Starting again has left Deborah feeling like shes on shaky ground, but shes figured out how to regain her strength
I’m back at university this year and I’m finding it challenging. I’m a lot older than the other students and even though I have gathered a certain amount of information in my 50 years – knowing the difference between Hegel and kegels, who sang “Free Nelson Mandela” and why Franz Ferdinand started WWI – I’m still back at humbling square one with everyone else on my course.
I feel as wobbly as a kitten. My therapist says I need to “sit with my own power” and “claim my mana”. But what does that even mean? I looked up ‘mana’. It’s a word in a number of Polynesian languages that means power, effectiveness and prestige. When you have mana, you don’t have to prove anything, you don’t have to please anyone or be stuck in the idea of what other people expect you to be. Mana seems to be an indefinable concept, but here’s what I’ve tried or learned so far to inch towards it.
ONE
This story is from the July 2018 edition of NEXT.
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This story is from the July 2018 edition of NEXT.
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