The Memory Is Still Packed in a Chest Somewhere
What if the evidence you need for your next chapter is already packed away somewhere in your house?
Memories have a way of ambushing you. Sometimes it can be inspiring for the future!
I’ll be doing something ordinary and one will surface out of nowhere, and before I know it, I’m in tears. Other times a memory comes up and I feel something closer to warmth — a little glow, almost pride, like running into an old friend I’d forgotten I had. One of my favorites is from my years as the advertising manager of a small daily newspaper in a small Oklahoma town.
I suspect you have a storage bin somewhere. A chest of drawers, a shoebox, a closet shelf you haven’t cleared out. Not just of objects — of memories. Years of them, packed away, some you revisit often and some you haven’t opened in decades.
As I was reviewing photos from my life in my early 20’s I discovered a memory about a situation that actually shed light as to who am ,how I manage my life now and to a greater degree how I manage my writing.
It all begins with the owner of the small newspaper where I was employed as the advertising sales director.
He used to walk the sales floor all day, checking on everyone. Former stockbroker, cashed out of New York, moved to Oklahoma with his wife for a quiet life. No kids. Just the two of them, and now, a newspaper.
He could not stand watching me sit and stare.
I was the director of the advertising department. My desk had paper on it, and a pen, and most days, an ad half-drawn. But some days I’d just sit there. Not writing. Not sketching. Staring at nothing in particular, somewhere past the wall.
To him, that was the one thing he couldn’t track. Sales calls, he could count. Client meetings, he could see on a calendar. But a woman sitting still with her eyes unfocused — there was no number for that. No column to put it in. It took him a long time to leave me alone when I did it.
One of those staring spells turned into an ad that won Best Ad of the Year from the Oklahoma Press Association. Statewide. Every paper in Oklahoma, and mine won.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
I accepted the award the way you accept a compliment you don’t quite believe — politely, and then you put it away. It’s packed in a chest somewhere in my storage building right now. I couldn’t tell you which one without looking.
Here’s what else was true that year. I was twenty-four, twenty-five. I had a two-year-old and a three-year-old at home. I was a minister’s wife, full time, which is its own unpaid job with its own hours. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I had just started to discover what I was capable of — except I didn’t have language for it yet. It just felt like happenstance. A lucky ad. A good day.
I didn’t pat myself on the back. I didn’t think: that’s how I work best. That’s evidence. I thought: huh, that worked out. And then I went back to my desk.
I’ve been thinking about why that story surfaced now, decades later, and I think it’s this: we collect proof of ourselves our whole lives, and most of it never gets filed as proof. It gets filed as luck. As a fluke. As one of those things that just happened to work out, so we don’t examine it too closely in case it doesn’t hold up.
But some of it holds up. Some of it is sitting in a chest, gathering dust, still true.
I think that’s part of what it actually takes to trust yourself — not some sudden decision to believe in yourself more, but the much slower work of going back through your own life and correctly crediting yourself for things you undersold the first time around. Not because you need the trophy.
Because you need the evidence.
So here’s what I’d ask you: what have you already done — a decision, a project, a moment you handled entirely your own way — that you filed away under lucky or happened to work out, instead of filing it away under this is how I operate best?
You probably have one. Most of us do. It’s probably not framed on a wall. It’s probably in a drawer, or a box, or a chest you haven’t opened in years.
Might be worth going and finding it.
It is likely that some of what’s in there is exactly what you’d need to build a retirement life that actually suits you, instead of the one built out of woulda-coulda-shouldas handed to you by what I’ll call the retirement marketing complex — all those glossy images of a life you’re supposed to want, that may have nothing to do with who you actually are.
That’s really what Building Trust With Yourself is for: just a simple way to start noticing the evidence that’s already sitting in your own storage bin, and collecting more of it on purpose instead of by accident.
Because that evidence is the foundation for the whole rest of your life — what you want it to look like, feel like, and be, from here on out. A retirement built on what you actually know about yourself, instead of whatever’s left over once the retirement marketing complex has had its say.
Become a paid member this month, and I’ll send you the booklet as my gift to you.
In this video clip I show how to collect evidence from your past to build your own foundation for the retire life you actually want.
And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.