Book Update: A Garbage Bag, a School Bus, and Where Your Eyes Go

This week I worked on chapters 4 and 5

Last week I shared how I’ve been rewriting the opening of each chapter so you don’t just read my stories, you step into them. This week, I carried that work into chapters 4 and 5.

Chapter 4: Don’t Fight, Set Intention

This chapter now opens in April of 1998, on a chilly day with the sun breaking through now and then. I’m nine years old, standing at a curb next to a big black garbage bag stuffed with my clothes, looking at the place that’s about to become my new home.

Before that day, I’d spent months picturing it. I didn’t fight to get there. I just kept my eyes on it, night after night, often humming “Part of Your World” (you know, that song from The Little Mermaid) to myself in the dark.

This week I also moved one of my favorite ideas out of the story and into the chapter’s lessons, so it gets the space it deserves. Whether you’re skiing, riding a horse, or steering your life, where your eyes go is where you end up going. Where attention goes, energy flows. I didn’t have words for that at nine, but I was already living it.

Chapter 5: Bullies and Questioning or Respecting Authority

This one opens on a school bus: windows fogged over, that musty “bus” smell, and fourth-grade me standing on my seat, scowling into the driver’s big mirror. Let’s just say I communicated my feelings about him with one finger, and I was in the principal’s office the next morning, haha.

There’s a lot of humor in this chapter (the boys on the bus decided I was a werewolf, and yes, there was howling). But the heart of it is a lesson a school counselor gave me that I still use today: our energy is ours to give or to withhold. When I stopped feeding the teasing, it faded away.

The chapter ends with a question I think about a lot: where does your sense of worth actually live? If it lives in other people’s opinions, or in where you live or what you drive, it will rise and fall with every one of those things. If it lives within you, it holds steady.

A question for you

Here’s one from this week’s You Are the Change section:

Where in your life are you fighting something right now? If you set down the fight and set an intention instead, where would you turn your eyes?

If you feel like sharing, I’d love to hear your answer in the comments.

Thank you for walking alongside me on this journey. More next week.

Aubrey