I received an email over the weekend that floored me.
It was a note from a woman I had known over the years through networking. We had taken one nice long walk, but hadn’t really spent a lot of time together. I was aware of her desire to break out of the box and do more with her life, but she felt hindered.
Her note said “you are amazing, and I am so impressed with everything you have accomplished. You are so brave, strong, creative, and funny.”
She inferred that she wanted the courage to build a path like I had in my life.
I had to sit back and think about my courage. Did I consider myself courageous or was it more a desire to not be bored. A seeker. The truth is, when you have lived most of your life in the dark, unaware of who you are, and then you turn on a big light bulb and really see. I mean really fucking see… you are excited.
While I tend to disassociate from praise or reward (an old mechanism from detaching from feelings to survive abuse), I was able to identify what she was responding so vehemently to. The big change in me in the last year was I decided to give myself permission. Permission to fall madly in love, permission to go to Paris solo, permission to go on my first writers’ retreat, permission to no longer ask permission to make decisions that felt aligned to me but may not be another’s cup of tea. Permission to be tired, or bored, or antsy. Permission to explore cities outside LA with my boyfriend, because one day I may give myself permission to leave. Permission to take weekends off, and to buy tickets to a concert. Permission to believe deeper in God, go to a church in Compton, and pray when I felt aligned. I gave myself permission to have my own experiences about my daughter going to college, versus the ones people expect you to have - sadness, empty nesting. I feel the space for both of us, and look forward to sharing each other’s lives. I don’t feel the loss. I feel a gain as women, for her branching out after I gave her 18 years of parenting.
As I unveiled all the areas where I have given myself permission in the last three years, I understood this was my next book. And this woman’s email came just as I was really ruminating on what self help book I would write next. I had written a memoir about buying a house, and while I loved the writing about submerging myself in a different cultural area, and the wild experiences of being a solo homeowner in LA, the book wasn’t the heart of what I really wanted to say. Sometimes we have to write a whole book to really step back and go, ohhh, that’s what the theme is! Then most of the book is just detailed stories that are not so significant, but in writing them you got to the essence of what you were up to every time you broke up with the wrong guy, or tried to put up blinds when you know you should hire someone, or renovated a garage blindly and prayed it worked out for the best.
I went shortly before this woman’s affirming email to a women’s event and we did a short tapping exercise (not tap dancing, but the modality of actually tapping points on your body and repeating positive statements…). After the exercise, she asked the group what they wanted or got out of the experience. One word. Can you believe 22% of women said “permission?” (I have been dying to use the statistic 22% in something now that I am writing a book proposal on the permission book and agents like to read stats.)
So I have heard the word. And now I have to get this proposal written and a new sample chapter. I have to put down a 250 page memoir that I was even told in France I should run with by two instructors at a writing retreat. I have to give myself permission to not go with this book right now but try out the one that is called to serve. I have been listening, and the answers come from my creative muse even if sometimes she is all over the place. She is serving a higher writer calling and also a life calling and I need to follow that drive and impulse.
Of course, I could ask myself, who am I to think I could go out on the circuit with a book about permission and talk about this topic? Well, I find myself again and again talking to women about it so I must have it in my veins, and I never get tired of seeing the light come on in a woman’s eyes when she tells me she doesn’t know why she was so hesitant to do something for herself.
Where are you not giving yourself permission in your life to grow and expand? Where are you holding back because you think it would be risky or silly or you won’t be loved?