Becoming Social

My mother tells me I was a normal child until I turned 4 when she had to go into the hospital and had to send me down to my grandmother. I was abused down there and when I came home I did not speak for about a year. As I was growing up my mother used to say, "Susie, you were never the same after you came back."

This experience laid the seeds of what eventually became the anti-social person I am today.

Like all young girls, I wanted a boyfriend. I heard once that a boy was attracted to me. For years I never understood why nothing came of it until God revealed to me that it was my body language that changed his mind. It shouted loud and clear "stay away." I was also to hear this from people when I joined AA in 1982.

In AA I tried to learn to be social but I failed miserably. Then I got tired of trying to learn and stopped working on this. I decided it was too late to learn this. It was a lost cause. Still my own words, in my book The Art of Changing, haunted me.

Fast forward to my latest spiritual experience in which I was given willingness and tools to change. Once I had the willingness, it was just a matter of following my own instructions. So I took out a copy of my book and opened it up. When I thumbed through it I came upon the page about role-models. I read it and realized that God had already sent me a role model. My partner Frank.

Frank is the most social person I know. A true extrovert. He talks to people and they think they are the center of his universe. They are. I think Frank is a good match for Bill Clinton. He just has that natural charisma that most of us envy.

So I watched Frank and vowed to change.

A few weeks later, I was in the car dealership to buy a key. While waiting I decided to see if I could make small talk. Usually I try to draw attention to me and what I have to say, but this time I said something simple to open the conversation and then listened to what he had to say. To make a long story short, he told me something that God wanted me to know. I had been trying to live in the moment under the guidance of Eckhart Tolle. When I found out how difficult it was, I became ashamed of my right brain/left brain thinking. This is where I was when I started the conversation. When I listed to him he said, "You know I am a scientist, and they say that right brain/left brain thinking is genetic.

Suddenly my shame washed away. It was not my fault. I just have to learn to train my mind despite my handicaps.

As they say, "God works in mysterious ways."