How I found the secret to my sanity

I was asked to speak at a Mental Health Week event at the Makati Medical.  Here are excerpts from my speech.

Thank you very much for inviting me to this Mental Health Week.  For most of my early life — until I was in my 40s — people tended to dismiss me as somewhat crazy because I was not a great observer of rules.  Rules like a woman must never have a life of her own.  What kind of thinking is that?  Women are as good as men.  They have as much power as men. 

When I was in my 20s I discovered that the country’s rules did not favor women, did not look at them as equal to men.  The church’s laws were the same, even more rigid.  Early in my life I decided to straighten that out on my own in my own life.

I got married at 18, very young and extremely stupid.  After many years, three daughters and a lot of grief, I decided to go back home to mother.  Then I got a job.  I worked in advertising, which means many hours of hard work but I stuck to it while my mother helped with my children. I got older then thought maybe it would be better for me if I did not marry again, if I just lived with a man.

So I did and had a son.  This was in the early ‘70s.  It seemed like nobody else was doing it back then.  I played the happy housewife for a few years until I found out about his many other women.  That spelled the end of us.  I worked again and realized that I valued freedom more than anything in my life. 

Now I am 69.  I think it is time to share.  I learned in my 50s that the 20s are our years of experimentation, time we spend just figuring out what suits us and what doesn’t.  We get married.  We live in with someone.  Then we get unhappy and for women our mid-30s are our critical years.  We have a mid-life crisis and that usually turns our lives upside-down.  But we survive.  By the time we hit our 40s most of us are whole again.

At 44 I wanted to be a columnist.  I bought newspapers to look at what the columnists were doing.  They were all writing about politics, a smattering on motoring, health.  My advertising background said:  write about life, always in the first person, always with a universal truth common to all.  I have been writing now for 25 years. Very few now call me “crazy.”  In fact more and more people text me to say they have lives like mine and they too are happy living sort of outside the law.

What led us in that direction?  Our ability to make clear decisions.  First, list all the fors and againsts.  Second, ask yourself:  How do I FEEL about it?  There are always two aspects:  how we think and how we feel.  How we think is left-brained.  Our left brain holds all the things we learn from the outside world, the rules, the regulations, the words, the grammar, the numbers.  Our right brain is the inside world, what makes us feel.  That’s why the title of this talk is Right Brain Positive, because I honestly believe that that’s how I found the secret to my sanity by breaking the rules that were not comfortable for me and by finding and fighting for the path that was most comfortable to me.  That is the secret to my Mental Health.  That’s how I found happiness.

I discovered the long hard way that the secret to life is first discovering and loving yourself.  There is nothing wrong with loving yourself.  It doesn’t mean you’re vain.  It doesn’t mean just saying I don’t care what you say, I am prettier than you.  It means looking inside your heart and knowing from your heart whether a thing is good or bad for you.

Since my retirement, I have been teaching a course called Joy of Writing.   It teaches you first to throw away all the writing rules you learned in school then replaces those with a method that makes your right brain lead the process, making your writing and your person more creative than you ever were before.   The best poet turned out by my writing class was a vice president of finance.  She was so delighted that she could write.  My students all discover the creativity within them.  I have also become quite creative even if I am old. I take lessons when I feel like.  Soon I will learn to do web pages.

So there is my creative life in a nutshell.   Let me end this talk with a quote from Carl Gustav Jung.  He says, Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart.  Who looks outside, dreams.  Who looks inside, awakens.

Don’t you want to be awakened?

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