Writing Prompt #11: Growth Is a Living Process
You can either run from the past, or learn from it.
I keep notes on my phone to help me remember ideas for essays and memoir pieces. Today, I went to look for inspiration and discovered my note from a few weeks back. It said:
Growth isn’t a learning process, it’s a living process. All your failures and trials are fertilizer for growth. You just have to apply the lessons.
I’m not even sure what prompted me to make that note, but this one’s worth exploring, because it took me almost 50 years to absorb the lesson. I’ve spent a lot of my life chasing self-knowledge and emotional wellbeing by sitting at home reading about how to know myself better and navigate my emotional life.
It turns out learning won’t do much for you if you’re not living.
If you’ve been reading I’ll go first… for a while, you may have sussed out that I spent 25 years navigating a tumultuous marriage to a mentally ill man, someone who coped with his inner demons by inflicting chaos on everyone around him. I was desperate to save him from himself and, in the process, make him into someone I could accept.
Instead, I made him miserable. I couldn’t stop him from upending my life or our children’s, but I sure had a knack for making him feel judged and controlled. Which only made his behavior more volatile.
Then one day, I found myself in my therapist’s office spouting the wisdom I’d acquired from my self-help book du jour. I had a tendency to latch onto any idea that made sense to me, worrying it away like a dog with a bone until the next juicy idea came along. In this instance, I was analyzing Peter, as I always did, picking apart his tendencies and trying to show Mindy, my counselor, how right and saintly I was and how wrong and broken my husband was.
Mindy leaned forward, wearing an expression that was equal parts empathetic and exasperated, and said the words that changed my life. Not all at once, but slowly, over years, as I let the message sink in.
“I wonder if you realize,” she said, “That you can’t be in a relationship like the one you’re in and also be healthy.”
She went on to explain that in any dysfunctional relationship, one person often looks like a hot mess while the other looks like a hero. I’d made myself out to be the latter. I was going to fix this man, save this marriage, make it work no matter what. I was the functional one, the strong one, the emotionally intelligent one.
Or was I? Maybe I was the controlling one, the stuck one, the person sagely saying “the only way out is through” when in reality the way out was just to let go and, you know, get out.
And I didn’t learn that from a self-help book. I didn’t even learn it from Mindy. I learned it by living it, and by examining my own role in what Mindy called “the dysfunctional dance” day after day until something shifted.
Each happening in my life led to new discoveries: My mom died, my kids graduated, my job changed. Then, I found myself constantly thinking about the Pacific Northwest and what it would be like to live there. Every night, I researched cities in the PNW. I pored over Redfin and looked at homes and rental properties, dreaming of escape.
And over time, I took the lessons life was teaching me on board, and I made my move. I escaped. I found my place in the world in the Pacific Northwest, and my life opened up. I stopped isolating myself in my room, curled up with The Four Agreements or Daring Greatly, and I stepped out into the world. I found my people, I found love, and I found contentment. Self-help was there when I needed it, but I soon realized that someone else’s prescription wasn’t necessarily a fit for me. I learned to take advice with a heaping tablespoon (or two) of critical thinking.
But there’s one platform that has handed me simple lessons day after day, and all I had to do was pay attention and reflect on what it had to teach me: life.
When my son was a toddler, The Lion King was his absolute favorite movie. He asked to watch the VHS on repeat. One day, he found me crying over some drama with Peter that I don’t even remember now.
“Why you cry, Mama?”
“I’m just thinking about something that happened, and it’s making me sad.”
“Happened in the past?”
“Well, yes. Not very long ago, but in the past, I suppose.”
And my adorable Ian quoted Rafiki, a wise lion-taming mandrill from a Disney movie, at me:
“The past can hurt,” he said, nodding with feigned wisdom. “But you can either run from it… or learn from it.”
And that was some self-help advice I wish I’d listened to sooner than I did.
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