Mission statement
29 September 2011 02:26 PM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral | Facing fears
I have to write a mission statement for my marriage and family therapy graduate school application, something that should be no more than five typed pages and autobiographical in nature. So welcome to my new occasional series, Things I will Probably Not Put On My Graduate School Mission Statement, though this does help me think through the process.
I make lists of things I don’t want to regret, bottle up emotions to savor when I am alone. I am almost always alone. I engrave those I once loved into my core, I take what was essential between us and store it up for old age or loneliness, for the times when reality does not suffice. I try to take on the perspective of the other.
Bravery is doing something even when it frightens you. On Wednesday morning, I drove around and around a parking lot with an instructor. I drove with confidence. I turned right and right and right and then left and left and left. We ventured out and I drove from one parking lot to another. The instructor and I talked about the career she left behind, about kids and elderly drivers, as I maneuvered the car.
Was I scared? Kind of. But what really scares me is getting out into traffic and doing it again and again even while I am scared. Slowly, that’s the way to go. I need to use just enough imagination to feign confidence (versus imagining the worst of it, me paralyzed at the wheel, the panic, the crush of metal, the destruction). I need to gather my courage for the real test. I need to see myself in the distant moment, project into the future, the all-grown-up me at the wheel. The confident me speaking up in class. The capable me creating a whole new life despite my fears.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave.
If I told you that’s why I am here, out of some sort of personal journey (the lousy childhood, the adult revelations, the beauty of fucked up me), would that get me in? Do I tell you a different version of the story, me the daughter of a plucky single mom, the lean years of no car and no money, the thinning of familial relationships, the thickening of barriers? Oh, yes, I survived it all intact, I was cunning and hidden and then had to undo the structure, take down the heavy blinds, unleash my needy heart.
How do I spin this past into getting-into-graduate school gold? Sure, from the outside I look like a well-off middle-aged white lady, not a care in the world, but can I tell you about the lonely trembling in empty rooms, the beratings at long-cleared dinner tables, the time it has taken me to feel almost at home in my skin?
The past wearies me. We’ve danced together long enough, though the facts stand. And I still stand before them. We will always be connected, though the connection may be frayed. If I have to conjure it up to explain why I am here, I will, but that isn’t the whole of me or of my reasons for applying.
I want to take what I know through experience and struggle to help other people. I want to help children, the most helpless of all, trapped and marked by adult circumstances. I can’t separate myself from the emotion this brings up in me because I can’t separate myself from my emotions. I will use my experience and this deep reservoir of feeling to assist others. I used to think my childhood and my emotions were handicaps, that I had to separate myself from them in order to live properly in the world. But now I see that they are essential, that they give me strength when I allow them to exist without indulging their more florid characteristics. I can harness them for good and tame them when they threaten to take over my perception.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave. To help those who are helpless. To not let my past and emotions overwhelm me, but to accept them. Experience provides knowledge, emotion supplies fire and tears. Sometimes both are necessary, the past plus the upwelling of love and anger within.
I make lists of things I don’t want to regret, bottle up emotions to savor when I am alone. I am almost always alone. I engrave those I once loved into my core, I take what was essential between us and store it up for old age or loneliness, for the times when reality does not suffice. I try to take on the perspective of the other.
Bravery is doing something even when it frightens you. On Wednesday morning, I drove around and around a parking lot with an instructor. I drove with confidence. I turned right and right and right and then left and left and left. We ventured out and I drove from one parking lot to another. The instructor and I talked about the career she left behind, about kids and elderly drivers, as I maneuvered the car.
Was I scared? Kind of. But what really scares me is getting out into traffic and doing it again and again even while I am scared. Slowly, that’s the way to go. I need to use just enough imagination to feign confidence (versus imagining the worst of it, me paralyzed at the wheel, the panic, the crush of metal, the destruction). I need to gather my courage for the real test. I need to see myself in the distant moment, project into the future, the all-grown-up me at the wheel. The confident me speaking up in class. The capable me creating a whole new life despite my fears.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave.
If I told you that’s why I am here, out of some sort of personal journey (the lousy childhood, the adult revelations, the beauty of fucked up me), would that get me in? Do I tell you a different version of the story, me the daughter of a plucky single mom, the lean years of no car and no money, the thinning of familial relationships, the thickening of barriers? Oh, yes, I survived it all intact, I was cunning and hidden and then had to undo the structure, take down the heavy blinds, unleash my needy heart.
How do I spin this past into getting-into-graduate school gold? Sure, from the outside I look like a well-off middle-aged white lady, not a care in the world, but can I tell you about the lonely trembling in empty rooms, the beratings at long-cleared dinner tables, the time it has taken me to feel almost at home in my skin?
The past wearies me. We’ve danced together long enough, though the facts stand. And I still stand before them. We will always be connected, though the connection may be frayed. If I have to conjure it up to explain why I am here, I will, but that isn’t the whole of me or of my reasons for applying.
I want to take what I know through experience and struggle to help other people. I want to help children, the most helpless of all, trapped and marked by adult circumstances. I can’t separate myself from the emotion this brings up in me because I can’t separate myself from my emotions. I will use my experience and this deep reservoir of feeling to assist others. I used to think my childhood and my emotions were handicaps, that I had to separate myself from them in order to live properly in the world. But now I see that they are essential, that they give me strength when I allow them to exist without indulging their more florid characteristics. I can harness them for good and tame them when they threaten to take over my perception.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave. To help those who are helpless. To not let my past and emotions overwhelm me, but to accept them. Experience provides knowledge, emotion supplies fire and tears. Sometimes both are necessary, the past plus the upwelling of love and anger within.
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