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A Womans's Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard by Eliza VanCort

When I was about four my mother, who had recently been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, took me across the country by truck. We hitchhiked from truck stop to truck stop from New York to California. Meanwhile my father, who had full custody of me, went to the police to put out a national all-points bulletin to find us. 

It was a profoundly traumatizing experience. 

Eventually, the police did find us, and after a brief stint in foster care, I went home to my Dad. 

The world I experienced by the time I was six was scary, and it was unpredictable. After the third kidnapping I became a quiet little girl who didn’t like leaving the house much. Indeed, I didn’t like being in reality much. What I did like, however, was the world I could create in my head. I spent a lot of time there, chilling with imaginary friends in my imaginary worlds. (Tony was my best friend. He was cool.)

Before she became ill, my mother had been a writer, a poet, and an English teacher. By all accounts she was also an exceptional parent and a brilliant, creative human.

As I got older, I went from feeling fear when around her to unbridled fury. In hindsight, I wasn’t really experiencing rage. I was experiencing deep, profound grief. It was the worst during my mom’s most clear-headed moments when she showed flashes of the brilliant, empathetic, inspiring mother she would have been, had schizophrenia not robbed us both. 

The thing I resented the most happened every last time I would get up to leave after a visitation. My mother would grab my wrist and say, “Eliza! Be great.” In those moments I saw why my father said her students worshiped her, why she inspired them. My mother had a unique ability to see peoples’ potential. So often, we don’t see ourselves, much less are we seen by others. My mother’s ability to see your full potential made you believe you could fulfill it. 

By the time high school rolled around, I was able to decide when to see my mom and when not to. This actually resulted in a few wonderful conversations on the phone during her rare moments of lucidity.  

There was one piece of advice she gave me that I didn’t reject outright. 

We were on the phone and I was telling my mom how much I hated math. She paused, and then said, with utter seriousness, “If you’re bored in class here’s what I want you to do. You just look out the window and daydream, Eliza. Anything you daydream will be so much more important than sitting through a boring high school class.” From that day forward, I followed her advice. I daydreamed in math and science, and I did it a lot. The places I went!

Let’s fast forward into my 40s. Even though I went to school for political science, I ended up becoming an actor and then an acting teacher. Eventually I opened my own acting studio where I taught people how to live in their imaginations and how to daydream with purpose. Things were going swimmingly until a texting driver hit me while I was riding my bike. I suffered a bilateral brain injury and a subdural hematoma. My memory and communication skills went from excellent to terrible in seconds. 

Oddly enough, it was in that moment that everything began to come together for me.

One of my best friends, Katie Spallone, suggested I start writing every day so that even if I forgot everything, I would have a record of what had happened. Sometimes what I wrote was trash. Sometimes it was treasure. Some days I didn’t want to do it, but I could feel my brain healing faster, so I forced myself to write. Before I knew it, I had written a book. Literally. That was my first book, the one I didn’t publish. Most of it really was trash, but some of it was treasure, so I kept writing. Eventually I wrote a book that was mostly treasure, and that book got published. It’s called A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard. and it drops on May 11th. 

Thankfully you don’t need to experience all of this to become a writer. You just need to embrace the basic principles I unwittingly learned through the school of hard knocks. 

My recipe for writing?

Daydream

Live in your imagination and don’t be afraid of it. The ability to imagine is one of the greatest gifts we are given as humans. Look out the window and daydream. 

Be great 

There is nothing in the world that says that one person’s ideas are better than another’s. Believe that your ideas are great, that they are worthy of sharing. 

Embrace the trash

Let go of being perfect. Sometimes your writing will be utter crap, and that’s fine. You’re going to write something that is absolute genius. Don’t judge any of it. Just write and write and write and write. 

I have a mug that says, “Don’t quit your daydream.” If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a teacher, it is this: everyone has a story and that story is worth telling. Believe you can “be great.” Proudly write trash and forget about looking for treasure. Trust that treasure will be there. 

There is gold in your daydreams. Never quit them.

Be great.

A Womans's Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard by Eliza VanCort
Genre: Business, Nonfiction, Self Help
Author: Eliza VanCort
Eliza VanCort

Eliza VanCort is an in-demand consultant, speaker, and writer on communications, career and workplace issues, and women’s empowerment. The founder of The Actor's Workshop of Ithaca, she is also a Cook House Fellow at Cornell University, an advisory board member of the Performing Arts for Social Change, a Diversity Crew partner, and a member of Govern For America's League of Innovators. Her first book, A Woman's Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard., publishes May 2021.

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