Finding My Badass Self
Page 26
I became less hesitant to confront what I found frightening or intimidating. No surprise, considering I had endured a year in which I often said to myself, “Which should I choose to do this week, the terrifying thing that will disgust me or the terrifying thing that will humiliate me?” As I told the students at the high school honors banquet, pushing your limits builds your character through both humility and empowerment. The most rewarding life experiences may be the ones we’ve been sidestepping all along.
Life is full of hurdles, but the biggest obstacle is our decision to stop at a bump or a crossroad, fearful to move on. What’s most important is to take that first step and, if we stumble, to just keep going. We’re only losers if we’ve never tried.
I learned to face change with far more ease. One of many new mantras I adopted was, “Change is good. Change is good. Right?” Granted, this philosophy sometimes still took a bit of convincing, especially when life took its most unexpected and terrifying turns, such as my diagnosis of uterine cancer, just six months after my balloon ride.
Cancer wasn’t a new experience I ever expected or wished to face. But like most of my other new experiences, it proved less frightening and more successfully conquered than anticipated.
Whether due to that brief glimpse into my mortality or the lingering effects of The 52/52 Project, I also began tackling items not just on my unbucket list but also on my true bucket list. I scheduled more vacations. I attended more concerts, plays, and author readings. These are the kind of experiences that brought me great joy, even if they once seemed a luxury. I also made more concrete plans for retirement. Although that goal remained many years away, I planned to find some way to make it attainable sooner rather than later.
Did this year of new experiences make me a happier person? It’s almost impossible to quantify or qualify happiness. With all its individual components and nuances, happiness—like love—is not something easily rated on a scale of one to ten. All I knew was I felt more accomplished, confident, and complete.
I expect I’ll still be searching, learning, and evolving thirty years from now.
Above all, The 52/52 Project taught me to live my life. I experienced more fear, exhilaration, and laughter than I had in much of the fifty-one years preceding it. When your world is broader and your mind is open, it’s never too late to reinvent yourself.
Facing our fears perhaps prevents one of life’s greatest fears of all, of someday asking ourselves, “What if?” Instead, as my young friends in Italy taught me, we might begin asking, “Perche’ non?”
Why not, indeed?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mentioning everyone who played a part in The 52/52 Project would require another 50,000 words, and it would be my most futile challenge of all. Just know I thank all of you from the depths of my humbled, humored, and often humiliated heart.
Thank you to the staff of She Writes Press, especially Brooke Warner and Cait Levin, for taking my collection of words and giving them life, and to the entire SWP editorial and design staff. And thanks to the BookSparks publicity team!
A huge thank you to readers of some early story drafts: Betsy Lerner, Roxane Gay, Holly Miller, and Dennis Hensley. I might have quit before I hardly got started if not for your encouragement.
For their eagle eyes and expert editing advice, I send out huge hugs to Vicki Kroll, Whitney Bryan, Gloria Stanfa, DC Stanfa, Terri Spilman, Patty Gelb, and Laura Maylene Walter. Acknowledgments to Vicki, again, as well as Kendra Wright and Chris Maloney, for book title inspiration.
Thanks to Tony Napoleone, who ensures me he provided the impetus for this whole thing through a blog comment when we each turned fifty.
Many writer friends offered support through social media, promotion, and personal guidance. They include Gina Barreca, Nikki Knepper, Cathryn Michon, DC Stanfa, and Katrina Willis. A special thanks for their input and support, over years of my writing projects, to the circle of friends I met through Betsy Lerner’s blog: Deb Aijo, Teri Carter, Averil Dean, Amy Gesenhues, Jessica Lahey, Erika Marks, Catherine McNamara, Downith Monaghan, Lyra Nelson, Sarah Wesson, Lisa Williams, Suzy Vitello Soule’, and others I may have missed here. FTF? Indeed!
I need to give a shout-out also to the fabulous folks I met through the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop and the Midwest Writers Workshop.
Great appreciation to my original Stranger Party friends, who helped set the stage for much that has followed since that wonderful evening: Susan Jane Berson, Dawn Hammer, Tamara Johnson, Cindy McComb, Elizabeth Ulmer Page, Stella Reeber, and Kathleen Sallah.
My escapades would not have been the same without those courageous and crazy individuals who joined me on my 52/52 experiences and on my subsequent National Stranger Party Tour. Too many of you to name, but you know who you are. I hope you, too, have no stranger danger regrets.
Thanks to Lynn Konoff, for being a constant source of support, and to Mary Kasper, whose encouragement of my very earliest writing meant more than she will ever know. (Teachers rock!) I am grateful, also, to my oldest group of friends: Cindy Kozak, Diane Wielinski Stark, Karen Hoehn Miller, Joan Bruning, Mary Bruning Forshey, Molly McHugh Branyan, Linda Murphy Savercool, Peggy Harms Sullivan, and Sharon Suski Blakely, who didn’t abandon me when I turned down countless social invitations while I lived out these stories and then stayed home for endless evenings, writing about them. Hey, call me now!
To the readers of my blog and my 52/52 Project Face-book page, who have become new friends: You are my heroes. Your engagement and comments inspired and motivated me. You proved this wasn’t just one woman’s story, but a journey for all of us.
Most of all, I must thank the usual suspects: my family. Much love to my mother, Gloria Stanfa; sisters, DC Stanfa and Lori Stanfa Schroeder; and my two sons, Jorden and Kyle Stanley. Life with you guys is always an adventure. I look forward to many more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sherry Stanfa-Stanley is a writer, humorist, and squeamish adventurer. She writes about her midlife escapades and other topics on Facebook (The 52 at 52 Project) and also blogs at www.sherrystanfa-stanley.com. By day, Sherry attempts to respectably represent her alma mater as a communication director at The University of Toledo. An empty nester after raising Son #1 and Son #2, she now indulges a menagerie of badly behaved pets.
Author photo © Mary Pencheff Photography
SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press is an independent publishing
company founded to serve women writers everywhere.
Visit us at www.shewritespress.com.
Daring to Date Again: A Memoir by Ann Anderson Evans. $16.95, 978-1-63152-909-2. A hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir about a legal secretary turned professor who dives back into the dating pool headfirst after twelve years of celibacy.
Peanut Butter and Naan: Stories of an American Mother in The Far East by Jennifer Magnuson. $16.95, 978-1-63152-911-5. The hilarious tale of what happened when Jennifer Magnuson moved her family of seven from Nashville to India in an effort to shake things up—and got more than she bargained for.
This Trip Will Change Your Life: A Shaman’s Story of Spirit Evolution by Jennifer B. Monahan. $16.95, 978-1-63152-111-9. One woman’s inspirational story of finding her life purpose and the messages and training she received from the spirit world as she became a shamanic healer.
Renewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope by Eileen Flanagan. $16.95, 978-1-63152-968-9. At age forty-nine, Eileen Flanagan had an aching feeling that she wasn’t living up to her youthful ideals or potential, so she started trying to change the world—and in doing so, she found the courage to change her life.
Miracle at Midlife: A Transatlantic Romance by Roni Beth Tower. $16.95, 978-1-63152-123-2. An inspiring memoir chronicling the sudden, unexpected, and life-changing two-year courtship between a divorced American lawyer living on a houseboat in the center of Paris and an empty-nested clinical psychologist living in Connecticut.
Gap Year Girl by Marianne Bohr. $16.95, 978-1-63152-820-0. Thirty-plus years after first backpacking through Europe, Marianne Bohr and her husband leave their lives behind and take off on a yearlong quest for adventure.