Coming Out of My Shell

“Let go of your past, dwell not on your mistakes. If your playing small didn’t work out in the past, it most likely won’t work now. Release the fear, the anger, the troubles, the worries. They will only make you weak and unable to move ahead. Evaluate your life, discard what is not working. Shed your old skin and never look back.” ~ Asuni LadyZeal

“There is no passion to be found in playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” ~ Nelson Mandela

“Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.” ~ Carol Burnett

For years I kept my head down, trying to navigate the scary and hostile world. I did this because I’m a highly sensitive person and situations that were perfectly normal to most of my friends, affected me much more deeply. For example, I have a really hard time being in situations, or even consuming movies and books, where people are being personally belittled. If I’m in a store and a parent is yelling at their child, I cringe. I want to intervene. And yet, I hesitate. Is it my place to say something? It depends on the situation.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the years. If I stay connected to Divine Oneness, and I feel prompted to keep quiet, I do. If I blurt out something, which has happened to me several times, I know I’m supposed to say something. Speaking up in those situations has been a good thing. 

This desire to remain relatively invisible has affected other parts of my life as well. At almost every job I’ve ever had, I kept my head down and did my work. Often, I appeared to be doing what I was told, but sometimes I fudged it. In the early 2000s the principal at the high school where I was working gave us the directive to take cell phones from the students we saw using them in class. We were supposed to take the phones to the office where the parents would be called to authorize giving them back at the end of the day. Right or wrong, I thought that was a ludicrous rule. The flood gates were already open. Almost everyone had a cell phone, we weren’t going to stop students from using them. I thought the rule would alienate the students, not a good thing when working with teenagers. The one exception to the rule I thought was valid was when the students were testing. 

So, I made up my own rule. I told my students at the beginning of the year they had three strikes before I took away their phones. If I asked them to put their phone away three times, I’d take it and put it in a basket. They could have it at the end of class. I think the students appreciated being treated as if they could be responsible because I had very few problems with students abusing cell phone usage during class.

Recently I’ve been thinking about my habit of trying to remain virtually invisible. Over these last few years, I’ve begun to speak up more and more often. I started this blog because I have lots to say about what’s happening in my personal life, and in the world around us. Maybe that’s also why I created Story~Power. I have lots to say, but I’m also curious about how other people experience what’s going on around them. I feel the need to get new perspectives and challenge what I think about the way the world works. It’s uncomfortable sometimes to shake up my belief systems. Yet, I know from experience, doing so is vitally important if I want to grow.

I’m going to work at being more open about my life lessons from failures and successes. Hiding in my shell isn’t an option if I want to share my creative work.

Having written that, I’m exhausted and maybe it’s from spreading myself too thin. I can’t be everything to everyone. As I wrote last week, I’m ready to break free from teaching and put all my efforts into building a community of people who are creative and want to make the world a better place in which to live. Creating something new happens one little step at a time. I have to be okay with that for now.

Welcome to my new followers. I hope you’ll share your wisdom with us.

Blessings,

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2021

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.

Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.

Lucinda is also the host of Story-Power a new podcast where she and her guests discuss the stories in all formats that have changed their lives. It’s available here on Sage Woman Chronicles and on Apple, Google, and Spotify podcast apps. Please rate and leave a review. It helps people find me.