The Blessing and the Curse of “The Extraordinary”

What’s your relationship with the word “extraordinary”?

Whenever I’m feeling healthy and whole and fully sovereign in myself I would tell you that I wish to live an “extraordinary” life. 

Even in the midst of this terrible disrupted year when all we seem to have is the at-home routine, I believe I have still sought - and experienced - the extraordinary.

Does that sound like some kind of crazy humble brag? Let me tell you the story of what it took to embody and compassionately redefine the word and make “the extraordinary” into something that belongs in the everyday.

Expanding the Extraordinary In these Extra/Ordinary Times

When you look up “extraordinary” with our friends at Merriam Webster, they offer “going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary.”

This definition seems to explain a Valentine’s Day trip to Paris, graduating summa cum laude from an Ivy League school, or having quintuplets. It also can include pulling over the car to take in a particularly stunning sunset, leaving a love note in your beloved’s pocket on an average Tuesday, or taking time to ask neighbors if they need anything from the store when you make a run into town.

With this expanded definition, there are a hundred opportunities a day to go beyond the typical, even in an era when most of life is lived with a few miles of home. 

At this moment, I’m deeply grateful I’ve landed at an understanding of extraordinary that is at once more expansive and terrifically small. If I had been striving for an extraordinary life when I was twenty-one in the midst of Covid circumstances, I would have given up long ago.

“Someday, we’re going to be extraordinary.” 

In the spring of 2001, my college roommate directed Wendy Wasserstein’s play Uncommon Women and Others. The show was brilliant. To watch it in my last few weeks as an undergrad, full of all the fears of what the “real world” would bring was ridiculously (and understandably) emotional.

And, as we tend to do when absorbing good art (especially while ridiculously emotional), I pulled the show through my own prism and refracted it so it spoke directly to me.

I can still see the blond pixie girl put her arm around another actor at the end of the final act and proclaim “someday, we will be extraordinary!”

At twenty-one when the world was still wrapped in its pre-9/11 blanket, the greater part of me was all full of hope. We all had our entire rich, as-yet-to-be-written lives ahead of us. I was all about committing to this horizon reach to the extraordinary.

A hard-to-ignore part of me was also full of regret (and also the bagels and beer that had a gluten-intolerant me feeling bloody awful most of the time). Though I’d spent most of high school on the stage, I’d said goodbye to performing just as I’d said goodbye to writing fiction when I entered college. I had resigned myself to reading and commenting on other people’s words, watching other people’s plays, longing after other women’s boyfriends, and feeling generally uncomfortable in my own skin.

I had achieved so much in my four years, but I was still assigning the real goal, the extraordinary self who lived a life of passion and creativity, to that blessed someday.

The Long Dance With the (Extra)Ordinary

I held on to this line for most of the next two decades, constantly measuring whether I had achieved the almighty “extraordinary.” 

In 2008 I wrote a blog post about my quest for the “extraordinary” how I finally made some peace with that. (Eating like a grown up and no longer longing for a lover surely helped all that.)

And yet, it was still a “middle of the journey” moment. When I wrote that post at age 28, I joked about how I would be happy with myself even if I did not have my name on the spine of a book by the time I was 30. (The subtext, of course, was that I was kidding/not kidding. Without that wunderkind book on the shelf, I could be happy, but I was also aware I was not quite living up to extraordinary.)

Due to New Information, the Author Has Compelled to Alter the Story

When I started researching that book of mine that would come out earlier in 2020, right smack in the middle of my fortieth year, I finally got my hands on Wasserman’s play. The part I mis-remembered for all those years is in the very last line. Rita speaks: 

Timmy says when I get my head together, and if he gets the stocks, I’ll be able to do a little writing. I think if I make it to forty I can be pretty amazing. Holly, when we’re forty we can be pretty amazing. You too Muffy and Samantha, when we’re… forty-five we can be pretty fucking amazing.

Wait, what? I had spent all this time forcing myself to be extraordinary when all I had to do was be amazing?

And I hadn’t even remembered what would make the characters so amazing (or extraordinary): all they had to do was write. And make it to forty. 

Turns out, I nailed it. I even have four more years to land at the ultimate “pretty fucking amazing.”

And you know what that is? Extraordinary.

Extraordinary, Amazing, Magical, Sovereign, and the Power to Re-Define and Embody Those Words As We Go

Here we are in an extraordinary year that is anything but amazing (most of the time). In spite of it all, we are constantly surrounded by chances to stand sovereign in our own choices and to call in our own kind of magic when the usual ways of the world are inaccessible. 

We’re called redefine the words and rewrite the story and re-member all the pieces of life in a new way.

If I could go back and speak to my 21 year-old self about what a beautiful life might look like, I would leave extraordinary and amazing out of the conversation. Though I have come to love those words as I have lived them and re-defined them, there’s too much room for misinterpretation (and perfectionism and discontent).

Instead, I would tell me to go for magical and sovereign and trust all the rest to fall into place.

What is magic?

• Magic is having the power to seek and see wonder in the everyday.

• Magic is the ability to find hope in the shadows.

• Magic is realizing you've had the power to transform your world all along.

And what is sovereignty?

• To be sovereign in your own life is to have your feet lovingly rooted into the earth and your hair all spangled with stars as you love what is and reach for what is possible.

• To be sovereign is to know yourself and trust yourself in the midst of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

• To be sovereign is to know how to use your magic for your own highest good and for the good of all creation.

This December I have two ways for you to bring more Sovereignty and Magic into your life and redefine the way you use the words that shape your experience.

The #7MagicWords Challenge is our seasonal creativity project. This free week of prompts, community, and, of course, creative magic gives you a chance to play with and redefine the worlds that define your world.

A Sovereign Way 2021 is a half-day planning retreat for creative entrepreneurs and sovereign souls who want to envision and plan a year of personal and collective transformation.

Will you join me in the next adventure?

A Song for the Accidental Digital Creatures Caught in the Medium

Beyond the blessed curse of connectivity
Beyond the broken codes and unwritten rules
Beyond these modern innovations too convenient to question

There exists a realm larger than the screen
Vaster than the newsfeed
Mightier than the network

Will you meet me beyond the metrics and the algorithms
In the hinterlands
Where the programmers of truth and the arbiters of worth can’t reach?

They say that “the medium is the message”
That the delivery is more important than the essence of the idea
Perhaps, once when this mediascape was new,
This phrase left room for wonder, creativity, flow

But now, we’re subdued by relentless cycles of “see me” strategy
Our voices reduced to characters
Our character distilled to brand
Our brands diluting the power of story

What if we’re called to embody rather than perform,
Generate value rather than profit,
Serve the entire spectrum rather than our addiction to one box of light?
What if we recognize, celebrate, and transcend the medium all at once?

I claim myself as medium, as storyteller, as seer. Could you?

As medium, you're here to speak what you see
Expressing what’s beautiful and terrible
In the heart, the mind, the union, the whole

At once holy witnesses and dancers in the dance
We can thrive along the edges,
Just outside the reaches of the boundaried infinity of our digital den

Channel the shadow as well as the bright
Cry out from the gut
Open lips wide and eyes even wider

Live without fear that anarchic laughter looks like a scream
That honesty looks like anger
That the sacred looks too much like the profane

Vision sharper than any camera lens
Fingers freed from their constant communicative claw
Tear your narrative from the hem of a dream cloak
Woven of the stuff more real than pixels and bytes

Remember you're here to rattle the world
And you can't always do that with a phone in your hand

---

The Story Behind the Poetry

I wrote this poem for us, for all the creatives, healers, artists, and entrepreneurs who, even after all these years, are still navigating the love-hate relationship with our digital world. O wrote this for all of us who are grateful for the connective magic that’s never more than an arm’s length away, but who also know these devices and networks are changing reality and warping the narrative.

These words flowed through when I started to gear up to once again promote and lead my Stand In Your Sovereign Story course.

At first, I was frustrated. To do online marketing “right,” I needed to show you the power of story and tell neat little tales that revealed former students’ and current clients’ results. I needed to embrace and display everything I know about captivating my readers and using the digital tools to draw new eyeballs.

Instead, I found myself spooling out lines of ambivalent verse as I pictured the “push-me-pull-you” relationship I’ve always with the internet and social media.

There’s power in this paradox, of course. Good stories rely on tension. The world I know and the material I teach is always grounded in the both/and - the real as well as the virtual, the struggle as well as the solution, the work as well as the love.

Part of my power - as writer, a healer, and a teacher - comes from being able to hold your hand as we leap between the personal and the professional. Together, we realize it’s all soul work.

The kind of storytelling I offer invokes your passion, your pain, and all you’ve learned along the way so you can create a bridge that connects you to the people who need you most.

A Sovereign Story heals the writer as well as the reader. These are the stories that transform lives and build livelihoods as they communicate, teach, and inspire something true.

Maybe it’s time for you to uncover the stories that mean the most so you can continue to build your world-renewing business. Maybe it’s time for you to stand in your Sovereign Story? I’d love to have you with us when we begin in September.

A Writing Prompt for Personal & Creative Integration

There are so many reasons we want to become more conscious, empowered storytellers.

As Jonathan Gottschall tells us in his book The Storytelling Animal, "stories make us human."

When we dedicate ourselves to telling our stories, we dedicate ourselves to our shared humanity.

As I work with the healers and creative entrepreneurs in my Stand In Your Sovereign Story program, I see another reason emerge...

We want to become bolder, braver, more competent storytellers because we need to integrate our gifts, ideas, and experiences.

Transformation professionals are multi-talented and multi-passionate. ("I'm a healer and a coach and an artist and a dancer and a mom, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.") We need a strong story to help us convey the unique combination of what we have to offer.

This process of integration is important when it comes to formulating a marketing story like we are in the SIYSS program, but it’s even more important for us as creative people trying to figure out how to show up and stay connected in this new strange, splintered reality.

In my other online group, the ongoing community the Sovereign Writers Circle where we focus on in-depth personal writing, I offered up this writing prompt yesterday…

Integration and Weaving the Threads

We know how to tie two threads. We know how to braid three together. Beyond that, working with four, five or more threads? That kind of knot work is beyond the usual skill set.

And yet, you are made of many threads - many passions, abilities, identities, stories.

Spend some time looking at your threads, teasing out the strands and learning which knots seem impossible. Imagine what kind of pattern you could create out of these pieces of you. Imagine that you do have the power to do this kind of weaving because, of course, you do.

Does this inspire your creativity and your desire to weave together your threads of story?

We’re welcoming new members into the Sovereign Writers Circle through May 5.

Apply to join this community of writers who heal and healers who write.

Your Personal, Creative, and Spiritual Sovereignty

And then there comes a day when you can no longer say "someday" and you laugh into the fresh spring air and tell the singing birds, the blossoming trees, and anyone who will listen: it's TODAY.

Every creative being has a soul-deep passion, some kind of unique magic that is just waiting to be expressed.

It might be art on a canvas or words on a page. It might be the way you fill a home with good smells and even better energy. It might be an idea, a lived philosophy that you long to embody and share with the world.

For me, it's this whole idea of personal, creative, and spiritual sovereignty. It's the desire to empower other women to say "I am the one I have been waiting for. I choose myself. The time is now. I am here to make the world more beautiful, bearable, and bold. I do this by first grounding into myself and then into the earth and then reaching out my arms to heal, help, and start a revolution."

Want to find you magic? Want to discover how to free your princess, crown your queen, and embrace the wise woman within you?

The new nine-week workshop series, Your Sovereign Awakening begins Monday, May 13. Will you join us?

My Turn, Your Turn, Our Turn at Sovereignty

It’s my turn.

And when I say that, I don’t mean that I get a turn and that you don’t.

It’s my turn to spin my own wheel of fortune. (Please think tarot card and not game show. Unless Vanna White inspires you to take action and make something amazing. Personally, I find Betty White a more inspiring figure, but to each their own.)

If you’d like, we can stand back to back and set our own worlds turning. We could hold hands and turn and spin together too, each held by our own center of gravity.

The momentum of my turning will feed yours, just as yours will feed mine. We’ll share the journey, but we’ll each stay sovereign and complete unto ourselves. We’ll be moved by our own unique power, and in doing so, we’ll empower one another.  And that will prove that we love and respect each other. That will prove that we love and respect the individual pilgrim soul within that’s ours alone to tend.

As I take my turn it feels important to say something: in exactly two months, I kiss my thirties goodbye.

I’m still far from my life’s halfway mark. Did you hear that, universe? I stand in my thirty-nine years of wisdom, of passion, of foolishness. I stand in all my  selflessness, selfishness, glory, and fear and say: I’m just getting started. My own mother might have died at sixty, but I’m shooting for at least one hundred seven, and I intend to make them all count.

There’s so more magic, so more insight, so much more power within me just waiting to be unfurled. I’m thrilled that I can barely imagine the potential. Right now, it’s ok that I don’t know exactly where I’m headed. It’s somewhere glorious, and I seem to be making really good time.

None of us knows where we’re heading, of course. You take your turn not because you know the outcome and can predict the next three moves. You take your turn because you’re scared, because you’re sure, because you’ve waited this long already, and because you’ve been hurtling, inching, sliding toward this moment for your whole life.

I’m taking my turn because, after years of living just a bit outside of my own story, my own heart, my own body, I’ve finally arrived somewhere. After years of longing and searching, everything has gotten so rich and real… Finally! It only took an entire lifetime to achieve this overnight transformation.

Deep down, I always knew this was possible. Deep down, I always knew the only way to change the world was to change myself. I knew it, but I didn’t believe it until now.

Damn, this sounds like a bit delicious dreaming in the midst of the world and its chaos, right?

I dream of sovereignty. In this dream, I choose myself. I choose this bit of earth beneath my feet and this collection of my favorite people. I choose this community, this work, and these words.

Yes, it’s all so delicious. But, deep inside, there’s still this dark little urge. You know the one. It’s that urge to berate yourself for all that wasted time, energy, and opportunity. It’s the urge to hate yourself just a little bit for the lost days, weeks, or even decades. It’s the urge to laugh at the woman who is so bold and daft, who dares to believe in the instant alchemy of transformation. It’s that urge to say “who do you think you are?” with the venomous sneer of an insecure bully.

Yeah, the timid little mean girl inside me wants to scoff and hide when I make all these powerful, grown up declarations.

But then I realize that any part of me that can’t believe in my own sovereignty, in my own power, in the fact that it’s my turn is a relic from the past. Those parts of myself exist in my memory, not in my current reality. The “not me,” “not yet,” and “I couldn’t possibly” chapter has ended. I could go back and reread it and try to revert back to the old stories, but inviting that sort of misery doesn’t really seem worth the effort.

I need to take all the energy I’ve got and pay it toward the future. It’s my turn after all.

Maybe you’re like me and you’re feeling all kinds of ecstatic and all kinds of worried at this shift into “It’s my turn. I choose me. I trust myself to use my focus and my power to make magic that will make this world more beautiful, bearable, and bold.”

We’ve been conditioned to be nice kids who let the loud ones, the eager ones, and the needier ones go first. We’ve been taught to make sure everyone is pleased and comfy. We’ve been trained to be practical and responsible. We’re the smart ones. The dependable ones. We’ve gotten used to taking refuge in our fantasies but we can’t imagine seeing that fantastical stuff happen in real life.

We keep on waiting. And waiting. Until one day, it’s not about the waiting any more.

Instead, it’s about being brave and crazy, centered and compassionate, irreverent and wise and saying “it’s my turn.”

In my world, taking my turn means declaring my own personal and creative sovereignty.

Sovereignty is about freeing the princess (that’s the brave and crazy part). Sovereignty is about crowning the queen (that’s the centered and compassionate part). Sovereignty is about embracing the wise woman (that’s the irreverent and wise part).

Sovereignty is about encountering all these aspects of yourself and finding your essential self in the center of all this magic, confusion, and possibility.

It’s my turn to really  hold space for these sovereignty teachings and offer them to you. It’s your turn to start to look at what your sovereign story looks and feels like to you.

Join me for The Sovereign Awakening, the new program that will inspire you to take your turn and give you the tools to live and tell your Sovereign Story.