#77: The stage of loss that often gets overlooked: reinvention.
Dancing with a plucked chicken on national television, learning a new craft, and not giving a damn.
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“I want to feel relevant… I want to BE relevant.”
~ Julia Child (played by Sarah Lancashire) in the HBO Max series Julia.
The series starts in 1962, months before Child’s famous PBS show, The French Chef, would be conceived. Her beloved bible Mastering the Art of French Cooking had been released, but her second book was floundering in the development phase, and she had just realized another major dream was dead… She’d never had a child, and now it was too late. Menopause had come knocking. Things weren’t great for Julia, but they weren’t terrible. It was a true mixed bag. You know, life.
This is the type of moment many of us can relate too. The future isn’t playing out like we had planned; we’re losing momentum, or maybe even have been stopped dead in our tracks. But Julia somehow turned this floundering into ten seasons of her beloved cooking show, Peabody and Emmy awards, and a TV revolution.
She didn’t even own a television herself! Let alone have any experience performing, producing, or in the entertainment industry.
But that was all beside the point. She had an idea, and not much to lose...
I feel a kinship with Julia. Life dealt both of us hands that we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves. Society expected us to become irrelevant — widows and childless women aren’t often heralded as the great innovators of the age. It would have been easy to disappear.
But our greatest losses became the staging ground for our most meaningful achievements. We threw out our carefully laid plans, took a sharp left turn into a new craft, and made something no one saw coming.
Loss is rarely as simple as losing something.
When we lose a loved one, a job, a dream, we lose our future. We lose who we wanted to be. We lose who we thought we were.
An essential mold we used to understand ourselves — for me it was Mike’s wife; for Julia it was future mother — breaks into a thousand pieces. We become un-categorizable, even to ourselves.
Untethered from our previous identity, we have also jettisoned our expectations, along with our fears of messing it all up. It’s been messed up. Everything has already gone wrong. Worst fears realized, future demolished, ego vaporized. Now what?
Might as well make a plucked chicken dance on national television. Might as well spill our secrets to the Wall Street Journal. Might as well do what we want.
When our defined future has been leveled, when the dust clears, when we stop sobbing long enough to look around, we often find a wide horizon of possibilities.
Yes, loss is crushing. But it’s also insanely freeing.
I’ve been told by many people that writing so publicly about my loss and life is courageous.
But I don’t feel courageous. I just feel more excited by the possibilities than paralyzed by the potential outcomes. And I think Julia felt the same way.
In order to try something completely new, to throw our hat into the ring when we have zippo skill, we have to see ourselves differently. Or, more accurately, completely cease to see ourselves at all.
When we can put the concept of our self aside — including the list of characteristics and judgments we have about ourselves: “I’m good at this, I’m bad at that, I can’t do that because I’ll embarrass myself” — we lose any reason to be afraid.
We have built walls around ourselves, thinking they keep us safe, but they just keep us small. We talk ourselves out of doing things we have not already mastered. We look at people and say, “they’re a natural” or “they’ve been doing it all their life”. We default to the excuse, “that’s not us”.
But when you have an idea, a curiosity, a vision, you step in. When you release the constraints on who you are, you step up. And the universe joins you.
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” - Goethe
Or as Julia Child would say, “Be fearless, and above all, have fun.”
Bon appetite to life,
Your journey, and your generosity in sharing it, is such a gift. I'm approaching the 2nd anniversary of my husband's death, and still stumbling. And I'm learning that as solitary as it feels, I'm not alone. So, like you, I'm writing and hoping to offer companionship to other grievers on the path. I'll definitely be sharing your page along the way. Thank you, and keep writing!
Your exceptional ability to bring the reader into the conversation and help us relate, is why I look forward to every Saturday morning coffee read. Creating the aperture for thought and reflection. Love the relatability of Julia and the memes you chose :)