Appetite for Change

I learned early how to confront challenges. Before I was a year old, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in a psychiatric hospital. When my mother died in residence at said hospital thirteen years later, my world was further upended by my father’s remarriage and our move to a new home, a new family, and a new school where I knew no one. When I became a wife and mother at nineteen, I already had a few handy skills in approaching life-changing situations, but now I had a family who depended on my ability to adapt.

Somewhere in my thirties, I learned perseverance. Oddly, that lesson was delivered by a fictional character. A coworker had recently read John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and loaned me her copy. The characters and situations were complex in ways I hadn’t encountered before. I almost gave up reading, but the story wouldn’t leave me alone. I realized with clarity that if I’d given up after Owen’s prediction of his own death, as I was inclined to, I’d never have been so satisfyingly provoked by this strange assortment of emotions. Persistence is a valuable characteristic in overcoming difficult tasks.   

In my forties, the biomedical research job I loved—the one that made my heart race in the morning in expectation of the tasks that awaited me—was eliminated. I chose to make a new path and pursue a hard thing, enrolling in a graduate journalism program. Before the ink dried on my M.A. certificate, I jumped into trying to capitalize on it. Over the next ten years, I wrote two and a half bad novels, published a few interesting articles for copies or pennies, and edited a university alumni newsletter. I learned a lot, like how to deal with rejection. While that might sound negative, it proved to be a highly valuable skill when I took the next 180.

When most women my age were slowing down and preparing for retirement, I wasn’t done stretching my capacity to develop new abilities. This time, I searched for a vocation. I wanted to do work that mattered, that transformed lives. Never mind I didn’t have the specified training to proceed. Never mind I had no experience in this newly chosen career. What was important was to do work with purpose, and this one had purpose in spades. I leapt with great conviction.

Little did I know at the time where this leap would take me. What never occurred to me was who I’d become as a result, that the life most likely to be transformed was my own.