Dear Reader:
The nicest thing about growing older… is finally liking ourselves for who we are. This huge benchmark doesn’t appear automatically… it takes lots of detours and dead-end paths to finally become who we always were… an unique human being with a gift to leave behind after our short visit to life here on earth.
What made me re-think my path to self-acceptance was found in an old Junior High yearbook. I was at Horace Sisk Jr High… a new school built over the summer -far outside my more familiar neighborhood schools in Fayetteville North Carolina… it was the sixties and bussing ( as part of the new Civil Rights bill) was now in place.
By junior high… I knew I loved history, reading, and writing. But at twelve… I had no concept of how these subjects were pushing me towards my own individual path into the future.
I didn’t have my braces yet and so I was always lip smiling slightly in all my school pictures. I felt ugly and wanted to be popular like the cute girls with beautiful straight teeth or popular braces. I just had buck teeth.
But then one picture stopped my browsing… it was a picture of the seventh grade chosen superlatives, alongside my favorite teacher, Mrs. McBride. I glanced and then glanced again… there I was with my lip smile and I was holding my plaque that read: Most Likely to Succeed. Me? No way! I was a loser! A reject! That couldn’t be right.
Suddenly, now in hindsight, that shy twelve year old Becky’s eyes were open… what I remembered feeling about myself at that age and what others thought were worlds apart.
By the time we moved a year later to Laurens, new braces and all… a new me showed up my freshman year… a wonderful English teacher, took me under her wings and convinced me that I needed to continue my creative writings into the future.
So I ended up teaching history ( one love) coupled with storytelling creative lesson plans ( my other love) supplemented with my writings ( my last love.)
My path took me where I belonged for over three decades… and then miraculously I overcame a potentially life/threatening cancer … which in turn challenged me to finally share my stories and writings with you… the beautiful universe-come full circle!
I met many ” nay-sayers” along the way but learned the hard way to stay true to myself and look for the “bread crumbs” God leaves behind …for us to follow …down our personal path.
So until tomorrow…
Today is my favorite day -Winnie the Pooh
