Your Life Your Story #3

"Love is Short, Forgetting is Long" (Pablo Neruda)


For reference, I present, above, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's view of life stages. I've come to appreciate it, especially as I reconcile his ideas with what I experienced during the specific decades of my life.  Compare and contrast if you will my "lessons learned" between the ages of fifteen and twenty years. And if you are able, have a look at what you were up to yourself during those years, when you were also enmeshed in the challenges of finding your own identity. And we know by now the degree of self respect and self-nurture that requires. 

It's been posited (though controversial) that every seven years our cells turn over and we transform into physically different people literally inhabiting different bodies. Since 2013, I've been exploring the flip inner-side of the coin, trying to figure out how much of me has changed, and what's stayed the same through the years. Considering Erickson's work, I've come to appreciate the frantic efforts in which I was engaged at the time, especially since I had no role models for responsible adulthood in my parents' example. 

Those of you exploring the spiritual journey of recalling decades of your life through writing, poetry, or other art may find it is getting difficult to quantify some lessons. Viewing our lives through the "retrospectoscope" means looking at events clouded by the residual matter of experiences and memories of other decades. 

It's a good thing to realize that everything we think we know is always subject to reflection and refinement. 

Actions Taken and Lessons Learned Ages Fifteen to Twenty

  1. If a person feels as if she has no future, one way to deal is to find another person to share their own uncertain future and attempt to create a lifelong partnership based only on determination and hope. 
  2. You can be certain you love someone one day, and the next seriously doubt it.
  3. No matter how much grandma loves you, you can still try to grow up too quickly, and in the process think you are gaining control over your life even as you lose it.
  4. Not thinking about a possibility like getting pregnant is different from doing something to prevent it.
  5. You can be happy about a life-altering decision to have a child or be married, and also incredibly sad upon the realization that you – in your particular place and time- have no other risky, rich experiences to delve into by which you might test your mettle. Your focus cannot be wholly upon yourself once a child arrives.
  6. School, once gone as part of your life, might be something you actually miss once it is no longer a possibility for you as you focus on being a responsible adult at the age of seventeen.
  7. It's nice when friends visit, but as they talk about their teenage lives, you think about paying rent, buying diapers, getting some decent furniture. Your thoughts are consumed by worries that you and your husband might lose your humble jobs (he on day shift, you working at night) as your visiting friends discuss what they are wearing to prom. Your high school friendships will never be the same.
  8. It is oh-so-very-easy to get into debt while young that takes YEARS to pay. It isn't worth it.
  9. Despite the hard lessons thus far, you can never, ever even begin to imagine life without your beloved child.
  10. If you think life with Mother was difficult, try Mother-in-Law. (Later, I was able to appreciate her over-bearingness, based on her knowing I had few resources for self-care - at the time I felt smothered). 

I was beginning to get smarter, but still confounded. I was learning to live the paradox of life that adults learn to negotiate if they are to have ultimately satisfying lives. Put another way, I was walking the tightrope across one responsibility and possibility to the next, not sure what kind of safety net I had – needing to take on faith that I had one at all. Often, I didn't.

These early years of my life could have culminated in multiple unrecoverable disasters. They did not. What followed was actually more mistakes such as those we humans are subject to make, and digging out of many ruts. There would be discoveries, sometimes delightful, other times painful, and recoveries.

As I tell and re-read my own story, I encourage you to do the very same. May your tenderness toward yourself blossom through what you uncover, for you were young once, and no doubt working hard to find meaning and happiness through those years just as I was. But mostly, whether you realized it or not, you were seeking a self to call home.