Many Lives, Many Masters

So... I've been thinking about this one quite a bit lately. To better understand my train of thought, let's take a step into the time machine and take a look back at my many lives and the many masters who ruled them.

Of course, there was childhood and teenagehood. Followed immediately by the incredible college years. Interspersed within the four years of college were a couple of semesters away, one in LA and one in London. (I know, it's taking a long time to get to the point, but hang in there, it's coming.) Then came LA and eight solid years of television work. The shows changed, the players changed, the payroll companies changed, the work mostly remained the same. In 2003, I said goodbye to TV forever (or for a couple of years, whatever) and moved to Charlotte, NC to begin a new career.

That's when things really got interesting. First there was temping at the mortgage company. Then temping at the pump factory (yes, you read that correctly! A pump factory!) Then the corporate office of the hair color franchise where I finally realized that it was only in television that I was allowed to wear jeans every day, so Tentmakers Entertainment brought me back into the TV fold. That lasted one glorious year until they went under. Following which, I tried on the hat of owner, ceo and general commandant-in-charge of my own video marketing company.

All of which led me to where I am now, a Pure Romance consultant spending some of my time in double-wides being paid in quarters and some of it in giant mansions with people who go through money like water.

What's the point, you patiently reiterate? The point is this... Each of those individual pieces of my life seem to me to have happened to a slightly different girl. Confused? Me too. But seriously, I look back on the girl hanging out in a nasty nightclub in London in 1993, headbanging to Nirvana, and think she was a different person from me. Then I think about the girl who stayed up all night long in 1999 working on her very first live show, Nickelodeon's 12 hour telethon "The Big Hell" (oops, I mean the Big Help) just drowning in exhaustion and paper and knowing she was totally sucking at the job but having no idea how to fix it, and I feel no connection to her at all.

Similarly, I currently feel no connection to any of my other lives where I had a boss and set hours. In fact, I really feel more like the girl in college now than anyone I've been since adulthood reared its ugly head.

Does anyone else feel this way? That your life is divided into sections and that they don't seem to go together? Or at least that all the other sections feel like they happened to someone else and you just have heard the stories so many times from that person that you know every detail?

I have some friends who I know have been in the same job their entire adult life. I wonder what that's like. I don't think it's any better or worse than my life, it's just the concept seems so foreign to me. Decades of time going by knowing, more or less, what the day will bring every morning when you open your eyes.

Then I have other friends... the girl who this blog is named for, in fact... who almost never have two days that are the same. And that seems alien to me too. Is she a different person to herself every time her circumstances change? Every time she gets on a bus and goes to a different venue with her tour, does it feel like she takes on a slightly different personality from the day before? OR is it like it was with freelancing for me, where the jobs changed but the person doing them seemed to stay the same. (Until the Olympics when I completely bottomed out and became another new person. A really whiny one, actually.)

I'm sure if I asked my friends with kids they would tell me that they feel their lives fractured and became different the second their first kid was born. I get that.

And it's not so much the change in life that baffles me these days, but the complete disconnect I feel to those other lives.

This morning, I started working on the MDA Telethon for the sixth year. I love this show. It is the only live TV I go back and do and it's a great chance to see the people I love as well as remind myself why I left in the first place. (Not much sleep to be had during the last week...) So when I started working this morning and started the familiar pattern of counting musical bars and typing out lyrics, I felt like I was putting back on an outfit from the previous summer that I used to wear all the time but had completely forgotten about months ago. It feels so comfortingly familiar and yet it feels strange to wear it again when I haven't touched it in so long. And even stranger, from the second I started counting that first beat, I stopped thinking about the work I needed to do for Pure Romance. I barely checked my email throughout the day, something I normally do compulsively, and I didn't even look at my calendar to see if there were any calls I needed to make. It's almost like I put back on my script supervisor self and left the Pure Romance version of me folded in the drawer.

If you've never read the book "Many Lives, Many Masters" I highly recommend it. It's FASCINATING! From Amazon, "In 1980, Weiss, head of the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, began treating Catherine, a 27-year-old woman plagued by anxiety, depression and phobias. When Weiss turned to hypnosis to help Catherine remember repressed childhood traumas, what emerged were the patient's descriptions of a dozen or so of her hitherto unknown 86 past lives, as well as philosophical messages channeled from "Master Spirits." Catherine's anxieties and phobias soon disappeared, says Weiss, and she was able to end therapy."

That's what I'm getting at here. All these other times in my life feel more like a past life than a part of this one.

When I think about all the different phases in my life, in mind's eye, I see a bunch of different "Sheri"s all lined up next to each other in order of height. And I can see their personalities as easily as if they were wearing signs. One says, "Angsty teenager." Another says, "Angsty script supervisor." Still another says, "Completely satisfied office manager who loves her job, the people she works with, her new house and her dog. But with angst."

I guess the reason I am thinking about this so much is cause I have recently started wondering what is coming next for me. I am steering myself toward being a successful PR consultant who has a team of amazing women working beneath me, each with their own strong, successful team beneath them. I see myself being the mother bird, a role I always enjoy since I am obviously a control freak.

So who will that Sheri be? Will she be more confident? Will she be more focused? Will she really enjoy her life and her work? Or will she be looking for another train to come through town that will take her on to the next master? What would the next master be?

The goal, of course, is to find a way to not only embrace the old "Sheri"s, especially the ones I don't like who keep poking their head out of the woodwork because of stupid Facebook, but to somehow unite them and absorb them into my current life. I'm sure each of those "Sheri"s has something to contribute. They all learned important lessons during their lifetimes.

Makes me grateful for the constants. (Shout out to Lost!) The ones that have been there to know many, if not all, of the incarnations of "Sheri" and who liked her all along.

So, constants... you know who you are... thank you. The little connection I feel to those other lives are due in large part to your memories of them and my memories of you and them together.

Does this make me a bit crazy? A lot crazy? Perhaps schizophrenic? Or does everyone feel this way? Who knows. All I do know is that I am pleased to report than I feel each "Sheri" has grown up a bit more than the previous and by a few more "Sheri"s from now, I should be a completely mature adult!

Fingers crossed...