The stories we tell ourselves
I’m lucky enough to be in a stage of life where people sometimes pay to hear me speak.
It’s not often, mind you, and one day I’m going to have to ask my friend Steve (the one Julie and I kidnapped) how to get better at it.
But it happens. Sometimes friends say to their employer, “Hey, you should have Keely speak at this event and you should pay her.”
I’m lucky to have good friends.
And, if we’re not doing the false modesty thing, I’m also lucky to be good at speaking. My number one gift in my Human Design chart is “magnetic charisma” and I do well on stages. One college student switched majors after hearing about the charity I started to create jobs for women in recovery who are re-entering the workforce. Another tearfully told an advisor, “I didn’t know that you could be a normal person and do the things Keely’s done. I thought you had to go to an Ivy League school to do things like that.” (If memory serves, in that talk I shared about asking a Pittsburgh police officer if I could pretty please just leave jail for a few hours because I had to take a final. I’d come back, scouts honor.)
But, the single best talk I’ve ever given in my entire life wasn’t paid. It was at a recovery meeting in 2015. A friend had asked me to speak at a treatment center and I happily obliged.
In it, I started with a sob story. “I’m 4 years sober,” I said, “And the last few weeks have been rough. I just lost my job. I tried to buy myself lunch the other day and my debit card was declined for lack of funds. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. And there’s a lot of uncertainty in my life right now.”
Then I told the group, “I could easily look at my life this way. I could easily look at these things that have gone wrong recently and feel pretty darn sorry for myself.”
“Or,” I continued, “I could look at it this way.”
“Six months ago, I had the opportunity to move to Thailand to take a Director of Marketing role. A director role! Me! A woman who had to drop out of college in order to go to rehab.”
“When I moved over here, my boyfriend flew with me, stayed for two days, then flew back to the US. Not because he wanted to eat pad thai, but because he cherishes me and our relationship. He wanted to make sure I was safely settled, so he flew twenty hours here, then twenty hours back, in order to spend 48 hours getting me set up for this exciting chapter of my life.”
“My mom, who hated my guts in the worst years of my addiction, CRIED when I left. She cried! She was sad to see me leave because, thanks to my recovery, our relationship has become something we both value.”
“And that debit card getting declined thing? It was at the London airport. After losing my job (working at a startup is risky), I flew home to spend Sam’s birthday with him, then came back to Thailand to close out this amazing adventure. My card got declined because I’m now the kind of adult who has money automatically pulled from her checking account to go into investment accounts. Me! I do that! I used to have to choose between eating or paying rent and now I just have money automatically pulled from one account to another so that I can retire one day. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn it off when my paychecks stopped coming, so there was a momentary shortage of funds.”
“And,” I concluded, “With my whole heart, I believe the difference in how I can tell those two stories is what makes or breaks my recovery. I’m not the victim of my circumstances. I’m someone who used to actively drink herself to death. I had liver issues and my memory was going and I was pretty sure that I was going to commit suicide in a blackout one night if I didn’t get things sorted…and today? Today I do things like land my dream job four years into recovery, and have the chance to move to Thailand with the support of the boyfriend who I love. I have a really solid relationship with my family. I can pay my bills. I have an amazing circle of friends. And I get to do things like sit here with you and share what I’ve learned about being in recovery.”
It was easily one of the best moments of my life. I remember returning to Thailand years later and having someone say, “I remember you. You spoke at my treatment center. Powerful story.”
I’m writing about it today because of something I shared yesterday. In my “celebrating a win” post, I wrote with unmitigated joy that 82 people had given me permission to email them each morning (and, that same day, 4 more people signed up!). Past Keely, the one who hated life and felt like getting out of bed each morning was a horribly punishing chore…she never would have celebrated an 86-person email list.
She wouldn’t have told you a number until it was in the thousands.
But this Keely? The one who feels like she’s living the luckiest lifetime ever? She knows that her list could stay at 86 people for the next five decades and she would feel oh-so-very-lucky to have even one person who cares what she has to say.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or because the thousands of hours in therapy and recovery rooms have paid off or because of my spiritual beliefs or because of shamanic retreats or because of 472,865 other possible variables…
But I’ve become the kind of person whose happiness doesn’t feel linked to external metrics. And, back when I thought that happiness came from earning a few hundred thousand dollars a year and wearing size 0 pants, I couldn’t have fathomed having the inner peace I have now.
So this is a musing to reflect on the stories we tell ourselves. A musing to say that perspective matters a lot. A lot, a lot.
Wishing us all radiant inner peace and abundant happiness,
Keely
