Towanda!

Each year, in early December, I gather with a group of women I consider sisters for an annual retreat.  It's work related for my second job (it seems all educators have a second job), but it's also something I look forward to all year long.  Yes, we work hard from 9:00AM to 5:00PM, but we also laugh, dance, sing, play, and connect outside of those work hours in a way you can only do with people you truly consider family.  One of the activities we complete each year is to individually choose a one word intention for the year ahead and stamp it onto a washer that can be worn throughout the year.  

I'll not lie, I struggled to land out last year's word.  I spent the whole retreat trying out different words, bouncing ideas off of friends, but I kept feeling like no one word truly encapsulated what I wanted from 2023. And then it hit me... a made up word from a movie I'd not seen in years...

TOWANDA.

If you've not seen 1991's Fried Green Tomatoes, you have no clue what I'm talking about, but for those of us who know this movie, Towanda is a personal battle cry.  It's the alter-ego of main character Idgie Threadgoode, a word she says (or more often yells) when she wants to feel empowered.  She describes Towanda as an "amazon woman", which makes it even more fitting since I have a lifelong love of Wonder Woman.  At one point Towanda is referred to as "righter of wrongs, queen beyond compare!"  She is warrior-like, assertive, a bad ass.  She's an anti-doormat.  

In short, I wanted to embrace my inner Towanda heading into the new year.  I wanted to live with wild abandon, to throw caution to the wind, to boldly step into my future.  I could recognize that I almost always hesitate, I second guess myself, I worry too much about what other people think, and I wanted to intentionally change that pattern.  Towanda encapsulated that approach to life in one word, and, good news, it would fit on the disk!

So how did it go?  For starters, only a handful of people (most of them on that retreat with me) knew my word.  I didn't put it out to the world because I needed to make choices on my own, not be pushed or nudged.  Making a personal year-long commitment wasn't a new concept to me.  In the past few years I'd adopted similar practices.  The year after John died I made a personal commitment to say yes when asked to join friends for social events unless I had a really good reason not to do so.  Another year I realized I was doing too much, so I made a personal commitment that if a school event was optional, Rachel wasn't doing it (I did share that one with my principal who heartily supported it).  But this intention to lead a Towanda life seemed so much bigger.  It wasn't measurable in the same way the others had been, but rather a mindset shift on a larger scale.  

In the past year, living a Towanda life has meant:

• When I realized my job was no longer a good fit, I actively started looking for a new position right away.  This might not seem like a big deal to some, but I'd had the same job at the same school for 13 years.  There was a certain level of comfort in it, especially since this was the school family that had supported me through John's illness and death.  At the end of last school-year I had 6 years left until I can retire, and it would've been easy to just stay in that job until that point.  But I was itching to do something different, and living a Towanda life meant taking the leap to look for a new position at a new school.  
• When I was offered the opportunity to co-present at one of our week-long Conscious Discipline(R) Summer Institute events, I took a deep breath, then said yes.  When several weeks later they reached back out to me and said they were adding to the role and that if I accepted I'd both co-present AND serve as Lead Helper, a role I'd not yet experienced, I took another deep breath and still said yes.  As a result, I ended up having one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life last June in St. Cloud, MN.  
• When my (now) new principal asked me to let her know what job I wanted without giving me any guidance as to what she was thinking, I took the risk of asking to be her Magnet Coordinator... and I got it!  This job has taken me so far out of my comfort zone - I'm at a middle school and in a support staff position.  Despite the fact that each day presents new challenges, I've loved having the opportunity to learn a new skill set.  I'm learning to use my big voice with peers (something that's always been a struggle), I'm learning some marketing and graphic design basics, my introverted self is giving weekly school tours to potential families, and I'm learning to trust my thoughts and ideas.  
• Without going into details, leading a Towanda life meant taking uncomfortable steps in a few key relationships to set boundaries and put myself first.  I've realized that trying to be what someone else wants me to be in order to have a relationship with them doesn't work, so I'm working on learning to love and be my most authentic self.  
• When I found myself back on an online dating app, living a Towanda life meant not settling.  I'd rather be alone.  Also it helped me to see the irony in someone telling me not to settle who I'd be settling to date.  Yes, that was an interesting catch-22.  
• My heart broke when I had to put Sophie down in May.  It didn't take long before I knew I needed another dog, but in the summer my life was in complete upheaval as I switched schools/jobs and did multiple jobs for Conscious Discipline(R).  I knew I needed to settle into my own patterns before I added a dog into the mix and tried to establish patterns with them.  I kept saying, "I need to get through all of my August trainings and travel before I adopt another dog."  Living a Towanda life meant that, when a friend's mother contacted me about 1-year-old dog that needed to be rehomed on the day after i got home from my last August training I said yes.  Taz is a malti-poo full of puppy energy who I swear is part mountain goat, part cat.  He couldn't be more different from my Sophie, but he's just what I needed.  At a time when I wanted to shut myself off from the world he forced me to get out and walk with him every day.  He's locked me into a routine and keeps me from staying too late and burying myself in work each day.  

So what does this look like moving forward?  I'm still holding onto Towanda heading into 2024.  It was a mindset shift, not a temporary goal.  I'm still learning to take risks, but I'm also starting to embrace it.  The question I'm faced with now is how to find balance - how do I take the leap and still stay grounded?  That's the challenge.  

And yes, I have a new word that I'm wearing - maybe I'll write about it in a year.