Collective Self | Finding all of me

This post is part of Create Your Own Travel Guide Month, celebrating the release of our new book A Travel Guide for Transitions…

As we created our book this spring, it came clear to Bas that by taking his journey outside the corporate world he had discovered an entire A-Team of new selves. Here are just a few of the different versions of Bas that he’s found over the last couple of years…

They are so beautiful, aren’t they?

Given their outfits, I might have gone with “a Smarter and Geekier Partridge Family” instead of “A-Team.” Don’t tell him I said that. 😉

Anyway, across that same period, I came to recognize and write about two versions of me: Order Girl and Wonder Woman.

Order Girl is a control queen and also, I’ve learned, a Harbinger of the Freak Out…

And Wonder Woman is a 40+-year-old learner, happy being lost, full of wonder, and an embracer of Chaos…

These are Bas-created images from our book. He’s so freaking good at noticing what matters most. I love that Wonder Woman is just me, in my regular clothes, deciding to let go of Order Girl and just dance instead. But I digress…

When I began this post this morning, my thought was that I was going to write about a third version of me that I found in the past few months: possibly Melting-Down-About-New-Puppy Mom or Bat-Shit-Crazy Event Planner or maybe even Cool Writer Chick who I’ve been getting to know this summer.

And because I’m not great at drawing, I went back to the images file of our book, hoping that Bas had created just one drawing of me that I could use in this post.

Then something amazing happened.

I didn’t find just one drawing.

I found dozens of drawings. I found dozens of different Loris in the images from the book.

Dozens Of Loris.

Holy crap!

When did this happen? Wow. So cool.

So here are my just-found points:

There are lots and lots and lots of MEs to be found. Some of these MEs are easy to embrace. Some MEs surprise and delight me. Some I want to just punch in the teeth. But all of them – ALL of them – are more interesting characters than I can imagine when I live within my fear, within my choking-for-me cubicle, trapped in somebody else’s story.
I can’t fully be or see these characters without the helping hands and kind eyes of dear friends.
Today surprised and delighted me. Most days out here in Lori Land do. It’s my story, after all, and I like surprise and delight. This new journey, this new story, is so freakin worth it…

The Rock-Pusher and Lori-the-Playful…