Book Review: Remember Who You Are

Remember Who You Are by Linda Carroll immediately caught my attention with the dedication and ultimately was the reason why I was so interested in reading her book. The dedication includes Carroll’s daughter’s names including Courtney Love and her granddaughter’s names including Frances Cobain. I jumped at the chance to read a book, especially a book about a woman’s spirit and learning and living with authentic power, written by the mother of the famous and never boring Courtney Love.

Linda Carroll is a practicing therapist whose life’s mission is helping women and in Remember Who You Are, you can clearly see her passion and dedication as she offers personal anecdotes and genuine wisdom she has gathered throughout her life and from the people she has met and bonded with.

As a person who blogs almost compulsively, I have often used the phrase ‘life got in the way’ to excuse my absence from the internet world, as disappearing from this technological world a lot of us become staples in, is bound to happen from time to time; but that phrase has many more meanings–Because life can so easily get in the way, obstructing our paths to what we truly want to do in our lives, we also have the ability to forget who we are in a sense. With the help of the words and wisdom of many inspiring and creative women such as Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Jane Kenyon, Alice Walker and many others, Carroll makes her readers really think about their lives and the people they have grown to be. According to Carroll, a woman’s “journey of spirit” involves seven stages–Forgetting, Remembering, Exploring, Practicing, Shadows on the Path, Reclaiming and Acceptance. As Carroll takes us through the stages, her book makes us dig down inside of ourselves and fearlessly acknowledge what makes us tick by using the teachings of several different cultures and the world’s major religions.

Being an atheist, I did not think I would take much from this book, given that the subtitle mentions a journey of spirit; however, I was happily surprised by the outcome. The reason why I am an atheist is because I know a great deal about the world’s major religions and while most of these religions instill a series of teachings that are the equivalent of personal morals and common sense and what goes into being a good person, that alone does not instill a sense of faith inside of me or the belief in a higher power that will ultimately have their say in what is to become of my soul at the end of my life. Given those facts, Carroll is not teaching one specific religion in this book; she introduces us to many different religions and aspects of those religions that coincide with her seven stages that she believes every woman moves through, perhaps even several times, throughout her life. Ultimately, the goal Carroll is teaching us is to remember who we are as people before life got in the way.

Rating:

Get to Work, Woman!

And that is what I have been telling myself for weeks now. Every day for weeks I have been waking up in the morning or afternoon or middle of the night, whichever time my wonky sleeping schedule of that particular moment warranted, enjoyed some coffee and sat at my computer with WordPress and Photoshop open and for weeks I have gotten nothing done. I never realized a day could go by so fast while sitting in front of the computer racking my brain for inspiration, but here I am, way past the point of ‘don’t force creativity to come spilling out onto the computer, just wait it out and it will strike when you least expect it.’ It did not strike and I am well past the waiting period to just let it come oozing out of me; I need it now, dammit!

I was hired to design and develop a website for a woman I have admired for years, Angela Shelton. She gave me the motivation to begin my healing process and it is because of her that I am a relatively sane and functional woman. I have been fortunate beyond words due to the fact that I speak to the woman whom I believe played an integral role in saving my life on a relatively regular basis; and while I am far more fortunate than many others out there who would love to speak with their mentors, to be hired by them is quite another feeling.

After we first began talking online and I told her what I did for a living, she hired me to design and develop a website for her online cooking show, Stirring Up Trouble, which I did, and because she liked the work I did so much, she then hired me to revamp her current online web presence, AngelaShelton.com. This, of course, has been an opportunity of monumental proportions for me. The design planned for the website is nothing short of my limitations, but because I have gained so much in my life from this person, every time I sit down to work on the design of this website, I freeze. This experience has sent me through emotional hurdles; waves of inferiority and teeny tiny little waves of determination. I have been working on websites for over eight years; I have always had a website of some sort to work on and a friend of mine told me, when I told him about this gig, that I have been training for years for a gig that means this much to me and he was right.

Working for someone who you admire is hard. It challenges you to make sure that you bring everything inside of you, especially creatively, outside and make sure that you are representing yourself as a designer to the best of your ability. It gives you the chance to give back to someone who has helped you more than you could possibly put into words and while it isn’t an easy task, I’m willing to bet it will be amazingly rewarding. That is, once I force the creativity out of me and onto the screen in front of me and until then, I’ll just have to keep working on it because that’s all you can do.

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