The Deborah Award

Thank you, Dear Ces!

*****

Some time ago I attended a tremendously powerful weekend personal development course - a positive, wonderful and life changing experience.  For one other participant it was altogether more challenging: the very start of a journey into her Self – into places that, in her efforts to fit in, please others, comply, she had for much of her life kept locked away.  During that weekend the floodgates opened.  I truly hope that weekend was the start of a journey that is taking her to a happier, more assertive, more authentic place.

On the final day this woman was talking about how people often put her and her ideas down.  In what I hoped was a helpful response I replied ‘But that’s about them, not you.  It’s about their values, their views, maybe even their fears.  You’ll never please everyone else.  So why not give yourself permission to focus on you, and what you need for yourself.’

I remember the look she gave me.  ‘It’s all right for you,’ the look said.  ‘You don’t have to deal with this.  You don’t care what other people think.  Maybe you don’t even notice!’

She couldn’t have been more wrong.  I notice every little look and every disapproving tone of voice.  And I have been subjected to more of them than I care to remember.  Opinions from people who thought they had a right to be heard regarding my life choices: people who believe what they think is right and what anyone else thinks is valid only if it fits in with their narrow views.  And since I often seem to think and feel differently from people around me I’ve long since come to the conclusion that decisions based on my own values (which I know to be good and honourable) and affecting only myself and my family are of no concern to anyone else.  I wonder, sometimes, that a person who barely knows me might think even for one second, that they have the right to try to persuade me that I should be living my life to suit them, and to vocalise their disapproval of me for not doing so.  But this is my life, and I cannot live it to make strangers happy.

You’re probably wondering what heinous things I do to get myself in people’s bad books.  Do I play loud music at 4am?  Deal in hard drugs?  Steal children?  No, I do not.  Let me give you some examples.  I have met with disapproval for continuing my professional work when I had pre-school children, at the same time incurring disdain from another set of people for being an ‘economically dependent’ woman.  In fact I was doing what felt right for me and my family: working freelance, largely from home, at a reasonably high professional level, but part time.  I have been accused of selfishness for leaving my ‘poor mother’ when moving to take up work in another part of the country (this by the office cleaner at my summer job after graduation); and it seems my decision not to change my surname on marriage continues to scandalise in some quarters.  Of course I have many more examples, but I won’t go on.  And I’m sure you can substitute some examples of your own.

So what does all this have to do with the Deborah Award?

When Ces created this award she wanted to honour the hope, courage and faith of Deborah, mother of a son serving in the armed forces.  Also honouring womanhood and friendship: ‘there is nothing more wondrous a blessing for anyone than for a friend who came and never left your side.’ 

It obviously says something about what’s going on for me that the word that leapt out of all that was courage.  Courage that comes in all guises.  I don’t know if I could summon the strength shown by families of serving soldiers, waiting back home, praying for the safe return of their loved ones.  I do know I haven’t the courage to jump from an aeroplane!  But I have eventually found the courage to ignore interfering, small-minded people, and live the life that’s meaningful for me.  So I notice those looks and I hear those comments.  And I ignore them.  I absolutely respect every person’s right to live their own life according to their own values, and expect to be afforded the same courtesy.  Getting to this position has taken, and continues to take, a good deal of courage and a great number of hard knocks.

The thing about courage is that it isn’t about lack of fear.  It’s about feeling the fear and doing it anyway.  And after a while that thing we feared will be second nature.  That’s when we look to take the next step.  For me, a life without keeping on taking those brave, meaningful little steps would be a life half lived.  So what should be my aim?  To please dissenting strangers?  Or try to live my life in the best possible way I know how?

In passing this on I’ve selected five bloggers whose stories, whether they be of coming to terms with tragic loss, or of self exploration and search for meaningful creative self expression, are shared with courage, generosity and sometimes with humour. 

To all of you, I give this award with no expectations that you’ll display it or pass it on.  Please don’t feel in any way obliged to do so.  And if you do decide to pass it on, you may prefer to focus on a different aspect of Ces’s Deborah Award.  Read all about it here. 

• Carol at Carol’s Little World
• Karen at Contemporary Embroidery
• Lis at Dandelion Seeds and Dreams
• Ines at Forward Tumble
• Scriber at Scriber’s Web

‘When you share your fears with me, your joys or brokenness, you give me a way to better understand my own. Your speaking is a mirror in which I find myself. That is the gift of our self-expression. When we give shape to our interior world, put words to it, offer it to others, we are offering more than the eye can see.’

Jan Phillips