Discover Your Wake-up Call

How a single, life-changing moment forced me to confront a promise from the past

This is how it started.

Or a more accurate way to put it, this is how a promise I’d made to myself in the past changed the course of my life.

Are you keeping the promise you’ve made to yourself?

The No. 1 regret of the dying: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

I came across that quote months after I was gut-kicked by a part of me I’d buried long before. A promise I’d made to myself burst out. Over the years, Reality had pushed it down the list of life priorities. Below putting food on the table. Getting my kids into a good school. Paying down debt.

Succumbing to the temptation to believe that my career was my identity.

I look back now with no regrets for putting those things first, including the failure of ego to ultimately bring worthiness. Each served a purpose. Until one day, like surging to the surface after holding my breath underwater, the first deep gasp of recall shocked the memory out of me.

It felt like a clarion call. A new choice.

At the pinnacle of a full, well-orchestrated, color-coordinated, occasional hair-on-fire routine, some wise (sneaky) part of me knew only a Big Jarring would get my attention. For my focus had been razor-honed to an entirely different direction for a very long time. It would take more than a nudge to get me to change course.

And to remember.

But when the door of memory cracked open, recall flung it wide open.

The Tale of How It All Began

Once upon a time a Girl made a promise.

She is a little blonde girl who loves to read books. When Mrs. Hamlin, her beloved school librarian leads Girl over to the bookstacks and pulls colorful worn books from the shelf, this Girl runs her fingers lovingly along their spines. “You’re such a book lover,” Mrs. Hamlin laughs with a pat on Girl’s shoulder, “You should write a book someday.” “Yes,” whispers Girl, hugging the books to her chest and blinking at the sudden warm feeling there.

“Someday I’ll write a book.”

Now Girl is a Teenager. She is in Advanced English classes in high school. She writes a short story about a teenage girl with torn pantyhose (torture device designed to make female legs sweat) and mismatched clothes and is the brunt of jokes. Yet, this is not autobiographical. Teenager’s clothes are nondescript neutrals. She obediently cultivates the be-good, stay-safe persona her parents taught her and so stays undercover, pleasant, hides in plain sight in the flood of bodies bolting down hallways between school bells. The character in Teenager’s short story is fictional, but for a while, as she wrote the story, she felt like she was her. Lonely, targeted. For it is only safe in the school’s “Student Editor” room (abandoned janitor closet) with other writing student friends where she cuts loose, tells jokes and opens up glimpses of who true Teenager is behind her adolescent insecurity.

Fast forward to college. Teenager is now metamorphosized into English Major. She wears the mantle like a light, fashionable, slightly dramatic cape above her flair jeans and platform shoes. Not the earnest cloak of erudite lit majors destined for grad school MFA programs. And even though English Major secretly wants to be intellectually cool like them, lit analysis makes her yawn and she’s grown impatient with masks (so naive!) and so artfully claims that she’s a lover of words and stories and poetry and theater and . . . ideas instead. “Someday I’ll write a book!” English Major frequently declares, dramatically. (Maybe a little too much?)

But upon graduation, the icy wallop of living on one’s own smacks English Major into a new cold identity: Third-string Scribbler. In her new job, she’s assigned to write employee benefit explanations and steel pipe distribution info sheets and articles explaining the manual assembly of teeny-tiny connections in circuit boards. She tries to include the people behind the topics (which helps), but still, it’s not enough. “Someday I will write a book,” she asserts, waving her chopsticks over budget-friendly Chinese food on the weekends with other Third-string twenty-somethings.

She is reassuring herself.

Third-string Scribbler becomes a Second-string Scribbler who becomes a Newsletter Rookie and then a Newsletter Maven and then a Research Newbie and then a Catalyst and then Alchemist while all along trading up from trendy retro mantles to posh capes and into indulgent cloaks, (alas, wearing high heels over these many years) until she is a Dynamo. Never mind that all that draping feels heavier. Stitched into the fabric are expectations and responsibilities pulled tight around her shoulders.

She can handle it.

That small promise. That “write a book” promise. It does not belong on Dynamo’s crowded agenda and working at 2 am and always, always fighting an overflowing Inbox fountain.

For her talk is peppered with memos and strategies and reports and metrics and findings and speeches and performance assessments and objectives. And all of this BTW is good. For its a school for critical thinking and leadership and being mentored/mentoring that develops into lovely friendships and sharing wonderful life moments with many talented and smart people. It is a very good place, though also a consuming place.

It eats up the years.

Until one day a joke kicks Dynamo in the gut.

Gut Check

She is with friends at lunch. They are kidding about what should be printed on their tombstones. “Finally! A meeting that ended on time!” and “No more PowerPoints!” They laugh, checking their watches (must get back in time for 1pm meetings) and go another round. This time Dynamo says, “There lies Joan, she always said she’d write a book, and she never did!”

Peals of laughter but oh! Ouch! Unnoticed, Dynamo doubles over, clutching her stomach. Something kicked right beneath the ribs.

She never wrote a book?

Not ever?

And suddenly, for good measure, the next crystal-clear thought slugs her gut again: Your book will never write itself.

I have a promise to keep.

Dynamo does not live happily ever after.

But Joan does.

My novel is Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh and will come out in April 2025. Soon! In the blink of an eye. I’m eager for you to read her story and see why her gumption has been a means for me to continue writing my own life story.

What an adventure this Promise is.

What’s yours?

Warmly,