Wendy Keller Blog

When my home and office building burned up in 2007, one of the few things that survived was – curiously – a large plastic crate full of memorabilia from my life as a writer. It’s mostly story ideas, character sketches, awards and tear sheets, but I’ve always known that in that crate are three bulging manila folders, each labeled “Encouragement”. They’re stuffed with the best of my fan mail, the cards, emails and letters I’ve received from people who’ve heard me speak or read my books over the years. It’s eerie that the crate survived. I moved it from its usual place in the shipping room not ten days before the blaze.

I’m working with a new counselor to break through a mental habit I’ve formed that isn’t working for me anymore. She encouraged me to observe my focus, so tonight I just randomly yanked out an Encouragement folder. I was feeling the need for some fan mail. Just wanted to believe I’d done something – anything — that had helped someone else so far.

To my surprise, the folder didn’t contain fan mail at all! Instead, I found condolence letters from strangers sent to my then-husband and I after our children died – heartfelt outpourings I was suffering too much to appreciate at the time. I found a stash of crayon drawings by my daughter. She turned 18 this month. I thought all her old artwork had been burned up, so I got magnets and hung it all on the fridge. (Just wait until she gets home and sees it – uh-oh!) I found a bunch of touching, fervent love letters sent to me since my divorce in 1994. The dearest ones are from my high school sweetheart Dave. We still carry a secret torch for one another 31 years later. He’s my “One That Got Away”. There are letters from Ernestine, a seminar leader-turned-friend who greatly influenced my life with her words. An actual written apology from my ex-husband. A forgotten postcard from my dearest long-dead grandfather. I read the record of my life in that file like a geologist reads sedimentary layers. I didn’t find a single piece of fan mail. Not one thing lauding my professional achievements. But every scrap of paper there is a testament to the fact that I have lived, and I have loved others, and they have loved me.

I felt my heart’s DNA rewriting itself as I read them, like in the old days when we could hear a hard drive writing over a floppy disk. This stack of paper feels like proof that I’ve been here, that even if I end tomorrow, I’ve touched some dear people, and they’ve touched me. That love exists, it flows, it moves, it changes. In some cases, all that’s left is faint traces, like water poured on sand. In other cases, it has grown and blossomed into something so precious it cannot be described by mere language anymore – like my love, respect for and pride in my daughter.

I wish every person could accidentally stumble on a box of encouragement when they’re feeling a bit blue. What a transformation we’d have overnight! We live our lives so fast. Love letters have become text messages. Scribbly crayon drawings quickly become algebra homework and then college entrance essays. Sometimes it’s easy to forget it’s the lives we touched and that we allowed to touch ours that really matter. And I can prove it – c’mon over and look at my fridge.

A friend called today and told me how sad he’s been feeling.  It’s been two weeks since we’ve spoken.  It used to be we talked and texted on and off all day, but when I realized our friendship was morphing into a Grand Romance in his head, I gently disconnected.  Problem is, although he’s a good friend to me, he’s a husband to someone else.

It’s not that I’m so noble or ethical or praiseworthy.  It’s that I’ve been bitten by that karma bug when I was the one besotted by someone unavailable. There’s no upside.  I’ve learned that the momentary joy of making a real, deep, sincere connection with another human being isn’t worth it if that other person is supposed to have a real, deep, sincere connection with their marriage partner and doesn’t.  Part of me thinks it’s sad that it has to be this way.  Why can’t people just be great friends? Why does that Other Element have to come in and confuse matters when it’s a man and a woman who are friends?  I’ve been single again since the invention of clouds, and I have lots of fantastic, wonderful single male friends who are only male friends.  I listen to their dating tales and they listen to mine.  I dance at their weddings. I think of them all as once-removed from my dear, precious brothers.  I would never in a trillion years want to date one of these guys – shudder!  I know their foibles too well and they know mine.

So why when one party is married is it suddenly fraught with all sorts of weirdness?  Why can’t I just be friends with my married guy friend without it seeming furtive and like I’m plotting to wreck his homelife and destroy his children’s lives?  (He knows I’m not, I know I’m not, but if I was his wife, I wouldn’t want my husband’s closest friend to be a single woman, either.)

More times than I can count, I’ve heard unhappily married men say, “My wife just doesn’t understand me!”  Maybe she doesn’t, but shouldn’t that get fixed first, and if unfixable, actions taken, before one seeks solace elsewhere?   I’ve heard men brag that they have open marriages or are getting back at her for cheating on them in the 80s; I’ve heard “we have a special arrangement – I go my way and she goes hers” and all that.  Well, it just doesn’t fly with me.

My friend, the sad one, didn’t tell me all those things.  He wasn’t trying to get me to do something untoward.  We just had an instant bond of friendship, compassion and concern for one another from the minute we met.  Why the heck did it have to start feeling like a thwarted romance?  If he were single today, I would definitely be his friend, but not his girlfriend. Why does human love have to come with complications?  Why does it have to hurt anyone?

Like Rodney King said during the LA riots, “Can’t we just all get along?”

My daughter’s father isn’t a bad guy, he’s just made a lot of unfortunate choices, before and since our divorce when Sophie was barely two.  During the best of times and the worst of times, he’s chosen not to pay the court-ordered child support.  Enforcing the law costs more than the paltry sum he owes, so pretty much I’ve been Sophie’s sole support. 

Although she has a half dozen pairs of designer boots, she recently fell in love with yet another pair.  I decided to take this opportunity to underscore the value of money so I refused to buy them.  Her new part time job starts tomorrow. In a recent call, she told her dad that I wasn’t buying the much-desired boots because I was trying to teach her the value of money.  She wasn’t asking him.  You can’t get blood from a turnip. 

He told me later that he’d recently come into a bit of cash, so he’d be sending her money for the boots.  I picked up the mail today.  I handed her the envelope, a huge smile on my face.  She opened it up and out fell the money.  She picked it up incredulous. Then…she burst into tears!  

When she recovered, she said, “In my whole life, he’s never given me money before!”  She’s on the phone with him right now as I write this.  We never know when one little thing we do for someone will be the gift that melts their heart and transforms the relationship.

An article in More magazine  is haunting me.  A would-be author wrote about how her blue collar parents responded to her desire to go to college to study writing.  Short answer: not good.  They wanted her to get a “real” job. 

Her Dad was a steel worker, mom stayed home.  They understand this life equation:  Work for X hours, get paid X dollars. Repeat. The writer was the first one in her family to go to college. Me, too. I come from generations of union electricians. I value blue collar workers, I just didn’t want to be one.

I went to college at sixteen, burning with my desire to be a journalist.  I worked four jobs and sometimes starved myself to pay for it. Maybe it sounds like a glorious accomplishment to work so hard to achieve a goal. It isn’t. I had my nose against the grindstone so hard, I never looked around to strategize or network into better opportunities. I learned that I could fight for what I want and get it, but it left me believing that achieving anything has to be a struggle.  That’s not always true.  I know there are people out there who view work and life differently than I do and who therefore create different results. They think at a whole other level.   

I reflect on my friend Mark Victor Hansen, author of many books including the Chicken Soup for the Soul books (co-authored with my client, Jack Canfield).  Mark’s father was a baker, up at 4 AM to toil. Mark has overcome his blue collar childhood and created a vast fortune. We’ve talked about it, and sometimes I can catch a glimpse of how he’s trained his mind to think, but it always dissipates when we hang up the phone.   

Of course, it’s not all about money. I am grateful for every blue collar person who makes the world around me work so beautifully.  But how do any of us throw off the limiting mindsets of our childhood? How does anyone move past the mentality of struggle?  How do we stop excusing the fact that we are not living our dreams?

The article writer eventually gave up her job as a college writing professor to work in a grocery store, because it gives her more time to do her own writing. Did she finally get a “real” job?  Does the answer depend on whether she ever gets her book published?  Or perhaps, is it all about having and pursuing a dream – the journey, and not the destination? What do YOU think?

My friend John texted me today. He wrote, “I seriously just don’t know if I’m strong enough to go blind.” He’s a PhD candidate at a prestigious university, in his late 20s. His disease is genetic and aggressive and heart breaking.

I texted him back “I can’t begin to fathom what you are feeling. But I do know that if someone had asked me the day before my children were killed, I would have said I couldn’t survive it. That was 1991.”

Amazing the variety of traumas humans survive. I’ve noticed that it comes down to a choice: deal with it and make the best of it, or give up on life. People have been going through whatever we’re going through for millennia. It’s sad. It hurts. It’s not fair. It’s an outrage. There is no huge payoff for surviving tragedy that I can see. I would much prefer my children back than to be told I’m a “better person” now. But that’s not the hand I was dealt, so like John, I have to decide how I’ll deal with my life’s challenges. So do you.