August 28, 2022

Dear Pamela Jeanne,

As you wrap up your 30s and prepare to arrive at 40, let me give you the benefit of 20 years more wisdom and experience. (That’s right, the months are now ticking down to 2023 bringing another milestone into view: 60 years on this planet!)

Yours has been a life filled with curiosity, discovery, challenge, ambiguity, tears, laughter, and, yes, sometimes more frustration than your limited patience could endure. Fortunately, you are an intrepid soul. And you turn to writing to help make sense of the world. Do you remember the stenographer pad you flipped open your 15th summer? That was where you turned to try to sort out those mostly awful teenage years. Thus began a new practice to record the noisy thoughts in your head. Who knew, 45 years on, you’d keep writing? That in 2007, your mental and emotional restlessness (and craving for validation) would move you online to blogging, journalism, and academic articles?

Pamela Jeanne, you are on the cusp of one of the most trying decades of your life. Your once carefully crafted life plan will not unfold as intended. Your thinking, your relationships and your identity will alter in ways that will test you to your core. Know, though, that you possess the strength deep down to soldier on. The pain you will carry will cause you to doubt yourself and your associations and knock you far off course, but the suffering will also be the catalyst for connecting with others who have faced the same burden, the loss of control, and an alteration of being.

Out of raw grief, you will forge new lifelong friends, bond through shared burdens, and create a different sort of legacy. You will help pioneer a new form of healthcare activism and societal understanding with many others. Together you will shed new light on the many ways women who are not mothers nurture, contribute, and animate our world. I know this is 180 out from what you desired.

Because you’re you, you will grumble and resist. But, in time, you will find acceptance.

Twenty years on, you will understand more fully that life is equal parts what happens to you and how you respond. Sure, that’s easy to say, but not so easy to live. It will seem the joyful times go in the blink of an eye while the demanding, personally challenging, and, yes, sad times never end. That’s because it’s the difficult times that mold, shape, and school us.

Paradoxically, it’s the sorrow and distress you experience that will also makes the joyful times something to treasure deeply and fully. Channel your consternation and searching in ways that birth new thinking, understanding, and knowledge.  Know in your darkest night you will one day take heart in blissful birdsong, wondrous cloud formations, deep belly laughs with friends, and starry skies, among many pleasures large and small.

Meanwhile, cherish time spent and conversations with friends and family and strangers alike. Embrace the bad and the good and be gentle with yourself and with others. Learn to forgive. Shed any shame. You will stumble, but you will rise into your 50s and beyond.

Hold three Rs in mind: Resilience is your superpower. Recovery from hardship takes time and patience. Reinvention makes life both motivating and fresh. These concepts are core to surviving and thriving.

Lastly, while your scars through this crucible may not visible, fundamentally, you are a fighter in the best sense of the word. You, like many who have inspired and connected with you along the way, possess the depth of spirit and fortitude necessary to challenge the status quo and pave new paths.

Offer your hand in friendship and keep your love alive.

Yours in peace and strength,
Pamela

Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos