Here’s what I learned about moving forward: when you don’t have a map, you have to make one from scratch. But you don’t have to make a new map alone. My post-PhD life really started coming together when I found some community and got serious about figuring out what I cared about and valued, who I wanted to serve, what I was good at, and what people might pay me for.
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.
