starting over

Finding Joy in Simple Pleasures: A Path to Healing

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

On May 29, 2016, I tried to end my life. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried, but it was the closest I came to succeeding. My reasons are not the point here. The point is that, during my long, slow climb back to mental health, I learned that I needed to stop living my life in the past and the future. If I was going to stay alive, I needed to live my life one moment at a time. 

Cover of the book 'A Cure for Heartache' by Mary Jane Grant, featuring an open window view of a cityscape with greenery, an open notebook and a cup of tea on a table, accompanied by cookies.

That is the key message of Mary Jane Grant’s (class of 2016) A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time (hard cover, Hodder, 2019, sold in paperback as Happier Here and Now: The Restorative Power of Life’s Simple Pleasures). Struggling with grief after a sudden divorce, Grant moved to England where she slowly learned to live her life moment by moment, soaking in the joys of each minute, and learning that life can’t be lived in the past or the future. It can only be lived here and now. 

The therapist I found to help me through that period of my life is trained in a well-researched and fully secular practice of meditation called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). One of the techniques she taught me for pulling myself out of depression and anxiety, though not meditation, is a simple practice, of going through the five senses, one at a time, and noticing five things I see, five things I feel, five things I hear, taste, and smell. It’s meant to break the cycle of rumination over past experiences one finds depressing and anxiety over future experiences.

It’s meant to bring the person back to the physical world around them in each moment. 

This is what I thought about as I read Grant’s book, as she explained her process of minding her senses, learning to wander, learning to let go, loving what you do, and learning to appreciate and to connect. Here’s how Grant describes her experience of getting reacquainted with her five senses:

I entered the reading room. Morning light streamed through tall windows. The walls were filled from floor to ceiling with books, and a dozen or more freestanding shelves took up the remaining space. To the left of the entrance door were counters with computer stations. Above, a bulletin board was covered in notices, local advertisements and sign-up sheets for local classes and lectures. A couple of round wooden tables filled the rest of the space. People sat here and there, reading books and newspapers. I went to an empty table, quietly unpacked my things, sat down and closed my eyes.   

Book cover of 'Happier Here & Now' by Mary Jane Grant, featuring a hand holding a colorful bouquet of flowers, with the title and subtitle prominently displayed.

I could hear the occasional rustling of a newspaper and the soft hum of the heating system. 

I took a deep breath through my nose. I detected a faint floral hint from the hand lotion I’d applied before leaving my room. Lately, I’d switched my allegiance from lavender to rose. Maybe it was the influence of England. After all, what was more English than a rose? 

I settled into place, connected my laptop, opened the internet and started my search. My first question was simple: why, when I immersed myself in the present, did I feel so much better? By pulling my attention to the five senses, I gave myself no choice but to focus on what was happening in the moment. I was not stuck in the past or worried about the future. Yesterday, I had learned first-hand that the senses held the key that opened the gate to my present experience. They admitted me to the garden of earthly delights—sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical feelings—right here, right now. By being in the body, I could calm the mind and soothe the spirit. It felt neither self-indulgent nor hedonistic. It felt beautifully, blissfully ordinary. 

When I was recovering after my suicide attempt, I read Full Catastrophe Living, a 650-page volume by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a world-renowned mindfulness researcher and originator/teacher of MBSR. I took the MBSR course twice, and underwent a one-year program called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. 

If I ever encounter someone going through a rough time, I might tell them, instead, to buy Grant’s 200-page A Cure for Heartache and read it slowly, mindfully, savouring each syllable, and then maybe go back and read it again. Because everything I learned in that difficult time is what I learned all over again from this meaningful little book. 

For more on heartbreak and healing, read:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Leslie Buxton

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel

Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, by Laura Pratt

For more lyric essays, read:

Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and other dilemmas, by Gloria Blizzard

I Don’t Do Disability and other lies I’ve told myself, by Adelle Purdham

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More, by Karen Stiller

Finding Success with YA Fiction After the MFA in Creative Nonfiction

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I don’t usually review fiction in this space, but this week I’m making an exception. 

Cover of the book 'Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve' by Richard Levangie, featuring stylized flowers and an ornate staircase.

The University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction has, to date, produced more than 50 published authors of creative nonfiction, most of which are listed here. Assuming each cohort comprises about 20 talented and experienced writers, as did the inaugural class of which I was a very lucky member, that means about a quarter of us have had the good fortune to hold a copy of our published work in our hands—an amazing success rate. 

Sadly, that means three-quarters of us are either still searching for a publisher (read excerpts of my as-yet-unpublished manuscript here) or, alas, have moved on. But moving on often leads to other successes. Starlit Simon, a member of the inaugural class, is working on her PhD as well as perfecting the traditional Indigenous craft of porcupine quill art. Moira Dann (class of 2016), whose MFA project about the mothers of confederation sounded fascinating to me, went on the publish Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures (which I’ll write about for BC Day in August) and more recently Fat Camp Summer: Advice I Would Have Given My Parents. And Richard Levangie, another member of the inaugural cohort (class of 2015), went on to write the excellent middle-grade YA novel, Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve (Nevermore Press, 2020). 

Hotel Maisonneuve focuses on 13-year-old Jacob Jollimore, who is having the worst summer of his life. Then he finds a 100-year-old letter hidden in a bureau in the Edwardian hotel his parents are renovating, which sends him on a treasure hunt that would challenge even the great Sherlock Holmes. It’s a great plot, and I have no idea how Richard thought up the incredible puzzle clues.

But that’s not all that makes it a worthwhile read. Richard’s writing, replete with references to books like Lord of the Rings, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The King of Attolia, is also full of clever imagery, like “the minutes dripped by like a leaky faucet,” “paint stripper oozing from his pores,” and “[her] bruises were as purple as pansies.” The book even includes a haiku:

Jacob was so intent that he forgot where he was. An ancient woman crashed into his cart with almost-lethal force, but she didn’t apologize. No wonder everything was so heavily dented. Jacob decided to pay closer attention before someone sent him flying into the. Mangoes where he’d die a quick but horrible death, buried under hundreds of pounds of hard green fruit. 

Maybe that would be his epitaph. He composed a haiku.

Here rests the fool who

Could not solve hard puzzles

Crushed by rock-like fruit.

Not bad, but it needed work. 

One of the things I admire most about Richard is his ability to move on, not just from the creative nonfiction project he worked on for his MFA, but in life. As he writes about himself:

If I couldn’t be a hockey player in the NHL, I wanted to be a doctor. But when I was studying to be a doctor, I realized that what I really wanted to do was tell stories. As a journalist, it started with artists and artisans, and with food and wine, but then real life intervened in the form of a rare brain tumour that knocked me flat. For nearly two decades, I wrote nothing worthy.

When an unexpected respite from the pain took hold in 2012, two novels sprang into my head, waiting for me to write them. I cherished this rare gift, for it felt like Divine Intervention into a life that had forgotten what it was like be alive. I believe that the stories we tell offer us a chance to truly understand ourselves, and come to understand each other. It is a sacred gift, and I feel blessed. 

Not surprisingly, Richard recently inked a deal for his second novel, this time an adult fantasy called Red Tiger. Read an excerpt on his website. I have no doubt it will do well.

Other books to come from grads of the class of 2015:

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin.  

Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, by Jen Powley.

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.

The Girl in the Woods, by Stacey May Fowles.*

(*This book was published, but it appears to have been pulled from sale.)

And coming soon:

No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery, by Lynne Melcombe.

Resilience and Chocolate: A Refugee Family’s Remarkable Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I’m finding it hard to live in the world at this moment in history. Over and above the daily headlines about Gaza and Ukraine, there is a major violent humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which has been largely overshadowed by the focus on the former two. In fact, the website for the Geneva Academy tells us that there are currently over 100 armed conflicts raging across the globe. None of these affect me personally, and yet in a way all of them do. Edited to add: And now, Israel has started a war with Iran.

Cover of 'Peace by Chocolate' book featuring the Hadhad family on a beach, with text highlighting their journey from Syria to Canada.

So, you can imagine how I felt reading Jon Tattrie’s Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada (Goose Lane Editions, 2020), perhaps the most uplifting book I’ve read in—well, maybe ever.

Okay, Anne of Green Gables, but that’s fiction. 

Peace by Chocolate is the story of a large family that had a successful, internationally renowned chocolate business in Damascus, a business the father had created from scratch as a young man. This business was the reason he met his beloved wife, which led to the births of seven children. It was the reason his family home, a single-story building when his own father was young, grew into a 10-storey home for much of his extended family. It’s a story of success and love and plenty …

… until the Assad regime responded to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria by turning on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into refugees. The Hadhad family survived, but their beloved family home and their chocolate business did not. 

After three years of languishing as refugees in Lebanon, the Canadian government finally chooses the eldest son, Tareq, to come to Canada. Meanwhile, a group of people in Nova Scotia have come together to welcome at least one family, to save at least one person, from this horrible conflict by bringing them to Canada and helping them settle in the small town of Antigonish. 

When Tareq arrives at Halifax airport on a snowy night just before Christmas, to his surprise, he is greeted by dozens of people who have been making calls and filling out paperwork and fundraising for a couple of years. Tareq’s arrival is the first of the fruits of their labour. 

What follows—the way things come together, the barriers that fall away, the pieces that fall into place—is nothing short of remarkable. Within months, he is joined by most of his family. His father begins making chocolate in the kitchen of their new home and selling it at a winter fair. The chocolate business outgrows the kitchen, and then the basement, and then a shed. Within less than a year, the Hadhads open a factory in the small town that’s welcomed them—and several other Syrian families—and Peace by Chocolate, the company, becomes a major local employer. 

The farther their remarkable story spreads, the more remarkable it becomes, leading to international speaking engagements, meetings with heads of state—and a request by CBC journalist and author Jon Tattrie to write a book about them. As Tattrie writes of his first meeting with Tareq in the Author’s Note:

I’d been watching Tareq Hadhad for almost two years. I knew the names of his mother, father, sisters, and brother. I knew of his dreams to be a doctor. I knew of his family’s passion for chocolate. I knew they’d lost everything in the Syrian war and rebuilt it in Canada. But I didn’t know how. How had they turned from refugees into pillars of the community so quickly?

And I didn’t know how small-town Canada had truly reacted to a Middle Eastern Muslim family dropping out of the clear sky to take up residence. My previous books had documented the intense and often violent racism minorities face in Nova Scotia. Eddie Carvery was a young black man in the 1960s when Halifax bulldozed Africville, his family home for generations. He moved into the ruins in 1970 to plant his body as a living protest for justice. He was still there forty years later when I asked him if I could tell his story. And I’d written about the notorious Edward Cornwallis, the British soldier who founded Halifax and tried to exterminate the Mi’kmaq First Nation. I’d written about Daniel Paul, the Mi’kmaw elder who campaigned for decades to get the city to take down its Cornwallis statue.

Would I find the same grime under the shiny story I’d been reading about the Hadhad family and Peace by Chocolate?

The answer is no. But to find out more you’ll have to read Peace by Chocolate, which quickly became a national bestseller and was later made into a multi-award winning motion picture. Whichever way you choose to find out more about this story, I caution you to do so with a box of tissues at hand. I’m getting misty again just writing this.

Other books about food:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonny Reichert.

Finding Yourself in Retirement: Memoir of a Journey of Self-Discovery

/ Lynne Melcombe / 4 Comments

Sue Harper’s Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement (self-published, 2019, class of 2016) is about exactly what the title suggests. After years of teaching, the author and her partner retired. A talented artist, her partner knew exactly who she would be in retirement. Harper wasn’t quite so sure. 

the Eiffel Tower with the book title overlaying it

Within a few years of retiring, they went on an adventure: a winter in Paris, where Harper’s partner attended an art course at the Sorbonne. Harper imagined that, during the days when her partner was at school, she would explore the most exciting city in the world, waiting for inspiration to strike, and then withdraw to the small apartment they’d rented and churn out book manuscripts.

It didn’t work out that way. On her own all day in a strange city, Harper had to face her fears, not only about going out on her own to explore the city, but about whether the author she’d thought was inside her was struggling as hard to get out as she’d always thought. About midway through the book, Harper writes: 

When we retire, we have lots of time to doubt ourselves. While the imposter phenomenon is destructive, it’s also difficult to overcome because no one talks about it. One of the researchers who labelled this phenomenon, psychologist Dr. Suzanne Imes, says little can be done to change the imposter’s feelings about herself. She is convinced she’s the only one who feels this way and fears that if she told anyone else she was a phoney “she would meet with criticism or at least very little understanding on the part of others.” …

It’s funny. I never felt fraudulent when I was writing textbooks, teaching, or helping other teachers, even when I earned promotions at work. My doubt seems strongest when I go to school. I’ve tried to pinpoint the reason for this. Was it because I always compared myself to my brother, who scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the university entrance exams? Or maybe I couldn’t forget my father’s comment when I showed him my 88% in music: “What happened to the other 12%?”

Ouch. 

The point is that retirement is something we do in the winter of life, but we can never forget that winter can also be a turning point in a journey back to light. And ultimately that’s what Harper’s time in Paris became. Overcoming her imposter syndrome enough to complete the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College in Halifax, she also completed a book manuscript describing her own journey. 

Full disclosure: I met Harper through the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction program and later copy edited her manuscript. I haven’t quite made it to retirement myself, but it’s likely when I get there I’ll go back and read it again to help myself face my fears and make my winter a time of new beginnings, as she did. 

Other books about journeys to self-discovery:

Run, Hide, Repeat: Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin.

The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, by Gwen Lamont.

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir, by Nellwyn Lampert.

Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, Laura Pratt.

I Don’t Do Disability: And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, by Adelle Purdham.

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Scott.

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More, by Karen Stiller.

Just Jen: Lessons in Resilience and Inclusion

/ Lynne Melcombe / 4 Comments

Today, December 3, 2024, is International Day of Persons with Disabilities. This year’s theme is “Amplifying the leadership of persons with disabilities for an inclusive and sustainable future.” If anyone embodied the leadership traits required to ensure inclusivity of people with disabilities, it was certainly Jen Powley.

Jen was another author in my class (2015) for the master’s program in creative nonfiction writing. I remember arriving a day late for second-year summer residency. My daughter had gotten married on the first day of the residency, so I hadn’t left Vancouver until after the reception and had only arrived in Halifax in the wee hours of the morning. 

The next day, we had our mentor groups in the morning. Exhausted by my very late arrival, I took a nap on the lunch break and overslept. So I arrived late to the afternoon large group session and proceeded to go around on the break to say hello to people I hadn’t seen since the previous year. 

When I got to Jen, she didn’t recognize me. This wasn’t a surprise. She hadn’t been in my mentor group the previous year; her quadriplegia (caused by MS) prevented her from socializing much; and my social inhibition never helps with anything. So, I don’t know if I’d ever introduced myself to her.

Approaching her to say hello, I explained that I’d missed the welcome reception the previous day as I’d been at my daughter’s wedding. Without missing a beat or cracking a smile, she said, through her assistant, “And do you think that’s a good reason?” 

Jen was famous for her dry wit. Introducing her at a conference I later attended where she sat on a panel talking about disabilities, her first-year mentor, Lorri Nielsen Glenn, talked about her remarkable ability to, among other things, say a lot with very few words. I suspect Jen had an ability to zero in on the absurd long before she developed MS, but having difficulty finding the breath to speak honed her ability to “level a room,” as Glenn put it, in just a few syllables. 

Powley’s memoir, Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis (Fernwood Publishing, 2017) takes us from her diagnosis at age 15 through her adult life, boyfriends, difficulties finding work, activism in the disability community, quadriplegia, and finding the love of her life, not to mention earning several academic degrees in her spare time. (The first time I met her, she dryly described her decision to embark on yet another degree as “much to my parents’ chagrin.”)

In a chapter called Engineering Families, Jen wrote: 

“Having hired twenty-seven assistants over eight years, I was accustomed to saying goodbye. Many of my assistants were students who didn’t stay for more than the years they were in school. Others simply moved on. Working one-on-one with my assistants, I came to know them well, but they usually only knew each other through the emails they typed for me. Some of my assistants met at shift change, but if one worked on Fridays and another worked Sundays, it was doubtful their paths would cross. Occasionally, I hosted barbecues for everyone who worked for me. Introducing themselves, they would say ‘Oh, you’re blah-blah at gmail.com. I’ve read your emails.’ The barbecues were meetings of the Jen community. I would say ‘knees’—to signal that I needed to be repositioned—and four people would get up to adjust me. 

“I engineer families out of strangers, and in the time my assistants spend as part of my family, I hope they see how strong someone who appears so fragile can be. I want them to go into the world as doctors, marine biologists, academics, librarians, and artists who know that differently-abled does not mean dumb or ill-tempered. I want them to raise their children with compassion, and if their mother or brother ever needs assistance, I want them to know they’re strong enough to step up and give it.” 

This book should be required reading for high school graduation because it helps readers learn some fundamental life skills: courage, humility, generousity, humour, compassion. At the least, I hope it’s used in some certificate, diploma, and degree programs for people who wish to work with those living with physical challenges. As Glenn wrote of her former student, “Trust this writer; she’s the real thing.” 

Published in 2017, two years after our graduation from the MFA program, Just Jen went on to become a finalist in the Atlantic Book Awards. Jen Powley died on September 17, 2023, leaving an incredible legacy of warmth, wit, and wisdom. I didn’t know her well, but I know she’s missed. 

Other books on disability:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Leslie Buxton.

I Don’t Do Disability: And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, by Adelle Purdham.

Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health, by Jason Schreurs.

Claire Sower: Rocking Her Art in the Middle of Life

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

Claire Sower in her Granville Island studio.

Claire Sower in her Granville Island studio.

I’ve never seen my friend Claire Sower happier. Not that I see her often; we’re colleagues who bump into each other once every few years. But when I saw her displaying her work Art! Vancouver 2015 last spring, and she told me she’d been invited to participate in a show at the Agora Gallery in New York in October, there was a joy in her face I’ve never seen before.

“In my heart, I know this is what I was born to do,” she says of her mid-life switch from computer to canvas. “When I’m not painting, it’s what I want to be doing.”

Like me, Sower started out as a freelance journalist. And like me, as the years went by and well-paying freelance journalism gigs became fewer and further between, she filled in the gaps with contract work. Eventually, she landed a great gig as a medical journalist, writing reports about clinical research that had been presented at conferences prior to peer-reviewed publication. It was a stressful job, with ever-tight deadlines and a need for pinpoint accuracy, but it included world travel and good money—enough to buy a piece of property, not a common thing for a freelance journalist these days.

Her career switch had its seeds in 2007, when the FDA changed regulations regarding third-party reporting of medical conferences so it could only be done by those with university accreditation for providing continuing medical education. The bottom fell out of the industry; many communications companies went out of business. Out of work, other than the usual jobs most freelancers eke out a living on before finding something more life-sustaining, she set out to create a website providing medical information. But the internet was changing too quickly, social media had not yet evolved into the marketing tool it’s since become, and she was competing against dozens of other health websites, like WebMD, and tens of thousands of out-of-work medical reporters.

“I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t have deep pockets.” She was just making ends meet, and getting to the point where she realized, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do what I want to do, goddammit!” She’d always wanted to paint, but “it never seemed like an option. I never had the time or money.”

Then in 2009, a friend mentioned she’d signed up for an art class and invited Sower to join her. Within weeks, she was hooked. After perhaps a dozen classes, “my friend and I went out and looked for a studio,” she says. “We had one within 10 days down on Granville Island. I just knew at the soul of my being this was what I should be doing.”

After a while, the paintings started to pile up and she figured she might as well try to sell them; if you don’t, she deadpans, “eventually, you’ll just be found dead under a pile of canvases.” Her first show was just a display of her work in West Vancouver City Hall, but it generated enough interest to keep her looking for opportunities.

I’ve been admiring and sharing her work on Facebook for a few years now; there’s something about the flowers she paints that draws my eye. She does landscapes, too—there were a few on exhibit when I saw her last May—but it’s the florals that are written about so glowingly in her artist’s bio for the New York show:

Claire Sower’s florals are tactile and interpretive, conveying a strong sense of tension and joy. . . . Eschewing detail in favor of essence, Sower works quickly, using palette knives to build depth by layering paint, allowing colors to mix on the canvas. This brings a sense of immediacy to her work, which conveys a flower’s “living energy.”

The New York show happened through social media. Claire has a website, of course, and a Facebook presence, but finds Instagram a great platform for emerging artists because it’s where a lot of galleries look for new talent. The Agora Gallery in Chelsea, New York, found her there and invited her to participate in a group show, which opened yesterday (October 9) and continues through most of the month (to October 29).

There’s a whole business component to any art, she says, as any artist knows all too well. You can’t just sit back and relax; you have to be constantly self-promoting. You also have to make some hard choices financially; you have to love what you do or it won’t feel worthwhile. You have to be willing to embrace a somewhat precarious existence, have some faith, and let go.

In some ways, that can be easier for a young person at the beginning of their lives, but Sower feels it’s an advantage to be making this kind of life change at an older age.

“I think being older serves me better because having had 20 years as a self-employed writer and running my own business, I have a lot of experience to draw on in terms of how I want to set up my business as an artist. I understand there’s a lot of pitfalls. I mean, yes, there’s debt, but there’s always debt. I think that’s just a way of life these days. . . . I’ve learned to trust my gut, trust my instincts, and they’ve never steered me wrong.”

At the moment, Sower spends her mornings on freelance writing opportunities to help pay the bills; rent from her property helps, too, another way being older is helping her fulfill her dream. But throughout those mornings at the computer, she’s always looking forward to afternoons and evenings at her studio.

Her long-term goal is to paint full time. “I’m going to have a big studio with a studio assistant and I’m just going to rock and roll!”

I believe she’ll do it. Her work is beautiful and original, and she has the drive and passion to get where she wants to go. And why not? People are living longer and healthier lives these days. Why shouldn’t mid-life be a time when we switch tracks and gear up for something completely new?

If you happen to be in New York City this month, visit the Agora Gallery in Chelsea between October 9 and 29 (opening reception October 15). If not, check out her website or Facebook page and see for yourself. Claire Sower’s art rocks—and, by the way, so does she.

“If You Don’t Like Starting Over, Stop Giving Up”

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

I recently read somewhere, “If you don’t like starting over, stop giving up.” At first, I was taken aback. After all, I’d only just started a blog on the subject of starting over in mid-life. But then I thought, “Wait—there can be all sorts of reasons one might start over that have nothing to do with giving up.”

I’ve started over several times in my life. I don’t care how many people say it’s exhilarating; putting oneself out in the world in a new way is always hard, and I find harder as I get older. I’m not sure if that’s because I don’t have any personal role models for starting over late in life; among my family and friends, everyone did what they did until they died or retired.

Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert—a person who recharges their batteries by being alone, as compared with extroverts, who get their energy from being with people—and starting over typically requires energy to put oneself out there. It’s not unusual for people to have less energy as they get older, whether from a naturally slowing metabolism or because they’re dealing with personal, professional, or health issues.

More likely, I think anyone who starts over in mid-life finds it hard, in at least some respects, but doesn’t necessarily talk about the hard parts. I’ve never been a member of the say-only-positive-things-all-the-time school of thought. Almost inevitably, when people subvert so-called “negative” feelings and experiences because everyone else would rather only hear about the “positive” ones, they enlist unhealthy coping mechanisms.

The problem, of course, is that difficulties only become more difficult when they’re not talked about, but it’s all the more difficult to talk about them when no one else is taking a risk and talking about them lest others target them for not being positive enough. North American culture, I find, is as obsessed with non-stop positivity as it is with relentless self-sufficiency, effortless perfection, and endless youth and beauty. But that’s a whole other rant.

Getting back to the many reasons one might start over, I started over as a youth worker after university because I realized that, although I loved studying anthropology and archaeology, I wasn’t as drawn to the career options as I’d thought I’d be (and wasn’t aware of some of the other options that might have been open to me).

I stumbled from there into youth work almost accidentally. It influenced the course of my life in countless ways, but after seven years I was burning out. Besides, I’d always wanted to be a writer; it had been in the back of my mind for years, but I’d always felt like I needed more life experience. After university, archaeology, travel, youth work, and marriage, I felt ready. It was time to start over again.

I set about to be a freelance journalist around the same time I started my family and stuck with it for 12 years, until our third child came along. At that point, I still wasn’t making a living—freelance gigs were already becoming scarcer and more poorly paid, and I finally had to admit it wasn’t just a personal failing and put my family first. So I started my fourth career, as the sole proprietor of a communications business, working with small nonprofits, with a long-term goal of getting back to creative nonfiction writing after the kids were older.

That’s what I’m doing now, though it feels more like “starting over” than “getting back to it” at least partly because the publishing world has changed much more than I anticipated 20 years ago—and, frankly, so have I. And all those changes make it more difficult than I thought it would be, to the point that I have many moments of regretting that I ever left writing behind.

When I look back with hindsight, I can see there was a third road. On my bad days, I feel bitter because the choice not to take that road wasn’t entirely mine. On my better days, I remember doing what I felt was best for everyone and I remind myself that harbouring anger over old choices doesn’t change anything, past or present.

I imagine a lot of people have those sorts of feelings, which is why I think talking about them is a good thing. The point is, though the statement “If you don’t like starting over, stop giving up” took me aback when I first read it, I soon realized it only sounds true until you think about it.

Anyway, I’d forgotten all about it until I read an article in the Globe and Mail last weekend about an accomplished writer who started over as an Anglican priest in her fifties. It was something she’d always wanted to do, something related in many ways to what she’d been doing all along, something that continues to carry on aspects of life she’d started much earlier. I found it a good read.

It sounds like a completely joyous journey for her, and maybe it has been. Some people really are relentlessly positive, while others battle depression and “negative feelings.” But maybe more of the latter would find the courage to start over in mid-life if they knew more about others who are doing it, and that having/sharing fears and negative feelings about it is not a bad thing. It’s not a sign that the only reason you’re struggling with starting over again is that you’ve spent a lifetime giving up.

I’ve started over many times, for many reasons. None of them had anything to do with giving up. It’s difficult starting over now, but I want it, so I’ll stick with it. I hope it will be my last start-over, but if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that you never know what’s coming up. You never know when life is going to throw a start-over at you, you never know how you’re going to feel about it until you get there, and it’s probably better not to judge people who are in the process of finding out.