Lesson Learned

I had my mid-life crisis when I was thirty-one. That’s what my mom called it anyway. “You’ve always been mature for your age,” she said. “It makes sense that you’d get yours early.”

I’d been living in Toronto for a few years, married to my best friend and pursuing a career as an opera singer. But there was a problem: I wasn’t singing well. 

When I sang, my voice was restricted and stuck. It was something I’d struggled with for years only now I was struggling with it in front of judges and audition panels whose job was to assess my talent and ability. Cue crippling anxiety.

After ruling out all kinds of physical issues, I decided to try therapy. I wasted no time in my first session getting down to business, “I just need to figure out why I can’t seem to just let go and sing.” Simple, I thought. 

A few short months later I’d quit singing, quit my marriage, and quit pretending that I knew who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. 

The problem, it turned out, wasn’t isolated to my singing. I’d been focused for so long on pleasing other people, on what others might think, that I’d lost touch with myself and what I wanted. I’d placed such high importance on keeping other people happy that I’d become perpetually anxious and unable to express myself, on stage or off.

It was a confusing time, but one thing had become clear: I needed to get to know myself better. 

Lesson learned.

Unfortunately, it was promptly forgotten only a few months later. In fact, I would learn and forget this particular lesson several times over.

I learned it again when I broke up with my boyfriend (now husband) in the midst of our backpacking trip through Europe. It was my dad who put it together this time, as I sat on his couch back in Barrie, Ontario, in a puddle of tears. “Kiddo,” he said, “I think you just don’t love yourself enough.” Hard to love someone you hardly know.

Then I learned it again a few years later when I started my own business. You might have heard of it, I call it Me & C. I signed up for a series of online business and marketing courses and every one of them started with the same set of questions: Why did you choose this business? Who are you helping? What makes you unique? What are your strengths? I had trouble answering them. A lot of trouble. So much trouble that it triggered a multi-year tailspin that landed me in the office of a new therapist who said, “You have somehow become disconnected from who you are.”

Alright, I thought. Time to get serious here.

To learn my lesson once and for all, I had to learn a sub-lesson which was this: learning doesn’t end at the aha! moment. Shifts in perspective are helpful, but if we want tangible, lasting change we have to intentionally and persistently take action. 

Which is, you know, hard.

I’m watching a good-bad show right now on Crave called Blindspot. I say good-bad because I like it and Jim thinks its absolute crap. You’ll have to be the judge. Admittedly the writing is a little simplistic (Jim: “It’s terrible!”), but I like the premise. The protagonist is a woman who’s lost her memory. She doesn’t know who she is, what she can do, or what she likes. 

You can see why I find it intriguing.

There was a great scene in the first episode of the series where her therapist sets down two cups in front of her - one full of coffee, the other with tea. He asks her to take a sip of each and decide which one she likes, explaining:

"You’re not helpless. We’re defined by our choices you just don’t remember yours. So, keep trying new things, see what your body remembers. Or make new choices. The more you make the less helpless you’ll feel. Even if nothing ever comes back you can still find yourself."

It’s taken ten years, two therapists, and one insightful father to get there, but I’m making slow progress this time around by experimenting. I’m trying things, noticing what feels good and what doesn’t - what I like and what I don’t like - and adjusting what I do accordingly. 

All this in the midst of a pandemic, in which we’re collectively experiencing some powerful aha!s.  Friends and strangers alike have told me that over the past several weeks, they’ve had profound realizations about themselves or their way of life or their children or the injustices in the world, and they just hope that they’ll remember it all when this is over.

I hope so too, I think to myself but I know hope won’t cut it. If we want to learn our lesson, we’re going to have to work for it.

PS - All this getting to know myself better has prompted me to make some significant changes to my business over the past six months. Most recently, the decision to keep my online store closed during this pandemic. But Mother's Day is coming up soon and I don't want to leave you hanging. If there's something you were hoping to give as a gift, just email me and we'll figure it out.