In 2001 I took my first trip abroad. It was a solo backpack trip to Europe in a time before cell phones and google maps were a thing. I started my first email account right before I left for that trip. I am one of the OG’s who still retain a “hotmail” address.
I had a few contacts in Europe who I planned to visit during my travels. One was an old gymnastics friend I knew mostly back in my high school time period, and with whom I hadn’t really kept up correspondence for many years. A mutual contact let me know that he was studying abroad in Italy and suggested I contact him.
As excited as I was to be on a solo adventure, I liked the idea of having some anchors of familiarity strewn about my course. I sent him a message from my freshly-launched email account and we planned to make a plan to meet once I arrived across the pond.
This was an exciting time in my life. I had just completed my Master’s degree at the University of Colorado, 2000 miles away from where I grew up. I had packed my bags 2 years earlier and driven across the country to a new adventure.
I’m not even sure how I ended up there. All but one person in my extended family had remained rooted in the Northeast. There were definitely things going in my life at that time that spurred me to want to do something drastic like move across the country.
I desperately needed to break free from some toxic relationships, but it still surprised me that I had the guts to actually go through with that kind of move.
After losing my adolescence to an abusive gymnastics coach who controlled all of my life decisions starting from the age of 13 and continuing until I was 21 years old, I was ready to “reclaim the past.”
This was my mantra, “reclaim the past,” and Colorado turned out to be the perfect place to accomplish my goal.
One of the pivotal experiences I had in graduate school was rooming with a British guy who was a postdoctoral fellow in the same lab as me. He was an adventurer, always up for anything, and I was in a place in my life where I was trying to make up for a lot of lost experiences. We had a blast together and he inspired me to take a trip outside of the US to really spread my wings.
Leaving the country by myself with a giant backpack and no plan was next-level wing-spreading, but I was determined to prove to myself that I could take on this challenge alone.
(I wrote about some of the mishaps and life-changing lessons from this trip in a previous blog, linked here).
The old friend I was meeting in Italy was part of the gymnastics community led by the abusive coach.
The environment we gymnasts experienced was more like a cult than a sport, and many people, both girls and boys, were under the control of this charismatic, manipulative and disturbed coach.
I wasn’t quite at the point in my processing of those experiences where I was ready to call out the abuse, but during my time in Colorado I had at least had my eyes opened to the fact that it actually was abuse.
Creating new connections with people outside of the gymnastics cult was the only way I would have ever realized the gaslighting and abuse we all experienced.
The friend I was meeting knew what had happened between me and the coach, but we had never really talked about it and no one was calling it “abuse” out loud yet.
When we finally met up in Verona, he seemed quite stand-offish with me. I didn’t really understand why, but his hesitant demeanor persisted for the first day of the trip as we traveled on together to Venice.
I was in full-on adventure mode, planning activities and spontaneously taking turns down random streets in the circuitous layout of the canal city. I was in a great mood, and I couldn’t understand why this friend of mine with whom I used to write letters back in my teenage years and with whom I had really bonded back then was acting so strange.
I thought it would be a fun reunion, especially now that we were all far from those disturbing and confusing days in the gym.
At my behest, we took a boat excursion to Cemetery Island where the Venetians buried their deceased. Sacrilegious or not, we sat on a grassy knoll within the cemetery and ate a picnic lunch of cheese, bread and chocolate. I worked up the courage to ask my friend why he was acting so strange with me.
He told me that he had a recent “bad” experience with a traveling companion who was extremely moody and negative and ruined the trip for him. He then revealed that his recollection of me from my teenage and early college years was akin to the personality attributes this other traveling companion had.
He recalled that I was always “emotional”–moping, sad, frustrated and negative.
I reflected for a moment and then easily found the words to explain to him who I was back then, and who I was now.
Back then, I told him, I was a vulnerable teenager who had been groomed and manipulated by an adult who was supposed to have been focused on training me in the sport that I loved, and guiding me to grow as a young person in the principles of sport–determination, positive mindset, work ethic, finding joy in the process and building strong bonds with my teammates and peers.
Instead, this “coach” took advantage of his position, isolated me from my friends and family, kept me in a dark corner of his life and forced me to keep a secret that held me hostage in my own mind, unable to grow, to explore, to feel or connect with my own emotions.
Is it any wonder that I was a moody, negative, lost teenager?
I assured him that I was no longer that person, that I had broken free and was finally able to enjoy life, trust myself, open to the opportunities of growth the world offered, and connect with people on MY terms.
This was a wonderful opportunity for me to understand my own journey, as well.
Having encountered someone who was associated with a time period in my life where I was a completely different version of myself, or not even my true self at all, provided me with a lens on how others viewed me back then when they had no idea what was going on behind the scenes.
It also felt liberating to identify why I adopted the attitude and mindset and attitude I did during that time period–it was my way of surviving while I was unable to come out from under the darkness that trapped me in a situation that I could not share with anyone.
This situation has also helped me avoid labeling people based on what I see on the surface.
My gut reaction may sometimes be to accuse someone of being “grumpy” or “rude,” but then I try to tell myself that I don’t know what is going on in their life that may be impacting their emotional presentation.
We put on moods or dispositions sometimes that protect us from getting hurt.
There is an expression that helps explain this, “hurt people hurt people.”
The “hurt” doesn’t necessarily need to be a hurtful action, but it can also be a mood or barrier that just doesn’t feel warm or friendly.
We may feel “hurt” when someone doesn’t want to engage with us or be vulnerable with us, but we would do best to assume that this is not personal (always go back to “The Four Agreements!”)
Taking this advice further than an example that is in a moment, like an exchange at a store where an employee is cold or short with a customer, we can also keep an open mind when re-meeting people from the past, holding space for the possibility that the person may have changed from what we previously experienced.
I think about this a lot when asked for my perception of an individual who is applying for a job with someone I know.
If I don’t have an entirely positive perception of the person, but there is nothing egregious (harassment, ethical breach, etc) that I have witnessed, I will often say, “well, when I knew them there were a few personality quirks that didn’t quite sit well with me, but that was 5 years ago and they may have grown/changed since then or they could have been going through a tough time.”
If you’ve been a consistent Warrior by Day reader you know that one of my core beliefs is that people can change. I know I have changed, and I always want to give others the benefit of the doubt that they can, or even have, changed as well.
Case in point–when I wrote about being “RED,” as defined by the Insights Discovery personality test, those results were from a test I took in 2021. I repeated that test this week and my profile shows an increase in green and a decrease in my red.
(Quick definitions of the Insight Discovery colors: “fiery red” signifies action-oriented leadership, “sunshine yellow” represents enthusiasm and collaboration, “earth green” symbolizes empathy and support, “cool blue” represents analytical thinking and structure.)
I’m not totally surprised by this shift in my profile. I have done a LOT of soul-searching, introspection and healing over the last couple of years. I took time off from work, I met regularly with an executive coach, I journaled almost daily for a year, and I met myself again.
My “red” personality has always been a protector for me. It served me well when I was afraid to be vulnerable. It drove my inner sword-yielding warrior to fight and “die on every hill” of an argument or conflict.
After all those years of being taken advantage of, it makes perfect sense that I led with “red.”
Brene Brown talks about how many of us who have not addressed our own trauma have trouble finding empathy and compassion for others. If we have developed ways of protecting ourselves and “moving on” without necessarily processing or confronting our “stuff,” we may take a stance of comparative suffering when others complain about their problems or their reasons for not being able to move forward.
This may look like a response of, “you think YOU have problems? Well I’ve been through even worse and you don’t see me complaining.”
Well, we may not be complaining, but we may be showing up with character traits that seem to be protecting us while they are also limiting our ability to grow, thrive and reach our highest potential.
I have been in this phase of life, where comparative suffering has left me devoid of empathy and unwilling to tolerate people whom I have judged as having not “done their work.”
My shift from red to green in the Insights profile is a good sign for me. It tells me I have allowed some of my protective red to recede. I have acknowledged its purpose in my life and am realizing that I don’t need it to be as strong now because I have allowed myself to evolve.
Brene says that compassion is a relationship between equals and that ” only when we know our own darkness can we be present in the darkness of others.”
Everyone’s journey will involve a different type of adaptation that at some point protects and serves us, and at another point, when it is no longer needed, limits us.
Recognizing this in ourselves as well as in others will allow us to show compassion and empathy, leading to human connection and acceptance.
I am certain there are some people from my past who have paused the part of the movie where I was in their life at an unpleasant angle, not my best side. They presume I’ve remained frozen in that frame and they may never know how the plot twisted in the ensuing frames, what I look like now, who I am. They may never “meet me again.”
But it only matters that I know the movie didn’t end there.
It only matters that I am open to meeting myself again, and again.
We can all meet ourselves again, if we believe in our power to change.