TEACHER/HEALER/HELPER

Early on in my identity quest, it was apparent to me that I am best described and defined by the roles of the teacher, the healer, and the helper.

In fact, the professions I most considered were teaching, nursing & midwifery, and counseling. I came very close to earning my Bachelor's degree in elementary education, but after the car accident damaged my vision, I realized that teaching was no longer an option for me and that is when I changed my major to psychology and now, at the master's degree level, counseling.

When I was much younger I was very interested in becoming a midwife, but my husband forbid it. He said the legal risk was too great and he didn't like the idea of me being on-call all the time. I allowed him to make that decision for me, sadly.

And, had I known myself better when I was much younger, I would've considered becoming a funeral director and would've studied mortuary science. Too late now, although I've recently begun researching the Green Funeral Movement and would like to become involved in that, even as I pursue my Master's in Community Counseling.

I think of the years I spent homeschooling and while there are many things I would have done differently in that arena had I had access to more support and more money, I enjoyed the experience immensely and still miss it.

So when I must define who I am, the words teacher, healer, and helper always come to mind first.

Community Counseling will be a wonderfully perfect career choice for me, even now, late in my life. Perhaps it is especially now, as I approach fifty, that I believe I am even more qualified than ever to counsel and work in the mental health field - as if all of my life experiences thus far have prepared me for this role. Finally, I will get paid to do something I enjoy and something I am naturally good at doing. People have always turned to me for insight and advice and now I can charge for that service! And, in doing so, I will be taking another giant step toward self-actualization.

Had I become a midwife, I would've excelled. Had I become a public school teacher, I would've excelled. Had I known enough about myself to become a funeral director, I would've excelled there too. And now, as I approach the Counseling field, I am confident that I will excel there too!

IT JUST DOESN'T SEEM RIGHT

That wisdom comes with age, maturity, and experience just doesn't seem right - or fair. By the time we learn how to cope with Life and to successfully contribute to Life, it is too late; the damage has been done and generational cycles continue to spin.

As I approach my fiftieth birthday, I can look back with perfect hindsight and see with painful clarity just how little I knew about who I really am when I was busy with building what would become my life story, a tragedy in the making.

For example, when I was in high school and was being pressured to decide what it was I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I did not have a clue! I knew that I felt a maternal urge to mother, but that desire was probably rooted more firmly in hormonal surges than it was in my innate talents and skills. Those urges may have been better fulfilled had I invested in a pet to nurture.

I also knew that I wanted to be a schoolteacher, but as a young girl without the experience of childrearing, what did I really know about child development? What kind of teaching skills would I have had at such an early age other than the simple book knowledge and psychological theories and precepts that would've been imparted in college coursework? While I believe I was innately primed to be a teacher, I would not have become a truly good teacher without my direct experience gained through years of motherhood.

What I did not realize in my youth, and what did not become apparent to me until I was well into my thirties is that I probably should've gone into mortuary science and become a funeral director. But, that is not a career presented to high school students for consideration, so it escaped my consideration until it was way too late.

In my early thirties, as I began to become acquainted with my Authentic Self, I realized that I am a teacher-healer-helper. No need for vocational assessments; those terms adequately define my truest and most innate skills. They define who I am. It explains why I have been drawn to teaching, homeschooling, support-group facilitating, midwifery, counseling, ministering, and funeral directing. But those parts of me were elusive and ill-defined when I was just a teen. How could I have known?

It just doesn't seem right - that it would take me living life before I could know how to best orchestrate my life. And that's not fair.

So while it is true that I have applied my authentic skills throughout my life - as the founder, coordinator, and facilitator of a mother's support group, as a home-school educator and tutor, as a "counselor" and "minister" to friends, neighbors and strangers, as a "teacher" and "mentor" to a flock of Girl Scouts, and once as a "midwife" to a young mom who needed a home birth attendant - it is only now, as I approach fifty, that I am working on becoming a licensed mental health counselor so that I can finally receive recognition and compensation for what I've been doing all these years!

So while it is true that I can look at this next stage of my life as the culmination of my life's experiences and the opus of my being, it also seems horribly unfair that it would take this long for me to know who I really am, to approach self-actualizing, and to be able to finally apply the wisdom that comes with age.