This Wasn’t The Plan
There are a few lines that I hear over and over, spoken from the couch to my chair, that I hear every year, from multiple people.
This theme transcends nearly everything. Regardless of the types of work people do, if they have 0 children or 3, where they live, and it has nothing to do with gender.
So often, it feels as if people are waiting.
They are frustrated and taken aback by the way their lives look or the situation they are in.
There are common themes of hardship: loss of a loved one, divorce, looking for a soulmate, or feeling lost and searching for meaning. There are an innumerable number of curveballs.
But it seems to boil down to this delicate point: what do we do when life doesn’t feel the way we thought it was meant to?
I am toying with this concept as I finish the most beautiful memoir by Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which explores her divorce from the father of her beloved children. I was introduced to her work by my dear friend, colleague, and fellow clinical psychologist, Jennifer Wolkin, PhD, who wrote the book Quick Calm, another must-read for all things mindfulness.
The beauty and prose that Smith writes are part of the reason the book is so captivating, but it is also the recognition that life is- and simply must be-what it is.
What may appear to be loss or betrayal in the moment is often the turning point for something else. It is the opening of a door or a portal into a new life that is something we could not have imagined, had that curveball not been thrown our way.
Smith reflects on this new space that she is in as a time of discovering a new relationship with herself—terrain that had always been filled by another person.
What happens when that space becomes empty and we learn to fill it with our connection to ourselves?
Who are we in this new context?
Who are we when the reflection, or our other half, is not our partner but ourselves?
The other part of this memoir that was so profound to me, is that Smith does not write from a place of being fixed.
She is not writing from the moment of riding into the sunset with her brand-new husband and perfectly blended family. She is, in fact, still on the journey as she writes the book.
She writes from a place of wanting to heal. She recognizes that this divorce was not her choice, but she also sees how she contributed to this curveball, the ways in which she skipped herself to make everyone around her happy, and potentially missed the warning signs of the hairpin turn her life took.
So, what can we learn from this memoir and apply to ourselves?
The only constant in life is change (Heraclitus).
Once we get attached to the way we think things will be, we open ourselves up to disappointment and sadness. We settle into comfortability, trying to predict the unknown, believing we are not susceptible to the mysterious ways life works.
We can-and should-have goals and dreams, and be working toward lives with meaning, but we cannot think we know the end of the story when it is unfolding in real time.
I have written often before that life is lived in the in-between moments: the car ride to the beach, preparing dinner, choosing what movie to watch, going to all the games, not necessarily winning them.
Life is created in the in-between moments, and cannot be scripted. We must accept that there are things we cannot control- as Smith says, we must “serenity prayer it” and let it go.
Back to letting go of the shoulds and believing we got robbed if our lives are not turning out as we thought they would.
We must embrace the struggles we have and the unknowns we encounter and know that they are what life is, as much as the moments of joy and abundance. We must have both to have either.
Hairpins and all.
Get to KnowDr. Danielle Shelov
Dr. Shelov's therapeutic approach emphasizes understanding individuals within the context of their families, childhood experiences, relationships, and larger systems as crucial to psychological treatment.
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