My Mess My Message
Thank goodness for friends, especially those who provide support and willingly challenge you. You know who you are, so thank you and here goes.
“Make your mess your message”- that’s what was said. Talk about hitting the target dead center. I had the honor and privilege to join a Mastermind group, which to be honest, I had no idea what a Mastermind group was. When I first heard the term a few months ago, I was reminded of a childhood game from Milton Bradley. That game is now labeled as a “Vintage” 1972 Mastermind Game on eBay (I know I am showing my age here and I certainly do not relate to the term “vintage”….that’s another story for another blog). For those unaware like me, a Mastermind group offers a combination of brainstorming, education, peer accountability and support in a group setting. This group has helped me become more courageous than ever and even more comfortable with vulnerability. Time to peel back this onion.
My mess starts with the stories I am telling myself, or more so, those I choose to recall. For instance, I am great at telling myself everything I ever did “wrong”, reminding myself of the mistakes and things that didn’t go the way I planned. The other night I was thinking about the house I grew up in, what came to mind first? Flooding in were the stories where something went “wrong”, where I wasn’t good enough, I let someone down or I had failed. You would have thought every day of my life was like this, and it certainly wasn’t at all. Why is it that these memories are the ones I recall the easiest and come to mind first? At that moment, I began to feel the weight of the message my memories were creating. The story I was telling myself, the story I carried into many aspects of my life. Here is another “rock”….thank you sir….can I have another? Talk about creating a self-destructive story. I hadn’t yet fully grasped that I am the author of the story. What an interesting insight, I am the author and the editor. I get to decide what “rocks” to carry forward and which to leave behind. How empowering does that sound! Time to drop my rucksack and dump some of these old boulders sitting at the bottom. As Bob Seger said, “Turn the Page”, it is time to rewrite this story by starting a new chapter.
Honestly, it took quite a while for other memories to surface to the top. How did I do it? Well, I let my imagination and creativity take me on a journey. I started thinking about all the rooms of the house, the furniture, the carpet, recalling those smells of food or a certain detergent that bring you back to an earlier time. Then I started thinking to myself, what fun did I have here? Soon images began to take shape and words were forming. We had a “rec room” and I remembered orange swivel chairs (it was the 70’s after all) and how much fun we would have spinning each other around until we got dizzy. The time my sister’s guinea pig escaped, and we had to chase it around the entire house, only to find it a day later in a game box in the garage (perfectly fine by the way). The garden out back and all the tomatoes we would pick and fry up. All the parties my parents had, my sister and I sitting with our parents playing cards with the “adults”. We became stealth crab meat thieves, letting our parents do all the work of filling up bowls of crab meat only for us to swoop in and eat it. My parents taught us Pinochle and Gin Rummy, my wife calls me a “sandbagger” to this day and hates playing cards with me. I usually win the card games and she kicks my butt in Scrabble, which seems like a fair trade-off to me. Hey, wait a minute, what’s happening here? I am writing a new story. I feel lighter, inspired, and motivated.
So, author, what stories are you telling yourself? Are you ready to “Turn the Page”? How can you use your creativity and imagination to rewrite your story? How will your new thoughts create new feelings and emotions that move you forward?
Thanks for joining me on my journey. I look forward to hearing about yours.
(Photo courtesy of pexels.com Siddhant Bodile)