Prime Time - Jane Fonda [63]
A man might explore what he was like before and after he started formal schooling. Remember what I said in Chapter 3 about how this is the stage when boys tend to shut off emotionally so as to “fit in,” to not be called a “sissy” or “momma’s boy”? Try to remember how you felt at that age, what messages were sent to you either implicitly or explicitly about how you were supposed to act. Many psychologists today feel that societal pressures on little boys to fit a macho stereotype cause a bifurcation between head and heart that does damage to their emotional development. Research seems to show that the Third Act of a man’s life is when the nurturing, empathetic, sensitive aspects of his psyche can make a comeback, allowing his final decades to be happier and his relationships healthier.
Unlike boys, girls begin to feel pressure to conform to gender norms at the onset of adolescence. A woman will want to closely explore those early teen years, when she may have become disembodied, when her true self might have gone underground, her voice become muted.
As I said earlier, I have found that when you make yourself write things out, whether in longhand or on a computer (which is how I write), you are forced to be more intentional and you learn more deeply than if you simply think about your life.
Getting your story published—or even read—is not the goal. Just write. Commit yourself to paper—with all the truth and courage you can muster. Try to interview the key elderly people in your life now, while they are still alive. But even if your parents and grandparents are no longer living, there are probably relatives and friends of the family who remember things. If your life remains too busy for you to actually write, at least gather the information that is most at risk of being lost, as friends and parents die, so you’ll have it later when your pace slows down and you can address these things.
Try to identify the times in your life when you went through real developmental changes—when something inside you began shifting and you saw the world and your place in it differently. Adolescence was probably such a time, because that is when we begin to discover our identities independent from our parents.
The onset of the women’s movement may have been an important catalyst for many of us. Menopause can also be formative. Developmental changes can be purely internal transformations resulting from our realizing that how we’ve been leading our lives isn’t making sense anymore. Maybe we feel we haven’t been “leading” them, that they’ve been leading us, and so we commit to doing something significant about it. It may have been that external events triggered developmental changes—your parents got divorced, someone close passed away, you were fired from your job, you gave birth to your first child, your spouse left you. How you reacted and adjusted to these kinds of external events would have determined whether or not they caused developmental change and propelled you on to a new life course.
Don’t worry about allotting big blocks of time. Just start with Act I. Set aside an hour to begin the process. Get a notebook and a pen you like or, if it allows your ideas to flow more easily, use a tape recorder.
Think about the main events, the scenes that stand out for you. As you make progress, perhaps things will emerge in more detail.
Search out old family albums, scrapbooks, family trees. Study them carefully for clues. Spend quiet time visiting old haunts, like the houses and neighborhoods where you grew up, and try to conjure up how you felt back then. Attend school reunions, interview your old classmates, and explain what you’re doing. Who knows, it might inspire them to do their own life reviews! Play the old songs from your past. Music is an evocative way to call up forgotten images. A single stimulus may bring forth buried memories. In his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust illustrated this beautifully: The protagonist eats a small cake he enjoyed as a child