I am often asked this question.

“So, Shannon, why do you ‘do what you do’?”

As soon as I figure out that the asker is referring to my work with MentorCONNECT, and not my odd jogging gait or my thoroughly unexceptional (and sometimes scary) culinary skills, I quickly answer:

“Because recovered people matter.”

There is a lot more to it than that, of course – and there is quite a bit of passion, personal recovery ideology, and even a smidgen or two of verifiable common sense behind these four words.

But I can answer so quickly because I have made (and continue to make) a study of myself – my motivations, my decisions, my interactions, my choices, my preferences, my aversions, and everything in between.

It is important to know why we do what we do.

One of the most difficult lessons I have had to learn in my ongoing quest to explore the fullness of who I can be free from shame, blame, guilt, disordered eating, alcohol abuse, anxiety, depression, codependence and all other manner of life-limiting activities is that I deserve kindness.

I DESERVE it.

So do you.

It is a lesson that my mentors, and now my life coach, continue to reinforce to me. They often have to remind me of it. Nearly equally as often they have to be that objective voice letting me know I’m not treating myself very kindly.

This is painful, but very helpful too.

I thought I would share a message I recently sent out to a group of folks who receive a monthly eating disorder support newsletter I publish called Good News for Eating Disorders Recovery.

I hope you enjoy it!

We can take heart that no matter how great the teacher becomes, they start as the student, with the most basic lesson to master being how to offer kindness to self and the world.

You Deserve Kindness

As the years continue to pass, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon unfolding in my life.

As the challenges get tougher, I get softer.

When I turned 40 (one year and one month ago pretty much today) Woman’s Day magazine just started arriving in my mailbox.

They knew.

In the mysterious ways of modern marketers, somehow they got an alert when another gal hit the big 4-0, and they were already prepared to deliver timely advice about reducing middle age pudge, covering up grey hairs (I’ve had that move mastered for years), menopause meds, and other helpful tips.

Most of it I don’t actually find that helpful….yet….some I find a bit scary.

And yet I keep reading each month, out of curiosity if nothing else about what the coming years may bring.

Is your own body language comforting to you – or does it make you feel, well, all twisted up inside?

One article in January’s edition caught my particular interest – it was titled “Body Talk”, and the author, Annie Finnigan, interviewed several experts to find out how what we aren’t saying verbally often gets said anyway.

Years ago, my mentor, Lynn, told me, “if you are feeling anger, then it is not the right time to act.”

Lynn is still my mentor today, and she still tells me this from time to time.

I have also learned that it applies equally well in situations where I am feeling sadness or grief, anxiety or indecision, and, well, anything other than peace, basically.

Peace, Lynn has often explained and re-explained to me, is like finding true North on a compass, or the North Star in the midnight sky. It is always reliable. I can trust it. I can walk in that direction with confidence.

But anger might be pointing me South.

Sadness might ask me to go West.

And anxiety might have me heading off far to the East.

So if I don’t feel peace, it is always the right time to wait.

Today I was pondering yet again the intense gratitude I feel towards my own mentor, Lynn.

Without Lynn……well, I’ve never really relished thinking about that.

When I first met Lynn, she was not my mentor but my boss. That was not the easiest job in the world….I’ve always been a free spirit, and have never exhibited a strong fondness for square-shaped spaces called “offices”. I was out of mine a lot.

Some few months after Lynn arrived to take the helm at the marketing company I worked for, she and I had a conversation, and from that point on she became my mentor. We discovered that we shared a love of service, that we were both in recovery, and that we enjoyed talking about life and growth and the deep questions of the universe.

That is not to imply that there was a single area where we particularly stood on equal footing – except in the fact that we both knew what it felt like to struggle, and we both had a strong desire towards self-directed self-improvement.

However, in every other way, Lynn was several steps (yards? miles?) ahead of me, and even as we took on service projects together outside of work hours, and often spent lunches and other spare moments chatting about my questions and her insights, she was firmly in the role of confident mentor as well as boss.

I have so enjoyed contemplating and writing this series about 10 things my mentor taught me that I might just continue it again in the future!

There are so many more things that Lynn has taught me – all worth discussing, all worthy of the highest contemplation.

But for now, I will end this particular 10-part series with one of the most valuable lessons Lynn has taught me, which is that there is always another perspective.

I will never forget the time, back in 1989, when I went to a therapist because I had sustained an injury that prevented me from playing music. The therapist told me that I would never play music professionally again – my injury was just too great.

I ran out of the office and drove straight to the home of my mentor at that time, Joannie. I walked in the door, sobbing, and burst out with the news, “That therapist said I would never play music professionally ever again!”

Joannie looked at me very calmly, and spoke these words, “Well, you don’t have to believe her.”

This was the first time I had ever considered that perspective.

“The Subject Tonight is Love”, as the poet Hafiz would say, is actually more accurately translated as “the subject of this life is love.”

A psychologist working with returning prisoners of war remarked upon her fascination with the subject matter her clients wished to discuss. They were not interested in discussing the horrors of the camps, the separation from their friends and family, the atrocities of war.

Rather, they focused their time in therapy discussing the intricacies of love – and mostly in the format of their romantic love relationships with others, or lack thereof.

The subject tonight is always love, whether we know it or not. Whether it is familial love, romantic love, friendship love, or self-love, love is why we wake up in the morning and what helps us fall asleep at night.

Love is where our survival instinct comes from, and why we listen to it and heed its warnings and directions.

Love is what gets us through a crisis, and brings us back to life when the crisis ends.

Love is the only reason we can endure copious amounts of hate, anger, fear, and greed, yet still emerge with our hearts intact.

If we have the love of just one other person, we reason to ourselves, we will be okay.

But have we ever considered that that one other person could – and should – be ourselves?

My mentor, Lynn, has never wavered from reminding me over the years that I deserve my own love and respect.

“Whether other people love you is not as important as whether you love you.”

My mentor, Lynn, and I have been working on this one for years.

It is taking so long because it is a concept I am curiously resistant to.

Somehow, despite my best efforts and intentions otherwise, I consistently fail to see the equivalent value my own love has in comparison with the love I want from others, or the love I want to offer others.

Lynn reassures me that I am not the only one who struggles with this.

She finds creative ways to reinforce what we are working on, sometimes suggesting books or movies that bring the concept to life in ways that are now or could someday be parallel to my own.

Sometimes she tells me this is what she is doing. And sometimes she waits for me to figure it out on my own (I’ll give you one guess as to which method takes longer).

And don’t get me wrong here – I like the concept of loving myself. I like it a lot. I just have trouble doing it.

When I look at me, I see one thing.

When my mentor, Lynn, looks at me, she sees something else.

Or someone else, to be more accurate.

In other words, in my mentor’s eyes, I am always kinder, smarter, more sensible, and have more going for me than I realize.

Our views differ because I am usually mired in the events of the moment. Today I feel sad. Tomorrow, guilty. The next day, joyful. And the day after that, angry.

So each day I feel like a different person, and as a result I often fail to see any continuity between the days, the emotions, and the person experiencing the life she is living in.

That is what a mentor is for, Lynn repeatedly reminds me. She sees the continuity.

Joy.

Now there’s a sore subject.

15 years out of the 40 current total years of my life have been spent battling anorexia and bulimia. A good 15 more have been spent working my way into and out of that precarious state.

That leaves approximately 10 years of my life in which I may have even had the perception that joy existed for me. And those were the first 10….not my wisest or most emotionally mature years.

Although, according to my mentor Lynn, that may be open to debate.