Embracing Change: Life Lessons from 58 Years

If a photo is worth a thousand words, here's 20,000 words of personal evolution over the course of 58 years.

The top row is the story of my beginnings. I was born with a cone head. My father said it scared him to death when we first met, but my mother was in labor for like 24 hours, and my head showed the effort she made to get me out.

So what tone did the circumstances of my birth set for me for the rest of my life?

I believe it led to me wanting to understand pressure and the growth that comes from tight places.

The photo of me smirking in my cool 70's attire is a big memory for me. My mother was making a framed piece of art out of felt letters she had painstakingly cut out with her good sewing scissors.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill becomes any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

First of all, that was the first time I had ever seen my mother do something creative. I was mesmerized by her process. And my father, who loved photography, was using his brand new Pentax camera circa 1972 to capture this moment in time.

That was a day that I remember very clearly. I was basking in an atmosphere of love and self-expression.

Moving on, there is the photo of me in my 1980's big hair with the striped sweater. I was sitting on the couch on Christmas morning, waiting for the day to get going. My parents were divorced, and the merry-go-round of Christmas travel between parents had just started.

Those years were a pressure cooker for me in many ways.

Navigating new family dynamics with my parents' remarriages, step-siblings, moving to a new place and trying to deal with my own internal changes due to being a teenager was chaotic and filled with emotional drama.

I emerged from it understanding that life was unpredictable. After graduation from High School, I kicked around for a couple of years, then moved to Chicago with my best friend, Wendy.

Chicago was frightening and exciting to me.

I was 21, and legally able to drink. And I did. A lot.

And as a result of some things that happened, I decided it wasn't for me, and I left for Alaska.

The land of pressure and what it that looks like in a landscape was illuminating!

It changed me...and I emerged from that period of life learning to be more self-reliant.

On the second row, you'll see a progression of me growing through my love of the outdoors.

I started traveling solo and saw many things around the world that left me more curious about our water covered planet.

I lived on a couple of boats working as a Steward, and on my off time, traveled to Europe and walked a lot, looking at castles and drinking warm beer in pubs.

I discovered that I like to wander around in my mid-20's, and I moved a lot.

I ended up married to another wanderer and we explored various places for the next 20 years. We finally ended up in Roanoke, Virginia and it has become home.

My wandering over the last ten years has been more internal than external. That's the third row. I went through a period of coloring my hair blonde to hide the gray.

Menopause. Talk about a pressure cooker. All of those juicy hormones decided to take a siesta. I went through a period (ha!) of trying to get it back.

But no. Another lesson on the pressure to stay young.

Then I decided, fuck that, let that silver shine. Becoming authentic became very important. I wasn't chasing anything much externally anymore.

The experiences I was craving became focused on integrating all of these versions of myself that I'd experienced in the past into some wisdom for my future.

It was a time of deep reflection.

I was the girl looking to laugh. I was the teenager trying to shrink herself because of the changes that swept her up and tossed her around like a boat with no motor in a sea of tall waves.

I see different cities that led to different versions of love, different kinds of laughter.

Some of those faces I see in my photo collage feel like strangers. Some feel closer than ever.

Funnily enough, none of those women are fully me anymore. But they’re not gone, either.

Just a few days ago, I looked in the mirror at my studio and saw my mother and father smiling back at me. My mother's eyes, and my father's chin, live on my face.

I now see not just different versions of myself on my face, but others, too. I've spent so much time with my beloved, that we are now starting to resemble each other.

Integrating all of my life's experiences into what I am now is a trip!

Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to become someone. I started allowing myself to become.

There's a difference.

So who am I now?

I'm here. That's all that I know anymore. I'm here, I'm always changing and have learned to appreciate the pressure of becoming, and accepting the death of what once was.

Even if I have to live with temporary distortions from those tight spaces, like my birth story, it's been worth it.

And maybe that’s the beauty of looking back... not to define ourselves, but to witness the cycle of birth, and death, and rebirth over and over again.

And understand that "I" am still here.

I find that comforting.

When the body I am using is used up, where do "I" go then?

And what do I want to leave behind that lasts indefinitely?

Random fact about me: My first job was working on a frog farm in Arkansas. I was 12.

Exploring Dream Interpretation with ChatGPT

I have a very vivid dream life, and pretty much remember my dreams the next morning.

Years ago, my brother introduced me to dream interpretation, and suggested that I explore it to understand myself better.

Initially, I blew it off, but he gave me a book about it, called The Dreamer's Dictionary, by Barbara Condron, and it changed my mind on the importance of understanding and interpreting your dreams.

My brother is a great dream interpreter. He can weave together aspects of a dream story and blow your mind over the accuracy about what it is reflecting regarding what you are currently mulling over or dealing with in waking life.

Recently, I've started running my dreams through ChatGPT, just to see how it interprets dreams, and I have to say it's been very helpful. I am surprised at its ability to interpret the dream, and then relate it back to me as to what it says about my current state of focus or worry about something.

So good, in fact, that I wanted to share this with you.

Dreams are about what you are concerned with or learning about the day before the dream occurs. The proposed insights Chat is giving me are on target. It doesn't know what I'm worried about, or what insight I had the day before, but it figures it out based on my dream interpretation.

Alarmingly so.

I just tell it to interpret my dream and write out as much as I can, and it zips back a well-integrated response that makes immediate sense.

I'm finding it very helpful to dig a bit deeper into what my inner self is trying to communicate to me right now as I navigate this psoriasis flare.

I've been playing with ChatGPT and Grok ever since they came out. Like any tool, you have to be intentional with it, and I tend to use it like an administrative assistant.

Today, I gave it a task to give me a 7-Day Writing Protocol to get at the root of my emotional issues regarding some traumatic things I went through in the past 5 years regarding death and illness.

I have a tendency to repress my emotions during times of crisis, and then my body deals with the release if I continue to repress, and not fully feel all the feels.

I am learning my habit of emotional repression, especially of anger, that I learned from my mother is clearly a component of the psoriasis issue I've been dealing with all my life. I'm not blaming my mother, she did the best she could and she worked very hard while alive to overcome what she learned from her own childhood.

But I still picked it up, and it's up to me to transmute the tendency and change it to something healthier for me.

I'm going to go through the 7-Day Writing protocol and if I find it helpful, I'll share it here. I asked ChatGPT if it lifted it from any other source, so that I could credit it, and it responded with this:

That protocol is an original creation I wrote specifically for you, Stacie. It’s not copied or adapted from any particular author or published source—it’s designed to honor your unique healing path, drawing on the themes you've shared (psoriasis, emotional repression, parental loss, creative flow, etc.).

That said, the structure itself draws loosely from widely used therapeutic practices like:

• Writing for emotional healing (James Pennebaker’s research)
• Somatic journaling (used in trauma-informed therapy and body-based healing modalities)
• Narrative therapy techniques (like giving the symptom a voice)
• And ritual practices found in grief work and Indigenous-inspired emotional clearing

Chat's response is intriguing, isn't it?

It will take another post to dissect how I feel about Ai, but I'm not in the camp of some that think the genie needs to go back into the bottle. It's here. It's not going anywhere, and I believe we are in the process of developing a moral value system on how to use it and discern when it's clearly spitting out bullshit or propaganda.

You still need to be able to think on your own when given a new input. It doesn't matter if it's from a 'real' person or an Ai.

What I'm finding is it's more about the questions and perimeters you put in place when interacting with it. It's not like Google, and my questions often involve asking it to give me a compare and contrast output to whatever input I am interested in.

But my experience with it so far has been pretty positive as an assistant to help me pull together a bunch of seemingly disparate subjects into something meaningful.

Like dream interpretation. There's nothing more reflective of seemingly random story lines and images than a dream!

What are your thoughts on Ai, and do you use it?

Random fact about me: I collect feathers I find in the yard.

How Singing About a Chicken May Have Saved My Life

When I was in my early 20's, I worked on a ship called The Seabird in Alaska as a steward. We got 2 days off a month and on one of my day's off, we were in Glacier Bay National Park.

Another crew member was off that day, too, and we decided to get a double sea kayak and kayak around an island we were anchored next to and eat lunch on shore.

We found a neat spot, grounded the kayak and started walking to find a place to eat our sandwiches.

We turned a corner and about 20 feet in front of us was a big, brown bear.

We froze.

She stood up to smell us, and we locked our hands to make ourselves look bigger, flapping our arms on the other side of our bodies like a crazy bird.

When you are face to face with a brown bear, there is no running away. That invites a chase you won't win.

There was no place to go.

We had no bear spray or a gun.

In an incredible moment of clarity, my mind and body sort of split apart and I wasn't scared. I was present to the moment in a hyper-focused way.

This could very well be my time to go.

As we were flapping our arms, I did something very unexpected.

I started to sing a song I first learned as a small girl.

"Oh, I had a little chicken that wouldn't lay an egg, so I poured hot water up and down its leg. The little chicken hollered and the little chicken begged, the darn little chicken laid a hard-boiled egg!"

I sang that song over and over again, at the top of my lungs, while both of us were flapping our arms to make ourselves look bigger.

That bear dropped on all fours, spun around, kicking up dirt and ran off.

And it was over.

Where did I get the idea to sing that crazy song? And props to whoever taught it to me.

I've often thought about that moment.

Instinct is a powerful thing. My body's nervous system came to my rescue while my mind was frozen and I sort of jumped out of my body to witness what could have been my body's gruesome death.

I remember a strange sense of wonder, too.

Would the bear knock us down and then eat us? Would I have to go through the process of being eaten alive?

The weird thing was that I wasn't really terrified until after the moment of reckoning was over.

Then my mind and body re-integrated and I really felt the adrenaline and fear walking over to that kayak to get back to the boat.

I guess that bear figured it wasn't worth the effort to attack the crazy creature it was confronted with and bolted.

But that chicken song...I'm pretty sure it saved my life that day.

Random fact about me: I used to put fish sauce on everything when I was trying to learn how to cook Thai food. My husband was kind and ate my experiments. I married a good one.

Gifts of the Father(s)

My father was ill on and off for 10 years. After a serious heart attack, I wasn't sure if he was going to be around much longer when he arrived home from the hospital. He ended up living another 8 years, but at the time, I was told by his doctor that a sneeze could take him out because his heart was in such bad shape.

My father and I had a deep relationship. But when you have a deep relationship that often means you have to go through some tough times together, and boy, we sure did.

I'm also close to my step-father. My parents divorced when I was 15, and my step-father stepped in as a father figure when I needed him to. He was a Navy captain when he was still in service, and his steady hand in rough water has always been a valuable resource to me.

Shortly after my father's heart attack, Dad and I were sitting at his kitchen table and we started talking about some past events that I felt needed to be brought to the surface.

One event that I brought up had to do with a decision he had made that had deeply hurt me. Up until that point, I'd never discussed it with him, but it was something that had made my heart heavy and I thought I needed to clear the air in case a random sneeze happened and I wouldn't have the chance again.

He acknowledged my pain, and gave his reasons for the decision, and we got it resolved.

But then the tables turned. He decided to confide in me about a decision I had made that had deeply hurt him.

I was taken aback. Not by his honesty, but by my total and complete unawareness that this decision that I had made years ago had left him so hurt.

At the time, I thought my decision was a good one, and it never occurred to me that it had impacted him in such a hurtful way.

My surprise was complete. "My God," I thought. "how many decisions have I made in my life that I thought were good, or even without much significance to others, that hurt someone so deeply that they never let it go?".

It was one of the most sobering moments I've ever experienced.

I was talking to my step-father this week about the pathway of grief, and he said something that has stuck with me all week.

I shared with him that for the first time, I was able to think about my parents without automatically going to my memory of their time of death.

He told me, "Try and remember the gifts your mother and father left you, and don't think about the pain of their passing."

Looking back, that conversation with my dad taught me more than I expected.

I brought something to the table that I had carried for years, and it felt good to finally speak it out loud. But I didn’t expect the table to turn. I didn’t expect to hear how something I had done had left a mark on him.

That moment stopped me in my tracks. It reminded me how easy it is to hurt someone without ever meaning to. I was just living my life, making what seemed like the right choice at the time.

We both showed up that day with our own stories, and we both chose to keep our butts parked in the kitchen chairs facing each other with the pain. That’s what grace looks like to me now.

I didn't know, and I'm truly sorry.

Random fact about me: I've been covered in whale snot in Alaska.

The End of the Tortured Artist?

Benson. Boone.

Benny brings up a lot of emotional juice, doesn't he?

To the cynics, he’s suspect.

To the ones that love him, he's a fantasy.

Either way, he draws a line in the sand, doesn't he?.

Me? I like him.

My husband is bewildered by my fascination with him. But he's not too fond of pop music.

I'm not known as a music aficionado. I discovered Robert Plant in 2007 when he did an album with Allison Krause. Somehow I missed Led Zeppelin.

But I like what I like, and with Benson, I like the whole package.

He didn't have a miserable childhood, yet he is still wildly creative. I believe he works out the melodies on his piano and co-creates the lyrics.

He didn't know he was a singer. His best friend asked him to sing for The Battle of the Bands contest in front of his hometown. That's where he discovered he has some natural talent.

He's courageous and loyal to his friends.

He jumps into experiences with confidence that he'll land on his feet.

Literally! What a talent stack!

He's also innocent in a way that I haven't seen often in a pop performer. It's more of an unspoiled presence. This innocence is demonstrated in his ability to be emotionally vulnerable. He expresses himself without fear of how it makes him look.

His joy and wonder hasn't become jaded by cynicism.

And he's what I believe they used to call a triple threat. He can sing beautifully, is wildly performative, and can probably act based on the video he did for Mr. Electric Blue.

He is who he is naturally, and he's well adjusted.

I get the feeling that when this stops being fun for him, he'll disappear into the sunset. We won't hear from him again.

He doesn't need the world as much as the world needs him, and he seems to know it in a deep way that's hard to describe.

So is he an anomaly, or is he the beginning of something new?

Is his rise in popularity a sign that we are making a shift in what we believe about artists and performers?

If it is, I'm all for it. I want to see more artists that are on board with being joyful, emotionally available and grounded in self-respect.

And his music and lyrics are surprising, not formulaic.

Artistic self-expression isn't one-sided. It doesn't have to be skewed to trauma and self-hatred.

There is beauty in healing and connection, growth and realization. You can be whole with lightness and a sense of belonging and still be creative.

I'm definitely team Benson.