On depression as a necessary winter before the spring…

suicide placardImagine if we, as a culture, could embrace depression. Imagine that in any life cycle there are, as in nature, seasons. Depression does not always have to be viewed as pathology.

The industrial age introduced clocks, the digital age upped 9-5 to 24/7.

We are not meant to operate outside of the natural order of things. Riotous springs are followed by productive summers. In fall, as energy wanes we’re motivated to prepare for winter and muster the energy to get things done. In winter we accept that little grows, days are short and if we give over to the darkness and rest, we’ll recharge.

I’ve learned from the creative people around me, as well as my own experience, that a depression is a terrible thing to waste. We will emerge from them. When we do, we can allow for the riotously creative personal spring that follows. It will be there when were ready to embrace life again.

To every season there is a time and a purpose.

Accept the winters. And please keep faith, your personal spring will follow.

 

Courtesy GardeningAtTheEdge.wordpress.com

Courtesy GardeningAtTheEdge.wordpress.com

See also: The Rose, Bette Middler’s timeless hit.

“Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows,
lies the seed that with the sun’s love in the Spring becomes the rose.”

Reframe your understanding of it. Imagine it as a love song for yourself.

Seasonal Affective Disorder” (SAD), is also predictable and seasonal, but the above reflection is on the experience of major depression.




Welcome

This blog is a relaunch of one that I started in 2009 in support of an enthusiastic mid-life relocation to Ireland while embarking on the path of a reluctant entrepreneur.

Reluctant because in 2008/09 there were few other choices – and because the gods have a sense of humour. I began training for the work I do now during the great recession of the early eighties when career development work was ‘teaching entrepreneurship’. I’d never expected to be taking my own advice – thirty years later.

You can learn more about my ongoing work, find out about our courses and workshops, and join the conversation at Empowering-Change.com.

Why have a separate blog?

The change I encourage there is an invitation to repair and restore your own sense of self and to bring those lessons and habits into an effort to repair and restore your world.

Globally we’ve seen a post-pandemic shift. There’s less of a call to return to normal than there is a demand for a new normal. One that is focused on the environment, wealth inequality, the millions displaced by climate and conflict – in short the needs of the many over the tyranny of a power elite.

What you’ll read about here are reflections by and about empowered citizens and servant leaders.

My story, other people’s stories, observations about Ireland and Northern Ireland from the lens of this blow-in perpetually frustrated that so many of my neighbours can’t see the possibility and potential of a prosperous future on this island.

More importantly through the lenses of native changemakers who believe that were we to embrace diversity, demand transparency and accountability, and excellence from both taxing authorities things would improve economically, politically and socially.

When we’re less angry about the failures of systems and leadership we can begin to concern ourselves -with a shared future to benefit every citizen rather than fear monger over a need to share an identity or nationhood.

A Culture of Recovery

In a 2012 TEDx talk I related the experience of being shamed by a butcher because my order was not to his liking. Oh, I pushed back, got what I wanted and I do business with his shop this day.

At the time I could often be heard suggesting that what the island needed was its own 12-step program – rooms in which I had learned to unapologetically assert my position and invite further conversation.

The lessons of recovery are developmental and universal.

Well-reared children in all cultures come of age with the skill to live at peace with themselves.

They move from dependent infants to terrible toddlers, to determined and rebellious teens. Through the course of adulthood, they evolve into confident, consensus-seeking adults who negotiate calmly, personally and professionally, to establish their place in the world.

Sadly, most of us don’t experience this ideal and uninterrupted progression. We reach adulthood struggling with dis-ease or discontent.

At best, we wish we were happier at work or at home, at worst we self medicate our dis-ease with substances or behaviours to numb it.

Thankfully if motivated by our discontent, we can all choose change.

Catalysing Conversations & Connections

If you can see it, you can be it.

The first time I heard that it was powerfully uttered by Irish Senator Lynne Ruane.

The occasion was an event convened to honour the memory of a young Irish mother who succumbed to the despair of homelessness – the legacy of an economic recovery that focused on preserving the wealth of a few over the needs of women, children and families.

Notably in direct contravention of the one of the founding principles of the Republic.

Her own story – and book – People Like Me gave voice to the experience of being marginalised – and it gave me hope that a generation of truth tellers was emerging here.

“Few voices ring out as clearly as those who have long been oppressed or silenced. In her heartfelt memoir People Like Me, author Lynn Ruane tells the gripping story of her working-class Dublin life, the kind of life that rarely gets a hearing elsewhere and so she does it with the kind of detail those who have been waiting years to speak up bring to a written work.”–Irish Voice

Her story powerfully illustrates that witnessing our personal stories of change is where societal change begins.

I have been privileged to know changemakers on both sides of the Irish border – and there is power in connecting them with constituencies that can amplify their messages.

We don’t know what we don’t know

It’s an invitation to become curious.

However, a post-conflict society requires more than an invitation.

What’s needed is the kind of relationship building that introduces the safe space that gives over to brave space where trust and compassion can overcome the wilful blindness wrought by generations of the wilfully blind leading the wilfully blind.

Empowering Changemakers

I’m convinced that you can’t teach or evangelise about excellent leadership – but you can witness and celebrate it.

If you recognize the dysfunction of our social, economic and political systems rooted in the dis-ease of our leadership, then we must share the stories to inspire and empower each other to challenge that leadership.

That is the call to “servant leadership”.

And please – email eve@eveearley.com to share your stories.




Creating Community; the Family We Choose

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If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not be one cheerful face on earth.

Abraham Lincoln

This timely reading from a book of daily meditations was followed by: “If Lincoln could achieve all that he did feeling such depression, can I not bear feeling down in the dumps occasionally without being driven to the insanity of….?” fill in the blank with whatever your personal demon, overeating, drinking, gambling; workaholism, irritability, controlling, fits of rage…

Thursday night I broke bread with fifteen friends and colleagues – a summer social barbecue, to wind down another year of breakfast meetings for a small cross border business group in the Northeast of Ireland.

These fifteen are among the most positive of about 25 who meet from time to time during the year.  Monthly, in fact, at 7 am for a networking breakfast in either Dundalk (County Louth, Ireland) or Newry (County Down, Northern Ireland).  There is much for this group to be pessimistic about. The economy is faltering, we are sole practioners or small business owners – many of whom started new businesses following career setbacks and redundancies. All of us struggle to live and work a “new way”.  Many thought they would be in corporate jobs, large professional practices or civil service until they retired.

What we have in common is that we wake up every morning, put one foot in front of the other and just do the work of doing the work.

I am grateful they embraced me warmly and shared their knowledge  – experience, strength and hope – when I came to Ireland two years ago.  They have carried me through low times, and I hope I have done the same for some of them.  The shared commonality of our experience is what has sustained us as a group. We celebrate each others’ successes and mourn and learn from the losses.  We encourage, coach and cajole. You cannot help leaving a meeting on a positive note.  I have gone to meetings while in the depths of personal and professional loss and I have been uplifted – either by someone’s success or the knowledge that they too have come through what I am now experiencing.  I am never alone. In the sentiment of Lincoln’s quote – whatever the emotion it becomes “equally distributed to the (this) whole human family”.

Who are your fellow travelers? What human family are you choosing to embrace? Who brings the light of sunshine or optimism to your day? What I was reminded of that evening was that this was no accident. There are days when I think how lucky I am to be part of this group – and then I remember: I went looking for them, I go to meetings on dark, cold and wet winter mornings and I just keep showing up. So do they.

Choose to find a home among like minded folk, a family of choice – a new tribe. Not sure where to start? Pick up a copy of the Artist’s Way it will embolden you, find a 12 Step group, go to a Toastmaster’s meeting, try a business or social networking group, take a class, go to a house of worship you’ve abandoned or try a new one.

Or write me.

Just stretch – a little. Take a step outside of your comfort zone.  You will undoubtedly be rewarded.




Grown Up & Choosing Life

A gift of the discipline adopted from The Artist’s Way is the #MorningPages. Three pages written in the fugue state between dreaming and waking when we are most in touch with our wisdom. Wisdom un-soured by intellect. Our human being absent our human thinking and doing.

I am often astounded by what lies written on the page before me. Today, in the midst of a tumultuous period I ended with:

Buoyantly and consistently hopeful for the first time in my life. Not in the way of Jennie’s “when you grow up”…then again, was she right?

To explain, Jennie was the loving grandmother who would swoop into the chaos of my childhood and assure me that everything would be all right “when you grow up”.

I often remark that I learned none of the codependent behaviours learned by children of alcoholics, developmentally – over time and experience as an adaptive response.  I learned them at her knee – the express course. By the time I was five she’d taught me everything I had to know –she’d learned it by 1890 in the chaos of her own abusive and alcoholic childhood home.

She taught me to keep my head down, pretend everything was fine, foster the illusion of a “normal” family for the outside world, deny my feelings and be a parent to myself – and my younger brother. If I did all that perfectly well enough to keep tempers calm (because children really believe everything is within their power to control) I would grow up to leave home and be happy.

What I suspected in the thirty five years between leaving home and now, was that she meant well but that she’d missed the mark.  Because really, everything wasn’t “all right”.

Everything was what you would expect from the life of a child turned adult who brought to the world a wounded, un-parented self, unrealistic expectations that she could continue to “create the illusion of a normal family”, and on a mission to recover, besieged by the “two steps forward and one step back” that comes with the territory.

There were moments of blissful joy, dark despair, celebrated life cycles, achievements, depression, calm and cycles of more of the same. More dark than light.

The most significant “ah ha” moment in my recovery was in my mid thirties while mothering three young children with the wildly hectic and erratic schedules of suburban America. They had school, sports, ballet, figure skating, and religious school, play dates etc. The youngest rarely had a midweek nap anywhere but the back of a station wagon. I’d raced home between carpools to unload groceries from a mad shopping run.  With a sleeping child in the garaged car I was tearing through bags to unload the perishables.

SPLAT went a container of yogurt all over the kitchen floor. It smeared up and down the chairs, the fridge, the wallpaper – in short, beyond a mess.

And I lost it. I broke down into the keening, crying wail of someone who has lost everything. And I had.

Three decades of unshed tears, unacknowledged pain and sheer grief welled up in me. The floodgate I’d used to hold them back was gone. I heaved and cried and rocked on that floor for a long time. My cry was the hiccupping cry of a child. “I don’t want to be a grown-up” were the choked words through the tears.

What I knew in moment was that if I didn’t clean it up, no one else would. And I understood in a core way that I did not want to be a grown up when I was 5, 15, or 35. For just a while, I wanted to be taken care of – a well parented child.

Recovery for me has been that. Reparenting myself a day at a time. Trying to be gentle and to silence the critical voice that sabotages my efforts from the mundane of housework (Really, ?!  that floor looks clean enough to you?), to my appearance (Really, ?! that’s the best you can do with…..), to my work (Really, ?! that was your idea of “well prepared”).

Some days now I never hear it. Some days there is still a faint echo. But I wake every day knowing it will take discipline and the skills I have learned to keep it silenced.

It has been quieted enough and I have been rewarded with many more moments of joy in these last 10 years than the 40 before. I have been empowered to change my life significantly and I have been happier than I ever imagined being.

Still there has been a nagging, sabotaging little girl who really does not want to be a grown up.

And two days ago, for the first time in my life when I was called upon to take care of that little girl, to put her, and me, first I made that choice for her.

It was not without pain and even frankly, the resentment that would at times arise when I’d chose other’s needs and priorities over my own. There was, however, the loving resignation that there really was no other choice.

So really, Jennie Muscara, you were right. The day after I did, finally and fully decide to be a grown-up parent to my needy little girl, everything really was all right.

I am buoyantly and consistently hopeful.