Lao-Tzu said that a journey of a thousand miles needs to start with a single step, and this, everyone, is definitely not the first step that I am taking.
I wrote blogs, insta posts, posted pictures and wrote in an endless amount of notebooks as well. This is not my first blog and not my first step either.
It started a while ago. Well, pretty accurately I can even tell you that it started 29 years ago, when I was watching a video clip on TV while my mother was ironing. I was just doing my thing, mesmerised by the light of the TV and enjoying the music, when I felt what I would call now “inspiration” but what I couldn’t name back then. I grabbed the first piece of paper that was there (a red piece of cardboard, the kind you put in binders to create categories) and a pencil, and I wrote. I wrote and wrote and I felt this urge inside of me and all of a sudden I just knew: I wanted to be a song writer. I just knew it. There was something about the rhymes and the sound and the beauty of making it all work.
I was proud of myself, proud of my work and I decided to share with the only person that was there, my mother. I got up and asked her to look, because I wanted her approval, of course, I was 6. She stopped for a second, looked at the piece of paper without even looking and said “that’s great” before getting back to ironing. This was the first time my mother broke my heart a little, and it would not be the last.
I had a calling on that day. I can still feel the feeling in my guts, the light coming on and brightening my entire existence. Suddenly I wasn’t a kid but a kid with a mission. I discovered that I wanted to write, that it made me feel good and alive.
Everybody can have a calling. Not everyone listens to it, and not everyone can go for it. Life comes in the way, you can always be sure of that. I spent another 3 years with my mother and her abusive partner, being bullied and abused, before she finally made a choice: her relationship with her man was more important than me, and because I was growing up accepting his crap less and less…she abandoned me, and I let.
That’s right. I saw my mother walking with my baby brother, in the opposite direction of our home, lost in the crowd of all the parents after school. I saw her and she saw me: we kept walking. I was 9 and I knew this was the best thing for me, however hard it would be. I was right.
It’s the short version of a much longer story, but it’s the first step towards a life that I decided to dedicate to people who are going through transitional times and need a healthy support. Mental health professionals are great, but some people would rather talk to someone who knows about their struggles, and that’s where I come.
My approach is simple: we are even. A coach and a client are on the same level, but the coach is there to provide tools and a holistic support to know how to cope and move on. Be it a change of job, a loss of job, a burn out, a breakup, a need for change, to find purpose and reconciliation with your true calling… I am here.
Ange's blorner 