One of the books I’m currently reading is You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried by Susannah Gora. It’s basically a deep dive into the brat pack and the movies of John Hughes.
There is a story about Molly Ringwald (who, if you don’t know, is the queen of the brat pack) and her meteoric rise to fame. Ringwald was on the May 1986 cover of Time magazine. A cover which she cared little about (she was more excited about being on the cover of Seventeen). But when she was debating whether or not to do the cover shoot, her mentor Warren Beatty told her she had to do it but that it would take her five years to “get over it.”
This really struck me as interesting. That Beatty would have the insight to know that being on the cover of such a famous magazine would essentially take years for Ringwald to emotionally adjust to.
And, for the most part, it seems like he was right. Being on the cover of Time turned Molly into the face of a generation. And that, of course, would take some time to process.
I would venture to say that this transformed Molly Ringwald.
And that’s what I want to talk about today. This idea that it almost always takes SO much longer to get over something (to be transformed) than you initially think it will.
If you lose someone close to you, or your dog dies, or you go through a breakup or get fired from a job…those things take so much longer to get past than we would like.
In each of those scenarios, it’s taken me at least a year to even begin to grasp what happened. For the first 12 months, I’m fairly delusional about what went down. But as time moves on, I can grieve the loss. Then, I start to process it in a way that allows me to move forward.
It kinda feels like it takes forever!
That’s because we are transformed by these life events. These events that happen to everyone, without exception.
If I am actively cultivating awareness (through meditation and journaling), I can observe that I’m rarely “where” I want to be in life. I want to be through this pain already. Or I wish I was past these feelings of regret and on to the next phase of life (where I’m back to enjoying myself).
Less often do I think to myself, ‘I love where I’m at mentally and emotionally right now, this is perfect.’
But it takes what it takes. I don’t get to process these things on an accelerated timeline. I’m going to have to go through what I have to go through and that can’t be rushed or hacked or cut short.
You gotta do the work, or the work will do you.
Patience, trusting the process, and some faith can go a long way when we’re in the midst of transformation, and it seems like nothing is going the way we’d hoped it would when it seems like the dark and confusing part will never end.
When walking through these uncertain times and trying to accept that I might not feel the way I want to feel for a long time, I find it useful to stick to the practices that have always worked. Even when they feel like hollow gestures now. Meditation, movement, and writing/journaling all have the power to move me from a place of unsatisfied and upset to accepting and content.
If you’re in this place, I encourage you to keep moving. You will get through this thing and you will be transformed. It just might take longer than you’d like.