H. Hsu Word Salad

Went to a fab journal therapy workshop, and this is a poem they sent over, which I love.

In my line of work, one can’t help but notice how people trap themselves in the stories they tell themselves (narrative therapy, anyone?), and how they repeatedly cast themselves or others in the same, confining, tired, limited - but familiar roles.

Or get rid of one villain/addiction/habit, only to bring in another version of the same.

People fear being destroyed by new choices and risks.

Meanwhile digging their own graves of denial.

Look, I’m a bit of a control freak too-but I realized:

Almost everything worthy in my life was actually unplanned. 

I just had to be open to what surprised me around the pike. 

Had to stop clinging to what I originally had scheduled for myself.

And thus wound up with the most amazing cast of friends, & experiences all around our world….which I never could have imagined, which would have scared me to death or seemed nonsensical back when I was in Taipei, or Cupertino, Alameda, or even L.A. (most recent L.A. trip shall be fodder for the next blog)

The New Story of Your Life

Say you finally invented a new story

of your life. 

It is not the story of your defeat

or of your impotence and powerlessness

before the large forces of wind and accident.

It is not the sad story of your mother’s death

or of your abandoned childhood. 

It is not even a story that will win you the deep

initial sympathies of the benevolent gods

or the care of the generous, but it is a story

that requires of you a large thrust

into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude

entirely your own. 

Whatever the story is,

it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes

in it, gardens that need to be planted,

skills sown, the long hard labors

of prose and enduring love. 

Deep down

in some long-encumbered self,

it is the story you have been writing

all of your life, where no Calypso holds you

against your own willfulness,

where you can rise

from the bleak island of your old story

and tread your way home.

                        Michael Blumenthal 

Copyrighted material used for educational and/or therapeutic purposes. 

Compliments of The Center for Journal Therapy Inc., 888-421-2298, www.journaltherapy.com

Healing body, psyche, soul through writing