Be the Heroine of Your Life

After Nora Ephron died last year I clipped this quote from one of the many articles about her:  “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

It seems like I can see it when someone else slips into victimhood but I’m last to notice when I’m doing it. And today—home and alone with me and my thoughts—I finally listened in and whoa, readers, my manta was “Poor Me.”

I guess it snuck up on me because I am wrestling with some hard stuff. I worked my fingers to nubs last week writing, editing, typing, revising, typing…and my body too. It’s hard to sit for hours and hours like that. But I also do know that even that is a luxury problem. I’m a writer and so, writers kinda have to sit and type a lot. Comes with…

And I am scared. I’m working on a book that is so important to me. It’s the story of a group of elderly Marines (they are 95, 98, 99, 101…) that I got to know over a period of 12 years and no one has ever told their story. And it’s a trauma story and that makes it so relevant to today and our very current events. So, you can see, I have a lot of personal energy tied in this book. And …What if it doesn’t work…and what if it doesn’t get published…and…and…

Yes I’m doing all those things we are supposed to NOT to do in recovery: Don’t project, don’t fear, don’t tell God what to do…etc. Because when I do all those things I get smaller and smaller and smaller…and that is victimhood.

So thank you, Nora Ephron—for great movies and great books, especially “Heartburn”—in which she turned her husband’s affair into a best-seller and totally turned victim into heroine—and thank you for this reminder:

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”