Latest / Beyond the Arc: Reflections on Resilience, Identity, & Life Podcast / I Had the Magical Shoes All Along

Transcript

I Had the Magical Shoes All Along · Beyond the Arc: Reflections on Resilience, Identity, & Life Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Beyond the Arc.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Amy Gamble, and this episode is the beginning of, well, something new.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm calling it Driving My Way Through Grief,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: a continuing series of short stories about grief,
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: life, loss, and everything I've discovered along the way.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And strangely enough, this one begins in Las Vegas, at The Sphere, watching The Wizard of Oz.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting in the front row of the balcony,
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I leaned forward a little to snap a photo of these gigantic fans.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And as Dorothy ran outside with her suitcase,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: with this massive tornado on the horizon,
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I grabbed onto my hat to keep it from blowing off my head.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Seriously.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I was sitting inside the sphere in Las Vegas.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the tornado wasn't real.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: But when that thing came roaring across the screen and the wind started blowing
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: and leaves were flying around thousands of people, it sure as heck felt real.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I've never actually been standing in the distance of a tornado,
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: but for those few moments, I felt completely immersed in one.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Wizard of Oz has always been one of my all-time favorite movies,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: and seeing it like this,
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: inside of one of the most technologically advanced venues in the world,
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: well, it left me a little awestruck.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: But there was something else going on for me that day.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: We left for Vegas the day after the third anniversary of my mother's passing.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Three years.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: My sister Shelly and I always seem to find a memory to share or a story to tell
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: about our Esther.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And sitting there watching The Wizard of Oz, I couldn't help thinking about her.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: My mom would have absolutely loved seeing the Wicked Witch light up that enormous scream.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, she would not have enjoyed paying $24 for a cocktail.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: No way.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing about Esther.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: If she really wanted that drink, she'd have paid the $24.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because she taught us to buy what we wanted, do fun things, and enjoy life.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: She used to tell me, life's short, Amy.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta enjoy it while you can.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Turns out she was right.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: As I sat there watching Dorothy and all of her friends,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I started thinking about the lessons in that movie.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've kind of felt like Dorothy,
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: plenty of times in my life,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: lost, trying to get home, and some wicked witch chasing me.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Lion too.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because every one of them went looking for something they thought they were missing.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole time, they already had it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: That lesson hit me hard because it took me most of my life to figure out
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: that everything I needed, I always had.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: There really wasn't much to prove to anyone else.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was myself who had to believe in me.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever chased that insatiable, gotta prove yourself ghost?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know the one.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: You get one more certification, one more degree.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Finish one more project before the sun sets.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Accomplish one more thing.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then you'll know you're a hard worker.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then you'll feel valuable.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then you'll feel smart.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then you'll feel qualified.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Then you'll finally feel, well, good enough.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Except there's always one more thing.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's always the chase.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you're trying to prove your worth to other people, the finish line keeps moving.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there I was, watching a tornado barrel down on Dorothy.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: She had absolutely no control over stopping it.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: None.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought about how little we actually control in life.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: We certainly can't control what other people think of us,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: whether they believe we're worthy, qualified, successful, smart, good enough.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: All that belongs to the same family.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's called external validation.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Trying to prove to other people that we are worth something.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: What I've learned in the years since my mother passed away has truly been life-changing for me.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: In a strange way, grief has been the ultimate school of excellence.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because the power, resources, skills, and talents, they were always within my reach.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they were already in my grasp.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was just so busy trying to prove myself that I hadn't stopped long enough
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: to reflect on who I actually was.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Or what experience had already taught me.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And no matter how fast the tornadoes in my life have spun, I'm still standing, hat on head.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Something changed when I finally started believing in myself.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I realized I didn't have nearly as much reason to prove myself to somebody else.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what an absolutely freeing feeling that is.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a simple concept and something incredibly difficult to grasp.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like Dorothy,
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've spent plenty of time hoping there was some wizard out there
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: who could help me get where I was trying to go.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Someone who knew more.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Someone who could tell me what to do.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Someone who could somehow give me whatever I thought was missing.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then, I stopped moving long enough to realize something.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'd had the magical shoes on my feet all along.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Funny how we can spend so much of our lives searching outside ourselves
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: for answers only to discover the real magic was already within us.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Intuition, wisdom, experience.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's part of what grief has taught me.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Home isn't necessarily going backward.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes home is discovering who you've become
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: and realizing you've been carrying what you needed all along.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's no place like home.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to Beyond the Arc.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is part of my new continuing series, Driving My Way Through Grief.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: These aren't going to be stories about getting over grief,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: because I'm not sure that's how grief works.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're stories about living through it,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: driving through it,
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: laughing through it,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes getting completely lost in it,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: and discovering things about ourselves along the way.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And until then, remember what Esther said, life's short, Enjoy it while you can.