Reality Check: Examine Your Self-Worth

It takes courage to be authentic in a culture content with conformity. However, embracing your authenticity is the only way you learn to become content with your life. Becoming authentic also takes knowledge. Self-knowledge. "You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself," Beryl Markham wrote in West with the Night.

Not if you keep The Illustrated Discovery Journal.

Think of this journal as a visual autobiography of that savvy and sassy babe — your Authentic Self — you know yourself to be. Think of it as a book created by you, about you, for you. (In my opinion, probably the best read you'll ever have in your whole life.)

How happy are you right now? Do you even know? In my twenties I thought fame would make me happy. In my thirties, I knew the secret to happiness was marriage and a baby. On my fortieth birthday, with my little girl and husband blowing out the candles with me, I became convinced that a comma in my checking account balance was the answer to my relentless search. But it was only after I wrote Simple Abundance, a book on how to be happy despite not having any or all of the above, that I gratefully realized that happiness is dependent on one thing and one thing only: self-worth. But before you can hold yourself in high-esteem, you have to know what you love and how magnificent you truly are.

More often than not, we discover who we are and what we love through revelations found in the small, the simple, and the common. In tiny choices, in what seem like infinitesimal changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed. In moments I call everyday epiphanies. When those "ah-ha" transmissions allow the static of the world to clear. Suddenly the soul's Morse code — the dots and dashes of our daily round so often dismissed as meaningless — connects and resonates on a deep level.

Many of my everyday epiphanies have occurred when I have been pleasantly immersed in my Illustrated Discovery Journal.

You've heard the expression "One picture's worth a thousand words"? Well, it's true. In fact, I've discovered to my astonishment, as will you, that random pictures — images culled from periodicals, cut out of catalogs, photographs, or postcards — when reverently and reflectively assembled by your own hands into a collage, can reveal nearly anything you'd ever want to know about yourself, from the prosaic to the profound. Your passions. Your preferences. The perfect haircut. What tickles you. What ticks you off. What makes you happy.

"An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge," the Mexican poet Gloria Anzaldua tells us. "Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious." Maybe this sounds so suspiciously easy that you're sure there's bound to be a catch, such as requiring an artistic talent you're convinced you don't possess. (You do — you just don't know it yet. Wait!) But I swear to you that the woman you truly are is patiently waiting to be revealed on the pages of your Illustrated Discovery Journal, and I'm going to show you how to coax her out of hiding after decades of denial.

I'll even make you two promises.

The first is that you cannot use this amazing insight tool incorrectly. Unlike any other area of your existence, it's refreshingly impossible to make a mistake. (I'm the one who made this up, I should know.) My second promise is that while creating your Illustrated Discovery Journal, you'll experience goose-bump shivers of recognition, heartfelt moments of reconnection, and an astonishing amount of fun. Think seven years old and a brand-new set of paper dolls. You've probably forgotten you could have this much fun indulging in a purely healthy addiction— but you will.

Now it's time to get started. You need these tools: a blank artist's notebook (8 1/2 by 11 inches or larger) or a copy of The Illustrated Discovery Journal: Creating a Visual Autobiography of Your Authentic Self (Warner Books). You'll also need a stack of magazines and mail-order catalogs from which you'll cut out images of anything that pleases you — from clothing, home furnishings, and travel adventures to children's faces, gorgeous landscapes, and wacky ads; a pair of small sharp scissors; glue sticks; stickers; rubber stamps; and colored pencils (the watercolor ones are wonderful because, after you draw, you can go over your work with water on a paintbrush and voila! you're a painter.).

As you flip through your periodicals, when you see an image that you love or one that elicits a visceral reaction, cut or tear it out. Make no judgments as to why you like an image. Don't stop to analyze why you were attracted to a flock of penguins one moment and a four-poster bed the next. The logic of it all will be revealed in the by-and-by.

But magazine and catalog pictures are just the beginning. You'll also be collecting and adding favorite quotes, sketches, greeting cards, photocopies of photographs (you probably don't want to glue down the real thing), feature-article headlines, travel brochures, art postcards, ribbons, menus, pressed flowers, mock-ups of magnificent events you want to occur in the future and any other darn thing that triggers a memory, whether it's past, present or to come. The idea is to craft on the pages of your Illustrated Discovery Journal what the poet W. H. Auden calls a map of your planet.

Skeptical? It's okay. Often skeptics make the best seekers. But did you know that when psychologists work with amnesiacs, one of the most effective and gentle ways to help them remember who they are is by showing them different images and seeing which they perk up or recoil at? So if you often feel like you're walking around in a strange woman's body, raising her kids, and working her shift, let me say this again, so that I'm sure you understand: The only way you can go wrong with the Illustrated Discovery Journal is to think it won't work for you the way it has for thousands of other women.

I believe you'll find collage to be an incredibly powerful, imaginative and enjoyable way to bring new messages to yourself. Think of each collage you create as a detailed dispatch from your subconscious mind to your awakened self. Want to know your future? Understand your past? Enjoy your present? Forget crystal balls, tarot cards or the Ouija board. Within the pages of your Illustrated Discovery Journal your own private oracle is waiting to be consulted.

So get to it, and have a blast. And let me know how you're doing. Blessings on your courage.

Excerpt from The Illustrated Discovery Journal: Creating a Visual Autobiography of Your Authentic Self by Sarah Ban Breathnach (Warner Books)
© 1999 by Sarah Ban Breathnach