Happy Sacred Sunday!
A couple of years before my father died, my husband and I were sitting in our living room having a “date night” while our three toddlers slept upstairs. We got to talking about my dad, and my husband confessed he didn’t understand our relationship. “You two are so close and yet it seems like your dad wasn’t around too much when you were growing up. I just don’t get it.”
That’s when I decided to show him the box.
The box I had kept with me all of my life, tucked on a shelf in a closet, no matter where I lived. It was the box of postcards my dad sent me from all over the world.
As we sat there reading the postcards, laughing and even crying a few times, my husband shared an idea.
“What if you two wrote a book about how to be there even when you’re not? You could teach divorced dads or working moms how to create meaningful relationships with their kids even if they’re not physically present.”
We presented this idea to my dad and eventually got him excited about it.
We hired a ghostwriter, put a book proposal together, and even came up with a title. Love, Dad.
But my father got too sick too fast, and our dream of writing this book took a back seat to managing his care.
One day my dad said to me, “About the book my love, whether you publish it or don’t publish it, it doesn’t matter. Our story is already written. That’s what really matters.”
After he died, I set out to finish the book, but I couldn’t pull it together. The format we had chosen didn’t work without him, and even though I was sharing our story in keynote speeches and writing about him … something about the book felt like it wasn’t mine.
One time I gave a speech and a friend of mine listened to it. She called me afterward and said, “I have to tell you something that is hard to say.”
“Go for it.” I braced myself.
“I think you talk too much about your dad in your speech. It’s like you’re telling his story, not yours. And you have so much value to give on your own. It’s like you’re trying to stay in his shadow because you don’t want anyone to forget him. But if this is going to be your career, you need to carve your own path.”
I sat with her advice and ran it by a couple of my mentors. They told me she was right. And I knew it, too, deep down inside.
It was then that I finally put the Love, Dad manuscript away.
I’ve spent the last few years developing my own work and carving my own path.
But lately our story has been resurfacing, and although the story hasn’t changed, the narrator has.
I don’t share this story anymore as a little girl grieving her dad and making sure no one forgets him. I share it as a woman whose life was built on that story, and who can see it now from a different perspective.
You have a story like this. A story you’ve told the same way for years. A story you think defines who you are now, or a story you’ve been trying to forget.
Maybe it’s a dream, a goal, or a project you put away, and you’ve never let yourself ask whether it was actually finished or just abandoned.Here’
s what I want you to notice. The story isn’t the problem. It’s the identity you held on to through that story.
Because when the narrator changes, the story becomes useful, too. It stops being the thing that explains you and starts being the thing you’ve built on.
This week on the podcast I’m sharing what my dad taught me about designing a life. The Bliss’n Up theme for July is Design July, and these postcards turned out to be more relevant than I expected.
If I’ve been in your inbox for a while, you may know about the postcards. But I’ve never shared the insights that I talked about on this episode anywhere before.
Love, Dad was not the book I was meant to write. But it was the foundation for the stories I tell today.
You don’t always get to decide what happens to you, but you can always choose what you make it mean. And design around that.
By the way, I’d love to know if you picked your theme for July? Did you adopt the collective Design theme, or did you name your own?
Hit reply and tell me.
Sending you so much love today and always,
