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What are the emotional and spiritual tasks of transition? That is a question that found me and circled ‘round me for the last 3 years. It then morphed into the outline of a book I am writing, my magnum opus I tell friends. The book, which links the cultural and personal stages of transition, includes my own story to “model the behavior,” as the educator in me is inclined to do. As I do, I am finding, yet again, a new level of meaning-making. I hadn’t counted on that, given all the ways I have written my story throughout my career—in journals, in columns, in articles, essays and stories, in a graduate school thesis, in the materials I shared when I ran workshops. But the gift offered now, with this long view of my story, is a deeper awareness of how my power was repeatedly stolen and how I reclaimed it. As the next stage of the book becomes real—a good friend and now book agent has agreed to represent it—and the idea that my oh-so-intimate story may find a larger audience, there are moments when I wonder what the hell I have done. But here’s the deal. The stories I want to read but can’t always find are those that tell what the work of reclaiming one’s power is like in the psychic trenches of our lives. Few writers actually share that intimate work. And so we all bumble along, our neuroses hidden deep within our stories, until some major life event pushes us into a therapist’s office. I want to change that via the “radical act of telling my story,” to paraphrase the words of psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan in A New Approach to Women and Therapy, a book I read 20 years ago when I first began to “wake up” to the deeper work of my life. And then I want to show how such simple acts transform the darkness. Carolyn
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