Meeting challenges always helps define us. We either succeed or succumb; but either way they define us. When I first started to write this I had a romantic notion of creating a myth of who I am, of supporting the notion of the ‘who’ that I willingly present to the world, but this is about meeting challenges, of inner strength and awareness.
I can't really remember when I first decided that being somebody else was preferable to being myself. Some of my earliest memories revolve around telling tales to anybody who would listen, or even just to myself. But somewhere along the line I decided that being myself just wasn't "good" enough to cut it.
I’m fairly successful by most standards. I’ve traveled the world and even lived in several different countries. I’m lucky enough to have a career I enjoy that has supported a great lifestyle. But even with all the material support that one could want, there always seemed to be something missing.
It would be wonderful to simply point a finger and say, “that’s the cause”, after all children are supposed to be clean slates without hidden insecurities. But I can’t find a convenient scapegoat to point at. My father was largely a missing feature in my early years due to workloads and career building, but I have many warm memories of when he was home. Yes I grew up in a family of exacting standards, but they were tempered with the warmth of love and acceptance. In this case, I think I was just one of those children who was extremely sensitive to her environment – every small slight took on major significance. Every frown became a condemnation.
The patterns of a lifetime develop step-by-step. If I were not ‘good’ enough, then I would become someone else. As a child I would simply retreat into a world of my own imagination. In later years I would physically travel to different places where I could become someone new… someone exciting. It sounds like the perfect profile for a budding young actor and in effect I did become an actor… in my own life story. The pattern of not facing problems, of metamorphosing into a new identity every few years, developed early. By the time I finished highschool I had perfected the art of hiding from myself. University gave me an even bigger stage to work on and graduation gave me the world at large. Through all of it I fought constant self-recrimination because I knew I wasn’t being honest. I knew the image on the outside did not match the scared little girl on the inside.
After graduation I sought out a life that would allow me to perpetuate my hidden agenda. I chose to live overseas, finding new stages in a variety of different countries. Moving from place to place is not difficult if you’ve perfected the art of fitting in. Moving also gives you the chance to hide because you’re always meeting new people and experiencing exciting new challenges. Staying within one country and moving from city to city would have served the same purpose, but moving from country to country was more exotic and fit the fantasy a whole lot better. Funny, but it was coming home that proved the greatest challenge and ultimately provided the greatest benefit.
In 1992 I returned to Canada after almost ten years overseas. At the height of the 90s recession, my timing could have been better, but the reality of economic hardship helped lead me to a time of personal triumph. In all of my travels I had never been without work or friendship. In moving to Toronto I encountered a town in crisis. Work was impossible to find. I was isolated socially and financially I was vulnerable. I finally didn’t have a place to hide. And yet out of this fragile time came one of my greatest triumphs.
It had never occurred to me that I would have any difficulty adjusting to life in my own country, after all I had adjusted to life in Australia, Indonesia and Mexico. But Toronto in the early 90s was different. This was a town that had flown high in the 80s and crashed in the 90s. Thousands of people were unemployed, businesses were failing and the property market had crashed. Instead of finding a quick position in my chosen career of advertising, I had to expand my horizons. I was facing challenges daily, but perhaps the hardest was the isolation.
We all have our gifts. My whole life I had relied on my intelligence, whether it was in my imagination or my analytical ability. Because I have always found intellectual pursuits relatively easy, an intellectual challenge really didn’t seem to be much of a contest. But athletic, I am not. I was always the last one to be picked for a team in school. Gym class was something to be endured, not enjoyed and the fitness movement of the early 80s pretty much passed me by. In fact my idea of a heavy workout was a night of dancing at a local club. So it’s easy to see why any challenge that involved the physical was truly a challenge indeed.
In the summer of 1992, after four months of isolation in a new town, I grabbed at the chance to participate in a charity event that would give me contact with new friends. So what if it meant I would be cycling over 1,400 kilometers. How hard can it be to ride a bike? I found out and in finding out also found something to be really proud of.
The event drew people from all over southwestern Ontario and Quebec. We cycled from Quebec City to Toronto via Montreal, Ottawa and Kingston and along the way I dug deep to find a core of strength I never knew I had. Each day we rode over 100 kilometers. To the uninitiated, that sounds like an impossible challenge in itself. The first thing I learned was not to face the task in its entirety. Instead break it down into doable segments. For me, this meant thinking in terms of just five kilometers to the next break. I took a lot of breaks. I was the last one in every night. And everyday I vowed this was not the sport for me. But by the end of the trip I knew there was nothing I couldn’t do if I really wanted to. By getting on that bicycle every day no matter how much it hurt, or how easy it would have been to stop, I had found something admirable in myself. I was seeing for the first time, what friends around the world had seen all along.
Since that summer in 1992 I have met a lot of challenges head on. I have continued to ride my bicycle. I even participate in other sports. I still don’t like working out at a gym and probably never will, but I call myself athletic now. By facing a challenge head on and seeing it through to the end I broke the cycle of lifetime habits. By finding a core of strength in myself, I was able to face so many other insecurities, to draw them out into the light of day and see them for the foolishness they were.
We are all flawed and we all have challenges to face, but by seeing them through we find the strength to face the next one and the one after that. Finding your challenge is not difficult, seeing it through is the challenge. For me, rewards that came easily were not rewards at all. I needed to face an insurmountable challenge and beat it. It was not the athletic challenge that counted, it was seeing something through to its conclusion. It was sticking with a difficult situation and not running away. That had been what the little girl had done. She had run away, felt shame in the running and then covered up the problem with exciting stories and exotic places.
My final metamorphous did not happen over night, it’s an ongoing exercise, but I’m not hiding from myself any more. I like the role of me a whole lot more than any of the perfect characters I had tried to play. I make mistakes, but they the world does not end. Each day I grow and I like the person I’m growing into.
