant to talk about where my mother will likely fit in my life story and how I am going to capture the wealth of events and anecdotes. For a physically slight person, she was fairly imposing and affecting. But why do I have to decide what “color” she will be is TBD – to be decided. A next step in the book writing process.

As I leave this nourishing workshop environment today and head back to “real life,” you’ll just have to hold on to your questions until I fully explain tomorrow. I believe that is called a cliffhanger in LitSpeak.