Articles - Victim No More -- A Life Song
Barclay McMillan in Conversation with LifeSong Graduate, Bernice Logan
Edited by Andrea Prazmowski
...something about choosing to say or sing my story in different ways made it a story of beauty. You know it's not something that needs to be stuffed under a carpet... It's this life's story, and it can be celebrated. It's a victory story, and one that helped me to see the victory. Of my life. Since LifeSong I've been living very differently. Remarkably differently!
-- Bernice, LifeSong participant
Change of life -- transformation - we find over and over again in the experiences of LifeSong. The changes differ in degree and in kind, but show themselves in the context of healing -- changed perception, integration, restored confidence, augmented skill, renewed energy, creativity, joy.
Bernice was thirty-six when she took part in LifeSong. She was and remains employed in social advocacy on behalf of marginalised groups of people. Divorced and re-married, she plays the guitar and enjoys singing her own and others' songs. In the pre-course interview Bernice told me that although she was professionally engaged in speaking up for other people she felt that when she spoke for herself her voice failed to carry her intention with the power needed to make her message clear and convincing. She recalls:
I could say the words but, there wouldn't necessarily be my emotion or all of me behind the words. I think I was feeling like I had more inside me that wanted to come out.
It becomes clear to me that agency, the power to think, make choices and act for herself, is the internal frame of reference Bernice uses to evaluate her experience of LifeSong and her life before and since.
[During LifeSong] I was in charge of what came out of me, I was in charge of how much came out of me, I was in charge of how I expressed what came out of me. I was in charge of all that... It was really all about my own experience of my experience. And that was important to me from where I was coming from and where I clearly was going... My experience of my life changed dramatically. Not so much that I was in control of life, because I don't really believe that I'm ever in control. I believe that there is some higher power leading me along. But I felt a lot more trust in the process - and I felt more like I was an agent in the process... I'm not [now] necessarily buffeted by the forces of life; the forces of life still come along but, rather than being buffeted, I have some choice about how to respond.. There's a sense of actually choosing to go in the flow rather than this kind of helpless, "Oh, my God, here's the flow, what's it going to do to me now?"
In Bernice's emergent ability to act on her own behalf she found a way to more satisfactory and joyful relationships with others and an ability to be more completely and effectively engaged in her advocacy work:
After LifeSong I was clearer in my relationships, clearer in terms of what I was willing to accept and not accept. I found a lot of joy in myself in LifeSong and so [afterwards] I found myself, over time, choosing away from relationships that were, perhaps, joy-lacking, and choosing toward relationships that were joy-filling or joy-creating... I certainly found myself willing to let myself out. I became a more authentic me. And so I am probably more effective when I'm advocating for people at work, or advocating for myself... There's more of me here for people now than there was before LifeSong... There's just more of me here.
The sense of agency began to emerge early in the LifeSong process as she began to experience herself as the author of her story:
That was very, very powerful. Somehow, the act of saying and singing the story from different angles over and over and over again took me outside my story. I was more than my story - it took me out of my felt experience of myself and gave me a creative way of looking, and a way that I was engaging with myself in looking. So it wasn't somebody else looking at my story and saying, "see you can see it from different perspectives," it was me recreating my story from different perspectives.
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