BECOMING
A True Fable of a Gently Tumultuous Journey Into Adulthood*
*Adulthood can occur at any age
To purchase a PDF download, please click the button below.
Excerpt from Introduction
Excerpt from: BECOMING Chapter 3 "The Day Before Tomorrow"
Excerpt from Introduction
How does a girl (or a woman who never had the opportunity to be a girl) identify what may be missing in her life? Understand the persistence of discontent, the elusiveness of joy? Address seemingly intangible struggles? Develop her own internal point of reference, independent from parents and others? Generate happiness from within, and not be vulnerably reliant on the responses of others? Know what she is looking for if she has never been there?
BECOMING is a tale of a Young Girl's passage to become a Young Woman. Throughout her mentor/friend relationship with the Old Woman, the Young Girl traverses, though her everyday experiences, the essential developmental steps to form her sense of self. With a mirroring Best Friend, she shapes her own identity through tumultuous times of adolescence into young adulthood. Self-actualization is demonstrated step by developmental step from the earliest sense of self to young adulthood. The narrative poem structure of this young adult self-help fable contributes to the literature of possibility in a style independent of how-to as well as traditional narrative.
If family, society, and one's own ideals all urge being a loving and giving caretaker, validation is through performance; affirmation is from others. To act on needs of one's own is "selfish."
BECOMING is about self-actualizing. It is a narrative of creating basic developmental building blocks to consolidate a cohesive sense of self. While each person's journey is unique, each uses the same fundamental building blocks for developmental growth of self esteem and confidence.
The embodiment of ubiquitous doubts, fears, hopes, and yearnings, the Young Girl serves as a Rorschach for each reader to project and focus on specific personal issues. The alter-ego Best Friend provides an accurate mirror for the Young Girl. The Old Woman simultaneously echoes the voice previously silenced by the Young Girl as well as being the ideal mentor/grandmother/therapist. The Young Girl comes to the end of her past to become all of who she really is the present moment.
Specific tasks within each major developmental step are illustrated, drawing from the rich fields of knowledge of psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The narrative free-style poem form, neither how-to nor traditional literary narrative is, as adolescents are, contrarian.
Excerpt from: BECOMING Chapter 3 "The Day Before Tomorrow"
As she had done so many times before,
the Young Woman went to see her friend, the Old Woman.
As she approached the porch,
in the late quiet of the day,
she saw the rocker...
empty.
The unimaginable had occurred.
A barren, hollow pain seized the Young Woman,
frightening her.
She, again, felt abandoned...
Alone in the cold trenches
of a predesigned story
composed by another.
Surprisingly,
for one so astute as she,
this possibility had never occurred to her.
Death,
the final leaving,
had only been a vague and distant rumor.
The cherished illusion of exception
shattered with swift certainty.
The Young Woman's stomach first housed her fear:
a yawning, gaping mouth
wanting to scream.
She yearned for a hand
to guide her through her pain,
to teach her
...again
...now.
Days passed.
Her sorrow had no words.
Silent screams and empty tears...
a blank dream of hunger shouting...
the quietness of despair...
sometimes
a shadow of light moving through the darkness
of what cannot be explained.
There was never a time
for such as this.
Her eyes filled with tearful questions--
and hints of running away.
Helplessness pivoted into anger...
burning and glaring behind her eyes.
No antidote sufficed for this rage.
How dare she die before explaining
more to me?
The Young Woman wanted no tissue to erase her burning tears.
Would what she shared with the Old Woman
be gone forever?
Her feelings lapped onto the shore
of her consciousness, wave after wave.
AS FROM THE BEGINNING,
LOVE KNOWS BEST ITS DEPTH
AT THE HOUR OF SEPARATION
The next days and weeks
saw grief fooling the Young Woman
with its disguises,
ripping away the smiling, energetic mask,
to flow in wailing tears.
Sometimes hiding south of her belly,
drying up her every juice.
The winds of grief changed in magnitude and direction.
When they blew steady,
she had to sail in front,
as they pushed her along.
If extremely hard,
she stayed in her harbor
to protect herself.
When the winds blew more gently,
she could sail softly,
venture further and further,
even swim for a time
in calm, clear waters.
She learned to sail with her mourning
rather than against it...
to listen to it --
for feelings never lie.
THE GREATEST PAIN COMES NOT
FROM REALIZING THAT SOMETHING EXISTS,
BUT IN RECOGNIZING THAT SOMETHING
REALLY DOESN'T EXIST.
