Coming hoME
I’m a classic over-achiever, and I say that more for you than me, because it’s a term you get and likely have a story about. Maybe over-achievers piss you off because of their annoying ability to assume everybody else wants to be one, or maybe you ARE one and already resent that I’m outing you, or perhaps you’re ashamed that you didn’t inherit that gene. Whatever — it’s a loaded word, over-achiever. Personally, I can’t stand it. It crawls up my skin. That said, when I put the word classic in front of it, I feel pretty damn good.
I can pretend I’m Audrey Hepburn, classic and stunning, fluttering my eyes and looking delightfully feminine in a black pencil skirt and pink lips. When I put ‘classic’ in front of over-achiever, I can justify the insanity of how I live(d).
Things people have said to me over the years that put over-achiever into my own home grown personal institution:
I hate to say this but did you know that I brace myself when you walk in the door? — says a lovely patchouli smelling college roommate.
Are you a freakin’ puppy Overbury? It’s like you wake up in mid sprint as you open the curtains. — says, ahem… multiple lovers from tangled 6am sheets.
Oh yeah. I know you, you’re the happy mom. Do you always smile like that? — As said by the observant but contained pre-school moms.
And then the classic:
I just can’t keep up with you. — say most people. Period.
Tina Overburden, Overblurry, Over-achiever, Relentess Overbury. That’s me. I’ve been given many nicknames over the years but Overbury, my last name, has to be my favourite.
Overbury, do you ever stop?
Come on… Overbury like, come on, aren’t you tired?
Breathe Overbury, breathe.
Overbury what is your deal?
I’m a life lover, giggler, guffawer, do-er, thinker, feeler, speaker, non-stopper, bubble up and over-er, defiant fuck-you-er, runner, conquerer, muther like mother bear-er, group orchestrater (screw the leader title, it’s not big enough), loud eater, vocal lover, big talker and a poet. I even do small big. Like really fucking small. Crazy ass can’t see me because I’m so god damn miniscule you wouldn’t believe I’m even there. Sometimes the Over in my Bury swallows me up for dinner because I’m so bloody hungry.
Because I’m starving to go home.
Home. 5806 Sophia Street.
Cement Smooth
Grey cool on barefeet
my three wheel
red lipstick in the sun.
Mr. Turtle smiles. I introduce him to the hose. Green arm to green face, wet hands shake. I slip blue and white starred bathing suit down his tongue.
Above, the eyeball, square, slides open… close. Mom’s mindful watching ‘just in case’.
Sometimes Mrs. Meyers pokes up over the jeweled magic dragons snapping purple faces in the wind. Violet dust collects under her chin. “God loves you” she says, waves, then disappears to her garden to pray.
My red Roofed clubhouse where the spiders live, top stained from the dripping of overripe cherries left unpicked. No door. All empty but for a sparkly peach table and home to a zillion creepy things.
She winks. Eye slides open. Her arm, pale, soft and round lowers a tray by rope. Red fruit punch in a smiling jug.
I run through wet grass
cool cement on my feet
squishing cherries between my toes.
-by me, January 1994
Home. Adoption and Death.
My mom died when I was 8 years old. As the story goes, she and my dad adopted me when I was two years old but maybe it was earlier. Family stories have a way of unwinding in the most radiant of light on the person who is telling it. I don’t know how old I was, and frankly, I don’t really care. I just know I was adopted. I was loved, and I felt chosen.
This is the pic of my mom that I folded back and forth, back and forth and shoved in my back pocket for years after she died. My mom, Margaret “Peggy” Overbury was a collector of strays. Our closets were filled with kittens, our beds with dog hair. We had a monkey named Charlie, a pet alligator (really? yes, really), birds, fish and multiple children. She would walk a gaggle of us rag tag kids to school every day. Down Sofia street, along 43rd to Main, across the busy street — hold hands everyone — and up 40th with the gigantic upturned palms of Canadian maples reaching to the sky. Up 40th to Sir William Van Horne Elementary with the coolest trolley/zip line thingy ever. They don’t make those anymore because they’re far too dangerous…only fearless over-achievers would dare risk their life on one of those.
Mom walked this crazy crew and our dogs every day with whomever she picked up along the way. She child-minded to bring extra income into the house and I, along with another boy were in her care. When his mother died, and mine made the selfless choice to give me a better home, Peggy Overbury, my mom, adopted us both. The boy became my brother and together, we were nestled into a family of now three girls and two boys. All of us connected by Home.
When she died of cancer she was in her mid 40's. In the 1970’s cancer was ugly, filled with concoctions, cocktails and bad wigs. Her beautiful face went from flushed rose to tired grey. Her eyes from the galaxy to the depths of the ocean, and her heart from expansive and welcoming to timid and scared, but always with faith. Always with faith.
We fought so hard, we hope we’ve won but only time will tell. Our weapons were the doctors minds, that God had trained so well.
My body was the battle-field, the enemy was within, pain and hurt were all around and with God’s love we fought to win.
The angels were our soldiers, and with my comrade by my side, I slept a dreamless slumber and we think we’ve turned the tide.
Now the battle is almost over, we think we fought quite well. The enemy seems defeated, but only time will tell. -Peggy Overbury 1975
When the body calls…
Last summer I too was diagnosed with cancer, but I got lucky. It was a wake-up call for me instead of the resigned, drawn out exit strategy that seems to come for many. I was only 44 years old, a non-smoker and reasonably healthy. I was my mother’s age, and the diagnosis knocked me down the stairs to the cold cement of my home. I’m speaking metaphorically of course, but rather than bore you with all my ‘home’ and ‘structure’ poetry, just know that I had built my over-achieving, highly positive and active life on an exhausted and grief stricken foundation.
I’m bloody strong, ruthless in fact with my energy, nothing was going to take me down, and for years, I’d stayed up until finally, my body couldn’t hold the over-ness anymore and my immune system cracked. Close to one year prior to the doctor’s phone call, I was standing in my kitchen, completely weighed down, feeling like I was drowning, sinking, dying but not sick. I reached out to my holistic food coach friend Miel Bernstein and said “I need you, and I don’t know why”. Thus began a process of listening to my body, the physical house that my spirit/soul/creativity/expression etc… lives in, so I could come home.
Coming home started with the body, then moved into the soul (thank you Chris Dierkes), then informed the doing-ness of my life, and now on to the tricky work of integration. It’s only complex because I make so. Truth is, it’s quite simple when I just follow instead of demanding that I be in charge. Alpha dogs don’t go down easy, says this one.
So when the cancer diagnosis came in, man, I was pissed, but not shocked. I knew that I hadn’t been listening to my body for a long time. The truth is, I’d left all my precious shiny things in the front window of my house, then opened the door as if begging for a gang of burglars to invade. I even left them a hand painted sign saying:
“Come and take what you want, I’m not loving it anyway”
I say I got lucky because the kind of cancer I had was HPV related (the human papillomavirus), which btw is totally avoidable today with a free inoculation (in Canada), well, as long as you are a girl and under 25 that is. HPV is a sexually transmitted infection, and just to hold onto a little bit of my dignity, HPV is the most common STI (sexually tranmitted infection) out there, so common in fact that nearly all sexually active men and women get it at some point in their lives. Geeze Louise…
There are over 100 types of human papillomavirus each one having a number to identify it. Mine was HPV p16 immunostaining, positive. One of the magic ‘cancer’ numbers.
There’s the education part of this story.
Here’s the soap box:
In the name of all who are holy, can we not get inoculations for people with a penis too? Come on now, cancer doesn’t discriminate nor do STIs. I have a uterus, but got an HPV related cancer on my tonsil. Uhhhhhmmmm last time I checked, boys have tonsils too and enjoy oral sex (there are some unproven stats to suggest the infection takes root where it made contact). Just sayin… STIs don’t discriminate, so let’s not hoard the inoculations just for girls (says this mom of 3 boys).
Okay, I’m off the soapbox.
Back to the story.
Clearly I survived.
Yes it was as grueling as the doctor’s warned me about and throat cancer treatment ain’t no picnic. I lost 30 lbs. I threw up a lot. I slept a lot and I had to let go of a lot.
My husband says to me as I’m in what feels like a pre-childbirth nesting panic, (you know where you run around the house cleaning every visible and invisible surface, corner and closet?), that was me. I didn’t leave a towel, shoe or bag in the ‘wrong’ drawer or cupboard so he says to me as I’m flying around:
The house is going to get cleaned, just not to your standards.
The kids are going to be fed, just not to your standards.
and the family is going to be fine, just not to your standards.
My standards. My over-achiever, overblurry, overburdened, Overbury standards.
Override
I started the Live Your Best Story workshop three years ago which was two years prior to my diagnosis. They say it can take a decade to grow a tumour. I suspect that my soul had been cranking up the fire alarms for awhile but my over-achiever, over-ride button was louder.
Let’s stay here for a minute: Over-ride. Yup, yet another over-achiever, Overbury word for me. I once had a naturopath say to me as I was leaving her office feeling perplexed, “Tina, I don’t want you to do anything this week other than wear socks and a sweater”.
What? I asked.
“You can’t tell when your body is cold. You’re that removed from your body. I want you to practice being warm this week.”
Oh. Right. Override. Override. Override.
Instead of a “That was Easy” button, I was a card carrying override button user instead. I’m tired. No you’re not: Override. I’m hungry. No you’re not: Override. My work is sucking the life out of me. No it’s not: Override. I’m sad, so sad and so tired, and so pissed off, and empty and and and and and… No you’re not: Override.
Where do you think all the unheard stories go? It’s not like we make this stuff up. It’s not like we’re playing pretend with our pain, our grief, our shame, or our highly appreciated, mega-acclaimed over-achiever-ness. Oh man… don’t even get me started on the ‘think positive’ override button this generation of personal growth gurus have created. I’ll tell ya, it doesn’t matter how pretty you paint your house, if your foundation is cracked, it needs a new pour. Period.
So I started a workshop. It erupted out of me like it was the only way I was going to get the message. My wisdom circle of women said to me plain as day and without hesitation upon my ask to them: You can see me better than I can. What do I do with my life now?
“Launch your friggin’ workshop Tina” each of them said and without apology or holding back. Apparently I needed a good smack of my own self to knock my treasured over-ride button off the table. They called me to wake up, snap out of it, and go home to the work I’m really here to do.
And so we launched Live Your Best Story. Some people got it, and lots of people didn’t… yet.
I don’t like the word story. It has such negative connotations.
It doesn’t make sense, how do you live your story?
I love the title, but I don’t want to live my life in some kinda of pretend story.
It seems that most of us are pretty removed from the concept of story. It’s too messy. We would prefer that our lives live as self-contained chapters all boxed up and living in the basement of our past or the attic of our future. As I got smacked with the present, I ask, what about right now? What about your living room? Where the hell do you sit down, put your feet up, reflect, nap even… if you don’t have a living room?
Your living story is how you ‘be’ at home.
That’s home with yourself.
Our living room is where the stories of our past wait for us like the photo albums that they are, treasured and honoured as part of us, our history, and perhaps on a loving bookshelf to be perused when we need it. It’s where the stories of our unwritten, unlived, and not yet realized future quenches our thirst for possibility and intrigue. It’s where we are challenged to turn our ‘dream boards’ into ‘life boards’ instead. It’s called the present and it’s a spectacularly rewarding and sometimes terrifying process. Imagine this… living your best story is standing in the living room of your home with one hand stretched out holding your past while the other reaches up inviting your future.
We are story.
The displacement I felt but had no words for,
the grief I knew but didn’t have time for,
the despair I carried but never, as in ever, ever, ever acknowledged as real,
became the cancer that grew in my body, held together by the spun yarn of my over-achiever-ness and then reinforced with the ding dang dong of my ever familiar over-ride button.
I’m not an over-achiever anymore. I’m an achiever. I love a challenge, and not because I don’t want to die. Not because I’m running from grief. Not because I won’t slow down enough to hear what I’m trying to say to myself. Not for any reason other than: going for stuff that lights my soul on fire is all I ever want to do. That’s my bar. Light me up. Heat up my soul. Stir my senses. Plug me in… that’s my best story.
Really, we are Story.
We live the words. We feel the punctuation. We breathe the pauses. We write by living and sometimes our paragraphs suck and our titles stink. We have spelling errors and dangling modifiers and run on and on and on and on sentences…
We are process, which is story, which is life.
A good story is predictable yet entertaining.
A great story is inevitable yet surprising.
I am hoME.
Me is where home is.
And living my best story is helping you to come home too.
Tina Overbury is a writer, speaker and message consultant and the founder of Live Your Best Story, a workshop held on Bowen Island, BC Canada. Check us out here or watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P25cqcGwB3w
If you like what I’ve said please recommend. We can all live our best story a bit more you know? Come on home. xxT.
