Finding Your Way Without a GPS System

Everyone travels some kind of road through life, and the hope is that by the end of it they've figured out where they were headed all along. Who are you? Who am I? From the moment we're born, people and circumstances start shaping how we see ourselves, and it takes a while to notice how much of that self-concept came from the outside. Eventually you sense that those outside influences steered you away from your own path, away from recognizing the gifts and resources you were actually given. That's when it gets to be time to ask who you really are and what you're doing here. I've reached the stretch of life where knowing my own path matters more than it used to, along with how and when I can reach my goals before I transition. I prefer that word to the other one.

If you've read my posts before, you probably have a sense of what I value and what I've been chasing for most of my years. I came up in a Lutheran church that ran strict, sometimes rigid, during a time when my mother's guiding question was, "What will other people think?" Both the church school and my parents worked hard to keep my life under control. Whenever I tried to simply be ME, trouble usually followed. That's where books became a refuge. I picked up things in them that nobody taught me at school or at home. For a while I considered becoming a Catholic nun, and also a nurse. Then I found the James Bond novels, back before the movies made them famous.

College and graduate school ran me hard, so there wasn't much room for fun, though I'd slip into the library stacks and page through old magazines from the 1950s and the war years. In high school I used to catch World War II films that aired right after the bus dropped me off. I dabbled in arts and crafts and played in band, but talked myself out of both as careers because I decided I wasn't good enough. I played a crazy woman in our senior class production of Gas Light, which taught me mainly that memorizing lines was not my gift.

The pull toward finding out who I really was didn't hit until my second marriage and my first child. Around then I met Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and set off on a spiritual search, reading one book after another and going to workshops. A spiritual calling, or New Age as people labeled it then, wasn't something you admitted openly, so I nearly kept my interests underground. I met a handful of people and found a few groups that drew me in, but I never planted myself permanently in any of them or saw a single course of study all the way through. That frustrated me. Nothing I tried felt exactly right. Something would hold my attention for a season, I'd dig in seriously for a while, and then I'd drift before finishing. I didn't believe I'd accomplished much, and I suspected others saw me the same way. I couldn't quite meet anyone's standard, and I genuinely didn't know what I was missing. Meanwhile my husband and I had three children, which I'd never expected to happen, and they wove themselves straight into our lives and hearts.

Looking back from where I stand now, I can see I needed those experiences and so-called failures to get here. A lot of my mistakes put me in rooms with people I might otherwise never have known, and they let me offer acceptance and respect to people the world treated as lower class.

It took a recent return to the Christian church for me to recognize that I'd often been doing what Jesus and the apostles did. I also discovered I could sing hymns, that I'd memorized the words and melodies just from singing in church, never having gotten the singing lessons I always thought I wanted. My fondness for fashion, interior decorating, and architecture turned out to be outlets for a love of harmony and beauty. I was raised on a farm and ended up living on one, Ph.D. and all. Turns out I never wanted to be boxed into a city with no room to be out in nature.

I keep learning new things about myself, a bit like those DNA commercials on TV, only not quite. I tend to take better care of others than of myself. I love working with children, I'm drawn to hypnosis (and I wonder how often I'm quietly in a trance myself), and I use drawing in therapy, especially with kids, and in projective diagnostic testing. One lesson I keep relearning is that something often has to end in my life before something new can arrive, and that goes double for friendships. I'm wholly loyal to my friends, and I choose them by how we feel about each other, never by what either of us can get from the arrangement.

Plenty has happened to me, spiritually and otherwise, that I once figured I must have invented because it couldn't be real. These days I accept all of my memories and experiences, even the ones that make no sense in the moment. Some of what I've lived through wasn't "normal," and for a long time I pushed it away because other people hadn't been through the same things, so I assumed it shouldn't count as normal for me either. Reading the Bible now, I notice how many things happened to the people written about there that were not normal at all.

Could you set down your own life story? Your experiences carry meaning, and they've steered your life too.

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