An Everyday Night Bloomer
Ok, so we’re not all going to be Nelson Mandelas. Let me share with you another real-life example, lest you think this paradigm shift is only for a highly select few. This story is about my friend and colleague, Jenny Owens, who did something remarkable after she and her husband nearly lost their newborn son. I’ll let Jenny tell the story in her own words:
“In April of 2016, my husband and I were thrilled to welcome our son Maximus Owens to the world. Within hours of his birth, Max was diagnosed with a rare condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia. His diaphragm was not fully formed at birth, allowing his bowels to move into his chest cavity, displacing his heart and crushing and impacting the development of his left lung. The doctors gave Max a 50 percent chance of survival and it was a very rough start the first few months as Max and physicians fought for his life. He spent several weeks in the NICU and more time in the children’s hospital as he underwent several surgeries.
“When we were staying at the hospital for one of Max’s surgeries, I ran into a grandmother of an infant patient in the family lounge. We chatted for a while, and during our conversation she shared that she was visiting for two weeks and staying at a hotel. Her son and daughter were living in a tiny hospital room at the Children’s Hospital until either the Children’s House or Ronald McDonald House had an open room. They were from Tennessee and had traveled all the way to Baltimore for specialists that could care for their baby’s rare condition. They would be there for months while their tiny baby had multiple surgeries.
“Right then I realized how incredibly lucky we were to be in Baltimore and so close to such amazing hospitals. Had we lived in a more rural area, Max may not have had access to the critical treatment he needed for survival, especially since we weren’t aware of his life-threatening condition before birth. When we were in the NICU we could get home in ten minutes, but many families traveled hours to be there each day and stayed months longer than we did. I thought about it all night and most of our stay. And I wondered—what if people living nearby hospitals could volunteer rooms in their homes to people traveling with loved ones for care?”
In 2016, Jenny started a nonprofit organization in Baltimore, Maryland, called Hosts for Humanity. The organization matches volunteer hosts with patient families seeking a place to stay while their loved ones receive care. Family and friends of patients now have a low-cost and supportive place to stay while their loved one is in the hospital.
I spoke with Jenny again recently about the idea of blooming in the dark and here’s what she said:
“Reflecting over the last couple of years, I’ve experienced periods of both extreme highs and crushing lows. I felt lowest when Max’s first surgery failed a few weeks after his birth. When the surgery team rolled him into the room and triumphantly declared a successful repair, I didn’t feel their elation. I felt despair. I didn’t see a newborn that had been “successfully repaired,” but instead one that was hopped up on fentanyl, puffy, and nonresponsive. I wanted to lie on the floor, for no other reason than my body seemed to want to reflect my emotional state. Fast forward almost two years, and Max is now a thriving and resilient toddler. We feel tremendous gratitude for his health, and for an amazing support network that took care of us when we were down. And although pain in all its forms is a state I don’t want to be in for long, I’ve come to appreciate it for facilitating a journey of tremendous personal growth.
“Some pain is unavoidable, systemic, or just bad luck—perhaps a car accident, an illness. Some pain you play a part in, by neglecting your health, finances, relationships, etc. I try to see pain as a sophisticated alert system identifying a credible threat. Pain told me to “pay attention!” loudly and forcefully. So I did. After I witnessed the need for housing I could no longer do nothing. This suffering showed me the hidden pain of others, and radically altered the path of my life.”
Jenny could have spent the year after her son was born simply cherishing her time with him and her husband (and I know she did a lot of that). She could have gotten stuck in her trauma and fear and anger. But through hard work, determination, and the love and support of others, Jenny took her pain and fear and turned it into something incredible, an organization that helps others who are experiencing similar pain and fear. Jenny said she never would have thought of doing something like this until she experienced this kind of suffering. She wouldn’t have seen the need, wouldn’t have felt the same pull on her heart. The world is a better place because Jenny experienced this pain and allowed herself to use it to help others. She’s an inspiration. She’s a Night Bloomer.
A Change in Perspective Changes Everything
My hope is that this metaphor—flowers and people who require the dark to bloom—has begun to shift your perspective from one of loss and despair to one of growth and hope. Because once you change your perspective, you can begin to use your own inner resources and creativity to begin moving in this new life-affirming direction.
Let me just pause to clear something up before we build on the new perspective and guiding metaphor of the book: Blooming in the dark is not about whether what got you into the dark—perhaps the death of a loved one, divorce, illness, abuse, loss of physical functioning, a fractured relationship, a child addicted to drugs, job loss, or bankruptcy—was good or right. None of these things are good. And debatably none of them are “right.” Nor does this metaphor mean that we should purposely pursue or create painful situations in our lives so that we can grow. Rather, the message of blooming in the dark is that the dark presents us with a unique opportunity that if harnessed skillfully can propel a life forward in ways that couldn’t occur if the darkness had never happened.
I’ve designed this book as a guide to help you view your particular situation in a new way and to equip you with effective and powerful tools, so that you can navigate the darkness in your life skillfully. I will share with you principles about blooming that I have learned from practicing psychotherapy for nearly two decades. I will tell you about some of the empirical findings I have learned as a researcher who studies coping with stressors and who develops interventions to improve mental health. I will share transformative knowledge that as a university faculty member I teach my students about integrative health and wellness, such as mind-body approaches for healing, including journal writing. I’ll provide many of the powerful writing prompts I’ve used as a Writing for Wellness workshop facilitator with people who want to process and grow from cancer and chronic illness. And I’ll share some of the strategies I use as a health and wellness coach when I assist individuals in achieving goals they thought were beyond their reach.
I will also share with you the exciting findings of many other researchers that support the blooming principles in this book, so that you can feel confident that the tools we’ll be using are effective. But beyond all this professional experience and research, I will also meet you in these pages as a fellow Night Bloomer. You’ll witness part of my personal journey, as well as those of some of my clients and workshop participants, and even those of some famous individuals who bloomed in the dark. I see myself as a humble guide with hard-won experience, a guide who has traversed this path many times before with people from all walks of life and who has learned some of the secrets of finding treasures and experiencing transformation in the dark.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, asserted that “suffering ceases to be suffering … at the moment it finds a meaning.” Indeed, despite the old adage that “time heals all wounds,” recent research shows that the real healer is “finding meaning”1. The goal of Night Bloomers is to help you make meaning out of your suffering, so that the darkness in which you find yourself can become a fruitful time of healing and personal