What are you Leaving Behind?

When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher Mrs. Morgan asked us all to write one short story per week for six weeks.  Although I was a straight-A student and enjoyed school immensely, I knew my mother enjoyed writing children’s stories and took this as an opportunity to see if she would want to “help me out”.  You can imagine my surprise when she agreed.  She NEVER condoned cheating or doing my homework, but I believed she enjoyed writing so much, she went against her better judgment and wanted the challenge.  After submitting the first week’s assignment, Mrs. Morgan gave each of us back our stories and told the entire class that my story was the best – she even read it to the class.  Everyone applauded at the end and I felt no guilt, just pride that my mother had written something so fabulous.  That evening, I told my mother about everyone’s reaction and she just smiled serenely.  She continued to write a different story each week and Mrs. Morgan continued to read them aloud to the class.  At the end of the week, Mrs. Morgan pulled me aside and told me that I was going to be a great writer one day.

I never wanted to be a writer and never thought of myself as a creative person.  I continued to do well in school and college and wrote all of my papers.  I even managed to become a somewhat successful grant writer, but still never thought of myself as a great writer – just decent.  However, about five years into my first job out of college, I had a new supervisor.  I knew she didn’t like me very well.  I never knew why, but believed she felt threatened by me.  Any and every document that I had to create, she would mark up with a red pen and write statements that said it was “horribly written” or the “worst thing she had ever read”.  This became a daily ritual with her for the next year until I finally quit.  However, the damage was done.  Although I had been successful in being awarded every grant I had written, I knew inside that it was a fluke.  I told myself that I received those grants because I had built relationships, not because I was a good writer.  It continued in my future jobs – before people would ask, I would tell them that I was a horrible writer.  I made sure people double and triple-checked my work because after all, I was a horrible writer.

Then something odd happened.  When I was in graduate school, all of my professors told me that I was a great writer.  It shocked me.  Me?  A great writer?  They must be mistaken.  Everyone knew I wasn’t a great writer – I’ve been told my whole life.  But had I?  When I wrote my capstone, my advisor sat down with me and told me that it was one of the best written first drafts she had ever read.  She told me that inevitably, she had all of her students rewrite their capstone because the first draft was never good enough to submit.  She told me mine was good enough to submit.  I remember looking at her as if she had sprouted two heads.  Could it be that I was wrong all of these years?

From that day on, something changed inside me.  I don’t know if I actually became a better writer, but I didn’t automatically think that I wasn’t.  That was huge!  For 20 years I believed, and encouraged, a narrative about myself because one person said it.  No one else after that time ever said that I was a bad writer, even when I said it first, no one agreed with me.  I began thinking about what I could have done in those 20 years if I had known I wasn’t a bad writer.  Would I have had different jobs? Different dreams?  Would the confidence of knowing that I was a good writer give me the confidence to pursue other things?  I will never know…because I chose to believe what one person said about me.  And if I was a bad writer, why didn’t I try to get better?  Or maybe I did get better by continually writing but I just didn’t believe in myself anymore.  I continued to write and receive grants – big grants – in all of my jobs following my first one.  But I never thought it was because of my writing.  I told myself all of the “other” reasons we were awarded the grant.

Why is it so easy for us to believe the negative things about ourselves?  We can hear hundreds of positive remarks about ourselves and forget them in an instant but remember that one negative for the rest of our life.  Who does it serve by us not living our true selves with all of the gifts and talents God gave us?  What talent have you left behind?  What gift have you not shared with the world because someone said something negative to you about it?  Maybe that someone was yourself.  By not living to your full potential, you not only hurt yourself, but you hurt those who could benefit from your gift.  God created us with a multitude of gifts, talents, and skills, and in order to become our true, authentic selves, we must rise and stand proud of who we are and know that we have something to offer the world.  Something so beautiful and unique that even if we don’t see it in ourselves, we still must share it in order to become whole.

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