Fall light flooded our eyes as we popped out of the grimy darkness of the tunnel onto the Golden Jubilee bridge.
Alice, Nic, and I had shared a haven’t-seen-you-for-a-while group hug, then left the ancient environs of Charing Cross Station behind, passing through 60 seconds of broken-bulb purgatory before emerging onto the Thames footbridge in all its modern beauty.
We hadn’t stopped talking post-hug. We’ve only been friends for 18 months, but we had a marathon’s worth of ground to cover in the few short hours on tap. Nic’s new book. Alice’s professional pivot. My ambitions for and confusions about my writing career. I was blathering on about this very newsletter. Its three year anniversary is approaching, and I’ve been trying to reconcile what I’m doing now with who I’ve been, and who I want to be.
In her delightful Dutchie way, Nic listened to me talking with a keen eye and a mischievous smile. Then she said quite matter of factly:
“When I met you, I just knew you as a writer. I’ve never known you as anything else. That’s who you are to me.”
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We live up in our heads.
Here’s what it looks like inside of mine: a massive construction zone, multiple work areas competing for time, attention, and energy. A tug-of-war over the community bulldozer. Worker strikes. Lots of loud beeping, clanging, crashing. The occasional siren. Or ominous silence. Some areas have been neglected for years, despite the fact that I’m constantly tripping over them. Some I diligently work on daily. Sometimes I make progress. Sometimes I just add to the mess.
For much of my life, my career felt like the aspect of the endless renovation I had most under control. Sure, it was always a work in progress, playing the corporate chess match while trying to keep investors happy while trying to serve our employees and customers too. But at least I knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it: to provide for my family. My mission was clear, my to-do list prioritized, and though some weeks my work hours far exceeded 40, I felt focused and clear-eyed.
But now, doing whatever the hell it is I’m doing these days, I don’t have the same tangible motivation or obvious priorities.
And nothing is worse for a construction site than being unsure about what you’re trying to build.
Yes, I’ve been calling myself a writer for the last year, plus or minus. But compared to my 30+ years in corporate, I don’t feel embodied in that yet. I’m still learning. I’m in the toddler stages. The Luminist, Do Loss, early drafts of my next book are all bricks in a brick wall I’m building… but to what end? I’m still trying to figure that out.
But Nic already sees me as just that: a writer. No question, no confusion, no blinking and rubbing her eyes as she tries to understand how Corporate Sue became Creative Sue.
The next morning, I was having coffee with Alice. She’d read my Do Loss draft, and we were using the language and stories in the book as I intended: a kind of shorthand to bring loss out of the dark. We were sharing a few formative, family-related loss experiences from our pasts when a thought struck me.
“I tell stories about my different kinds of losses in the book,” I said, puzzled, “but I never once mention my parent’s divorce. Even though that’s a major loss… It might have been more formative than I realized.”
I can’t believe I worked on this book for a year and never once thought of that.
Like my own history has become a room I walk through every day, without even seeing the photos on the walls, momentos from vacations of yesteryear, or the plant in the corner that desperately needs water.
But sitting next to Alice, it’s like I flipped by the memory of the divorce and actually paused… because she didn’t know about it. That’s what caught my attention, not the memory itself but the fact that I had never shared it with her. I knew it was a part of me she’d never seen, so I did a double take and realized I personally hadn’t thought about it in years.
My new friendships strike again.
It’s like these relationships are giving me permission to tell my own story differently. Because I’m a different person today than I was two years ago. Same history, but not the same woman.
During my London trip, I also managed to squeeze in a laughter-filled dinner with another group of new friends. In a Primrose Hill gastro pub, Lisa, Mindy, Rebecca, Alice and I talked challenges, accomplishments, and how to take a selfie without ending up with a double chin.
We’d all been speakers at the Do over the last three years. We talked about what it was like not just to stand on stage with all your vulnerabilities in full view, but to then be challenged by watching yourself on the recording. Some of us dove right in. Some waited. Some never watched at all. Then we talked about the reactions of our friends and family — the way they recognized the ‘us’ they knew in those videos. How we wave our hands when we are nervous. How we catch our breath in the gut wrenching moments. How we were surprisingly funny at just the right times.
I felt so nourished by that dinner that when I lay down in the cool white sheets of my Baker Street hotel bed, I didn’t reach for my regular soothing strategies. A flick through New Orleans Zillow. Reading a random article in the WSJ. Instagram.
I just laid in the dim light feeling a full body contentment, wondering about the power of being with these other humans to pull a giant tarp over my construction zone, blocking it from my mind’s eye view and giving me a rest…
I’ll never let my old, ride-or-die friends go. When I text and say “I’m at Target and I can’t stop buying pillows,” they know that 1) I’m melting down and 2) I need to be pulled out of my tailspin with a precise ratio of tough love and a walk in the woods.
But new friends provide something so special too: a fresh perspective on the construction zone I’ve spent so much time staring at, my eyes are getting crossed.
That lack of knowledge is SO freeing. While I’m flailing around trying to decide what’s next for me with all my baggage on my back, they are providing active input baggage-free. They are participating in the construction of the person I’m becoming, not based on who I’ve been. Sue 2.0. (Or maybe 3.0 or 7.0?)
As I build myself into this new season of who I am, I keep trying to go back to my old selves as building blocks. But my new friends don’t have that context. They provide novel data based on who I am today.
All my old mistakes, character flaws, lack of empathy, tendency to set someone on fire with a glare — those are invisible to them. Sure, I fill them in. As you build a friendship, you always end up sharing the things that are key to who you have become. But what you share and how you weave it in can be yet another surprise and revelation.
So as someone who likely doesn’t know you or any of your history, but would like to consider myself a friend, can I say:
* Whatever renovation or pivot you’re working on, you’ve probably made more progress than you realize.
* You owe nothing to your history, past versions of yourself, or renovations that got abandoned halfway through. So while you’re reinventing yourself, feel free to reinvent the way you relate to your past too.
* The fact that you even have a construction zone is not a personal failing. It just makes you one of the crew.
* And finally, you’re also probably more tired than you are lost. Give yourself a break and get some rest.
To seeing yourself anew,
Sue
Thanks for reading The Luminist!
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