The Queen of My Self

You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
- Erica Jong

The story of our lives is ours to create. We can design our own roles and ideals, compose the scripts, and author the sagas of our own futures and that of the environment around us. While we cannot necessarily control the circumstances and influences that present themselves to us in the course of living, we can choose how we will respond to them when they do arise. Our power of choice is our sole control in the world.

With each new paragraph, each turn of the page, each new dawn, each new season, each moment in time, each blink of the eye, each beat of the heart, we are gifted with another opportunity to exercise our right to choose.

Coffee or tea? Lemon or milk? Right or left? Stairs or elevator? Vacuum? Vote? Cheat? Trust? Care? Dare? Change?

What paths we take, what decisions we make influence how the story will proceed and who we will be from this day forth. As George Eliot reminds us, “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”

The difficult times that we encounter in our lives might tempt us to dull our senses and opt out of any upsetting experiences, choosing not to let things “get to us.” We often try to ignore the hard parts — pain, fear, guilt, grief, confusion, anger, and disappointment — dilute their impact, drown them out in an endless list of pleasurable addictions: soporifics, anesthetics, mood enhancers, caffeine, food, hormones. We can even turn ourselves off altogether.

We don’t have to engage in the emotional upheaval. Nobody is making us. We could choose to drink cabernet and watch Public Television, play cards, play bingo, play it safe, every night for the rest of our lives if we wanted to. It is an option.

It is ultimately up to us whether we succumb to the unexamined life or try to figure out what the hell is going on inside us and around us, and engage in it, alter, change and grow with it, so that we might fulfill our greatest destiny and dreams.

You need only to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are
fierce with reality.
- Florida Scott-Maxwell

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The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.

Today, we see many women in public life, ranging the gamut from Hillary Clinton to Sharon Osborne, who have stepped out of the shadows of their husbands and families to pursue their own ambitions for themselves. Millions of ordinary women face the same challenge in our daily lives, as well.

After a couple of decades on the job, many of us feel that we have explored one option or direction as far as we can and now we want to do something else. Or, we have wanted to do that certain something else all along, but never had the chance, the opportunity, the backing and/or the nerve to pursue it.

Now we recognize that to stay with what we have always done simply by default would be stultifying and self-limiting. And money isn’t necessarily the object this time around, either. Now it is more a matter of what is personally satisfying and fulfilling than what is smart, stable or safe.
        
Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.
- Oprah Winfrey

When I was in my early fifties, I made the decision after years of procrastinating to begin publishing a quarterly journal about living in sync with the cycles

After a quarter of a century of studying, teaching, writing and celebrating, it was the next logical intellectual step in my exploration of the cycles of the cosmos and their physical, emotional, and social significance. This new publication would deal with how to live consciously with the changes of the seasons — including the seasons of our own lives.

Good idea or not, however, my well-meaning friends pointed out that I had no resources or backer to support this ambitious project. But I was beyond reason. My biological clock was ticking, though I wasn’t thinking of babies. Mortality was on my mind. Mine. If I didn’t do this now, when would I?
       
Needless to say, I didn’t listen to the criticism, constructive though it might have been, and went right on ahead with my plan anyway. And, yes, they were right. But though I incurred a very large debt as a result, I have no regrets. Publishing that journal was a most rewarding endeavor, a four-times-a-year-discipline that challenged me to stay in tune with, and respond to, the times, even as they change. This effort kept me alert and in the moment — a worthy lesson at any price.

I kept Always in Season: Living in Sync with the Cycles alive for eight years. Thirty-two issues. And I am still paying the bank interest for lending me the capital. But I am grateful for having taken the chance. It yielded me critical acclaim and loyal subscribers in thirty-one states and eight countries who were not simply readers but more like an extended community of like-minded souls, a network of spiritual support, an international circle of care and concern. Surely this is what truly matters.
 
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The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.

Several of my recent posts have been about the Self,
including “What Exactly is the Self?” in which I wrote, “The Self is the sum of
all of our parts, and holistically, it is greater than the sum of all of our
parts. The fluid Self transcends time and space, expanding and shape-shifting,
changing and adapting to accommodate the possibility of all possibility.” Our
Self is “the artful patchwork of our own lives designed from the wild and
wonderful patterns of our own personality and experiences, and crafted from our
individual inner authority.”

Here are some words of Self-wisdom by some very wise
women:

“We have all a better guide in
ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” – Jane Austen

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“Doubt yourself and you doubt
everything you see. Judge yourself and you see judges everywhere. But if you
listen to the sound of your own voice, you can rise above doubt and judgement.
And you can see forever.” – Nancy Kerrigan

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 “It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone
else’s eyes.” – Sally Field

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 “Falling, falling, falling,
falling down. Look yourself in the eye before you drown.” – Emily Saliers of the Indigo
Girls

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 ”Our goal while on this earth is to transcend our
illusions and discover the innate power of our spirit.” – Caroline Myss

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” The authentic self is the soul made visible.” – Sarah Ban Breathnach

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 “As you begin to understand the immense power and love you hold inside, you will find an unending surge of joy. Light and love that will nourish and support you all the days of your life.” - Susan Jeffers

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“In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world
of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned, slaves to our appetites and our will
to false power.” – Marianne Williamson

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 “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell
it about other people.” – Virginia Woolf

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 “Every problem can be solved with the proper application of the
means at hand. Maybe not easily, happily, cheaply or painlessly – but it can be
done if you have the will; you already have the means – yourself!” – Joanne
Siewert

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 ”It is easier to live through someone else than to become
complete yourself.” – Betty Friedan

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 “I didn’t leave Sonny for another man. I left for another
woman. Me.” – Cher

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 “The bright shining

only reflects back to myself,

my own light blinding me.

I can’t see the world and they
can’t see me.” – Anna Chrisrest

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 “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a
second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland

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 ”Since you are like no other being ever created since the
beginning of time, you are incomparable.” – Brenda Uleland

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 “At some point in my life, I
swallowed a Sun. And now it dawns and sets in my belly.” – Erika Harris

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 “My heart filled with love,
flowing over with joy, my own little drum that I like to march by!” - Gunda Fijnje-Nolan

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 “I took a deep breath and
listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.” – Sylvia Plath

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What us your experience of your Self? How would you describe
it? Please share you wisdom.

Aging and changing might be inevitable, but they ain’t easy. They precipitate in us a great uncertainty. The myriad dramatic disturbances of modern middle life — menopause, health concerns, career shifts, the empty nest, divorce and death — create an overwhelming crisis of identity and purpose for each of us. What follows is an intense period of questioning absolutely everything — our goals and achievements, our priorities and our operating systems, our morals and our values, our fantasies and our fears.

Some of us spend a considerable amount of time — easily ten or fifteen years — swirling in the turbulence of this middle age reassessment. Who are we supposed to be at this stage of our life when we are less likely to be bound and identified by our kinship connection to someone else — as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a lover? What exactly is our role as older than young and younger than old women who are still active and more effective than ever?

This middling transitional shift into the next stage of our being promises us a vast world of positive possibilities for the second half of life. But first, before we are able to avail ourselves of the advantages and rewards of maturity, we must cross the Grand Canyon of midlife change, steep, rocky, and ripped asunder by a whole panoply of seismic ripples — mental, emotional, and spiritual — beyond the obvious physical ones. We climb and climb, and still we lose ground. The Earth that we once trusted to be solid under our feet is slipping away and we are dragged out to sea where we bob along in uncertain waters, in a leaky boat with no map to guide us.

It seems as if
I’ll never get beyond
the foot prints that I made.

- Qernertuq, Eskimo woman poet
c.900-1400

In her book Goddesses in Older Women,  the therapist Dr. Jean Bolen says that menopause is “a time of great spiritual and creative unfolding — although it sometimes feels like great unraveling.” Unraveling, indeed. The whole damn sweater is falling apart and we are standing here naked in the cold (and we are still hot). Nothing has prepared us for this landslide of transitions that greets us as we enter our middle years. There we were, going along as always, then one day out of the blue, we discover ourselves to be middle aged. Blindsided in a youth-conscious culture, we never saw it coming, but the overwhelming evidence of our aging can hardly be ignored.  

These profound changes in the chemistry of our bodies and in our intimate relationships, the terrifying disruptions of our status quo, the daily life-and-death dramas we are forced to deal with, are incredibly disorienting. Not only are we burning up physically, blasted with flashes from our out of control internal furnaces, we are also, many of us, burnt out on an emotional level after years of tending the home, the hearth, and usually a job as well.

Gallup took a poll of women over 55 years of age. They were asked in which decade were they the happiest. 11% said their 20′s, 14% said their 30′s, 13% said their 40′s, the rest, well over 50%  answered “RIGHT NOW!!!”

Interesting. Society tells us, and our own experiences have verified, that now that we are menopausal, we are poised to lose everything that has so far defined us: our power of reproductivity, our youth, our sex appeal, our children, our parents, our spouses, our time left on the job, our visibility, our very lives — and we have never been happier! We might have suffered great loss, but look what we have gained — our Selves, And that makes us happy, indeed.

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The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.