Connecting the Dots

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” - Steve Jobs

Sifting through the events of a particular time in one’s life and documenting it is no easy feat. While cathartic, and healing, at first you bleed when the band-aid holding your emotions in check gets pulled away. When Ernest Hemingway described writing as sitting down at a typewriter and letting yourself bleed. That’s 100% true.

Years ago, my son gifted me with words of wisdom one Mother’s Day, when I was floundering. The inscription he wrote inside the cover of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein holds such deep meaning. She was one of the first female travel writers ever published. And if I am honest, there were days I felt like Frankenstein after my surgery, when I looked in the mirror, with the shaved scalp and stitches across the crown of my head. I felt ugly. Unlovable. Alone. And I wanted to give up.

Completing my memoir has forced me to not only sit in one place for a while and type away, it has also given me an opportunity to lay everything out there in a timeline, a map of events. Had you asked me to predict my future on that November day in 2009 when I was first diagnosed with that brain tumor, I can promise you it looked nothing as it does today.

Do I know where my life goes from here, once I submit that final draft to the publisher? Do I know if my book will actually go to print from there? Or even read by anyone? Nope.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is to have faith, and to trust a higher power than myself. And going through my memoir is a stark reminder to me. Everything that happened, every small kindness or conversation, every heartbreak or disappointment, it was a dot that connected me to where I am right now.

Steve Jobs was spot-on in his Stanford Commencement Speech when he said. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

I see it with my own eyes. I’ve lived it. I believe it.

Life is magic if you look deep enough. Intuition is real, and whether you listen to that inner voice when it first starts as a whisper, or if it’s when Life forces you to pay attention with a loud yell to go that direction, make that difficult decision. Some call it fate. Others kismet. Many people call it faith.

Open your eyes. Open your heart. Open your mind.

With a little bit of faith, trust, and pixie dust, everything turns out okay in the end. I promise.

And if you don’t believe me now, wait until you read my book.