Catching On

Carolyn B Healy

I met Lucia at a writing seminar. She was slight, with a lined, hard luck face and unruly dark hair that obscured her small brown eyes. Twelve of us, all strangers, sat in a loose circle in a sunny high-desert retreat house waiting for the first session to begin. Our leader, a successful and engaging author of personal growth books, arrived and immediately handed out water bottles and instructed us to drink and keep drinking to stay ahead of headaches and any other high altitude symptoms. It was a way of telling us we’d be safe here.

Each of us had a book project in mind and came for help in shaping it into a best-seller. He told us what to expect: Each of us would get two hours to lay out our book concept, the group could ask clarifying questions and provide feedback, and he would provide consultation about how to focus the topic to catch the interest of a large audience. But first, we would get to know each other.

He divided us into pairs and told us to interview each other, and be prepared to introduce each other to the group using one amazing fact learned during the conversation. Lucia and I were a pair. I don’t remember the amazing fact, but I do remember that we had remarkable overlap in what our early lives had been like. Both of us grew up only children of widowed mothers living in modest circumstances in a big city; both became therapists; both had two children almost grown; and both had killer book ideas.

As we talked on about our parallel histories, I questioned her about her experience growing up without a father and what she ultimately made of it. My killer book idea was that personal narrative, the story you tell about yourself, has everything to do with how your life turns out and your level of satisfaction with it. And that if you are not satisfied, changing that narrative is the – or at least one – route to transformation.

So how could I not ask? Plus, of late I had been putting an excess of energy into finally sorting out my parental loss and how it figured into my own story, so my curiosity could not be contained, even if it took us beyond the prescribed activity.

Lucia answered, “I remember everyone always saying to my mother, ‘Isn’t it a shame that you have to support Lucia alone?’ ‘It’s such a shame that Joe left you with such a hard life.’ Everything was a “shame.” I took that in, and that’s how I lived my life for years. Ashamed.” She explained that she’d been prone to disconnection and self-pity from girlhood, and had to work hard as an adult to come out of it.

I didn’t know what to say, not a common occurrence. I realized that there was a sentence that rang through my childhood too, directed to my mother Jessie: “Aren’t you lucky that you have Carolyn?” Or to me, “Your mother is so lucky to have you.” Or overheard around relatives’ tables, “Thank goodness Jessie and Carolyn have each other.” You hear that difference? It was all about luck and good fortune on my side.

I’d long wondered where my disposition toward appreciation and gratitude came from, and originally figured that they must come easy to me because of my early loss. It was no problem for me to tell the difference between an annoyance and a real tragedy that was worth getting worked up about. I didn’t need to make gratitude lists to open my eyes. They were open.

I would hear my friends moan about how hopeless and unfair their parents were, and suffer over not being allowed to go on a Girl Scout overnight because they had a family occasion they shouldn‘t miss. But how do you say something like “count your blessings” without sounding like you’re feeling sorry for yourself? So I kept it to myself. I knew what I knew because of my loss experience, I decided, one they hadn’t had.

As I grew, I discovered that, as usual, life isn’t that simple. And now Lucia further confirmed it. If my original idea had held up, she would have developed the very same practical assessment I had - any day when the roof didn’t fall in was a good day. Instead, she had gone through the same loss, but assigned it a different meaning, the opposite one even, and got a quite different outcome.

In fact, the encounter with Lucia proved my new theory – that it’s not what life throws at you, it’s how you catch it. It fueled my determination to write that book and highlight this route to resilience.

The meaning that Lucia put to her fatherlessness and how I saw mine activated whole different sets of neurons in our developing brains and sent us down entirely different paths. She developed a grim expectation, the opposite of my knee-jerk optimism.

As I look around, what is not to be grateful about? I see others whose attention is drawn to the negative – the latest political scandal or crime statistics or fears about health care or taxes. Happily for me, my attention goes instead toward a dynamite sunset, or a poke in the ribs from a friend, or a good medical report.

Does that make me a Pollyanna, or worse, a self-congratulatory one? Not so. I am lucky, not admirable. I can meet trouble when I see it, but it just can’t trump the rest. Dr. Martin Seligman, a founder of the positive psychology movement, asks if the word in your heart is Yes or No, and provides questions to reveal the answer. He rushes to say that even if it is No, there is plenty you can do to nudge it toward Yes, which brings rewards of pleasure, protection against physical and emotional difficulty, and greater achievement. Ask Lucia who worked hard to move in that direction.

My word is Yes. And I’m grateful for that.

One loose end: What about the personal narrative book? I did write up a nice book proposal and an agent friend shopped it around to several likely editors, but no one bit. I’ll dust it off one of these days, tighten it up, add my new learnings and send it out there again to see if it finds a home. I know which story I’m going to lead with.

CBH 11/09