It’s Not a Life Sentence
By Marj Lacey
My original title for It’s Not a Life Sentence was Becoming Who You Are. The latter eventually became part of the sub-title because A) I discovered books already on the market with similar, if not identical, titles, and B) it took me so long to write the thing that by the time I finished the final version, the moniker seemed worn out.
Perhaps I was the one worn out, but that’s a topic for another day.
I’ve always loved to write and was blessed with teachers and other mentors who encouraged me in my youth. I think there’s a novel (or two or three) in me somewhere, but at the moment non-fiction is more compelling. The idea for this self-help book had been percolating for several years. The better I got to know and understand myself and the more I worked with clients who had been blown off track by events, people, and forces they often barely acknowledged, the more I realized how important—and how difficult—it is for people to get back in touch with who they are at the core.
Underneath all those personas—spouse, parent, careerist—who are you?
Of course, I had a million excuses for not actually sitting down and putting words to paper. I was counseling at a high school during the day and in my private practice many evenings. From time to time, I taught a community college class. My husband had begun to develop worrisome health problems. And on and on . . . and on.
The book simmered away on the back burner. There would be time for that later.
Then came 9/11. In bed with the flu, I called the office early to let my colleagues know I wouldn’t be in that day.
“Do you have the TV on?” my normally laid-back cohort asked brusquely.
“No,” I replied groggily.
“Turn it on and tell me what’s happening,” she demanded.
As I fumbled with the remote, I asked, “What is happening, anyway?”
She told me then, as I clicked on just in time to see one of the towers collapse. Was it the one I had toured just a few weeks earlier? I didn’t know, but once again I was struck, as I had been so many times before, by the randomness of catastrophes. I could have been, I told myself, in one of those buildings.
To say this jarred me out of my complacency (“there’d be plenty of time to write the book . . . but later”) would be an understatement. Within a week, I started organizing notes, mapping out a tentative sequence of chapters, and writing for an hour or two every evening.
I had gotten up a pretty good head of steam by the time my husband was felled by a major stroke. I found him, helpless, on the floor in the middle of the night. Into the breach came the paramedics. Against my better judgment, I agreed to let them transport Hal to the nearest hospital. We’d had less than stellar service there before, but it was the closest facility and hope springs eternal, you know. All too soon, however, I got a glimpse of the worst of what our lives could turn into. It came when, after hours of delay, the ER doc came in and said they weren’t able to do all the tests they wanted because some of their equipment was down.
“So we’re going to release him to go home now,” he announced.
“What are we going to do about the fact that he can’t walk?” I asked—and none too sweetly, I’ll confess.
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Whereupon, apparently embarrassed at not having examined the patient sufficiently to uncover this particular detail, he shot out of the room.
Eventually, we were transferred to a hospital that maintained its diagnostic equipment and had a competent staff.
But I digress. Bottom line: The book languished. By the time I got a moment to myself at night, I had neither the energy nor the will to write. Eventually, however, I got angry enough at myself that I took the bold move of setting my alarm for 4 a.m. and getting up to write before the demands of the day set in.
Five years later, having passed through two editors and a couple of major
revisions, It’s Not a Life Sentence was ready for a life of
its own. Here’s a sample from Chapter 9 (“The Inescapable
Relationship: Me, Myself, and I”).
• • •
A crucial step in becoming who you are is bringing to the conscious level
the "not good enough" messages you've internalized. Only then can
you change your inner dialogue, which in adulthood occurs at lightning speed
largely out of awareness.
• • •
The sequence in which you form beliefs about your self and establish habitual
patterns of behavior on the basis of a specific incident goes like this:
1) You interpret what the incident means; your thought produces
2) An emotion, leading to
3) A decision, leading to
4) Subsequent behaviors, leading to
5) The firming up of that belief about your self
While every step in this sequence is important, the pivotal step early in your life, the one with the power to change your relationship to yourself for a lifetime is Step 3, the decision. But what perpetuates that shift is Step 4, the subsequent pattern of behavior based on that decision. That behavior reinforces and solidifies your belief about yourself, and that belief becomes the filter through which you view yourself in your world.
The way you handle your first serious adversity will most likely be the way you handle the next one, the one after that, and the one after that. But there's an important difference between the first incident and those that follow: In the initial episode, you're much more aware of what you're thinking. As you figure out what to do, you converse with yourself about options. Later, having already established your modus operandi , your internal dialogue accelerates. Eventually, it moves at warp speed, and you don't think; you simply do. Your response solidifies into a pattern as predictable as sweat in Death Valley.
We can't change the past. But it's not too late to change the future, and that has to begin in the present.
• • •
Happy writing, fellow authors!
