Last week something happened that made me pop into the tooth.
What’s that, you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about? Oh, that’s because I’m referencing an inside joke borrowed from the childhood of a friend of a friend. It is the cutest story…. allow me to explain.
As a kid, my friend’s friend was in a day camp play about healthy dental habits. When they called her on stage by her character’s name (a starring role as The Tooth!), she ran on beaming a huge euphoric grin through a hole in the front of her costume, absolutely dazzled by her big moment in the spotlight. Forever after, “popping into the tooth” became their shorthand for the sheer elation you feel when you’re having a peak experience. You get a huge opportunity, you meet your hero or win a big award, and suddenly, POP! You’re back in The Tooth, and you can’t quite believe it’s all happening for me right now!
Don’t you love that feeling?
Get this: Last Thursday, Martha Beck sang Happy Birthday to me, and I fully popped into the tooth. Yes, the actual Martha Beck, my very favorite self-help author who wrote The Way of Integrity, on a Zoom call, looking at my face, speaking my name, and singing the birthday song RIGHT AT ME. Not only that, but she then coached me personally for ten minutes! I thought I was going to plotz.
This is my roundabout way of dropping the news that I’m taking Martha’s Wayfinder Life Coach Training. It started in March and runs to December, by which time I’ll be qualified to get accredited by the International Coaching Federation. That’s pretty cool, but I have no plans to hang out my shingle as a life coach. I’m doing this training for my own personal growth; because I believe it will make me a freer, happier, better integrated version of myself. I also hope it will make me a more attuned mother, friend, and boss, and that it will add new dimensions to my writing and the creative work I do with authors.
Honestly, I credit Martha’s teachings — not only in the Wayfinder course, but also in her books and on her podcast — with launching me into a whole season “in the tooth” that started last year and may never end.
Launching my podcast The Selfish Gift popped me into the tooth.
Writing for The Underwire each week and hearing that some people like it pops me into the tooth.
After decades of feeling like a patchwork person made up of identity fragments that I developed to fit in with specific places and people, I have finally clicked into wholeness and am feeling centered in my life purpose to a degree I’ve never experienced before.
Everything’s happening for me right now!
And (this might sound weird to you) even facing down my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment last year kind of popped me into the tooth, in that it was a momentous experience that was as resilience-building as it was hard. Not all bad things are all bad, and not everything that feels hard is wrong. I can’t exactly call my cancer journey a good thing, but certainly several good things came of it; things that I haven’t fully measured or defined yet. Maybe it shook me awake to the fact that I’m alive now, and won’t always be. That my life is happening for my benefit and I’m here to live it according to my own agenda.
A pair of my closest friends moved to Greece about ten days ago. I was FaceTiming with one of them last night, and as she showed me around their new country house in Corfu, I asked her what I should write about this weekend. True to the experience she’s having right now, she suggested I take a look at transitions.
She said, “I think the harder the change, the more scary it is, the better the gifts it can bring. The more love you put into that ‘what the fuck is going to happen’ feeling, the more loving the gifts will be on the other side.”
Cancer was so fucking scary and upsetting, I just couldn’t stand divided against myself in any way anymore, not even against the part of my body whose cells had turned on me. I poured so much love into that ‘what the fuck is going to happen’ feeling. And my friend is right: I found loving gifts on the other side. Liberation from obligation. Self-compassion. And a no-holds-barred determination to fully play my part in this human pageant.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I thought I needed to be my own dramaturge, pre-write my narrative, design the stage that my life would play out on, and assemble all the set pieces before I could really start living. But backdrops kept sliding away, characters exited stage left too soon, others went way off-script. This relentless waywardness used to cause me great anxiety and confusion. How could I tell if I was doing it right if I couldn’t remember my lines, or even the plot? Would this contrary cast of characters ever settle down and take their places so the show of my “real life” can finally go on?
I know better than that now.
My real life is well underway, and it is unscripted.
I don’t know how many acts it has.
I don’t know how it ends.
I do know that I got the villains and heroes thing all wrong.
I know it’s an epic saga.
And I know my role in it.
I AM THE TOOTH.
In fact, we are all The Tooth. Everything’s happening for us, right now. Let’s play our parts with all the unbridled enthusiasm that our hearts desire, and cheer each other on from the front row. (And if you can’t feel that enthusiasm or locate your heart’s desire right now, it probably just means you’re wearing the wrong costume and reading someone else’s lines.)
With love,
Maggie
I think I’ve always been in sync with unscripted but now I’m realizing I want to script my choices much more. Thanks Maggie
Yes! Everything is happening for us right now! Me, too!