Inner Workings discussion

This week I turn 36.

At the beginning of my 35th year I started to clearly see a different kind of life for myself. Too afraid to let go of what my life was at the time to pursue it, cowed by years of being told who I was and what I was worth but just strong enough to grasp at this new version of myself, I created a Scylla and Charybdis existence - two inescapable monsters, one my life as it was, one my life as it could be. I could not be or avoid one without nearly being swallowed by the other.

Friends who have watched closely in the last year, who have talked me through my doubts and fears, comment on how far I've come in a year, that I have started to get back to who I really am, with all the two steps forward and three steps back that this entails. As though I were living in my own novel (not the one where I get my groove back with a 23 year old Jamaican hottie). Goal, obstacle, goal, obstacle - does the character make it? Does the character change?

What I was - a woman with two children, falsely believing I controlled my own life, falsely portraying to the world a perfect little family - and what I am becoming, a strong, self-assured woman with two children actually in control of my own destiny, and not trying all the time to be in control and perfect - is who I truly am.

The largest hurdle in all of this becoming is the issue of control. I have known consciously, for many years, that control over anything other than my own response to a situation or act is an illusion. It's as simple as Newton's laws of motion:

1. A body at rest stays at rest, and a body in motion stays in motion, unless it is acted on by an external force.

2. Force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma) (or alternately, force equals the time rate of change of momentum).

3. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I have counseled friends about change, unpredictability, rolling with the punches, not trying to keep everything under wraps at all times. That to live means to err, to trip up, to make mistakes and learn from them.

I could not apply this to my own life. Perhaps because errors seemed to have a great cost, perhaps because I took on too much of the cost, or because I was desperately trying to hide that I was not in control of my life, of my family's well-being.

Change and control. Control and change.

36 should be interesting.

It looks like you came farther than me at 36.