Now as the director of a study abroad program, I’m still wrestling with the same kinds of questions I dealt with in my dissertation. I worry about my own culpability and my own responsibility to the people around me. I think about my own Peace Corps service and wonder about what I left behind for people. Did I leave anything of substance or did I just take what I wanted? This time, I’m not the only person whose experience I have to consider; I now have students to guide through these same kinds of unequal encounters and experiences.
I’m building new communities of people and relationships with others to support people in their creative ventures. I'm also thinking about how to have more joy in writing. What might shift for us as writers and people if we looked for those moments in which writing feels joyful and creative? What if we allowed struggle and joy to overlap? Struggle and joy in the creative process might be better thought of as a both/and than an either/or.
Sometimes you just have to take The Flying Leap, engaging in some big inspired action that would otherwise make no sense under ordinary circumstances. The Flying Leap occurs when your inspiration and desire for change become bigger than your fear.
Reclaiming trauma stories and telling those stories as our personal truths is different from creating victim narratives. They might sound similar, but victim narratives almost always involve blame, either explicit or implicit. Reclaiming your pain and trauma story means standing tall in your truth, no matter how much it hurts.
If you’ve ever felt helpless, you may have been the sitting-on-hands-and-complaining-loudly person. You refuse to accept any solutions to your problem. You reject any solution as ridiculous and preposterous at best, and downright foolish and risky at worst. At this point, you’re not actually trying to solve problems, even though you pretend you are. You're in the grips of the "Yes, but..." syndrome
The grief I felt when I conceded defeat on the job market was the real deal. I cycled through every one of the Kubler Ross model’s stages of grief several times. And as anyone who has been through the five stages of grief knows, they are not really stages at all, but rather suggestions. Grief is a full body contact sport that involves cycling and recycling through the stages of grief, moving forward and backwards and sideways at the most inopportune moments until the heart and soul decide there’s nothing more to be done and they’ve let go. There’s nothing rational about grief and no time table to “get over it.” It’s insanely confusing and consumes massive amounts of emotional resources. Grief is involuntary and wild and frightening.
