The Winchester Mansions of My Mind

            For over thirty years, Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester, widow and heiress to the Winchester fortune, remodeled and expanded an eight-room farmhouse into a sprawling mansion in San Jose, California. Now a tourist destination, the architecture of the house is marked by its history. If a project wasn’t going according to plan, Winchester would abandon it, leaving the house to be a conglomeration of architectural styles that host stairwells to nowhere. And, if you believe the lore that has grown as steadily and complexly as the house itself, it’s also haunted. Bonus.

            Like Sarah Winchester, I too have built a mansion of different architectural styles. In fact, I’ve had so many lives, I rather think I should have been born a cat. My titles have ranged from theater kid to anthropologist, customer service manager to hotel clerk, accidental sex worker (there’s a story), reiki master, martial arts enthusiast, and, most recently, licensed therapist. I have three master’s degrees, a bachelor’s degree, certifications in hypnotherapy and community ministry. I’m also a certified end-of-life doula, though life has been so busy, I haven’t been able to be involved in the work. And still, if someone were to offer me a training, certification, or mentorship, I would probably take it despite having a business, full-time job, and attempting to start a writing career.

            Why?

            I get that question a lot. The easy answer is that I enjoy learning. I’m a “perpetual student” or a “lifelong learner,” all words tainted with the pejorative edge of boomers who wonder when I’ll do the normal thing and “settle down and have a family.” The moderately true answer is that, for every degree I earn and can actually pay for, I can defer the student loans I can’t actually afford. The harder truth is that no matter how many degrees I have, no matter how many credentials, I will never feel that I have enough to do the things I imagine I want to do.

            The latter is a common enough sentiment. Scott Sonenshein in his book Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less- And Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined talks about the difference between people who use what they have to find success and people who are always looking for more…whatever…before they take a chance. Aside from some criticisms regarding privilege, corporate culture, and the standard criticisms one can lob at an “airport book,” Stretch did get me thinking about my own tendency to hoard credentials before taking on risk. I have a lifetime of experiences, a couple of them, actually, but somehow, it’s not enough.

I am not alone here. I hear similar refrains from my clients. Such a feeling can result from intergenerational trauma, the internalization of advice, however, misguided, or the weird isolating feeling that comes from being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. As an AuADHDer, not being enough was grafted onto my social skeleton. I could never do enough to please my teachers, earn the social capital I yearned for, or find a partner. I compensated with learning, but learning isn't a substitute for living.

I built, in retrospect, a lot of stairwells to nowhere.

            At some point in time, I have had to accept that all of the credentials, certificates, and degrees aren’t going to eliminate the imposter syndrome, “I’m not good enough”-itis, and paralyzing insecurity that hunkers on my shoulder, an existential gargoyle painfully lacking in a sense of humor. The problem, as Sarah Winchester likely discovered, is that all of the staircases and additions eventually just run into each other. Most of my mental engineers and architects only last a short period of time, a result of both neurodivergent special interests and the conflicts between career ideals and career realities. It’s just impossible to be able to do everything, or even most of everything, even moderately well. It’s not that all the credentials and certificates aren’t useful. They are. They just might not get to be used. In the end, all of the extra studies and work ultimately fade in the face of the mundane reality of running a practice and taking care of the day-to-day of quotidian existence.

            They just become stairwells to nowhere.

            My clients do this a lot, too, particularly in times of transition in life, career, or school. They build empires of existential dread, constructing endless labyrinthian layers to protect against the Minotaur at the center of their minds. Or they create parfaits of perceived failings topped with crunchy self-deprecating granola. Or, sometimes, they seek to find fulfillment in other people, objects, pets, or things that inevitably fail to do the fulfilling. They stock endless rooms with regrets, tear-stained memories, and dogeared could-have-beens that never got the chance to be. They forget that, once they strip it all down to the core, they are, in all likelihood, exactly what they need.

Despite all the trappings, the bones of the house are still good.

They always have been, even when, in the face of trauma and the inevitable suffering of life, they’ve forgotten what those bones look like.  

At some point, as both the wounded and the healed, it’s okay to take an inventory of everything in our internal mansions. There’s a reason that the fourth step in 12-step programs is so complicated. An honest inventory is not for the faint of heart. But an honest inventory can help us see what it is we already have, what it is we need to let go of, and remember who we are in the depths of our being. Unlike the material walls of the Winchester mansion, such deconstruction does not threaten the integrity of our buildings. Experiences are not vampires that fade away when exposed to sunlight. We can sift through the aspects of our life that no longer bring us joy or fulfillment and remember the things that bring us back to our core values, the skills we have already, and our authenticity.

It’s like Marie Kondo for your existential closet. Take stock, remove the cobwebs, and rediscover the person, therapist, healer, professional, creative, whatever you are.

No additional degrees required.

By the time you’re done, you may not have a haunted mansion anymore or an architectural wonder in your mind. You will, however, have a comfortable farmhouse that offers everything you already need to build the life you want.

The bones, after all, are good. They always have been.