Life Doesn't Come With An Instruction Book

Nobody hands you an instruction book for your life, though you probably deserve one. You end up writing it yourself. A lot of people burn through their years hunting for a manual that's already been written, and the trouble is there isn't a perfect match out there. We're each built differently. You can try on a handful of lifestyles, ones people recommend or ones you quietly admire, and still never land on something that fits right.

Think about how clothes used to be made. A tailor or a dressmaker would do the work. I remember the paper patterns that showed you where to take something in or let it out. Some households even kept an adjustable dress form, and you could fit a dress over it until it sat exactly the way you wanted.

What if the kind of life you chose could be taken in and let out like that? When I was training as a psychologist, I had a hard time finding my footing among other psychologists who worked nothing like me. Modeling myself on them didn't work, and on top of that these people I was supposed to emulate tended to be critical of me. Liking them back was a struggle.

When I did come across a psychologist or psychiatrist I genuinely wanted to resemble, I'd be brutal with myself. It never occurred to me that my own abilities were still coming in, and I was holding my early self up against professionals who had decades of a head start. I worked at it hard and more or less pulled it off, but I never figured out who I actually was. That pattern followed me into my working years.

Because I didn't know myself, succeeding and meeting what everyone else expected kept slipping out of reach. I kept pushing, kept grinding, and carried around this sense that success was simply never going to show up for me.

Later I turned toward self-help and spirituality, reading everything I could get my hands on and going to workshops whenever one was within reach. The same feeling came back. Fascinated as I was, I didn't think I was getting anywhere. What I didn't grasp then was that this stuff is personal, and it lands differently for every single person who takes it on.

The shift came when I started looking into how people learn in different ways. That's where I discovered I was a different kind of thinker. I'm a creative who has to act first. I can't tell you ahead of time what I'm going to do; often I don't know myself until it's already done. Afterward I can explain it and tidy it up, but the explaining comes after the doing, not before.

I'm left-handed, right-brained rather than left-brained. It's far easier for me to just do the thing and then field questions about how and why once it's finished. Take interviewing. I'm good at drawing information out of people, but the only real way to show others what I do is to sit behind a one-way mirror, interview, and then answer the audience's questions once the session is over.

I wish I'd understood this about myself a lot sooner. I let opportunities slip past in areas where I could have grown into something genuinely creative if I'd kept at them. Hypnosis was one. So was reading drawings and using drawing in therapy with children. I also learned I can sing well, as long as I'm not self-conscious about it, and I sing in a loose, interpretive way with songs that have simply lodged in my memory, no accompanist involved. I can't seem to settle on a key, and I've never found an accompanist who could follow me around.

Voice lessons were never an option for me, though I'd sung in school choirs and in church. These days I suspect lessons might have hurt more than helped. Back in college the voice majors were all polished, technically sharp people, and I couldn't go toe to toe with them or do what they did. Now I do it my own way, and I do it well, provided I'm not scared to be myself.

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