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deletedFeb 6, 2023Liked by Carrie Newcomer
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Moments of truth and wisdom I’ll keep. Great hour well spent.

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Feb 5, 2023Liked by Carrie Newcomer

I loved this. As one who has often struggled with my story, and the past, it cleared up for me the notion that there is any need at all to rewrite that story! It is fine and acceptable right where it is. No excuses, no lies, just the growth we all experience through life as stories unfold.

Thank you so much! ❤️

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Thank you both 🙏💛

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I struggle with the idea of the first part of Frost's answer in the David Ray poem. I suppose I've learned to accept what has happened in my past because it happened, and I can't change that. But I'm still not sure it will "turn out to have been al right for what it was," for what it was something I could not reconcile for 50 years, until I was told something that changed how I understood what has been the primary formative episode in my life.

When I was five, my parents divorced, and I never saw my father again. Years later, when I asked my mother why he left, she simply said that he could not handle having a family. So I blamed myself for some 50 years. In my 50s, an aunt told me that my mother basically kicked my father out for what my aunt said was an attraction to underage girls. I don't know if that was true, but it made a sense that allowed me to somewhat accept what happened all those years ago.

But there is an anger or perhaps a bit of a resentment that the path of my life was directed and shaped by what seems to have turned out to be a lie. At some level, I understand that my mother did what she thought was best, but I sometimes wonder what direction my life would have taken and how I would have better survived my childhood (a story for another day) if she had told me the truth. The albatross turned out to be very heavy indeed.

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Your conversation and the Frost poem reminded me of a time when I was in my 20s. I had decided to go to film school in upper New York state. This was a bold step for me. My mother as well as other members of my family were totally against me following film as a vocation, much less going to a film school hundreds of miles away. My time at the university involved hardships with the school and in relationships, including a marriage and subsequent divorce. After four years, I came back home viewing my time away as a failure, a perspective my family reinforced. They saw this exploit of mine as falling away from the path of Catholic righteousness and into sin. However, over the following years, I reframed this exploit not as a failure but as a triumph, partly because of the hardships. These difficulties enriched my life and continue to do so both in relationships and as a writer. So reframing can be a powerful tool.

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February 1, on a long drive from Michigan to Minnesota. The Growing Edge podcast in hand, listening "Hope, even for the past". As if years of grime suddenly fell away, hope for the past reframing what has been fixed in shame, regret and pain, into a lightness of spirit. It is as if I have received the maintenance manual to caring for Harold, and the albatrosses that I have carried have been set down. My soul has been touched, Carrie and Parker, my soul has been touched.

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