At various times in our life we will need to re-invent ourselves whether we like it or not. The choice won’t be ours to make. After illness, separation, job loss, bankruptcy, ill-treatment, bereavement and a plethora of other life-changing situations suddenly thrust upon us.
Alongside accepting this new ‘new’ (which is usually devastating in itself) we’re also tasked with having to reinvent ourselves to accommodate the changes that are happening to our lives.
Our ‘old’ self probably won’t handle this ‘newness.’ However, once reinvented, most of us have the ability to think in new ways and learn to live within this new ‘newness.’
I think first of all (pre-reinvention) following your trauma, you have to allow yourself to go through the pain, in order to allow your mind and body to start the healing process. You have to really feel the low because some day in the future you’ll feel equally high!
When I first started living alone at 50 for the first time in my life, alongside the crippling fear of the unknown, I knew that in order to find a way to succeed I had to go in deep. I had to look at the parts of me I liked and the parts that needed working on. I had to examine the patterns of my behaviour that brought me good results and the patterns that threw more destruction into my life. Unwittingly I’d started my own process of REINVENTION. My family and some of my friends didn’t particularly like my reinvented self, but I was banging my own drum and had to do what I thought was best for me. After all, I hadn’t got to fifty without attaining a huge dose of common sense and being reasonably worldly-wise!
I had to learn to trust MY decisions and life choices.
In reinvention it’s important to examine the circumstances, feelings and reactions and stay on high alert for those ‘lightbulb’ moments when a whole new realisation pops into consciousness. It’s often in our most tortured moments we learn the really powerful truths that can transform and free us. How do I know this to be true? Well I look at the evidence provided by hundreds of my former patients given a terminal diagnosis but still having to ‘live life’ before the inevitable happened, because you can’t just give up! (These people are the greatest Masters Of Reinvention of all time!) Similarly my grieving relatives, starting life anew without their loved one in their life. They had to ‘reinvent’ and coped better than they expected!
If you’re starting the journey of reinvention then it’s nailed on you’ve just spent time wading through rivers of s**t (bless you.... my heart goes out to you.)
Or you may already have taken those first few steps on your journey already. So remember this dear friends... the ‘new you’ you are creating will thrive; And don’t get caught up in this “I’m too low to even think about reinvention” because even at our most depressed, we can and will start making waves in the right direction without even knowing we’re doing it!
People or events may still play football with your broken heart, but you will, in time, no longer be living on Misery Island, and you will find real purpose again. It’s when we trust our gut that inspirational things happen.
BE YOUR OWN HERO !
M xx