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When I was 18 I was afraid of turning 21
When I was 21, I was afraid of turning 30
When I was 30, I was afraid of turning 40
When I was 40, I was afraid for what would happen with the rest of my life.
Now that I am 44, I am afraid of nothing.

Sticks and stones
Will break my bones
But words will never
Hurt me…


Did you grow up singing that? If you were from the American Midwest you probably did. What a load of poppycock! By now we know that the language we hear as a child stays with us all our lives, forming our character either by compliance to it or in reaction to it. Father said I was a criminal, so I thought, “What’s the use in trying, may as well prove him right.” Mother said I was a liar, so “I’ll never lie about anything, even if it means saving my life!”

Language gets woven into stories, into icons of who we are and where we fit. It is driven deeply into the spikes of our pride and our shame. We over perform or under perform to evade the pierce of those stakes within us. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. Won’t. Won’t. Won’t. Must. Must. Must.

What is it we must do?

What is it we can’t bear to look at?

Those inner conversations never go away until we physically shatter them.

I was raised in a mixed family, mixed race, mixed class, mixed education levels. I heard all sorts of things as a child I had thought I had gotten over, but as a young woman, some one bent on cutting me deeply had said:

“You can take the girl out of the basement, but you can’t take the basement out of the girl”

He may as well have said trailer park, for I wasn’t even well off enough to rent a trailer. I stayed in more rooms in more basements than I care to recount. Rooms full of spiders, and seepage, and mold. I would dress them up with paint and glitter and cloth – but I was still living behind a door that wouldn’t close, mold that made me ill, dust mites that left little scars when they bit me, seepage that reeked of septic tanks.

For years, no matter how well I dressed to leave for work, or how thoroughly I showered, I still came home to that dank basement. The smell was even in my hair. It was a big deal just to get a new mattress and to get it up off the floor so it wouldn’t mildew in the Seattle rainy season – which is three quarters of the year.

“Sarah is ugly, Sarah is ugly”

The campfire girls skipped around me in a ring, ring around the rosy style singing this song. It was like being burned at the emotional stake.

When I looked at pictures I could see I had been a beautiful woman. But I knew for certain that I was now horribly ugly. Beautiful then, ugly now. The pictures caught some fantasy. I would just grow uglier and uglier … until, in my forties I shattered that ring.

“The Queen of Unrealized Potential”

This one dragged on me for years, because it was part of an old pattern of things my parents used to say, only to be confirmed by a cranky colleague.

“Maybe now she’ll learn to write!” said a man, passing me in the editorial halls of my publisher. Could anyone be so cruel? I have been making my living as a writer for 16 years now – obviously somebody thinks I can write.

The Basement:

David and I just downsized, from a large house, in which, for some odd reason, we were still sleeping in the basement. When the last roommate was gone, I went to work very quickly. With the help of a dear man from church, I found a perfectly sunny, top floor apartment, that has bright windows, fresh air and trees all around it. It is like living in a tree house, and is several hundred dollars a month cheaper than we had been paying in rent. Now we can put money towards savings and retirement, and are not so much living paycheck to paycheck for the first time in, well, ever.

Sarah is Ugly

A dear friend of mine gave my name to a Beautiful Women’s project. This photographer and story teller are touring the world gathering images and stories of women of unusual beauty – not Cosmo beauty. They came, photographed me from several angles and took several pictures of my long, slender hands – which are very unusual.

Then, because of the arthritis I have had in my back since I was a child, I recently took up water aerobics. They teased me because I was the only woman in the locker room without silver hair – not quite true, but funny. And here I had always been ashamed to undress in a gym – as a child because I would show bruises, and as an adult because I thought I wasn’t pleasant to look upon. Here these women are, 40-80, getting undressed like it’s nothing at all, and they have floppy bits, and veiny bits, and spotty bits and stretch marks, and I swear to you ever single one of these women is beautiful – absolutely beautiful. And here I am among them.

And last week I had a conversation with a lover I’d had, fifteen years prior. He was complaining that the women he was trying to date, in their mid thirties, looked older than him -- older than me (I am nine years his senior) and not as mature as I was when I was twenty seven. He wasn't making a play for me, because he is a deeply old fashioned, and highly principled man. None the less he told me I was still a “damn fine” looking woman even now. I'll take that. "Damn fine" at 44.

The Queen of Unrealized Potential

I had to leave college early because Ronald Reagan (thank god he didn’t have a republican son) gutted the scholarship program I was on. But I had most of my degree program under my belt, so I just went to work.

I have worked very, very hard. I worked in Sales, Sales Training, Fiction Writing, Film Writing, Screen Play Adaptation, Public Relations, Marketing and Design – often working two and three jobs at a time to gain the income and experience I needed.

I have recently been attending women’s breakfasts, about four mornings a week. I co-own a small design and pr firm, and I have been networking to expand our business base. We are very good at what we do. In fact, we are so good that we can guarantee 100% satisfaction and not lose money. We have only had to return a client’s money once.

These breakfasts are the staple of the “old girl network”. They are women who are either new to their fields or have been experts for 30 years plus. And the old girl network doesn’t work the same way that the old boy’s club works. We are not about competition. We are about relationships, support, mutual success, thriving, blossoming of the young through the guidance of the more experienced.

And there is a woman I particularly like who is in finance, who is always dressed in sharp suits and gold accents – and she looks for me at every conference we attend. I adore her, but I am so flattered that someone like her would consider someone like me her comrade. But I am thronged by people asking for my advice, services, my friendship. There is a room of powerful women that I always wanted to belong to –

-- and I have arrived.

Turning 40 was traumatic.

Being in my 40’s is amazing!

An old Indian man once gave me a handful of blue glass bracelets. I drew back from his gift - “But I’ll break them,” I said.

“Good luck to wear glass,” he said, “Good luck to break glass” and he slid them onto my thin wrist.

Are you frozen somewhere in your life? Trapped? Condemned? Damned?

Break the glass.

Do something so wildly out of character that the old story of who you are won’t hold it any more. Do something brave. Do some thing violent. Do something impossible.

Cut off your hair. Dye it blonde. Go back to school. Seek out the perfect job. Tell your husband what you really want him to do in bed – and then show him how to do it. Buy him some Viagra. Buy yourself a new vibrator. Take Viagra. Buy funky hand made jewelry, flashy hand painted scarves. Get a tattoo. Wear an anklet with bells. Show off your taste. Buy the art you always wanted, but from a talented student, so you can afford it. Dedicate yourself to a triathlon. E-mail me and ask for the name of the triathlon trainer who dedicates herself to powerful women’s fitness. Decide that you don’t have to just live with your disabilities and start to ask for a better than average existence. Cook with new spices. Learn to dance Salsa. Create a non-profit organization for the thing that would most satisfy your heart and give you a sense of having accomplished something. Join a non-profit that already exists – they will find a way to use your hands .Give yourself an hour a day, just to be -- and dream about what you could create, now that you are past the age of simply surviving from day to day.

Break the glass.

Break the glass.

Break the glass.

Because at this point in your life you have nothing to lose, and your whole life to gain.

They used to say, “It’s all downhill from here.”

I say, let go of the handlebars and fly!

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